The Amaranth Enchantment

by Julie Berry

  I frowned. “What makes you guilty?”

  She looked down at her hands, lying limp in her lap. She wouldn’t meet my gaze.

  “Murder.”

  Chapter 11

  Dog rose from my lap and jumped down to the floor. He sat behind a covered chair, as if he’d had enough of the fire’s heat, and started eating the drape that covered it.

  I felt my hands grow trembly. Murder. I was sleeping alone under the roof of a murderer.

  I was about to enter into an impossible bargain with a murderer.

  There wasn’t a living soul who knew I was here, or who cared. No one would come searching or wonder why Lucinda Chapdelaine had vanished.

  Oh, Uncle, why did you have to die?

  I wiped away the tears from my eyes and tried to put on a brave face. I looked up boldly at Beryl and saw tears streaming down her cheeks.

  I wouldn’t have thought a creature like her could cry.

  “You hate me now,” she said.

  I said nothing.

  “You fear me.”

  I rocked back and forth a bit on my hips, trying to wake up my resting body, in case I needed to spring up and try to get away.

  “I can’t blame you for hating me.”

  She seized my hands once more and I tried to pull away, but my wrists might as well have been enclosed in iron. She looked down at her hands holding mine and seemed to realize what she was doing. She let go.

  “Don’t go, Lucinda. I’m not a murderer. Please believe me.”

  I couldn’t think what to do, so I stayed to listen. My senses were numb, my ears ringing. She searched my face and took courage from the fact that I wasn’t leaving.

  “I was a little girl,” she said, her words tumbling out in a rush. “I came here as a child, something like ten years old in your years. I came here, and your earth races around its sun so quickly! Time sped for me. I aged quickly. Almost overnight, I was a young woman.”

  Earth races… sun… what?

  I didn’t have time for a lesson in physics.

  “I fell in love,” she said miserably. “Desperately in love with a young man in the village near where I’d… arrived. I had allowed a widow woman to take me in, and I helped her with housework. It saved me from people asking questions, or worse. But, as I said, I fell in love with this young man. He loved me, too.”

  I watched Beryl’s face. Not even she could keep her marble composure in telling about this young man. Her eyes drifted toward the portrait of the handsome young man on the wall.

  “He wouldn’t marry me until his younger sister was grown. Both their parents were dead, and he felt the responsibility of providing for her.” She laughed, a bitter sound. “He was worried about providing for a sister and a wife. Turnips and onions! I need no food at all. But he didn’t understand. That was the price of both our happiness. Turnips and onions.”

  I nodded to show her I was listening. I could understand, at least in some way. The littlest things ruin lives. A faulty carriage wheel, a misshod horse… something such as this cost me my parents, and all my happiness.

  Beryl continued. “We met in the woods one day. He was a timberman by trade. I pleaded with him to marry me and take me away from the miserable old widow. I promised I’d be a second mother to his little sister. But he would not bend.”

  She closed her eyes. “I grew angry. I told him I could have offered him endless life—and I could have. He said he had to get along with his work. We… struggled over the handle of his axe. I was just trying to make him stay, stay a little longer to listen, so that perhaps I could persuade him. He… he saw my strength and grew frightened of me.”

  Beryl sat very still.

  “All his love for me drained out in that moment when he began to fear me. He turned and ran, leaving the axe in my hands.”

  Even knowing how this tale must end, I dreaded it. I closed my eyes.

  “I hated him for fearing me. For abandoning me, when I’d done nothing but love him.”

  Please, make it end. I couldn’t bear this story. Even behind my closed eyes, the portrait of the smiling youth lay before me.

  “It was so sudden. I was young, Lucinda! Too young for my body, for my strength. All in an instant, I wanted to wound him like he’d wounded me.”

  I couldn’t say I’d never felt that way toward Aunt. “I threw the axe after him. It found its mark.”

  The bloodred flowers in the picture became the young man’s blood, spilled on the ground around him.

