She doubted it, but there was always the possibility that she could be surprised.
Chapter 6
A night’s sleep in her own bed improved Frau Beck’s outlook and helped her to think more clearly about the problem now confronting her.
She was adamant that, if she were to be involved with a clear conscience, this would be different from how the lindworms had approached this problem in the past. There would be no deception, no taking advantage of someone’s desperation for a baby. There would be no spells to cloud someone’s mind, though she had the power and the knowledge. If she made the offer to anyone, they would know full well from the very beginning what they were agreeing to. She would consider all the women of the right age who were married or about to be married, and would see if she thought any of them even had the right temperament for such a task, and the ability to keep their new knowledge of the supernatural a secret.
The first logical step in her quest, given that she was still a relative newcomer, was to tap into the network of gossip that was the lifeblood of any town this size. To that end, she threw herself for the next two weeks into visiting her patients and anyone who bought remedies from her under the guise of checking up on them and chatted about anything and everything they or their families seemed inclined to discuss. Her skills at this sort of innocuous talk about births, marriages, courtships, deaths, and the general web of relationships that connected everyone in town were rustier than she would have liked to admit after years of neglect, but within a few days she had fallen back into the rhythm that had once come so easily to her.
In between these visits, she brewed her medicines and mixtures, and continued to mull on the problem. Especially if she didn’t find someone worth considering in Brig. Did she dare look further afield?
Switzerland had no royalty and never had. Most of the surrounding countries once had monarchies, but no longer. Not that Frau Beck thought they were likely to have had much luck in that quarter even if she were willing to approach a princess desperate for an heir. With the rise of the scientific mindset had come a corresponding surge in new technology, which included fascinating inventions such as the photograph and the radio. And those inventions had made following the lives of notables, such as the fabulously wealthy and those royal dynasties that were left, into almost a spectator sport for those who were interested. She didn’t think a strange pregnancy could survive the intense scrutiny, and the last thing she wanted was to risk exposing the existence of Herr Lindworm to the general public. No, the lindworms’ traditional route would not work at all in this modern day and age, of that she was certain.
But what then? If she didn’t find someone in Brig, the question was going to become an urgent one to answer.
Herr Lindworm did have a point about being the last of his species. He might perhaps even be one of the few magical creatures left in the entire world, and he had been lucky that a very odd quirk in how they reproduced meant the species could continue even if there was only one left. She was as unhappy with the idea of being responsible for the disappearance of all magical creatures in the world as she was with having to trick or take advantage of someone in order to propagate the last.
A quandary, indeed, and one with no easy solution.
She avoided anyone in the bergermeister’s—or for that matter his wife’s—circle of friends with a will. It was inevitable that she would come into contact with the pair of them, especially since two people who bought remedies for frequent headaches were servants of theirs, but Frau Beck did her best to keep from attracting the exalted pair’s notice.
She stopped by their grand house a week after she returned, slipping around to the back and entering by the servants’ gate. Their cook, Signora Vidanetti, welcomed her warmly.
“Come in, come in, Frau Beck. Sit down for a bit and have some coffee,” she offered in Italian. “I just have a few more things to do and then I can rest for a minute.” Frau Beck took a seat at the big table in the kitchen where all the servants of the household ate, and accepted a plain, thick fired ceramic cup of coffee. She watched the cook, who was a tall woman only a few years older than she but with many fewer gray hairs, bustle about tasting a simmering bowl of something on the range and adding salt to a mixture sitting on the sideboard. A few other servants came in, nodded politely to Frau Beck, and departed again on their various tasks.
At last Signora Vidanetti put down her spoon and came to sit with Frau Beck with a sigh. “They do keep me hopping,” she said of the bergermeister and his wife. “And occasionally the lady is more…demanding than one would hope for. But it’s a good job.”
“Here is what you asked for. I made it stronger than last time based on what you told me,” Frau Beck said, producing her vial of headache remedy.
“Ah, thank you. It’s such a relief to have it when I need it,” Signora Vidanetti said, taking it and passing over the promised payment. She tucked the vial into her apron pocket, near her heart. “I never realized how much more I could do when my head wasn’t pounding. Nothing else I’ve tried has worked.”
“If my remedies stop working, or don’t seem to work as well as they once did, speak to the doctor,” Frau Beck recommended. “But in the meantime I’m happy to provide you with this whenever you need.” She had just lifted up her cup to drink the dregs of her coffee when Dame Telle appeared in the doorway from the main house.
The cook shot to her feet, her face flushing red. Frau Beck rose more slowly. She put her cup down onto its saucer with a soft but audible ‘chink,’ earning her a glare from the lady. Frau Beck smiled sweetly and said, “Good day to you, Dame Telle. I can see you have things to discuss, so I will take my leave.”
“I won’t have you wasting my servants’ time when they should be working,” Dame Telle snapped.
