Just Ella (2 page)

“No,” the other gasped. “So she was—”

“Beaten within an inch of her life and dismissed,” the first said, sounding as self-satisfied as rabble cheering an execution. “Thrown out the palace gate by six.”

“Lazy slugabed got exactly what she deserved, then,” the second said, even as she gently placed a single rose on my pillow. “But the fire—”

They both fell silent and glanced my way. I lowered my eyes and pretended to be intent on the watercolor I was copying over in the afternoon light struggling through the western window. I don't know why I cared what maids thought, or why I acted as though restarting a fire to heat my own room was something to be ashamed of. After a moment, one said, “Humph,” and the other echoed her, and they left. I sighed, glad to be alone, but then Madame Bisset, my decorum instructor, arrived in a flurry.

If it had been someone else, I would have said she was disheveled and flustered, but, of course, Madame Bisset never allowed herself to be anything but absolutely perfect in bearing and dress. Every gleaming silver hair was in place, every one of the fifty-two tiny mother-of-pearl buttons that marched up her dress was precisely fastened in its loop. But she looked as though she'd given thought to
appearing disheveled, as though circumstances might warrant it from anyone else.

“Princess Cynthiana Eleanora,” she said sternly as she sat down, discreetly arranging the yards and yards of fabric in her skirt so she would be comfortable on the sofa. “I have heard a rumor.”

The unfamiliar name and title jarred, as always. I had only recently managed to stop myself from looking around when people addressed me like that. A princess? Where? Oh, that's right. Me. Sort of.

“Madame? A rumor?” I murmured, trying to get the pronunciation of “Madame” exactly right. The day before, Madame Bisset had chided me for how—she lowered her voice to whisper the horrifying phrase—“common” my French sounded. This “Madame” evidently passed muster, because Madame Bisset's frown didn't deepen immediately. So I worried instead that I was breaking some rule against echoing another speaker's words. But no, it was my father who had opposed that. I could hear his dry voice: “I'd prefer to hear an original thought, if you have one.” I couldn't imagine Madame Bisset caring about my thoughts, original or otherwise.

“A rumor,” she said firmly. “Now, normally, a cultured woman does not listen to rumors or gossip.
Au contraire,
one must hold oneself above such—such crudity. But this rumor is so appalling, it must be dealt with. And since I am the person responsible for instilling you with a sense of etiquette, I must not shirk.”

She sniffed daintily and dramatically, fully conveying both
her dedication to her responsibilities and her distaste for the subject she was about to discuss. In my first few days in the palace, when I still dared, I would have joked, “You mean, it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it?” But I'd learned.

“Now, the servants are saying—” Her inflection on “servants” carried the full weight of her disgust at being put in a position of having to quote servants. “The servants are saying you lit your own fire this morning.”

“I did,” I said in a small voice.

Madame Bisset gasped and went pale. She leaned back against the sofa. I wondered if I was going to have to call for smelling salts.

“You must never do that again,” she said in a surprisingly firm voice. “Never.”

A proper young lady would have bowed her head in shame and murmured, “Yes, Madame Bisset.” But no one had thought of training me to be proper until two weeks earlier, so my instincts were all wrong.

“Why?” I asked, truly curious.

Madame Bisset gasped again, as if I were beyond hope if I had to ask. She took a deep breath—as deep as her corsets allowed, anyway.

“You have no idea why you should not light your own fire.”

It was a question without being a question—a trick. I'd be rude to answer it, perhaps interrupting her next thought. But I'd be more rude not to answer, if she was waiting for a reply. These were the games I had to play now.

“No,” I ventured. “Or—I'm not really as stupid as you think. I mean, I know princesses usually don't do things like that. But I was cold, and—”

“You were cold,” Madame Bisset said. A lesser woman would have rolled her eyes. Not Madame Bisset, of course, but the muscles around her eyelids twitched ever so slightly, as if they knew what was possible. “You were cold. Did you perchance remember that you have a bell to call your servants? Did you remember that it was
their
job to tend your fire?”