  Beryl’s voice pleaded with me. “I didn’t understand about dying. I didn’t know what would happen to him.”

  If she came from a world where there was no death, she might well not understand. Pity for Beryl flowed over me. And yet, I couldn’t allow her excuse to stand on its own. “But you knew you wanted to hurt him.”

  She nodded. “That is true.”

  “And the little girl?”

  She turned and looked at me sharply. “What little girl?” I pointed to the portrait on the wall. “The little girl who looks just like the young man you killed.”

  She hung her head.

  “A sister?” I asked.

  She nodded. “She found the body.”

  If I pitied Beryl, I pitied this poor child far more. An orphan, like me, but at least she’d had a brother to look after her, until this happened.

  “What did you do for her?” I asked.

  Beryl looked at me curiously. “What do you mean?”

  I gestured impatiently. “Did you… apologize to her? Tell her what happened? Help her in some way?”

  Beryl frowned. “If I had told her, or anyone, they would have tried to arrest me and hang me.”

  “And?”

  She spread out her hands as if this should be obvious. “And it wouldn’t have worked. No prison could hold me, no noose could kill me. So it was better for everyone that I went away, wasn’t it?”

  “Hmm,” I said. “But what about the girl?”

  Beryl sat a little taller. “I have kept watch on her, through the years, from a distance” she said. “She doesn’t know me.”

  “You need to change that” I said, feeling reckless in the extreme. Who was I to chastise an immortal who has killed? “You need to apologize to her.”

  Beryl stared back at me, her head held high, her face haughty and cold.

  “What good would it do?”

  Suddenly I was the little girl.

  “Much good, perhaps,” I said. “Look at her face! You painted it yourself. Was there no one who ever explained to her the reason her brother was taken away?”

  Beryl’s arms were tightly folded across her chest again. She wouldn’t look at me.

  “It was decades ago. Almost a lifetime to the girl. Why dig it up again?”

  I stared at Beryl until she was forced to look back at me. “Because she’s suffered far too long already. Even if she’s grown old now, she deserves to know.”

  Beryl sat motionless for a long moment. Then, to my great surprise, she crumpled, falling back weakly against the arm of the couch.

  “Perhaps it would bring her some peace,” she said thoughtfully, “regardless of what it does to me.”

  My fervor subsided. She meant it.

  She reached for my hands. “Lucinda, if I can make some restitution, and if you can bring back my stone, it may be that I can find a way to be content here.”

  She looked around the room. “I have my painting, and reading, and…” Her violet eyes pleaded with me. “I think I have… perhaps you and I will, in time, be… ?”

  Friends.

  I looked back at the paintings on the wall, of Mama arid Papa, and me as a child, and felt a rush of hope. If I could track down Peter somehow, and find that stone, and relieve him of it, one way or another, this home was mine again!

  I looked once more at the painting of the glorious youth, and the sorrowing girl. Her face haunted me.

  “Who is she, Beryl?” I said.” The little girl?”

 
; “Hortensia,” Beryl said, watching me closely. “Hortensia Montescue. I believe you call her Aunt.”

  Chapter 12

  How could I sleep after that? But sleep I did. I tumbled into bed and passed immediately into a fitful slumber, dreaming urgent, fretful dreams, full of sorrow, but in the morning they mercifully faded from my mind. Dog slept on the foot of my bed, and that was a comfort, even if his hooves did bash my shins as he ran in his dreams.

  When at last I rose, there was a fire to revive and water to heat. In all my preparations for venturing into the city, I soon forgot about my troubled sleep. I bathed in front of the fire in my room, where my nurse used to wash me. Never in all my years with Aunt and Uncle had I had a bath by a fire. And such elegant soap! Scented with lilacs. It smelled like Mama. I soaked and scrubbed my hair until it squeaked. It felt like years of grime and weariness sloughed off me. Dog helped by drinking from the tub.

