“Of course,” Gretta murmured, as if she suddenly understood everything. She held my eyes with her own. “How else could you have come alive out of the wood?” She turned her gaze toward the forest. “Never have I seen a fairy, but death is as real to me as the scar on my knee. What exactly is the bargain, Keturah?”
“I told him a story and then refused to tell the end. Let me live one day, I said, and I will tell you the end of the story on the morrow. ‘Tis a story of love, a love that is greater than death, I told him, and I revealed that I myself would have such a love. He told me that if I could find a love like that before I returned to tell the end of the tale, he would free me of the bond.”
I could not bear the hopeless look in Beatrice’s eyes, nor the grim one in Gretta’s.
Gretta stood tall and put her hands on her hips and looked out over the village. “Now, I wouldn’t marry a single one of them,” she said. “There’s not a perfect one among them. But... Tailor comes very close.”
“Tailor? Not at all, Gretta. He would be perfect for you,” I said.
Gretta looked at me with a shrewd eye, and back to the bustling village. “When I find a man who will let me increase him in perfections, I will marry,” she said. “And Tailor seems not to be a man who will be bossed. He must be perfect for you instead.”
“No, Gretta, no. Tailor I could never love. Besides, everyone knows your stitches are the only ones Tailor could bear to look at all his life.”
“He has never seen my stitches. He mourns his wife still too greatly to notice such things. No, I have decided, Keturah. I shall never marry. You shall marry Tailor, and I shall be the best spinster and needlewoman in the village, and I shall live to keep my figure and my heart, and I shall grow old and never live to regret unruly children.”
“There is Choirmaster,” Beatrice said.
“Choirmaster! For Keturah?” Gretta exclaimed. “But I thought you liked—” She stopped; then, looking meaningfully at Beatrice, she said, “Ah, yes, Choirmaster—a most eligible bachelor.”
“He is intelligent,” Beatrice said.
“But gloomy,” Gretta replied.
“We could cheer him up,” Beatrice said bravely. “He is a devout man.”
Gretta answered, “But what about his nostrils?”
“Keturah shall have to try not to look up them.”
“But that is impossible!”
“Shush, Gretta,” Beatrice said, smiling. “He is an elegant man. And if one can’t help but look up his nostrils, at least he keeps his nostrils clean. I’ve noticed he has a fresh handkerchief every day.”
“You know I have always thought well of Ben Marshall,” I said slowly.
“Ben Marshall is not bonny enough for you, Keturah,” Gretta said.
“You say that about every lad,” Beatrice said with a sigh. “Of course he’s a handsome lad, Keturah, and well off, too. But there is the tradition—he must marry a Best Cook.”
Gretta leaned across the table on her elbows. “He will never love a wife as dearly as he loves his pumpkins and his squashes,” she said.
Beatrice said encouragingly, “He is a frugal man, I think.”
“Aye, another strike against him,” Gretta said, thumping the table and straightening up.
Beatrice frowned at Gretta and then smoothed her frown into forgiveness. Beatrice generously forgave Gretta many times a day.
“Padmoh wants him,” Gretta added. “And while she is better suited to him, she is a scold and would make his life a torment.”
Padmoh Smith was likely the best cook in the village. She ate eggs every day and sported her girth as proof of it. She had already won Best Cook two years in a row, but Ben Marshall had not yet proposed. Still, Padmoh could make a loaf that would cause a hungry man to weep with desire, and a stew that would make even a fed man beg. Grandmother said that although she was as plain as a fencepost, when a man ate her pie he began to think she was beautiful.
Grandmother also said Beatrice was pretty, though not beautiful, but when she sang, men began to forget that she was not beautiful. Demonstrate talent, said Grandmother often to me, and you will still be loved by a husband when beauty has faded.
But when it had come time for me to demonstrate talent, I did not demonstrate. I could bake a pie and I could tell a story, but neither would win me a husband, Grandmother told me sadly. I might make a fair midwife in time, she said, but it would be my beauty that would get me a husband.
In my mind, any beauty I possessed had not done me good but only caused me grief. Gretta and Beatrice said the other village girls claimed that their sweethearts had been led away by me. That was nonsense. I had no interest in any of their sweethearts, and if the boys spoke to me or stood about me, I was as silent as I could be. I found that I could be very silent. Besides, what need of beauty for a poor peasant girl, living in her own wattle-and-daub with her own peasant husband and her little peasant baby?
I sighed. “A love greater than death,” I murmured, and then, just then, I did not know what that meant.
“Well, one thing is certain—we go a-manhunting,” Gretta said.
It felt good to have my friends in my confidence, though I confess not my full confidence. I could not bear to tell them what Lord Death had said about the plague.
“I won’t let Death have you,” said Gretta with great calmness, yet beneath the calmness was a vibrating anger.
I put one hand on her cheek and held Beatrice’s hand with my other. “How many die every day under that same heaven which one day cannot be swayed?”
“I will fight him,” Beatrice said tearfully—Beatrice, who escorted bugs out of her house with all gentleness. Her pretense of good cheer and bravery had vanished, and I squeezed her hand.
I shook my head. “Beatrice, this is not a man you fight. This is a man before whom you curtsey.”
“No,” she said. “I hate him.”
“Now, now,” I said softly. I kissed her hair. Why did it pain me to hear her say this? “It will not be tonight. Go home and rest.”
When I went to kiss Gretta, she drew away. “If all else fails, you must fight him, Keturah,” she said. “I shall be forever angry with you if you don’t.”
III
J determine to solicit Soor Lily.
I slept the night away and awoke the next morning with a gasp, having thought myself there with Death in the underland of my dreaming. I looked out my window and saw that the dawn was a gray bird beaked with crimson.
My days lost in the wood had not faded in my memory. I had a remembrance of the hardness of trees and the bitter taste of leaves and the black earth that gave me no water. Plague, I thought. Plague.
From my window I could see the forest looming dark and deep, seemingly without end. But I could also see the village, close and safe. No—not safe. My village was in terrible danger, but what could I do to save it?
It began to rain. Our poor and shabby village seemed even poorer and shabbier when it rained. It made the gray houses grayer, and the barns and sheds saggy, as if being wet was more than they could bear. The square turned to mire, the yards to muck. The color went out of the bay, and even the manor looked a great, bare mound of stone.
And yet, I thought, had there ever been so sweet and glorious a place?
“He has allowed his lands to fall to ruin,” Lord Death had said. From that one clue, I hoped, I could perhaps stave off the plague. To save myself I had already devised a plan. I would go to Soor Lily, the village wise woman, and seek a charm by which I might discover my true love. Then, by whatever wiles a decent girl might employ, I would have him wed me this very day.