Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [46]
She was panting with excitement, as if she could not part with the details fast enough. "There really was not very much blood, you know. Stepmother bled the most, but that is because she fought the ax man hardest. You would not believe how she wriggled and cried out. Why, she was down on her knees before they even put her neck on the block. 'Fetch my stepdaughter,' she cried. 'Send for the princess! Tell her what they are doing to us!'"
Pausing for breath, she undid the cloak from her neck and stood, proud and radiant, in a pale yellow gown. "How I wanted to speak up and tell her I was there! I wanted her to look straight at me when the ax fell!"
My head was spinning, and a poisonous, bitter taste filled my mouth. I closed my eyes on her brightness, but her happy voice found me still. "Of course, a princess cannot afford to be seen in the streets like that. So I kept my peace and pulled this old cloak tight around me." She paused again, a touch of indignation softening her relish. "I only wish they had let me take a lock of Stepmother's hair, too. If the executioner had known who I was, he would never have dared push me away."
***
That night it was I who took to my bed. Pleading illness, I bid my wife good night at the door to our chamber and went to sleep again in my father's old rooms at the end of the hall. I was hardly guilty of deception, since the minute I lay down I was swept by trembling and nausea. I closed my eyes and, sweating mightily, let the waves of sickness wash over me. Their rhythm was somehow reassuring: the pain and then the brief reprieve, the quiet, hopeless space into which I could fit one or two breaths, succeeded by the harsh, grinding pain. Absorbed in this pattern, surrendering to its awful symmetry, I fell at last into a dreamless sleep.
It was next day I met Lynette, a dairy maid in the palace stables. Of course, I had seen her before, plump and charming and careless. She laughed too loud, slapped her thighs, and was forever picking straw from her hair. It was not hard to guess how it had gotten there. All the stable boys and several of the kitchen crew found endless excuses to tarry in the milking barn.
I could not blame them. As my own days grew emptier and my nights more hounded by guilt, I began to spend hours at a time lulled by her guileless chatter and her generous impulses. "If you like the milk of cows," Lynette took to telling me, winking naughtily and cupping her mountainous breasts, "you shall find much sweeter here."
Day after day, I was drawn back to her like the rest. The queen and my princess never missed me, so there was nothing to prevent my trips to the barn. Besides, there was something cleansing about the sweet breath of the cows and the steady rhythm of the buckets filling as Lynette milked. At first she took no special notice of my presence, but soon she must have sensed my need, my desperate case. She sent the others away and saved all her jokes and sly teasing for me.
In the beginning, these meetings were merely a way to fill idle hours, but now the scamp affords me pleasures as rich as any I fancied at that long-ago ball. My dairy maid is no princess, nor does she wish to be. But she lifts her skirts and wraps her dimpled thighs around me with a will. And I tarry longer and longer with her in the loft. As each afternoon fades into dusk, I rise reluctantly from our bed of hay. I push her from me, laughing. "Stop, Lady Lynette," I protest, bidding her cover herself and cease our play. "If I am any happier it must show upon my face. And for the sweet Lord's sake, help me brush this straw from my clothes."
Though in truth there is no need to hide, to proffer proof of my fidelity to Cinderella. She requires no troth, no lust, no love. She asks merely for the same tired recitation each night. As we lie in our silken bed, three times the size of the loft that I prefer, it is only the story she begs for, the same words over and over. And because it frees me