The Stepsister's Tale

by Tracy Barrett

  The young man on the white horse spoke. “Isn’t there a hunting lodge near here?” Jane nodded. “I believe my father and I stayed there when I was a boy on my first hunt,” he said. Then, to Isabella, “You have no living relatives?”

  Isabella somehow managed to drop a beautiful curtsey, even wrapped up in the heavy cloak. “No, sir.”

  “And you are your father’s only child?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And your mother?”

  “Dead.” Once again Isabella’s voice caught.

  “If you have a fortune,” broke in one of the gentlemen, “why is the house in such disrepair?”

  “My father hired workmen to fix it. After he died, my stepmother dismissed them without paying them.”

  The young man on the white horse persisted, “You are your father’s heir, then?” Isabella nodded. “What is your name?”

  “Isabella Delaville.” Isabella raised her eyes to his. Her golden hair looked even brighter with flakes of snow falling into it, and her pale face glowed in the fading light. The young man stared down at her. The people around him shifted in their saddles, exchanging glances, and the horses stamped in the snow.

  The man swung down from his mount. He dropped lightly to the ground, crunching the snowy gravel under his booted feet. A groom seized the white horse’s reins; his rider seemed to have forgotten about him.

  The young man approached Isabella, who dropped her eyes modestly and folded her hands in front of her. He gently unclasped them and held them in his own gloved hands. He didn’t seem to realize how cold she must be, standing there in her light dress and no overcoat, while he was robed and cloaked in velvet and furs. “I’m—Bertrand,” he said. “Do you like music, Isabella?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “But it’s been so long since I heard any.” Jane and Maude looked at each other. Music? What on earth?

  But someone else had understood. One of the men hastily unstrapped a lute from his back and tuned it rapidly, blowing on his fingers to warm them. He struck up a slow tune, but Bertrand snapped, “Not a funeral dirge, man! Play something lively!” And instantly the lutenist swung into a happy melody.

  Bertrand bowed to Isabella, who curtsied so low that Jane wondered if she would be able to rise again. Bertrand took her fingertips and gently helped her up and then, slowly, carefully, led her in a dance.

  It was the most beautiful sight Jane had ever seen. The snow was turning rosy in the light of the setting sun, which also brought a touch of color to Isabella’s wan cheeks. She moved as lightly as the snowflakes that had begun drifting down, and the notes of the lute were so sweet and so sad and happy at the same time that Jane felt her throat close with tears. Maude wept openly at her side.

  The melody ended, and the young man stood still and stared at Isabella, who curtsied once more. “Sir—” one of the ladies began, but she stopped when Bertrand raised his hand to hush her. Slowly he lifted Isabella’s fingers to his face. He pressed his lips to them, and then turned her hand over and kissed the palm. Isabella’s face glowed like a candle. Jane’s heart ached as she watched them, and she found herself thinking of Will, and of how warm his hand had been in hers, next to Harry’s grave.

  Still they stood, until finally an older man said, “Sir, your father must be getting anxious. It will be full dark soon, and—”

  With obvious reluctance, Bertrand dropped Isabella’s fingers and mounted his horse. Isabella stared up at him. “Come!” he finally barked to the company. He pulled on his reins so that his horse wheeled in a tight circle before plunging back into the darkening woods. With a great deal of commotion, the other riders, too, urged their horses forward. The dogs were the last to go, and they ran baying through the woods, dodging around trees and nipping at one another before disappearing into the shadows.

  Chapter 12

  Jane worked and worked at Baby’s udder, but no stream of milk spurted into the pail. Not even a drop came out. The milk had been growing scanter each day, and Jane had stopped dividing it between a portion for them and one for the people of the woods. There was so little that almost as much stuck to the sides of the bucket as what she poured out. She stopped, forced to admit to herself that it wasn’t that Baby was refusing to let her milk down, but that there was nothing left.

