The Secret Stories
As soon as Handsel and Chanterelle were old enough to hear stories, Alastor, Lucinia and Catrianne were careful to tell them the tales that that they thought appropriate for them to hear. They told them tales that were popular in the town as well as those they remembered from their own childhoods in the highlands, but they had a natural preference for the highland tales, which Alastor and Lucinia remembered with an acute nostalgia, and in which Catrianne too found a special pleasure.
Each of them often told tales while they were alone with one or other of the children, but it was by no means uncommon for tales to be told while all five of them were together, with the adults taking turns to serve as storyteller. On such occasions, hearing the tales told again, in the company of the children, added an extra pleasure to the remembrance of their own childhood stirred up within them. The tales, and their telling, acquired a new significance in that context, and a further charm.
In the course of those gatherings, when Alastor, Lucinia and Catrianne took turns to serve as narrator, it soon became obvious that although Lucinia knew many of the same stories as Alastor and Catrianne, as well as some that they did not know—just as they knew some that she had never heard—the versions she had been told as a child were often different in detail, and in attitude from the versions known to Catrianne’s nurse.
Almost all of the stories known to all three of them featured fays, as the principal species of the fae-folk were usually known in the tales, and almost all of them assumed that there were fays who treated humans benevolently and others that treated them malevolently, but Lucinia’s versions sometimes attributed different and more elaborate motivations to the fays of either kind. Catrianne noticed, however, that when Lucinia repeated stories that she or Alastor had previously told, her narrations often fell into line with theirs, or at least came to resemble them more closely, as if she were giving their versions preference to her own, at least while all of them were together.
When Catrianne mentioned that to Alastor, he said: “I suppose that she doesn’t want the children to be confused by hearing different versions of the stories, and as you and I are two and she is only one, it seems more convenient to adapt her versions to mirror ours.”
“Isn’t it odd, thought,” Catrianne remarked, “that there should be different versions of the same tales?”
“Not really,” said Alastor. “Tales vary a good deal from place to place and between the town and the city, and individual tellers are always changing them at their own whim. You have to remember that although you and Lucinia are both highlanders, and both children of the forest, her people seem to have been relatively recent settlers, whose ancestors were nomads. Between themselves, they still speak a language that bears no resemblance to ours, although they have all learned ours in order to communicate with us. It’s quite natural that the versions of the tales that Lucinia was told as a child differ from those your old nurse told us—in fact, the surprising thing is that she knows so many of the same ones. Tales do travel across all kinds of frontiers, though, storytellers always being avid to adopt and adapt the bare bones of them to their own way of thinking. The ones we know probably have widely scattered points of origin, and have become somewhat confused during the process of transmission.”
That all made such perfect sense that Catrianne accepted it wholeheartedly, and there was absolutely no malice intended in the casual remark she then made.
“Well, I suppose she adapts her versions to mirror ours when we’re listening, but as their mother, she’s alone with them more frequently than you or me; perhaps she tells them her own versions then.”
“But that would defeat the object of the mimicry,” Alastor pointed out.
Catrianne frowned slightly on discovering that she had said something silly, and sought for something to say that might repair, or at least at cover up, her error. “Well, she might tell them secret stories, which she considers unsuitable for our more civilized ears.”
“Perhaps she does,” said Alastor, laughing. “I confess that when I’m alone with one or both of the children, I often whisper confidences to them that I would hesitate to voice to you or Lucinia. Perhaps you do the same. Chanterelle is a particularly good listener, don’t you find, and very discreet, given that she lags a little behind Handsel’s understanding?”
“Do you think so?” asked Catrianne, laughing in her turn. “I sometimes think her more subtle and more complicated than her brother—and she’s a girl, of course, which means that she is naturally cleverer and more skilled in dissimulation.”
“What a strange thing to say,” said Alastor. “What need do you have to dissimulate, who have no husband from whom to keep necessary secrets? Surely you have nothing you need to hide from a brother who has had you full confidence since you first learned to talk?”
