While Beauty Slept (2 page)

One

A DESTINY REVEALED

I
am not the sort of person about whom stories are told. Those of humble birth suffer their heartbreaks and celebrate their triumphs unnoticed by the bards, leaving no trace in the fables of their time. Raised on a meager farm with five brothers, I knew that the expected course of my life was to be married off at sixteen, to work a similarly poor piece of property with my own brood of underfed children. It was a path I would have followed without question, had it not been for my mother.

I must start my tale with her, for all the events that followed, all the wonders and horrors I have witnessed in my many years upon this earth, began with a seed she planted in my soul almost from birth: a deep-rooted, unshakable certainty that I was meant to be more than a peasant’s wife. Every time Mother corrected my grammar or admonished me to stand up straight, it was with an eye to my future, a reminder that despite my ragtag clothes I must comport myself with the manners of my betters. For she herself was proof that great changes in fortune were possible: Born into a poor servant family and orphaned at a young age, she had risen to a position as seamstress at the castle of St. Elsip, seat of the king who ruled our lands.

The castle! How I used to dream of it, envisioning an edifice of soaring turrets and polished marble that bore little resemblance to the hulking fortress I would later know so well. My girlish fascination extended into imagined conversations with elegant ladies and gallant knights, fantasies my mother did her best to suppress, for she knew all too well the dangers that came from putting on airs above one’s station. My mother rarely spoke of her youth, but I hoarded the few stories she told me like a ragman collecting scraps, wondering why she had given up her position as a cosseted royal servant for a life of crushing drudgery. Once her slim fingers had caressed silk threads and rich velvets; now her hands were chapped and reddened from years of scrubbing, her face set most often in an expression of weary resignation. The only times I remember her smiling were during the private moments we stole together, in between the baby feedings and the planting and the harvesting, those precious hours when she taught me to read and write. Most of my practice was done in the dirt at the side of the house, using a stick to form the lines and swirls of the words. If I spotted my father approaching, I would hastily rub out the scribbles with my feet and scramble to find a chore to occupy myself. To him an idle child was a wicked one, and a daughter had no cause to learn her letters.

Mert Dalriss was known in our parts as a hard man, and the description was apt. His eyes were the cold gray-blue of stone, and his hands had been gnarled and roughened by a lifetime of physical labor; when he slapped me, it felt like a blow from a shovel. His voice was gruff and harsh, and he used his words sparingly, as if uttering each one caused great physical effort. Though I felt no affection for my father, I did not hate him either; he was simply an unpleasant feature of my existence, much like the mud that clung to my feet each spring or the hungry ache that filled my stomach instead of food. I took his harshness as nothing more than the usual resentment of a poor man toward a daughter who will cost him a dowry.

It was not until I was ten years old that I learned the true reason he had never loved me and never would.

It was a Saturday morning, and I had accompanied my mother to the weekly market at our local village, a gathering of some dozen houses a half hour’s walk from our ramshackle one-room cottage. Farmers and townspeople would meet to haggle over a meager range of scraps: a few turnips or onions, small sacks of salt or sugar, perhaps a pig or a lamb. Rarely did coins change hands; more often meat or eggs were exchanged for pieces of cloth or barrels of ale. The luckiest sellers claimed a spot in front of the church, where they could stand on the clean, dry flagstones; the rest simply stopped their carts in the middle of the muddy road that passed through town. A few of the more prosperous farmers would tap into their ale barrels and remain there most of the morning, laughing and slapping one another’s backs as their faces grew redder. My father was never among these men, drunkenness being one of the many weaknesses he despised in others.

The market was a place to exchange gossip as much as goods, for which reason most women lingered longer than it took them to stock up on supplies. My mother never paused after her business was conducted; it seemed she had taken my father’s disparagement of the villagers’ idleness to heart. I would move slowly from cart to cart, hoping to drag out the visit, but she passed me by with brisk efficiency, nodding at neighbors but rarely stopping to talk. Usually I hurried to follow her, ignored. Until one day when I froze in front of the baker’s cart. The smell of fresh rolls was so tempting; I thought I could satisfy my cramping stomach by drinking in the aroma. Perhaps, if I smelled it long enough, I might fool my appetite into thinking it had been sated.

