The Devil on Her Tongue Read Online Free PDF Page B

watching my mother make her medicines, and of seeing her pull babies—pink, blue, chalky,bloody—from the hidden part of a woman’s body. She taught me how to bring down the swelling of sprains and relieve the pain of bruises, how to set a broken bone, soothe a fever, or rid the body of the venom from a spider bite. She also studied the smoke of the wormwood and the small blaze of candles she dipped into a powder she made from sea water and herbs so that their flames flickered blue and green. She spoke Portuguese with a heavy tongue, but the secret language she chanted while the fragrant smoke whirled about our heads flowed from her lips in a beautiful, lilting melody. I learned these chants even though I didn’t understand what they meant. Sometimes she would stop in mid-sentence, gazing at something I could never see, and I knew she was having a vision, or listening to the voices that surrounded her. The smoke and the visions and voices told her the future.
    While other girls were playing with bits of yarn and little wooden figures made by their grandfathers, I was learning my mother’s secrets. I felt her recipes and spells sewing themselves under my skin with tiny, careful stitches.

CHAPTER FIVE
    I sold the snuff box and bought myself a square hand mirror edged in bone, and a little book of poetry. I knew I should have used the réis for food, but I still burned from Maria’s insult. I stared into the glass, willing myself to be the pretty girl Abílio had seen.
    I hoped my mother would scold me for spending the money recklessly, so that I could fight back. I would berate her for not being an ordinary woman like the others on Porto Santo. Maybe then my father would have stayed.
    But before I went back to my hut on the beach, I went to Rooi’s inn. Rooi Eikenboom was Dutch, like my father, and also like my father, he had once had a life at sea. Now he served sailors the local rum made with sugar cane, or wine delivered from Funchal every week during the good weather. In the storm season, when wild, howling winds blew the ships off course, away from the Madeira archipelago, Rooi closed his inn and went to the Canary Islands, returning when the winds calmed. My father said he had a family there, but I didn’t understand why they didn’t come live with him in Vila Baleira.
    The inn was empty, but Rooi had already drunk a number of cups of wine. I could smell the sourness on his breath as soon as I drew near him. He looked at me sadly, holding his cup towards me.
    “What am I drinking, Diamantina?” he asked. “Where on Madeira do these grapes grow?”
    I didn’t have the heart for our game today. “Did my father say anything to you about coming back?”
    “Poor
meisje
,” he murmured—“little girl” in Dutch—which made me miss my father all the more. “Ach, it’s a hard life for us all,” he said, setting his cup on the table. “Your father stayed on Porto Santo because he couldn’t show his face at the docks in Madeira or Lisboa. He was supposed to be dead.” His florid face, surrounded by long, thick white hair, was wide and flat. “I was the one who cut him from his chains after your mother found him. She came to me because she recognized that Arie and I shared a language. He stayed with me at first, waiting, he said, until it was safe for him to go to the ships again. But before that time came, he found that he was pulled by your mother’s beauty, and her spells. And so he stayed.”
    “I know all this,” I said. My father had many times told me what had happened aboard the
Slot ter Hooge
, and how the barrel had saved his life. That my mother had found him washed ashore. Rooi often told me his part in the story. I had heard the same story so many times it bored me, and I had no patience for it today. “But he’s gone now. He did leave.”
    Rooi stared deep into his cup, as if searching for answers. He gave me one more sorrowing look, his eyes stopping on the talisman around my neck, then