Bitter Greens (19 page)

Margherita often dreamt of the eight dead girls.

She knew their hair intimately, and imagined faces and personalities to match. The girl with the fiery-red ringlets would be hot-tempered and wild. The girl with the wheaten sheaves would be a comely country girl, smiling and peaceful. The one with the soft strawberry-blonde hair was a shy little girl. She was the one who had found it hardest being locked up in this one small room. Hers was the littlest skeleton in the cellar.

One girl at least had leapt to her death – Margherita was sure of it. She too had felt the allure of the drop. Probably the fiery redhead. Another girl had had waves of bright bronze hair, just like Margherita’s own. Margherita called her Rosa – a name she had always liked – and the little strawberry-blonde girl was named Peony. She named the other girls Celandine, Alyssum, Hyacintha, Magnolia, Jasmine and Viola. It seemed fitting that they all had flower names, like Margherita herself.

‘Tell me your stories,’ she would whisper sometimes, late at night. ‘Were you stolen too? How old were you when you died?’

Margherita imagined at least one of them living on for years. She had found marks on the wall behind her bed one day, hundreds and hundreds of tiny regular scratches, marking away days and weeks and
months and years. Decades, even. She could not tell if it was just one other girl who had made the marks or a few of them. Some scores were small and neat, others straggly and wild, some deep and measured, others just a faint scratch. Did the girl or girls making those cuts in the stone mark off each day, or only the coming of the full moon, and, with it, the call of the sorceress: ‘Let down your hair so I might climb the golden stair.’

The scratches fascinated her. She often rubbed them with her finger, thinking about the girls who had made them. She decided to make her own scratches. Yet, when she crouched before the wall, the iron spit in one hand and the griddle as a hammer in the other, she was frozen with sudden panic. How many days had she been here? How many months? She counted up the presents that the witch had brought her on each of her visits.

A muslin bag of comfits, which she had not been allowed to eat, as punishment for breaking the shutters.

Some screws, to fix the shutter, along with a screwdriver, which the sorceress had taken away as soon as the job was done. At least La Strega did not make Margherita screw the shutters shut. She was to be allowed to keep them open, to let some air into the stuffy little tower room. ‘Even if you did try to signal, no one would see you,’ the sorceress said. ‘There is no one for miles.’

A dress of turquoise green and silver brocade, and two clean chemises.

No present the next month, for tearing up her new chemises and tying the rags together to make a rope. No ham either.

A lute and some songbooks. How delighted she had been at those. Margherita loved to sing so much, but the tunes had begun to evade her. Now, she was able to spend much of her day playing her lute and learning new songs. It made the long days seem much less empty.

An illustrated atlas, with maps stretching from the Land of Silk to the Great Gulf, and the fables of Aesop, illustrated with beautiful woodcuts.

A fur blanket, some fur-lined boots and a thick shawl. It was cold in the tower.

A basket full of delicacies to celebrate Christmas, a chess set and a book called
Repetition of Love and the Art of Playing Chess
. La Strega loved this exotic new game, with its queen that could rampage all over the board while the king cowered in his corner. She taught Margherita to play as best she could.

No present the next month, to punish Margherita for having a temper tantrum and knocking over the board. No apples, honey or dried fruit either.

An illustrated volume of poetry by Ovid, filled with stories of gods and magic and disguises. Margherita was fascinated by Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, for the tower had been built on a shrine to her. Margherita read the pages where she appeared over and over again.

No present the next month, to punish Margherita for quoting Ovid’s Minerva: ‘Not everything of old age should be shunned: wisdom comes with the years.’ Very little food either.

Eleven months had passed. Margherita stared at the little marks she had just made on the wall in horror. Almost a whole year. She would be thirteen in a month. She lay for the rest of the day on her bed, watching the sun creeping across the rug, her pulse fluttering with panic.

Eleven months of filling the dreary hours as best she could.

Eleven months of watching every mouthful she ate, in case her food ran out.

Eleven months of watching for the moon, half dreading its fullness, half longing for it.

Eleven months of submitting to the sorceress.

Eleven months of offering her wrist to be slashed with rose thorns.

Margherita glanced down at her wrists and realised she had her own tally marks engraved upon her skin. Eleven thin scars, crossing and
criss-crossing
.

She sighed heavily and looked back at the wall. Her eleven marks looked no different from the thousands crowding above them. She got up, her long braid dragging at her scalp, and chipped a scraggly ‘M’ above her scratches.
M for Margherita
.

That night, she lay in her bed and looked out at one faint star glimmering in the arch of the window.
Help me
, Margherita whispered, thinking of the ancient goddess of wisdom, with her owl and her distaff, who had once been worshipped at this rock.
If any power remains to you, help me
.

Far away, she heard the hoot of an owl, as she often did at night. It seemed like an answer, though, and so, comforted, Margherita turned her cheek into her pillow and slept.

The days passed in their usual way. Margherita combed and plaited her hair, cooked and ate breakfast, made her room tidy, walked swiftly around it three hundred times, played her lute and sang, played chess against herself, read Ovid aloud for the pleasure of hearing her own voice, lifted sacks of onions and potatoes to make her arms strong, cooked and ate dinner, and then sat watching the sun set over the lake, singing to herself. Every day, the view was different: sometimes, the lake was placid and blue; sometimes, it lay concealed under mist; sometimes, it was tossed in a tempest; sometimes, it was smeared with flame and gold as if God himself had drawn his fingers across the sky.

