Mildred Ellen Davis-Page always bought anything a fisherman's son or daughter brought her and all the fishermen's children knew it. They brought her barnacles scraped off their fathers' boats and limpets fished from tide-pools and beach glass and broken shells and occasional thumb-sized lumps of salt-water polished driftwood. For these, she gave them butter mints. Usually one per child.

"Where did you discover this treasure, dearest heart?" she'd ask, and the little bastards would smile and fold their hands together behind their backs, fingers crossed to ward off the devil who takes all liars away to burn in hell.

"I found it in the belly of a hognose pike, mum."

"Gilly-eel, missus, in its guts just like you told us."

"My da, he landed a seal shark, a great biggun, bigger than his boat, an it had ate all kinds a stuff. I brung everything for you to look through and there's an awful lot but I have to bring the bucket back to my mam when I finish with it and how much can I have for all this lot? Can I have extra?"

Sometimes what they brought Mildred had actually come out of the belly of a fish or a shark, but most times the child had just felt a little tingle in his sweet tooth and had scooped up any river pebble or shell or solid piece of sea trash that looked like it might have believably fit into a fish's mouth.

The fishwives usually brought her better, but not always. Those who knew what Mildred was after brought her chunks of tourmaline and spinel, or pinkish colored chunks of quartz they dug out of the cliffs over the river. Mildred could never predict what they'd turn up next. Over the years they'd brought her carbuncles of garnet, broken chips of poppy jasper, ammolite, red coral, cinnamon stones, and even the odd faceted ruby that someone had pried loose from the setting of a ring or necklace.

"So this came out of the belly of a fish?" she'd ask, and they'd nod their heads emphatically and lie to her.

"Yes, miss. It's a wonder, innit?"

Mildred paid the wives in glass beads, or strings of beads, or sometimes with a single, tarnished coin if the stones they brought her were actually worth something. Sometimes she even paid them with their own rubies, which their daughters or granddaughters had stolen from their jewelry boxes and traded to Mildred for a glass-bead necklace or two. Mildred did her best to make sure stolen gemstones made it back to whomever they belonged, her way of suggesting to the universe that anything lost or stolen needed to return to its rightful owner; though, to be sure, she always came out on the winning end of every bargain, even if it didn't seem so to the casual observer.

Of course, not every woman and child was a liar or a thief. Some brought her the genuine article, rare chunks of calcified bone or dirty pebbles scraped from the innards of fishes and eels. She paid the honest women and children a little better than the dishonest ones because it encouraged everyone, honest and dishonest alike, to keep picking through their fish guts before they turned it into bait or chum or tossed it all back to the sea or fed it to their hogs or their mangy dogs.

So it was, one afternoon, a red-haired child Mildred didn't recognize approached the booth where Mildred sold her jewelry every day. The girl smelled like the river and carried a soggy bundle of fabric. Mildred cleared a space for her, and the girl pulled the wad apart and plucked stones out of folds and wrinkles.

"My neighbor told me you buy rocks from out the river," she said. "Here, I brought you rocks. I'll get more if you give me some money. My pa took away my allowance."

Mildred, who'd selected a stone to examine, dropped it and drew her hands against her breasts. "I pay in butter mints not money, dearest. Until you're grown. When you're grown we can renegotiate. But I'm on a tight budget. Plus I don't want any old stones from the river bottom. I want—"

"Yeah, I heard. You want us digging through fish guts to find diamonds or something. But my friend told me you'll buy anything if somebody just tells you it came out of a fish. Even when it didn't."

Mildred pressed her lips together. "Well, I can't be responsible for liars now, can I?"

"I'm not a liar."

"All right, but I don't buy river rocks from honest children."

"What do you buy?"

"Not diamonds. I couldn't afford one. Anyway, what I want is better than any diamond."

The red-headed girl looked skeptical. Mildred sighed and retrieved her money box from under her counter. From it, she withdrew her paper sack of butter mints and, also, the brass frame of a tiny monocle, small enough to be mistaken for a finger ring if it hadn't been for the attached silver chain—the lens had been removed and lost many, many years earlier, when Mildred was still a young woman. Mildred counted butter mints into her palm, three of them, and gave them to the child.

"When I was your age," she said, "my father was an optician. A spectacle maker." Mildred held the monocle ring to her eye. "He ground lenses out of quartz crystals."

The red-headed child shifted her weight to one hip, leaning against Mildred's necklace display. She tucked a mint between her lips.

"Sometimes," said Mildred, "gentlemen or ladies came to commission lenses of a specific size or shape or material and, one day, a particular gentleman brought my father a curious stone and asked him to slice it for spectacle lenses, three pairs of varying thicknesses, and to polish them and set them into the frames of three gold-handled lorgnettes, which he provided."

