Black Pearls

by Louise Hawes

  "Enough of your wiles, girl," he scolded. "Go back to the hearth."

  "—she will think you have lost weight."

  "Get out! Get out, before you ruin it all!"

  "And she will feed you even more."

  Her words found their mark. Gretel saw her brother stop, lean back on one round elbow, and consider. She plunged ahead, heaping him with delights. "Crumpets and pasties and those littie blue eggs you like. Rabbit and trout and all manner of fowl."

  He reached for the twig she proffered, reciting dreamily, "Pancakes and almond tarts, puddings and jam."

  Gretel nodded. "More of everything," she agreed. "She will feed you twice, maybe three times as much as she does now."

  When they heard the witch's shuffling footstep in the hall, Gretel had won only half what she'd hoped for: Hansel was delighted with the plan of tricking the old woman into feeding him more, a plan that, although he didn't know it, might spare his life. But she had still found no way to persuade him to leave that cursed house.

  Gretel climbed out the bedroom window and circled back to the kitchen. The witch unlocked the door to visit her plump cherub, unaware of the visitor who had left him seconds before. And so more weeks passed, and months as well, time that left Hansel plumper and Gretel and the witch more famished. For as the witch grew hungrier, she fed the girl less, too, and by the time she decided to put an end to her fast, neither of them could remember what a full stomach felt like. Gretel, as she lay by the hearth at night, her poor insides churning and empty, remembered the way Mother, at the end, would push away the trays Gretel brought. I will have none of that, she'd say. Just sing me another song, sweet. 'Tis that will fill me up. And sometimes it was enough to put her to sleep, humming the old song, the lullaby Mama craved.

  "There be no use," the witch said one day, as Gretel had known she must. The crone threw her book of spells at Gretel, though it fell short of its mark and skittered along the floor. "I have prayed and chanted and fed the boy until I am worn with toil." She waved a frail hand at the girl. "I may as well eat a skinny thing like you."

  She rose then and, with a horrible finality, walked to the drawer where she kept her knives and skewers. "I have conjured cornmeal and compotes, peacock and ham hocks. I have summoned up soups and stews. Souffles and crab cakes. But still he loses flesh." She sharpened one of her longest, cruelest knives on a whetstone, brushing it faster and faster across the oiled rock. "I have coddled and spoiled him and emptied his foul pan."

  She held up the gleaming knife now and, before Gretel could

  pull away, sliced off a lock of the girl's hair. "Sharp enough to do the job," she said, grinning at the curl of fine hair in her hand. "I will have him this day. I can wait no longer."

  But when she led him to the table and bade him wait while she stoked the fire, even when the oven got so hot they could feel it across the room, Hansel did not fear the witch. He sat, his haunches overflowing the small bench beside the trestle, and smiled. "What treat shall we have tonight, Mother?" he asked. "It must be a feast if you cannot carry it on a tray." He gripped his spoon and knife, as if the food were already in front of him.

  Did he call the crone Mother to please her? Gretel wondered. Or did he nurse some dark angel of his own—the image of a mother made of yams and comfits, chops and pies?

  "There shall be no feast until I can make this oven hot enough, my lamb," the witch told him. "Perhaps you could come see if the flue is blocked." She gestured toward the fiery oven. "This old frame is too stiff to bend so low."

  If her frame was too old, the boy's was surely too broad. But he stood with what alacrity he could muster and went to her side. "Let me see, Mother," he said, bending down, peering into the blood-red innards of the stove.

  Just as Gretel dreaded, the witch rushed at her brother, a look of such fierce yearning on her face that for a moment the girl stood paralyzed. But then, just in time, she reached out and pulled her brother away from the stove, and what had started could not be stopped. The old woman, hands outstretched to push her boy-roast in the oven, fell into the flames herself. The children watched in horror as, blind with agony, the witch crawled deeper into the fire instead of finding the way out. Hansel put his hands in to reach her, but the witch, in her anguish, writhed out of his grasp. "Fools! Fools!" she wailed as the smoke and heat did their work. Once more Hansel reached into the flames, and once more failed to catch hold of the witch before the fire forced him back. "Fools! Fools!" And then her mouth was lost, her skin, her need to cry out at all.

