For Daisy and Chloe
The Iron-master and his Family
There was once an iron-master named Ernand whose foundry was in a vast clearing in the great highland forest, close to quarries from which iron ore was extracted, and surrounded by a village where the workers in those various enterprises lived.
There was also a mine nearby from which copper ores were derived, the produce of which Ernand combined with tin to make bronze. It was in bronze that he still founded cannon and bells, as his father had done before him, but since inheriting the foundry he had been much more prolific in his use of iron, with which he made horseshoes, the heads of axes, the blades of weapons, barrel-hoops, wheel-rims and all kinds of agricultural implements, especially heavy plowshares; that was what entitled him to claim the title of iron-master, which was recent in honor, if not in origin.
Ernand’s foundry was situated beside a road that cut straight through the heart of the forest. In one direction it led straight to a busy port, via a sizeable town; in the other it forked not far beyond the foundry, the left-hand fork veering downhill toward the plain, and the capital city of the region, whereas the more steeply-angled right fork soon gave rise to further branches that extended up into the mountains and the highest regions of the forest. The main road was well-made and well-maintained, bedded on gravel and paved with stone, in order to support the heavy carts that transported goods to and from the port to the inland town and all the way to the capital. It also conveyed all of Ernand’s products to his widely-scattered clients and markets.
Ernand considered himself to be a great pioneer of industry and tool-making, and firmly believed that the future of humankind depended on iron and its many uses. In mastering iron, Ernand believed, he was playing his part in the human mastery of the world.
By virtue of that belief, Ernand was deeply disappointed when his only son, Alastor, grew up with a deep distaste for iron, and even for bronze, and was firmly determination not to follow in his father’s footsteps. It was not that the boy was not industrious, but that his interests and his talents were all turned toward wood and its many employments. That was perhaps not unnatural in a boy brought up in a village surrounded by a great forest, all the more so as his mother, Eulalie, was a child of that forest, the daughter of a widowed woodcutter and charcoal-burner who supplied fuel for Ernand’s furnaces. It did not seem so very natural to Ernand, however, to whom Alastor was a profound disappointment.
Ernand’s conviction that his son’s antipathy to iron had something unnatural about it was encouraged, and intensified over time, by a rumor that was current in the region regarding Eulalie, his wife. Although the woodcutter was absolutely adamant that she was his daughter, the gossip of the old crones of the village suggested that she was, in fact, a changeling that had been slyly introduced into the actual daughter’s cradle by the fae-folk, and that it was the presence of the changeling in her home that had caused the premature death of the woodcutter’s wife, Eulalie’s mother.
Ernand had first fallen in love with Eulalie when he was still a relatively young man, who had only just inherited the foundry from his father, and she was only sixteen years old. He had treated such tales as nonsense, and continued to do so. He insisted on believing—contrary to the vast majority of the residents of the forest—that the fae-folk were entirely imaginary, the product of a primitive imagination that should have been disciplined long ago, by religion if not by skeptical philosophy. Although Eulalie married him very willingly, however, rather than merely being bartered in marriage for the sake of vulgar interest by her parents, as was common among townsfolk, she certainly did not have her husband’s love of iron, and could never be persuaded to acquire it. Indeed, it sometimes seemed that she suffered from contact with the metal—something that only encouraged the old crones’ gossip, because that aversion was held by legend to be typical of the fae-folk.
Eulalie’s health was always fragile, even before she married Ernand, but it remained sturdy enough for her to bear him two children, Alastor being followed after an interval of two years by a daughter named Catrianne, before she perished not long after the birth of the latter. In view of that circumstance, Alastor’s antipathy to the material of his father’s industry could not be attributed to any direct influence of his mother, whom he had hardly known, but one belief Ernand shared with the crones was that such tendencies were in the blood, and needed no particular education to bring them out.
Because of her sex, Catrianne could hardly have been expected to devote herself to any kind of laborious industry, let alone that of ironworking, but she too was something of a disappointment to Ernand, because she loved her brother dearly and supported him in everything, including his resistance to Ernand’s attempts to direct his interests and shape him for a career identical to his own. As the differences between the father and the son gradually developed from mutual incomprehension to open conflict, Catrianne always lent Alastor substantial reinforcement in arguments that eventually took on the proportions of verbal battles.
