Swan Sister (12 page)

It was Karla’s idea to play on the riverbanks, and Beatrice,
who would have preferred to stay indoors that gloomy day, suspected nothing. They played at being pirates. Humoring her younger sister, Beatrice asked what treasure they would seek, and raven haired Karla produced a rag bundle into which she’d put a few trinkets of her own. “You have to put something in too,” she urged. Beatrice asked her what, and Karla pointed to the golden bracelet on her wrist. Beatrice clamped her hand upon it, reluctant to part with it. Her father had given it to her for her fourteenth birthday. But Karla said, “It’s only for the game, Bea. It’s only for a while. It isn’t as if we’re
throwing
it in the water.”

Finally the bracelet went into the bundle.

They set out alone because the river wasn’t terribly far from home, and because they were pirates and didn’t need to share their schemes with adults. There had been a lot of rain, and the river was high and fast, dark and swirling.

Karla urged Beatrice to follow her, persuaded her to walk along the sharpest bank, above the angry river, to hide the treasure bundle. Then at the last moment Karla seemed to change her mind. She turned back. For a moment they stood almost nose to nose, and Beatrice saw her fate in her sister’s eyes. Then Karla pushed her off the bank.

Beatrice cried out, and her fingers pinched at the air for something to catch her, but there was nothing, no root or dangling limb where Karla had turned. Beatrice plunged into the angry river.

Her head broke the surface and she spluttered, calling, “Sister, sister, help!” She choked and waved her hands. But the water turned her every which way. It spun her, tumbled her, hauled her against rocks, to which she tried to cling while the torrent tugged her loose.

High above her, Karla watched, so still that she might have been stone, so still that her sister never saw her. She watched as currents dragged Beatrice under, and dark blonde hair fanned out upon the surface. She watched until even the hair was pulled from sight. Then she knelt and opened the bundle. She took out the bracelet. This was her prize. It was the most beautiful thing in the world, and she had it now. She slid it onto her skinny wrist and tied up the bundle again.

By the time she reached the manor, she was hoarse from screaming. Along the way she threw herself into brambles and bushes. The contents of her bundle lay spilled along the path behind her.

Long before she’d crossed the yard, her parents heard the screams and rushed out to meet her. Servants, too—for her father was a great lord, and many people lived and worked on the estate.

Karla babbled her terrible story of her sister’s misstep upon the banks that had tumbled her into the river. Most of the household raced to the river. Over the next few days they combed it, dredged it, took their boats miles downstream until the falls there stopped them. Her father didn’t sleep in all those days. He stayed out with the boats, calling Beatrice’s name until his voice failed him.

No one found her.

Her mother mourned for months, and Karla closed herself up in her room as if sharing the grief, but actually she was admiring the bracelet. Her father, though he mourned too, watched her so oddly then that she knew he must suspect. Outside of her room, she stopped wearing the bracelet. She worked very hard to make sure she gave his suspicions nowhere to take root. A stone—a cenotaph—was erected in Beatrice’s name, and every day Karla took some trinket or flower or scrap of paper and placed it on the stone, creating her own personal memorial.

In time her father’s suspicion ebbed. In time the loss of her sister translated into extra attention lavished upon
her. Eventually she placed the golden bracelet upon the memorial stone. She didn’t care for it anymore. She wanted something else. The marriage that had been arranged for Beatrice was renegotiated, and Beatrice’s husband-to-be was pledged to her. Karla acquired everything of her sister’s, and no one was the wiser.

Antonio had no idea where he was going, just that he had a sense he would find what he needed before he was finished. He’d lost sight of the rest of the gypsy camp. There was no path through the woods here, but his feet seemed to know the way. The gusting wind nearly blew his cap off twice.

Before he saw it, he heard the roar of the river ahead, and he emerged from the woods onto a low bank that led down to a mudflat bend. Protruding from the mud were two curved bones—two ribs from a rib cage.

Cautiously Antonio made his way down to the mud. There were a few other bones scattered across it. Old bones, from the look of them. Antonio took off his boots and walked barefoot into the muck.

