Black Pearls Read online

  Because she cherished this vision, the two of them flying together, Tabby's garden died before her meetings with the coven stopped. But it was not long after the peonies withered, their wilted heads drooping on broken stalks, that Tabby began to find reasons to miss the gatherings with her sisters in the woods. What had been her greatest joy was now cheating her of one far greater. Each time she left her daughter, she suffered dreadfully, imagining an endless variety of accidents and illnesses that might strike while Rampion was alone. What if the girl were to wake feeling thirsty, for instance? Were to push a stool against the wall to reach the cupboard overhead? And what if the stool tipped and sent her sprawling? Or say she managed to lift the latch and wander outside while Tabby was away? There were snakes in the old garden wall; Tabby had seen them several times at dusk, slithering out of sight before she could find their nest. The night she remembered this, Tabby tortured herself with a vision of Rampion being bitten, falling to the ground, then crying for her mother, calling and calling until she had no breath left but lay still and cold.

  When Tabby finally told them she could no longer come to the woods, the others had been sad but not surprised. "You have caught the way of human love," her friend Maeve warned her. "'Tis not a bad way, but it clouds the heart and will make you weak. The Great Mother will ne'er abandon you, but 'tis you that will draw away from her. Further and further, until you have forgotten how to fly."

  Tabby had laughed, knowing she would always remember the upward thrust, the whirling through moonlit air. "'Twill not be for long," she reminded them all. "Only until my daughter"—she said it out loud now, proudly—"comes of age. We will return to these woods after her first blood. The two of us."

  Maeve and the others had nodded, but it was clear they did not believe her. "Paths are never straight," Sheba said, pointing the same finger at Tabby she had once used to show her the stars in the sky. "Turnings and choices leave tangles behind."

  Tabby's old teacher drew her close. "You are not likely to find your way back to us." She kissed the younger woman, but it was a sad kiss, one that Tabby felt for a long time on her cheek, like a print, a seal of farewell.

  After that night, she did not meet with the others again. Though she sometimes felt the urge to fly alone, to shoot like a lance through the dark, she stayed true to her changed life and her new responsibilities. These last were so consuming that they kept her from self-pity. Rampion was soon old enough for lessons. Tabby could not teach her to embroider or play the spinet like the daughter of the village mayor, but she had her own skills to pass on. The kitchen garden was still intact, and if Tabby had not raised the stone wall until it met the bottom branches of her cherry tree, their neighbors might have seen the two of them gathering herbs each morning, might have stopped to listen to Rampion's cheerful recitation: "Burdock for skin and blood; goldenseal for what ails; yarrow for strength, and..." Sometimes she would break off, forgetting the name of a plant. "What is this one, Mother? It has an awful stink! I hope 'twill vanish in the stew!"

  "'Tis tansy, love," Tabby told her, smiling at the way the girl's lips and nose had nearly met in the center of her darling face. "The root for fevers and flies, the leaves for puddings and cakes."

  "Then let us leave the root in the ground," Rampion had decided. "'Twill grow more leaves that way, and you know how I love pudding!"

  There were cooking lessons, too. And darning. And the smattering of Latin Tabby had learned from the coven. It was mostly words that went with flying spells, not the church Latin the other children in town knew. Her sisters' church, after all, had been the wild woods, and their prayers had focused on thanksgiving, not penance, on the Great Mother, not the Holy Father. So it was little wonder that, at last, Rampion came to be regarded with the same suspicion and fear her mother was.

  It did not happen all at once. There were only whispers at first, some nervous laughter when Tabby and her daughter appeared in public. But if Rampion chanced to stretch her tiny arm toward a stranger and utter a Latin phrase she had learned, some mistook it for an incantation. And once when they had gone to a fair in Bridley and Rampion tried to join a group of children watching a Punch and Judy show, the other children's mothers, one by one, had pulled their sons and daughters away from the stage. But in those early years, while Rampion was still a child, the two managed to brush shoulders with the rest of the village, and no great harm was done on either side. In fact, Tabby began to enjoy taking the girl with her to market, loved the way Rampion's cheeks reddened with the fresh air, the way people stared at her loveliness. Sometimes the tradesmen and shoppers even made timid overtures, handing the child sweets and trinkets or stroking her hair and asking if fairies had spun it. It made the final blow all the more cruel, then, that it came on market day.