  There was silence, blessed silence until Gretel noticed her brother's hands. "Here," she said tenderly, reaching for his burned fingers. "Let me get some salve."

  But Hansel pulled away from her. "No!" he screamed. "Do not touch me. Do not dare touch me."

  "But your hands are terribly burnt." Gretel looked up from her brother's hands to his face, and lost her breath. What she saw there was hate, burning and bottomless.

  "You killed her!" Hansel's skinless hands were balled into fists, and he was crying as she had never seen him cry before.

  "But Brother," she said, "she would have pushed you in." She backed away from his eyes, for they seemed to give off a heat like the oven's.

  "You were jealous!" he screamed at her, anger turning his round cheeks pink as beef fillets. "It was you she kept working and me she fed."

  Gretel backed toward the stove, which still smelled of burning flesh and sulfur. "You couldn't stand to see one of us safe and happy and protected," he yelled. "Only one of us, sister mine. That was it, wasn't it? Only one!"

  "Of course not," she told him, hearing herself whimper, try ing to escape those eyes even as the heat from the oven grew behind her.

  "You wanted to drag me back home." He was no longer screaming but spoke as slowly, harshly, as a wheel turning on cobbles. "You wanted me to be poor again, to drink soup made of water."

  The stove's flames, fed by the witch, leapt higher now and Gretel tried to move toward Hansel. But he pushed her back. "Mother loved me more than anyone ever has"—slowly, relentlessly, he advanced toward her—"but you could not bear it, could you?"

  "No! Surely, you know—"

  "I know that your mewling angel never fed us as Mother did." He bore down on her, raw hands shaking, his face filled with rage and tears. "I know that no one will ever care for me as she did."

  And then he was on her, but not before someone else barred the way. Gretel's angel, sudden, soundless, stood between brother and sister. Just as the boy tried to push Gretel backwards into the flames, the angel with their mother's face stopped him. A white-hot light surrounded it, steamed off the milk-white shoulders and wings. The finger it pointed at the boy, Gretel knew, was molten. It touched Hansel lightly on the chest and he screamed in pain. For a minute he hesitated, but, staring right through the angel, glaring at Gretel, he charged again. Growling with fury, he hurled himself at her, and if her angel had not pulled her away, it would have been the end of her. Instead, it swept Gretel up, as if they were dancing, and whirled her away, while Hansel raced headlong, screaming, into the flames.

  When she set out for home, Gretel took some of the witch's cooking pots and a basket of food that would only go to mold if she left it behind. She could not carry more because her hands still ached from the flames she had braved at the end. When her brother fell into the oven, she had tried to pull him out. With no more thought to her own safety than a loyal dog protecting its master, she had leaned against the poker-hot opening of the stove and reached into the fire. But the searing pain, the breathless heat, brought her to her senses. She pulled back and watched in horror as Hansel rushed to his make-believe mother, as he picked up the flaming husk that had been the witch. As the skin ran like melting wax from his arms, he crumpled to the oven floor and raised his hands above his head as if surrendering to the roaring tongues that devoured him, bit by bit.

  The thorny brambles had dissolved as soon as the witch died, and Gretel now made her way easily
back into the woods through which she and Hansel had wandered before the old woman had trapped them. As she walked, the girl found ivy and chickweed to make poultices for her hands and for the bright red scar that crossed her waist where she'd leaned against the stove. Though she had no idea how far or which direction she and her brother had traveled, she was not afraid. Each night her angel leaned over her dreams, kissed her burning hands, and whispered the way to take next morning. By the time she reached her father's house, spring was coming on; tender shoots curled out of the ground, and birds flew once more in packs so thick they peppered the sky.

  The old man, for old he suddenly seemed, was outside chopping wood as Gretel came up the rise toward the cottage. When he saw her, he dropped his ax and went mad with joy. "Gret, Gret!" he called, folding her to him, making the pots she carried clank and clatter. "You are home. You have come home at last!"

