The Magic Mirror Read online

  “None taken,” she said.

  “Think on it.” Bertram began to walk on.

  Margaret stood still in the middle of the road. To be healed! To set out, and to come back different. Just because you limp doesn’t mean you can’t heal….Is that not what the Grimsby seer had told her?

  She busied herself with the effort of catching up to Bertie, clump-slide, clump-slide, clump-slide.

  Having bickered the better part of an hour while the sun moved across the sky, Minka and Bilious determined to travel farther east to Bolingbroke. Pip had picked a farthing from the purse of a nun—“An accident!” Bilious insisted in the face of Minka’s glare—and they’d decided as one mind to depart Eastham with all haste.

  The cart rolled into Bolingbroke late in the day, and Minka called out to the townsfolk, “Has anybody seen a girl with a crooked leg? A skinny thing, capering and stumbling and looking for all the world like a muddle-headed prat?”

  Bilious frowned at Minka. “Now, then,” he called, “has anybody seen a ginger-headed girl, slender of waist and intelligent of eye, walking nobly but with an unfortunate limp?”

  Minka humphed.

  Bilious looked sidelong at her. “Is the girl not ginger-headed?”

  Minka nodded. “She’s not as fair as I.”

  “And is she not slim as a whip?”

  “She never et much.”

  “And is she not bright and smart as—”

  “I suppose she did bring back the proper coin, most times, when she went to market.”

  Bilious smiled. “There now,” he said. “I’m convinced we’re looking out for the same girl, then.”

  They stopped the wagon at the center of town and set out on foot to search the streets, and to inquire of everyone they saw.

  “A girl with a crooked gait asked me what direction I might be traveling,” said a merchant, “and when I said east to Eastham and on to Bolingbroke, she thanked me and moved away in a hurry.” The merchant let out a great fart that rumbled long and deep as hell’s own thunder.

  “I should say she did!” said Minka.

  “When did you see her? Where?” Bilious asked the merchant.

  “Day afore last, I think,” he said, mulling it over for a moment, “back in Lesser Dorste.”

  “Bad luck, that!” Minka moaned.

  “And yet we know now that she did not travel east,” Bilious suggested. “That’s something we didn’t know before.”

  “Oh, but what if it were another girl with a crooked leg what spoke to the odorous merchant?” said Minka. “How are we to know?”

  Bilious pondered. “Let us assume, for lack of better instruction, that it were indeed she. We will travel north from here, for north is not east, and discover what we will.”

  “Oh, bad luck we’ve come the wrong way!” Minka moaned again, and wrung her hands.

  “It were she,” the merchant piped up. “And she might have stole a meat pie from me as well, now I come to remember it,” he said, eyeing Minka’s supper.

  “She never done it!” cried Minka.

  “She were hungry!” said Bilious.

  “A thief, now, is she, as well as a cripple-noggin!” said Minka.

  Bilious pulled Minka aside. “Rest easy, we’re on her trail now. We know sommat more than before, and I’ll wager she never stole any meat pie. Let’s do some custom here, and then early tomorrow we can be on our way north to Sackville Proper.”

  Minka sniffed and nodded. “All right.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve.

  Bilious smiled. “You can’t hide your tender heart, Minka, not from me.”

  “Tender heart, my bunioned foot,” she said, then smoothed her skirts and sniffed once more. “It’s the mirror I seek, as well you know.”

  “I do know what you seek,” said Bilious. “Mayhap better than you know yourself. Now, then,” he said, unfastening his satchel and sizing up the crowd, “let the squirrel cirque begin!”

  “Gah!” Minka hurried off, to spare herself the company of the rodent Pip.

  Two days passed upon the road. Whenever a pilgrim stubbed a toe or patched a blister, Bertram would play a tune on the bagpipe to take away the pain, and each time, the ailing pilgrim would hasten to assure him that the bagpipe had done the trick, and that he need not play any longer on their account. For all her travel, Margaret felt no closer to the man in the mirror, be he real or—the thought had crossed her mind—invention. But there was no question now of turning back, no matter how often Margaret wondered whether she’d have been better off had she never set out. Margaret Quest indeed.

