Bitter Greens

by Kate Forsyth

  Margherita gathered up her long plait of hair, which dragged along behind her like a fine lady’s train, sick with trepidation at the idea of it disturbing the bones. It was hard to carry her sack, and her candle, and thirty yards of hair, but by moving slowly and carefully she was able to manage it. It was a relief to reach the other side and be able to drop her plait once more.

  The door was ancient, made of thick dark wood, and banded and studded with iron. Margherita tried the handle but it would not open. She bent and peered through the keyhole but could see nothing but blackness. She groped in her bag and pulled out her spoon, inserting the handle into the hole. Her heart sank when the spoon hit something hard just on the other side of the door. She poked again and heard iron ring on stone.

  Rocks had been piled against the door. Even if Margherita found some way to break down the door, she would not be able to get out.

  She slid down and sat on the filthy floor, her head bowed to rest on her knees. It had all been no use. She could not get out.

  It was hard to tiptoe past the skeletons once more, but Margherita had no real choice. As she carried her burden of hair over the bones, she wondered who they were. Other girls locked away by the witch? Had they lived in the tower long? Had she cut their wrists with rose thorns and bathed in their blood? How had they died? Had they died by accident or old age or sickness? Had they killed themselves, throwing themselves from the tower height? Had they starved slowly to death? Or had the witch murdered them?

  There was no answer to such questions.

  When she was finally safe in her tower room once more, Margherita stood in the window frame, looking out. It was late afternoon. The lake shone like burnished gold, and the mountains floated in a violet mist, looking as if they stretched away forever. Cypress trees marked the edge of the lake like a dark knotted fringe, casting long shadows across the water. Margherita took her plait in her hand and wrapped it around the hook three times, and then she climbed up onto the window ledge. She leant out into the wind, till the plait was stretched taut and she was tilted out over the abyss, like a flying figurehead. She looked down.

  At the base of the tower was an immense pile of rocks, some of the boulders larger than she was. Margherita heaved a sigh and pulled herself back up with her plait. Her arms shook with the strain, her legs trembled. She sat on the floor, the plait still wrapped about her wrist, and rested her forehead on her knees.

  There was no hope. She was trapped in this tower forever.

  I must be strong, she told herself. I must not let myself go mad. Don’t think about the skeletons. Don’t think about falling.

  She watched the moon rise, wafer-thin, then crept into her bed and pulled the coverlet over her head. She felt as if she wanted to stay in that dark cave forever.

  Yet morning came, and with it hunger. Margherita ate, and then slowly set about trying to hide the evidence of her attempts to escape. First, she filled in the gouges around the trapdoor with the rubble she had dug out. Yet she could feel the unevenness beneath her feet as she walked across the carpet. So she mixed flour and water together to make a paste, which held all the rubble in place and smoothed the edges of the trapdoor again. It set hard, like cement, but Margherita knew she could soon hack through it again if she needed to.

  Making the flour paste gave her a sweet kind of pain. Margherita had often helped her father prepare papier mâché this way in his mask-making studio. She wondered where her parents were, and if they missed her, and if they had ever looked for her. She did not have much memory of the night she had been snatched. Only the mist, and her mother’s white face, and being carried through a labyrinth of dark alleys. It could have been a dream. Only the constant repetition of her three truths helped her believe it had been real. She ran the words through her mind as she worked, taking comfort from them:

  My name is Margherita.

  My parents loved me.

  One day, I will escape.

  Margherita let herself drift away on her favourite daydream. She imagined her mother frantically knocking on doors, saying, ‘Have you seen a red-haired girl? With eyes as blue as the rapunzel flower?’ She imagined her father asking at every wharf and jetty, ‘Have you seen my little girl? She’d be twelve now.’ And one day, perhaps, they’d hear the figlie di coro at the Pietà and say to each other, ‘Our little girl used to sing like that.’ And perhaps their longing to hear little girls singing would take them up to the grille, and they’d ask, in trembling voices, ‘Have you seen a girl with hair as red as fire and eyes like the twilight sky who can sing sweet as any angel?’ and Elena would say, ‘Why, yes. I have.’ And so her parents would track her down, and come to the tower with the tallest ladders in the world, and free her.