“Very proper,” Frau Beck returned. “This was a business matter, nothing more, but Signora Vidanetti is so dedicated that she has no time to visit me in person. So I thought I would come to her.” She nodded at the cook and then grinned a big toothy grin back at Dame Telle. The woman’s mouth was working as she tried to come up with some cutting rejoinder, and her eyebrows dropped into a scowl as she realized that she had been outmaneuvered.
“Good day to you then, Frau Beck,” she said. In a lesser woman, her voice would have sounded sulky and childish.
Frau Beck dipped her chin just slightly, then turned towards the door, offering Signora Vidanetti a broad wink out of her mistress’s sightline. One side of the cook’s mouth twitched in response. Then Frau Beck was back in the golden afternoon sunshine.
“That woman makes me want to curse her into a clucking hen and damn the possible consequences to me,” she muttered to herself once she was on the street. Something about both the Telles got under her skin in the worst way.
She grinned to herself. If this were one hundred years ago, Dame Telle would have been the first woman she considered as a potential bearer for a lindworm child. She fulfilled the traditional requirements: she had the highest social standing in town—the best the remote mountains of Switzerland could produce in place of a queen—and while she was still young enough, she had no children as of yet. She might even be starting to get desperate, if she or her husband wanted heirs. Frau Beck’s general dislike of them would not have affected the lady’s candidacy.
Fortunately this was not one hundred years ago, and Frau Beck would not be faced with tricking someone she wasn’t fond of to begin with by dangling their heart’s desire, knowing her victim would take the bait. Frau Beck wasn’t certain what she might have done in that situation since in no version of that scenario would her conscience have been entirely clear. She was glad she would never have to find out.
It didn’t solve her immediate problem, but it did make her feel a little better about it to know things might have been worse.
Unfortunately, all of her efforts to milk town gossip after several weeks of diligent work eventually landed her with nothing to show for it. She gleaned a few pot
ential prospects from talking to her network of clients, but upon closer observation she discarded them all for one reason or another. Her biggest concern was how a woman might react to learning that not only was magic real, but that there was an enormous lizard hidden in the mountains nearby. Frau Beck doubted anyone would take both of those revelations calmly, especially back-to-back. She would continue to observe her candidates discreetly, but she had the feeling she was really back to where she’d started with no viable solution in sight.
When frustrated in the past, Frau Heller had always encouraged her to turn to her two most reliable resources: the wisdom of the past and her fellow hedgewitches. To that end, as the third week since her return from the mountains crept to a close Frau Beck sat down and began composing carefully-worded letters to a few hedgewitches she trusted implicitly. These letters were merely gentle probes, to see if they had even heard of a past encounter with a lindworm and if they had any insights into the problem Frau Beck might have overlooked. Perhaps something obvious was staring her in the face.
She also began to consult books, starting with her own very limited selection and then proceeding to scour the town library, if only for mentions of fantastical beasts. She wished now that she hadn’t decided to leave Frau Helle’s collection of old tomes behind when she locked up the tiny little home she had shared with her son Karl in Wildesehausen for the final time. There had been no room to carry a pile of dusty books when she’d had no idea where she was going or how long she would be traveling, and her mind had been consumed with the news of Karl’s death, but she knew at least one book had something in it about lindworms. She had no idea whether the mention had been a mere sentence or an entire chapter, but she would have liked to know for sure.
There was no use dwelling on the loss, however. She’d made a choice, and now had to work around the consequences.
She didn’t hold out much hope for the town library, but until she’d been through every book that might possibly contain an idea hidden within its pages she vowed to keep looking. Even their books on local plants and herbs, of which there were a quite a few more than those on mythical creatures, might contain the kernel that would lead to a revelation. She was no stranger to dogged research and experimentation until something yielded the result she wanted.
In the evenings, as she mixed and brewed, her mind wandered even further ahead.
A larger library might have what she needed. Big cities tended to have equally large libraries, some of the collections going back centuries. The three closest cities to Brig were Bern to the north, Geneva to the west, and Milan to the south. Any of them might have what she needed. None of them were a short journey, and she would also need to plan for plenty of time to search for likely books and read them, but it was an idea she could continue to ruminate on if her fellow hedgewitches did not have any advice they could offer.
And if she did travel to a larger city, the possibility always existed that she might bump into a candidate who was exactly what she needed. After all, the odds that she be the one to find the Herr Lindworm had to be astronomically low and yet the universe had aligned itself to bring that to pass. Who was to say it would not do so again?
Chapter 7
Frau Beck found she kept reaching into her pocket to fiddle with the bag that contained her mixture to confuse predators. She only realized she was doing it when she stopped to eat her midday meal and nearly got butter on her dress. After that, she did her best to stop. If her eyes kept darting around whenever they thought they detected something large moving and her ears perked at harmless rustles, well, there was no one else around to see.
She had spent nearly a month in Brig after returning from her second trip to visit Herr Lindworm. Still no candidates and nothing in the books she had tried so far, but her letters to her fellow hedgewitches had been posted on her way out of town at the crack of dawn that morning.
