While Beauty Slept (46 page)

When I had satisfied myself that we had ample provisions, I dragged a final sack of dried apples to Rose’s room. I bowed my head to the king as I passed him in the doorway, but he did not acknowledge my presence. Queen Lenore stood directly inside, her back pressed against the wall as if she might collapse to the floor without its support. When she caught sight of me, she beckoned me over with a quick flick of her eyes and thrust a small velvet bag into my hand. I caught a glimpse of gold through the opening and knew immediately what it was. I nodded, silently acknowledging her wishes, and placed the bag at the bottom of the trunk where Rose’s dresses were stored.

Across the room Rose sat on her bed with her legs pulled up under her skirts. Her parents must have informed her of the king’s plans while I was downstairs, for she asked no questions. Her lower lip drooped in a slight pout, an expression I was intimately familiar with, for it was the same expression of displeasure she had used ever since she was a child denied a sweet before supper.

King Ranolf’s valet placed a final log atop a pile of firewood. He turned to the king and said, “That’s all, my lord.”

The king nodded and sent him out. I surveyed the confines of my new life. To my right was the large window overlooking the countryside, a landscape untouched by the contagion that had silenced St. Elsip. Stacks of food were arranged underneath, alongside tin buckets of water. To my left was the worktable where Rose did her writing and sewing; two chairs with tapestry seats and backs sat before the fireplace. Through an archway lay Rose’s large bed, overhung with a purple velvet canopy. Underneath I glimpsed a corner of the straw pallet that would be my bed. I thought back to the hovel where my parents had raised six children in a space half this size. They would not have thought my imprisonment here a hardship.

“Elise, do you have what you require?” the king asked.

I nodded.

“Good.” He did not move. I glanced at Queen Lenore and saw a woman crushed by grief. Her eyes were damp with tears as she gazed at Rose, gorging on the sight of her daughter.

“How long am I to be shut away?” Rose demanded imperiously. She began to rise from the bed, but the king raised his hand to stop her.

“I will leave that for Elise to determine.” He signaled me to approach and whispered his orders out of his daughter’s hearing. “Stay here as long as your supplies last. If the pox passes us by, I will notify you as soon as it is safe. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bolt the door, and do not open it for anyone.”

Rose must have heard this, for she called out, “Am I not permitted visitors?”

“No,” the king snapped, worry harshening his tone. “No one must come near you, don’t you see? Any one of us might be carrying the sickness even now.” He looked at me warily. “You have felt no signs?”

“No, sir.”

“The future of the kingdom is in your hands.”

Queen Lenore caught her breath in a choked sob, and Rose leapt off the bed. I extended an arm to stop her as the king cried out, “Stand back!” Rose’s face fell as understanding washed over her.

“Mother?” she begged.

Tears streamed down the queen’s face, and her voice emerged as a faint whisper. “We must keep you safe. It is the only way.”

Rose’s lips, so disdainful moments before, were now trembling. She looked from her mother to her father, desperate. “But you’re not sick. Why must I be kept from you? I can’t bear it. . . .”

The king turned his back on Rose, a gesture that would have appeared heartless to one who did not know him. I saw his dismissiveness for what it was: protection from his daughter’s despair.

“Lenore!” he ordered briskly.

Wrenching sobs racked the queen’s body as she sank against her husband’s chest. Firmly, he wrapped an arm around her shoulders and led her toward the doorway, even as I caught Rose’s wrists with my hands to prevent her from running across the room. The two women erupted in a cascade of sorrow: Queen Lenore’s moans coming low and mournful, Rose’s protests escalating into hysterical screams. The king pulled his wife outside without looking backward, her body crumpled against his. As soon as they were out of sight, I ran and bolted the door, just before Rose flung herself against it, pounding her fists frantically against the wood.

“Mama!” she shrieked. “Mama! Don’t leave me!”

I kept my hands firmly on the bolt, ready to fight Rose off if necessary. But she released her anguish on the panels of the door, slamming her palms until they must have stung. When she finally fell to her knees, I wrapped her in my arms, as I used to do when she was a child sent screaming into wakefulness by nightmares. I knew that my embrace could not offer the same solace it once had, and my body ached with the misery of powerlessness.

“Elise,” Rose pleaded, looking up at me with flushed cheeks and red eyes. “What if I do not see them again? What if they die?”

She had spoken my own fears aloud. But I took the king’s orders to heart. My duty was to protect Rose, even at the cost of the truth.

“They’ll be safe,” I assured her. “The pox has made its way through the servants’ quarters, far from your mother’s rooms. They wish to spare you any chance of illness, that is all.”

“How long must we wait?”

“Not long,” I said. “A week, perhaps two. We’ll pass the time well enough, you’ll see.”

Rose wiped her face with the back of her hand and took a deep breath, calming herself. “A week. We can manage.”

“Of course we can,” I said confidently, reaching out a hand to urge Rose to her feet. “Come, you must help me decide how best to arrange all these baskets of food.”

Rose joined me in the task willingly enough. But the echo of Queen Lenore’s sobs haunted the room. I tried to think of something to say, but it was no use. Nothing could drown out that heartrending sound.

If I have shown some small talent in recounting the events of my life, it is thanks to those days confined with Rose, for they made me a storyteller. I ordered our days as precisely as Mrs. Tewkes once oversaw the household: breakfast upon rising at daylight; the morning spent reading or writing; a midday meal followed by an afternoon of needlework; a light supper, which Rose helped me prepare, marveling at my ability to cook over the flame in her fireplace; and, as the light outside faded, an evening of conversation, our voices drifting toward each other in the dark until we fell asleep.

