If words get fuzzy and twist around in front of your eyes, it’s a difficult thing to stand on a step stool and differentiate between this jar and that, the various labels blurring before your eyes. Now, Jacob had seen cinnamon before and knew it to be a reddish brown, but his mam never had used it (his father had carried it in his peddler’s pack now and again, which is how Jacob knew about it). Still and all, there was a jar of brownish red leaves, a little minty smelling to be sure, but Jacob felt sure that was it. He didn’t find the apples where the witch had said they were, but instead two cupboards over. Leave it to a witch, he thought, to mislead him even when he was doing her the favor of making a pie.
The witch gave him careful instructions for simmering the apples over a low flame and forking lard into a bowl of flour to make the crust. In an hour’s time the pie was ready. Jacob smelled its apple-y smell and approved. He would have some after a dinner of roasted potatoes and dandelion greens from the garden, seasoned with a touch of spring onion.
The witch, however, wanted hers the very minute Jacob pulled it from the oven. “Don’t you want it to cool?” he’d asked. “I know how to set a pie on the windowsill. Seen it done a thousand times.”
“What? And let the birds have it? No, boy, bring me a piece right now. I take my pleasures as they make their presence known.”
It was the very first bite that sickened her. “Bring me the jar of cinnamon,” the witch demanded, her eyes widening when Jacob handed it to her. “This is pennyroyal, not cinnamon, boy. You’ve gone and poisoned me.” She sounded more amazed than angry. She looked Jacob straight in the eye and asked, “Did you mean to?”
Jacob felt as though he’d been hit in the stomach. No, of course he hadn’t meant to. Yes, yes, she was a witch, but she was an awfully nice witch, and he even believed her when she said she hadn’t killed Hen.
“Quit blubbering, boy, and try to help,” the witch commanded, her skin growing paler by the second. “Outside, in the thicket near the front gate, look for a shrub with white flowers and purple berries. Dark purple, almost black. Bring the berries to me right away.”
Jacob stumbled out the front door and down the steps, his eyes blinded with tears. Where was it? Where was the shrub? He swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand and looked and looked, but he couldn’t find it. From inside the house the witch moaned.
White flowers, purple berries, it had to be here somewhere. She wouldn’t lie to him about that, would she, not when she was poisoned and needed help. Jacob began pulling up plants willy-nilly, as though he might find the bush he was looking for by getting rid of all the bushes he wasn’t looking for. Thorns scraped at his skin and vines tripped him up. Where was that stupid shrub?
“I’m sorry!” Jacob cried out. He fell to the ground and buried his head in his hands. Oh what, oh what had he done? “I’m sorry!” he cried again.
But there was no reply.
39
Isabelle and Samuel raced into Grete’s yard, panting and holding their sides. Slowing, steadying themselves with their hands on their knees, taking in gulping, gasping breaths, it took a few seconds before they noticed the boy by the front gate.
“I’ve killed her,” he called out forlornly. “I killed her, but I honestly didn’t mean to. She was a nice old witch for a witch.”
They dashed up the porch steps and through the door. Grete lay still on her bed, held to it by a hodgepodge of vines. Isabelle spun around, wanting to throttle the boy, throw something at him—how dare he tie Grete up! What could he have been thinking? Heat flashed from her fingertips to the roots of her hair.
Samuel waved his hand to get Isabelle’s attention. He nodded toward Grete. “She’s not dead yet, but listen to her breathing, all hollow-like and raspy that way. If she don’t get help, she’ll be dead soon. We need to know what happened.”
Isabelle bolted to the yard. “What did you do to her?” she demanded of the boy, her heart pounding so hard in her chest she thought it might push her over into the grass.
“Put the wrong thing in her pie,” the boy said. “Didn’t mean to. Thought I was putting in cinnamon, but instead it was pennies.”
“Pennies?” Isabelle stared at him, then asked again. “Pennies?”
“Pennies-something,” the boy said. “Royal pennies, like a king might give you.”
“Pennyroyal?”
The boy nodded excitedly. “That’s the one! Pennyroyal.” His face turned glum again. “Thought it was cinnamon. ‘Twas the color of cinnamon.”
