While Beauty Slept (6 page)

Ahead, a paved drive led up a short rise to the entry doors, emblazoned with gold crests.

“That’s how the quality enter,” Hannolt said. “The rest of us fight our way to the back.”

He took my hand and tugged me alongside him as a cart came crashing toward us. I saw that most movement in the courtyard was swelling and ebbing around an arch to the left side of the castle. Cramming ourselves into the passageway with the others, we emerged into another courtyard, of similar proportions but even more crowded. Opposite us, groomsmen were leading horses in and out of paddocks. Immediately to my right, a series of doors opened into the lower level of the castle; judging by the huge hearths I saw inside, I guessed they led to the kitchens. To our left, workers were loading supplies off carts into storerooms. As we passed, I glimpsed a basket the size of a horse’s trough, filled with nothing but onions. Next to it were sacks of flour and meal that stood almost as tall as I was.

“Careful!” Hannolt shouted.

Distracted by the sights, I had come close to stepping into a mix of mud and rotting food. I pulled my skirt above my ankles and wrapped it tight around my legs.

A voice from behind me barked, “Look sharp!” Before I had time to turn around, Marcus had wrapped his arm about my shoulders and pulled me back from an almost certain collision with a barrel that had been tossed from the storerooms. It was the closest I’d ever been to a young man of my own age, and I was surprised by the sturdiness of his grasp, the firmness of his chest when I fell against it.

“Oy!” shouted Hannolt to the men inside. “Watch it!”

“Watch your lassie, more like it!” someone shouted back. “This is no place to prance about!”

I began to thank Marcus for his vigilance, but he drew back and turned his face before I could finish. Had the seemingly imperturbable Marcus been shaken by our near miss? Or, like me, had he been momentarily unsettled by the sudden press of our bodies together?

“Best get on,” Hannolt urged. “I don’t know where to find the housekeeper exactly, but we’ll ask in the kitchens.”

We walked gingerly through the muck, following Hannolt until we entered a room with three blazing fireplaces, each filled with a hanging cauldron. The heat was stifling.

A sweaty woman in a stained apron and matted hair stepped before us. “What d’you want?” she asked suspiciously.

“I have a delivery for Lady deWey,” Hannolt said, as grandly as a knight readying for a royal audience. “I am expected in the Great Hall. This young lady is to see Mrs. Tewkes.”

She looked me up and down. Evidently unimpressed, she sighed in annoyance. “You’ll find her in the Lower Hall.” She pointed across the room. “Through that door, down the passage, and up the stairs.”

“This is where we part, then,” said Hannolt. “I will tell your aunt we saw you here safely.”

I looked at Marcus. We had barely spoken, but he had a steadiness of demeanor that made me regret the briefness of our acquaintance. He appeared to be on the verge of telling me something, but his father interrupted with a flurry of good wishes before turning to go. Marcus dropped his head in a brief nod and then followed his father out of sight.

Lonely and afraid, I felt my spirits falter, but I would not risk the cook’s wrath by dawdling in that chaotic kitchen. I followed her directions, walking with one shoulder pressed against the walls to avoid being knocked down by men and women carting bags and buckets around me. The dogged procession brought to mind the ants that used to march across our dirt floor in search of crumbs dropped by my brothers. Flushed from the kitchen’s heat, then jostled in the narrow passage, I felt light-headed as I climbed up a set of wide wooden stairs and emerged into a long room that extended as far as I could see.

I later learned that this Lower Hall—so named because it was beneath the castle’s Great Hall—was the central gathering place for all who worked in the castle. It was here the servants ate their twice-daily meals, received their orders from the housekeeper, toasted the New Year, and mourned the death of one of their own. I took in the long expanse of space, calmed by its impression of symmetry and order. Simple wooden tables and benches were lined up along either side. Above my head, gray stone walls soared upward toward the massive beams supporting the ceiling.

Slowly, I walked forward, glancing into the workrooms that opened off the hall. One held looms and baskets of yarn, another engraved serving plates and candlesticks. The next was filled with bolts of cloth and spools of thread. The sewing room. I froze, trying to conjure up an image of my mother as a young seamstress, bent over a swath of silk. But, to my despair, I could only envision the mother I had known, ruined by years of hard living, and the memory brought on a throbbing ache of pain.

