Kissing the Witch (2 page)

My mother and father beat me when they felt the need, but only by the rule of thumb: thin sticks break no bones. What they wanted, I believe, was not to hurt me, but to teach me the way things
were. The lesson was simple, and if I did not learn it I had only myself to blame. The birch pen wrote it often enough on the skin of my back. Keep your horizons narrow, your expectations low, and
you will never be unduly disappointed. Keep your heart infinitesimally small, and sorrow will never spy it, never plunge, never flap away with your heart in her claws.

So when one spring in spite of all this good advice I fell in love, it felt like disaster. I took a tiny bite, and it exploded in my stomach. Love splashed through every cranny, hauled on every
muscle, unlocked every joint. I was so full of astonishment, I felt ten feet tall. My shoulders itched as if wings might break through.

Little one, your skin is so soft, said the man as he stroked my cheek with one huge thumb.

I always started quivering as soon as I heard his knock at the door; when I opened it and curtsied, my knees dipped like a frog’s; his first smile set me a-stutter. His eyes, cloudy under
billows of black hair, were the only weak thing about him. He could always recognize me by the sound of my breathing.

Once I scrubbed the same corner for three hours, and when the man finally passed I upset my pail of dirty suds all down the passage. He stepped back at once, but his shiny leather shoes had been
spattered like rocks by the seashore. I tried to wipe them with my apron, but he lifted me to my feet. Such force in his forearm; what an aimed bow was his elbow; how delicious the arc of his
shoulder. His hands were backed with a faint black fur. He was like the boulder that parts the river, and he smelt like apples stored in darkness all winter.

I, who had nothing and no right to anything, would have him for my very own.

And so, somehow, it came to pass, as in the best of stories, as in the dream to which you cling like a torn blanket on an icy morning when it is past time to get up. My father, his words slurred
with suspicion, told me that a great man had asked for me. My mother carried in a huge basket of linen and a needle. Unspeaking, we began to cut and sew my new life.

I would be a stain on my husband’s line, I knew that without her telling. If it was his whim to stoop, to lift me up, then I was never to delude myself that I deserved it. I was always to
keep in mind the tiny smoky image of what an insignificant creature I had been before he honoured me with his gaze.

But when I was presented to him, in my new dress, he made me forget all my fears. He discovered my hand in my long sleeve and began to count my fingers. No sooner had my parents backed out of
the room than he was bending over me to sink his face into my hair. His whisper boomed: what were they to us, now, or we to them? His ear, against my cheek, gave off a surprising heat; my finger
crawled along its furred tunnels like a venturesome bee. He would take me away from all this, he promised, give me a new name, never let anything hurt me. I began to shudder with pleasure.

The morning after our wedding, I lay awake beside the hot mountain that was my husband. I traced the brown pattern we had made on the linen: was it a flower, a claw, a snowflake? At last I
decided that it was the sign of two leaves growing round each other. I belonged to him now, and he to me.

With surprising ease I learned to rule a house greater than the one I had scrubbed for my keep. I knew who I was at last: this was what I had been born for. I liked to walk through the
corridors, my train of brocade sweeping the flagstones; I found delight in every pane of glass I would never have to wash. When, within the month, I found I was with child, every mirror seemed to
echo my grandeur. Shameless, I longed for it to show; I wanted to be the shape of an apple or the noontime sun.

One morning at midsummer I woke early and thought I would go out to see the grass grow and the birds rise, as I used to in the days when it was my only consolation. How different I was now; how
I had grown rich in things of the spirit and flesh; how my skin felt taut as a tambourine. And then my husband peered sleepily over his shoulder and asked where I was going.

It all made perfect sense the way he explained it to me as I sat on the edge of the bed: the danger of wandering under the scathing sun, the risk of exposure to rough men in the cornfields, the
unsuitability of such a thing. I nodded, and laughed with him, and that morning it was true that I would rather climb into the cave of his arms and fill myself up with bliss again.

But as my hips widened the great house began to seem too small. I paced the corridors until I knew them by heart; I learned every angle of the courtyard. In their smooth leather, my feet itched
for the stubble of the open fields, and my eyes strained for a far horizon.

I set out again one Sunday, when there could be no men in the fields, but still my husband said no; this time his eyes were a little bewildered. I tried again when he was away on business, but
the housekeeper would not give me the key to open the gate. I sneaked off another day, while he was counting his money, and still he was gentle when they brought me back, though I could see anger
stretching itself between his brows. Again, he put it to me in words a child could understand. He enclosed my two hands in one of his huge fists, and kissed the tears from my cheeks.

I nodded. I wiped my face. I knew it was unreasonable to pine so much for a walk in the sunshine. My husband laughed softly, and wondered aloud what a breeding wife would ask for next: to fly
like a kite, or a fox for a pet, or charcoal to chew on? It was only then, staring into the blur of his eyes, that it all became clear to me, and dread stopped up my mouth.

Oh, my husband was no tyrant; he would never sell my jewels, or steal my children, or cut off my head. But now I knew that what I wanted was not the same as what he wanted for me. What this good
man had sworn to protect me from was not the same as what I feared. I trusted that he would never let anything hurt me, but he would never let anything touch me either.

Summer declined into chilly autumn. From my window I could see restless flocks of birds forming themselves into arrowheads, pointing south. Sometimes they faltered, broke from the shape, swung
loose like hail, but always they came back together.

Day by day my belly swelled with life, but the rest of me was shrinking. My husband had taken to referring to me as if I were someone else. How is my dearest wife today? he would ask, and I
would stare back mutely and think, I don’t know, how is she? Where is she? Who is she? Bring her here, so I can ask her how I am to live this life.

