Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [42]
She studied our reflections, but her eyes seemed to peer deep inside the glass, behind my consternation, past her own loveliness. "'Old'? 'Sad'?" she said, mocking me. "Sad enough to turn a house wench into a princess! Old enough to make a queen my mother! A mother who will stay with me always, just as I dreamt."
"I am with you, too." My tone was petulant; even I heard the small boy's whine behind my words. (I am sorry I made you unhappy, Mama. I have been so lonely without you.) Perhaps moved by my pitiable tone, Cinderella came to bed then, sat beside me while I unbuttoned her jeweled vest. Like an obedient pet, she allowed me to undress her until I tried to slip away the long layers of petticoat that rustled around us.
"Wait," she begged as before, her eyes staring so deeply into mine, I thought she had found a new mirror there. "Tell me how it was that night. How you fell in love with a fairy princess. How she danced and whirled and stole your heart away."
When a kitten slips its head beneath your hand, it is little enough trouble to pet it, to stroke the soft head and back until it purrs. She required only a few words, a memory that pleased us both. So I told her again how she shone at the ball. How no eyes could look away from the lovely dancer, how the hours were like minutes as the blue satin swept round the room and the glass slippers spun webs of light across the floor.
As I recited the litany, she held me tight, her nails digging through my shirt. Each time I paused, she pulled away and held me at arm's length, laughing. "More!" she demanded, tossing her head like a spoiled child. "Tell me more!" And like a doting fool with a pretty changeling on his lap, I helped her see it all again: the grand hall lined with glittering torches, the tapestried walls, the carved satyrs holding up a painted sky. And at the center of it all, whirling like a firefly, a fragile golden girl catching us in her spell.
My hands under the petticoats, I retold the rings that had sparkled through her lace gloves. Against her ear, her neck, her damp white breast, I whispered of the satin bows at which the queen had stared in fascination from her balustrade decked with flowers. When the story was done, Cinderella sighed softly and drew me to her.
I woke again to an empty bed. Sweating, I rolled away from the stream of sun that striped the pillow, dressed hurriedly, and went in search of my bride. There was no one in the queen's chambers but an aged servant who had been ordered to wait for me. "They are in the east garden," she told me over her sewing. "They request you to join them there."
Fussing with roses and chattering amid stalks of lilies, my wife and mother looked up with mild annoyance when I arrived. "Oh, good. You're here at last." While she spoke, the queen advanced on the lilies, cutting blooms with a precise and practiced hand. The huge white heads dropped one by one into a basket held by the princess beside her. "We have a boon to ask, have we not, my dear?"
A small rose the color of egg yolk peeked from my wife's hair. "Yes," she said, smiling uncertainly into my mother's steely eyes. I had to laugh now at my foolish fear that the queen could mold Cinderella into an image of herself. Standing together, the two could not have looked more different. One was dark and stately, with a sharpness that had already hardened her beauty. The other was fair and changeable as sunlight, as innocent as a new day. "That is, your mother thought, and so did I..."
"It would be a wedding gift," my mother finished for her. "A way of announcing your choice to all the world." She bent to snip a calla, then stood again, the silver shears flashing. "A way, too, of putting an end to vicious talk and preserving honor in the wake of your somewhat hasty match."
I knew the talk of Princess Cinders was painful, not only to the queen, but to my love as well. "Worthy goals all," I admitted warily. "But why are the means so long in coming?"
The queen turned to cut another flower while my sweetheart raced