“May I help you?”

I turned abruptly, disoriented. A tall, willowy young woman with pale skin and equally pale hair, wearing a pristine white apron, was watching me with an expression somewhere between suspicion and curiosity.

“I’m looking for Mrs. Tewkes.”

Pondering me for a moment, she appeared to decide that I posed no danger.

“This way.”

She guided me to the opposite end of the hall, toward a door carved with a pattern of vines and flowers. I marveled that a mere housekeeper should live in a place more elegantly embellished than the finest home in my village.

The door stood ajar, but the girl paused before it and knocked.

“Come in,” a voice commanded.

Compared to the shadowy Lower Hall, the room was bright and welcoming. Opposite the door a large window overlooked the courtyard. A table covered with papers and a few books sat against one wall, beneath a tapestry depicting a lion and a unicorn. Along the opposite wall lay a bed and a trunk inlaid with a pattern of multicolored wood. If this was the housekeeper’s room, I could not imagine how fine the queen’s must be.

Mrs. Tewkes sat at the table, saying nothing as I entered the room. I learned later that she ruled through silence rather than shrillness. In a castle where activity never ceased, her serene presence set her apart; she could draw the attention of an entire room with a few well-chosen words. I could not be certain of her age; her round face bore the creases of middle age, and her hair was more gray than brown, yet her eyes carried none of the weariness so common in the women of my village. She wore a simple black dress, its loose shape enveloping a figure that had widened and softened with time.

I bent my head, as Aunt Agna had taught me to do in respect of my elders.

“My name is Elise Dalriss,” I said. “I believe you knew my mother, Mayren.”

“Mayren.” Mrs. Tewkes slowly whispered the name, as if her voice were unaccustomed to forming the sound. She rose from the table and walked over to examine me more closely. Then she placed a hand on my shoulder and smiled.

“Yes, I see it now,” she said. “You have the same carriage. Mayren always held herself well.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, remembering my mother hunched beneath the weight of a baby on one side and a pail of water on the other. Mrs. Tewkes might not have recognized the woman who raised me.

“Where is she living these days? Is she doing well?”

The words did not come easy. “She died, not a month ago.” I felt the tears ready to well up in my eyes.

“Oh, what a shame.” The polite words were tinged with genuine sadness.

“She told me to come to you,” I said, holding my voice steady through force of will. “I hoped there might be a place for me here.”

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Fourteen.”

“If you grew up on a farm, you’re accustomed to hard work.”

I nodded.

“Usually I caution girls that chambermaids here do not have an easy time of it,” she said. “But it’s likely an easier living than you’ve seen. At least you won’t reek of cow muck at the end of the day!” Mrs. Tewkes laughed, and I found myself smiling along.

She reached out and used her fingers to stretch my lips apart, checking my teeth as one would when buying a horse. Her eyes ran up and down my body, pausing at my arms. She took one of my hands and turned it palm upward. My coarse fingertips testified to my life of labor, though I was proud I had avoided the cracked and reddened skin so common in farmers’ families. Mrs. Tewkes nodded approvingly.

“Your mother, what skills did she teach you? Needlework, I presume?”

“I learned to embroider not long after I learned to speak. She also taught me to read and write passably well.”

“Ah.” Mrs. Tewkes looked pleased and motioned toward the table behind her. “The housekeepers before me barely knew their letters, and none could tend to the kitchen accounts as I do. The queen is a great proponent of education for ladies. She has even been gracious enough to give me a few books. If you can read, it may serve you well here, once you’ve proved yourself.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Whatever learning I have is thanks to my mother.”

“I am glad she did right by you.”

There was a pause in the conversation, long enough to make me fear that Mrs. Tewkes was searching for a polite way to reject me. I have wondered since if she considered telling me all she knew of my mother’s disgrace. Was she weighing, even then, the danger that might fall on me as a consequence? She could have warned me off, sent me away. But she did not. She kept my mother’s secrets—and her own.