Catrianne too had an aversion for iron, which extended even to the employment of needles, and instead of developing the skills in needlework that would normally have been expected of a female child of her class, as necessary training for marriage and housekeeping, she concentrated her time and interest the development of her musical skills. She played all manner of wind and stringed instruments with consummate skill. Partly by virtue of her interest, Alastor developed a particular interest in using his woodworking skills in the manufacture of musical instruments of both kinds.
That specialism caused further irritation to Ernand, who might have been able to understand and tolerate his son’s art had it been applied primarily to the manufacture of the wooden components of tools, weapons, wheels or barrels, or even to the kinds of carpentry associated with the building of houses and cabinet-making; but he regarded music and all its associated instruments as impractical frippery.
As tensions built up in their home, Alastor and Catrianne, even as children, began spending much of the day in the forest, exploring it and learning about the plants that grew there and the animals that lived there, in spite of the real dangers still posed by some of those animals, including wild pigs, wolves and bears. In the parts of the great forest that extended into valleys, aristocrats sometimes hunted such animals, but hunters rarely came far into the highlands, where the ground was too rugged once the horses left the road. They preferred in any case to chase roe deer, which were less dangerous when cornered than pigs, let alone wolves or bears.
When the time came for Alastor to begin work, he left his father’s house in order to go to the town on the road to the port, where he was apprenticed to an aging maker of musical instruments named Zebedee. At first, however, he returned every Sunday in order to see Catrianne, with whom he went to mass at the village church and then went walking in the woods. Their separation did not last long, however, and as soon as Alastor was able to afford accommodation that she could share, Catrianne came to join him in the town. Alastor’s skill had quickly become well-known and greatly appreciated, and the demand for musical instruments was too considerable for his aging master—whose fingers were beginning to suffer from arthritis—to execute more than a small fraction of the commissions he received. Zebedee was a good and honest man, who lived very frugally, and who allowed Alastor to receive and keep a larger share of the money earned by his labor than many a master would have done.
Zebedee’s reputation extended beyond the town in which he worked, and when Alastor began to do take over the greater part of their collective employment, he not only acquired a share of that renown but further increased it. Before long, he was obtaining requests to purchase instruments, and commissions to make them, from the port and from towns and villages inland of the foundry, including some in the elevated regions of the highlands, where the forest extended all the way to the tree-line of the mountains. For that reason, he often traveled on horseback along the road, and sometimes along the winding side-paths that led into the upper highlands. He always stopped at the foundry whenever he passed through the village, even though his father did not seem enthusiastic to receive his visits.
On one occasion, Alastor received a commission directed specifically to him, to make an unusual instrument based on a very ancient design, which came from a remote hamlet high in the mountains. On his way to deliver the instrument he called, as usual, on his father, and asked him whether he had ever heard of the hamlet in question.
“Aye,” said Ernand, “I have. It has a bad reputation, because of a witch who’s said to live in the neighborhood, who steals children and teaches them to sing like birds.”
“That’s a very strange thing for a witch to do,” observed Alastor. “Where does she take the children.”
“Oh, she leaves them at home with their parents, and only steals their souls. When they grow up, she lets them alone. The lads go to work and the lasses marry, like normal folk, but she steals their own children in their time.”
“If all witches are as harmless as that,” Alastor said, “I wonder why the church persecutes them.”
“You’ll have to ask the curé about that,” Ernand grunted. “It’s no business of mine.”
Alastor continued on his way, taking the right fork in the road and going high into the mountains. He was so late returning from that expedition, however, that Zebedee and Catrianne became convinced that he had been overtaken by misfortune, especially when they heard a rumor that a terrible storm had raged in the mountains during the night when he ought to have reached the hamlet, which the local people naturally blamed on the malevolence of the local witch.
