Just Ella (6 page)

Somehow, though, it seemed like I needed more. Maybe it was because I'd won him too easily. I'd known girls in my village who'd set their hearts on a particular boy, then plotted their days so they'd be coming out of the baker's just in time to bump into their beloved as he was leaving the miller's. They'd save and scrimp for weeks to have enough sugar to bake a pie for their intended, only to say, giggling, “Oh, it was just some extra we had—thought you might want it,” when the pie was delivered, as if any sign of wanting him would scare him off (which it sometimes did).

I had hardly plotted to ensnare the prince. I'd never even dreamed it was possible. I'd just gone to the ball as a lark, partly out of curiosity, partly to spite Lucille. (Would I have cared about going if she hadn't forbidden me?)

I felt a surge of triumph—oh, how I had spited her. Then I was instantly ashamed. Perhaps, truly, what mattered most to me was beating Lucille. It didn't seem like a very
worthy cause. As much as she'd messed up the last five years of my life, Lucille had problems of her own. Now that I was in the castle, and she was still in the village, I shouldn't think of her as the enemy anymore. I should probably just pity her and find some other goal to focus on. But what?

My thread tangled then, and I had to interrupt a discussion about dressing gowns to get Simprianna to help me unsnarl it. (She was also quite skilled at that. I suppose I was too hard on her, considering her an absolute simpleton.) I apologized profusely to Simprianna, as if that could make up for all the cruel things I'd ever thought about Lucille.

“I'm so sorry. I don't know how it happened.”

Silently Simprianna picked at the knots in my thread with a perfectly curved fingernail. Then she began to pull out my last row of stitches.

“Wait,” I said. “Why—” Then I saw a snarl that I hadn't even noticed at the beginning of the row. All my stitches since had been useless.

“Oh,” I said. “I see. I'm sorry about that too. I guess my mind was wandering.”

Simprianna barely glanced up.

“Aye, Princess,” she sighed. “Can you not ask your fairy godmother for help?”

“My what?” I asked.

She and a few of the others giggled. I heard someone whisper, on the other side of the tapestry, “Well, of course she has to pretend she doesn't know. . . .”

“Nothing, Princess,” Simprianna murmured, keeping her eyes on her work.

I looked around. All twelve of the other ladies had their heads bent low over the tapestry. Nobody was going to enlighten me. But—fairy godmother? It reminded me of Mary asking about magic. I decided the castle folk, servants and nobility alike, were a superstitious lot. I wish I had had a fairy godmother to protect me all those years I lived with the Step-Evils. Of course, I wouldn't need one now.

Would I?

Once he'd shared his dream for the refugee camps, Jed seemed to feel he could tell me anything. My daily religion lessons were taken up less and less with talk of the trinity or the “corporeal evidence of His Holiness”—whatever that meant—and more and more with banter, jokes, and Jed's tales about his childhood.

“I feel sorry for any child who didn't get to grow up in this castle,” he said one sunny morning a few weeks after he'd taken over for his father.

“Why?” I asked in surprise. By then, Jed surely realized my own childhood had taken place outside of any palace walls. And if he didn't, I hardly cared if he found out. “I would think a child in this castle was to be pitied. All those people around telling you to sit up straight, don't speak while the minister of the treasury is speaking, and don't spill your soup on the foreign ambassador or it'll start a war—”

Jed laughed.

“Yes, there was rather too much of that for my taste.
But we children were kept mostly out of sight, so we didn't have to worry about foreign policy. What I meant was . . . have you never noticed the length of the banisters on the main staircase?”

I nodded, remembering my awe the night of the ball at the sight of the grand staircase, which rose from the entrance hall to a spot that would be three stories higher in a normal house. The tallest man I'd ever seen, a carpenter in my village called Tom the Giant, could have lain down on a step with neither his head nor his feet touching the sides. And the staircase was lined on each side by pillars and a banister of rare polished wood that I knew from Lord Reston's lectures had been brought from faraway lands decades ago.