  She burst into tears, her head resting against the cow’s bony side. What would they do now? The milk, little though it was, was all that was keeping them this side of starvation. She knew what a real farmer would do, but slaughtering Baby was unthinkable. No, she thought as she sat up and rubbed the tears off her cheeks. No, they would all starve together.

  Jane opened the doors between the stalls to allow the animals to crowd together for warmth. She shoveled out the old straw and gave the goats and poor little Mouse just a handful of hay each, with a bit more for Sal. In a very few minutes it was all gone, and Baby, as usual, butted her with her hard head.

  “Nothing for you there today.” Jane laughed shakily, pushing away the animal’s big face. The hunger and sorrow in the dark brown eyes went to her heart almost as much as the sight of Maude shivering in the big empty hall. She scratched Baby briefly between the ears, but a head scratch was not what the cow wanted, and she lowed a deep, mournful moo. Jane stood rubbing the angular neck, once so firm and glossy, while the cow thrust her muzzle with resignation into the empty manger and then grunted and lowered herself to lie down.

  Back at the house, the other two girls looked at her in silence as she came into the parlor with no milk bucket. Maude dropped her gaze to her lap, and Isabella turned back to the patterns she was tracing in the cold ashes. Mamma, wrapped in her shawl, stared out the grimy window, her mouth a thin line in her thin face.

  The situation was no better in the pantry. Jane poked into every corner, lifted the lid off every box and bin. There was nothing, not even a shriveled apple or a crumb of biscuit. They had finished their small store of cheese days ago.

  In the South Parlor, Isabella was still huddled by the hearth, no doubt imagining that she was sitting near a warm fire. The girls glanced up at Jane and then down again, obviously reading the despair in her face.

  At the sight of their dull eyes, Jane made up her mind. “Come, Maude.” Maude rose, wrapped herself well, and followed Jane out the door. Mamma and Isabella did not even look up as they left.

  They trudged through the muck that had once been the familiar path to the home of Hannah Herb-Woman and her family. But even before they reached the small house, they knew something was wrong. Maude took her sister’s hand and Jane squeezed it.

  They emerged into the clearing and stood hand in hand, staring at the boarded-up hut. No smell of smoke, no clucking of chickens, no barking of Hugh’s friendly dog had reached them on the path. Still, she was unprepared for this utter emptiness.

  Maude finally broke the silence. “Where did they go?” Her voice was barely above a whisper.

  “How should I know?” Jane’s fear made her snap, and then she softened as she saw the fear in her sister’s eyes. “They probably went someplace where Hugh’s father could find work. If—” She hesitated, and then went on carefully, “If something bad had happened, they wouldn’t have taken the time to close up the house.” She opened the door to Hannah’s drying shed. “And see? She took all her herbs and the chickens, too. That shows they had time to prepare. They’ll be back.” Maude looked unconvinced.

  They turned into the forest and went in deeper than they ever had before, deeper than Jane had gone the day she had dropped her basket. Maybe they would come across a frostbitten apple, or maybe a squirrel had hidden a cache of nuts last fall and had forgotten to collect them when the hard weather hit. Perhaps, like the children in one of Mamma’s tales, they would wander until they died and were covered by leaves.

  The trees shot straight up, the tangle of branches making it impossibl
e to see the sky. The canopy was so dense that even on a sunny day, little light must reach the ground, and the forest floor was bare of grass and underbrush. The thaw that had set in a few days before had stripped the ground of the small amount of snow that might have penetrated this far.

  Jane was sure she saw signs that someone had recently been there: broken twigs near the path, a dent in the soil that might be a footprint but might not. She was about to move on when something glinted from a clump of weeds. Making sure that Maude was busily foraging and not looking at her, she parted the stems and picked it up. It was a buckle—just a simple buckle of the kind that would fasten someone’s boot or shoe. She tucked it into the pouch at her waist.

  A few times a twig cracked, and once a rustle in the branches seemed to indicate that someone was near. Each time, the girls jumped, and Maude clutched at her sister. Jane remembered that dark figure behind the tree. But they saw no one except an occasional squirrel or soggy-looking bird.