  By the time she had laid the carpet down again, her hair was filthy and knotted. Drearily, she set to work filling up the bath and washing away the dust and cobwebs she had collected on her trip down the stairs. She began at the bottom and washed it in lengths, having to empty the bath and refill it over and over again. Her arms and back ached, and soon the carpet was wet through. But she persevered, dreading the thought of the sorceress coming and finding her hair in such a mess.

  As she washed and combed and twisted the hair dry, Margherita realised there were eight different colours and textures, all somehow sewn into one extraordinary mane of hair.

  Eight tresses of hair.

  Eight skeletons.

  Her hair had come from those dead bodies laid out in the room below her.

  Margherita crouched very still, leaning over the bath, her wet purloined hair flowing around her. She met her own reflection in the water. Her eyes were dark and hollow, her skin very pale, her face thin and angular. She looked different. Older. Margherita slowly stretched out one finger. The girl in the water reached out hers in response. Their fingers touched and dissolved into each other.

  One day, I’ll not be a little girl any more, she thought. One day, I’ll find the way to get away from here. All I need to do until then is survive.

  Day by day, the supplies on the shelves dwindled. The bowl of dried fruit and nuts was empty, the ham bone had been boiled to make soup, the flour sack had been shaken till not a speck of dust remained. Hunger became a hot presence in the room, a companion that never let her be.

  Every evening, Margherita sat on the windowsill, watching the moon rise. It grew fatter and redder as the month slipped past. Sometimes, it filled her with dread. At least, while she was alone, she could sing to herself and spend the hours daydreaming of the things she would do once she was free. She could believe her parents really had loved her and that they were searching for her every day. She could hope that they would find her soon.

  The coming of the sorceress would shake all the precarious peace she had found, turn it all inside out and upside down. It would reawaken the terror that she had steadfastly buried under the trapdoor. Margherita was afraid the sorceress meant to murder her, leaving her bones to be shrouded with cobwebs along with the other eight dead girls, her hair to be plaited into a rope and sewn onto some other girl’s head.

  Yet Margherita was hungry and lonely. The sorceress would bring food. She would be company of sorts. And perhaps, if Margherita was very good, she would bring her something to play with. Margherita daydreamt a lot about what she would ask for.

  The day came when the moon rose at the same moment that the sun set. It was huge, as big as Margherita’s fist, and the same colour as her hair. Margherita picked up the painting of the woman looking into a mirror and hung it on the wall again.

  ‘Petrosinella, let down your hair so I may climb the golden stair.’

  At the distant call of the sorceress’s voice, Margherita stood and began to unwind her plait from the snood. She wrapped it about the hook three times then let the hair ladder tumble down to the ground. She felt the yank as La Strega took hold of it, the heavy drag as she began to climb. Margherita imagined her grasping the knots of silver ribbon to stop her hands from slipping, imagi
ned her walking up the side of the tower. She must be strong and fearless. If Margherita wanted to escape her, she would have to be strong and fearless too.

  At long last, the sorceress stood framed in the window. She looked at the shutters, wrenched off their hinges and pushed to one side, then looked at Margherita. ‘Well, you have been a naughty girl while I’ve been away,’ she said in a voice of mock-scolding. ‘No comfits for you.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Margherita said meekly. ‘I wanted to see the sun and the sky. I couldn’t breathe with it all shut up.’

  ‘You’ll be sorry when winter comes,’ La Strega answered. ‘Or a big rainstorm.’

  ‘If you’ll bring me some tools, I’ll do my best to fix it,’ Margherita replied.

  La Strega pressed her lips together, regarding her steadily. ‘So, what else have you been doing, apart from wrecking the shutters?’