  Once, the road ran close to a dark wood, and Henry and Bertram walked one on either side of Margaret. She looked deep into the forest for a sign of John Book, but they passed by in safety. Once, they passed through a village and drank some ale that was not as good as Minka’s, nor as strong, and once, a storm howled in the night as they slept in a shed, and the rain on the roof roared Minka-Minka-Minka! to her ear.

  Sometimes Margaret would stop to rest and the others would go on, but Bertram always stayed back with her, talking and joking until she caught her breath and grew strong enough to continue. He never seemed troubled by her slow pace, nor did he seem to prefer another’s company. And by the light of the evening fire, he whittled designs to pretty her crutch.

  She wasn’t used to so much chatter. Bertram had ready an endless supply of questions, and songs to share, and curious interests; gradually her shrugs and scowls gave way to real conversation. Even so, time passed as often in pleasant quiet as in talk and merry singing.

  One rainy morning, Bertram’s step was not lively. His bagpipe drooped beneath his arm. He shuffled, grim-faced, his eyes sunk in dark hollows.

  “You look like you’ve et fish gone bad,” Margaret said, though she knew from the slope of his eyebrows and the hang of his head that the trouble was not his gut.

  “I cannot shake the dream I had last night,” Bertram replied, “for it’s as well known to me as my own feet. I dreamed of my sister. My dear companion, when she lived.”

  “I—I’m sorry, Bertie,” Margaret managed. She wished there was something she could do for her friend. She recalled the good peddler back in Lesser Dorste, who’d kindly asked about her leg instead of ignoring it or cursing it.

  “It pains you,” she said, “to think of her?”

  “When I was ten years old or thereabout, my parents died of the black death. It happened quickly, and sadness was overtaken by worry. I had myself to care for, and my sister, younger by two years. We lived in St. Alwes, and I thought to travel to Minster City, to find work and food. On our way, we stopped to wash in the river. She went under and never breathed again. I dove in and found her struggling in the reeds, vicious as eels and strong they were. I grabbed her under her arms, but…in the end…I let go.

  “I dragged myself from the river and up the bank. It was then I remembered the knife in my belt. Why had I not thought of it before? I returned to the water and cut her free, but she was dead. I buried her on the riverbank, marked the place with a cross of stones, and prayed God her soul to keep.

  “She and I will meet again in heaven, if I mind my step,” Bertram said, “and Mother and Father, too. Dear little Taggot.”

  “Taggot!”

  “Yes, that was her name. Taggot.”

  Margaret took Bertram’s arm, and he stopped and looked at her. “What is it?” he said.

  She reached up and tugged at his hood so that it fell to his shoulders, and the rain fell freely on his curling black hair and on the tops of his ears.

  “Listen,” she said. “Do you not hear it?” She gripped his arm like a vise.

  “I hear the other pilgrims,” Bertram said. “I hear your voice. I hear the rain.”

  “Yes, the rain!” Margaret said. “It speaks her name all around us! ‘Taggot Taggot Taggot’! Do you not hear?” To her ear it had often sounded “Maggot,” but, she thought now, it could as well be “Taggot.” Not insult but benedictio
n.

  Bertram shook his head and yanked his arm from hers. “It’s only the rain.”

  Margaret dropped her crutch and took both his arms, stumbled, and caught herself.

  “I hear it,” she said to him. “I hear your sister’s name. In some way she is everywhere. All around us.”

  Bertram stared at Margaret a long moment. Then he stooped to pick up the crutch from the ground and gave it to her. “Margaret Church, Maggie Hopalong, Maggie Quest, she who hears kindness in the very rain that falls,” he said. “You have a sweet and tender soul.”

  Margaret held her breath. Bertram thought that lovely thing of her.

  Margaret was the first to see it—the cathedral! Two more days had passed along the pilgrimage route. The rain had stopped and the sun had come out, warming their backs and drying their cloaks and hoods and then, as the day wore on, moving ahead of them, a shining path for them to follow. The trees began to grow thin along the road, and suddenly there it was, immense and splendid in the evening sun. The great roof of the twin-spired cathedral was built all of pointed lead. Sets of flying buttresses bristled around it, and the spires pointed higher than every other structure in sight, even above the great stone wall surrounding the city.