  I trimmed my hair and my nails and rubbed ointment into my chapped hands. Then I hunted down my mother’s closets and found to my surprise that many of her clothes were still there, and none the worse for wear after a bit of sponging and ironing. I remembered almost every gown. It brought tears to my eyes to see them hanging limp in the closet, not worn by Mama. The one I chose, a blue merino winter dress with lace over the front, smelled of lilacs, too. It made my skin tingle to put it on.

  I found boots and stockings and a coat and gloves, all somewhat faded and rumpled but still usable, and finer than anything I’d ever worn. I couldn’t resist twisting my hair into an elegant coif and fastening on one of Mama’s stylish little hats with hairpins.

  I stood before Mama’s dressing room mirror and spun around. In spite of everything, I laughed at the sheer joy of feeling clean and new. And fancy!

  Maybe, even, almost pretty. I took a closer look. In a mirror grainy and yellow with age I saw a face I’d never seen before, except as a shadow in the glass of Uncle’s shop cabinets.

  That shadow girl looked nothing like this one. This girl in the mirror looked like one for whom anything was possible.

  I sat upon the cushioned chair and opened the small dresser drawer where Mama had kept some of her jewelry. Empty, of course. Whoever disposed of Mama and Papa’s estate would doubtless have found the jewels in this drawer and sold them off long ago, to settle their debts, I supposed. Any fragments of value my parents left would have been picked over by vultures.

  That was when the tears came. They rose from nowhere and waylaid me. The kind of tears I used to cry years ago, when their faces were still fresh in my mind and their loss was still something I believed might be a bad dream erased by sunrise.

  My hand was still in the empty drawer. I slid it farther back, and the tip of my finger felt something hard and irregular in a corner. I yanked the drawer farther. Wedged in a crack where the wooden sides of the drawer joined was a cameo brooch. I brushed the dust away, revealing a serene figure, the delicately carved bust of a girl, immortally beautiful in her ivory stillness.

  Just as Mama was immortally beautiful in my memories of her, in this very seat.

  I pinned it to the lace at the throat of my gown, wiped my eyes, and went downstairs.

  The house seemed empty. I searched through the kitchens for something to eat.

  Sunlight poured in through large windows, illuminating the small red petals of dozens of potted flowers that blossomed on the sills. The air was warm and moist, sweet with their perfume.

  But there wasn’t a bite of food to be found. Every cupboard was empty, save for tarnished pots. Nothing in the dairy, nothing in the cellars. I wondered how Beryl conjured up the soup she’d fed me.

  She entered the kitchen as I banged cupboard doors. I felt myself stiffen, full of shyness after all she’d revealed to me last night. She, too, took in my appearance and smiled, a little nervously.

  “You look lovely.”

  I thought it better, at this early hour, to be brusque rather than intimate.

  “Don’t sound so surprised. Do you have any bread?”

  She shook her head.

  “Don’t you eat?”

  She gave a little hmph, half a laugh without the mirth. “I can eat,” she said, “but I don’t need to. This way there are no mice.”

  I dropped the lid to the empty flour barrel. “Well, I need to eat,” I said.

  “Regularly.”

  She nodded. “I’ll order some food.”

  “How?”

  She gestured out the window and across a meadow. “A farmer and his wife live across the way. They help me keep up the property. I don’t need the cooking or heating or washing that others do, nor do I keep animals, but the house and gardens need some tending.”

  I thought of the dozens of servants my parents had employed. Some tending indeed.

  “Ben and Leda don’t mind the pale color of my skin, and they like the color of my coins,” Beryl said. “They’ll find something to suit you.”

  “I’m not choosy,” I said.

  “In the meantime,” Beryl said, reaching under the front placket of her dress and pulling out a pouch, “you may need to buy back the stone from whoever now holds it. There’s plenty there for you to buy today’s food in the city.”

  I took the leather pouch. Inside was more gold than I’d ever seen in one place, and she’d given it to me as casually as if it were a bag of hazelnuts.

  “Where did you get such wealth?” I asked.

