Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [12]
She leaned out to the night, and the wind nuzzled her bare toes, slipped sly fingers up her gown. She remembered her sisters' warnings. "You have caught the way of human love," Maeve had said. And Tabby had laughed when they told her she would forget how to fly.
Tonight, though, it was not flight she was after. She still knew how to catch an updraft, how to surrender to a current, arms wide. But what Tabby wanted most, what she craved as she stood in the light of her last full moon, was to walk, not fly, from this door. To leave behind the loneliness that made her days rattle like chains and stole the taste from everything she ate. To drop like a stone and put a stop to the waiting, the mad dream of the girl racing up the tower steps and into her arms. Wasn't such an end better than trying to begin again when a garden was no longer enough? When the sweet, empty face of a flower or the warmth of the sun was nothing beside the rush of air, the final fall?
Pipe Dreams
When the rats ate Herr Bergman's footstool, Father decided to call on the mayor. It was the same day they ate my crutch, but I was the only one who cared about that. The footstool meant money, after all; it was nearly finished and had been left on a workbench near my bed. I had leaned my crutch against the same bench, where it would be within easy reach. Easy reach of the rats, it turned out!
By the time I woke that morning, the footstool had only two legs left and the crutch looked as though a band of beaver had taken a fancy to it. The carved pad on top had been nibbled to a stub, and the rest was nearly four hands shorter than it had been the day before. When I leaned my weight on it, the whole shaft split down the middle and sent me sprawling.
I am not sure which made Father angriest—the sight of me, far too old to be sobbing on the floor in a pile of splinters, or the unpaid hours and new wood it would require to rebuild the stool. I know only that he was red-faced and trembling when he leaned down and yanked me to my feet.
"What will it take?" he yelled, bracing me against him and clamping his huge arm around my waist. "Do those monsters need to eat the trim off his wife's jacket before our fool of a mayor decides to hire the piper?"
I thought of the mayor's wife, a thin woman who walked as if she were standing on her toes inside those fur-lined boots of hers. And then I thought of the egrets I had carved on the top of my crutch, each one carefully polished with mineral spirits until its wings shone.
"A crutch is one thing," Father told me, as if he had heard the words I'd only thought. He steered me toward the workbench, where four small chests waited for finishing. "You can make another in a few hours, if you don't insist on decorating it like an emperor's walking stick." He made a snorting sound, the whinny of a large, steaming horse, then looked forlornly at the mess on the floor.
"This stool was nearly ready." He kicked the legs that remained on the halbchewed base. "The old man will not pay us twice for one stool." He handed me a mallet, unrolled an apron of chisels across the bench, then grabbed his cap and jacket from the pegs by the door. "I will call on the mayor after I fetch the birch," he told me, his tone as stern as if I were the one who had chewed the stool to shreds. "Find what you can for supper, boy. I'll not be back till that lout and his council have come to their senses."
I knew there was endless work ahead. But still I felt slyly grateful, glad that, for once, I was not the "lout" father blamed for our troubles. Ever since I was four and old enough to hold an awl, father had complained of my work. For nearly eleven years,