The Amaranth Enchantment (7 page)

They were people like Beryl.

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Over the mantel was a painting I did not recognize. I approached to study it.

A reclining figure sat by a stream, surrounded by luxuriant blossoms of purplish red. His smiling face was the picture of youthful beauty and vitality. It struck my heart. I turned and sat on the couch.

Beryl sat on the other end of the couch and looked at her hands in her lap.

Dog, whom I'd insisted should come in, sat on my feet and chewed the canvas drape that lay on the floor.

The fire crackled. Candlelight wavered on the walls, where gilding on the plaster scrollwork had begun to peel. How Mama would feel to see the cobwebs, I hated to think.

Beryl seemed lost in thought. Her face, so pale in the moonlight, now took on the amber color of firelight.

"What was it you wanted to tell me?" I ventured at last.

Beryl nodded, as if resigning herself to what she was about to say, despite her better judgment.

"To tell you who I am, I must tell you about the place I come from." She smiled. "It's probably no surprise to you to hear me say that I am not from the kingdom of Laurenz, nor any place near here."

No surprise, indeed. That was a bit of an understatement.

"Do you believe in heaven?"

I blinked. "Are you saying you came here from heaven?" Beryl looked alarmed.

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"Certainly not. I'm trying to figure out your beliefs, your thoughts about...

this world, and... other places besides this world. Like heaven. But not
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heaven."

"You're confusing me."

"I'm sorry. It's... let me try it this way. You live on this earth, you watch your sun rise and set, you see your moon at night, and all the stars."

I nodded.

"I come from a place that isn't part of this earth. Our sky holds a different sun and moons and stars."

A different sun? Moons? I tried to push my mind past that. I had promised to listen and try to believe.

Beryl watched my face anxiously.

"Go on," I said.

She seemed relieved, and she plunged on. "Perhaps it's wrong of me to tell you much. Perhaps it's unfair. Perhaps if I tell you about my home, I will be responsible for burdening you... for infecting you with my own misery. But how else can I explain?" She worried a silk handkerchief with her hands. It tore like old paper.

She saw the shreds in her lap and sighed.

"If I had my stone, I could show you." She looked up, a new hope in her eyes.

"Can we find it first, and then I can show you everything?"

I looked at her, bewildered and unsatisfied.

"Please?" she said, almost timidly.

I looked over at the wall of paintings and saw one of 74

a little girl with thick dark curls tumbling helter-skelter around her face.

She was wearing a pauper's dress, and kneeling on the ground in a forest. All around her was the beauty of a forest in spring, with dewy violets and snowdrops blossoming at her knees, but her face was fixed in a mask of despair. Quite a contrast from the smiling youth beside the stream. And yet, there was something similar in their faces.

"Did you paint these pictures?" I asked.

"All except the ones your mother painted," Beryl said.

I kept my face trained toward the wall. "Can't you tell me anything about the stone?"

Dog stood up and stretched, then leaned back on his haunches and placed both his hooves on my lap. He cocked his head to one side and peered at me through one of his devil's eyes. If goats could talk, I'd feel sure this one wanted to.

"It has tremendous power," Beryl said. "Without it I'm a shadow of myself."

I pondered this and stroked Dog's nose.

"How so?" I asked. "What does it do?"

She shook her head. "The stone, by itself, does nothing. It magnifies the soul of the bearer. Whatever seeds they have in themselves, the stone grows the fruit. It helps the mind open doors to the past, to other worlds, to souls themselves. It gives the bearer a clearer understanding, a fuller memory. If they are capable of happiness, the stone brings them joy."

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I thought of the statues that guard the churches in the city, the stone carvings of glorious beings that are said to move as lightning and speak as thunder. It wasn't hard to picture Beryl's marble form among them.

"It turns you into an angel," I said.

She blinked, startled, as if seeing me for the first time. Then she sighed and shook her head bitterly. "If so, then, a fallen angel now."

She looked away.

"Will you ever grow old and feeble?"

"No."

"Will you ever die?"

"No."

I felt a thrill of fear prickle across my whole body. Someone who would never die. I shouldn't believe her, but I did. Dog clambered into my lap.

"Such a doggy," I scolded, scratching behind his ears.

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I looked back at Beryl. She was watching Dog with an odd, curious expression.

"Why are you here, Beryl, if this isn't the world where you belong?"

She seemed to search for an answer, gathering words gradually.

"Others have come before. Banished from my world, some have arrived here as a punishment. I wasn't banished. I came when I was very young. It was an accident, though, I'm not without blame."

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I couldn't see this flawless, ageless person carrying such a thing as blame.

There she sat, looking more regal and graceful than any queen I could imagine--good heavens, just picture fat and jolly Queen Rosamond, for instance--how could it be? Blame was for the rest of us. Not someone like Beryl.

"How does one travel from your world to mine?"

She smiled for a moment. "You will think I'm joking."

I urged her on. "No, I won't."

She gave up. "Down a well."

"Down a well?" Evidently I'd lied. She must be joking.

She laughed faintly. "In your world, you have prisons for your little crimes, and gallows for your great ones. In our world, little crimes are few, and great ones almost none, but when they do happen, we would not kill the guilty even if we could. We send them away. Banish them. There is a well in my world, in the shadow of a mountain. When someone goes down that well, they travel to some other world--I believe not always the same one."

I was transfixed by her words. "And?"

She shook her head wearily. "And, I was curious about it. In the past, whenever anyone was banished--and it's so rare, Lucinda, so rare!--they go unwillingly, so it takes another to go with them, to force them down the well, making sure their banishment succeeds. It means that one member of the community must sacrifice themselves for

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the sake of the rest. It's horrible." She rested her face in her hands, as if she couldn't face herself. "Yet I went down the well myself. Stone and all. I wasn't planning to, at first. I just wanted to take a look. But I looked down the well, and I could hear sounds, great noises from far away, like the noises of many worlds rolling through space together. They called to me. I jumped in.