One day he found me kneeling in a corridor, over a bundle of brown feathers. A tiny swallow: it must have flown down a chimney and battered itself to death. I was sobbing so hard he thought my
time had come; he was stumbling away in search of the midwife when I turned to him and held out my hands. He peered, his face almost touching the skewed feathers, and for a moment I feared he would
laugh, but his face was grave as he raised it towards me. My love, he said, what is a bird to us, or we to a bird?

I had no answer to give him. When he tried to lift me up I was too heavy for him; my legs were frozen to the ground.

As I knelt there, aware of his steps dying away, I felt a tremor under my thumbs. When I brought the bird nearer to my face, I could sense a tiny pulse. Not quite dead, then: half-way to
alive.

In the week that followed, I fed the brittle creature drops of milk from my smallest fingertip and kept it warm in my fur collar. Everything waited. I refused to think about myself: my
exceptional fortune, my perfect house, my excellent husband, who could make any woman happy if she let him. I simply waited to see if the bird would live.

One day it swallowed. One day it stood. One day it flew, and the next it got a glimpse of sky and tried to smash through the glass. I could have kept it beside me, a silk-tethered plaything, but
what would have been the use of that?

I took it to the highest window in the house and let it out. The kick of its wings was surprisingly strong. The air smelt like frost, but there was still time to reach the summer land. I stood,
watching the bird wheel over the rooftops. Flesh weighed me down like a robe. The child within me was kicking, a mute clamour for release.

Next time. Next year. I would get away somehow, sometime, with or without this child, heading somewhere I knew nothing about but that the sun would shine down on my naked head. I would be hurt
and I would be fearful, but I would never be locked up again.

My life was in my own hands, now, beating faintly, too small yet for anyone to notice. I cupped freedom to my breast. I would feed it, I would love it; it would grow big enough to carry me
away.

The bird circled back, and hovered outside my window for a moment as if it had something to say.

In a whisper I asked,

Who were you

before you took to the skies?

And the bird said, Will I tell you my own story?

It is a tale of a rose.

I
N THIS LIFE
I have nothing to do but cavort on the wind, but in my last it was my fate to be a woman.

I was beautiful, or so my father told me. My oval mirror showed me a face with nothing written on it. I had suitors aplenty but wanted none of them: their doggish devotion seemed too easily won.
I had an appetite for magic, even then. I wanted something improbable and perfect as a red rose just opening.

Then in a spring storm my father’s ships were lost at sea, and my suitors wanted none of me. I looked in my mirror, and saw, not myself, but every place I’d never been.

The servants were there one day and gone the next; they seemed to melt into the countryside. Last year’s leaves and papers blew across the courtyard as we packed to go. My father lifted
heavy trunks till veins embroidered his forehead. He found me a blanket to wrap my mirror in for the journey. My sisters held up their pale sleek fingers and complained to the wind. How could they
be expected to toil with their hands?

I tucked up my skirts and got on with it. It gave me a strange pleasure to see what my back could bend to, my arms could bear. It was not that I was better than my sisters, only that I could see
further.

Our new home was a cottage; my father showed me how to nail my mirror to the flaking wall. There were weeds and grasses but no roses. Down by the river, where I pounded my father’s shirts
white on the black rocks, I found a kind of peace. My hands grew numb and my dark hair tangled in the sunshine. I was washing my old self away; by midsummer I was almost ready.

My sisters sat just outside the door, in case a prince should ride by. The warm breeze carried the occasional scornful laugh my way.

As summer was leaving with the chilly birds, my father got word that one of his ships had come safe to shore after all. His pale eyes stood out like eggs. What he wanted most, he said, was to
bring us each home whatever we wanted. My sisters asked for heavy dresses, lined cloaks, fur-topped boots, anything to keep the wind out. I knew that nothing could keep the wind out, so I asked for
a red rose just opening.

The first snow had fallen before my father came home, but he did have a rose for me. My sisters waited in the doorway, arms crossed. I ran to greet him, this bent bush who was my father inching
across the white ground. I took the rose into my hand before he could drop it. My father fell down. The petals were scarlet behind their skin of frost.

We piled every blanket we possessed on top of him; still his tremors shook the bed. My sisters wept and cursed, but he couldn’t hear them. They cried themselves to sleep beside the
fire.

That night in his delirium he raved of a blizzard and a castle, a stolen rose and a hooded beast. Then all of a sudden he was wide awake. He gripped my wrist and said, Daughter, I have sold
you.

The story came wild and roundabout, in darts and flurries. I listened, fitting together the jagged pieces of my future. For a red rose and his life and a box of gold, my father had promised the
beast the first thing he saw when he reached home. He had thought the first thing might be a cat. He had hoped the first thing might be a bird.

My heart pounded on the anvil of my breastbone. Father, I whispered, what does a promise mean when it is made to a monster?

He shut his trembling eyes. It’s no use, he said, his tongue dry in his mouth. The beast will find us, track us down, smell us out no matter where we run. And then water ran down his
cheeks as if his eyes were dissolving. Daughter, he said in a voice like old wood breaking, can you ever forgive me?

I could only answer his question with one of my own. Putting my hand over his mouth, I whispered, Which of us would not sell all we had to stay alive?

He turned his face to the wall.

Father, I said, I will be ready to leave in the morning.

Now you may tell me that I should have felt betrayed, but I was shaking with excitement. I should have felt like a possession, but for the first time in my life I seemed to own myself. I went as
a hostage, but it seemed as if I was riding into battle.