"I don't know what that is," said the girl.

"A lorgnette? It's like a pair of spectacles with a handle. Have you ever seen a pair of opera glasses?"

The girl shook her head no, but Mildred couldn't think of another comparison to make. She waved her hand vaguely in the air, as if somehow that might conjure a lorgnette into the child's mind.

"Well," she said. "The stone was semi-transparent and a rather startling shade—somewhere between alizarin and vermilion."

"Red, you mean," said the girl.

"Red, yes. It doesn't seem enough to just say red seeing it was a magic stone, but yes. Red as a rose."

"I brung you red stones." From her wad of fabric, the girl plucked up a river pebbles, red indeed, due to the rust-colored river clay caked on it.

"Yes, well, that's very nice." Mildred took the stone and held it up as if to peer through it, though it was obviously opaque, then she set it down and wiped her fingers. She used the blunt end of her pen to maneuver the remaining dirty pebbles off the fabric, which unwadded into something resembling an apron when she prodded at its folds.

"My father didn't trust me, a child, near the magic stone," said Mildred. "It was too valuable. But he could hardly put it down. He cried the first time he clamped it to his workbench and set his lapidary saw atop it to cut it up. He sat and cried over it for most of a night, then he gave up, unclamped it, and put it in his shirt pocket."

The little girl—Mildred should have asked her what her name was—propped her elbows on Mildred's countertop. Mildred waited, pretending she didn't mean to go on, and after a moment the girl scratched her scraggly head. "You seen him cry?" she asked. "My Daddy never cries."

He wouldn't, Mildred thought. If any fisherman ever had a romantic bone in his body, it would've long been broken or worn down by the physical strain of hauling in pound after pound of suckermouth cod long before he'd grown old enough to become a father. In the summers it was cod, anyway. When the leaves turned, they dropped traps for the danio crab migration, then it was nothing but jellyheads and dories until the sea got too bad in winter to fish, at which point everyone just moved up into the mouth of the delta and dragged nets around for spotted river haddock and whiskerfish until spring, when it was time to go out for cod again.

"Well," said Mildred, primly, "my father cried sometimes. Usually at night, when he thought I was asleep. You see, dearest child, my mother died in her birthing bed, bringing me into the world. My father was too poor to hire a wet nurse, so I suckled goat's milk from the corner of his handkerchief until I was old enough to eat mash." This wasn't strictly true, of course. Mildred's father had been a shrewd businessman, doing work both as an optician and as a jeweler. Mildred's mother really had died in childbirth, but Mildred had been raised by a string of sweet-natured, doe-eyed milk maids who were pleasing to look at and played surrogate wife with her father in their off hours from playing surrogate mother to Mildred. "What's your name, child?"

"No, but he was saddened to have made me unhappy. I told you, he loved me greatly. He lifted me up and set me on my bed, then asked what I'd seen in the stone that had made me cry so to lose it. I couldn't remember, but eventually he admitted that when he'd looked through it, he'd seen my mother. He missed her terribly and the beautiful red stone showed him every place where she still existed in our life. In our blankets, which she'd knitted. In our furniture upon which she had sat. At our table where she'd eaten meals. Even in our clothing, which she'd sewn and patched.

"He never allowed me to peer into the stone a second time. Not when it was whole. He knew we couldn't keep it for ourselves no matter how we'd have liked to. Even had my father been a dishonorable man and tried to steal it, the man who'd commissioned the lenses was wealthy and powerful. We'd never have escaped him. So my father cut it up for the man, very carefully sliced the man's lenses so that the excess slivers of stone would be made as large as possible. There was little excess—the man had known how many he could get—but my father had a little experience at jewelry cutting, so he knew how to make every cut count. You see, he believed if he could get one more lens, even if it was quite thin, he'd be able to see my mother through it.".

Mildred's father had a lot of experience at cutting stones for jewelry, actually, but it would have spoiled the story for Mildred to say so. Jewelers were usually wealthy, and this was the tale of an ailing old man and his poor daughter, not the story of Mildred's true childhood.

"My father succeeded in creating one extra lens." Mildred held up the tiny monocle frame again. "Unfortunately, the effect of the crystal was greatly diminished by its reduced state. None of the lenses my father had cut produced the same potent apparitions of my mother that the larger stone had been able to produce, in fact. So my father—disillusioned by what he'd made and sorrowful at what he'd lost—gave the finished lorgnettes to the nobleman and hid the lens he'd made away, along with all the fragments too small to use for lenses. He put everything in a tiny box, which I found many years later in the back of a drawer.

