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goblin man had done and relieve me of my regret and sorrow,

wishing she would at least be kinder.

After my acquiescence, though, she only turned and went into the

cottage without another word.

What would I have done without Lizzie and her parents? I would

have been an orphan in some other house, I’m sure. I might have

been given over to an innkeeper and his wife, or I might have been placed as a worker in a factory, at the ripe age of sixteen, when my own parents fell ill and began to pass away before my eyes. Instead, Lizzie’s father promised my father, his oldest friend, a friend he called brother, that I would not fall into the hands of strangers and be left alone in the world to fend for myself.

And yet there I was, latching the gate to their cottage behind me, alone, and latching the door of the cottage behind me, alone, and

creeping over the creaking floorboards until I could latch Lizzie’s and my bedroom door behind me, as if I were a stranger stealing

through their property in the middle of the night. Lizzie had already put on her bedclothes and pulled the covers up to her chin. She lay with her yellow hair streaming out on the pillow like an aura of light, her body curled into itself in the same way babies are born into the world. I changed my own clothes and slid into bed beside her, felt the heat of her body warming her half of the bed, and nearly put my hand upon her waist as I had grown used to doing all that spring and summer, before Lizzie grew afraid of our passion and told me it must end or we would burn in hell like poor Jeannie, upon whose grave no grass would grow. I had once planted daisies for poor Jeannie,

who everyone shook their heads about whenever her name was

mentioned, but no blossoms ever came to bloom. Everything wilted

and withered, as Jeannie herself had wilted and withered after she returned from the woods without her dark-skinned suitor.

“Are you awake?” I whispered into the dark that separated us.

Lizzie groaned and told me to be quiet.

“You shall see,” I told her. “Tomorrow, I will bring you the most

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delicious fruit—peaches, melons, fresh plums still on their mother twigs, and cherries worth getting—and then you will no longer feel such anger with me.”

Golden head by golden head, we lay in the curtained bed, like two

pigeons in one nest, like two blossoms on one stem, like two flakes of newly fallen snow, like two wands of ivory, tipped with gold for awful kings, and heard nothing more from the night but the sound

of our own hearts beating, and fell asleep without having reconciled.

Early in the morning, when the first cock crowed, we rose together and, sweet like bees, began our work for the day, neat and busy. We fetched in honey from the combs, milked the cows, flung open the

shutters to air the house, and set to rights all that had fallen out of place the day before. With Lizzie’s mother, we kneaded cakes of whitest wheat, churned butter, whipped up cream, and then went on

our way to feed the chickens before, in the late afternoon, we broke from our duties to sit and sew together for a while, and talk a little about nothing of importance, as we used to do, as modest maidens should, which I could see from the placid smile on Lizzie’s face, bent over her needlework, gladdened her. But no matter what we did that day, my thoughts were with the night to come, with the fruits my

teeth would meet in, with the music and the dancing, and the goblin men and women who would spin me within their embrace.

When at length the evening reached us, Lizzie and I took up our

pitchers to fetch water from the reedy brook, and did not speak of goblins or of fruit, but went along peacefully, as we did at the end of each day. Kneeling by the brook, we dipped our pitchers into the water to fill them with the brook’s rippling purple and rich golden flags, and when we stood again, the crags of a nearby mountain were flushed red with the setting sun.

“Come, Laura,” Lizzie said. “The day is ending. Not another

maiden lags. The beasts and birds are all fast asleep, and soon too shall we be.”

I loitered by the reeds, listening for the sound of their voices,

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waiting to hear a bow eke a tune from the strings of a violin, or a first rush of breath fill the pipes and bring the glen alive with music. “It’s early still,” I said. “The dew is not yet on the grass, no chill has settled into the wind.”

Lizzie, though, was not having any of my excuses. “It’s them you’re waiting for,” she said, “isn’t it?”