“Do you think so?” she replied, and then added: “Well, perhaps you’re right,” in a tone that might have suggested the opposite to anyone but Alastor—who, having always been less subtle and less complicated than his sister, was always more inclined to take things at face value.
Alastor did notice, however, that both of his children loved stories featuring the fae-folk far more than stories that only had human characters. He was not sure whether to attribute that to the reflection of the storytellers’ own fondness and preference, or whether there was something intrinsic to the stories that struck a chord in their infantile souls. Their own preferences were not identical, of course, but Alastor thought it only to be expected at his son would be particularly attracted to tales of adventure and derring-do, in which the heroic deeds of princes, knights or other heroes were placed in the foreground, while Chanterelle liked quieter and more mysterious tales—although not necessarily those in which princesses or goose-girls took center stage.
Handsel, as might be expected, given his name, was particularly fond of the tale of Handsel and Gretel, and Alastor tried to adapt it further for his taste by giving Handsel credit for both initiative and activity in extracting the captured children from the lair of the evil fay. Handsel also liked tales with an Oriental flavor, and tales derived from chivalric romance, which routinely featured heroes confronted with strange and dangerous circumstances, from which they had to extract themselves by means of a combination of ingenuity and swordplay.
Chanterelle, on the other hand, seemed to have a particular liking for a tale of a bronze-founder who was lured away from his family by a fay who had fallen in love with him, until he was eventually recalled to his duty by the tolling of a church bell he had made, which had fallen into a lake but continued to toll mysteriously in its depths. Catrianne had initially told the children that story to help them understand the kind of work her father did, although the bell was made of bronze rather than iron and she assured them that Ernand was not at all the kind of man to be seduced by a fay. Chanterelle also liked tales set in the forest, where her other grandfather had lived—although Lucinia tended to be rather vague about exactly what he had done there, except for resisting strongly the suspicion that he might have been a woodcutter or charcoal-burner.
“My mother,” she said, firmly, if pressed on the point, “would never have harmed a tree.”
“But your mother is not your father,” Catrianne observed, “and men often have ideas different from their wives.”
“Alastor and I do not,” Lucinia insisted, although that was not the issue on which slight suspicion had been cast. “Alastor loves trees as much as I do.”
“Which doesn’t prevent him from dissecting their living flesh in order to make musical instruments,” Catrianne riposted, always inclined, when she sensed an argument, to try to win it, even though nothing was further from her mind than hurting anyone’s feelings by so doing.
“In fact, that’s not entirely true,” Alastor was quick to put in. “Trees are not like humans, who only have a few dead parts in association with their quick—hair, nails and the outermost layer of the skin—and seem to die all at once. Trees are much slower to die, and the parts of the living tree that are akin to the quick of our own flesh consist of the layer immediately below the bark, and the heartwood. Most of the other layers of the xylem are dead long before the tree itself dies, no more alive than your hair or your fingernails, and it’s those layers—the death within the life—that provide the raw material for workmanship.”
“That’s not the point,” Lucinia put in. “Trees accept being carved, for certain purposes, and one of those is the making of music. The forest used to love music. The forest was always willing to make the sacrifice of individual trees for certain purposes, of which music was one. Even now….”
But there she stopped, in confusion, as if she feared that she might already have said more than she intended, and more than she would have wished, if she had not been carried away.
“Does the forest no longer love music, then?” asked Catrianne, having observed Lucinia’s use of the past tense. “Does it no longer make sacrifices?”
Lucinia did not answer, and Alastor, perceiving that she might appreciate a little moral support, intervened. “Forest folk—genuine forest folk—don’t have the same attitude to the forest as we do,” he attempted to explain. “They’re far closer to nature than people like our father, who lived surrounded by the forest, but in a clearing contrived amid quarries and mines, as far from the forest spiritually as it’s possible to be. You and I, as children loved the forest and loved to spend time there, but we always went into it as invaders, from another world. For Lucinia’s mother and her family, it was quite different. We see the forest as something static and unchanging, but they have a sense of its antiquity, its transformations. You can glimpse that in some of Lucinia’s stories as well as turns of phrase that sound odd to us. Then again, her ancestors came from elsewhere, and might well have handed down memories and stories about different forests.”
