Just Ella (5 page)

As the days passed, I decided that the servant girl, Mary, was another. She began springing up at odd moments with odd bits of information about Lord Reston (“Criminy! Would you believe he heaved his pillow at the wall yesterday? And him a lord and all?”) or touchingly eager offers of help. (“You don't need anything, do you?
Because if you did, I could get it for you. I've dusted the whole castle since breakfast, seems like, and now me mum says I'm allowed to do whatever I want.”) I found myself telling her things I probably shouldn't have, because she was so much like a puppy dog bouncing around me, ready to fetch anything I wished without so much as a pat on the head for a reward.

“Vinegar will get that out,” I told her one day when she informed me she wouldn't be around for a day or so because she'd been given dozens of stained napkins to wash.

“Yes, that's what me mum said,” Mary answered. She squinted, an expression that made her features look even more unmatched than ever. “But how do you know? Is it true, what people say about you?”

“What people? What do they say?” I braced myself for Mary to accuse me of having washed plenty of dirty laundry in my lifetime, and of possessing no more royal blood than herself—an accusation that was certainly true. I was more than prepared to confess. But Mary was backing away from me in awe.

“Oh . . . nothing. Is . . .” She started timidly, then grinned with a bit more of her usual flippancy. “Is magic easier than vinegar?”

It was my turn to squint, puzzled. But Mary just melted away because yet another instructor was being shown into the room to teach me something I didn't want to know.

“Do you believe in magic?” I asked Jed later that morning when he showed up for my religion lesson.

“It depends,” he said slowly. I was discovering that Jed never gave easy, automatic, or quick answers, but had to ponder out every side of things. “I believe there can be extraordinary events that ordinary humans tend to label as magic because we can't fully understand.”

“And are you an ordinary human?” I teased.

He hesitated and seemed about to ask me something, then appeared to think better of it.

“I'm certainly no prince,” he said. “Now, about that catechism I gave you . . .”

I recited it word for word, the list of twenty beliefs I was supposed to swear to that would make me a fit wife for the prince and a fit mother for a future king. This catechism was much longer, more formal, and less understandable than the one children learned back in the village. Of course, that one ran: “I believe in God. He is good. I will obey Him”—so there was lots of room for improvisation. But I had a hard time believing that my ladies-in-waiting—the moronic Simprianna? the breathtakingly beautiful but addled Cyronna?—had spent much of their lives pondering “the transubstantiation of the Spirit” or “the resurrection of the physical being of our entities.” For that matter, the king, queen, and Prince Charming didn't seem like the types to sit around considering weighty religious matters, and they supposedly were in charge of the entire church.

“Good, ah, good.” Jed nodded encouragingly. “That's really all you need.”

I stared.

“So, that's it? I've—graduated?”

He looked away.

“No, no, of course not. Now that you know the creed, we have to make sure you understand it.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. That could last at least until my wedding, if not until my dying day. Jed opened the
Book of Faith
between us and pointed at the first line of the catechism I had just recited. He opened his mouth to begin an explanation.

“I wasn't raised to be religious,” I said suddenly.

“No?” Jed asked, typically patient with the interruption.

“No. My father was a doubter—he carried that around like a belief.”

“So you're just reciting this? It means nothing to you?”

“No, no . . . I don't know. I knew people back in the village—I mean, where I come from—who had a great deal of faith, and it truly meant something. It made a difference.” I told Jed about my neighbor Mrs. Branson of the ten children. Once, years ago, her husband broke his leg and couldn't work for many weeks, and they ran out of food. This was during a hard winter, and even if the Bransons hadn't been too proud to beg, there were few people who could spare enough for twelve extra people. So she prayed. And then that very night, food appeared on her doorstep. Several loaves of bread, a wheel of cheese, a cured ham. Enough to tide them over.

“Did she ever find out who left it?” Jed asked.

“No. But I knew. Those exact foods disappeared from our
larder. And my father's shoes were muddy in the morning, even though I'd cleaned them—I mean, they'd been cleaned—the night before.”

Jed digested this story, which I'd never told anyone before. Lucille would have killed my father, had she known.

“I think you lost me,” Jed said. “How does that story argue for belief? Maybe your neighbor should have just prayed to your father.”

“Wouldn't have worked,” I said. “He hated beggars. But her faith gave Mrs. Branson the sense of peace and dignity that even my father, a doubter, had to respect.”

Jed nodded thoughtfully.

“I wasn't really raised to be religious either,” he murmured after a moment.

I turned to him in astonishment.

“What? But your father is priest to the king!” I'd only recently learned that from Mary. So
that
was why he was supposed to be addressed as “His Excellency.” I continued in my amazement, “After the king, he's the most powerful person in the church!”

Jed shrugged.

“State religion—you'll learn this—it's got nothing to do with God. It's all show. Smoke and mirrors. If any of these people really believed what they mumbled about, they'd go
do
something, instead of just talking.”

“So what does that mean about you?” I teased. “Why aren't you doing something, instead of just talking?”

I thought we'd been friends long enough that I could joke like that.
But Jed flushed a deep red and turned shy, as if I'd just accused him of being sweet on some maiden.

“Well . . . uh . . . actually,” he said, stumbling over his words, “there is something I'm . . . um . . . trying to find a way to do.”

“What?” I asked, full of curiosity. I had no idea what he might say.

Jed looked down.

“You know about the Sualan War?” he asked softly.

If he hadn't been acting so strangely, I might have joked, “Do you take me for an imbecile?” Even the village idiot knew to curse Suala, because they were trying to take lands that belonged to our kingdom. At least, that's what everybody said. I sometimes wondered what Suala's version was. My father had once said—in the privacy of our own home—that the two kingdoms had been fighting for so long that they'd rendered the land useless to anyone.