Several days passed after the date when Alastor should have returned, and Catrianne was about to put on mourning-dress, when he reappeared abruptly, riding a horse that was not his own, and carrying on its rump a slender girl, seemingly no more than sixteen years old. As soon as they had dismounted, he introduced her to his sister by the name of Lucinia, and declared that he intended to marry her as soon as possible.
That news deflected interrogations as to precisely what had happened during the delay to Alastor’s return, and the explanations he gave were sketchy, although the implication was that the missing days had been taken up by his rapid courtship. He told Zebedee and Catrianne that he had gone astray during the storm after being thrown from his horse, which had bolted. Left limping, he had been forced to seek hospitality wherever he could, which was not easy in the high forest. Lucinia and her mother had kindly taken him in, and had kept him until his bruises had healed and he was able to ride again. They had also given him a horse, and, because he had fallen in love with Lucinia in the interim, he had asked her to come with him to the town. She had agreed, and her mother had given her permission.
The formalities of the marriage might have proved a trifle awkward, because Lucinia had no documentation of her civil estate and had never been baptized. She explained to the Maire of the town, however, that her parents were mountain-dwellers descended from nomads, who paid little attention to such formalities, and the Maire kindly made no difficulty about the civil registration of the marriage. The local curé was perfectly happy to carry out a belated baptism in order that the religious component of the alliance could proceed with equal propriety.
After the marriage, Alastor’s affairs prospered, as he gradually took over almost all the work that Zebedee had previously done, and his own reputation as a constructor of beautiful musical instruments continued to increase. He was soon able to buy a house large enough to accommodate the family that he and Lucinia hoped to have—she was already pregnant with her first child—and also for Catrianne, from whom there was never any possibility of his separating.
Catrianne had initially experienced some slight distress in consequence of the intrusion into their home of a newcomer, but she soon came to like Lucinia very much, and a firm alliance was forged between them almost immediately, because Lucinia sang beautifully, and loved to sing, especially to the accompaniment of Catrianne’s flutes and lutes. Although Lucinia was an inept player of such instruments by comparison with Catrianne, she was familiar with an abundance of tunes completely unknown to the iron-master’s daughter, which she delighted in teaching her sister-in-law to play—a delight redoubled by the fact that Catrianne was able to play them so beautifully that she seemed to add extra charm and meaning to them.
The sound of Lucinia singing to the tune of one or other of Catrianne’s instruments—all products of Alastor’s artistry, naturally—soon became so familiar to the household’s new neighbors that they nicknamed Lucinia “the Nightingale.” She did not like the nickname, though, which seemed to have some unfortunate connotation for her, and she was always eager to tell anyone prepared to listen that she did not warrant it. If anyone were entitled to it, she sometimes said, it was Catrianne, because the notes she produced on her various instruments were more closely akin to beautiful birdsong than the sounds produced by her own human larynx. Few people agreed though, and insisted on believing that Lucinia was merely being modest.
The three of them lived together very happily—which was as well, given that Catrianne had no desire to leave the household. Although more than one suitor had previously expressed an interest in going to the foundry and confronting the redoubtable iron-master in order to ask for her hand, she had put them off gently, explaining that she had no desire as yet to be anyone’s wife. That determination was not altered by the advent of Lucinia, and seemed to become even firmer when, a year after the marriage, not long after they had moved to the new house, Lucinia gave birth to a son, and firmer still a year after that, when she gave birth to a daughter.
Catrianne seemed to regard the children as her own as much as Alastor’s and Lucinia’s, and there was never any question in her mind that she would share fully in their upbringing and their education. Lucinia never seemed at all resentful of that partial usurpation, and no jealousy developed between the two sisters-in-law, who always seemed closer than many natural sisters. In fact, being both dark haired and dark-eyed, slender and graceful, they could easily have been mistaken for sisters. Catrianne was older by more than a year, but the difference was not obvious and Catrianne never attempted to claim any kind of seniority, always accepting meekly that Lucinia, as Alastor’s wife, was the mistress of the house.