Then it was as if the noise of the river faded away. The bones seemed to sing. Awestruck, he listened. The wind gusted and the bones sang again, a high but mournful note. The bones were small—too small to be a man’s rib cage. A fawn’s maybe. He crouched beside the ribs, and sunlight glinted on strands of gold so fine that he had to peer closer to see them. They were wrapped around and between the ribs like a spider’s web. Here was the source of the odd droning—fine, long strands of golden hair
drawn tight like the strings of a harp between the bones, and thrumming in the wind.

So, he thought, this was what I was after.

He dislodged the bones from the muck, then wrapped the silken hair around them. He didn’t imagine that the hair and bones belonged together—had ever been part of the same creature—but he was a gypsy, and his world was full of connections and coincidences.

It was a year later that Antonio was invited to perform for a wedding banquet. He had long since finished his remarkable harp made from the beautiful bones, polished and carved with triskeles and small figures. The golden angel hair—and he had come to think of it as strands from an angel’s head—he had wrapped tightly around the pegged strings to make them glint; he couldn’t say just why. It wasn’t the sort of thing one did with a harp, but some instinct had guided him, and the music those strings made was sweeter than that of any other instrument he’d ever built, sweeter than any his companions or anyone else had ever heard. That was how word reached the household of the lord who was throwing a banquet for the wedding of his daughter, and how Antonio, a distrusted gypsy, was offered a handsome fee to make sweet music before and after the ceremony.

He drove his wagon to the estate, accompanied by other musicians from his camp who would play krumhorn and bodhran beside him. It was the gypsy way: Good fortune was shared.

The banquet hall was spectacularly prepared, with flags and streamers all lavender, pink, and white. Rose petals were sprinkled across the floor, and sunlight cascaded in through the leaded glass windows. The musicians sat at the rear of the hall, in a boxed area to the left of the aisle where the bride would come walking. The crowd milled about, and everybody was finely dressed. They chatted and laughed, warming to the celebration. Yet when Antonio began to play, those nearest him stopped whatever they were doing and listened. Even the servants forgot themselves momentarily, in thrall to his music. His harp made it seem as if heaven itself had entered the hall.

Then he began a gentle lullaby. His companions exchanged glances, and Antonio himself seemed bemused by the tune his fingers were forging, as though they played without his command. He glimpsed a woman rising at the other end of the hall, turning, her face alarmed. The lord of the manor hurried to her and from her to Antonio, waving his hands. “Please, not that song,” he insisted. Antonio made himself stop, though his fingers seemed almost to want to continue. He had to curl them into fists. “That was a song our long-dead daughter used to sing,” the lord went on, “and while you’ve no way of knowing, it grieves my wife to hear it now. Especially on this occasion.”

Antonio nodded. “Forgive me, sir, for in truth, it’s not even a song I know.” He set down the harp.

“Not a song you know?” asked the lord. “But then, how did you perform it?”

“I can’t say, my lord. It was as if the tune were coming from the harp to me instead of the other way about.” Folding his hands, he asked the others to play awhile without him, then sat most humbly in the hope that his lordship wouldn’t require a more sensible explanation since he had none to offer.

Fortunately for Antonio, the time had come for the lord to retrieve his daughter. He departed from the chamber, and upon that cue people began to line up on either side of the aisle. More flower petals were sprinkled down the middle of it, and a white sash was tied across it at the far end. On the opposite side of the sash, the groom awaited, looking bold and merry, smiling to his friends and well-wishers.

The doors beside the musicians opened. The lord entered the room in a solemn promenade. Beside him his daughter, Karla, clasped his arm. She glanced at Antonio, and the bright excitement on her face clouded, though he could not imagine why. He had never set eyes on her before that moment. She reached up and pulled the white veil over her face.

Even as she hid her unease, the harp at his side began to vibrate, and the plangent music of its gilded strings formed into words that called out, “Oh, sister!”

Karla gasped and took a step away, pushing against her father. She stared into Antonio’s eyes, and while his remained an expression of complete innocence, hers were one of horror-fueled guilt. She found her father’s gaze sharp-edged with suspicion. Only the veil safeguarded her.