  “Knightsbridge, we greet you!” cried Bertram, raising Margaret’s hand in triumph. While Henry bowed his head, overcome by private emotion and humility, Margaret quaked in the shadow of the great cathedral. This was no common church like the one—humble, half-crumbled, and skewed—where she had been found in Lesser Dorste. The great spires seemed to reach straight to God in his heaven, while their shadows ran over the wall and across the ground and directly to her feet. She shuffled away from the creeping dark so that she might escape God’s notice.

  The party walked on toward the gatehouse—two magnificent towers flanking a pointed arch, and with a painted statue of the queen in a niche above the entrance—and soon their feet trod a bridge across the River Severn, which flowed around and shaped the eastern boundary of the city. With the steep cliffside there, it formed a natural defense of the royal castle. The river carried with it detritus of all type; the foul stink of it was horrid. Margaret put her velvet scrap to her nose and mouth and stepped gingerly across the bridge to the other side.

  The church bells began to chime the hour, and Margaret looked up. A great cloud of blackbirds exploded from the cathedral’s two towers, just as she’d seen them do in the magic mirror. She stopped and held fast to her crutch. She felt in her bones that the wild-eyed man was flesh and blood, as real as this cathedral built of stone and glass.

  “I am Margaret of the Church,” she whispered. “Who are you?”

  Margaret felt Bertram at her side, and firmly took his arm.

  “He is here, Bertie,” she said. Her heart beat like wings against the cage of her ribs. “Now I’ve only to find him.”

  “I’ll never find him!” Margaret shouted, midst the music and singing, the color and movement and people. So many people!

  Once they were through Isobel’s Gate, as it was known, and inside the city proper, Brother Henry went straight to the cathedral to pray and then to arrange lodging in the lady chapel there, as was the pilgrim custom. The rest of the party broke away in small groups: the plump missus and her daughter to seek the marketplace (perhaps to buy more sausages), a few of the men and women to sample their choice of nearby alehouses. Margaret and Bertram staggered about the city, marveling at the crowds and the costumes of merchants dressed in rich red, bright yellow, deep blue. Margaret’s ear caught words in foreign tongues, and she wondered whence the people had come. She’d walked seven days. How far from home were these great throngs? The streets were wide, some twenty feet side to side, and yet so peopled there was barely room to spare.

  “Are you sure you want to find him, Maggie?” Bertram said. “Do you not recall what the soothsayer said? About the danger? The death? I expect this fellow’s a madman, mayhap a murderer, and I’d be glad if you never set eyes upon him.”

  “He is why I’m here, Bertie, and why else would I have seen him if I wasn’t meant to find him?”

  “Perhaps you were meant to find another,” Bertram suggested solemnly. “Such as me.”

  A few people stopped and stared at them; Margaret supposed she and Bertram looked more travel-weary than she could guess. She tugged her cloak around her as best she could, but there wasn’t much she could do to hide the grubby state of her clothing, nor the curse of her crutch.

  Margaret’s stomach trembled with eagerness, and she felt weak from walking, from nerves, but above all because she sensed she’d arrived at the end of a journey, and that now she would begin another sort of journey altogether.

  But to have set out, and to have found the very place where the wild-eyed man must be, danger or no? What luck! What excellent good luck! Could it be that Minka was wrong about the coin of life? The thought of Minka made the back of her throat sting. But Minka wouldn’t be missing her, she told herself.

  Her belly groaned. Smells of meat and baking bread and fresh-brewed ale teased, but she was too excited to eat. They wandered through the marketplace, where stalls displayed all manner of wonders: a supposed unicorn horn (she thought of the peddler Bilious), a selection of inks on a wooden tray, stylish hats and boots. A soothsayer winked knowingly at Margaret and crooked a beckoning finger. If she’d had a penny she’d have dared, but she did not.

  All the while, they were making their way toward the castle on the far side of the city, opposite the cathedral. They could see turrets and towers and the top of the mighty keep.