Isabelle began to tremble, and he reached out a hand to help her sit. “Hen should have come instead of me,” she said in a shaky voice, lowering herself to the ground. “She’d know what to do.”
The boy looked at her, eyes wide. “You know Hen?”
Isabelle stared back at him. “Of course I know Hen. Do you?”
“Why, she’s my sister!” he exclaimed. “Have you seen her?”
“Jacob!” Isabelle exclaimed. “Hen’s been worried sick about you! Oh, I wish she were here. She’d know what to do about Grete. There’s just got to be something we—”
“The shrub, she said.”
“The shrub who said?”
Jacob pointed to the house. “The witch. She said there’s a shrub out here with white flowers and purple berries. She wanted me to get her some, but I couldn’t find it.”
Isabelle leaped toward the front gate. “White flowers?” she called back over her shoulder. “Purple berries?”
“That’s right,” Jacob replied, sprinting after her to the thicket. “I reckon it’s something to make the poison not so poisonous in her belly.”
“Or to make her throw up the pennyroyal,” Isabelle suggested, crawling through the tangle of bushes and vines, ignoring the rocks that dug into her knees. “Throwing up is exactly what Grete needs to do!”
Jacob turned a bit green at that, but he began pushing through the vines and growth, grabbing at every plant in his way. “Hen could help with this?”
“Your sister is a natural-born healer,” Isabelle informed him, pulling a thorny vine from her sleeve and tearing through a patch of flowering chamomile. “Grete taught her all sorts of things about plants and medicine.”
Samuel came out to the porch. “She’s still breathing, but she looks terrible gray,” he called. “I wish Hen were here to look at her.”
“I could go get her,” Jacob volunteered. “I run fast.”
“It’ll take hours,” Samuel pointed out. “I don’t know if this one’s got hours.”
Isabelle stood up with a shout. “I found it!” She held up a bunch of branches and waved them at Samuel and Jacob. Scrambling over the thicket, she stumbled toward the cottage, her arms and legs scratched and bleeding, twigs tangled in her hair. She plucked off a purple-black berry from one of the stems. “This is what Grete said would help her! She can take these, and then when Hen gets here we’ll figure out what to do next.”
“I should go, then?” Jacob asked eagerly, moving toward the clearing. “It might help?”
“It might,” Isabelle told him. “But hurry!”
He was already gone, his feet crashing over rocks and sticks.
Isabelle bounded up the porch steps, cradling the branches in her arms. “All Grete has to do is eat these. That’s all she has to do.”
“She’s not even awake,” Samuel pointed out. “I don’t know how we can get them down her throat without choking her.”
“We’ll find some way,” Isabelle insisted, sounding more confident than she felt. “We have to.”
40
The next part of this story is a blur. How can I describe a blur to you? Maybe I can’t. Maybe you should just close your eyes and think of clouds and, holding that thought, turn round and round and round.
Do you feel blurry yet?
Do you feel slightly ill and rushed and a touch out of sorts? A tad confused? Spin some more. Go faster, and while you do—
Take that picture of Grete you have in your
mind. You’ve been reading about her for pages and pages now, so I know you have a picture. But it’s a picture of someone up and moving about, isn’t it? Someone lively and full of life? Well, change all that. Picture her lying down, unconscious, very sick, dying, almost dead.
And then spin around some more.
You know, I’m not actually a trained storyteller. They have schools for storytellers in which they learn the tricks for describing these things, but I don’t want you just to see it, I want you to feel it, too, and I wonder if that’s something they can teach you at storytelling school. You’ve come this far, traveled more than a few miles, and you deserve a place of honor in the middle of these next scenes, right there in the center of the room, invisible of course, but watching it all and feeling it all, being caught up in the blur and the fear and the racing hearts—
Keep spinning.
Keep spinning—
41
Isabelle’s head was spinning and her eyes blurred with tears as she mashed the berries with her hands. But she refused to cry. No time for crying, no time to find the heavy pestle Grete used for crushing leaves and stems into a mush. No time for spoons or forks. Purple juice stained Isabelle’s fingers, ran down her arms. She didn’t know how many berries they needed, so she’d thrown all of them in the bowl, and now they were lumped together in a purple, juicy soup that jumped halfway up to her elbows each time she mashed down.
