Black Pearls Read online

  Black Pearls

  A Faerie Strand

  Louise Hawes

  * * *

  illustrations by Rebecca Guay

  * * *

  Houghton Mifflin Company

  Boston 2008

  * * *

  Text copyright © 2008 by Louise Hawes

  Illustrations copyright © 2008 by Rebecca Guay

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to

  reproduce selections from this book, write to

  Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South,

  New York, New York 10003.

  www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com

  The text of this book is set in AT Hadriano Light with Norlik Ital.

  The illustrations were created with graphite and paint and digitally enhanced.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

  Hawes, Louise.

  Black pearls : a faerie strand / by Louise Hawes ; illustrations by Rebecca Guay.

  v. cm.

  Contents: Dame Nigran's tower—Pipe dreams—Mother love—

  Ashes—Evelyn's song—Diamonda—Naked.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-618-74797-9

  1. Fairy tales—United States. 2. Children's stories, American. [1. Fairy tales.

  2. Short stories.] I. Guay-Mitchell, Rebecca, ill. II. Title.

  PZ8.H3126B1 2008

  [Fic]—dc22

  2007041166

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  * * *

  This book is dedicated with love to

  Regan and Stephen.

  * * *

  Contents

  Dame Nigran's Tower

  1

  Pipe Dreams

  35

  Mother Love

  69

  Ashes

  105

  Evelyn's Song

  137

  Diamonda

  165

  Naked

  189

  Dame Nigran's Tower

  Flying had come naturally to her. When she'd grown of age and joined the ceremony in the grove, Tabbatha Nigran found her body lifting even before the words were done. She had lost herself and the others each time she'd spun into the night, turning like a thistle, up and up. There were no words for what she felt then, nor did she try to find them. It was simply the reason she lived, the place she had to go, the answer to every question she would ever ask.

  Daughters of the Moon,

  children of the Night,

  rise like dew together

  until the morning's light.

  When Tabby chanted with her companions, she could scarcely sort her voice from theirs. The song was like a braid, binding them together, joining them in the sacred rite:

  The owl's cry is our anthem,

  our altar is the sky.

  The Great Mystery is our Mother

  to whom now, sisters, fly.

  Held fast in the wind's strong arms, tumbling through the lacy mists of clouds, Tabby seldom gave a thought to landing, only let her heart swell like the moon, only set her face to the west, where she fancied the sun lay in its dark bed. Landing always came too soon on those magic nights. And it always stung. Not in a physical sense, of course. For it was not the actual coming down—the crisp, almost smug way her toes found the ground—that bothered Tabby. It was the return to earth and to the small minds and shriveled hearts that waited for her there: to the pack of dogs that chased her when she left the house, and to the filthy, rheumy children who parroted singsong rhymes—"Witch, witch, fell in a ditch, set her hair on fire."

  Tabby never thought of herself as a witch, nor had her adoptive sisters ever used the word. They called themselves Wise Women, and she knew no way but theirs. The coven had taken her in as a babe, had given her love and a home and the sweet, wild joy of flight. That joy, they told her, was neither sorcery nor heritage. It was the gift of every woman who comes to her first blood when the moon is full.

  She left the coven before her seventeenth summer and found a place as a weaver's apprentice. When the old woman died, Tabby stayed on in her teacher's humble cottage, but her neighbors could not forget where she'd been raised. No women brought her handiwork and no men came courting.

  Tabby knew better than to try to change things. She kept to herself instead, tending the lush garden behind her cottage gate. Everything there brought her solace: the peonies, their great heads crisscrossed by delirious ants; the four o'clocks, slow to wake but glorious till dawn; the sweetpeas and primroses, unruly as children. Even the kitchen plants filled her with pride when she tended them mornings, her hands diving like pale fish among their leaves.

