Princess of the Midnight Ball - Jessica Day George [16]
“I don’t understand it,” Maria clucked, tenderly washing Rose’s face with cool water. “It’s astounding enough that she managed to get that gown out of the wardrobe, sick as she is. But how did she wear out a new pair of slippers?”
“I don’t know,” Lily said innocently, kicking her own worn-out slippers under the bed.
Then Jonquil coughed.
Plan
As the princesses succumbed to Rose’s illness one by one, King Gregor became desperate. He was a good-hearted man, for all his blustering and arm waving, and it pained him deeply to see his girls suffer. Worse still, Dr. Kelling feared that Rose’s illness was turning to pneumonia, and that brought back grief-ripe memories of Queen Maude’s last illness.
To add insult to injury, the mystery of the worn-out dancing slippers continued. Every third morning when the king visited his daughters’ rooms, it was to find them sicker than ever and with their dancing slippers lying at their bedside, worn to pieces. Gregor accused their maids of stealing his daughters’ shoes at night to meet their gentlemen friends, and even fired two of them before the housekeeper could point out that none of the servants could wear the younger girls’ shoes.
King Gregor begged and pleaded with his daughters to tell him what was going on, but they refused to answer, standing there coughing piteously and looking hollow eyed. He had hoped to marry one or two of them off to their new allies in Spania and La Belge, perhaps even to smooth things over with Analousia through marriage. But now all the girls were sick (and unattractively so, with red noses and hacking coughs), and the rumors of the constantly worn-out slippers had caught the attention of the city’s gossips.
It was Kelling who brought him that unwelcome piece of news. The shoemaker or one of the servants must have talked, because the town was awash with stories about the princesses’ nighttime activities. It was being said that they were ill from dancing with the fairy folk. Some even said the girls had caught some strange fairy ailment that could be cured only by dancing even harder than before, or by drinking goat’s milk under a blue moon, or other foolishness. Others spitefully whispered that it was God’s punishment on King Gregor for the war or for wasting so much money and labor on that fool garden.
The king put his head in his hands. “What am I to do, Wilhelm?” he moaned.
Dr. Kelling put his physician’s bag on the king’s desk and sat in one of the large leather chairs opposite. His father had been the prime minister during the reign of Gregor’s father, and the two had been boys together. They had served in the army side by side, been married the same year, and been widowed within a month of each other.
Feeling nearly as exhausted as his daughters, Gregor leaned back in his tall leather chair. It was like watching his Maude fade away all over again. He promised her he’d take good care of their girls, but she hadn’t seemed to believe him. Her eyes had been filled with such despair toward the end. And last night, visiting with Rose, he’d seen the same look. And why? If they could only show him the root of the trouble, he would seek it out and destroy it. But there was only silence and tears and hopelessness.
“Wilhelm, I …” The king’s voice trailed away. He didn’t know what to say, what to do. When war with Analousia had been inevitable, he had made the decision that had seemed best, and they had triumphed in the end. But how to triumph when you didn’t know what battle you were fighting?
Dr. Kelling leaned forward. “We’ve got to get to the bottom of this, Gregor,” he said. “It does no good to ask them; they cannot or will not tell. Now, I’m not one to indulge in talk of fairies and the like, you know that. But it seems to me that something is very wrong here. Something beyond youthful high spirits and a love of dancing.” He snorted. “Which doesn’t seem to be there, by the way. Poor little Pansy, when she was delirious with fever, kept sobbing that she