This time she worried less about being followed, though she did make it a point to gather plants along the way just as if this were a usual trip into the mountains for her. The season had begun to warm even more, and new flowers had bloomed in the time she’d been gone. Her feverish rounds of making and selling remedies had also depleted some of her stores that she liked to keep high.
Thus, it was once again dusk as she made her way into Herr Lindworm’s valley. This time instead of coming towards the front of the cave after she had set up camp and started a fire, he poked his head out to investigate as soon as she came back from a foray into the rest of the valley with her first load of dead wood.
Once he saw who it was, his cautious air dropped and he raised his head higher. “It is good to see you again, Wilhelmina,” he said, clambering the rest of the way out of the cave.
“It is good to see you, too, Herr Lindworm,” she replied.
“Somehow I expected you to reappear within a few days again,” he said, settling himself so that they could talk but he would be out of the way while she started her fire.
“No such luck,” she answered. “I had some things to take care of in town, and some research to do. I will tell you about it once I’ve started the fire and dinner is cooking.”
“Was it successful, your research?”
“Not really.” Frau Beck knelt and began arranging the smallest twigs so that she could strike a flame from the matches in her pocket.
“I am sorry to hear it.”
She glanced up briefly to smile at him, then bent to her work again. “Have you been keeping busy?”
“Busy enough. Hunting has kept me occupied, though I have tried to return when I was close enough to spend the night.”
She felt a guilty flash. “Oh, dear, you shouldn’t stint your hunting waiting for me. I have enough supplies to last me several days. Don’t worry, I would have saved you some sausage.”
He let out the huff that served him as a laugh, followed by a series of rumbling, guttural sounds that sounded more like an approximation of a human chuckle than she had heard from him before. “Of that I have no doubt. You do keep your word. I have seen no sign of other humans in the time you’ve been gone.”
Implying that if she had told of his existence, inevitably a human besides her would have come looking at the valley—possibly someone with less-than-peaceful intentions. A month was more than enough time for the story to circulate. Without even realizing it, it appeared she had passed a test of integrity. It occurred to her that for all of her claims of being able to do magic with planets, she had never really showed any proof to Herr Lindworm of her ability. For all he knew, she could have been lying about that, as well as everything else. Her evident interest in plants might be a way for a poor woman to make a living, or no more than a hobby bordering on obsession.
She had to look down to hide the slight flush staining her cheeks. It wasn’t often she was caught so flat-footed. Normally she was faster than this, quick to assess and quick to accurately guess what others were thinking. Unsurprisingly, Herr Lindworm was difficult to read, but the difference between this and her usual easy deftness with people kept throwing her off balance.
Once her food, plus as many extra sausages as she could cram into a frying pan, were heating over a warm fire, she took a deep breath. “I have been thinking about your request.”
“Request?”
“About…finding a woman to give you a son. I still don’t think it’s right, but I have been giving a lot of attention to the problem, and considering whether there might be another way to go about things that would yield the same result.”
He was silent for a few long moments. “Was this the subject of your research?”
“It was.”
“Then I thank you for the effort, Wilhelmina, and for considering changing your position.”
She decided she liked hearing him use her given name rather than calling her ‘Frau Beck,’ and refrained from asking him to address her more formally. “Don’t thank me yet. I still haven’t found anything remotely helpful. I may have to go further
afield before anything useful turns up. Or one of my colleagues may have an idea I hadn’t thought of. I hope you don’t mind that I wrote to a few fellow hedgewitches? They live far from here, so the chances of anyone coming to bother you are still slim, and I didn’t tell them where you lived. I just told them about the problem. I’m sure they’ll want to help if they can. I trust them.”
His crest flared out about halfway, but after a moment he flattened it again. His tail swung back and forth just outside the circle of firelight, restless like a cat’s. “You have left me little choice but to rely on your judgement. I hope these colleagues of yours prove reliable.”
She gulped. “You’re angry.”
“Not angry,” he said. “I am just unused to decisions that concern my secrecy being made without my knowledge. It is…uncomfortable.”
Frau Beck had to stop herself from squirming like a child caught in a misstep. She felt terribly guilty. “I am so very, very sorry. I should have thought…”
“Yes, you should have.” This last ended with a snort, though thankfully as he claimed he did not appear to be outright angry. His teeth weren’t showing, and other than his still-lashing tail there was no other outward sign of agitation. But the rebuke was enough.
Frau Beck met his eyes, and then looked down. After a few moments of thought, she said in a low voice, “I had not realized…I am so used to being alone, so used to being responsible for people…it didn’t even occur to me. I’ve treated you like one of my patients, consulting on another obscure remedy. I should have asked you first before doing anything concerning you.”
“Hmph,” he grumbled, the sound managing to convey annoyance and agreement together.
The Dragon & the Alpine Star Page 7