“Wake up, old woman,” Isabelle heard Samuel yell from Grete’s room. She could hear his knife tearing through the vines. “You need to wake up now!”
She hurried down the hall with the bowl of mush, trying not to spill, wishing as hard as she knew how that her hands would stop trembling. She’d never been so shaky, felt so helpless. When this was over and done with, she would learn everything in the world there was to know about healing herbs and plants, and then the next time someone was poisoned or deathly ill or had the slightest bit of tickle in their nose, the barest hint of fever, she’d be prepared. No more swirling, dizzy Isabelle, her hands a mess of mush.
By the time Isabelle reached the door, Samuel had untied Grete, but she was still unconscious. “She won’t wake up,” he reported. “I shook her and shouted at her, but her eyes won’t open.”
“Sit her up so her head’s leaning back against the wall,” Isabelle ordered, setting the bowl down on the table next to Grete’s bed. She was guessing what to do. She hoped that at any second Samuel would take charge and start shouting out instructions, but Samuel looked as lost as Isabelle felt.
“You sit next to her and hold her,” Isabelle continued. Her throat tightened, but she forced herself to sniff back her tears. No time, no time! Besides, when had Isabelle Bean ever been a crybaby? Been afraid of anything (besides snakes, and practically everybody was afraid of snakes)? There was no time to wilt like a lettuce leaf. Isabelle took a deep breath, straightened her spine. “Tilt her head back, and I’ll spoon the stuff in her mouth,” she said, trying to sound less wobbly than she felt.
Samuel nodded. He looks like he’s going to be sick, Isabelle thought as she dipped the spoon into the berries. She thought this thought in a clinical sort of way, deciding to ignore the goings-on in her own guts, the churning and swirling, the acidy dance—
No. No time for that. Dip the spoon in the bowl. No trembling. No shaking. Just dip and lift to Grete’s mouth.
Isabelle did what she told herself to do. Her fingers only wobbled a little bit, her stomach only lurched halfway up her throat. The spoon slipped easily into Grete’s mouth, past her teeth, over her tongue. “Sip it all, Grete, the whole thing,” Isabelle whispered, and Samuel tilted Grete’s head back to help the juice down her throat.
Again, the spoon over the lips and past the teeth. Down the throat. “Give her some water, don’t ya think?” Samuel asked calmly, as though he did this sort of thing every day, as though he weren’t scared to death too. He handed Isabelle a cup, and she tilted it above Grete’s mouth, poured some water in. Grete coughed, sputtered, swallowed.
“That’s the trick,” Samuel exclaimed, just as Grete’s stomach lurched. He quickly turned her on her side, held her head over the bowl he’d placed by her pillow. Grete heaved, and Samuel held on.
Isabelle held on to the bedpost, dizzy again, her head a swirl of noise, no words, just rush and buzz and tremble. Her knees buckled, but she caught herself, yanked herself up.
“More,” she told Samuel after he’d pulled Grete back to a sitting position and wiped her mouth with his sleeve. “We’ve got to get it all out.”
So they did it all again, and again, and after the last spoonful, the last hurl of purple mush, Grete’s eyes opened. She didn’t say anything for a few minutes, just lay there breathing, her eyes darting back and forth between Isabelle and Samuel.
“There’s an awful side to it,” she whispered when she was finally able to speak. She lifted her head up to take a sip of water from the cup Samuel offered. “To this healing business. A dark and terrible side. But I knew you wouldn’t be afraid.”
Isabelle slumped into the chair next to the bed. Not afraid? Not afraid of mashing berries or spooning mush, maybe, or even of holding Grete’s shoulders as the poison rushed out of her. She wasn’t afraid of doing what needed to be done.
No, it wasn’t the doing that made Isabelle afraid. It was the watching. Bad enough that Grete might die—but to watch Grete die? To sit there and watch as the life drained out of her face and hands? Isabelle’s brain reeled at the thought.