And here I am."

I didn't know what to say. I wrapped my arms around Dog's neck and squeezed him. He lovingly ate my hair in return.

"I was a little girl, Lucinda. I'd been out filling my pockets with colorful pebbles from the stream. I followed the stream until it reached the valley of the stones and the well. I was so small, I crawled underneath the fence that guarded the well."

I watched the fire smolder down, felt the waves of heat it threw my way, red heat pulsing through the black embers. Was our world really such a prison? We had comforting fires and warm lap goats.

"Can't you go back?" I asked.

Her long lashes grew wet. "Not anymore."

"Because you were wrong to come?" I asked. She said nothing. "Because you don't have your stone?"

She pressed her lips tightly. "I would need it, yes, but that's not the reason, or I'd have gone back long since." She shook her head. "I can't go back because I'm guilty. They would strip me of my stone and banish me. So I remain

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here, banishing myself, but at least I've had the comfort of my stone."

I frowned. "What makes you guilty?"

She looked down at her hands, lying limp in her lap. She wouldn't meet my gaze.

"Murder."

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Chapter 11

Dog rose from my lap and jumped down to the floor. He sat behind a covered chair, as if he'd had enough of the fire's heat, and started eating the drape that covered it.

I felt my hands grow trembly. Murder. I was sleeping alone under the roof of a murderer.

I was about to enter into an impossible bargain with a murderer.

There wasn't a living soul who knew I was here, or who cared. No one would come searching or wonder why Lucinda Chapdelaine had vanished.

Oh, Uncle, why did you have to die?

I wiped away the tears from my eyes and tried to put on a brave face. I looked up boldly at Beryl and saw tears streaming down her cheeks.

I wouldn't have thought a creature like her could cry.

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"You hate me now," she said.

I said nothing.

"You fear me."

I rocked back and forth a bit on my hips, trying to wake up my resting body, in case I needed to spring up and try to get away.

"I can't blame you for hating me."

She seized my hands once more and I tried to pull away, but my wrists might as well have been enclosed in iron. She looked down at her hands holding mine and seemed to realize what she was doing. She let go.

"Don't go, Lucinda. I'm not a murderer. Please believe me."

I couldn't think what to do, so I stayed to listen. My senses were numb, my ears ringing. She searched my face and took courage from the fact that I wasn't leaving.

"I was a little girl," she said, her words tumbling out in a rush. "I came here as a child, something like ten years old in your years. I came here, and your earth races around its sun so quickly! Time sped for me. I aged quickly.

Almost overnight, I was a young woman."

Earth races... sun... what?

I didn't have time for a lesson in physics.

"I fell in love," she said miserably. "Desperately in love with a young man in the village near where I'd... arrived. I had allowed a widow woman to take me in, and I helped her with housework. It saved me from people asking questions, 81

or worse. But, as I said, I fell in love with this young man. He loved me, too."

I watched Beryl's face. Not even she could keep her marble composure in telling about this young man. Her eyes drifted toward the portrait of the handsome young man on the wall.

"He wouldn't marry me until his younger sister was grown. Both their parents were dead, and he felt the responsibility of providing for her." She laughed, a bitter sound. "He was worried about providing for a sister and a wife.

Turnips and onions! I need no food at all. But he didn't understand. That was the price of both our happiness. Turnips and onions."

I nodded to show her I was listening. I could understand, at least in some way. The littlest things ruin lives. A faulty carriage wheel, a misshod horse... something such as this cost me my parents, and all my happiness.

Beryl continued. "We met in the woods one day. He was a timberman by trade. I pleaded with him to marry me and take me away from the miserable old widow. I promised I'd be a second mother to his little sister. But he would not bend."

She closed her eyes. "I grew angry. I told him I could have offered him endless life--and I could have. He said he had to get along with his work.

We... struggled over the handle of his axe. I was just trying to make him stay, stay a little longer to listen, so that perhaps I could persuade 82

him. He... he saw my strength and grew frightened of me."

Beryl sat very still.

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"All his love for me drained out in that moment when he began to fear me. He turned and ran, leaving the axe in my hands."

Even knowing how this tale must end, I dreaded it. I closed my eyes.

"I hated him for fearing me. For abandoning me, when I'd done nothing but love him."

Please, make it end. I couldn't bear this story. Even behind my closed eyes, the portrait of the smiling youth lay before me.

"It was so sudden. I was young, Lucinda! Too young for my body, for my strength. All in an instant, I wanted to wound him like he'd wounded me."

I couldn't say I'd never felt that way toward Aunt. "I threw the axe after him. It found its mark."

The bloodred flowers in the picture became the young man's blood, spilled on the ground around him.

Beryl's voice pleaded with me. "I didn't understand about dying. I didn't know what would happen to him."

If she came from a world where there was no death, she might well not understand. Pity for Beryl flowed over me. And yet, I couldn't allow her excuse to stand on its own. "But you knew you wanted to hurt him."

She nodded. "That is true."

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"And the little girl?"

She turned and looked at me sharply. "What little girl?" I pointed to the portrait on the wall. "The little girl who looks just like the young man you killed."

She hung her head.

"A sister?" I asked.

She nodded. "She found the body."

If I pitied Beryl, I pitied this poor child far more. An orphan, like me, but at least she'd had a brother to look after her, until this happened.

"What did you do for her?" I asked.

Beryl looked at me curiously. "What do you mean?"

I gestured impatiently. "Did you... apologize to her? Tell her what happened?