Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [4]
She let the garden go to seed. All except the vegetables and herbs she grew to feed the child. There were not enough hours in the day to waste on primroses. Tabby was tending something far more precious now—something that responded to her care by growing more beautiful with every season. There were times, often when she sat stitching, that she looked up to find the girl playing in a stripe of sunlight spread across the floor. She would stop then, losing a stitch she would have to pick up later, and stare at the fearful loveliness of her daughter. And when, feeling doting eyes on her, Rampion looked up as well, she would likely run and put her arms around Tabby's neck, settle in her lap, and set to unpinning her own bright curls. "Mother! Mother!" she would beg. "Brush my hair."
Then Tabby would stroke Rampion's shining locks with a brush she had bought at market, a fine one made of willow wood and boar's bristles. The soft lapping of the brush, the hair falling pale as light across her daughter's shoulders, it worked the same miracle every time—the soaring inside her chest, her heart straining up and up. Her body never left the chair, but her mind and spirit flew away to the sweet future when her lovely child would grow to womanhood, when Tabby would take her by the hand to the sacred grove. When she would teach her what she knew of splendor, of endless joy.
Because she cherished this vision, the two of them flying together, Tabby's garden died before her meetings with the coven stopped. But it was not long after the peonies withered, their wilted heads drooping on broken stalks, that Tabby began to find reasons to miss the gatherings with her sisters in the woods. What had been her greatest joy was now cheating her of one far greater. Each time she left her daughter, she suffered dreadfully, imagining an endless variety of accidents and illnesses that might strike while Rampion was alone. What if the girl were to wake feeling thirsty, for instance? Were to push a stool against the wall to reach the cupboard overhead? And what if the stool tipped and sent her sprawling? Or say she managed to lift the latch and wander outside while Tabby was away? There were snakes in the old garden wall; Tabby had seen them several times at dusk, slithering out of sight before she could find their nest. The night she remembered this, Tabby tortured herself with a vision of Rampion being bitten, falling to the ground, then crying for her mother, calling and calling until she had no breath left but lay still and cold.
When Tabby finally told them she could no longer come to the woods, the others had been sad but not surprised. "You have caught the way of human love," her friend Maeve warned her. "'Tis not a bad way, but it clouds the heart and will make you weak. The Great Mother will ne'er abandon you, but 'tis you that will draw away from her. Further and further, until you have forgotten how to fly."
Tabby had laughed, knowing she would always remember the upward thrust, the whirling through moonlit air. "'Twill not be for long," she reminded them all. "Only until my daughter"—she said it out loud now, proudly—"comes of age. We will return to these woods after her first blood. The two of us."
Maeve and the others had nodded, but it was clear they did not believe her. "Paths are never straight," Sheba said, pointing the same finger at Tabby she had once used to show her the stars in the sky. "Turnings and choices leave tangles behind."
Tabby's old teacher drew her close. "You are not likely to find your way back to us." She kissed the younger woman, but it was a sad kiss, one that Tabby felt for a long time on her cheek, like a print, a seal of farewell.
After that night, she did not meet with the others again. Though she sometimes felt the urge to fly alone, to shoot like a lance through the dark, she stayed true to her changed life and her new responsibilities.