Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [5]
"'Tis tansy, love," Tabby told her, smiling at the way the girl's lips and nose had nearly met in the center of her darling face. "The root for fevers and flies, the leaves for puddings and cakes."
"Then let us leave the root in the ground," Rampion had decided. "'Twill grow more leaves that way, and you know how I love pudding!"
There were cooking lessons, too. And darning. And the smattering of Latin Tabby had learned from the coven. It was mostly words that went with flying spells, not the church Latin the other children in town knew. Her sisters' church, after all, had been the wild woods, and their prayers had focused on thanksgiving, not penance, on the Great Mother, not the Holy Father. So it was little wonder that, at last, Rampion came to be regarded with the same suspicion and fear her mother was.
It did not happen all at once. There were only whispers at first, some nervous laughter when Tabby and her daughter appeared in public. But if Rampion chanced to stretch her tiny arm toward a stranger and utter a Latin phrase she had learned, some mistook it for an incantation. And once when they had gone to a fair in Bridley and Rampion tried to join a group of children watching a Punch and Judy show, the other children's mothers, one by one, had pulled their sons and daughters away from the stage. But in those early years, while Rampion was still a child, the two managed to brush shoulders with the rest of the village, and no great harm was done on either side. In fact, Tabby began to enjoy taking the girl with her to market, loved the way Rampion's cheeks reddened with the fresh air, the way people stared at her loveliness. Sometimes the tradesmen and shoppers even made timid overtures, handing the child sweets and trinkets or stroking her hair and asking if fairies had spun it. It made the final blow all the more cruel, then, that it came on market day.
It happened when Rampion was eleven years old, when her beauty had already begun to stop people in their tracks, to make them gossip and whisper things that sat like stones in Tabby's chest: Was such a face normal? Were Christ's children meant to be so alluring? Did her sweet shape dissolve at night, turn into the scab-infested leer and hairy chest of devil's spawn?
Perhaps if the hurt had traveled no further than her own anxious love, Tabby would not have run away, would not have packed up her daughter and taken to the forest like a gypsy. But one day when Rampion joined two girls playing at hoops in the market square, a group of older boys surrounded her. Tabby was bargaining with the apple woman when the boys' song made her turn:
Witch's Child, you cannot cry
when I pinch you low or high.
Fie! Fie! Four fingers round my thumb!
You must not walk where good folk come.
Though Rampion eventually forgot the teasing, Tabby relived the ugly scene for weeks on end. It was still buried like a barb in her heart the day she packed their belongings and set off toward an old tower she had found in the woods. "They shall ne'er treat you like that again," she told the girl. Just as she had at market, Rampion sobbed piteously. But this time it was Tabby, and not the village bullies, who made her weep. She held fast to her mother's skirts and did all she could to prevent her from stuffing the last of the cookware into two bulging saddlebags