During the early winter, the mountains were grey and the lake like a pewter mirror. Then the snow would come, swirling around the tower, hiding everything. With the snow came the beast-wind, howling from the north, tearing at the tower with claws and fangs, finding every crack and hole to hiss and spit through. All Margherita could do then was huddle under her eiderdown, her face hidden in her hands, hoping the beast would not tear the tower apart.

Despite the cold and the darkness, she had to be careful with her candles and her kindling. She was terrified of running out and having no fire or light at all. So she lay in her bed, as snug as she could make herself, and imagined herself out in the world, having all kinds of grand adventures: fighting giants; defeating witches; finding treasure; sailing the seven seas; singing at the courts of kings. Soon, Margherita had spun herself a tale almost as epic in scale as Ovid’s.

As spring came, Margherita began to scatter crumbs on her windowsill
in the hope that birds would fly down and befriend her. She was delighted when a little brown bird came fluttering down to her sill to feast and later brought its mate. Margherita saved some of her own bread for them, though she had little to spare, and soon the birds came every day, growing tame enough to land on the sill even when she was standing there. Margherita watched, entranced, as they built a nest of mud under the arch, lining it with grass and soft ash-brown feathers. Soon, three small eggs were laid inside, white with brown blotches. It gave Margherita great delight to watch the mother sit in the nest, guarding her eggs, while the father brought her insects to eat. Once the eggs had hatched, three hungry beaks screeched all day, demanding food, which the two parent birds did their best to supply.

The moon fattened every day. When it was almost full, Margherita, as always, began to clean more frenetically, comb and braid her hair more carefully, and make sure her room was tidy, the bed back in its place, the portrait hanging on the wall. She was terrified that the sorceress would come early one month and discover the tower room out of order.

The day came when the moon was round and as golden as a sequin, sewn to the silk of the sky, and the sorceress’s voice called from the base of the tower. Margherita let down her hair and braced herself as the sorceress clambered up the immense height. Her approach agitated the little birds, and they swooped about her head, shrieking. La Strega ducked her head, then, as she pulled herself up onto the windowsill, reached up and knocked the nest away. It tumbled down, spilling the baby birds. Although they flapped their tiny wings, squawking in terror, the baby birds could not fly, and they plummeted down into the blue abyss. The parent birds darted after them, their distraught cries filling the air.

‘No!’ Margherita cried, both hands flung up as if hoping to catch the falling birds. Her impetuous forward motion was halted by the cruel wrench of her hair, looped three times around the hook. She watched the nest and its precious cargo disappear, tears flooding her eyes.

‘What on earth is the matter?’ La Strega was genuinely puzzled.

‘The nest … the baby birds …’

‘It was in my way,’ she said, stepping down into the tower room. ‘Come now, don’t cry over a silly nest. The birds will build another one.’

‘It wasn’t a silly nest. It was their home. You shouldn’t have knocked it down.’

‘You shouldn’t be so rude. You don’t wish me to cut your rations again, do you?’

‘No!’ Margherita cried. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. I was just sad about the baby birds.’

‘You must learn not to be so tender-hearted,’ La Strega said. She took the heavy coil of rope she had carried over her shoulder, tying one end to the hook and tossing the other down so her servant Magli could tie the first of many sacks to it. ‘The world is a cruel place, Petrosinella, and it wounds the weak.’

‘Yes, I know. I’m sorry.’

‘Wait till you see what I’ve brought you,’ she said, helping Margherita pull up the heavily weighted rope. ‘You’ll be so surprised.’

Let it be a puppy
, Margherita wished, crossing the fingers on both hands.
Please, let it be a puppy
.

But the sorceress’s birthday present for Margherita was nine small terracotta pots, a sack of soil and some small calico sacks of seeds: parsley, basil, oregano, rosemary, thyme, chives, sage, wintercress and the little rampion bellflower that Margherita’s mother had always called rapunzel.

A harvest of bitter greens for Margherita’s thirteenth birthday.

The bell rang, signalling the beginning of sext.

I looked towards the convent irritably, not wanting to return to
the vast gloomy church for yet another hour on my aching knees. But Sœur Seraphina was brushing the earth off her tools and laying them in her basket, drawing off her gloves, rising to her feet. ‘I’ll have to finish my story tomorrow. Hasn’t the morning flown? We’ve almost finished planting out the whole bed.’

‘Why? Why lock a little girl away like that? It seems … it seems so cruel,’ I burst out.

I was remembering the times that my guardian, the Marquis de Maulévrier, had locked me in the hermit’s cave at the Château de Cazeneuve. I’d crouch in the bitter-cold darkness, my body bruised and aching from his birch rod, hating him with all my might. ‘I hope you’re smitten with boils all over,’ I’d rave. ‘I hope you’ll be plagued with gnats, and flies, and locusts, and cockroaches. I hope you’ll be trampled by a herd of stampeding pigs, and kicked by an incontinent camel. I … I’ll make you sorry. I’ll put scorpions in your bed. I’ll spit in your soup.’