The first few nights, I retold stories Rose had loved as a child, tales of fair princesses and noble knights slaying fire-spouting dragons. Legends in which spells were broken and love triumphed. When my store of such entertainment ran dry, I moved on to more truthful accounts. I tried to paint pictures of the place where I was born, describing how the mist rose from the ground at dawn when I walked to the barn to milk the cows. The way the oxen marched across the fields, laying out furrows behind them. The smell of simmering fruit filling us with hungry longing as my mother prepared provisions for the winter.

I did not tell it all: I spared Rose descriptions of the chilblains that plagued us during the winter or how it felt to huddle with my brothers under one threadbare blanket, shivering against one another in a bundle of bony limbs and rumbling stomachs. I did not speak of my father’s beatings, my mother’s blank-eyed despair. And nothing of the death that stole my family. I would not speak of the pox.

Instead I recounted my wonder when I saw the castle for the first time and my awe at her mother’s kindness. I told of Queen Lenore’s joy as her stomach grew round and the tender way the king laid his hand on her belly. How happy they had been on the day she was born. The remembrance of it brought pangs of loss, but such stories appeared to cheer Rose, for she often requested that I describe the same scene over and over. At times, as we lay there in the dark, the years melted away, and I could have been back in the maids’ bedchamber with Petra, exchanging whispered confidences. How old and self-assured Petra had appeared to me in those days and how I had longed to mold myself in her image! With the passage of time, our disagreements had faded into insignificance; I was content to remember her as a loyal friend and mourn her departure from my life. Never having known such a friendship, Rose did not feel the lack, but I thought it the one richness she had never possessed.

The days wore on, each passing as the one before. When the room was bathed in daylight, we kept our spirits light. We went about our tasks as if it were perfectly reasonable for two women to live separate from the world, playing the parts of gracious ladies with no cares. But when night approached, our spirits grew darker along with the skies. With only dim views of each other’s face by moonlight, we opened our souls. Rose began to demand that I fill in the gaps in my recollections.

“You have not spoken of my baptism,” she said one night.

“What of it?” I asked warily.

“Millicent. The curse.”

Her voice was weighted with sorrow. Even if by some miracle the king and queen were to emerge unscathed, Rose would carry the burden of these days forever. The girlishness that had lingered in her womanly body was gone, replaced by the knowledge that fate was capricious and cruel. That beauty and rank and wealth were no protection against loss.

After all that had passed, I thought it could do no further harm to hear the truth. Indeed the story came easily, for I remembered each moment with eerie clarity, from Millicent’s appearance in the Great Hall to Flora’s assurances that she would protect the baby. The only part I dared not speak of was Queen Lenore’s account of her bewitchment in the cavern beneath the church of St. Agrelle. That tale, I determined, must remain as buried as the evil shrine itself.

“She had her revenge in the end,” Rose murmured. “She brought death to my house.”

I rushed to forestall such thoughts. “Millicent was a devious woman, but she had no magical powers. The pox spreads of its own accord, striking the godly and the wicked without distinction.”

“Do you believe so?”

“Of course,” I said firmly.

But I had no way of knowing whom it had struck beyond our door, for two weeks had passed since the terrible parting of mother and daughter. We had received no visitors, heard no footsteps pass along the hall outside. I had expected Queen Lenore to reach out to Rose in some way, through letters slipped under the door or whispers from outside. Had the king ordered her to stay away, or was it sickness that kept her from hovering outside her daughter’s bedchamber? Rose’s melancholy wafted over me, and there were no more stories that night, only silent remembrances.

Every morning Rose looked at me warily, her eyes asking an unspoken question. And every morning I left my bed and turned from her to wash my face, refusing to answer. To her credit, Rose did not moan complaints or beg to be set free; she followed my orders and went easily to the tasks I set her. When we had embroidered every one of her petticoats and mine, I declared we would start on her sheets; I could not allow our time to pass idly. As my stock of stories dwindled, I embellished insignificant court gossip into grand drama in an increasingly desperate attempt to fill the empty hours. One evening I told of a long-ago flirtation between a stout cook and her comically tiny beau, drawing out each incident of their romance in the hopes it would take us past sundown. Shadows gradually enveloped the room, and I began pulling out the laces of Rose’s bodice in preparation for bed.

“You have told many tales of love,” she said quietly, staring forward. “Do you not have one of your own?”

I blushed, though I knew she could not see me. I had not spoken Marcus’s name in years. Could I tell our story with the detachment of age, or would my voice still carry a trace of girlish longing?

Rose’s voice broke the silence as she stepped from her gown. “Forgive me. It must pain you to speak of the happiness you shared with your husband.”

My husband. When Rose spoke of love, it was not Dorian’s name that sprang to mind. I hesitated, remembering Marcus’s face at the castle gates. The sight of him had released a tangle of emotions I thought long since buried, and I found myself yearning to recapture the selves we had once been, young and hopeful and churning with desire.

“There was another I lost my heart to, long before I married Dorian.”

Rose turned, her eyes bright with expectation. She sat on her bed and curled her legs up under her shift. “Was it someone you knew when you were young? On the farm?”

I folded her dress and placed it gently in the storage chest at the foot of the bed. “No,” I said. “I met him here, in town.”

“Why did you not marry?” She had pulled her hair loose from its ribbons, and the auburn waves tumbled down her shoulders and arms. She looked like a child again, so free of cares that I felt myself hurtled back in time. If the tale of my heartbreak could divert Rose from her own, it was worth telling.

So I revealed what had passed between Marcus and me. With the wisdom of years, I was able to give us both a fair hearing, acknowledging our love for each other and the difficult choices we had been forced to make. Yet Rose was outraged on my behalf.

“There must have been some way you could have married Marcus and continued to serve at the castle,” she said. “Cannot love and duty go hand in hand?”