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“I don’t care what you say, I don’t believe you,” Anastasia declared, “Its a touching story, I must admit, but how do we know it’s not a pack of lies?”

“Because Cendrillon looks just like her mother,” Amelie said, speaking for the very first time. Her mother and sisters swung around.

“How can you know that?” Chantal demanded. “Constanze d’Este died before you were born.”

“I have seen her portrait,” Amelie answered simply, “It’s in the room at the end of the hall, the one that’s been locked ever since we arrived. I found the key just this morning, in the peach orchard.”

“The peach orchard,” my stepmother echoed in a dazed voice.

Amelie came down the steps, her dark
eyes
both thoughtful and excited as they met mine.

“I got hungry, so I picked a peach,” she went on. “Instead of a pit, there was a key inside, I remembered what you had told me, Cendrillon. That Etienne de Brabant was so heartbroken after the death of his first wife that he locked the door to her room, and threw away the key.”

“And you found it inside a peach?” Anastasia exclaimed, her tone scoffing. “That’s not possible and you know it. You’ve been out in the sun too long.”

“Sunflowers shouldn’t have been possible, either,” Amelie replied. “But you and Maman picked armloads of those. I searched for something, and I found it.”

“Your surprise,” I said. “You found your surprise.”

Amelie nodded. “A greater one than even I knew to hope for. That day in the hall, why didn’t you tell me you were Constanze d’Este and Etienne de Brabant’s daughter?”

“I wanted to,” I said. “But I didn’t know how.” I let my gaze take in Chantal and Anastasia. “I didn’t know how to tell any of you. I’m sorry. I never
meant to make things worse than they already are”

Amelie put a hand into the pocket of the apron she had taken to wearing. She pulled it out to reveal a key resting in the center of her palm.

“I would have let you be the first to open the door,” she said, as she held it out toward me. “But I didn’t know I should, Cendrillon. Not until I saw the portrait. After that, I came to find everyone. I was about halfway down the stairs when I heard Anastasia bellowing.”

Anastasia sucked in a breath. But her mother spoke before she could reply. “I will see this portrait,” she said. “And then we will decide what is to be done.”

“I didn’t like the thought of locking the room back up again,” Amelie said when the four of us arrived outside my mother’s door. My stepmother had dispatched Raoul to find Old Mathilde. “But it didn’t seem right to just leave the door standing open, so I closed it again.”

“Open it, please, Cendrillon,” my stepmother said quietly.

I put my hand on the latch, squeezed to lift it upward. I heard the sharp
click
as the catch released. Slowly, as if the hinges couldn’t quite remember what it was they were supposed to do, the door to my mother’s room swung open.

Great ropes of cobwebs hung down from the ceiling, swaying gently in the sudden movement of the air. The path of Amelies footprints was plain upon the dusty floor. Moving from the doorway to the far
corner of the room, disappearing around a wall which formed an alcove. On the wall closest to us stood a great four-poster bed, its hangings gray with dust. A straight-backed chair sat before the window closest to the bed.

Old Mathildes chair,
I thought.

“Where is the portrait?” I asked, and my own voice sounded as dry as the dust.

“In the alcove,” Amelie said.

I took a breath, and stepped across the threshold. It was no more than fifteen paces from the doorway to the place where the portrait of my mother, Constanze d’Este, still hung upon the wall. Fifteen paces, one for every year that I had been alive. But, then as now, that walk across my mother’s room seemed set apart from time. I may be walking across that room still, for all I know. Still making the journey from the doorway to my first glimpse of the face of the woman who had given up her life the night she gave me the gift of mine.

I reached the edge of the alcove, turned the corner, and suddenly I was face-to-face with a woman with hair the color of leaves in autumn, eyes the color of a fresh spring lawn. High cheekbones, pointed chin, a firm and determined mouth. But none of these were the things which brought the fierce and sudden rush of tears to my
eyes.
The thing that did that was a complete and utter surprise.

“Oh, come and see,” I heard my own voice say. “Come and see what love looks like.”

Quietly, their footsteps stirring up the dust, Chantal de Saint-Andre and her daughters came to stand at my side. I heard my stepmother catch her breath and, as she did, my tears began to fall.

For never had I seen an expression such as the one that gazed out at us from my mother’s portrait. Never had I seen any face so filled with light, with such a pure and radiant joy. There could be only one reason for a look like that, just one cause: looking into the face of the person you loved best in all the world, and finding what you felt reflected back For the thing that was in my mother’s face, shining out from it like a torch in the night, was love.

“Oh, but it is wicked,” I suddenly heard my step-mother say, and I barely recognized the sound of her voice. “So terribly wicked, to be given such a gift and throw it all away. So terribly, terribly wrong.”

“Maman, what is it? What’s the matter?” I heard Amelie exclaim. “Maman!”

I turned my head, then, to look at my stepmother, and found to my astonishment that Chantal de Saint-Andre was weeping also. Huge tears streamed down her face to stain the silk of her gown. The ice inside her was well and truly melted now.

“I have been such a fool!” she cried. “I should have had this door broken down the very day that I arrived. I have behaved no better than your father, Cendrillon. I was so certain I had been betrayed by the one I trusted most of all. So furious with the king for making me marry your father that I forgot
the reason I’d given him my trust in the first place. I forgot about love.”

She turned to face me then, and I saw that her tears were already beginning to dry. In her face was a light that I had never seen before.

“But here love is,” Chantal de Saint-Andre said. “Shining out from your mother’s face, locked up, hidden away for all this time. I look at it, and I feel ashamed, for your betrayal is much greater than mine has ever been, Cendrillon. Your father threw away the greatest gift your mother could bestow—the gift of what their love created. I think that I have never heard of anything so wrongheaded, or so blind.”