Alastor and Lucinia’s first child was born on the first Monday after New Year’s Day, which is known throughout Christendom as Handsel Monday. A handsel is a gift made to celebrate a new beginning, as a coin might be placed in the pocket of a freshly-tailored coat. Alastor felt that his son could be seen as exactly such a gift, bestowed upon his marriage, and he was determined to make the most of him.
“Might we call him Handsel, do you think?” Alastor asked Lucinia and Catrianne.
“It is a good name,” they both said. Although Catrianne necessarily left the ultimate decision to Lucinia, there was never any possibility that she might deviate from such a unanimously approved opinion.
Every choice that is made in human life affects the range of further choices, and when the second child was due to be born Alastor said to Lucinia and Catrianne: “If our second-born is a girl, we ought not to call her Gretel.”
Lucinia had never considered that as a possibility, so ruling the name out coast her nothing, but she was curious as to Alastor’s reasons for making the remark, so she asked: “Why not?”
“Because I remember a tale that Catrianne’s nurse used to tell me when I was a small boy, in which two children named Handsel and Gretel are abandoned in the wild forest by their father, a poor woodcutter, at the behest of their uncaring step-mother. The old crones who lived in the vicinity of my father’s foundry loved tales of that sort, and the nurse to whom my father was obliged to confide Catrianne after my mother’s death seemed to know hundreds of them. She used to delight in telling them, while she served the functions of my governess as well as Catrianne’s nurse.”
“I was too young to pay close attention to then when she told them to my brother,” Catrianne explained, “but Alastor was at a very suggestive age, and some of the tales made a deep impression on him. I know that one, which is common even in the town, but it never frightened me in the way it seemed to have frightened Alastor. Not that it matters: who would want to call a child Gretel anyway?”
“It’s precisely because the tale is common, even in the town,” Alastor said, “that many people might think that Handsel and Gretel make a natural pair, and having already called one child Handsel, might think it quite appropriate to call a second Gretel—but there are omens in tales, and I do not think the example of that one ought to be followed. The lost children are captured and tormented by an evil fay, and although the tale ends happily enough for them—as all tales are bound by the principles of storytelling to do—I think that it might be dangerous to tempt fate in that fashion.”
“You’re not a woodcutter, my dear,” Catrianne replied. “Our maternal grandfather was, according to father, but he died before either of us was born, and we live in the town now. We left the wild forest behind us when we left the highlands, and although I often miss the days when you and I used to roam there, I’m not sure at all that we ought to carry its legacy of sinister beliefs with us.”
Lucinia, however, agreed entirely with Alastor that there really were omens and hidden meanings in ancient tales—of which she had an abundant supply of her own, which she had heard in early childhood—and that it was necessary to be very careful in naming children.
Catrianne shrugged her shoulders. “No matter,” she said, again. “Ruling out one name still leaves thousands from which to choose—unless you deem that the supposed wisdom of old crones sets others out of bounds, for any of the ominous reasons of which old crones always seem to have an abundant supply.”
“You should not be so dismissive of what our father calls superstitions,” Alastor said, pensively. “Father would have no truck with any such convictions, and frequently got angry if anyone tried to tell him that there was a kernel of truth in the old tales of the fae-folk that the forest-dwellers loved so much, but I have always suspected that there is real wisdom in that legacy, even though it is no longer easy to decipher. We may be far away now from what were once reputed to be the haunts of the fae-folk, in terms of the society we inhabit, but we are highlanders still. If we were still resident in the vicinity of the foundry, rumors would probably still be circulating to the effect that our mother was a changeling, and the crones might only have had to glance at you and Lucinia to begin whispering among themselves that both of you have the look of fays about you.”
“Might you have been a changeling too, then?” Catrianne asked Lucinia. “Or were the same things said of your mother that were said of ours?”
“I am certainly no changeling,” Lucinia replied, with perfect seriousness, “and nor was my mother. That did not prevent rumors being spread among our own community concerning her, though, and she was subjected to ostracism by her own folk for a long time, on the basis of a suspicion spread in whispers, so I understand what Alastor means. Fortunately, as you say, my sister, we live in the town now, and there is every chance that our children will be spared that kind of curse. Even so, we should be careful in naming them…and we must take care that they hear all the stories we know, when they are of an age to listen, for whatever their guidance might be worth.”