“You used to slide down the banisters,” I gasped. I did not confess that I had longed to do that very thing from the moment I'd seen them. But I'd never been near the banisters when there weren't at least a dozen others with me. And while it would be delightful to see the scandalized expression on Madame Bisset's face, I did still want to marry the prince. Not to mention, to continue living. Considering that I'd been confined to my room for letting my petticoat slip out and show beneath my skirt for an instant, I had a feeling Madame Bisset would view banister sliding by a princess as a crime worthy of execution.

“Was it as much fun as it looks?” I asked Jed.

He grinned in a way that made me think he must have been an awfully ornery little boy.

“Oh, yes. My brothers and I would sneak out at night and have races, one of us on each side.”

“Brothers?” I asked.

“I have three. All younger, and all away at school in the East,” he said.

“So, will they all become priests like you?” I teased.

He grimaced.

“No, 'tis only the oldest who must follow his father's career. They may do as they wish.
They
would be allowed to work with the war refugees, as I may not. If any of them wanted to. Which they don't.”

“What do they want?” I asked.

He laughed.

“To be priest to the king. The one thing they won't be allowed. What's that your friend, the servant girl, is always saying?”

I'd told him about Mary.

“Oh, you mean”—I mustered up my best imitation of her voice—“don't that beat all?”

We laughed together, at either my poor imitation of Mary's words or the perversity of Jed's brothers.

“I wish—,” I started, and immediately clamped my mouth shut. For what I had intended to say was, “I wish I could laugh this way with the prince. I wish I felt as close to him as I do to you.” I didn't need Madame Bisset around to tell me those were inappropriate words, indecent thoughts. But I shouldn't worry. The prince and I would feel close as soon as we could be together without a chaperon.
I was just lucky that Jed, being a priest in training, didn't need to be chaperoned in my presence as well.

“What do you wish, milady?” Jed asked with mock formality.

Because I had to say something, I blurted out, “I wish I knew if you know the truth about me.”

I saw a gleam of interest in his eyes, as if he'd been longing to discuss this but hadn't felt he could bring it up himself. In that instant, I decided to tell him everything.

“Well, I do know,” he started slowly and carefully, peering straight into my eyes, “that you're not a Domulian princess, as is claimed.”

“And how do you know that?” I asked.

He began ticking off the reasons on his fingers.

“One, Domulia is the farthest land we know of, and you probably could not have had time to hear of the ball and travel here between the time it was announced and the time it was held.”

“Maybe I have magical powers,” I teased.

He seemed strangely jolted by that, but went on.

“Two, Domulian princesses are famously ugly and wart covered and you, well, are not. Either one. Ugly or wart covered.”

It was the first time he'd mentioned my appearance since the day we met. His glance made me uncomfortable.

“And?” I prompted.

“Three, you once told me a story about your father giving food away to a hungry neighbor. Kings do not live near
hungry people, and if they do, they don't feed them. They employ them. Or banish them.”

“But maybe my father was an extraordinary king,” I argued.

Jed ignored that.

“And, four, you do not remember this, because I was far in the background, practically out of sight, but I was there the day the prince put the slipper on your foot and whisked you away to the palace.”

I blushed. How had I missed him? Of course, that day I'd had eyes only for the prince. I vaguely recalled that he'd had a crowd of retainers with him, but they had seemed more like props than people.

“You were? Why?”

“One of my royal duties,” Jed said with a shrug. “I was supposed to be getting experience advising the prince. Of course, all my advice was disregarded. I said that since your entire village knew about you, the king should announce to the world that his son was marrying a commoner, in a show of unity with his people or some such thing. I thought it would be good for the royal image in the kingdom. But it was decided that acknowledging the truth would insult all the kings who'd hoped to marry off their daughters to Charming. As it is, I'm sure all the foreign kings have heard the rumors and are insulted, but they can't confront the Charmings without calling them liars.”

For just that instant, I could imagine Jed as a royal adviser. He would give well-reasoned counsel, but he wouldn't
care enough to be persuasive. Because he'd always be thinking about the refugee camps instead.

“Why—” I gulped, not quite sure I had the nerve to voice my question. But this might be my only opportunity. “Why
is
the prince willing to marry a mere commoner?”