  ‘There is not much to do,’ Margherita said. ‘I cooked and cleaned and tried to keep my hair tidy. I almost went mad with boredom, though.’ She took a deep breath. ‘You said you’d bring me a gift if I was a good girl. Well, I’ve been good. Look how neat my room is. Look how well I’ve combed my hair. Will you not bring me something to play with?’

  La Strega’s tawny eyes lit with amusement. ‘What would you like?’

  ‘A lute,’ Margherita said at once. ‘Some music. An orange. Some books to read. Something else to wear. I’m not a baby to spend all day in my nightgown.’

  La Strega laughed. ‘You’ll have to be very good for all that.’

  ‘I will, I promise,’ Margherita said.

  TALLY MARKS

  The Rock of Manerba, Lake Garda, Italy – March to April 1596

  Margherita often dreamt of the eight dead girls.

  She knew their hair intimately, and imagined faces and personalities to match. The girl with the fiery-red ringlets would be hot-tempered and wild. The girl with the wheaten sheaves would be a comely country girl, smiling and peaceful. The one with the soft strawberry-blonde hair was a shy little girl. She was the one who had found it hardest being locked up in this one small room. Hers was the littlest skeleton in the cellar.

  One girl at least had leapt to her death – Margherita was sure of it. She too had felt the allure of the drop. Probably the fiery redhead. Another girl had had waves of bright bronze hair, just like Margherita’s own. Margherita called her Rosa – a name she had always liked – and the little strawberry-blonde girl was named Peony. She named the other girls Celandine, Alyssum, Hyacintha, Magnolia, Jasmine and Viola. It seemed fitting that they all had flower names, like Margherita herself.

  ‘Tell me your stories,’ she would whisper sometimes, late at night. ‘Were you stolen too? How old were you when you died?’

  Margherita imagined at least one of them living on for years. She had found marks on the wall behind her bed one day, hundreds and hundreds of tiny regular scratches, marking away days and weeks and months and years. Decades, even. She could not tell if it was just one other girl who had made the marks or a few of them. Some scores were small and neat, others straggly and wild, some deep and measured, others just a faint scratch. Did the girl or girls making those cuts in the stone mark off each day, or only the coming of the full moon, and, with it, the call of the sorceress: ‘Let down your hair so I might climb the golden stair.’

  The scratches fascinated her. She often rubbed them with her finger, thinking about the girls who had made them. She decided to make her own scratches. Yet, when she crouched before the wall, the iron spit in one hand and the griddle as a hammer in the other, she was frozen with sudden panic. How many days had she been here? How many months? She counted up the presents that the witch had brought her on each of her visits.

  A muslin bag of comfits, which she had not been allowed to eat, as punishment for breaking the shutters.

  Some screws, to fix the shutter, along with a screwdriver, which the sorceress had taken away as soon as the job was done. At least La Strega did not make Margherita screw the shutters shut. She was to be allowed to keep them open, to let some air into the stuffy little tower room. ‘Even if you did try to signal, no one would see you,’ the sorceress said. ‘There is no one for miles.’

  A dress of turquoise green and silver brocade, and two clean chemises.

  No present the next month, for tearing up her new chemises and tying the rags together to make a rope. No ham either.

  A lute and some songbooks. How delighted she had been at those. Margherita loved to sing so much, but the tunes had begun to evade her. Now, she was able to spend much of her day playing her lute and learning new songs. It made the long days seem much less empty.

  An illustrated atlas, with maps stretching from the Land of Silk to the Great Gulf, and the fables of Aesop, illustrated with beautiful woodcuts.

  A fur blanket, some fur-lined boots and a thick shawl. It was cold in the tower.

  A basket full of delicacies to celebrate Christmas, a chess set and a book called Repetition of Love and the Art of Playing Chess. La Strega loved this exotic new game, with its queen that could rampage all over the board while the king cowered in his corner. She taught Margherita to play as best she could.

  No present the next month, to punish Margherita for having a temper tantrum and knocking over the board. No apples, honey or dried fruit either.