Grete reached over and touched Isabelle’s hand. “Everyone’s afraid of that, girl. The worst thing, to watch a bad death.”
The world blurred in front of Isabelle’s eyes. Blurred and went spinning like it had been pushed off its axis—spinning into nothingness, blackness—
“But I’m not dead,” Grete reminded her in a raspy whisper of a voice. “A bit worse for the wear, mind you, but not dead.”
“You done good,” Samuel said to Isabelle. “Good as Hen would have done, I’d wager.”
She looked to the window, wishing Hen would appear. Grete wasn’t dead, but Isabelle knew there was more to do. How do you heal a stomach torn up by poison? Isabelle hadn’t the slightest idea, not a clue. Hen would have to take over from here.
It was early the next morning when the buzz began again in Isabelle’s ears. She’d been sitting with Grete, dozing off for short stretches, then waking to give Grete sips of water. She and Samuel had spent the night before cleaning up mush and muck and bile in a tub in the kitchen, having wiped the floor with rags and taken the spoiled sheets off Grete’s bed and exchanged them for clean ones. When they’d finally finished, Samuel had lain down on a pallet of blankets at the foot of Grete’s bed and fallen into a hard, deep sleep. Isabelle sat in the chair next to Grete’s bed and kept watch until her eyes wouldn’t stay open any longer.
At first the buzz wove its way into Isabelle’s dreams without disturbing her at all. Her head had been so full of strange noises and happenings all day, the buzz wasn’t enough to catch her attention. But when she woke up, the buzz was still there. She turned quickly to Grete to see if she was breathing. When she was sure the old woman was fine, Isabelle stood, careful not to wake her, and walked to the porch.
The yard was empty. Still, the buzz grew louder in Isabelle’s ears. She sat down in a rocker and waited. The yard slowly filled with light. The buzz grew even louder. Isabelle kept waiting.
Hen was the first to crash through the woods into the yard. “Is she dead?” she cried when she saw Isabelle. “Jacob said she was half-dead when he left here.”
“She’s alive,” Isabelle reported, practically dropping out of her chair with relief at the sight of Hen. “She’s in the bedroom. Try not to wake her up, though. She’s pretty beat.”
Hen ran up the porch steps, nearly stumbling in her hurry to get through the door. The buzz grew louder. Isabelle turned expectantly toward the woods, and sure enough, here came Jacob, with Rat Face behind him, holding Suga
r in his arms.
“Is she still alive?” Jacob called across the yard. “Did the berries work?”
“They worked, they worked,” Isabelle told him. “Boy, did they ever.”
“Is this where the witch lives?” Sugar asked sleepily. “Jacob says she’s a nice witch, but I never heard of a nice witch, have you?”
Isabelle stood and walked out into the yard. “She’s not a witch. Jacob, you didn’t go back and tell everyone you found a witch, did you?”
“Told ‘em I found the very witch we’d been hearing about all these years, but that she wasn’t bad at all. Pretty friendly, actually,” Jacob said, sounding pleased with this bit of diplomacy. “Told ‘em they didn’t have a thing in the world to be scared about with this here witch, not a thing.”
But Isabelle felt the chill of fear close over her, and when she looked to the edge of the yard, she saw a dozen or so kids from the camp standing at the edge of the woods—she could see Elizabeth and Luke and Cornelia and some of the others she’d nursed, little and big, all standing in the warm light of the morning, shivering and hollow eyed, most of them with sticks in their hands.
“They came with you?” Isabelle asked, turning to Rat Face, who nodded. “But why?”
“Heard about the witch and wanted to see for themselves. Some of ‘em want to do more than just see her.” He gently set Sugar down. “They want to have at her, if you catch my meaning. Jacob’s been trying to talk ‘em out of it, but they won’t listen.”
“Elizabeth?” Isabelle called. “Elizabeth, what are you doing?”
“We just want to make sure that witch can’t do any more harm.”
“But you know she’s not a witch,” Isabelle insisted. “Samuel and I explained it.”
Elizabeth entered the clearing, a large branch in her hand. “But you’re her granddaughter. Why would you tell the truth about her? Too much of a risk to believe you, I decided.”
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