Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [2]
Still contrary, still perversely glad to see him in such discomfort, Tabby waved her hand at the dark tangle of garden. "There is a stone knocked from my wall," she scolded. "And just look how you have trampled my beds."
"But surely, lady," the man had pleaded, "even such as yourself must feel for the unborn babe my wife carries." Mistaking Tabby's stunned silence for compassion, he pressed on. "Even a fiend would not deprive an innocent babe of its father."
"If you have fathered innocence," Tabby told him, recovering, "where, pray tell, is the guilty party?"
"God preserve us, there be none, madam. 'Twas the mindless craving of a woman with child, is all. 'John, I must have rampion or die,' she tells me. Those be her very words."
"Indeed?" Tabby fixed her eyes on his. "She said, 'die'?" If he wanted a witch, she would give him one. "She meant to die for her supper?"
"No! No! You shall not take her life! Here!" He pulled the leaves from his vest and forced them into Tabby's hands. "I will take no more plants, nary a one. On my own head, last night was the end. I swear."
"Last night?" Tabby felt a tingle, a shiver of power. "You have been here before?"
"Oh, Lord! Oh, saints above!" The man dropped to his knees, grabbed the hem of her skirt. "I will do anything, give you all I have. Only spare my wife."
Tabby had not answered, wondering what service she could exact from this man. If he was as strong as he looked, there was a shed to be built and hay to be brought in before frost.
"You can have the babe." He stood suddenly, as if they had just come to terms. "I know that be what you crave, an innocent soul to turn to devil's work."
"Listen, fellow." Tabby was almost amused by the picture he nursed in his brain—a child-snatching witch, an unnatural hag who could not give birth and so must steal others' babes. "I ask only some honest labor in return for what you have taken from me."
"Ay, and when the child is grown, ye shall have it," the man told her. He placed his cap again on his head and bowed to Tabby, moving backward all the while. "A sturdy lad or lass to fetch and carry."
"Do you honestly expect me to wait years for what is owed me?" Why did she not laugh? Why did she not mention the shed or the hay, the wood that needed splitting?
"You be fouler than you seem, dame." His eyes found hers, and he resumed his pitiable handwringing. "A black heart in a fair frame."
It was time she set the fool straight. Tabby followed him and again touched his wrist. "Listen, my good man," she said. "I shall—"
"Yes! Yes! You shall have the babe as soon as it is weaned, I will bring it to you. On my oath."
"Weaned?"
"Ay, madam. As the Savior is my witness, the babe is yours." He stopped his scuttling crab walk and uttered a single bleating sob. "But it is a human child. It must suck at its mother's teat."
"But I do not want—"
He held his arms in front of him, as if to fend her off. "Ye have my oath, I say. Only do not harm my wife and me." Now that he had reached the gate he turned and, like some frantic animal, tried to walk through it without lifting the latch. At last he remembered himself and, making small, panicked grunts, succeeded in lifting the lock and racing off into the night.
A baby! Tabby had hardly dared hope for such a thing. Nor did she let herself dwell on the thought for long after the man left. Her satisfaction at having frightened him, in fact, soon gave way to self-recrimination: A fine witch, she was! Why, she had not even thought to ask his name or where he came from. Even now, he must be laughing at how he'd outsmarted her. She would surely never see him again.
It was not until spring, when buds shouldered their way once more out of the earth, that she allowed herself to think of the promise. She pictured a child, curled like a shoot in its mother's belly, and wondered idly how it was that someone went about