Bitter Greens (18 page)

A trapdoor was set in the flagstones.

It was made of stone and was as long as a pace on all four sides.

It had no handle.

It took Margherita eleven days to prise it open, with the help of the poker and the iron hooks.

At first, urgency drove her. Using the skillet as a hammer, pounding on the end of the poker, she chipped at the stone around the trapdoor. Her arms and shoulders ached, her back throbbed, but she kept pounding away as long as she could, only stopping to eat and drink and rest. The masses of her hair were a terrible encumbrance, constantly slipping undone from her snood and getting entangled.

It was such hard work, though, and all her efforts seemed to have so little result that gradually she grew discouraged. One day, she did not even
get out of bed but lay still, staring at the flagstone, surrounded by its halo of chipped stone. The silence and her loneliness were impossible to bear. She curled in a ball, gazing at the crack of light revealed by the broken shutter, twisting a loose lock of hair about her finger, her thoughts slipping back to the past. She sang to herself in a monotone,
Oh, come, sleep from the little mountain. The wolf’s devoured the little sheep, and oh, my child wants to sleep
. Tears began to seep from under her swollen eyelids again and she buried her head in her pillow, wishing with all her heart for someone to come and rescue her.

But nobody came.

That night, Margherita stood on the chair and stared out through the broken shutter, looking for the moon.
I’ll be back when the moon is full once more
, the sorceress had said. It was now waning, dwindling away to a tiny sliver. Soon, it would begin to swell again.

Panic stole her breath. She half-fell from the chair, knocking it over. She crawled to the trapdoor and took up her tools once more, chipping and chipping and chipping away at the stone, working more by touch than by sight, for her little room was filled with shadows. She only stopped when her arms screamed with pain and her hands bled.

In the morning, Margherita began her work once more. She found that, if she held the poker at a certain angle, she was able to knock away larger fragments of stone. She began to concentrate all her efforts just on one point. By evening time, she had gouged away enough stone to lever the trapdoor up just a few inches, but it was too heavy and crashed back down, almost crushing her hand. She levered it up again and wedged it open with the iron skillet.

A foetid smell rolled up into her face. She gagged and moved away, staring at the black slit in trepidation.

For a moment, her spirit quailed. She dared not try to lift it any higher. Old childhood stories of ghosts and goblins came into her mind; she thought of rats and spiders and snakes. It was growing dark. Margherita could not bear the thought of exploring the tower at night, even though it would surely be just as dark down there in daylight. But neither could she
bear the thought of going to sleep with that black slit staring at her. After a while, she pulled the iron skillet away and let it slam shut again.

At first light, she was awake. She had not slept very much. All night, her brain had whirled with schemes and worries and fears. It would be best, Margherita thought, if she prepared herself as if expecting to find a way out. She was dressed in nothing but a soiled nightgown. Her feet were bare. She would need food and fire and other necessities if she was to survive out in the forest. So she made herself some breakfast, then emptied a sack and filled it with supplies. She took the eiderdown off the bed and wrapped it over her shoulders like a cape, then took up a candle in a holder with one shaking hand.

Then she levered up the heavy trapdoor again, opening it as wide as she could. A flight of steep steps spiralled down into darkness. Margherita wedged the trapdoor open with the iron spit, so it would not crash down and trap her below, then gathered up her courage and tiptoed down the steps. Her hair trailed behind her, dragging a clean path through the dust and cobwebs.

Margherita’s candle flame trembled. The air was dank and heavy. She would have liked to clap her hand over her nose, but since her hands were full she could only breathe shallowly through her mouth. Here and there, the wall was pierced with arrow slits. She put her mouth to each of these and breathed in the fresh spring air, and then looked out. All she could see was sky.

Step by step by timid step, she went down, till the staircase opened out into the lowest floor – a dark echoing place with heavy beams on the ceiling and a base of hard-packed earth. It was so lightless down there, it could well have been midnight instead of noon.

Margherita lifted up her candle and then, with a jerk and a scream, dropped it. Darkness snuffed her. She fell to her knees, her hands covering her face. Her breath came in sharp uneven gasps.

The cellar was filled with skeletons.

Margherita crouched motionless, her heart thundering, listening with all her might.

Silence.

After a long time, she fumbled for the candle, fitted it back into its holder and then felt through her sack for her tinderbox. She tried to strike a spark, but her hands were shaking too much. She remembered the breathing exercises Elena had taught her, to calm her nerves before singing with the
figlie di coro
. After a few deep breaths, filling her lungs from the bottom to the top, Margherita felt calm enough to try once again to light the candle.

