The Magic Mirror Read online

  Margaret stood beneath the window and stared at her reflection in a puddle. Spring had come slowly to Lesser Dorste, and the late-April morning carried a chill. “I’ll be on my way, then,” she said. She picked up a large woven basket with her left hand; then, with a practiced movement, she hooked her crutch beneath her right arm.

  “Don’t forget you’ve got that crooked leg,” Minka screeched, remembering at last the final thing Margaret shouldn’t forget.

  Margaret grunted. As if she could forget the crooked leg that had dragged behind her all her life—fourteen or fifteen years, by Minka’s reckoning. She pointed her too-tight shoes toward the town center and began the walk—clump-slide, clump-slide—to Market Cross.

  Pestiferous, Minka had often called her, and worse. Margaret took a step. Clump-slide.

  Putrid, beetle-headed scullion was a favored taunt of Thomas’s. Clump-slide.

  Eye-offending offal, Otho the sniggler called her, as though an eel-catcher should judge. Clump-slide.

  A pox on them all, thought Margaret. Clump—

  “Wait!” came Minka’s cry. Margaret stopped.

  “You’d forget your own left foot if it didn’t drag behind you,” Minka yelled, and shook a small purse of jingling coins. Scowling, Margaret limped back below the window. From the purse Minka pinched a silver penny. Margaret held out her hands to catch it, but Minka paused, turning the coin one way and the other.

  “There are but two sides to the miserable coin of life,” Minka said from under the protection of the overhanging roof, while the rain dripped down on Margaret. “The good luck and the bad. The two of us, Mags,” she said, “we fall on the bad luck side every time, sure as Beady Bone.”

  Margaret shuddered at the name of the poor beggar girl who had been browbeaten and bullied and finally run out of town. Margaret knew she’d have shared the same fate were it not for Minka’s benevolence, such as it was. Minka reminded her of this fact often enough to keep the girl in her thoughts. But mostly Beady haunted her in dreams of a dark and frightening sort.

  Minka tossed the coin and withdrew from the window. “Oats and fresh fish, don’t forget,” she said, and banged the shutter.

  Margaret bent and collected the coin. Then she hitched her crutch and stepped warily through the mud and muck.

  Only last night she’d woken from a dreadful dream of Beady Bone, and then the rain had kept her awake as it dripped through chinks in the wood-tiled roof. She’d listened to the gale, worrying the scrap of soft green velvet she kept tucked beneath her bed of straw. She might have wondered where the wind was going and where it had been, but to wonder caused Margaret a sadness that was beyond her understanding, and anyway it didn’t do to dwell.

  A yellow cat appeared in the lane beside her. “Hello, Cat,” Margaret said, and the cat, smoothly matching Margaret’s halting pace, meowed intelligently. “Would you believe me, Cat,” Margaret said, “if I told you that the rain”—she glanced at the cat—“well, that it spoke to me last night?” The cat flowed like water around and between her ankles, and then sprinted off. “Hmph,” Margaret said to the departing yellow tail.

  But it was true. She had strained to understand the sound of the rain dripping steadily into the crock in the corner: pitter-patter, bitter-butter. But then the sounds had slowed to a rhythm that spoke more clearly. Better tell her, better tell her, better tell her, shhhhhhh.

  Better tell her what? Margaret wondered. Tell me what?

  Nothing about the poor and lonely circumstances of Margaret’s life had ever given her reason to hope, but if there was magic in the world, it seemed possible she’d hear it on the rain. Mayhap it would heal her crooked leg.

  Pick-a-pickle, pick-a-pickle, plinked the rain in the puddles now. She walked on into a narrow alleyway darkened by upper stories that jutted out and closed in over the street.

  “Oi! Cripple-noggin!” came a shout. “Maggot the Crutch!”

  Margaret glanced back. Thomas the miller’s son! Her awkward gait sped to match the beat of her heart: Clump-slide! Clump-slide! Clump-slide! She hurried toward the glimpse of sky at the far end of the alley. But then the way ahead filled with the figure of Otho the sniggler, so big he blocked the sky. Behind her came Thomas. She was trapped.