"I'd often helped my father in his work"—patently untrue but Becky probably helped her father and mother at the docks—"and cleaned up after him when he was tired from a long day. Yet somehow the box surprised me when I discovered it lurking behind a sheaf of old receipts.

"I'd grown into a young woman by then, but was as curious as ever, and it never occurred to me that my father would have put it there to hide it from me. I opened it, and immediately lifted the rose-tinted monocle to my eye. Can you guess what I saw?"

Becky shook her head no.

"Everything I saw when I looked through it was lovely and beautiful, like roses. You've heard stories of rose-colored spectacles before?"

Becky shook her head; she hadn't. When Mildred had been a child, the milk maids had told her wonderous stories of magical treasures like rose-colored spectacles that showed the world at its best, or rings that granted wishes, or necklaces made of shells that would transform you into a mermaid. But of course, she'd grown up in a different time and different place, and fisher children had altogether different concerns than those she'd had when she'd been their age.

"It's simple, really. Have you ever looked through a pair of spectacles?"

"No, I ain't never."

"A magnifying glass?"

Becky shook her head again.

"A spyglass, maybe?"

"Sure, that. My grandpa lets us look through his spyglass sometimes. He got it off a pirate, when he was adventuring at sea before he met my grand-mum."

Mildred tipped her head in acknowledgment of this unlikely story, then continued. "Well, you see, the lens in a spyglass distorts reality so everything appears nearer than it actually is. And so too, my father's monocle lens distorted reality, but in a different way."

Mildred tried to explain how the lens had made their home into a palace, her plain dress into a ball-gown, et cetera, but Becky was disappointingly skeptical. "It didn't just turn everything pink?" she asked.

Mildred held the empty monocle frame to her eye. "It certainly didn't. If I had it here, I'd prove it to you."

"What happened to it?"

"I'm getting to that. Patience, child. So, once I'd seen how the world looked through my lens, I sought out the most vile things I could find. A rubbish heap looked like a pile of china dolls. A beggar in the street became a wealthy fashionista. The lens provided glimpses into a wondrous parallel world, and I couldn't get enough of it.

"As it happened, that very afternoon the fishmonger's boy, about my age, came to our house to deliver a packet of filleted rainbow finnies my father had ordered the previous day and asked me to pickle for kippers."

Becky crinkled her nose, as expected. Kippered finnies were quite disgusting. It had really been cherry-eyed salmon the boy had brought to their house, but only a wealthy family could have afforded salmon, and admitting she and her father had eaten salmon would have made Mildred's story a little... well, fishy.

"I'd completely forgotten the finnies, and when I answered the door, I was peering through the rose-colored lens. Imagine my surprise when I found myself face to face with the handsomest lad I'd ever laid eyes on, and him carrying an armload of fresh roses, the reddest and loveliest roses to be found anywhere in the empire!"

"But they was just fish, yeah?" said Becky.

"Alas, so they were, but I didn't allow myself to see they were fish until the young man had come and gone and the roses—fish, of course—were ready for brining. By that time the young man and I had talked for quite a long time. I'm sure he thought I was mad staring at him through my monocle lens, but he was so handsome through it. I couldn't help myself."

"He weren't handsome in real life?"

"Oh heavens, no. He was ugly. Ginger hair and his face all spotty with freckles."

This made Becky frown. Red-haired as she was, she had more than a few freckles of her own, but Mildred made no attempt to soothe her. She was unpleasant to look at and leading her to believe otherwise would do her no favors in life.

"My boy was smart, though. The next day he strung the little chip on a fishing line with a hook and used it for a lure. He caught the biggest fish he'd ever caught in his life, that day. Maybe the fish looked through the stone and saw big worms, I don't know, but that lure was marvelous compared to any ordinary fishing lure.

"I didn't see him often after that. Not for a long while. He got himself a place on a boat and brought back huge trophy fish. Racingfish and sailfins and all kinds of sharks. He even brought in a water hydra, I'm told, though I wasn't allowed to go down to the docks to see it."

"My Grandpa caught a water hydra once," said Becky. "He always says it like to bit his hand off when he was pulling the hook free."

Mildred nodded, but she didn't believe any such thing was possible. She'd never believed her fishmonger boy had caught a water hydra, either. He might as well have suggested he'd caught a capricorn or mermaid or the leviathan himself. Everyone who'd witnessed the thing before it supposedly thrashed free of their boat had been drunk by the time they'd returned to port. No one had believed the stories, not back then.

"Well," said Mildred, "not long after the water hydra incident, my young man caught an impressively large racingfish, but when he tried to bring it into the boat, it leapt about and the line broke. It escaped, taking the necklace charm away when it swam off. Soon after that my young man started coming around again. He swore he'd never meant to neglect me, that he was only trying to make his fortune. After all, he was only a fishmonger's son and I, the daughter of a well-respected optician.