  “Petronilla pies!” shouted a baker, setting out a tray of heart-shaped tarts that glistened with deep red filling. “Princess Petronilla pies, try Her Majesty’s favorite,” he called. He turned to his companion. “Tasty, wouldn’t you say, Wife?”

  “Bitter they are, just like Her Royalship,” the baker’s wife muttered.

  “Indeed, and dark as blood,” the baker added, snickering. When he caught sight of Margaret, the snicker stopped short in his nose; he snorted, then sneezed, while his wife pounded him on the back to assist his recovery.

  “God’s wounds!” cried the baker, pressing palm to chest. “You gave me a start, you did!” He elbowed his wife in the ribs and pointed at Margaret. “Would you look at that one?”

  “Oh my, yes,” the wife agreed. “Upon my soul.”

  The baker motioned Margaret closer. She hesitated, glancing at Bertram, then approached the baker’s stall.

  “Has anybody told you, you are the very image of the Princess of Hearts, er, of Her Royal Highness?”

  Margaret looked at Bertram. Bertram shrugged. “Who?”

  The baker nodded vigorously, chins quivering in accordance. “The Princess Petronilla, by my honor!” He looked her up and down. “Excepting the dirt, and the burr-infested hair, and the filthy layers of clothing what no doubt crawls with fleas, and the tattered shoes, and above all the damnation of a cripple!” He nodded rapidly. “But elsewise the very image.”

  He leaned conspiratorially over the trays of tarts. “I know a jester, up at court,” he said, “happens my wife’s sister’s husband’s brother Quimby, and he pre-forms quite the amusing theater. Why, he rides in on the back of a dog, and it’s all laughter and bawdy songs and juggling apples and plates! The princess might find it funny, might she not, Wife,” he said, turning to the woman and nodding, “to have a cripple act out her part—a sort of comedy, like.”

  “I know, I know!” shrieked the baker’s wife, nudging him out of the way. “These two could act out the wedding! This one could be the bride, and that one”—she pointed to Bertram—“nah, too tall and thin; the groom’s a right fat fellow, in’t he though, and a droolin’ idiot, I hear!” She chuckled, then, eyes wide, made an O with her fleshy mouth and clapped. “The dwarf! The royal dwarf could play the role! I see it now, right up here in my mind.” She tapped her temple, leaving a splotch of flour on the side of her head. “Can’t you picture it, Husban
d?” She punched the baker’s shoulder.

  “Yes, yes, if this one were to play the part, it might be good fun, eh?” The baker scratched his chin. “Then again, Her Majesty might not like it one bit, and then what? She’d have your head!” The baker and his wife guffawed at length, finally turning their attention to another customer.

  Margaret shriveled inside. She turned, wide-eyed, to Bertram. “Bertie,” she began.

  “Right, then,” said Bertram. With a quick movement he pulled up Margaret’s hood and tugged it forward, so that her face was shadowed. “It would seem sensible to hide your face till we know more. But fear not. What do those two know? The baker’s wares were attractive enough to the flies, that much we know and no more.”

  They hurried back the way they’d come, and farther on to the cathedral, where they found Brother Henry in the lady chapel, in conversation with a priest clothed in black.

  “Lux Vera,” the priest was saying, and both men were gazing rapturously at the great rose window.

  “The True Light,” Henry said, and put a hand to his chest and bowed his head. “The window was not yet finished when I left the royal city years ago.”

  Henry turned, smiling, at the approach of his young friends, and introduced them to Father Sebastian. “Sebastian will let us stay here in the lady chapel for as long as we wish.”

  “Fleas!” said Father Sebastian.

  “Fleas, Father?” said Bertram, after a pause.

  “Our lavender incense discourages them,” Sebastian said. “Not so at the abbey,” he added, “as you would soon have found, had you lodged with our brethren on the other side of town.”

  “A boon indeed, Father,” said Henry, “and finer accommodations than we’ve enjoyed in many weeks.”

  Sebastian’s gaze lingered long on Margaret’s face. “I’m sorry for staring,” he said to her, smiling, “but you bear a remarkable resemblance—”