Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [38]
While these battles royal raged, I would hide under these very same stairs, my hands against my ears. If I closed my eyes, I could travel far away from the yelling and from the dark, intricate oaths issuing from my father's rooms. But of course, such respites never last. Neither did my time with the fairy dancer, Cinderella.
Too soon, I saw her grow restless, watched her count from our sanctuary the guests who had begun to drift in laughing clusters toward the door. Then, high in the castle tower, above the gods and goddesses painted on the ceiling, a bell began to ring midnight. Stricken, Cinderella looked up the marble stairs toward the guards at the door. "I must go!" She grabbed her train, darted back into the sea of silk and satin from which I had plucked her, and disappeared.
"Wait!" Midnight tolled again, and my mother, determined but unhurried, moved toward me down the stairs. "You did not tell me your family's name!" I saw a small figure gliding like a skater across the field of gold and marble, then gave chase. "How will I know where to find you?"
Too late, I pushed my way through the crowd, brushed past my mother, and reached the door. I raged at the watchmen who had let her climb into the silver coach that clattered out the gate as the last stroke of midnight hammered against the sky.
One of the watchmen, a burly fellow big enough to break me in two if I had not been his prince, hung his head, ashamed, while the other two pointed to a lost star that lay glittering in the moonlight on the bottom step.
The queen followed me down the stairs and leaned over the star burning my palm. "In order to wear that shoe, one would have to be a fairy or a child," she decided, straightening. "If she is the first, you will never see her again. But if you danced this night with a human, I swear we will ferret her out."
They made a joke of the story. In the streets and markets, they laughed at the love-struck prince who sent soldiers to every town. Who had his hopes raised and dashed a thousand times before he finally found his commoner sweetheart in a merchant's kitchen beside the grate, her elbows sooty and her hair filled with ashes.
Of course, the wags made much of the fact that it was a house my father had once frequented. They took relish in reviving old scandals and the foolish boasts of a widow in the habit of bragging about her "connections" to the palace. But those gossips never saw the smile with which Cinderella ran to me that day. They did not hear her laugh, warm and triumphant, as I placed the glass slipper on her foot. "My friend," I told her, "I was not certain I would ever be this happy again."
"And I?" she replied, brushing away the soot that clung to my sleeve. "I knew I would. If not, I should have died." Now she opened her arms and I scooped her from the hearth. Her fawning sisters bobbed up and down, bowing and crying as I helped her to my horse. Her stepmother stood bemused, then waved as if she had planned it all. She smiled at last, urging her daughters and her neighbors to bid us farewell as we raced like children to our palace of dreams.
Not without cost. The fact that my sweetheart's father had been, before he died, a wealthy man did little to stop busy tongues. Like a poison that infected the court and the market alike, talk of "Cinderella, the barefoot princess" spread everywhere. Old wives giggled over their stewpots, and ladies in waiting whispered at their sewing. They chattered and cackled and chewed on the story as though it were a meaty bone. How she had won a prince's heart, how she had cast a spell and caught a kingdom. Yet my mother, who usually despised such gossip, seemed not to mind.
"This foolish prattle will pass," she told me one morning. She had taken, since I'd brought home my future wife, to summoning me every day to her chambers, to looking more flushed and eager as the marriage date drew near. It was as if she, not Cinderella, were to be wed. "Before your father died, there were rumors, too. The people love to think their rulers fall in love with commoners.