“Here in the town,” said Catrianne, “it’s often said that children must make their way in the real world, and that stories of the fae-folk will only fill their heads with silly ideas and unreasonable expectations.”
“Some people do say that,” admitted Alastor, “but the town-dwellers have merely devised a new armory of stories, which seem to them to be more appropriate to the order and discipline of urban life. For myself, I would rather our children heard some of those that I heard in my early childhood, which I loved so much, and any that Lucinia treasures in the same way—for they are, after all, our flesh and blood.”
“What name did you have in mind for your second child, then?” Catrianne asked him.
“In spite of my experience with my own father, I cannot help thinking, or at least hoping, that our son will choose to follow me in working wood with his hands,” Alastor said. “I would like him to master the grain of the wood, in order that he might make pipes, harps, fiddles and lutes. In the same way, I would like to hope that our daughter might complement Handsel’s achievements with musical abilities, either by playing like you or possessing a singing voice the equal of her mother’s. Let us give her a name that would suit a player or a songstress.”
“Ever since she arrived here,” said Catrianne, “Lucinia has been nicknamed Nightingale, although she has always insisted that the name would be more fittingly attributed to me—but if you mean what you say about the wisdom of stories, we ought not wish that name upon our daughter.”
“Certainly not,” Alastor agreed. “Another of the stories that our old nurse used to tell me, while I watched her rock you in your crib, sent the worst shivers down my spine. It was a tale of a little girl who fell into the care of a wicked man who knew the secret of training nightingales to sing by day, and who trained her to be a human nightingale of sorts. Even today, I shudder when I think of it.”
“I know that story too,” agreed Lucinia, “and I also know one about a nightingale that impaled itself on a thorn in order to stain a white rose red for a student who wanted to make a present of it to a girl, who then spurned it, so that the nightingale suffered for nothing. No, we certainly should not call our daughter, if the child I am carrying turns out to be a daughter, Nightingale…or any name with a similar meaning.”
“The little girl in the story Catrianne’s nurse used to tell me was imprisoned in a cage by a prince, was she not?” said Alastor. “She was set to sing in the depths of the wild forest, but suffered misfortune enough to break her heart, and she refused to sing again, until she fell into the clutches of her former master, who.…”
“Please don’t,” begged Lucinia. “Your memory is good, but that story has always haunted me, too, for very particular reasons.”
“You know, then,” Alastor deduced, “that your name means ‘nightingale’ in Latin? But I thought your people spoke a different language, and had only learned ours after settling in the high forest? I had assumed that the similarity was a coincidence.”
Lucinia did not have to answer that, because Catrianne interrupted. “Never mind that,” she said to Alastor. “I want to know how the story ends,” she said. “What did the little girl’s master do? I was too young to listen when my nurse first told you the stories, and although she repeated many of her favorite tales to me when I grew old enough to pay attention, I don’t remember that one.”
Not wanting to cause his wife the slightest distress, however, Alastor, was quick to change the subject, or at least to return to the real subject of the discussion. “I wonder if we might call our daughter—if, as you say, the child you are carrying should turn out to be a daughter—Chanterelle, after the E string of a musical instrument: the one to which the melody is usually sung? That way, it would suit her whether she showed a talent for playing or for singing.”
“But the word has other meanings, does it not?” asked Catrianne, dubiously. “A chanterelle is also a kind of mushroom—a highly-prized edible mushroom, to be sure, but still, a mushroom is a mushroom.”
“Oh,” said Lucinia, “but it’s such a beautiful name. I love it. Yes, my darling, if our second child is a girl, I would love her to be called Chanterelle.”
“Chanterelle is an excellent choice, then,” said Catrianne, obligingly. “At least no one ever heard a story about a little girl named Chanterelle, so far as I know. But what if the baby turns out to be a boy?”
The discussion continued, but there is no need to record the rest of it here, for the child was indeed a girl, and she was named Chanterelle.