  It happened when Rampion was eleven years old, when her beauty had already begun to stop people in their tracks, to make them gossip and whisper things that sat like stones in Tabby's chest: Was such a face normal? Were Christ's children meant to be so alluring? Did her sweet shape dissolve at night, turn into the scab-infested leer and hairy chest of devil's spawn?

  Perhaps if the hurt had traveled no further than her own anxious love, Tabby would not have run away, would not have packed up her daughter and taken to the forest like a gypsy. But one day when Rampion joined two girls playing at hoops in the market square, a group of older boys surrounded her. Tabby was bargaining with the apple woman when the boys' song made her turn:

  Witch's Child, you cannot cry

  when I pinch you low or high.

  Fie! Fie! Four fingers round my thumb!

  You must not walk where good folk come.

  Though Rampion eventually forgot the teasing, Tabby relived the ugly scene for weeks on end. It was still buried like a barb in her heart the day she packed their belongings and set off toward an old tower she had found in the woods. "They shall ne'er treat you like that again," she told the girl. Just as she had at market, Rampion sobbed piteously. But this time it was Tabby, and not the village bullies, who made her weep. She held fast to her mother's skirts and did all she could to prevent her from stuffing the last of the cookware into two bulging saddlebags on the hob low-flanked mare they had borrowed from Old Chauncey.

  "It does not matter," the girl insisted, pursuing her mother into the forest and stumbling along the nearly invisible path Tabby seemed to find without effort. "For my sake, Mother, let it be. I would rather get teased every day than leave our lovely garden."

  But Tabby could not forget how the children had poked and prodded, trying to prove a witch cannot cry—"... when I pinch you low or high." How each had wrapped one fist around his other thumb and pummeled Rampion with both hands joined. Even when the girl began to sob, they did not stop, and afterward her slender arms had been riddled with ugly scratches and bruises.

  The tower did little to comfort Rampion, though the shock of it stopped her tears. Jutting from the undergrowth at a slight angle, it no longer belonged to a castle but stood by itself, a crumbling ruin pointing halfheartedly at the sky. Even Tabby was dispirited as they neared the place, wondering if it could ever be made habitable. She heard the need to please in her own voice, the desperate enthusiasm. "See, love, there's a window on high," she told her daughter. "You shall be mistress of all you survey."

  The girl sniffed and looked up to where two stone gargoyles guarded the tower's single window. "Then I will be mistress of fearsome rocks and noisome weeds." She kicked aside a clump of mandrake that barred her way and tied their mule to a tree. Pulling an ax from a satchel on its back, she called over her shoulder, "Come along, Mother. It would seem we must work until last light to part our front door from these woods."

  It was true. What once must have been a guard's entrance was all but swallowed up by thick, gnarled vines and brambles. After they had chopped away the brush and forced the small door open, they found a stairway that was sound enough to climb. They followed it to the top of the tower, a spacious, high-walled ro
om brightened on one side by the window and on the other by a second, larger door. Years before, Tabby supposed, this entrance might have opened into the castle. But if anyone had been foolish enough to walk through it now, they would have found no footing, only dropped like a stone to the woods below.

  That first day and many after, Tabby and the girl scrubbed and polished. They hauled bedding, benches, and trestles from the house they had left behind and dragged them up the winding stairs. For though they placed a few sconces and a braided rug in the hall on the ground floor, most of their belongings had to be carried to the topmost room, where the window and the old doorway let in a comforting, buttery light. They pushed a chest against the larger opening and hung thick curtains, turning it into a passable window. Through a chink that Tabby assumed had once served to rain arrows on soldiers below, they vented a hearth.

