Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [30]
"Do not trouble yourself," the woman told her. "There be only one small thing I need."
"Name it," said Hansel, sounding as though he was ready to perform miracles.
"'Tis something you might manage, young master," their hostess said. "Come and have a look at the wobbling leg on this chair." She led him back to the bedroom in which they'd passed the night, but when Gretel tried to come along, the woman pointed back to the kitchen. "There be the broom," she told the girl.
After she had swept the hearth, Gretel went in search of her brother. She tried the bedroom door and found it locked. "The young master must stay abed from now on," the old woman told her when she asked. "I shall not have him running off the lovely fat I plan to put on him."
Perhaps because Gretel had become accustomed to her step-mother's high-handed scorn, she was slow to apprehend the extent of the horror into which she and Hansel had stumbled. It took days of begging for scraps from the crone's table; of hearing the woman, whose voice no longer pretended any charity toward her at all, scold Gretel for drinking too much water or moving too slowly; of watching the witch (for what else could she be?) kneel and mumble prayers in a strange tongue before an ab tar covered with a blood-red cloth. It took the knife-sharp thorns of the black, bloomless brambles that had grown up around the house since she and her brother sought refuge there. And it took, finally, a chain of dreamless nights. Not once, after she had fallen, exhausted, into the brief sleep the witch allowed her, was Gretel visited by her winged guardian. It was a sign, she realized later, she should have taken to heart.
Eventually, though, she could delude herself no longer about the witch's plans. Three, and sometimes four times each day, the old woman took a brass key from around her neck and opened the door behind which Hansel now slept and ate. She always brought a tray with her heaped with elegant food: cakes and loaves and sugar tarts; cream and strawberries; even whole capons turned golden red on the spit above the kitchen fire. When she called Gretel to come get the dishes piled beside the door, the girl often heard the witch ask Hansel to hold out his hand. Through the keyhole, she watched the old woman circle his wrist with her gnarled fingers, and frown. "Not yet ready, my morsel," she would say, as if he were a roasting hen instead of a boy. "Not quite done."
It wasn't long before the witch, knowing Gretel would not leave her brother and that if she did there was no way out of the impenetrable thicket she'd contrived, began to treat the girl worse than ever. She fed her scraps, left her to sleep without a blanket, and at last grew as careless and talkative as if Gretel were a cat or dog, a pet that fended for itself but kept her company. "Ay," she grumbled one morning, stirring Hansel's porridge, "it has been a chain of long, lean days between meals. If I could eat such slop"—she stabbed at the pot with her spoon, then spat on the floor Gretel had swept only minutes before—"things would be different. But the blood thirst cannot be sated with your paltry human fare." She unhooked the cauldron from the hearth and set it to cool by the window. "'Tis a hunger to reckon with, a torture that feels close to madness when I must wait so long."
Gretel said nothing, knew the woman expected no reply. "But ah, when I feel that boy's flesh filling out, fat with life as he is of late, 'tis worth the pangs, the nights of waiting with my whole body crying out for him and my teeth rattling in my jaws."
Gretel knew, because the witch had told her, that if all went well, she would prepare her soulless feast soon. It was this fearful prospect that made the girl take a foolish risk and slip into Hansel's room the next time the old woman failed to lock the door. (The hungrier the crone got, the more forgetful she seemed. Once she even neglected to put on her shoes and clothes and spent the day naked, her wizened shins and third teat leaving Gretel torn miserably between laughter and tears.)
The