  Margaret gripped her crutch and raised it up like a knight’s lance, wobbling in her effort to gain balance. She had much practice in self-defense, but gone was the time when she could poke Thomas in the eye and send him running to his mother. As the town boys grew bigger and rougher, her efforts served her less. Now Otho, as slippery as the eels it was his job to catch, slithered near and grabbed at her. Margaret swung the crutch wide, but Thomas kicked high and sent it skittering. Margaret dropped to the ground and scrabbled toward it on hands and knees.

  “Go away, wantwit,” she growled. “Leave me be!”

  Margaret and Thomas grabbed the crutch at the same time, him on one end, her on the other; like vicious dogs tussling over a bone, they tugged and pulled and fought. She would have that crutch! They rose, each gripping an end of the stick. Thomas tugged with all his might, leaning, leaning….Margaret let go, and Thomas fell on his rump, knocking over a reeking bucket of waste. Margaret snatched up the prize.

  “Ah, Thomas,” cried Otho, “you look like my ma’s old rutty sow! Ha!”

  Margaret shoved the wooden stick beneath her arm and limped with all haste to the top of the narrow alley, where it spilled out onto Milk Street. She could hear Thomas fumbling to his feet and Otho already giving chase. Just then a cheese cart came rolling down Milk Street; quickly Margaret crossed. She let the wagon come between her and the alley, and kept pace with it as it moved away.

  When she came to the churchyard, Margaret ducked inside the gate, hurried to the graves, and dropped behind a marker. She waited in the shadow of the church. Years ago, when half the town had died of the black death, one aisle of the church had been chopped away to make the building smaller. Now the church was crooked, like herself.

  Margaret was thrown off balance by her feelings, muddled as the Mursey on wash day. She’d seen the miller kick his son hard enough to crack a rib. Thomas was a beast, but he was born of one, and for that he could not be blamed. He was as much an accident of birth as herself.

  She peeked around the gravestone and watched for Thomas and Otho to pass. The stone marked the grave of Minka’s husband, dead these twelve years.

  Margaret knew well the story of Minka’s bad luck, a tale woven into Margaret’s own history.

  Minka was a nurse, those years ago. One day a man was brought in, near drowned. He’d fallen into the Mursey River burdened with a suit of mail, and so he sank quickly to the bottom. His chain tunic, winking in the sunlight, had caught the eye of John the sniggler, Otho’s father, who had managed to pull the stranger’s head above the water.

  The soldier slept for seven days. Minka, captivated by his handsome though eel-bitten face and his silent disposition, spoke shrilly in his ear, called him Sweetheart, and stayed by his side night and day, so hers was the face he opened his eyes upon when he woke from death.

  “Holy God!” he exclaimed.

  It was a miracle he lived. Another miracle that he fell in love with Minka. And then, bad luck. One evening, Minka walked with Sweetheart along the riverbank; he’d been going to ask her to marry him. He knelt—would this be the question?—and at that moment a knight, a red-bearded stranger, approached on a galloping steed. They both turned in astonishment. And the “yes” that Minka had at the ready turned to “No!” For the stranger’s piebald horse spooked and reared and trampled poor Sweetheart to death. The ring in his fingers rolled away, into the dust and gone. Minka collapsed. The priest called the marriage near enough in God’s eyes and made Minka a respectable widow.

  When Father Bernard knocked at Minka’s door on the following day, the feast day of St. Margaret, it was to offer condolence and to ask a favor. He’d found a crippled child abandoned in the church and hoped Minka would take her in. The pri
est expected that someone would come for the child, a girl of three years or thereabout, for she was no street urchin—she was clean and cared for and dressed in a fine gown of green velvet. But no one ever came.

  In time, the priest assured Minka, the girl would give comfort and service, despite her tiny crooked leg. And, in time, she might offer love, much like what Minka might have known from her own offspring with Sweetheart, God rest his trampled soul.

  And so Minka resigned herself to her bad luck. She took up spinning and brewing. She put the sign of the bushel and the pike outside the door whenever she had ale to sell. But with the exception of an annual trip to church to give God a piece of her mind, she never left the house again.

  When Margaret heard Otho and Thomas pass by the church and head away up Milk Street, pitching stones at the poor yellow cat, she deemed the way safe enough and continued on it herself. Nearing the marketplace, she smelled cooking meat and burning wood and heard the thud of the butcher’s cleaver. She saw carts of grain bound for the mill, pickled meat and salted bacon, fresh fish, tanned hides and sacks of wool.

  “Hot peasecods!” came the cry of a street vendor.

  “Rushes fine and green,” sang another.

