A Creature of Moonlight (3 page)

Not that the nobles go through the hut when they come to walk in our garden. They take the path around it. They don't put their shiny boots on the floor of our kitchen. They don't throw their eyes on our beds and our one small dresser with our winter changes of clothes. They don't touch a finger to the mantel I wipe down every night with my own two hands so it gleams like theirs do up in their castle without them ever doing anything about it. I'm not sure what I would do if they tried to slip themselves through our front door.

They come too often for my taste as it is, those lords and ladies from the king's court. They come on horses, some of them, and some in fancy carriages, and some come walking on their own two feet, laughing and strolling along without a care in the world. Gramps calls out to them as they canter or roll or amble on up to our front porch, where we've set out our roses and marigolds and the rest, laid in rows all along our wide railing.

I don't talk to them.

They laugh with my Gramps. They sit across the porch table from him, in the chair I use when no one's around. They gossip about the doings at court and how the crops are coming in on their acres and acres of fields—not that they're the ones who tend their own crops, but they talk as if they were, as if they sweated over the planting and burst their fingers with the harvest. They don't talk about the way the woods keep moving in, not even this summer, when their estates must be having as many problems as the smaller farms.

I hover at the back of the porch, a wisp, a shadow. When they've done with the talking and get on with deciding what they want, I step up and pull the flowers together for them. I pick out the greens and the ribbon. I tie them all in a bunch, and I hand them to my Gramps.

And then some of them remember me and give me a smile.

“How's our Tulip?” they ask. They've always called me that, as long as I can remember. My tulips come in so many colors, they near make a rainbow, and in my garden they bloom all summer long.

I don't answer. I step back against the wall; I duck my head away. I owe them nothing.

They know it, too, and they always laugh a bit forcedly—the ladies high and bright, the lords a deep chuckle—and never push it. They take their flowers from Gramps, and then they get back on their horses or step into their fancy carriages or link their pretty arms and saunter up our path over the hill toward the city.

Gramps never answers for me, neither. He could. He could tell them what I've been up to, how long it's been since I had a sickness. He doesn't, though. He grows still, just like me, and waits until they're done with asking, done with paying me any mind, before he turns back into the helpful, talkative flower man.

There are some things Gramps understands about me. There are some things even he won't do, some things even he won't say to make them happy.

But I welcome the villagers when they come. I invite them inside when they've a mind to visit before the fire, and I feed and water them too, and happily.

That afternoon last year, after I handed Jack his cup of milk, I leaned back against the wall, my hands behind me, my bare feet scratching each other, tapping on the porch floor, my braid hanging over my chest. Jack sipped and talked away with Gramps about the harvest and the new babies in the village and the weddings that would be coming in the spring. Gramps smiled and laughed with him, just as he does with the ladies and lords. Not one for any false sense of importance, my Gramps.

The time wore on, and still Jack sat there, clutching an empty cup now, and running out of things to say. My legs were falling asleep, but if Gramps could wait him out, so could I, and there wasn't another chair in the house to fall into, and I wasn't going to sit myself down on the porch. The village girls, they might have done that. They might have smiled and nodded at Jack as he talked on—he sure was smiling and nodding at me. But I wasn't a village girl, was I? So I stayed standing there, and I let my mind drift off into the woods, where the sun would be dappling through the trees about now and the squirrels would be chittering, racing one another from branch to branch.

Into the silence of the porch and the silence of the woods in my mind, Jack said, “Well now, sir, and your wee Marni's grown right up.”

It wasn't something no one had said before. The women who bring our vegetables and such are always talking on about how I've shot up since they've seen me last, even if it was just two weeks ago. Them I give two or three smiles, if I feel like it. They make Gramps laugh, not just a politeness laugh, but a laugh deep from his belly, and there aren't many who can do that. Them I like, and I don't mind when they talk about me, so long as they don't expect me to talk all that much back.

