Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [40]
I shook my head, but obliged her. Then, with all the yearning that I had learned to stifle, with all the love I had saved, I untied her bodice and bent to kiss the brand-new face of love. She lifted her mouth to mine, but pulled back as I tried to unlace the shift that covered her breasts. "Do not take it off just yet," she said. "Let us dance first, you and I." She held her slender arms out to me and looked so like a child begging one more sweet that I walked into her embrace and held her fast. We whirled around the room while she sang off-key an old peasant song I had not heard in years.
"This is the way it was the night we met," she told me. "The magic felt just like this. The lights were shining, and you looked at me with just those eyes. Tell me what you saw."
"I saw my dream," I said. "I saw the fairest, most wondrous creature that ever walked the earth." She laughed, tossing her head and letting me slip my hand beneath the shift. "I saw a princess dressed in light, a fairy sporting moonbeams in her hair."
I laid her on the bed and began to kiss away the shift. Still she stopped me, begging for another dance. "Tell me how it was. How the magic made me look."
I could hardly speak for the knot of longing in my throat. But I held her gently, wooed her with tenderness and a patience born of years. "You looked as you do now." I touched her under the frothy gown she could not bear to part with. There would be time, I thought, for wearing away this shyness. Long chains of days together, filled with growing ease and love. She fell into the cloud of linens around us and her arms circled my neck. "As fair as any woman I hope to know."
***
When I woke my bride was gone and a single streak of sun shot across the floor and up the sheets. Once I had stowed the chamber pot and made my way to the window, the world seemed fresher, more promising than I had ever seen it. The trees trembled with excitement and every hill sloped toward some undiscovered joy. I dressed quickly, eager to find Cinderella, to spend our first day in the sweet intimacy I had nursed in my imagination for weeks.
I heard them laughing as I passed my mother's chambers. The sound stopped me in the cold hallway and drew me to the door. It was swung wide and I could see most of the sitting room from where I stood. A tiny tremor, not as sharp as disappointment, kept me on the threshold, watching the women at my mother's feet. They were clustered on pillows and footstools, some sewing, others working on the hair of the fair-headed beauty at the queen's knee. Her laugh was the gayest of all, as they fussed and giggled, rearranging combs and braiding tresses. "Is this the style you meant, Mother?" my sweetheart asked, turning to face the queen, then bringing a nervous hand to a curl that had strayed from its place. "Is it really French?"
My mother looked down from her perch above them. Her inspection was thorough and emotionless. "Exactly," she concluded at last. "It's perfect for you, my dear." There was a hint of a smile on her face, until she glanced up and saw me at the door. All the women followed her gaze, staring blankly, as if I were a curious menagerie specimen that had somehow wandered into their human society.
In that instant, something ancient and dispiriting gripped me, but I shook it off. When the frozen tableau spilled into action, bits of silk flying, a gilded mirror winking its bright eye at the ceiling, all the women rose and my mother walked to meet me. She stopped me just inside the door, and turned her face aside to be kissed.
Behind her trailed my Cinderella, flushed and self-conscious in her new coiffure. Again she touched a loose feather of hair. "Your mother has been showing me how they dress in the French court," she told me over the queen's shoulder. "Do you like it?"
I hardly heard her question. Her presence in my mother's chamber, her wild hair caught up in a stylish prison, disconcerted me. "I woke just now,"