By its wavering light, she saw eight skeletons laid out on the floor. Heads to the wall, feet facing each other, each laid out like radius lines in a circle. Their bony arms were crossed on the empty cage of their ribs, their leg bones stretched out neatly. Beneath them lay the rotting remains of fine velvets and brocades, much like the eiderdown Margherita clutched about her shoulders. Their empty eye sockets gazed serenely at the ceiling.

A heavy oaken door was on the far side of the room, beyond the skeletons. Margherita struggled to control her breath. She could not bear the idea of walking across the room, stepping over those bones. Yet it was the only way out. Holding her breath, walking as gingerly as if stepping
over sleeping guards, she tiptoed forward. Her eyes moved from skeleton to skeleton. One was small, about the same height as her. She had, weirdly, a thick hank of filthy matted hair coiling in the cavity below her ribs. The others were taller. A few were heavily shrouded in cobwebs and dust. The skeletons closest to her were only lightly draped, as if they had been lying here in this room for a lot less time than those against the far wall.

Margherita gathered up her long plait of hair, which dragged along behind her like a fine lady’s train, sick with trepidation at the idea of it disturbing the bones. It was hard to carry her sack, and her candle, and thirty yards of hair, but by moving slowly and carefully she was able to manage it. It was a relief to reach the other side and be able to drop her plait once more.

The door was ancient, made of thick dark wood, and banded and studded with iron. Margherita tried the handle but it would not open. She bent and peered through the keyhole but could see nothing but blackness. She groped in her bag and pulled out her spoon, inserting the handle into the hole. Her heart sank when the spoon hit something hard just on the other side of the door. She poked again and heard iron ring on stone.

Rocks had been piled against the door. Even if Margherita found some way to break down the door, she would not be able to get out.

She slid down and sat on the filthy floor, her head bowed to rest on her knees. It had all been no use. She could not get out.

It was hard to tiptoe past the skeletons once more, but Margherita had no real choice. As she carried her burden of hair over the bones, she wondered who they were. Other girls locked away by the witch? Had they lived in the tower long? Had she cut their wrists with rose thorns and bathed in their blood? How had they died? Had they died by accident or old age or sickness? Had they killed themselves, throwing themselves from the tower height? Had they starved slowly to death? Or had the witch murdered them?

There was no answer to such questions.

When she was finally safe in her tower room once more, Margherita
stood in the window frame, looking out. It was late afternoon. The lake shone like burnished gold, and the mountains floated in a violet mist, looking as if they stretched away forever. Cypress trees marked the edge of the lake like a dark knotted fringe, casting long shadows across the water. Margherita took her plait in her hand and wrapped it around the hook three times, and then she climbed up onto the window ledge. She leant out into the wind, till the plait was stretched taut and she was tilted out over the abyss, like a flying figurehead. She looked down.

At the base of the tower was an immense pile of rocks, some of the boulders larger than she was. Margherita heaved a sigh and pulled herself back up with her plait. Her arms shook with the strain, her legs trembled. She sat on the floor, the plait still wrapped about her wrist, and rested her forehead on her knees.

There was no hope. She was trapped in this tower forever.

I must be strong
, she told herself.
I must not let myself go mad. Don’t think about the skeletons. Don’t think about falling
.

She watched the moon rise, wafer-thin, then crept into her bed and pulled the coverlet over her head. She felt as if she wanted to stay in that dark cave forever.

Yet morning came, and with it hunger. Margherita ate, and then slowly set about trying to hide the evidence of her attempts to escape. First, she filled in the gouges around the trapdoor with the rubble she had dug out. Yet she could feel the unevenness beneath her feet as she walked across the carpet. So she mixed flour and water together to make a paste, which held all the rubble in place and smoothed the edges of the trapdoor again. It set hard, like cement, but Margherita knew she could soon hack through it again if she needed to.

Making the flour paste gave her a sweet kind of pain. Margherita had often helped her father prepare papier mâché this way in his mask-making studio. She wondered where her parents were, and if they missed her, and if they had ever looked for her. She did not have much memory of the night she had been snatched. Only the mist, and her mother’s white face, and being carried through a labyrinth of dark alleys. It could have been a
dream. Only the constant repetition of her three truths helped her believe it had been real. She ran the words through her mind as she worked, taking comfort from them:

My name is Margherita.

My parents loved me.

One day, I will escape.

Margherita let herself drift away on her favourite daydream. She imagined her mother frantically knocking on doors, saying, ‘Have you seen a red-haired girl? With eyes as blue as the rapunzel flower?’ She imagined her father asking at every wharf and jetty, ‘Have you seen my little girl? She’d be twelve now.’ And one day, perhaps, they’d hear the
figlie di coro
at the Pietà and say to each other, ‘Our little girl used to sing like that.’ And perhaps their longing to hear little girls singing would take them up to the grille, and they’d ask, in trembling voices, ‘Have you seen a girl with hair as red as fire and eyes like the twilight sky who can sing sweet as any angel?’ and Elena would say, ‘Why, yes. I have.’ And so her parents would track her down, and come to the tower with the tallest ladders in the world, and free her.