“I wished for you,” I heard myself say. “A mother to love me, a mother I might love. And two sisters in the bargain.”

“Why two?” Anastasia asked at once.

“So that at least one of them might like me,” I said.

Before I knew quite what she intended, Chantal stepped forward. She slipped the kerchief from my head, unpinned my braids so that they tumbled down. Then she untied the scraps of fabric at the ends of my hair, and with her quick, gentle fingers, combed out the braids until my hair lay thick and unbound across my shoulders, flowing down my back till its ends tickled the backs of my knees.

Then she turned me, her touch still gentle, to once again face my mother’s portrait.

“I cannot claim that I can be the mother she would
have been,” Chantal de Saint-Andre said quietly. “In this moment, I cannot even claim to love you, Cendrillon, for to truly love takes seeing truly, and I am seeing you now for the very first time.

“But I can promise you that I will try. Let there be no more throwing away of love while I am mistress of this house.”

“I don’t know what to say to you,” I said.

“Its simple enough,” Anastasia said. “You say, ‘Thank you, Maman.’”

“Oh, there you are!” her mother said to her. “There is the daughter that I know and love. I knew you could not have lost yourself forever.” She turned me to face her now, gathering us both, and Amelie, too, into her arms. “Another daughter,” she said. “What a wonderful gift.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you, Maman.”

I slept a deep and dreamless sleep that night, and, in the morning, awoke to yet another series of surprises. The first was that my stepmother and Old Mathilde had put their heads together and decided that I was to be treated like a servant no longer Instead, I was to take my place as what I truly was: a daughter of the house. With that in mind, my stepmother escorted me into breakfast herself Seated at the table was the second surprise.

“Niccolo!” I cried. “When did you arrive?”

He got to his feet at once, made me a perfect court bow, then swept me up into a hug.

“Late last night,” He replied. “I didn’t want to wake the house, so I roused Raoul in the stable instead. Somehow, I knew that’s where I’d find him.”

And where he would remain as much as possible, I thought, as I returned Niccolos embrace, then let him go. My status in the great stone house might have changed overnight, but Raoul’s was still the same as always.

“I thought I brought important news,” Niccolo went on as he pulled out a chair for me. I took it, feeling more than a little self-conscious, “But
your
news, little Cendrillon . . .”

“Why does everyone insist on calling me little?” I said. “I’m just as tall as Amelie.”

Niccolo helped my stepmother to the chair at the head of the table, then took a place beside me. He and I were on one side of the table, Amelie and Anastasia on the other. Niccolo shot a quick glance in Amelies direction, then cocked his head in a perfect imitation of her. I heard Chantal chuckle. She made a gesture, and the village girl waiting by the table began to serve the breakfast.

“He has captured you, Amelie,” observed her mother.

Amelie lifted her chin, her eyes gazing straight into Niccolo’s. I saw the way they sparkled. Then she cocked her head in the opposite direction of the one that he had chosen. I bit down on my tongue to keep from laughing, and even Anastasia smiled.

“Has he?” Amelie inquired. “I cant imagine why you would say such a thing.”

“No?” Niccolo said, as he tilted his head to the other side. Slowly, her eyes still holding his, Amelie tilted her head in the opposite direction.

“No.”

Niccolo laughed aloud. “You are too clever for me, lady Amelie,” He said. “In the future, I will make certain to keep that in mind.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Amelie replied, her eyes on her own hands as she added some of Old Mathilde’s blackberry jam to a piece of buttered toast. “I would have thought we were pretty well matched.”

“
Amelie”
Anastasia said, scandalized.

Amelie lifted her eyes. The expression in them was absolutely guileless. “What?” she asked. From the corner of my eye, I thought I saw her mother smile.

So that is the way of things,
I realized. I flicked a glance in Niccolos direction and found him industriously studying his napkin.
They will make a good pair,
I thought. Amelies inquisitive nature and Niccolos open one. And I had to admit, he did look well. His cheeks were tanned from whatever journeys he had undertaken in the summer months. He had a fine new suit of clothes.
He looks like what he is, now,
I thought suddenly.
A nobleman’s son, even if a younger one.

Anastasia cleared her throat. “You said you had news from court. Niccolo,” she said. “Will you tell
us?”

“But of course,” Niccolo answered, and there was both excitement and a note of something deeper in his eyes. “The news I come with is this: The prince has returned to the court.”

“Prince Pascal? I have not seen him since he was a small boy,” my stepmother said.

“Surely you have seen the prince, Niccolo.” Anastasia said, her voice eager. “Tell us what he is like.”

“Ah!” Niccolo said, and now his eyes were dancing with mischief. “Here, I fear I must disappoint you. It is true that I have seen the prince, but equally true that I can tell you almost nothing about him save what everybody knows.”

“There is some story in this, I think,” I said over my stepsister’s exclamations of dismay.

Niccolo nodded. “There is, and I will tell it if you will but give me a moment.”

“Be quiet, Amelie,” Anastasia said at once. I bit down hard on the tip of my tongue.

“The prince is much away from court,” Niccolo explained by way of a beginning. “This has been so for many years, ever since the Prince Pascal was little more than a boy. His travels served as a way for him to learn all the corners of his land and the people he will rule someday.”

“Not to mention keeping him outside his mother’s influence,” Amelie observed.

Niccolo gave a quick nod. “That is so,” He acknowledged. “In this, the cleverness of the king is crystal clear, for, over the years the bond between the prince and the common people has grown strong. Though he is young, he is just, and loved wherever he goes.”

“He sounds boring,” Amelie remarked.

“Amelie!” Anastasia exclaimed. “He’s a prince.”

Amelie turned toward her sister. “Is there some rule that says a young man cant be a handsome prince and a terrible bore all at the same time?”