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Betsy's fingers are long and pale and cold, her eyes ice-grey; I was pricked with a pin when I was a child, she said once, and I bled away my heart's blood. Ever after, she has been white as the moon, cold as the snow.
She is unwilling to be wooed, at first. Her smiles appear only shyly, slowly, the way young deer step from the trees and into the sunlit fields. She smiles as though she is afraid that she is being hunted.
"It needn't be a courtship," Mary tells her. "Be like Ophelia, and hold him a fashion and a toy in blood."
"It's blood that frightens me," says Betsy softly. "I shouldn't like to be Ophelia."
Mary is less shy, or perhaps less coy. When the man comes with posies to ward off the plague, she shakes back her long, black hair, and smiles, and asks him his business--and the man smiles in return and answers, "To please thee."
Their work is simple and pleasant; every day the lasses break their fast with porridge and then weave and spin together.
As she spins, Betsy sings of farmers' daughters charmed to their doom by passing knights, and Mary laughs at her and tugs her up to dance. Their arms link together, and they are inseparable, unbreakable. Betsy turns to kiss Mary's cheek and catches the corner of her lips instead, and Mary laughs so hard that she has to stop dancing to catch her breath. By the time she straightens, her face is red as a berry, her eyes glittering with good humor. "Wilt thou kiss me again, my swan?" she asks, and finally Betsy blushes and laughs with her.
Betsy will have a fine linen dress, when they have finished their work. Mary thinks that they must dye their fabric red, for red looks well against her pale skin. They will embroider it together with fine May flowers, and when the plague has passed they will ride through the town in their finery.
When the light has grown poor and the girls have eaten a dinner of bread and water, they lie upon a single bed with their arms around one another, trading well-worn secrets until their words have run out.
Betsy's hands are warm, when she has kept them pressed long enough against Mary's skin. Her lips are warm, too, and soft, and after a moment they part under Mary's.
"Wilt thou kiss me again, my rose?" asks Betsy, although she buries her face against Mary's neck when she asks it.
"I will," Mary answers, and she does.
Their suitor brings them apples from the city, and meat pies, and fresh flax to spin; Betsy cries out in delight at the sight of so much bounty, seizing Mary and kissing her soundly before she remembers herself enough to blush. The young man only grins at their good cheer and says, "If the Lady Bell's uncle would consent--would I could have two such women for wives!"
"Jacob had four," Mary answers, curtsying, and Betsy regards her aghast--but there is a pleasure in the scandal of it, and there is no one here to see it but they three.
"Do you mean to marry one of us?" Betsy asks, for she is thinking of Ophelia's tokens and Hamlet's scorn.
"I do," the young man answers, "But I should be equally pleased in fair or dark."
"We are not gowns, alike but for the color and the cut!" cries Mary. "Go, sir, until thou hast learned better manners!"
"It will be a long time in coming," the man laughs, "For I am a notorious rake."
"Wilt thou wed him?" asks Betsy, when they are finishing the last of their old flax and beginning to clean the new.
"I will not!" Mary answers at once. Her quick fingers thread the shuttle through the fibers that Betsy has spun. "What need have we of his charms? Handsome or not, he is no better than a rake--nay, worse than a rake, to ask us both!"
"Thou art more handsome than he," says Betsy. Her face is flushed, and Mary would be pleased at the sight were it not for the sweat on her brow.
That night, Betsy retires before the sun has set. She feels hot, she says, and her chest pains her--and indeed, her pale face is stained a hectic red.
Mary holds her hand until Betsy's eyes have closed, and then she goes to sit outside their little bower to prepare the flax. There is light enough, yet; the low sun turns the flax a fine, buttery yellow.
Mary feels a prick, and she gasps. She draws her finger up to her lips to suck it soothed, tasting blood on her skin.
When she sifts through the flax, she finds only a tiny pin.
Betsy dreams of a narrow stairway with a corpse at the bottom. It is her mother's body, pale in the moonlight and drained of blood; Betsy has never seen death before, and at first she thinks that her mother has fallen asleep there. She can smell something horrible, though, like the cesspit where the kitchen leavings go. Her mother's white hand is closed around something small and sharp that glints silver in the moonlight.
Why is the door open? Betsy wonders--and then there is a hand on her arm, and a flash of glittering teeth, and a sharp pain at her heart.
She cries out in her sleep and presses into Mary's arms, face hot and sweat-slick; Mary whimpers and clutches her closer.
Mary dreams of a woman lying dead in the water, her pale fingers threaded through with plague-posies of daisies and nettles. She does not know whether the girl has fallen, or whether her sister has pushed her for jealousy.
The loom does not click and the wheel does not spin. The porridge has not been made; the apples have not been eaten. The door to the bower falls open at a touch.
Betsy Bell and Mary Gray lie in each other's arms on their narrow bed, their heads bent together and their lips touched red-brown with blood.
Their suitor sits upon the bedframe and reaches up to touch their hair.
He will put them out in the sun, thinks the man, and let it work on them. By the time the girls are found, the crows will have eaten their eyes and the sun will have withered them beyond recognition.
He leaves the girls to lie together on the riverbank, and goes away whistling a familiar song.
They bore him barefac'd on the bier;
Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny;
And in his grave rain'd many a tear--
"But Lamkin's come again," he laughs, flipping shut his box of pins.