Free The Serpent Garden - Judith Merkle Riley

radiant light, streaming up through the roof, miles into the sky. The column was somehow human in form. It had a beautiful face, somber and glorious, and wings that stretched to the heavens. My heart beat hard. But I gathered my courage and spoke again. “If I let him go, what will I have left? I have no money, I have no family. Now I won’t even have a baby. I’ll have nothing at all.”
    “Nothing?” came the voice. “No, something. See this.” The radiant being moved one hand slowly across the night sky. Where it passed, the black, star-flecked heavens were erased and the blue of a summer noon took its place. Sweeping across the sky was the shimmering arc of a great rainbow. “It’s yours, if you can pick it up in your hands,” the enigmatic creature said.
    “But how? I can’t. Nobody can. How can I do it? What if I can’t? Stay, stay! Tell me more.” But the glowing column had vanished. The room was dark and small. A foul smell and eerie, sulfurous glow surrounded the cradle, which was empty, and stained with black blood.
    I woke much later, very weak. Full daylight was in the room, and Nan was peering in my face. “Her eyes, they’re open!” she cried. “Look what we have for you, everything you craved. Here is marmalet, made of oranges, just as you said. And a length of linen. And Mistress Hull found a cradle, ready made, for sale. And see here, Brother Thomas has brought you from the captain two lengths of the very finest wool. Just feel it!” She put the wool by my cheek. I turned my head on the pillow. My heart felt cold. Beside my bed stood the evil cradle of the dream. It had not been there the night before.
    “How—how did you get all these in only one night?” I asked.
    “Oh, dear, it’s been more than a night. It’s been three nights, and three days, too,” said Mistress Hull, who was sitting on the bench, sewing. “And we’ve watched all the time. You fell into a strange sleep, like death, and couldn’t be waked. Sometimes you screamed. Once we had to hold you down, for fear of injury.” Nan looked embarrassed, as if she hadn’t planned on telling me.
    “
Shush
. You know you shouldn’t disturb her in this condition,” she said to Mistress Hull and gave her that slit-eyed look that can stop runaway horses but didn’t stop Mistress Hull, who was even older than Nan and thought that gave her precedence.
    “So much has happened,” went on Mistress Hull, who is like me in that she doesn’t like to be cut off in midstory. “Oh, a world of things. Master Dallet’s funeral was as fine as a body could want, and the coffin was very elegant, though it did give off a bad smell, as if it had burst under the pall. But they did him honor, and you, too.”
    “Not that he deserved it,” broke in Nan.
    “My husband? Buried? Buried so soon?” For some reason, I felt more bereft than ever. How like Master Dallet to depart in grand ceremony provided at the expense of others and let me have no part in it. At least in death he might have let me have the place of honor I had earned in marriage. I could have walked behind his coffin and people would have respected me. Even dead, that man was a cheat.
    “But oh, there were some very elegant people there, very elegant indeed, and strangers. One of them, a distinguished gentleman with two white streaks in his hair, very rich and genial, approached me and said he wished to make arrangements to care for Master Dallet’s son, when he’s born in the summer, and raise him in his very own household.” Mistress Hull was bursting with the news.
    “‘And what about my mistress?’ I asked him,” interrupted Nan, eager to show that she was the cleverest and thought of everything, “and he said, ‘Oh, I’ll take care of her, too. Master Dallet was a very close friend of mine.’ But I swear, I’ve never seen the man before.” Nan’s words tumbled over Mistress Hull’s.
    “But he seemed like a very great gentleman. His hat was trimmed with a