  At last, even Rampion had to admit, they had fashioned an elegant aerie. Whereas the old cottage had made their possessions seem dingy and small, the high stone walls of the tower lent everything they owned a sort of spare majesty. "I shall be quite afraid to sing at baking here," Tabby told her daughter. "It seems more fit for curtsies and perfumed handkerchiefs, this grand place we have made!"

  "On the contrary, Mother." Rampion, who had not smiled in days, laughed and put down her broom. "'Tis made for trills and long, sweet notes." She picked up her skirts, then whirled around the huge room, singing as she spun. The combination of her daughter's tender form and the wild gaiety in her voice made Tabby stop work, dizzy with love, to lean against her own broom.

  ***

  All went well for a few months. Rampion spent hours watching the woods and the fields beyond from the tower window. And when she tired of looking at the land below them, she spent even more hours tramping through the forest outside their door. Tabby's fear of people made her trust the places where they were not. She never worried about her daughter, who came home from these walks with herbs and flowers and mushrooms; with baskets of acorns, blackberries, and the tiny, ripe fruits they christened "wood plums."

  What the wild world did not provide, Tabby secured by hard work. If Rampion begged for a new gown, her mother would hire herself out as a servant in town until it was bought. If the girl wanted a book, a few more weeks of work and Tabby could place it in her lap. And if the book was opened to a picture of a beautiful dame in a necklace for which Rampion pined, sure enough, Tabbatha Nigran overcame her hatred of the village folk long enough to clean their houses and wash their filthy linens. As she worked, she dreamed only of the moment she could fasten those flashing gems around her daughter's neck.

  When she did, the girl's rapturous smile was worth every ache in Tabby's back, every morning spent on stiff knees. "Oh!" Rampion stared at her reflection in the looking glass they had bought at Bridley the year before. "It is the loveliest thing I have ever seen!" She watched the play of light on her new necklace, staring as if spelled into the glass. "Will you brush my hair the way you used to, Mother? I feel as though I am quite outshined!"

  Rampion unpinned her hair, and Tabby was astonished to see

  how long it had grown. Reaching past her ankles, it rolled across the floor in frothy golden waves. The bristle brush was found and Tabby sat in the light from the window while, weak with fondness, she worked through the tangled locks, down and down.

  The evening Tabby found the upside-down cross nailed to their door, she did not tell Rampion. She had come home late from serving at a burgher's saint's day feast and was so tired, she failed to notice the two branches tied together and fastened just above eye level. It was the smell of the blood splashed across them that made her stop, made her draw back and cover her nose. Once she had tiptoed upstairs and seen that her daughter still slept, she snuck back down the stairs again, tore away the hateful token, and cleaned the door until no trace remained.

  Tabby was well aware that she courted such hate by working in town, but she had hoped it would not find their woodland home. Now the sign of the witch had been tacked to their door. We know where you are, it seemed to say We will not let you rest. Next morning, she took the padlock from her chest upstairs and fastened it on the little door.

  "You shall not leave the house today, my pet." She tried to keep the worry from her tone, worked not to sound too sharp or stern. "For a while, you must wait until I come home to go a'rambling." The day at the fair threatened to play itself out again in her mind, and she shook her head to banish the ugly scene. "And you must not go too far, must never stray toward town."

  "But why?" Rampion was accustomed to being on her own in the forest, to tramping when and where she pleased.

  "I will tell you by and by, but for now you shall do as I say." Tabby softened, melted by the girl's anguished expression. "Have I ere wanted more than your safety and content?"

  The first few days were hard, since no matter how early Tabby rushed home to unlock the tower door, it was never soon enough. "The sun is nearly down," the girl would moan. "I shall have no time at all." Or, "Mother!" she would cry. "You have caged me like a beast!"

  But then, for no reason Tabby could find, things settled into an easier pattern. Rampion was sweeter now, always ready with soup and a smile when her mother came home and unlocked the door. Occasionally, she even chose to stay inside rather than take to the woods. "The forest will be there tomorrow," she would say, making Tabby's grateful heart leap. "But you are tired, Mother, and will soon to bed. If we are to sing and sew a bit, we'd best be about it now."