  “White wine, red wine!”

  “Ribs of beef and savory pie!”

  Margaret’s stomach rumbled loudly, for Minka ate the queen’s share of everything Margaret brought home. Her purse hung lightly from the belt at her waist. She could imagine many and varied ways to part with money, if she had it. Sweet figs and dates, oranges bursting with juice. A hot pie, full of steaming meat and sweet plump currants. A visit to the tailor, maybe, to purchase a new kirtle: emerald-colored, with purple laces up and down the sleeves. But Margaret didn’t spend much thought on nonsense, and she brought to mind instead her duty: fresh fish and a sack of oats.

  She carried on with her errands, sniffing the fish before selecting it and digging down in the oat sack to be sure the grain wasn’t rotten beneath the handfuls of good oats on top.

  “You doubt my honesty, miss?” came the tart accusation from the merchant.

  “This way I don’t have to,” she replied.

  “Meowww!” The yellow cat streaked by. Close on its tail came first a skittering stone, then Thomas and Otho, joined now by some other rough boys.

  “Maggot!” shouted Thomas, forgetting about the cat now that better sport was at hand.

  Margaret clutched her basket in front of her and looked left and right but saw no escape. Thomas caught her arm and drew her so close that she could count the lice in his hair. Breathing foully into her face, Thomas pinched her cheek hard enough to sting.

  Margaret drew up her shoulders, shut her eyes against Thomas’s leering teeth, and turned her face from the dark smell of his breath, gathering strength and wits for another scuffle.

  “Ripe for the kissing, that one is,” Otho taunted. Thomas laughed and kissed her cheek rudely, and then he wiped his mouth with his dirty sleeve. Her face burned with anger and shame.

  “You, boys, watch yourselves!” came a shout. A dull old chestnut mare was stepping and dancing, the butcher’s well-fed terrier at her hooves, causing everything in the cart she was pulling—brass pots and bronze bowls, scissors and bridles and beads—to jiggle and twinkle like sparks from a fire. Seated in the cart, a man round and friendly as a pumpkin spoke softly to the horse, shushing and cooing and gentling the mare and then smiling. He struck Margaret as being the very opposite of sneering Thomas, who now, saints be praised, retreated a pace.

  “Step lively, dearie!” cried the peddler. Margaret drew up her skirts and stepped—clump-slide—to one side.

  “Maggie the Crutch ain’t much for stepping lively,” Thomas jeered. “Cripple and lame she is!”

  The peddler scratched his chin and leaned back on his perch in the wagon. He watched the girl hop-step to the edge of the street, trying to avoid the people, the little yapping dog, Old Penelope’s hooves, and a pile of steaming droppings. He watched her struggle to walk in the mud, watched the boys taunting in a laughing pack, while other folk pulled back so as not to touch the cripple.

  “It’s like that, then,” he muttered. He laced the reins to the hitching post and hopped down from the wagon to light beside her.

  Neat as a tumbler at the fair he was, and him with one leg cut off above the knee and a peg leg below it. He bent the one knee and peered into Margaret’s face. The peddler’s eyes, searching hers, crinkled merrily. Here was a one, she thought, who would not harm her any more than he would harm his old mare or the little dog at the mare’s feet or the tormented yellow cat.

  The peddler raised a menacing fist at the boys. “Be off with you, rascals!” he shouted. He lunged in their direction as if to deal a blow, succeeding in running them off but failing to keep his balance on the one leg. Margaret, thinking to help, grabbed at the peddler’s cloak, but with such force of will that she, too, went wobbly, landing them both in the mud.

  “God preserve me!” cried the peddler. “Will you try and kill a poor fellow?” But he laughed, and Margaret, after a moment’s hesitation, laughed with him. Her crutch stuck fast in the muck like a pollard tree, and the peddler reached for it to help him up.

  “Between us we’ve got two good legs, my girl, and that’ll do,” he said. “Maggie, is it?” His smile was broad and kind as he helped Margaret to her feet.

  “My thanks for running them off,” she said.

  “My pleasure,” the peddler replied. “They’ll be back, of course.”

  “Don’t I know it,” said Margaret, rubbing her cheek where it hurt.