"I didn't give him another lure right away. It isn't seemly for a lady to give in to her suitors too soon, so I made him prove he was sincere. Besides, I had only two chips of stone remaining that were large enough, and if he'd lost one, he'd lose another if I made it easy for him to get a replacement. Every day, he brought me roses, and every day he asked me for another charm like the one I'd given him before."

Mildred took up the necklace she'd been putting together when Becky had first appeared, and she sorted through her bead caddy to find a sea glass bead close to the size and shape of the one she'd threaded on the opposite side of the centerpiece.

"I did give in eventually," she said, "and he was more careful with the second pendant and used stouter fishing line. But with stouter line, he could land larger fish, and it wasn't long before the second charm was lost like the first. Well, I'd learned my lesson. I hadn't seen hide nor hair of him in all the months since I'd given him the second charm. So I refused to give him another until we were married."

"You were married?" Becky raised her eyebrows, as if somehow that seemed less likely than the existence of a magic stone.

"I'm still married, but my husband sailed away to make his fortune and when he came home again, he pretended not to know me."

Sometimes this admission brought sympathy from Mildred's audiences, but Becky was apparently still too young to care much about unrequited love and romantic betrayal. She shook her head and moved to browse Mildred's jewelry display.

"That ain't the way my grandpa tells it," she said. "My grandpa says you two weren't never married. You just tell lies all the time so people will feel sorry for you."

Mildred drew herself up in her chair. "Excuse me?"

"My grandpa's still got the glass lure you made." Becky gestured at the monocle ring, then took her wadded-up garment from the countertop and stepped back. "He showed it when my friend Natty told why his family picked through their fish guts before throwing 'em out. Grandpa says it's a good fishing lure, but not near as good as your stories make out."

She shook the bundle of fabric out—it was a pinafore, not an apron—and put the filthy thing on over her filthy dress. An expensive dress actually, Mildred realized, now that she'd taken enough notice to actually look at the girl properly. No wonder her father had taken her allowance away.

But yes, she could easily be who she claimed to be, and Mildred might have seen it sooner if she hadn't been misled by the girl's dirty appearance.

"My grandma says we ought to leave you be," Rebeckah said, "that you're just sorry for yourself because grandpa never loved you. That you just make up stories so to make yourself feel better, and that I ought to not feel too bad for you because you used to be rich and you're only unhappy now because you ain't never had to work hard a day in your life. You ain't never had to gut fish or untangle nets or anything."

Mildred laid her half-beaded necklace down on the counter. "Let me tell you something, little girl," she said, and her voice came out mean and hard. "For one, your grandma's never had to gut a fish or untangle a net either. And for two, your grandpa believed that lens was magic when I gave it to him. He believed it for a long time, and your family wouldn't be where it is today if he hadn't. The day after we married, he disappeared for ten years, sailed all over the world and fished in all the great oceans. He believed in his lucky charm, made his fortune, married a beautiful maiden and brought her home to live in the big house on the cliffs where you live now. None of that would have ever happened if it weren't for my magical lens."

"Grandpa says it's just a fishing lure. That it ain't magic."

"Yeah? If that were true, tell me why he won't give it back now that he's quit using it. Tell me why he can't let an old woman have her fantasy? It's mine by rights. He should have given it back when I asked for it. Instead, I've spent my life hoping I might find a little piece of it that a fish swallowed a generation ago, so that before I die I can see roses again."

Rebeckah exhaled sharply. She gave a dismissive wave of one hand, an infuriating gesture to see coming from a child her age. "They weren't roses anyway," she said. "They was fish. And you know what? If I liked roses, I'd have planted rose bushes and not wasted my time digging through fish guts to find a magic charm."

"You think so?" said Mildred. "My dear, I hope you live a long life and get everything you ever hope and dream for." Mildred picked her necklace back up and sifted through her bead caddy for another bead to string on it. "Now run along. Go plant rose bushes of your own, if you like, and I'll pray they're never struck by bugs or blight."

Maybe one day Rebeckah would grow up and wish she could see a better world—a world more just and beautiful than it really was—and maybe on that day, she'd understand and bring the lens back to Mildred. The two of them might sit together and look through it while eating butter mints and talking about the way things should be in a perfect world. Today was not that day.

Amongst her sea glass, Mildred's fingers drifted across something not quite round. She extracted what turned out to be a chipped sliver of reddish crystal, which she immediately held to her eye. Alas, the ugly, unpleasant little girl remained ugly and unpleasant.