Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [6]
"It does not matter," the girl insisted, pursuing her mother into the forest and stumbling along the nearly invisible path Tabby seemed to find without effort. "For my sake, Mother, let it be. I would rather get teased every day than leave our lovely garden."
But Tabby could not forget how the children had poked and prodded, trying to prove a witch cannot cry—"... when I pinch you low or high." How each had wrapped one fist around his other thumb and pummeled Rampion with both hands joined. Even when the girl began to sob, they did not stop, and afterward her slender arms had been riddled with ugly scratches and bruises.
The tower did little to comfort Rampion, though the shock of it stopped her tears. Jutting from the undergrowth at a slight angle, it no longer belonged to a castle but stood by itself, a crumbling ruin pointing halfheartedly at the sky. Even Tabby was dispirited as they neared the place, wondering if it could ever be made habitable. She heard the need to please in her own voice, the desperate enthusiasm. "See, love, there's a window on high," she told her daughter. "You shall be mistress of all you survey."
The girl sniffed and looked up to where two stone gargoyles guarded the tower's single window. "Then I will be mistress of fearsome rocks and noisome weeds." She kicked aside a clump of mandrake that barred her way and tied their mule to a tree. Pulling an ax from a satchel on its back, she called over her shoulder, "Come along, Mother. It would seem we must work until last light to part our front door from these woods."
It was true. What once must have been a guard's entrance was all but swallowed up by thick, gnarled vines and brambles. After they had chopped away the brush and forced the small door open, they found a stairway that was sound enough to climb. They followed it to the top of the tower, a spacious, high-walled room brightened on one side by the window and on the other by a second, larger door. Years before, Tabby supposed, this entrance might have opened into the castle. But if anyone had been foolish enough to walk through it now, they would have found no footing, only dropped like a stone to the woods below.
That first day and many after, Tabby and the girl scrubbed and polished. They hauled bedding, benches, and trestles from the house they had left behind and dragged them up the winding stairs. For though they placed a few sconces and a braided rug in the hall on the ground floor, most of their belongings had to be carried to the topmost room, where the window and the old doorway let in a comforting, buttery light. They pushed a chest against the larger opening and hung thick curtains, turning it into a passable window. Through a chink that Tabby assumed had once served to rain arrows on soldiers below, they vented a hearth.
At last, even Rampion had to admit, they had fashioned an elegant aerie. Whereas the old cottage had made their possessions seem dingy and small, the high stone walls of the tower lent everything they owned a sort of spare majesty. "I shall be quite afraid to sing at baking here," Tabby told her daughter. "It seems more fit for curtsies and perfumed handkerchiefs, this grand place we have made!"
"On the contrary, Mother." Rampion, who had not smiled in days, laughed and put down her broom. "'Tis made for trills and long, sweet notes." She picked up her skirts, then whirled around the huge room, singing as she spun. The combination of her daughter's tender form and the wild gaiety in her voice made Tabby stop work, dizzy with love, to lean against her own broom.
***
All went well for a few months. Rampion spent hours watching the woods and the fields beyond from the tower window. And when she tired of looking at the land below them, she spent even more hours tramping through the forest outside their door. Tabby's fear of people made her trust the places where they were not. She never worried about her daughter, who came home from these walks with herbs and flowers and mushrooms; with baskets