  “I’ve bought a hot meat pie,” the peddler said, jerking his head to the wagon. “I’ll gladly split it, and I’ve a dozen tales I’ll gladly share as well.” Margaret tried not to appear too eager. “What would you think if I told you that in my travels I have seen a unicorn?” Margaret drew back and squinted, doubting, but he nodded fervently. “What’s more, I’ve put my palm upon a whale, the briny monster!”

  At that, Margaret snorted. When the peddler grinned widely, apparently satisfied with her response, she saw he had but four teeth in his head. Unicorns and whales? Stuff and nonsense. But…enticing all the same.

  The peddler introduced himself as Bilious Brighton. The two of them sat by the side of the road in front of the town well, and it was quiet between them while they shared the promised meat pie, no longer hot but very good.

  “Your leg,” Bilious began. “Does it pain you?”

  Margaret shrugged. “Not so terrible much,” she said. “Does yours? Where it used to be?”

  Bilious wiped his chin with his sleeve. “It itches. I want to give a good scratch, but there’s no flesh where the itch is, confound it.” He knocked on the peg and shook his head. “The leg haunts me is what it does.”

  Margaret was quiet, and her thoughts went unbidden to her mother, the one who must have left her in the churchyard. Her mother was there and then gone, and, as with Bilious’s leg, the thought of her was very like an itch that she couldn’t scratch.

  “Have you really seen a unicorn?” she asked after a moment, licking the last bit of piecrust from her fingers.

  “Of course!” Bilious exclaimed, looking wounded. “You don’t believe an old man? You’ve cut me to the quick, by God.”

  “It smacks of magic, is all,” she said.

  At that very moment, as the word magic crossed Margaret’s lips, the church bell rang noon. But whether to confirm or to scold, she did not know.

  “What do you know of magic?” said Bilious.

  Margaret blinked. She’d come close to magic only last summer, in the soothsayer’s tent at Grimsby Fair.

  “I’ve seen a two-headed goat,” she said to Bilious. “And”—she heard the soothsayer’s words in her mind, saw the faraway look in his eyes—“I’ve had my fortune told.”

  “Oh? Did the seer tell of the handsomest peddler in all of Rowne?” he joked, grinning with all four teeth.

  Mar
garet shook her head slowly, pulling on her lip before speaking the words she’d put to memory:

  “ ‘In a glass glimmering, a green-eyed man awaits. Seek him, but soft! For he is touched by death and danger.’ ” The seer had peered at Margaret even more closely then—so near his breath had made her blink. “ ‘Just because you limp doesn’t mean you can’t heal.’ ”

  Margaret looked at Bilious sidelong, judging his reaction.

  “A strange portent,” murmured Bilious. “Gibberish to me. Sometimes these seers are only in for the penny, one can’t be sure, and if I could grow a new leg I’d have done so by now,” he said. “Now, then,” he went on, “I have one—only one—bit of magic that I’ve picked up on my travels. Here, let me show you.”

  He rummaged in his sack and pulled out a circular object the size of a bread loaf, ringed round with lead and with a slender handle fashioned of bone. Bilious turned it over, and it flashed. A hand mirror!

  Margaret smiled. “Rare,” she said, “but magic?”

  “My own dear wife gave it to me when we married. She was given it by a knight errant she’d nursed to health before we met, name of Harold, or Hobart, or Hy. Something haitch-ish.” He looked to the gray sky as if the knight’s name might be delivered from above, then shook his head and shrugged. “She followed its charms for a time, till she took up with me and put aside the mirror, after which she counted what blessings she had and longed for nothing more.”

  “What does it do?” Margaret’s skin tingled. She sat up very straight.

  Bilious scratched his bearded chin. “That’s the question, all right. The future? The past? The heart’s longing? True love? Over time I’ve thought it shone them all.” He glanced at Margaret and brushed his fingers over two words etched on the back. “Mayhap these would tell us what it’s meant to do, but I canna read, and I’ll warrant nor can you.”

  Margaret shook her head no. “Does it really work?”

  “The magic works, one way or another. I know, because I saw my own dear wife in it, God rest her soul,” Bilious said, and wiped a tear. “A more able woman I never met in all my travels. She could fell an oak and have a fire laid afore you could say ‘jackrabbit.’ She’d have downed a bit of game and popped a stew in the pot, all in the time it took me to climb from the wagon and set the nag aright.” He shot a look sideways at Margaret. “What with my absent leg, you understand.” He smiled fondly. “Had a laugh like a wheezing bagpipe, she did.”