“You’re very presentable for a country girl,” Mrs. Tewkes said at last. “Still growing into yourself, of course, but you have great potential. Never discount the importance of looks, especially here. You also have a modesty I find very pleasing. Yes, yes, I think you will be quite to the queen’s liking.”

The queen? Before I had time to ask Mrs. Tewkes what she meant, she was saying, “I will put you in Petra’s charge. You’d do well to learn from her example. Petra!”

The maid who had escorted me to Mrs. Tewkes’s room rushed into the doorway, so quickly I wondered how closely she had been listening outside.

“Show Elise to the chambermaids’ room. There’s a spare bed, is there not?”

“More than one.”

“Good. Have her follow you the next few days. If all goes well, she can take over your duties, and I’ll move you to the hall.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Petra said with a delighted smile.

Mrs. Tewkes turned her attention back to me. “Come here the first day of each month for your pay. Two gold pieces to start, and we’ll raise it to three if you perform well.”

It was more than I had ever dreamed of. “Thank you.”

“Off with you, then,” Mrs. Tewkes said with a good-natured laugh. “Petra, see me Saturday and we’ll talk about your prospects, shall we?”

After Mrs. Tewkes and I finished saying our good-byes, Petra grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me back into the Lower Hall.

“You’re a sly one, aren’t you?” she said, looking me over appreciatively.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Mrs. Tewkes doesn’t take on every groveling girl who appears at her door! Are you a relation of hers?”

I shook my head.

“Yet she places you in the royal apartments rather than setting you to haul kitchen slops. Quite a mark of favor.”

All I had done was invoke my mother’s name, yet something told me to keep that revelation to myself. There would be others here who remembered Mother’s disgrace, and she would not have wanted me tainted by her shame.

Petra, unperturbed by my silence, linked her arm in mine and led me forward. “Well, thanks to you my days of carting wood and chamber pots will soon be over. We’re friends now.” She spoke in a quick, lively manner that immediately put me at ease.

We walked to a small alcove off the hall, where a narrow circular staircase wound up above our heads into darkness. The smell of the dank, musty air provoked a sudden moment of panic. My entire body protested against entering such a place, cut off from all light, encased in a ring of stone.

“Come on!” Petra called out from the stairs above me. I hurried to follow, terrified of being left behind. She must have seen the fear on my face, for she paused a moment to reassure me. “It’s rather a maze, I know, but you’ll find your way around soon enough.”

The staircase traversed the center of the original fortress, built in the time of the king’s forefathers, when the building had been little more than a soldiers’ fortification. Over time, towers and wings had been added, each constructed to house the growing number of nobles who made the court their home. As we walked upward, I tried to follow Petra’s rapid descriptions of each floor we passed. One hallway led to the state apartments, where official business was conducted; the royal family’s sleeping quarters filled the floor above. Up and up we continued, until the stairs ended at a narrow passage.

“Here we are,” Petra said. She motioned me to follow her, and we walked by a series of rooms, most with doors closed. “The highest-ranking staff and those who are married have private rooms,” she explained. “The rest of us are not so fortunate.” She led me to the end of the hall, where we entered a large room with a sloping ceiling, under the very roof of the castle. Rows of simple beds extended from the doorway, each with a wood trunk placed at the foot.

“The maids’ quarters,” Petra announced. “Come, I’ll make sure you sleep next to me.” I examined the room as I followed her; there must have been twenty beds lined against the walls.

Petra pointed out her bed at the end of a row. “Sissy’s next to me now, but I’ll move her down one. Put the blame on Mrs. Tewkes.” She opened a trunk and pulled out an armful of clothes, piling them haphazardly into another farther down. “It’s much better on this side. You won’t be bothered by the door opening and closing.”

“All the girls in service sleep here?” I asked.

“Not hardly!” Petra laughed. “There’s another room this size across the way, and the boys have rooms at the other end of the hall. Far enough to resist temptation, for the most part. Mrs. Tewkes doesn’t tolerate any sneaking about, and any girl caught on the boys’ side is sent off without her wages. She runs a strict household. But you don’t seem the sort to fall afoul of her rules.”

Petra took my small sack and placed it in the trunk. My few possessions appeared even more meager inside that vast emptiness.