  When she shrank back, peering toward the dark cottage, he shook his head. "You have naught to fear, child," he told her. "Your stepdame fetched poison berries from a fair on St. Joseph's Day. They gave me a fearsome bellyache, but they stole the life clean out of her."

  "She is dead, then?" Gretel had seen enough death of late; the news gave her little joy.

  "Ay," her father told her, linking his arm through hers, leaning on her as he had never done before she left. "But let us talk of pleasant stuff. There be time enough for sorrow." He led her to the door of the house, then looked behind her, toward the rise she had just climbed. "Say where your brother is and when he will join us here."

  The time for sorrow came sooner than he must have hoped. For Gretel told him how brother and sister had found the witch's house but only one of them had left it behind. She told him about her angel, and how it had saved her from the fire that killed both the old crone and Hansel. It was clear, though, from the way her father listened to the tale, the way he held his head in his hands, that he did not believe her.

  "I tried to save him, Da. Truly, I did." But when Gretel held up her hands as proof, she saw how her angel's kisses had healed them, how they looked as white and smooth as if she had worn gloves along her rough and tangled way.

  Father's eyes, the way they fell from hers, told her what he thought. "Hunger can drive God's love from our hearts," he said. "It can turn us into beasts." He stood beside Gretel, staring at the empty, sloping hills. "When times were still hard, not two days after we left you lambs in the woods, your stepmother tried to steal a crust from me. She came at me while I slept, slipped her hand into my pocket like a thief. Taken sudden that way, I struck her hard across the mouth.

  "Whatever you did, child, is less than some and more than others. It's done and forgotten." There was weariness in his voice, and a dim gratitude. "The witch was starving you, but you have come home with food." At last he raised his eyes to hers. "You have come home with that slow smile of your ma's."

  He reached for his daughter's hand. "We will tell the neighbors you have both returned." Gretel heard the surrender, the tired truce behind his words. "I have been without family for too long. I shall not lose you to sheriff's men, to a tribunal and the noose."

  So her father shaped a new story, with a happy ending, repeating it again and again—to neighbors and peddlers and travelers; to brides and housewives who began afresh, now that the drought was passed, to pay for Gretel's handiwork and lace. Once upon a time, it seemed, there were two children, a boy and a girl. Father told of the witch, the gingerbread, and the oven. He told of the fire and the way the witch had planned to fatten the boy. He described with pride how his children had tricked her, how they had come home to him, hand in hand. "Of course, you know the way of young men," he always added at the end. "No sooner does Hansel come home than he takes a fancy to a comely lass from Wainridge. He is off courting, but my girl is home to stay."

  Each time her father told the lie, Gretel felt as if he had branded her. The mark of Cain burned on her forehead, turning her awkward and ashamed in front of others. She had tried to save her brother, but only she and her angel had seen it. And perhaps God. What wouldn't she give to trade her heavenly father's trust for her earthly one's!

  But she knew her da was right. She would never leave him now. Where was there to go? Where could she hide from the memory of Hansel racing into the fire? From the foolish, useless wish that she had said enough, done enough, been enough to save him?

  So she stayed. Her father needed her, after all. Her table linens and scarves helped put food on their table. And if he blamed her for her brother's death, he never said so outright. Only sometimes she caught a look on his face, a shadow when she looked up from her sewing and found his eyes on her. It wasn't like the hate she had seen on Hansel's; she could never have lived with that. It was more like pity. Though pity for her or himself, she could not have said.

  It did not matter. She had her angel. She could endure the cold stream where she took their buckets each morning. And the endless succession of days, like heavy, rough-scaled logs across her back—she could survive that, too. She could bear the mark Da's stories set on her forehead, because every night, in her dreams, it was kissed away. She worried sometimes, as she waited by the hearth for sleep to come, that it might not happen, that the angel might fail her. But it never did. Night after night, even after her father had died and Gretel was an old woman who lived by herself, the sweet moment always returned.

