Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [10]
The dream stayed with her all the next day, so that instead of going into town to work, Tabby went back to the cottage where she had raised Rampion. She was glad the girl was not with her to see what had become of their little home. Marked with an inverted cross like the one that had been tacked on the tower, its shutters burnt away and its door gaping wide, the house had been plundered until it was little more than a pile of rotting timbers. But the round stones in the wall suited Tabby's purpose, and by twos and threes she succeeded at last in hauling several score back to the tower in the woods. The next day, with wet earth and sand for mortar, she managed to seal up the tower door just as she had done in her dream.
It was cruel, backbreaking work, but even though Rampion begged to come down and help, Tabby was too caught up in her dream and her fears to let the girl out. Stone by heavy stone, she covered up the door and barely paid attention when her daughter leaned from the window to tease her. "For all you love me, Mother, this old monster is luckier far than I." She reached down to touch the tongue of one of the gargoyles that perched below the window ledge. "For here he sits in the sweet open air, while I am forced to sniff last night's fire and yesterday's soup."
So intent was Tabby on her labors that she neither smiled at her daughter's antics nor gave a thought to how she herself would enter and leave the place until the moon was full and the power of flight was strong in her again. Only after she had set the last stone and smelled the lentils Rampion put on to cook did she remember the end of her dream, the horror of finding herself on the wrong side of the wall. But this, of course, was different. There was no nightmarish beast storming toward Tabby now, only the foolish shame of having sealed herself away from her daughter and deprived herself of her own bed!
Mortified and bone weary, she was far too exhausted to laugh at her mistake. Instead, daunted and tired beyond measure, she sat down by the vanished door and wept. With no room for pride, she sobbed so long and hard that Rampion, who had never before seen Tabby cry, was moved to tears herself. "Please, Mother," she called from the window. "Please do not despair. We will solve this riddle by and by." And it was not long at all before she did.
Tabby wiped her eyes and stared in astonishment when her clever girl showed how she could twist her long hair into a braid and wrap it around the open jaw of one of the gargoyles. When she had let the braid down as far as it would go, she urged her mother to use it as a rope and climb up. Indeed, once Tabby had obeyed her daughter's instructions and rolled Old Chauncey's cart beneath the window, then clambered on top, she found she could easily grab the lovely, sunny ladder that tumbled down to her and hoist herself home. "'Tis very like flying," she said, pleased and smiling, when she had reached the top.
***
On the evening of May's full moon—the Milk Moon, the villagers called it—Tabby rushed back to the tower. As she had each day for a month, she called for Rampion to let down her hair. All morning she had nursed her excitement, like something warm nestled against her heart. In a matter of hours, she had told herself as she emptied the villagers' chamber pots and scrubbed their floors, the hunger for flight would come. Rampion must already be feeling the heat in her blood, the stirrings of a woman born to flight.
At first when she called up and heard nothing but the wind whistling through the empty windows, Tabby was not alarmed. "Rampion!" she cried, her hands cupped round her mouth in case the girl was reading or dozing by the fire. "Rampion, let down your hair!" A crow in a tree behind the tower answered, but no yellow braid dropped down to her.
She spent an hour calling and crying, then another seated in a miserable heap beside the walled-up door. As she sat, she remembered how bravely and gaily Rampion had accepted her long imprisonment, and how quickly she had