I turned around to find my mother gone. Not wishing to be left behind, I pushed my way through the huddle of people gathered before the baker’s wares, stepping on a boy’s foot in the process. No one there was a stranger, for we all worshipped at the same church, but I could not remember his name, only that his family worked a farm substantially larger than ours on the other side of the village, where the land was more fertile. He had the ruddy, round cheeks of someone well fed.

“Watch it!” he scolded, then rolled his eyes toward a friend standing at his side.

Intent on finding my mother, I paid him no mind. And that would have been the end of it, had the boy not said one thing more.

“Bastard.”

I do not think he intended me to hear. The word was whispered rather than shouted, but it had slipped from his mouth like a dangerous, powerful incantation. When I found my mother a few moments later, searching for me from the church steps, I asked her what it meant.

She caught her breath, then glanced around to make certain I had not been overheard. “That’s a nasty word, and I won’t have you utter it again!” she whispered vehemently.

“A boy said it to me,” I protested. “Why did he call me that?”

Mother pursed her lips. She pulled me by the wrist with one hand, clutching her basket under her other arm. We walked away from the church, along the road leading back to the farm, without saying anything for some time. When we could no longer see the village behind a hill in the distance, she turned to me.

“That word,” she said. “It is used for children who are born out of wedlock.”

“Are you not wed, Mother?” I asked.

She sighed. I can still remember the look of defeat that settled over her, and my own apprehension at seeing my strong, determined mother reduced almost to tears.

“I had hoped you would never know,” she said quietly, looking away, over the fields. Then, collecting herself, she continued in her usual brisk, no-nonsense tone. “If my life remains village gossip after all this time, I suppose it’s best you hear the truth. I gave birth to you before I met Mr. Dalriss.”

I knew enough by then to understand how a man and woman beget a child; farm girls who see animals rutting in the fields do not stay innocent for long. Shock mixed with exhilaration as I realized that my mother had lain with someone other than the man I called Father. Who? And why had he not claimed me? My mind reeled, each question leading to another as I tried to piece together what little I knew of my mother’s youth in the light of this revelation.

“Is that why you left the castle?” I asked. “Because of me?”

“Yes.” There was no bitterness in her voice, no reproach. Simply a weary acceptance.

She turned away and started back on the road, as if nothing had changed. Yet, for me, everything had. It was that moment, I realize now, that started me on the fateful path toward the castle, toward the king and queen and Rose, toward Millicent’s dark powers. I could have accepted my mother’s wish to wall off her past and followed her home in silence. I could have made what would have been considered a good marriage, to a prosperous farmer’s son or a village shopkeeper, and lived out the rest of my life within a few miles of the place where I had been raised.

Instead I galloped to my mother’s side, eager to extend the brief glimpse she had granted into her life before the farm.

“Did you not wish to raise me there?” I asked.

Mother did not slow her pace, but she glanced at me, mouth tightened disapprovingly. I braced myself for a telling-off, but instead she answered my question with unexpected directness.

“It was not my choice,” she said. “The castle was the most wondrous place I have ever seen. I would have stayed forever if I could. But the man who fathered you would not make an honest woman of me, and I was turned out in disgrace. I was deceived, as many foolish women are, and I paid a heavy price.”

I did not completely understand; the nature of relations between men and women was unclear to a girl of my age. But I can still hear the harshness in her words. She blamed herself for what had happened, perhaps even more than the man who had cast her aside. How I wish I could reach back in time and release the burden of guilt that weighed so heavily upon her! Had I been older, more compassionate, she might have told me everything and found some measure of peace in the confession. But perhaps it was for the best that the secret of my parentage remained hidden. What would a girl of my age have done with such dangerous knowledge?