  After a long, wet search, they had gathered only a handful of rain-soaked nuts. Then Maude stumbled on a clump of mushrooms, raising their hopes, but after that they found nothing else. In a small clearing, Maude sat down on a fallen tree, unmindful of the damp that seeped through its rough bark into her skirt. It started to rain, a cold gray drizzle that was barely more than a mist, but that seemed to reach into their bones with its icy fingers.

  Jane sighed heavily and reached down to her sister. “Let’s go back.”

  “In a minute,” Maude answered flatly. Jane stood and waited, but Maude made no move, so Jane began to move off, knowing that Maude would never stay in the woods by herself.

  “That’s the wrong way,” Maude called after her.

  Jane stopped and looked around. “No, it’s how we came.” But suddenly she wasn’t certain. She took an irresolute step forward and then stopped again. Surely she would have noticed that large, dog-shaped rock if she had passed it on the way into the clearing—wouldn’t she? But it didn’t look familiar. She turned and hesitated. This must be right. She glanced over her shoulder through the brush that grew on the edge of the clearing, back into the forest of tall, straight trunks straining upwards to the sky.

  “We have to go over there.” Maude pointed behind her own shoulder.

  “No,” Jane said. “We didn’t come that way.” Maude pushed herself up off the fallen tree and started in the direction that she had indicated. Jane ran after her and seized her arm. “We must stay together. No matter which way we go, we must go together.” Maude shook off Jane’s hand and stopped, looking in one direction and then in another. The rain was falling more heavily now. It tapped on the bare branches in the denser part of the forest. Large, cold drops fell with increasing regularity on their uncovered heads. The smell of damp earth grew heavy as the ground became wetter.

  Maude turned her rain-streaked face to her sister. “Oh, Jane,” she whispered. “We’re lost.” She flinched as a large drop hit her square on her nose. Jane looked about her. It was true; she had no idea which direction to take. She tried to remember a landmark, but the trees, monotonous in their sameness, stretched around them in all directions. Oh, why hadn’t they brought Betsy with them?

  “It’s all right,” she told Maude, although her heart shivered within her. Were they going to wander through the woods until they lay down exhausted and died? Or would someone—or something—find them first? Jane forced herself not to think of the tales Mamma told them about gnomes and witches, about men dressed in green who lived in the woods, wild men who would carry the two of them off to a different world—a lovely world, to be sure, but one where they would be lonely, for no humans inhabited it.

  And just as she imagined that world, she heard, far off, a few notes sung in a human voice. Was it human, though? Could fairies sound like people when they wanted to? It was so faint that she thought she must have imagined it. But then the same notes were repeated, just a hair closer and a shade louder.

  “What was that?” Maude whispered. “Fairy singers?”

  “Only the wind,” Jane wanted to say, but the lie stuck in her throat.

  A sudden crackling in the branches made them leap into each other’s arms and then stand rooted to the spot, quaking and clutching each other. “What was that?” Maude asked again, this time in a startled gasp. Jane forced herself to loosen her grip on her sister. She slowed her breathing with an effort and pried Maude’s fingers off her arms.

  “A squirrel,” she said without conviction, but Maude shook her head.

  “It was too loud to be a squirrel,” she insisted.

  “A deer, then.” Jane didn’t succeed in convincing even herself. A deer would have been as startled at the sight of them as they were at the sound of it and would have run off, but whatever this was, it had not moved again.

  Jane tried to move in the other direction, pulling Maude’s hand, but her sister refused to budge. “I’m not going. Not until I know what that was.”

  “It was nothing,” Jane said.

  “It was something,” Maude retorted. “Nothing doesn’t make the branches shake.” Jane looked at the thicket, and sure enough, several of the twigs were trembling. Even denuded of their leaves, the branches were so thick and intertwined that she could not make out what was causing the motion.

  “We’ll go a different way,” Jane said.

  Maude shook her head. “That’s the way we came. I know it is.”

