Princess of the Midnight Ball - Jessica Day George [10]
“Do you think this is funny?” King Gregor whirled away from Rose and turned his attention to Poppy, who apparently was the snickerer, as Rose had suspected. “Do you find this amusing?”
“N-n-no, Papa,” Poppy stammered.
Rose closed her eyes and prayed for strength. Poppy wasn’t stammering from fright, but from the effort of not laughing aloud. Curse the girl! There really was nothing funny about their situation, and yet Poppy found every opportunity to make light of it.
“Kingdom in a shambles! No money! Wounded soldiers everywhere I look!” King Gregor threw the slipper at the wall in frustration. “And night after night you girls sneak off and do who-knows-what, and expect me to pay for more fripperies!”
“No, Father,” Rose said.
“What?” The king turned back to his eldest daughter. “Are you saying that you aren’t sneaking off? I have the evidence right here!” Now the slipper’s mate was waved under her nose. It was one of Orchid’s, pink satin with silver ribbons. There was a hole in the toe and one of the ribbons dangled by a thread.
“No, Father,” Rose said, remaining as calm as she could. “I’m not denying the evidence. I only meant that you shouldn’t have to pay for our ‘fripperies.’ We will pay for new slippers ourselves, out of our pin money.”
The other girls all groaned, but Rose’s offer deflated the king somewhat. “Well!” He huffed. “Well! It’s not as if you could expect much pin money anyway. Not with the state of affairs this country is in.”
“You must not worry, Father,” Hyacinth said gravely. She stepped out of line—King Gregor insisted that his daughters line up like soldiers to take their punishments—and held out her hands to their father. Hyacinth was only fifteen, but already she had the pale, serious face and painfully thin body of an ascetic. She spent her days in the chapel, praying for all their sins, and for their deliverance. She was, surprisingly, an exquisite dancer.
King Gregor did not take Hyacinth’s outstretched hands. Instead he glared at her. “You! You have the most sense of all of them, or so I thought! How did they convince you to do this?” He waved the slipper in her face now. “And how is it that you get out of your rooms to begin with? I lock you in every night my own self! Hey? Hey? Answer me! Put you in different rooms, and I wake to find all the doors open and you all lying about the rug in Rose’s sitting room like a litter of puppies! What was that about, hey?”
But Hyacinth just bowed her head and backed into line again. Rose heard Hyacinth sigh. She couldn’t tell the truth, and Hyacinth would never lie.
“You may well sigh, my girl,” Gregor said. Then he softened, most of his ire having been worked out by the shouting. “Now, be off with you all. I will have Herr Schmidt come and make you a new set of dancing slippers. You’ll need them: Breton’s new ambassador will be arriving this afternoon. But the cost will come out of your pin money,” he warned. “It will have to,” he muttered under his breath as he walked away.
“Poor Father,” Lily said when he was out of earshot. “Things are so very bad these days and to have this to contend with makes it even worse.”
“I don’t want new slippers,” Petunia said. She was the youngest, at six. “I want to buy sweets, and then I shall dance barefoot!” And she began to twirl around the room. “La, la-la, la!”
Pansy, who was seven, sat down on the floor with a flump. “I don’t want new slippers either. I don’t want to dance anymore!” And she began to cry.
“There, there!” Lily rushed to her side and picked up the little girl. Their hair was the same shade of glossy brown and both wore blue dresses today. Pansy liked to match clothes with her favorite sister.
“I’m sorry, sweeting,” Rose said, rubbing Pansy’s back. “But you know that we have to dance.”
“Now I can’t have the new music I wanted to buy,” Violet grumped. At fourteen, she was a prodigy on the pianoforte and sang like an angel. “I have to pay for dancing slippers instead!”
“I’m sorry,” Rose said automatically.
She felt like she was always apologizing