By the time she had laid the carpet down again, her hair was filthy and knotted. Drearily, she set to work filling up the bath and washing away the dust and cobwebs she had collected on her trip down the stairs. She began at the bottom and washed it in lengths, having to empty the bath and refill it over and over again. Her arms and back ached, and soon the carpet was wet through. But she persevered, dreading the thought of the sorceress coming and finding her hair in such a mess.

As she washed and combed and twisted the hair dry, Margherita realised there were eight different colours and textures, all somehow sewn into one extraordinary mane of hair.

Eight tresses of hair.

Eight skeletons.

Her hair had come from those dead bodies laid out in the room below her.

Margherita crouched very still, leaning over the bath, her wet purloined hair flowing around her. She met her own reflection in the water. Her eyes
were dark and hollow, her skin very pale, her face thin and angular. She looked different. Older. Margherita slowly stretched out one finger. The girl in the water reached out hers in response. Their fingers touched and dissolved into each other.

One day, I’ll not be a little girl any more
, she thought.
One day, I’ll find the way to get away from here. All I need to do until then is survive
.

Day by day, the supplies on the shelves dwindled. The bowl of dried fruit and nuts was empty, the ham bone had been boiled to make soup, the flour sack had been shaken till not a speck of dust remained. Hunger became a hot presence in the room, a companion that never let her be.

Every evening, Margherita sat on the windowsill, watching the moon rise. It grew fatter and redder as the month slipped past. Sometimes, it filled her with dread. At least, while she was alone, she could sing to herself and spend the hours daydreaming of the things she would do once she was free. She could believe her parents really had loved her and that they were searching for her every day. She could hope that they would find her soon.

The coming of the sorceress would shake all the precarious peace she had found, turn it all inside out and upside down. It would reawaken the terror that she had steadfastly buried under the trapdoor. Margherita was afraid the sorceress meant to murder her, leaving her bones to be shrouded with cobwebs along with the other eight dead girls, her hair to be plaited into a rope and sewn onto some other girl’s head.

Yet Margherita was hungry and lonely. The sorceress would bring food. She would be company of sorts. And perhaps, if Margherita was very good, she would bring her something to play with. Margherita daydreamt a lot about what she would ask for.

The day came when the moon rose at the same moment that the sun set. It was huge, as big as Margherita’s fist, and the same colour as her hair. Margherita picked up the painting of the woman looking into a mirror and hung it on the wall again.

‘Petrosinella, let down your hair so I may climb the golden stair.’

At the distant call of the sorceress’s voice, Margherita stood and began to unwind her plait from the snood. She wrapped it about the hook three
times then let the hair ladder tumble down to the ground. She felt the yank as La Strega took hold of it, the heavy drag as she began to climb. Margherita imagined her grasping the knots of silver ribbon to stop her hands from slipping, imagined her walking up the side of the tower. She must be strong and fearless. If Margherita wanted to escape her, she would have to be strong and fearless too.

At long last, the sorceress stood framed in the window. She looked at the shutters, wrenched off their hinges and pushed to one side, then looked at Margherita. ‘Well, you have been a naughty girl while I’ve been away,’ she said in a voice of mock-scolding. ‘No comfits for you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Margherita said meekly. ‘I wanted to see the sun and the sky. I couldn’t breathe with it all shut up.’

‘You’ll be sorry when winter comes,’ La Strega answered. ‘Or a big rainstorm.’

‘If you’ll bring me some tools, I’ll do my best to fix it,’ Margherita replied.

La Strega pressed her lips together, regarding her steadily. ‘So, what else have you been doing, apart from wrecking the shutters?’

‘There is not much to do,’ Margherita said. ‘I cooked and cleaned and tried to keep my hair tidy. I almost went mad with boredom, though.’ She took a deep breath. ‘You said you’d bring me a gift if I was a good girl. Well, I’ve been good. Look how neat my room is. Look how well I’ve combed my hair. Will you not bring me something to play with?’

La Strega’s tawny eyes lit with amusement. ‘What would you like?’

‘A lute,’ Margherita said at once. ‘Some music. An orange. Some books to read. Something else to wear. I’m not a baby to spend all day in my nightgown.’

La Strega laughed. ‘You’ll have to be very good for all that.’

‘I will, I promise,’ Margherita said.