“I can understand that,” Catrianne agreed, “but it’s all rather vague. How much do you really know about her ancestors?” She turned to Lucinia to add: “How much do you?”
Lucinia still showed no inclination to say any more.
“I met her mother,” Alastor said, defensively, although it hardly constituted an answer to Catrianne’s question.
“But not her father?”
“No,” Alastor admitted. “He was long dead, I think. She and her mother lived alone.”
Catrianne looked at Lucinia then, with an interrogative gaze that was impossible to ignore. “That’s true,” Lucinia said. “When I met Alastor, I was living in the forest with my mother…almost alone.”
“Almost?”
“My mother had a sister, Amanita, who lived nearby and visited us frequently, even when the rest of the community shunned us, but she and my mother were…estranged…like you and your father.”
“I see,” said Catrianne. “So you never actually knew your father, then, any more than I knew my mother? Do you have any memory of him at all?”
“No, none.”
Catrianne nodded at that, implying that she understood that perfectly, because it corresponded with her own experience of her absent mother, although it seemed only natural for her to ask, in consequence: “And were you estranged from your mother in the same way that I have become estranged from my father? Is that why she didn’t come to your wedding, and never comes to visit you?”
Alastor’s father had not come to his wedding, and had never come to visit him, and although Alastor still called at the foundry when he happened to pass it while traveling on business, Catrianne had not been back there since she had left to join Alastor in the town.
Lucinia hesitated, but eventually said: “My mother and I love one another very dearly…but yes, we’re…estranged now, in a way. I don’t think it will ever be possible for us to see one another again.”
Catrianne wanted to ask more questions, but Alastor put his hand on her arm and warned her with his gaze to desist. It was evidently a sore point. Naturally, she did desist, for the time being. That was only one of several issues about which she had effectively been forbidden to talk, however, and about which her curiosity was sharpened by the continual prohibitions. She continued to raise them occasionally, as subtly and as slyly as she could, always hoping to obtain more information in order to sate her natural curiosity.
Another such question was the story of the little girl whose wicked guardian knew the secret of making nightingales sing by day. Catrianne knew that both Alastor and Lucinia knew the story, although neither of them wanted to tell it, even to her, let alone to their children.
“They’re too young,” Alastor told his sister, when she once suggested, pointedly, when all five of them were present, that he tell it, hoping to rally the children’s pleading to her support.
“But Handsel and Chanterelle must both be much older now than you were when my old nurse told it to you, over my cradle,” Catrianne argued. Handsel was then six years old, and Chanterelle five.
“Yes, but it was too horrible at that age,” Alastor said.
“Alastor’s right,” said Lucinia supportively.
“But stories have to prepare them for the fact that life has its horrors,” Catrianne argued. “You love telling them the tale of Handsel and Gretel, and they love hearing it, even though it’s about two children abandoned and left for dead by their parents, which must surely be an ultimate horror, from their viewpoint. And the story abut the bell-founder that I tell them, simply because it has a founder it, is also about a man who deserts his family, whose wife and children don’t even know what has become of him—in much the same way that I didn’t know what had become of you when you got lost in the mountains and found, or were found by, Lucinia and her mother. That was quite horrible, I can assure you.”
“I’m sorry,” Alastor said. “I didn’t mean to desert you. It was an accident. I was hurt when my horse threw me. I couldn’t walk properly for several days.”
“I know. That’s not the point. How old were you when you first heard the story, Lucinia?”
“I can’t remember, exactly,” Lucinia told her, evasively. “Too young, that’s for sure. I understand what you’re saying about having to prepare children for bad things, but….”