“Yes, but—” I looked down, knowing that if I kept looking at Madame Bisset, she'd see that I suddenly wanted to cry. I almost whispered, “But I didn't want to disturb anyone.”

I looked up in time to see Madame Bisset holding back an explosion. The color in her face rose like a thermometer, first deathly white, then fiery red, clear up to the roots of her curled-back hair.

“You must never, ever hesitate to disturb a servant,” she said, shooting off each word like an arrow, precise and cruel. “That's what they're there for. They exist solely to serve us.”

She closed her eyes, then opened them slowly.

“You may think you're being kind,” she said, the strain of trying to sound understanding weighing in her voice. “But servants know their place. They like to serve. They are hurt if you make them feel useless. Purposeless. And they cannot respect a member of the nobility who lowers herself to their level, to their
work
.”

She said “work” like it was a curse word.

I clenched my teeth—an ugly habit, I'd been told again and again. But if I opened my mouth, I knew the angry words would spill out. What did Madame Bisset know about how servants felt and thought? Why did she think anyone would get any pleasure out of serving lazy, selfish, self-centered people like her? I knew. I'd been there—not a servant, quite, but close enough. I'd had no respect for the ones I waited on, to begin with. If they'd so much as raised a finger to help me, the question was, would I have been able to stop hating them?

“Do you understand?” Madame Bisset asked, the way you'd ask a simpleton.

I lowered my eyes and made a stab at propriety.

“Yes, Madame Bisset.” I looked up, unable to resist another question. “The maidservant—I heard she was dismissed. If I'd thought to ring for her, would she still have been—”

Madame Bisset sniffed.

“Of course. She overslept.”

So now, cold again, I dared not get up. I couldn't start my own fire or ring for the maid, and risk getting another girl fired. I could only pray that she woke on her own, and crept down here without being discovered. I willed her to awaken, as if I could send my thoughts up three flights of narrow, winding stairs to shake her awake. I listened for the distinctive creak of my door, the one I so often pretended
to sleep through, because I didn't know what to say to people doing work for me that I was perfectly capable of doing myself. But the door didn't open. I got colder.

This wasn't what I'd imagined at the ball, the stars wheeling above me as I danced with the prince. Truthfully, I didn't imagine anything. Just being at the ball was beyond my wildest dreams. And then everything happened so fast—the prince seeking me for his bended-knee proposal, everyone making wedding plans, me returning to the castle to stay, for good. I remembered an old neighbor woman cackling as I rode by, astonished, in the prince's carriage: “Now, there's one who will live happily ever after.”

I was cold. I was lonely. I was engaged to be married in two short months to the most handsome man I'd ever seen—the prince of the land, the heir to the throne. But I had never felt so alone in all my life, not even shivering in rags in my garret the day they came to say my father was dead.

This was happiness?

I must have fallen back asleep, because when I opened my eyes again, there was a weak fire throwing shadows on the wall. Sunlight streamed in through the one high, narrow window, doing its best to brighten the dark room. I hadn't known this, having stepped foot in a castle only once before I came to stay for good, but castles are dim, gloomy places, full of shadows even at noon on the brightest day. My eyes had not adjusted. As a child, I had lived more out of doors than in, until my father taught me to read just to keep me in the house. And even then, I'd sneak his books outside and read them under the shade of the hazel tree, or while dangling my bare feet in the creek behind our house.

And now, I hadn't been outside the castle walls once since I arrived. Aren't princesses supposed to know horsemanship or anything like that? Shouldn't someone be giving me some sort of lessons outside? I resolved to ask. The thought cheered me so much, I sprang out of bed and began scrubbing my face with vigor.

Four hours later I was on my third lesson of the morning, and I still hadn't found an opportunity to ask anything. How could conversational French, dining table etiquette, and royal genealogy take so much time? Actually, royal genealogy would have interested me if it had been the kind my father used to talk about, where kings went crazy or a single peasant's whisper in a prince's ear changed the entire fate of a nation. In the history Lord Reston described for me, in his dry, dull, droning voice, everyone was upstanding and perfect, and absolutely nothing of interest ever happened.