“You want to fight in the war?” I asked incredulously. There were some who did—I remembered boys in my village who spoke of nothing but the glory they would earn in battle. But Jed didn't seem the type.

“No,” he said, as if surprised I might suggest such a thing. “I wouldn't give a minute of my life for that. It's the refugees, the people who have been thrown off their lands by the war. Every time the battle lines shift, the people on the border lose crops, houses, barns—sometimes everything. And some of them have nowhere to go. So, I want to set up camps to take care of them, to make sure no one
starves or freezes or dies because of what our kingdom is doing.”

His eyes flashed, and I thought,
This is the key to Jed. This is the most important thing in the world to him.
The whole time I'd known him, which was about three weeks now, he'd seemed mopey and directionless, like an old sheepdog who'd been taken away from his herd. As nice as he'd been to me, I knew he didn't want to spend his life teaching pompous words to pretend princesses. So this was what he really wanted to do instead.

“Have you told anyone?” I asked. “Have you asked your father or the king or whoever—”

“Of course!” Jed said, so forcefully I jerked back against my brocaded chair.

“And?”

He shook his head mournfully.

“They put me off,” he said. “They say they'll study the possibility; they'll draw up a committee to see what ought to be done; they'll think it over. . . . Not that they'd ever let
me
go, anyhow, because I'm supposed to be studying to take over my father's job. But meanwhile, people are dying.”

I tilted my head to the side, considering.

“Why do you need anyone's permission? Why don't you just do it yourself?”

Jed gave me a condescending look, the first time
he'd
made me feel like the empty-headed piece of fluff everyone else seemed to expect me to be.

“I have no great wealth of my own,” he said bitterly. “I don't
want to feed these people just for a day. I want to give them their lives back. But maybe you—”

Something crept into his voice, a slyness I did not associate with Jed.

“What?” I asked, my heart beating unusually fast.

“When you are queen—or maybe sooner than that, once you have the prince's confidence—maybe you can plead my cause for me. You could convince the prince to bankroll my refugee camps. It wouldn't take much, not compared with the vastness of the royal treasury. Not compared with what they're already spending on the war.” Jed leaned forward, beseechingly. “Will you help?”

I felt a strange disappointment. What had I expected him to say? Given who I was, where I was, what I was—a female, now a female of the nobility—how else could I be expected to help? And I was no stranger to the power of pillow talk. Early on in my father's marriage to Lucille, while I still thought of the tangled relations in our household as a war that I could win, I had many times thought I'd convinced my father of something—that Corimunde and Griselda should be required to wash dishes with me, say—only to hear the decision reversed the next morning. I would watch my father and Lucille retire to his room together and imagine Lucille purring her arguments—“Oh, yes, I'm all for fairness, but Corimunde and Griselda have such delicate skin, an affliction Ella is fortunate not to suffer”—without me there to counter her. So now I was supposed to possess that—not real power, not the right to make any decisions myself, but the power of persuasion,
when coupled with a kiss and a breathy whisper and the rest of what men and women do in bed? Unaccountably, the thought disgusted me.

It was a long moment before I realized Jed was still waiting for my answer. He was leaning so far forward in his chair that a small breath might knock him off and send him tumbling gracelessly to the floor. His expression was so full of hope, I wanted to cry.

“I'll—” I cleared my throat. “I'll do what I can.”

That afternoon, while sitting with my ladies-in-waiting working on a particularly vexatious tapestry pattern, I couldn't get my conversation with Jed out of my mind. I jabbed my needle in and out, the loops of white thread accumulating as slowly as milk in a pail from an old cow. We were working on a scene of knights at a tournament, and my meager needlework skills had been exiled to the clouds in the sky. Simprianna, for all her mental deficiencies, was surprisingly brilliant at knowing where to stitch to make an expression look jubilant or defeated, so she was doing faces. I stopped for a second and watched her needle flying in and out, creating a sense of fervor on every visage.

Jed had looked just as fervent declaring his hopes for the refugee camps. I remembered thinking years ago, about the time my father married Lucille, that everyone must have something that matters to them more than anything else, that blinds them to everything else. How else to explain my father and Lucille? He was
learned and honorable and true; she was base and lazy and greedy and mendacious. She was probably intelligent enough, but she did not care about knowledge, only gossip and fashion and getting her own way.

For a while I feared that what people whispered was true, that my father was lovesick, blinded to her faults by his desire to touch her skin, caress her body, join his to hers. (She was not bad-looking, if you didn't know her.) I don't think most twelve-year-olds want to think about their parents having intimate relations; how much worse that my father's relations were with Lucille. But then, by listening at doors and watching them together, I hit upon what I was sure was the truth.

Somehow she'd figured out that his books mattered most to him, and she'd been crafty enough to pretend to love them too. I believe she'd even promised to catalogue them for him—a task he'd been vowing to undertake for as long as I could remember but despaired of ever accomplishing. Of course, after they were married, her true views came out. I never saw anyone look as hurt as he did the day she shoved away a particularly rare book he was showing her and snarled, “Get that vile, dusty thing away from me.”

I'm ashamed to say I tried to deepen the hurt, reporting to him every inane, vicious, and ignorant comment she had ever made about him or his books. Childishly, I thought he could just undo his mistake, unmarry her. I didn't understand honor and promises—or didn't want to. He began traveling a lot more, to search for ever-rarer books,
but also to avoid Lucille. And that was what he was doing when he died.

So that was my father's passion and where it led him. And now I knew Jed's. Wanting to help those hurt by the war was a noble cause, to be sure. Why did that bother me? Was it because I didn't have a cause of my own? Was I supposed to?

I brought my needle in and out dozens of times, pondering that question. I am engaged, I reminded myself. Prince Charming is supposed to be your passion. No—he
is
your passion. You love him.