  In this way the winter turned to spring, and Rampion asked only a few times when her imprisonment would end. She was easily put off with Tabby's assurances that it would be soon, and indeed, the cross on the tower door began to seem a mere prank, the idle threat of a child. So when, on the first day of a full moon in April, Tabby's dreams came true at last, there was nothing to dilute her joy. "Mother," the girl announced over their mugs of morning porridge, "I must have cut myself on my walk last night. Look how I have spoiled my gown." As soon as she saw the red nightshirt, Tabby's eyes filled. First blood, she thought. My daughter is a woman made for flight.

  She embraced Rampion and explained that the blood was a ripeness, not a wound. She showed her how to bind herself, how to wash the cloth and bind again. "And when the blood has stopped," she promised, barely containing her joy, "and the moon is new again, we will take to the woods, you and I." She drew the girl to the window they had fashioned of the useless door, and together they looked out at the forest below. "I will show you a secret there, a secret only we two can share." She pictured the clearing in the woods, imagined them joining the coven's flight. Already, as if it had been days instead of years, she could feel the swift climb, the unstoppable cresting, like a tide in her veins.

  The next day, instead of heading for the village, Tabby hurried to the sacred grove. Or rather, to the spot she was convinced she had visited so often before. But when she reached the clearing, she found the ground overgrown with weeds and the altar of stones missing. There were no stray boulders, no tumbled remains at all. It was as if she and her sisters had never met, had never chanted the sacred words or worn the earth smooth with their comings and goings. Could she have forgotten the path? How could her feet have failed to take her the way she knew as well as she knew her name?

  For a while she stood, head bent, silent. It was almost like disappearing, losing the last traces of her past this way. But when she looked up again, she was still herself, still the mother of the dearest, fairest child she could imagine. She had not, after all, heard from her sisters in years, had not sought them out or missed them more than a handful of times. Those nights, when the moon swelled and the time of flight neared, she had dreamt of going with them, had felt awash with the old yearning, the call to the sky. But such dreams vanished like dew in the morning, burned away in the fierce love she knew would outlast all others. Nor did she need the sisterhood, she decided now, to pass on the glorious rite, to fly with Rampion at the very next full moon.


  As she made her way home, it occurred to Tabby that the coven might simply have grown old. She herself, after all, had been the youngest of them, and the rest (she felt suddenly guilty at the thought) might have died. Part of her grieved her lost friends, while another part trembled with eagerness to share the sweetest secret she knew with Rampion. Little wonder, then, that she failed to notice the second bloody tribute until it met her eye to eye. No harmless cross of twigs this time: it was a goat's head that had been hacked off and nailed to their tower door. The dead eyes were wide, as if stunned by the loss of the body they had been accustomed to steering. The tongue lolled, and a steady red stream still poured from the severed neck. Tabby's first thought was Poor thing. Her second was We must run.

  She realized now that the coven had probably left long before, driven out by the same hatred and violent fear that had turned the village against Tabby and her daughter. There was no time to lose, she told Rampion as soon as she had unlocked the door and hurried upstairs; they must escape right away. "I cannot leave you alone again," she said. "I dare not trust your safety, even in our own home."

  "And where, pray tell, will we go?" Rampion clearly feared the unknown more than the threats of bullies, which were, after all, quite familiar to her. "They mean nothing, those louts," she told Tabby. "They box with shadows and call themselves men. When I go to town, I point a finger at them and they all fall back, hexed. "

  "When you go to town?" Tabby was stunned. And furious.

  Rampion blushed. "Only once in a while," she said, "when I have finished picking..." She stopped, shamed by the look on her mother's face.

  "I have told you not to walk beyond the woods, have I not?"

  "Dear old worrywart!" Rampion smiled fondly at Tabby now. "I ne'er go far. Only to meet my friend for a walk or a game. Or sometimes to peek at the market stalls."