The woman caught the girl by her red hair and shook her. The girl shrieked when she realized what her mother was at. She understood it was all up with her, and she understood too how witchcraft was punished hereabouts. The tower was littered with evidence of vile deeds, besides what the woman kept in a chest beneath her unknowing husband’s bed. The woman and her daughter heard the shouts below and saw the torches in the garden. After the third glass he ran for neighbours and for the watch. He crept away and went to his cellar for wine to stay himself. But what came next drained the blood from his heart. He had something of a shock when he heard his wife’s voice rise up in glad welcome. At an angle of the stair, the lighted room above, he paused to spy and listen.
He had not considered any evil so far, and did not want to alarm her. On impulse, he followed her, but quietly. One night very late, the silk merchant came home from a guild dinner in the city, and he saw a slim pale shadow gliding up the steps of the old tower, and he knew it for his child. And often the father peered at the books his daughter read, unable to make head or tail of them, yet somehow not liking them. Her mother had taught the girl her letters, though the merchant himself could read but poorly. She preferred to read in the garden at the foot of the tower. Despite her great beauty, she professed no interest in marriage, and none in clothes or jewels. The silk merchant, who had never suspected his wife for an instant of anything, began to mistrust the daughter. No doubt the woman believed herself clever to have got such a helpmate, but it proved her undoing. Their games in the old tower bound them closer.
The girl and her mother were close as gloves in a box.
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