Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [62]
She looked up from her mending, her whole face flushed the way it had been when she was ill. "You will laugh at me."
"I could never laugh at you," I protested. "Or deny you any thing you ask for. Only tell me what you want." Before I explode with need, I should have added, with the frustration of heaven glimpsed through a keyhole, a distant horizon that calls and calls.
"Perhaps it is wrong to want more than we already have," she said at last, no longer looking at me, staring instead at the smoking hearth. "But my dream is so stubborn, so dear, I cannot give it up. I think I know what love is, Erin, though I have never tasted it." Still she could not bring herself to look at me. The cause, to my mounting joy, was not my appearance or any aversion she had to it. The flush on her cheeks, her downcast eyes, suggested instead that her native modesty struggled against a consuming passion. "How strange, how sad that I am most awake when I sleep, when he whose touch I have never known opens me like a flower."
One of my brothers turned in his sleep above us. The wind outside howled and beat itself against the door. The moon stopped rising and waited, caught in the window. "Who?" I asked. "Who is he?"
"Someone I know," she told me, staring still at the ashes, "as well as I know myself. Someone who has helped me bear sickness and poverty Someone whose face I carry like a dear, familiar secret wherever I go."
What had been a pale shoot of possibility was now a monstrous delight that out-howled the wind and filled me with a vanity and courage I had thought reserved for larger men. "I never guessed," I said, standing and walking to her, "that you were yearning for what is near to hand!"
I bent to her now, a good child rewarded suddenly with his fondest wish, a pious zealot about to collect the answer to his prayers.
"You are right," Diamonda told me. "He is no further than my dreams." She, too, had gained courage and was finally looking me full in the face. "His kindness, his devotion, are as close as my heart. His handsome smile, his tall and graceful form—they wait only for me to close my eyes."
Poor deluded dwarf! Now the current that had buoyed me up closed over my head. A drowning man, I sank down beside her chair, my face in my hands. "'Handsome'?" I repeated. "'Tall'?"
"I knew you would laugh at me." She shook her head, stroking the velvet vest in her lap. "In truth, Erin, I do not blame you. Here I am, a penniless princess dreaming of a man I have never even met!"
Again she shook her head. "Sometimes I think I will manage it, my friend. I think I can be content to stay here with you and your good brothers. And then I go to bed and he is with me again, wooing me away, calling me past any delight I have known."
That night, though I mouthed platitudes and urged Diamonda not to abandon hope, I buried mine. Just before dawn snuffed out the moon, I smashed the wine jar with the beautiful woman on its handle. I threw it with all my might against the hearth and watched it shatter against the stones.
Perhaps Diamonda, too, lost heart. Perhaps she began to fear she would live forever with her diminutive admirers, and never meet her handsome dream. Perhaps that prospect was worse than returning to the trap she had sprung. Why else would she have let in the old beggar woman? Why believe in winter apples, when all around her was ice and chill? Unless, somewhere, in the secret reaches of her dreaming heart, she had chosen to die?
The others found her first. I had taken to waiting behind, watching to make sure no one followed us home. When I walked in, my brothers were standing in a hushed ring around her. She lay as if, overcome by weariness, she had decided to take a nap on the floor. Her cheeks were still flushed, her skin warm. The apple had rolled from her hand and stopped, wine-colored and immense, just short of