But the way Jack said it, as if he meant more than what he said—that I didn't like at all. I pushed myself out of my slump, up straight against the wall, still keeping my head down but ready to run or fight or I didn't know what.

Gramps had gone still, too. “She's older than she was,” he said, “though I don't know if I would say she's completely grown.”

Jack shook his head at once, taking it back. “No. No, sir, not completely grown, that's true. But grown right up, she has, into something beautiful. What do the noble folk call her when they come to buy your flowers? Daisy? Violet?”

I could see my Gramps not wanting to answer, but a name like that—a daisy, a violet, only the commonest of flowers he could have chosen—that I couldn't stand, not even through my unease. “Tulip,” I offered, a bit put out.

Then I wished I hadn't spoken, because Jack looked around at me as if the clouds had parted and the sun itself had started to speak. “Aye, that's it,” he said, real soft. “A veritable Tulip you are, and you don't mind me saying so, miss.”

“She might not,” my Gramps put in, “but I'll have a word or two to say about it, you may be sure.”

“Yes, sir, yes, sir.” Jack turned around again so fast I thought he'd lose his cap. “But I mean nothing wrong by it, you know that, sir. I mean to pay my respects, that's all.”

“And now you've paid them,” said Gramps, still calm, but with something in his voice that said that Jack would get up and go if he knew what was good for him.

No one could say that Jack didn't know what was good for him. He stepped up and off the porch as quick as could be, tipped his cap to Gramps, and nodded toward me, almost a bow, if an awkward one. I didn't nod or smile back, but only stood there as he walked away and watched until he disappeared over the hill.

 

So I'm growing up, that's all that is.

Jack was the first, but he's not anywhere close to the last. It started last fall before the deep snows, and it picks up again this summer. They come on sunny afternoons and rainy evenings, these village lads, to share news with Gramps and sip their cups of milk, watching me all the while from the corners of their eyes. I pretend I don't know what's happening, and Gramps turns them out soon as he's able, soon as he can without seeming rude.

I sometimes wonder why they're interested. Not that I don't understand that I'm growing into a woman, and they are men. I mean, I'm not a horror, but I'm nothing special, neither. I work outdoors with the flowers all day long. I take no pains to wash my face or hands. I wear a dress as patched as any you'll find on a beggar in the city, I wager. My hair would be something pretty if I took care to brush it every night. But most times it's tangled and dulled by the dirt and the weeds and from getting torn by rose brambles and by branches in the woods.

I figure it's not me they're watching, though, or anyway not the girl I look like. It's the thing I'm not anymore. It's how I'm not one thing or another, but something else, something unlike anyone they know.

Gramps did ask me once, last winter, if there was any lad I fancied. I was putting a loaf over the fire to bake; I turned round, still bent over, and stared at him.

“It would be a way, Marni, to be forgotten once and for all. It would give you more protection than you'd ever have living here with me.”

I straightened, feeling the flush of the flames on my cheeks. “There's life, Gramps,” I said, “and then there's life. I wouldn't marry one of them if it were my last chance before the axe. What, and wear a village skirt and drink from the village well? Wouldn't be just the king and his court who'd forget me. I'd forget myself.”

Gramps looked over my dress pointedly, and he sighed and shook his head, but he didn't say nothing more. Yes, some of the village women wear better dresses than me. But then, they have the time to sew, or a wagon for traveling to the city for better cloth. And my dress doesn't say I'm one thing or another. It's just a piece of fabric, taking the place of what I should by rights be wearing. Now I wear the dress of—what? A flower girl? A made-up thing, a nobody. If I started dressing like a villager, I would become one. I'd give up what I'm not anymore.

Gramps didn't say,
You could marry a villager to make me safe
. He didn't say,
This is no life, Marni. Become someone else and start again. Who you were is gone, as good as dead.
Gramps understands things sometimes.

Still, he watched me close all the rest of the evening, and I went to bed uneasy that night, with an itching in my feet.