  An illustrated volume of poetry by Ovid, filled with stories of gods and magic and disguises. Margherita was fascinated by Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, for the tower had been built on a shrine to her. Margherita read the pages where she appeared over and over again.

  No present the next month, to punish Margherita for quoting Ovid’s Minerva: ‘Not everything of old age should be shunned: wisdom comes with the years.’ Very little food either.

  Eleven months had passed. Margherita stared at the little marks she had just made on the wall in horror. Almost a whole year. She would be thirteen in a month. She lay for the rest of the day on her bed, watching the sun creeping across the rug, her pulse fluttering with panic.

  Eleven months of filling the dreary hours as best she could.

  Eleven months of watching every mouthful she ate, in case her food ran out.

  Eleven months of watching for the moon, half dreading its fullness, half longing for it.

  Eleven months of submitting to the sorceress.

  Eleven months of offering her wrist to be slashed with rose thorns.

  Margherita glanced down at her wrists and realised she had her own tally marks engraved upon her skin. Eleven thin scars, crossing and criss-crossing.

  She sighed heavily and looked back at the wall. Her eleven marks looked no different from the thousands crowding above them. She got up, her long braid dragging at her scalp, and chipped a scraggly ‘M’ above her scratches. M for Margherita.

  That night, she lay in her bed and looked out at one faint star glimmering in the arch of the window. Help me, Margherita whispered, thinking of the ancient goddess of wisdom, with her owl and her distaff, who had once been worshipped at this rock. If any power remains to you, help me.

  Far away, she heard the hoot of an owl, as she often did at night. It seemed like an answer, though, and so, comforted, Margherita turned her cheek into her pillow and slept.

  The days passed in their usual way. Margherita combed and plaited her hair, cooked and ate breakfast, made her room tidy, walked swiftly around it three hundred times, played her lute and sang, played chess against herself, read Ovid aloud for the pleasure of hearing her own voice, lifted sacks of onions and potatoes to make her arms strong, cooked and ate dinner, and then sat watching the sun set over the lake, singing to herself. Every day, the view was different: sometimes, the lake was placid and blue; sometimes, it lay concealed under mist; sometimes, it was tossed in a tempest; sometimes, it was smeared with flame and gold as if God himself had drawn his fingers across the sky.

  During the early winter, the mountains were grey and the lake like a pewter mirror. Then the snow would
come, swirling around the tower, hiding everything. With the snow came the beast-wind, howling from the north, tearing at the tower with claws and fangs, finding every crack and hole to hiss and spit through. All Margherita could do then was huddle under her eiderdown, her face hidden in her hands, hoping the beast would not tear the tower apart.

  Despite the cold and the darkness, she had to be careful with her candles and her kindling. She was terrified of running out and having no fire or light at all. So she lay in her bed, as snug as she could make herself, and imagined herself out in the world, having all kinds of grand adventures: fighting giants; defeating witches; finding treasure; sailing the seven seas; singing at the courts of kings. Soon, Margherita had spun herself a tale almost as epic in scale as Ovid’s.

  As spring came, Margherita began to scatter crumbs on her windowsill in the hope that birds would fly down and befriend her. She was delighted when a little brown bird came fluttering down to her sill to feast and later brought its mate. Margherita saved some of her own bread for them, though she had little to spare, and soon the birds came every day, growing tame enough to land on the sill even when she was standing there. Margherita watched, entranced, as they built a nest of mud under the arch, lining it with grass and soft ash-brown feathers. Soon, three small eggs were laid inside, white with brown blotches. It gave Margherita great delight to watch the mother sit in the nest, guarding her eggs, while the father brought her insects to eat. Once the eggs had hatched, three hungry beaks screeched all day, demanding food, which the two parent birds did their best to supply.

  The moon fattened every day. When it was almost full, Margherita, as always, began to clean more frenetically, comb and braid her hair more carefully, and make sure her room was tidy, the bed back in its place, the portrait hanging on the wall. She was terrified that the sorceress would come early one month and discover the tower room out of order.