While Beauty Slept (8 page)

“When her carriage arrived at the main gate of the castle, the old king himself walked out to greet her and escort her inside. The wedding ceremony was held in the chapel, with only the highest-ranking families in attendance. But afterward, before the wedding feast, King Ranolf took his bride by the hand and led her upstairs to the Gold Chamber. I heard from one of the ladies’ maids that they giggled like children. Ranolf threw open the doors that look out over the castle courtyard and the town, then brought her out onto the balcony.

“‘I present your future queen!’ he announced. My sister was in the courtyard, readying tables of food and wine for the servants’ feast, and she said they were the most beautiful couple she had ever seen. We’d heard talk of this foreign woman who would bring wicked customs to our land, but she charmed the whole court from that moment. Her husband, too. From what I heard, their wedding night lasted well into the next day.”

“What?” I asked, shocked. “Surely her servants would not speak of such private matters?”

Petra laughed. “Not just the servants!” she said. “Both families expected a report on the consummation. The news that King Ranolf could barely drag himself from his bride’s arms was seen as a good omen.”

Petra lay quietly for a few moments. I wondered if she had drifted off to sleep. She yawned, then adjusted her pillow and continued.

“The old king died not long after the wedding, and once the period of mourning was over, there were grand entertainments every week: jousting, riding excursions, balls. Anyone would have described the king and queen as the happiest couple alive. When I first came here, a few years ago, I happened upon them once in her chamber, holding hands like young sweethearts. At dinner she would feed him bites from her plate or wipe a trace of food from his mouth. That’s long over, though. Ever since she proved herself barren.”

“Oh, no,” I murmured.

“Eight years the king has waited for an heir, in vain,” Petra said. “The queen spends more time consulting doctors than verses of poetry these days. And now that the king lies with her but once a month, she is even less likely to find herself with child.”

“Once a month? How do you know?” I asked.

“The laundress who changes the bedsheets reports to Lady Wintermale whenever there are relations. I suppose it’s no surprise the queen has turned desperate.”

“What do you mean?”

“Her pilgrimage.” Petra drew out the word disdainfully.

“I thought she was visiting a hot springs, for her health,” I said.

“That’s the story put about, but I heard from Lady Wintermale’s maid that the ladies traveled to a shrine in the mountains. The queen must be close to losing hope if she begs intercession from a saint that only country folk care about. Especially if it meant spending a week in the company of Madam Millicent.” She drew out the final word, her voice sharp with contempt.

Did a shiver of warning speed through my body the first time I heard that fateful name? It would make for a more dramatic tale if I could claim such a premonition. In truth I was more curious than concerned.

“Who?” I asked.

“Ah, I forgot, you haven’t seen her yet. Lady Millicent, the king’s maiden aunt.”

Many spinsters lived off the king’s generosity, most of them irritable old women who complained that the fire was too cold or the food too hot when they were lucky to have a roof over their heads at all. But the hardening of Petra’s expression implied that this woman was a more formidable presence than the rest.

“She was the one who convinced the queen that a week of prayer in a freezing chapel would cure her womb,” Petra continued. “The king was against it. Said God would hear her prayers just as well from the royal chapel. But Millicent got her way, the old witch.”

I could not believe that a servant would speak so disrespectfully of a member of the royal family.

“Forgive me, I should not have said such a thing,” Petra said, seeing my shock. “I do not mean that she conjures up spells over a black kettle, though some believe her capable of such nonsense. Best to avoid her, that’s all. She takes offense easily, and those who cross her pay the price. Drove her own sister round the bend, they say.”

“What happened?” I asked.

Petra shook her head, brushing off my question and the subject of Millicent. “I’ve already said more than I should.”

She turned from me and lay down, the hair splayed across her pillow shimmering in the darkness. The heavy breathing and shifting bodies of the other maids reminded me that we were not alone, that I must be mindful of what I said.

“Petra?” I whispered.

“Hmm?”

“There may be hope yet for the queen. I will pray for her.”

I did not expect a response, but after a few moments Petra’s hushed voice broke the silence.

“My father says it’s a family curse. Time and again the fate of the kingdom has hung on the life of a single boy. The king’s father was his parents’ sole surviving son, as was his father before him. The king and Prince Bowen were the first brothers in generations to live to adulthood. Everyone thought they would usher in a new era of prosperity. Yet both remain childless.”

Raised in a large family, I was accustomed to shouts and chatter and babies’ cries. Was it the lack of such sounds that made the castle’s vast, silent hallways so eerie?

“Will Prince Bowen inherit the throne if the king has no children?” I asked.

“I suppose so.”

“Poor Queen Lenore. No wonder she looks sad.”

What I did not know then was that the queen’s suffering went deeper than I could ever imagine. At my young age, I could not understand how the glowing young bride of Petra’s story had become the withdrawn woman I saw seated before the fireplace, for I knew nothing of the lengths to which a desperate woman will go in order to bear a child.

The next morning I crept into the queen’s bedchamber as the first shafts of sunlight brightened the windows. The queen herself was visible only as a slight rise in the middle of the bed, almost entirely hidden under an embroidered coverlet. I tiptoed around her personal attendant, Isla, snoring on a straw mattress on the floor, and swept the previous night’s ashes from the fireplace. Gingerly, I placed fresh logs inside, trying not to make a sound, and started a fire. When the flame was well established, I returned to the hall and carried in a bucket of water, pouring it into the elegant china basin that stood on a long table underneath the window. As the water fell, my eyes wandered to a piece of parchment lying on the table before me. Idly, I read the words written on it in an elegant, meticulous hand:

Where love has bloomed,

It surely must fade,

A memory of its perfume

All that remains. . . .

