Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [1]
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," she 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