  Once she had drifted past thought, Gretel found herself again in the woods. Again she stood by the small house trimmed with delights. But this time she walked without fear to the open door and the figure that waited there. Sweeter than a lemon drop, softer than caramel was the kiss Gretel's angel placed on her forehead. And when she was once more folded into the milk-white arms, Gretel felt no mark, no shame, only a tide of joy that rushed to fill her head, her heart, her whole body. Like a flood of music bursting from a small bird's chest, love forced itself through her bones and skin and erupted in a single perfect flower. Mother, she said as she held the angel fast. Mother, she sighed as she rested her head on the creamy shoulder. Mother, as the two of them turned their backs on the world and walked together until dawn.

  Ashes

  Even a young prince can be jaded. I had endured countless receptions and balls, had watched an endless parade of aristocratic beauties present themselves for my approval—and for secret embraces in shadowed chambers or damp-walled gardens (giggling, rustling skirts, and then the sun too bright on a painted cheek). But this lost, thin-waisted nymphet was different. My mother noticed it first.

  "Did you see that girl?" The queen stood beside me at the top of the stairs and studied the ballroom below us. "The one with Sir Lewis." Only a second before she had dismissed the gaggle of dancers, turned her back on the view from the balcony, and snapped open a perfumed fan pulled from her sleeve. Now, though, her eyes narrowed with interest, and she leaned over the railing. Like colorful gems spilled from a purse, men and women in velvet and satin moved across the marble tiles, each couple following the pattern of the pair in front of them.

  "Look! She's charmed the old fool into a gavotte. It's a wonder he can hoist that monstrous frame out of bed in the morning, much less drag it about to a jig."

  I glanced idly at the ragged chain of dancers beneath me. It was hard to miss chubby Lewis—bobbing up and down to his own private music while the others kept proper time—but once I had spotted the old fellow, I could not take my eyes from his partner. It was not the blue dress or the crystal slippers that shed rainbows as she twirled. It was not the lace gloves or the tiny jeweled bows that winked from her train. It was the way she carried herself—or, more accurately, the way she didn't. Instead of posing, dolblike, she floated, spinning and turning like a leaf, from hand to hand.

  The queen, still focused on the great hall spread below us, must have noticed my interest. "I am glad," she told me, without taking her eyes from the pageant of the dance, "you are not like some, mongrels led here and there, driven only by their base appetites." I ba
rely listened, already dizzied by the whirling fairy below me. "Perhaps your refusal to wed has been well advised, my son. Perhaps it will secure you now a bride of a different sort."

  After I had kissed my mother's cheek and worked my way to the bottom of the stairs, the fairy dancer was my reward. As glowing and impartial as the sun, she took my arm for the next carole with the same smile she gave poor Lewis in farewell. She seemed, in fact, to have no idea who I was.

  "You make the old dances seem new," I told her. "How has grace and beauty like yours stayed hidden from our court?" Something in her countenance unmanned me. The blaze of sconces twinkled behind her, and my flattery seemed empty and foolish.

  "I have never been to court," she told me, training curious, unblinking eyes on mine. "Or danced like this, or met anyone like you."

  "Surely I am not so different from other men." I laughed, more confident now. This was a game I had played before, over and over until I knew the script by heart, all the blushes, every whispered lie.

  "Perhaps not," she replied. "But except for my father and the kind gentleman who danced with me just now, you are the only man I have ever spoken to." She cocked her head like a pretty sparrow and studied me while we spun. "You are so tall and fair, you quite take my breath away!"

  She should have colored and curtsied; she should have lowered her gaze from mine. But her eyes, wide and greedy, devoured my face, and she laughed like a man, her head held back, her mouth unhidden by her hands.

  I searched the weary catalogue of women I had known. Not one of them had looked like this, had danced like this, had stirred to life an open rush of affection I thought had died years before.

  I learned the games early, you see. My first memory is of the endless carpet, the long trail along which my nurse led me to the tall, lovely woman who sat with her maids and laughed like music, "Mother, look what I have made for you," I cried, dropping my chain of dandelions in her lap, trying to scramble after them.