  She smiled again. “Do you remember I said that when I came down the well, I’d been gathering pebbles from the riverbed?”

  I nodded.

  “Pebbles in our world are emeralds and rubies in yours,” she said. “Each about the size of my missing gem. I had a sultan’s fortune in my pocket.”

  I whistled. I knew enough after living with Uncle to know that kings fought wars over gems such as that. I jiggled the pouch of gold to hear it clink.

  “How do you know I won’t disappear with this gold and live off it forevermore?” I asked, half-jesting, half-curious.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  And yet she trusted me, I felt sure of it. Aunt never trusted me an inch.

  “Your flowers are pretty,” I said.

  She stroked a cluster of blossoms. “They remind me of home,” she said.

  I could well believe it. “What are they?”

  “Can you guess?”

  “I don’t…” I stopped, remembering. It made me blush to say it.

  “Love-lies-bleeding?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “Amaranth.”

  Dog and I set out for the city and soon crossed the St. Justus Bridge. Beryl’s money pouch jangled against my hip. I tried to hold it still so as not to attract the attention of pickpockets. Though perhaps, I thought, the attention of pickpockets is just what I should seek, since I was searching for one in particular.

  As I walked, I considered Beryl’s parting words to me. “Remember, Lucinda” she said. “Someone is searching for my stone. I don’t know who. Please, be careful.”

  Wonderful. Not only did I face impossible odds, but I was competing with another, one who might—who knew?—hurt someone who stood in his way.

  A blue sky hung over the first day of the Winter Festival. The air was colder, but the sun shone, warming my spirits. Perhaps I’d set out on a doomed errand, but I was clean as an apple and dressed like a lady, with the money to prove it.

  I went to the first steaming cart I saw and bought a short loaf of bread with a crackling hot sausage tucked inside. The grinning vendor looked surprised at the coin I’d handed him. I wondered if I’d made an improper meal choice for a young lady. But when my first bite of sausage exploded with hot juice, I didn’t care.

  My hunger satisfied, I took a hard look around and tried to form a plan. I’d never seen so many people in one place in all my life, and the crowd fairly overwhelmed me. How in this never-ending jostle of faces and noises could I find one thin young man? To be sure, there were skinny youths
aplenty. That was part of the problem. Which of all these boots and trousers and spotty faces belonged to Peter—if that was even his name?

  Hours passed. The sun began its descent. Only a few more hours of daylight. I searched. I scanned faces. I walked until my feet were sore and my nose frozen. And still the sun descended, almost resting atop the tallest buildings on the horizon.

  I drifted with the crowd to the center of town, where the city common had become an ocean of tents and carts and booths, some selling wares, others hot meals, and still others touting contests of skill and chance. Jugglers, clowns, and fools wove throughout the flotsam. The noise and commotion pressed upon me. Whenever my glance pointed west, the sun blinded me. The charm of the festival had faded hours before. I wanted to run away and seek sanctuary from the chaos. This wasn’t a lark anymore.

  Peter had to be in this crowd somewhere, but I began to doubt I’d ever find him.

  At one end of the common a pavilion had been erected, with a platform and a podium. An orchestra seated on the platform played a tune that I could barely hear over the clapping. I’d so rarely heard any music at all since my parents died. I left Dog by a watering trough with instructions to wait—knowing him, he might understand—and pressed in for a closer look.

  I wormed and elbowed my way through, one hand firmly clutching my purse, until I found myself at the edge of the crowd, almost tumbling into the patterns of a great dance. Men and women, young and old, ragged and neat, were lined up in pairs of rows, facing each other and holding hands with the person on either side. As the orchestra played, rows skipped to the right, then back, to the left, then back, came forward until the rows met, then stepped back again.

  People linked elbows and changed partners. Cheeks were red and smiling, breath blowing out in frosty puffs.

  The dance charmed me—such order, such beauty, in the midst of the city’s chaos! How was it possible for so many people to act in concert? I’d never known even three people to do it.

  “What dance is this?” I asked an old woman.