 

It may be irritating, to be courted with sideways glances and half-formed flatteries, but at least these village lads are harmless. The real danger, I know, is from the lords.

Jack and the others might get frustrated. They might raise their voices, pushing for a word from me, an answer to some fool question—but a snap of Gramps's dark eyebrows, and they hush again.

They're in awe of him. They're in awe of how he speaks, the way I never learned to, with the short vowels and the clipped consonants. Every word out of Gramps's mouth sounds like he means it, like he knows just what he's saying and why. Out of my mouth, out of the villagers' mouths, the words all mash together, as if we can't be bothered to keep them one from the next, as if we haven't any time but must rush headlong from one thought to another. Times are I've tried to speak like Gramps, but it never seems natural. I've always latched onto the villagers' way of speaking—it's how my mouth wants to work, I reckon.

He sits so still, too, my Gramps, so tall and straight. He holds his cane across his lap, and he rests both hands along its shaft lightly. His shoulders roll back. His neck stretches up. Not even the lords or ladies sit like that. They loll lazily in their chair, bending forward when they laugh, leaning an elbow on the table. I imagine it isn't easy for Gramps to sit just so. His legs are half dead, so the other half of him has to work twice as hard to get across the floor or to reach for a cup or to rise up out of his chair. But he sits so easy you'd think he doesn't strain at all, that it's nothing.

When the villagers come, I see them sitting as straight as they can too, imitating him. The lords and the ladies don't even try. Could be they don't care what he thinks. Or could be that to give in on this, Gramps's standard of posture, would be to acknowledge something they can't bear: that Gramps is better than they are, and that they knew it once. Once, they hung on his every word; once, they fought for the honor of sitting at his side.

Maybe it's this refusal to remember that makes the lords glance my way with eyes the villagers would never dare make at me. That's a newer thing than the visits from the village lads; it's been a month or two, now, that it's been happening. There I'll be, leaning in my usual place against the wall, watching our morning glories curling around the wooden porch columns, and I'll sense a pair of them, dark and hungry eyes. It'll be someone not sitting on our visitors' chair, but the escort for a lady or a tagger-on to a large carriage group, someone not talking with the rest, someone whose mind has been able to stray.

And Gramps can't do a thing about it. He notices, sure, and I see the tightness in his face. At first I'd get all tight myself when it started to happen. They shouldn't be able to do that, I knew, and I worried what would come of it, who'd finally make some move toward me or come back late at night when Gramps was snoring and I was lying awake in my bed by the window. I used to stare up from my pillow at the moon, waiting for the shape of one of them to darken it, to reach in toward me, to cover my mouth before I could scream.

Now I stare back, as often as not. If they want to make something of it, they should go right ahead. Nothing has been stopping them all these years from coming round in the middle of the night to smother us as we sleep. Nothing stops them now from coming round to do other things. Nothing but the king, I guess—assuming he'd do anything about it. And their own small honor. And their fear of something else, of how close we are to the woods, of how strong Gramps always looks despite his legs, of how my mother was the only one who ever came back alive.

 

There's a story Annel used to tell about this girl, near grown, who was out in a meadow or somewhere, picking flowers. She was singing to herself, happy I guess, and as she reached down to pluck this red tulip, up comes a big brown horse with a man on its back.

Except it wasn't just a man, it was a sorcerer, and he didn't just happen to ride up right then. He had been watching the girl with his magic, and there was something about the way she picked the flowers, something about the way she leaned over with her hair all long and flowing and her lips spread wide in song, that made him love her. Or at least that's what he told the girl when he had gotten off his big brown horse and was standing there in front of her, and her mouth was wide with surprise now, and the tulip was still in her hand.

He wanted to take her with him back to his big old sorcerer's house, and he said she'd have jewels and dresses and anything she could want. Only thing was, if she came with him, she wouldn't ever go back home.