I wanted Jed to look me in the eye and say, “Because he's fallen head over heels in love with you. Don't you know? Everybody's talking about it. Men older than my grandfather say they've never seen a prince so deeply in love.”

But Jed wouldn't meet my gaze.

“I'd guess it's because you're not ugly and wart covered like a Domulian princess,” he mumbled, staring fixedly at the fire.

There was a silence between us, and I felt as tongue-tied and uncomfortable as I often did with the prince. Then Jed looked up and gave me a solid grin.

“So. Do you have magical powers or was there a fairy godmother helping you at the ball, the way everyone claims?” he asked.

“What?” I asked, flabbergasted. It had been one thing to hear Mary and Simprianna talk about magic and fairy godmothers as if such things truly existed. They were uneducated, bound to be superstitious. Simprianna also couldn't count beyond ten. But Jed was learned. He was practical. He was a man.

“You've not heard the story going around the palace?” he asked. “About how you got to come to the ball when your evil stepmother had locked you in the cellar?”

“Lucille isn't e—,” I started to protest, in an unusual surge of loyalty. Then I remembered Jed must have seen her, in all her frilly purple dressing-gown glory, the day I left. So he knew. “Well, she didn't lock me in the cellar. She just told me I had to scrub it out by hand before she and Griselda and Corimunde returned.”

“All right,” Jed said. “Close enough. And you were in tears about it. But then your fairy godmother appeared.”

I gave him a “You have got to be kidding” look, but let him keep talking.

“Your fairy godmother appeared and waved her magic wand and turned your rags into a ball gown, complete with glass slippers. Then she took a pumpkin and some mice and turned them into a carriage and horses. But she said her magic could last only until midnight—that's why you were in such a rush to leave at the stroke of twelve that you left one of your glass slippers behind. Which, everyone knows, is how the prince found you.”

By the time Jed got to the one detail that was true, I was laughing so hard tears were streaming down my face.

“Some . . . someone . . . actually . . . believes that?” I finally sputtered between giggles.

“It's more plausible than you as a Domulian princess,” Jed said with a grin. “What's the truth?”

“Well,” I started slowly, “it wasn't quite that exciting.”

And yet, I felt a surge of exhilaration just thinking about that night. Not just because I'd met the prince and fallen in love and started on my course toward happiness ever after, but because I'd made something happen. I'd done something everybody had told me I couldn't. I'd changed my life all by myself. Having a fairy godmother would have ruined everything.

“Promise you won't tell anyone?” I said. “I mean, it probably doesn't matter to anyone else, but if the king and queen and the prince still want to keep up the fiction that I'm foreign royalty, I don't want to spread my story.”

Jed nodded. “Of course,” he said.

I started my tale.

“Once upon a time,” I said mischievously, wrinkling my nose so Jed would know I was making fun of the whole thing, “I was just a poor girl in rags. . . .”

But somehow remembering everything transported me back, and I quickly settled into seriousness. I wasn't even pretending to be Princess Cynthiana Eleanora anymore. I was myself again, Ella Brown, always hungry, always cold, always angry at my stepmother's and stepsisters' cruelties. . . .

I was scrubbing the kitchen floor when the invitation arrived by royal herald. There was a smart rap at the front door, and I began debating which would make Lucille angrier: me answering the door with a kerchief around my head and water dripping from the bottom of my skirt, or me not answering the door at all and leaving her or Corimunde or Griselda to the indignity of opening it themselves. I hadn't decided yet when I heard Corimunde gasp.

“Look, Gris, out the window.”

I heard a flurry of swishing skirts and petticoats from the sitting room as they both apparently raced to the door. Thanks to a steady diet of bonbons, they each weighed twice what I did, and they rarely bestirred themselves for anything except to waddle into the dining room for their next meal. So I was sure whatever Corimunde was gasping about was worth a peek. Opening the kitchen door a crack, I had a direct view of the young, flaxen-haired man on the doorstep. He was stunningly handsome, with a physique I'd
seen only in my father's books about ancient gods and heroes. He wore tight black pants and a rich scarlet tailcoat, with a fancy design in gold on every pocket and lapel. He held a trumpet to his lips and blew two short blasts, then one long note of exquisite tone.