“So I was not born at the castle?” I asked, a child still, and concerned above all with my place in the story.

Mother shook her head. “No, you were born in town, in St. Elsip.”

“At your sister’s?”

My aunt Agna was the wife of a cloth merchant, a mysterious figure who sent rolls of wool each Christmas, allowing us to make new clothes when our old ones were shredded with wear. But I had never met her. Having come up in the world, she preferred to keep her distance from our family’s poverty.

“Agna did her best,” Mother said. “She gave me money and some swaddling clothes. But she would not have me in her home. She was a respectable married woman with children of her own. I did not want her reputation to suffer for my mistake.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I found a rooming house, run by a woman who had once been in the same state,” Mother said. “She was kind, in her way, and helped you come into the world. Without her you might never have lived past a few days. It was there that I met your father.”

“You mean Mr. Dalriss?”

“Father,” she hissed. “You will call him Father, miss. He saved us from starvation, never forget that. Every time you bite into a crust of bread, you should be thanking him.”

“Yes, Mother.”

I feared she was angry enough to walk the rest of the way home in silence, so it was a relief when she continued her story.

“You were two years old. I had sewn a few dresses for my landlady to pay my keep, but after a time there was nothing more I could barter. She allowed us to sleep in her kitchen, provided I help with the cooking. Mr. Dalriss came to town to buy a new horse and heard that my landlady ran a clean house. He saw me serving at dinner, inquired about me, and I suppose he thought he might as well come home with a wife. The first time he spoke to me was to ask if I would marry him. I said yes immediately, and gratefully. Not many men would take a penniless girl with a bastard child. And here was a man who owned his own farm, his own land. I had prepared myself to accept far less promising offers.”

Perhaps he had been kinder then, less worn down by disappointment. But I could not imagine that Mr. Dalriss was ever an appealing prospect. Mother must have been desperate indeed for her to have accepted him.

“I worked so hard to show him he had made the right choice,” Mother said. “When I told him I was with child not four months after our marriage, it was the first time I saw him smile. He told me, ‘I knew you were good breeding stock.’ I will always remember that, because it was the closest to a kind word I’ve ever gotten from him.”

He had chosen my mother as he would a cow. She had already proved she could bear a healthy child, so he felt confident she would produce a pack of children to work the farm. And Mother had kept her side of the bargain. Did she ever regret the choice she’d made?

“The man, my true father . . .” I began.

Mother twisted around and slapped me hard on the cheek. “You are never to speak of him,” she said. “He would not call you daughter. He would spit on you.”

The cruelty of her words brought tears to my eyes, more than the blow. Father would have beaten me again for crying, but my mother softened at the sight of my misery. She wrapped her arms around my body, pressing my face against her chest, something she had not done since I was a small child.

“There, there,” she murmured. “You must hold your head high. I will see you make something of yourself, no matter what the circumstances of your birth.”

“Do you think I might be accepted in service? At the castle?”

I could imagine no greater accomplishment, so I was surprised to see my mother hesitate, her face tense with concern.
She does not want me to go,
I thought, seeing her reaction as a mother’s natural inclination to keep her child close to home. Now, so many years later, I wonder if she was planning to warn me away. Given her own sad history, she knew only too well the malevolent intrigues that hide behind courtly manners. Had a cart not come rattling up behind us, causing Mother to extract herself from our embrace and offer a curt nod of greeting to the farmer who passed us by, what might she have said?

“Come along,” she urged, self-consciously straightening her sleeves as the cart rumbled off. “Your father will be expecting his dinner.”

My heart sank as I imagined his harsh complaints if we were late. Mother ran a finger gently along my cheek.

“Your face is so browned from the harvesting,” she said. “Time your brothers took on more of the field work. I won’t have you grow up with the skin of a country bumpkin.”

“Then you agree?” I asked hesitantly. “That I might find a place at court one day?” My stomach fluttered with expectation.