  The villagers called her "hellcat" and "twisted faerie" or sometimes "devil's handmaid." But her snapdragons only nodded at her, blushing in the early sun. Through her garden wall, behind the tumbled ivy, Tabby heard her neighbors gossip: "'Tis said she flies at night ... By God's blood, the milk she begged from me turned sour as I set it at her door ... Old witches must be young ones first, you know. Have you marked how she leaves her house when'er the Sabbath falls on full moon?"

  But her baby roses told no tales, only stared at her shyly from their green nests. So Dame Tabbatha Nigran kept her own counsel. She suffered the town's talk with patience and a resignation born of practice—years of it. She had her flowers and few regrets. Still, there were times, in the green quiet of her garden, when she wondered what it might have been like to have a family and a mother. Instead of sitting, when she was small, in the middle of the dream circle, lifted by dozens of arms as the drowsiness of their spells overtook her, what if she had been cradled in someone's lap? Tabby had seen mothers in town, tending their babes. She had even heard, one night as she made her way across Old Chauncey's field to the woods, her neighbor singing an off'key lullaby to her youngest. Tabby had peered through the window of the cottage, then, and seen the two of them beside the hearth.

  There was something in the way Dame Chauncey held that little one, in the way her voice purred and cracked with tenderness. The scene had lodged itself in Tabby's mind or heart, she was never sure which. Like a tune she didn't know the words to, or a person she could not name, the picture came back to her again and again.

  She blamed that picture for what happened the following autumn, when the bearded fellow scaled her garden wall. She had found him knee'deep in the watercress and rampion. The bells were silent and all the town dark, and yet there he was, bending over her plants, tearing them up by the fistful.

  "And what be your business in a poor woman's garden?" She'd come up behind him, surprising him quite as much, she noticed with satisfaction, as the sight of him had startled her.

  When he stood up, the moonlight turned his hair to ink, made his face look white and sickly. He had spilled some of the greens and was stuffing the rest down his vest. He was a long, large-boned man, but Tabby had seldom seen anyone so frightened. "Forgive me, good madam," he stammered, stooping to retrieve the cap he had let fall. "I only meant ... That is, I was just ... If you would be so kind..."

  Tabby liked the look of his face, blanched with fear, his eyes glassy currants. She was ashamed of the pride that shot through her, knowing she was the cause of his stammer and his clumsiness, of his high, pinched voice. Awkward with this uncommon upper hand, she said the first thing she could think of to keep him scared: "There will be a price, you know."

  The fellow looked behind him then, as if he were considering running right through the stone wall he had just climbed. When he turned back, his voice broke and tears shone in the corners of his currant eyes. "Please, my lady," he said. "I means only to put by for my family."

  Tabby leaned close, touching his wrist. "A thief's rampion," sh
e told him, "comes dearer than an honest man's." She wondered who he was, this intruder. She knew he was not Elsbeth Chauncey's husband, nor the son of the widow who sold Tabby milk. As for other men in the village, she had seen only the tinker and the market-day vendors. This fellow had not been among them.

  The stranger bowed now, and bowed again. "Anything, madam," he said, clutching his cap. "The greens is for my wife, madam. She is with child and craves them fierce."

  "So fierce you could not wait until morning and knock on my door?" As Tabby bent to pick up the scattered leaves, the nervous thief pulled back from her. What tales had he heard? What visions danced in his head? "So fierce you need take what is not your own?"

  "Ah!" He'd kept twisting his cap as if it were wringing wet, kneading and smoothing it against his chest. "Alas!" His eyes looked to the heavens, begging the wafer moon instead of her, "Please, madam, have mercy on a poor soul who meant no harm."

  Still contrary, still perversely glad to see him in such discomfort, Tabby waved her hand at the dark tangle of garden. "There is a stone knocked from my wall," she scolded. "And just look how you have trampled my beds."

  "But surely, lady," the man had pleaded, "even such as yourself must feel for the unborn babe my wife carries." Mistaking Tabby's stunned silence for compassion, he pressed on. "Even a fiend would not deprive an innocent babe of its father."