“Girl.”

I swung around, terrified of being called to task for idling. Queen Lenore was sitting up in the bed, looking directly at me. Her dark eyes were bloodshot and her cheeks damp with tears.

“Pass me a cloth.” Her accent gave the simple words a melodious rhythm.

I took a square of folded linen from a pile next to the basin and handed it to her. She ran the fabric over her eyes and beneath her nose before passing it back to me. As she reached out, the sleeve of her nightdress fell back to reveal an angry red gash on her inner arm, a wound that had only recently begun to heal. How could a woman of such privilege have come by such a cruel injury?

I should have taken the cloth from the queen without speaking and disappeared as I was expected to. But her drawn expression made me want to linger, to divert her from that grief.

“Madam, the poem,” I said, glancing back at the paper on the table behind me. “Did you write it?”

Her eyes widened with surprise as she nodded.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“You can read?” Her tone carried no hint of mockery. “What is your name?”

“Elise.”

“That will be all, Elise.”

I curtsied and turned away, belatedly shocked by my own forwardness. I had taken a great risk, yet the encounter had gone in my favor. Despite Lady Wintermale’s glares, my position might be secure after all.

And so it appeared in the following weeks. Every morning I lit a fire as the queen awoke and brought her a cloth to wipe her face, as if it were perfectly normal to greet each day with tears. Day after day we followed the same routine. The queen never said more than a few words to me, yet I felt a bond of affection for her out of all proportion to the time I spent in her presence. She had an innate warmth of manner that made me sympathize with her plight, despite the vast difference in our ages and ranks. Like me, she was an outsider, cut off from her family, an object of disparaging gossip with no natural allies at court. Yet, like my mother, she carried herself with dignity and resolve. Is it any wonder I should feel drawn to her?

As Petra had predicted, my appointment to the royal ladies’ chambers had set off a storm of complaints to Mrs. Tewkes, and jealousy cut me off from those who might otherwise have been my friends. The other maids’ distaste for me was only reinforced by my ignorance of the Lower Hall’s pecking order, where the hierarchies were murkier than in the royal apartments. One night at supper, finding the bench where Petra was seated already full, I slid onto an empty seat at a nearby table. The women seated there—clearly fellow maids, for we all wore the same gray wool dresses—glanced at me in silence, then at one another.

I introduced myself, and still not a sound was uttered. Confused and ashamed, I stared down at my bowl and ate as quickly as possible, my face flushed with humiliation. As I rushed out from the hall, tears trickling down my cheeks, I heard Petra calling after me.

“Never mind them,” she said airily as I wiped my face with my apron. “It was an easy enough mistake.”

“Why wouldn’t they speak to me?”

“They’re seamstresses.” Seeing my continued confusion, she sighed and explained. “They think they’re better than us, just because they’ve never had to pour out a pitcher of piss. Fancy themselves quite the fine ladies.”

A smile began to creep up one side of my mouth, and Petra went on, gratified by my reaction.

“You’d think no one else here could even thread a needle, the way they carry on. As if I’d want to be trapped in the sewing room all day, bent over a pair of Lady Wintermale’s underclothes. You watch, they’ll all end up hunchbacks and we’ll have the last laugh.”

I did giggle then, and Petra convinced me to return with her to the hall. In hushed tones, she explained the seating patterns that so mystified me. The pages sat with the valets, never the footmen. The footmen occasionally ate with the carpenters and other skilled laborers, but anyone from the stables who dared to join them would be shunned—unless of course it was the head groom, in which case his company would be an honor. As a chambermaid I was expected to sit with the greenest, youngest maids; in a pinch I was permitted to join the upper housemaids at their table, but to do so often would be considered presumptuous. The ladies’ maids, who attended to the needs of the noble ladies-in-waiting, sat at their own table at one side of the room, speaking only to one another and pointedly ignoring the rest of us. They were the Lower Hall’s royalty.

Petra, bless her, found me an intriguing novelty rather than a nuisance. It seemed half the castle staff was related to her in some way, and she enjoyed conversing with someone whose life was not already known to her. She would ask me about the farm with the wistful expression of one who has never had to milk cows at dawn. When I told her about my mother and my brothers—slowly and briefly, for the wound still ached—she wept along with me. And when she found out I could read and write, she asked for my help in learning her letters.
This
is what it must be like to have a sister,
I thought as we sat companionably together, poring over scraps of parchment begged from Mrs. Tewkes. Without Petra my life would have been dismal indeed, and anything I made of myself at the castle was due in part to her generous spirit.

During those brief moments when my duties were complete and Petra was not available to act as my defender, I lingered outside the queen’s rooms, hoping to take on any humble errand that might bring me into her presence. It was there that I came face-to-face with the woman who had intrigued me ever since her name passed Petra’s lips.

I have vowed to recount my tale without benefit of hindsight, depicting events as they happened. So while it is difficult for me to separate my early memories of Millicent from the knowledge of what she would one day become, I speak the truth when I say our first encounter left me shaken. I had seen the king’s aunt occasionally from a distance, among the other elderly ladies of the court. Up close, however, I was taken aback to realize she had once been beautiful. Though age had whitened her hair and loosened her skin, it had not altered her most striking features: a straight, narrow nose; large green-gray eyes; full lips; and a broad, curved forehead. She wore her hair pulled back tight in the old-fashioned way, without tendrils to soften the lines of her cheekbones, drawing all the more attention to her regal face. She walked with a determined stride, each step punctuated by the tap of a cane I suspected she carried not from necessity but to warn others of her approach.