“And then the next king, Charming the Ninth, was known as the Bridges King, because he ordered the building of thousands of bridges throughout the land. And every bridge was strong and true and lasted for hundreds of years,” he said, his hands resting on his enormous stomach. He looked like a huge pig stuffed into men's clothing. I thought of warning him never to go to the Haymarket Fair held in our village every summer, because boys there put clothes and wigs on pigs and chase them for sport, and he wouldn't want to be mistaken for a particularly well-dressed pig. I'd hate to think of Lord Reston trying to run.

“Some of the bridges exist even to this—”

Lord Reston's drone stopped abruptly. He gasped soundlessly, a stricken look on his face.

“Lord Reston? Are you all right?” I asked. “Lord Reston?”

His head lolled to the side, his tongue hanging out of his mouth. His face went gray.

“Lord Reston? Lord Reston?” Frantically I pawed at his collar hidden beneath rolls of double chins. I popped off his top button and undid his cravat. He had to get air. Why wasn't he breathing? “Help! Somebody help!” I screamed.

The castle walls were too thick for anyone to hear me unless they were right outside the door. Nobody came. I tugged and pulled on Lord Reston's arms and legs, thinking that if I could get him flat on the floor, perhaps the air would come in more easily. Even after my years of carrying buckets and firewood, moving him took every ounce of my strength. Finally he fell from the chair with a thud. I straightened his body out, trying to make him more comfortable. I thought I saw his chest moving up and down, ever so slightly, but I didn't stop to make sure.

“I'll be right back, Lord Reston,” I shouted over my shoulder as I raced for help. “I promise.”

Out in the hall, I lifted my skirts to run. There had to be maids about in the next chamber, or the next, and one of them could go for a physician. If only I could find one who knew or cared enough to run as fast as she could. Turning the corner, I collided with a serving girl, a child really, no more than ten or eleven.

“Go get the court physician!” I commanded. “Tell him Lord Reston is dying in my room!”

“Yes, Princess,” she said, sweeping into a graceful curtsy.

“There's no time for that! Run!” I commanded.

Obediently, she stopped mid-curtsy and fled.

I rushed back to my room, praying I wouldn't find Lord Reston already dead. A stench told me he was still alive enough to have fouled himself. I knelt beside him.

“Lord Reston? Can you hear me?” I took his cold hand in mine, wishing I hadn't been so cruel as to think of him as a pig. He may have been pompous and dull, but surely he had a family, people who loved him. . . .

“Unhhh,” he grunted.

“That's good,” I said encouragingly. “I'm glad you're in there. But don't try to talk if it hurts.”

I bent over him, putting my ear on his chest to listen for his heartbeat. It was there, but faint and sluggish, as if his heart were not quite sure the next
thump-thump
was worth the effort.

“Princess! Whatever are you doing?”

I turned, and there was Madame Bisset, arriving for my next lesson.

“It's Lord Reston—he's taken ill. Do you know anything about—”

I stopped because Madame Bisset was looking at me in such horror. She'd gone white.

“It's
His Excellency,
the Lord Reston,” she corrected.

I hardly thought a title mattered under the circumstances.

“And a true princess,” she continued, pronouncing each word with great effort, “would never lie on the floor with her head on a man's chest—a man's bare chest.”

She swayed ever so slightly, prepared to faint.

I looked down and saw that Lord Reston's shirt was open
practically to his waist, his immense girth spilling out. Hastily I tried to pull his waistcoat together, but the effort was in vain. I scrambled up and helped Madame Bisset to the chaise longue.

“I'm afraid he's dying,” I said. “I didn't know what to do—”

“That's what doctors are for,” Madame Bisset said weakly, her eyes closed.

“Yes, I sent for one,” I said irritably. I glanced over at Lord Reston, who probably was dying as we spoke. “But there wasn't a doctor here when he was stricken. Just me.”

Madame Bisset's only response was to flutter her eyelashes.