  "If you have fathered innocence," Tabby told him, recovering, "where, pray tell, is the guilty party?"

  "God preserve us, there be none, madam. 'Twas the mindless craving of a woman with child, is all. 'John, I must have rampion or die,' she tells me. Those be her very words."

  "Indeed?" Tabby fixed her eyes on his. "She said, 'die'?" If he wanted a witch, she would give him one. "She meant to die for her supper?"

  "No! No! You shall not take her life! Here!" He pulled the leaves from his vest and forced them into Tabby's hands. "I will take no more plants, nary a one. On my own head, last night was the end. I swear."

  "Last night?" Tabby felt a tingle, a shiver of power. "You have been here before?"

  "Oh, Lord! Oh, saints above!" The man dropped to his knees, grabbed the hem of her skirt. "I will do anything, give you all I have. Only spare my wife."

  Tabby had not answered, wondering what service she could exact from this man. If he was as strong as he looked, there was a shed to be built and hay to be brought in before frost.

  "You can have the babe." He stood suddenly, as if they had just come to terms. "I know that be what you crave, an innocent soul to turn to devil's work."

  "Listen, fellow." Tabby was almost amused by the picture he nursed in his brain—a child-snatching witch, an unnatural hag who could not give birth and so must steal others' babes. "I ask only some honest labor in return for what you have taken from me."

  "Ay, and when the child is grown, ye shall have it," the man told her. He placed his cap again on his head and bowed to Tabby, moving backward all the while. "A sturdy lad or lass to fetch and carry."

  "Do you honestly expect me to wait years for what is owed me?" Why did she not laugh? Why did she not mention the shed or the hay, the wood that needed splitting?

  "You be fouler than you seem, dame." His eyes found hers, and he resumed his pitiable handwringing. "A black heart in a fair frame."

  It was time she set the fool straight. Tabby followed him and again touched his wrist. "Listen, my good man," she said. "I shall—"

  "Yes! Yes! You shall have the babe as soon as it is weaned, I will bring it to you. On my oath."

  "Weaned?"

  "Ay, madam. As the Savior is my witness, the babe is yours." He stopped his scuttling crab walk and uttered a single bleating sob. "But it is a human child. It must suck at its mother's teat."

  "But I do not want—"

  He held his arms in front of him, as if to fend her off. "Ye have my oath, I say. Only do not harm my wife and me." Now that he had reached the gate he turned and, like some frantic animal, tried to walk through it without lifting the latch. At last he remembered himself and, making small, panicked grunts, succeeded in lifting the lock and racing off into the night.

  A baby! Tabby had hardly dared hope for such a thing. Nor did she let herself dwell on the thought for long after the man left. Her satisfaction at having frightened him, in fact, soon gave way to self-recrimination: A fine witch, she was! Why, she had not even thought to ask his name or where he came from. Even now, he must be laughing at how he'd outsmarted her. She would surely never see him again.

  It was not until spring, when buds shouldered their way once more out of the earth, that she allowed herself to think of the promise. She pictured a child, curled like a shoot in its mother's belly, and wondered idly how it was that someone went about being a parent. What did you feed them? And how did you hold one without hurting it? Not that the answers mattered, she scolded herself. Not that they mattered at all. Best to set aside such foolishness and put the new spade she'd bought at market to work. Radishes needed to be sown deep.

  ***

  So if you had asked her, Tabby would have said she was not expecting it, did not want it at all. But when the man came back the next fall, carrying the girl in his arms, her eyes had filled with tears of relief. She could not speak, but drank up the child with a thirsty heart: already pretty, the tiny thing had yellow curls and eyes as blue as the irises that grew in a thick, companionable cluster by Tabby's well. But it was not the dainty features or fair hair that stunned her, that flooded her own face with warmth. It was the way the baby leaned from her father's hold and reached her arms toward Tabby, as if she meant to fly across the space between them.