She left it there.
“But the real reason that neither of you wants to tell the story,” Catrianne objected, “can’t have anything to do with the age of her children, because you don’t want to tell it to me either, which you could easily do when we’re alone, without telling them.”
“That’s true,” Alastor admitted, “but I can’t tell stories about nightingales without thinking about Lucinia and you, who have been so frequently likened to nightingales. And because of that, I can’t even think about the story without shuddering. That’s why I don’t want to tell it, even to you, in private.”
“You’re too squeamish by half,” Catrianne told him, although she was careful to say it in a tone that suggested that she did not intend to scold him. “And what’s your excuse?” she asked Lucinia.
“I’ll tell it to you if you insist,” Lucinia said, quietly, “in secret. But once you’ve heard it, you’ll know it, and you’ll never be able to get the image out of your mind. You’re my sister; I love you too much to want to hurt you, and it’s a story that hurts.”
Catrianne was slightly taken aback by that, and once again refrained from insisting, for the time being. She did want to have the last word, though. “In actual fact,” she said, using a phrase the commonplace in the town, although rarely applied to actual facts—“nightingales aren’t very good singers at all. It’s the mere fact of their singing by night that’s remarkable, not the quality of their performance.”
“Why can’t we hear them?” Handsel put in, then, in his naïve fashion. “I hear birds singing early in the morning, but I’ve never heard any bird singing at night.”
“Owls hoot and screech by night.” Alastor put in, “but I don’t suppose you can call that singing.”
“There aren’t any nightingales in the town,” Catrianne told her nephew. “They’re rare even in the forest around the foundry, where I was spent my childhood.”
“As rare as the fae-folk?” asked Chanterelle.
“Not quite that rare,” Catrianne admitted. “I’ve heard nightingales, I’ve but never seen a fay.”
“Have you, Mother?” Handsel asked.
“Heard nightingales? Oh, yes. But your Aunt Catrianne is right. Their twittering is pretty enough, but they’re not the best singers among the forest birds.”
“And fays?” asked Chanterelle. “Have you seen fays?”
But Lucinia did not reply to that question.
As usual, in such circumstances, Alastor intervened. “Did you know that your mother’s name means nightingale, in Latin?” he said. “I think that’s part of the reason why the neighbors gave her the nickname.”
“But Catrianne is the one who plays the flute,” Lucinia put in, “which sounds more like birdsong than my voice. And her name, according to Zebedee, comes from the Greek katharos, which means purity.”
Zebedee was no longer working with his hands, and Alastor had long since qualified for his mastery, but he still maintained a warm relationship with the old man, whom he and all his family regarded as a fount of wisdom—and, indeed, Zebedee had once been to school, and owned a number of printed books. Alastor had become an enthusiastic reader himself, and so had Catrianne, but they knew that the books the old man owned, and was only too pleased to lend them, were only a tiny fraction of those he had read in his lifetime, even though printed books had been exceedingly rare in his youth. Strangely enough, Lucinia also showed glimpses of learning that could only have come from books, and admitted, if questioned, that her mother had learned to read long ago, and had delighted in reading any books that she or her sister Amanita had been able to acquire.
“If Catrianne means purity, it’s by no means an inappropriate name for you, my sister,” Alastor observed, “although I doubt that’s why my parents chose it, knowing no Greek. In the same language, Zebedee says, my name means avenger, but that doesn’t fit me at all. I’m a very placid person.”
“What does my name mean?” Handsel asked.
“And mine?” asked Chanterelle.
The appropriate explanations had to be given, at length.
The eventual result of those adroit changes of subject was not only that Catrianne did not get too hear the full story of the man who knew the secret of getting nightingales to sing by day, but that Chanterelle did not get to find out whether her mother hand ever seen a fay…unless Lucinia told her the answer in secret, in the same way that she had promised, reluctantly, to tell her the story.