  There was nothing else to do. Surely if whatever was in the thicket intended them harm, it would have come out and attacked them by now. Wouldn’t it? Perhaps it was a badger that had found itself too far from its hole to make an escape and was waiting for them to leave. Or an injured deer that couldn’t get away. Or—she didn’t like to think what else it could be. “I’ll just take a look,” Jane said. She forced herself to walk straight there without hesitating, pretending to feel no fear. She peered into the brush.

  “There’s nothing here,” she called to her sister. “I told you there was—”

  She stopped. Because there was something there. And whatever it was, was looking back out at her.

  Chapter 13

  Brown eyes stared up at Jane, and fingers held back the branches of the shrub. Before Jane had a chance to say anything, to jump backward, to call out to Maude, the figure leaped up and tore into the forest. It was a girl, Jane realized, a tall and slender girl, running over the sodden leaves.

  “What is it?” Maude had crept up to Jane unheard and touched her on the arm.

  Jane jumped and turned on her sister, fear making her vibrate. “Why did you do that?” she cried, shaking Maude by the shoulders. “Don’t ever do that!” Maude started to cry again. “Oh, Maude,” Jane said impatiently, and then stopped. For the strange girl had halted by a tree, almost out of sight.

  Maude followed her sister’s gaze, snuffling. “What is it?”

  “Don’t you see her?” But now the girl had disappeared. “She was right there.” Jane pointed at the tree where the girl had paused.

  Maude peered suspiciously into the woods. She swiped the wet hair off her face and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. “Who? I don’t see anybody.”

  “Well, she’s gone now,” Jane said crossly. “But there was a girl in the bushes and she ran into the forest. She stopped by that crooked tree.” She hesitated, knowing that Maude would be frightened by what she said next. “She looked at me like she wanted us to follow her.”

  “No!” Sure enough, Maude seized her sister’s hand and tried to pull her away. “No, Jane! We can’t go with her! What if she’s a fairy? What if she takes us to her kingdom to live for a hundred years and when we come back Mamma will be dead and Hugh and...”

  Jane didn’t know anything about fairies except what she heard in the stories that Mamma and Hannah told, but in her brief glimpse of the girl, she had seen grimy f
ingernails and a clumsily mended tear in the sleeve. She didn’t think that fairies got dirty or wore garments with big rips held together by coarse thread. One of the girl’s shoes had flopped as she ran—perhaps it was missing a buckle, the one that Jane had found? No, the girl was a mortal. “We have to follow her,” she told Maude, and without waiting for an answer, she started walking.

  Maude caught up with her. “But what if—”

  “Anything’s better than staying in the woods. Better than dying in the woods,” she amended grimly. This time Maude didn’t argue but fell into step behind her.

  Jane reached the tree where the girl had stood, and looked around. A flash caught her eye, and she turned just in time to see the slender form vanishing over a knoll. “This way.” She set out again.

  “I still don’t see anything,” Maude said, but Jane didn’t have the strength to answer.

  They trudged for what seemed like hours. Jane felt a blister rise on her heel and then pop, but she was too tired and cold to care. She caught glimpses of the girl every time they reached the spot where she had last seen her. They almost forgot why they were following her, or to be curious about where she was leading them. The rain stopped, then started again. Maude slipped and rose covered with mud, but lacked the will to wipe it off.

  “Jane,” Maude said when the sun finally showed itself. Jane grunted in reply. “Jane!” Maude said more loudly. “Isn’t that our hunting lodge?”

  Jane paused. It had been a long time since she’d been to the lodge—there was no reason to go there, really; it had been stripped of furnishings and draperies even before Papa had left. What she saw now was a small stone house. Brush and ivy had grown over much of it, and there were gaps in the red-and-white tiles that made up the gaily patterned roof. Still, as she looked more closely, she knew that Maude was right. This was the lodge that Papa and his friends had used as a base when they went out in search of deer and boar and other game, in the days when the old king ruled wisely and allowed his subjects free use of the woods.