  Though Tabby was speechless, the man was a veritable gossip. His wife was pregnant again, he told her, and though he hated to part with his firstborn, he knew, fiend that she was, Tabby would hex the second babe if he did not. This one was weaned and walking, and a stout little soul besides. Her needs were few, and she looked as though she would grow into a strong worker. But four were a lot of mouths to feed, and if the new child was a son, why, he bore no grudge. Even witches could be made to serve God's plan.

  Tabby said nothing, only stared at the treasure he carried.

  "Farewell, my Rampion, my tender babe," he told his daughter at last, setting her down and striding to the door. "God keep you in his care." He stepped outside and without another word left the child standing in front of the hearth. He did not look back or wave to the babe he had named after a kitchen green, but hurried off as if Tabby might change her mind.

  The girl did not look after him, only studied Tabby solemnly, then climbed onto her lap and fell asleep. Tabby had wanted to run after the man, to find out where he lived, to ask the countless questions that suddenly occurred to her. She needed clothes for the child, and shoes, and toys. She wondered if Rampion had ever been sick or whether there were foods she must not have. But the weight of that small creature kept her pinned to her chair, fearful of talking or moving lest the moment dissolve like a bubble in a stream.

  Rampion. A strange name, but a good one, Tabby thought. Some girls were called Rose, after all, and some Violet or Pansy or Blossom. Wasn't it better to bear the name of a sturdy little plant, a green that flowered in the summer and gave food the rest of the year? As she listened to the shallow, even breaths of the babe in her lap, she closed her eyes and tried to feel her way through the years that lay ahead. Tabby was not blessed, as some in the coven were, with the gift of second sight, so the image she saw was more yearning than certainty, but it was a comfort nonetheless—a girl fair enough to be a princess, with a slender, graceful form and a laugh that tumbled like falls down a mossy bank.

  She did not know how long they sat, the little one curled against her with her left thumb in her mouth, Tabby rigid with bliss, counting the small heartbeats that drummed against her own chest. But when Rampion finally stirred, her father was long gone and it was too late to ask him anything at all. They must make do, the two of them, with just each other.
<
br />   And make do, they did. Though she could speak only baby nonsense, Tabby's new daughter (daughter! the word was too sweet to say aloud) made her wants clear. And each one was given her, nearly as soon as she pointed or cried or smiled at it.

  Tabby hugged and fed and petted and played. She sang and clapped and laughed and jigged. She made dolls from old bed sheets and crowns from dried periwinkle and sweet William. By spring, the girl had spoken her first words, and by late summer, she was chattering like a magpie, telling her rag dolls secrets or begging her mother for treats. Though Tabby fell into bed each night panting with exhaustion, she lay sleepless for hours, tense and hopeful, her love like a hunger that could only be fed by Rampion's waking and wanting more.

  She let the garden go to seed. All except the vegetables and herbs she grew to feed the child. There were not enough hours in the day to waste on primroses. Tabby was tending something far more precious now—something that responded to her care by growing more beautiful with every season. There were times, often when she sat stitching, that she looked up to find the girl playing in a stripe of sunlight spread across the floor. She would stop then, losing a stitch she would have to pick up later, and stare at the fearful loveliness of her daughter. And when, feeling doting eyes on her, Rampion looked up as well, she would likely run and put her arms around Tabby's neck, settle in her lap, and set to unpinning her own bright curls. "Mother! Mother!" she would beg. "Brush my hair."

  Then Tabby would stroke Rampion's shining locks with a brush she had bought at market, a fine one made of willow wood and boar's bristles. The soft lapping of the brush, the hair falling pale as light across her daughter's shoulders, it worked the same miracle every time—the soaring inside her chest, her heart straining up and up. Her body never left the chair, but her mind and spirit flew away to the sweet future when her lovely child would grow to womanhood, when Tabby would take her by the hand to the sacred grove. When she would teach her what she knew of splendor, of endless joy.