Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [61]
They were a good distance away, that I could tell. But how fast they were advancing was harder to judge. I raced back to where she stood and grabbed her hand. I pointed to the torches, twinkling like stars on the slopes above the stream. "If they are on horseback, we have no time to get home," I decided, already skating away from the cottage. "We will hide in the mine."
We took off our skates and stumbled through the snow, cutting west toward the far side of the hills down which the lights were filing. "It lies just ahead," I told her, battering my way through drifts that reached my hips. She followed gamely, less encumbered by snow that came only to her knees. But fear had taken her breath, and she sucked in the icy air too deeply as she ran.
When we had reached the entrance to the shaft and worked our way down to a point where our torches were hidden from view, I stopped and made her rest. I climbed back to the surface to drag a branch across our tracks and seal the entrance behind us. "We are safe enough now," I told her when I returned, "unless your stepmother's men can see through stone."
She would not sit but remained pinned to the wall of the shaft, gulping air as if it were water, her body shaking, her eyes closed. When the pounding of hooves echoed in the cave, she ran to me and threw her arms around my neck. Her chest was heaving and I could feel her heart jump against me. As the men aboveground yelled to one another, I put my arms around her, too, and forced her to sit on the ground, soothing her as I would a child. "Shhh. Do not fret. I will not let them harm you."
I knew our mine as well as I did my own house. I was calm and certain of our hiding place. "There is no need to worry," I whispered, my breath spreading smoky fingers in the gloom. Still she shuddered and held me close, breeding in me a kind of madness, a sharp desire to prolong her anguish. For as long as the men remained dismounted and their footsteps crossed and re-crossed the ground above our heads, Diamonda melted into me. As long as they continued to yell and laugh, her sweet breasts were mine to press against, to feel with arms that fell slyly, secretly against her time and time again.
We remained undiscovered, and when the horses had clamored off over the hills, we were free to go home. But not free to risk again such foolish expeditions. Even Diamonda now saw the sense in her confinement and begged no more for moonlight skates. Our caution doubled and our lives rattled like dried pods. My brothers and I became prisoners, too, circling dully between the mine and the cottage, afraid to take trips to town, deal with traders, or let beggars in for food. In the center of our weary pattern, Diamonda grew more and more restless, her only entertainment the quiet talks she and I shared after the rest had gone to bed.
"Do you suppose," she asked me one evening halfway to spring, "that you and I want what is best for us?" She was mending a tear in the vest I had bought from a peddler. I had noticed often how the slow, regular passage of her needle through cloth turned her philosophical. Now something crumbled and gave way inside my chest as she pricked herself, sucked her finger, and sighed. "Do you suppose God has arranged it so that human desires are like seedlings bending toward the light?"
My body was a stream swollen with a sudden thaw, racing toward things it could not see. "What do you mean?" I asked.
"Oh, I know it sounds wicked," she said, eyes once more lowered to her sewing. "I used to have a tutor; he was a priest. He told me that the body desires but the spirit is always satisfied. Do you think that is so, Erin?"
The sound of rushing water filled my ears. I looked at her, helpless with longing. It was a longing of the flesh, yes. But of the mind, too. And of the spirit, surely, since I would gladly