“Here in the city,” said Catriona, “it is said that children must make their way in the real world, and that stories will only fill their heads with unreasonable expectations.”
“They say that,” admitted Alastor, “but the city-dwellers have merely devised a new armory of stories, which seem more appropriate to the order and discipline of city life. I would rather our children heard what we had to tell — for they are, after all, our children.”
“What name did you have in mind?” Catriona asked him.
“I hope that our son might choose to follow me in working with his hands,” Alastor said. “I would like him to master the grain of the wood, in order that he might make pipes, harps, fiddles, and lutes. I hope that our daughter might complement his achievements with a singing voice the equal of your own. Let us give her a name which would suit a songstress.”
“Ever since I was a girl,” said Catriona, “I have been nicknamed Nightingale — but if you mean what you say about the wisdom of stories, we should not wish that name upon our daughter. No sooner had it been bestowed upon me than I was forced to listen to the tale of the little girl who fell into the care of a wicked man who knew the secret of training nightingales to sing by day. Even today I shudder when I think of it.”
“She was imprisoned in a cage by a prince, was she not?” said Alastor. “She was set to sing in the depths of the wild forest, but suffered misfortune enough to break her heart, and she refused to sing again, until she fell into the clutches of her former master, who—”
“Please don’t,” begged Catriona.
“Well,” said Alastor, “we must certainly avoid the name that was given to that girl — which was Luscignole, if I remember rightly. I wonder if we might call our daughter — if indeed the child you are carrying should turn out to be a daughter — Chanterelle, after the highest string of a musical instrument?”
“Chanterelle is an excellent choice,” said Catriona. “I never heard a story about a girl named Chanterelle. But what if the baby is a boy?”
There is no need to record the rest of the conversation, for the child was a girl, and she was named Chanterelle.
When Handsel and Chanterelle were old enough to hear stories, Catriona was careful to tell them the tales that were popular in the city as well as those she remembered from her own childhood in the Highlands, but it was the Highland tales that they liked better. Although there was not the faintest trace of the fairy-folk to be found in the city, it was the fairy-folk of whom the children loved to hear tell.
Handsel, as might be expected, was particularly fond of the tale of Handsel and Gretel. Chanterelle, on the other hand, preferred to hear the tale of the foundryman who was lured away from his family by a fairy, until he was called back by the tolling of a church bell he had made, which had fallen into a lake. Catriona told that story to help her children understand the kind of work her father did, although she assured them that he was not at all the kind of man to be seduced by a fairy, but it was Alastor who told them the story of the little girl whose wicked guardian knew the secret of making nightingales sing by day. Catriona could not tell that story without shuddering, and she did not altogether approve when her husband told the fascinated children that she had once been nicknamed Nightingale, even though she had always been able to sing by day.
“In actual fact,” Catriona told her children — using a phrase she had picked up in the city—“nightingales are not very good singers at all. It is the mere fact of their singing by night that is remarkable, not the quality of their performance.”
“Why can we not hear them?” Handsel asked. “I have never heard any bird sing by night.”
“There are no nightingales in the city,” she told them. “They are rare even in the forests above the village where I was born.”
“As rare as the fairy-folk?” asked Chanterelle.
“Even rarer, alas,” said Catriona. “Had more of my neighbors heard one, they might have been content with my given name, which comes from katharos, or purity.”
As Alastor had hoped, Handsel soon showed an aptitude for woodwork, and he eventually joined his father in the workshop. He showed an aptitude for music too, and was soon able to produce a tune of sorts out of any instrument he came across. Chanterelle was no disappointment either; she proved to have a lovely voice. She sang by day and she sang by night, and on Sundays she sang in the choir at the church that Alastor and Catriona now attended.
All was well — until the plague came.
“It is not so terrible a plague as some,” Alastor said to Catriona, when Handsel was the first of them to fall ill. “It is not as rapacious as the one in the story of the great black spider — the one which terrified and blighted a Highland village, infecting the inhabitants with fevers that sucked the blood and the life from every last one. This is a disease which the strong and the lucky may resist, if only fortune favors them.”
“We must do what we can to help fortune,” Catriona said. “We must pray, and we must nurse the child as best we can. He is strong.”
The instrument-maker and his wife prayed, and they nursed poor Handsel as best they could — but within a week, Chanterelle had caught the fever too.
Alastor and Catriona redoubled their efforts, praying and nursing, fighting with every fiber of flesh and conviction of spirit for the lives of their children. Fortune favored them, at least to the extent of granting their most fervent wishes. Handsel recovered from the fever, and so did Chanterelle — but Catriona fell ill, and so did Alastor.
The roles were now reversed; it was the turn of Handsel and Chanterelle to play nurse. They tended the fire, boiled the water, picked the vegetables, and cooked the meat. They ran hither and yon in search of bread and blankets, candles and cough-mixture, and they prayed with all the fervor of their little hearts and high voices.
Catriona recovered in due course, but Alastor died.
“I was not strong enough,” Handsel lamented. “My hands were not clever enough to do what needed to be done.”
“My voice was not sweet enough,” mourned Chanterelle. “My prayers were not lovely enough for Heaven to hear.”
“You must not think that,” Catriona said to them. “Neither of you is at fault.”
They assured her that they understood — and it seemed that Handsel, perhaps because he was the elder, really did understand. But from that day forward, Chanterelle refused to sing. She would not join in with the choir in church, nor would she sing at home, by day or by night, no matter how hard Handsel tried to seduce her voice with his tunes.
Catriona and Handsel tried to complete the instruments that Alastor had left unfinished. They even tried to begin more — but Handsel’s hands were only half grown and his skills less than half trained, and Catriona’s full-grown hands had no woodworking skill at all. In the end, Catriona and her children had no alternative but to sell the shop and their home with it. They had no place to go but the Highland village where Catriona’s parents lived.
The journey to the Highlands was long and by no means easy, but their arrival in the village brought no relief. The plague had left the highest parts of the Highlands untouched, for no fever likes to visit places that are too high on a hill, but it had insinuated itself into the valleys, descended on the villages with unusual ferocity. When the exhausted Catriona and her children finally presented themselves at the foundry, they found it closed, and the house beside it was dark and deserted.