Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [32]
But Hansel looked past her, or through her, she could not say which. "She has a right soft touch, Mother does," he said.
"She has told me!" Gretel stamped in frustration, tears in her eyes. "She has said it to me!"
Hansel no longer glared; his expression approached pity. "You are making it up," he told her. "Because she does not love you as she does me."
"'Love'!" Gretel was blinded by tears, by disbelief, by the word itself. How could he use such a word here, in this house? How could he use it about such a woman?
"She says I have nobility," he told her now. "When she sets eyes on me, 'tis as if she see a duke or a prince." His own fierce eyes fastened on Gretel again. "No one has ever looked upon me that way."
"But—"
"And you shall not take this from me for spite."
"It is not—"
"Go back to Father and our stepdame, if you wish." He ab most rose from the bed, but perhaps his legs were not equal to the task of bearing his weight. He sank down to his bed again, sending more marbles across the floor. "As for me, I would rather die than go back to that thin gruel and those harsh words." If it was not loyalty that shone in his eyes, it was at least pure contentment. "I shall not leave Mother."
Gretel despaired of changing his mind. Of saving his life. But still she took the twig from her pocket. "Take it," she told him. "If you give her this instead of your wrist—"
"Enough of your wiles, girl," he scolded. "Go back to the hearth."
"—she will think you have lost weight."
"Get out! Get out, before you ruin it all!"
"And she will feed you even more."
Her words found their mark. Gretel saw her brother stop, lean back on one round elbow, and consider. She plunged ahead, heaping him with delights. "Crumpets and pasties and those littie blue eggs you like. Rabbit and trout and all manner of fowl."
He reached for the twig she proffered, reciting dreamily, "Pancakes and almond tarts, puddings and jam."
Gretel nodded. "More of everything," she agreed. "She will feed you twice, maybe three times as much as she does now."
When they heard the witch's shuffling footstep in the hall, Gretel had won only half what she'd hoped for: Hansel was delighted with the plan of tricking the old woman into feeding him more, a plan that, although he didn't know it, might spare his life. But she had still found no way to persuade him to leave that cursed house.
Gretel climbed out the bedroom window and circled back to the kitchen. The witch unlocked the door to visit her plump cherub, unaware of the visitor who had left him seconds before. And so more weeks passed, and months as well, time that left Hansel plumper and Gretel and the witch more famished. For as the witch grew hungrier, she fed the girl less, too, and by the time she decided to put an end to her fast, neither of them could remember what a full stomach felt like. Gretel, as she lay by the hearth at night, her poor insides churning and empty, remembered the way Mother, at the end, would push away the trays Gretel brought. I will have none of that, she'd say. Just sing me another song, sweet. 'Tis that will fill me up. And sometimes it was enough to put her to sleep, humming the old song, the lullaby Mama craved.
"There be no use," the witch said one day, as Gretel had known she must. The crone threw her book of spells at Gretel, though it fell short of its mark and skittered along the floor. "I have prayed and chanted and fed the boy until I am worn with toil." She waved a frail hand at the girl. "I may as well eat a skinny thing like you."
She rose then and, with a horrible finality, walked to the drawer where she kept her knives and skewers. "I have conjured cornmeal and compotes, peacock and ham hocks. I have summoned up soups and stews. Souffles and crab cakes. But still he loses flesh." She sharpened one of her longest, cruelest knives on a whetstone, brushing it faster and faster across the oiled rock. "I have coddled and spoiled him and emptied his foul pan."
She held up the gleaming knife now and, before Gretel