He took her arm again. “Come,” he said, and led her forward.

On her first step, the harp’s strings sang again: “Oh, sister, how could you treat me so!”

Crying out, Karla tore free of her father’s guiding arm. She backed away, but the doors had been closed after her. She pressed against them as if she might melt between the panels.

At the far end of the hall the woman who’d become animated by Antonio’s earlier performance now started up the aisle. “Beatrice,” she called. “Beatrice?”

The harp sang, “Mama!” and the woman stopped, her hand pressed to her mouth. The young groom followed with uncertain steps behind her.

The lord and the gypsy both stared in wonder at the harp. Their eyes met, and each shared in a realization of what was transpiring here.

Her father returned to Karla. “We must continue down the aisle or give up the marriage,” he said. “You know you don’t want to do that.” She, half mad, could not think how to deny him without confessing everything. His hand closed about her arm, and like a force of nature he walked her forward again. She stiffened as they came abreast of Antonio, but her father drew her on.

“Oh, sister,” cried the harp, “envious sister, who drowned me for my bracelet and my place.”

Karla wailed, “No, no!” but her father would not let her go this time.

“Sister!” cried the harp.

Karla collapsed at her father’s feet. He dropped her arm and looked down upon her.

The harp ceased to speak, but invisible fingers played the lullaby that Antonio had been forbidden to perform. Like a small child, Karla clutched her father and begged, “Forgive me, please!” He stood, unmoved. She lowered her face and drew her arms over her head, as if the gown and veil might swallow her up.

The harp strings fell silent. “Forgive me, sister.” Karla sobbed into her skirts, but the harp didn’t reply.

His wife came forward as if to comfort the girl, but the lord ordered, “Leave her be.” He stared darkly upon her. “I don’t know what we’ll do now, but love her we dare not. On the day she committed it, I suspected her crime. I saw her sister’s bracelet upon her wrist, but I didn’t want to acknowledge it. I feared to lose both my children, while this cold and witchy creature set about playacting the mourning sister to misdirect the doubt I had. She’s as human as a watch spring. There’s nothing she could say to me now that I could ever trust not to be the mechanism’s cunning to gull us more.” To the groom he remarked, “You’re fortunate it was today this harp found its way here.” He glanced darkly at Antonio, then took his wife by the arm and left the hall. She seemed ready to collapse as Karla had, but he would not let her, not yet.

The guests were left to wonder, to gossip and surmise. The family of the dazed groom surrounded him and drew him away, and quickly the others followed. They swirled around Karla like water around a rock, never saying a
word to her. Soon the hall was empty. When Karla raised her head again, even the musicians had departed and the candles had been snuffed. But the lullaby played through the hall.

Karla got to her feet. The harp was gone. How did she still hear it? She covered her ears and fled the room, but the lullaby followed her into the hall. She ran from the house. The song pursued her there, too. Wedding guests saw her race across the yard and out a side gate.

In the woods the song clung to her. She pounded at her head to drive it out. The voice of the harp called, “Sister, sister, how could you kill me?”

She shrieked finally to drown it out but heard Beatrice even above her own screaming—as if Beatrice floated right beside her, lips to her ear. “Sister, sister.”

She beat at her head, tore at the veil, at her hair. Her dormant conscience awoke in that voice. She ran blindly as if she could escape herself.

Without realizing, she ran straight off the bank above the river.

The current snatched her. She surfaced, choking, gasping. Her arms flailed for purchase. She struck a rock but was dragged along before she could grab on to it. Thus her sister had gone, and in terror she looked back at the bank, and maybe for a moment there was a figure standing there—she was spun about too fast to be sure. Her white dress billowed on the surface as if to buoy her, but claws of hidden currents grabbed at her legs and dragged her down. In the dark, swirling waters she heard
her sister’s voice, and she opened her mouth to cry, “Beatrice!”

After that there was only the uninhabited veil upon the surface, floating along like foam.

The lord caught up with Antonio on the road. The gypsy drove the wagon without speaking to his two accompanists. Despite the failure of the wedding, they’d been paid the promised sum for their playing, if grudgingly.