Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [54]
When the song ended, Jack turned to me, triumphant. "You can play, after all. And here I was about to spend a pretty penny to put the music back in you, sly wench." He gave the nipple on one of my golden breasts a tweak, then stepped carelessly over the old man, who still lay unmoving in the street. "Wait till they hear your songs now! They shall be begging to dance to my tunes, all the beauties in town." He bound me up in the cloth again and headed back the way he had come. "And won't she be sorry, Miss Proud Heart who would have none of me? Won't Miss High and Mighty pine to be invited, too."
But, of course, it did not happen that way. For when we got back and Jack called his mother to come see, when he removed my covering and commanded me to play, he still had not a single song in his heart, and I remained silent.
"I fear the musician does not know his work, my boy." Jack's mother had settled herself on a chair for my concert but seemed little perturbed by its postponement. "You must take the harp back straightway and make him do it right."
"But I tell you, this harp played." Jack was yelling now, though his mother had done nothing to deserve his harsh tone. "Just by the miller's courtyard, right in the street, a song for all to hear." Jack would not rest until I played again, and two times, three times, he pointed at me and shrieked, "Play, you harlot! Play!"
Two times, three times, I felt no song to play and my head remained bent and unmoving above my strings. Even after his mother had urged him to come to supper, to forget about music until the morning, he ranted and raved and ground his rude thumb in my eyes. "You shall play," he promised at last, kicking me so that I landed on my side and clattered against the hearthstone.
"Look what you have done to the poor thing," his mother said. She stooped to set me right, took a handkerchief from her sleeve, and knelt down beside me. Making small clucking sounds like the hen when it settled to roost, she spat upon the cloth and used it to polish my head and shoulders. It is a sad thing, indeed, to put a name to something precious you have lost. So it was for me when the woman stroked and petted me. I felt, of course, neither the warmth of her hand, nor even the weight of her fingers against my golden skin. Yet the memory of touch—of embraces and holding hands, of strolling arm in arm, or jostling up against a market crowd—all this came back to me so that I was loath for her to stop. But stop she did at last, rising and standing back, arms folded, to check her work. She looked at me with the same self-satisfied smile my aunt had often bestowed on a gleaming goblet or platter, then followed her son to table.
That was not the last time Jack's mother picked me up and rubbed me to a shine. My surly owner saw fit soon enough to hurl me again to the floor in a fit of temper. One night when Jack and a companion came home from hunting, they sat by the hearth to eat a late supper and drink toasts to their own prowess with bow and arrow. After many boastful toasts and too much mead, Jack forgot that there was anything he could not do. And so he pointed his finger at me and commanded me to play.
I tried, you must believe, to find a song in that bleary-eyed lad. As I listened, two shadows, one tall and the other short, fell across his heart. The tall figure sang to the smaller one, but though I knew it would serve me to hear the words, I could not make them out. Like a fairy tune from a faraway wood, his song was lost and dim. I remained as quiet, then, as any other harp without a master to play it, and I dreaded what my silence might cost.
Instead of getting angry, though, Jack laughed and bade his friend try his hand, too, at making me play. But the other hunter, who had just toasted his own skill in felling a pregnant doe, had no more music in him than Jack, and so the two of them proposed at last to make their own songs. They laughed and roared tuneless ditties at each other till I dared to hope