Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [17]
Ilse took the cake now and, as I might have expected, tore a generous portion off to give to a squalling infant in another girl's arms. They were like a family, these orphans and runaways, a tiny family that looked after its own. I knew it was a sin, but sometimes I envied the beggar children. I had a warm bed and a father who taught me a trade, but I had no littermates, no warm bodies to jostle and nest against.
***
Father came back home well satisfied, whistling as he hung his coat and cap by the door, took up his apron, and tied it around his waist.
Though I would never have dared whistle out loud, I was whistling, too—inside, where my little beggars had lifted my spirits. The children had all admired my new crutch. Not only was it sturdy and just the right size, but the carving was surely my finest: the sweep of wings, the cut-out mountains on the armrest, and then, along the shaft, a shepherd leading his flock down from the foothills. I could not help but feel pride when the ragamuffins gathered round, touching it as if it were a relic in church. How Use had laughed as she counted the sheep and followed their tracks with her tiny finger!
I used the crutch now to make my way to our hearth, though I ran the risk of Father's making a joke of the "curlicues and doodads" with which I'd decorated it. "And what did he say, the mayor?" I asked, hooking a small pot above the flames. It was well past suppertime, and the church bells had rung twice since I'd lit the candles.
"The old fool," Father told me, bent over the last of the four chests. "He sings whichever way the wind blows."
I could not cook griddlecakes the way Mother used to, but cornmeal mush made a fine supper with roasted turnips. Not that Father would taste the food, anyway. He always ate like a human whirlwind, sucking up whatever was on his plate, belching after and stumbling to bed.
"Once I persuaded him that the rat-catcher could not very well summon dead rats back from the river," Father said, looking extremely pleased with himself, "he agreed there was no need to pay so much as he had promised.
"In fact," he added, turning the chest, applying varnish with his smallest brush, "I warrant he has decided not to pay him at all."
"But the rat-catcher worked the whole morning," I said. Father surely knew what it was like to have hours of labor go for nothing. Wasn't that why he had gone to the mayor in the first place?
He shook his shaggy head now, shoved the finished chest toward me. "Did you see me smile even once, boy, when I was fitting the lock on this box?" He stood up to take off his apron, then came to the table where I'd set out our bowls. "Do you see me asking good folk to pay me for a pipe dance?"
"But the rats, even the mice, they..."
"Those vermin were chased here by that rat-catcher," Father said. "It was all part of his plan to fleece the town."
"Still," I told him, "they are gone now. The piper kept his part of the bargain."
"He kept it with magic. Those rats were under a spell." Father brought his bowl to the fire, held it out for me to fill. "For all we know, that spell caster is in league with the devil. Would you have me help Satan earn his keep, boy?"
There was nothing to say. It mattered little whether the piper was a heavenly messenger or the devil's own son. Father would not be persuaded to pay for help he no longer needed. We finished our meal in silence and went to our beds the same way.
It was three days later, on St. Paul and St. John's feast day, when the piper came back to Hameln. The mayor gave him no money, and the rest of the council scolded him for trying to do business on a feast day. Then they all hurried off to church. Which is where Father and I were when the rat-catcher followed his debtors into the great nave of St. Nicolai. The mass was beginning, and we two had just found a bench in back when the piper strode in the door. He made his way down an aisle in the direction of the altar. I watched him stop at the seventh station of the cross,