The Spinner and the Slipper (20 page)

“You know,” said Heloise after a while, “you’ll have to accept one of them.”

“I’m sorry,” said Evette, turning a puzzled glance upon her sister. “Accept one of what?”

“One of your doting swains,” Heloise said. “You’ll have to accept one of them. For Le Sacre. Someone has to escort you now. You’re eighteen.”

“Oh.” Evette shifted the heavy basket from one arm to the other. “Well. I told Edgard I was going with my family.”

“Yes, but you don’t mean that!” Heloise shook her head, her wild curls bouncing. “No girl goes with her family on the night she sings and dances. You’re eighteen. It would be so childish!”

“And this coming from you?”

This was the closest to sarcasm Heloise could recall hearing from Evette, ever. It stopped her in her tracks. Evette, however, did not stop, and Heloise was obliged to trot in order to catch up, her shock so great that she could think of nothing to say.

They continued in silence to the top of a certain hill. From this prospect they commanded a fine view of much of Canneberges, including the great stone structure of Centrecœur in the near distance.

It was a grand house indeed. So ancient and yet so modern at the same time. There were rooms in the house that, according to legend, were part of the original castle built by the original masters of this land. But it had been added onto and improved so often over the years that little of the old structure existed. All that remained of the castle battlements was a single tower, which rose up proudly above the rest of the house and, indeed, above all Canneberges.

Heloise caught her breath as she always did when Centrecœur came in view. Sunlight reflected off of little glass-paned windows. Real glass! There couldn’t be more than a dozen houses in all the kingdom that boasted real glass windows! Surely not even the palace of the king himself could be so grand.

A wind caught at Heloise’s hair and whipped through her skirts. She shuddered and couldn’t help listening for a laughing voice. But there was nothing. It was a normal sort of wind, she supposed.

“Come along,” said Evette, and they continued down the hill.

After a few moments, Evette spoke again. “I have something for you. For your birthday.”

This was a surprise indeed. Heloise couldn’t recall the last time she’d received a gift. She was fairly certain it hadn’t happened since her fifth birthday. Since that one, no one bothered to celebrate. Indeed, rarely did anyone so much as acknowledge the day.

“Since you’re fourteen now, I thought you might like something special,” said Evette. She paused, hefted her basket onto one hip to free her opposite hand, and dug down into her apron’s deep pocket. She pulled out a folded square of linen cloth and handed it to Heloise.

Heloise set down her own basket so that she might accept the gift. She spied at once the little red flowers embroidered around the hemmed edges of the linen: cranberry flowers, Evette’s trademark. Most of the sewing done at the Flaxman cottage was of the mending, repairing nature, but Evette found time as she could to try more delicate stitchery. There was hardly a garment to be had in the Flaxman household that wasn’t decorated with red cranberry flowers and berries and trailing vines all stitched in leftover dyed thread considered not fine enough to send up to the Great House.

Heloise unfolded the linen and discovered that she held a white day-cap. It was the sort of cap worn by young women of the estate, covering their hair. She would have to pin up her braids in order to wear it.

Briefly Heloise wondered if she should feel affronted. Pressured even. But despite herself, she felt only a sudden warm glow of gratitude. “Thank—thank you,” she managed, stumbling over the words. “It’s very pretty.”

“Try it on,” Evette suggested.

But Heloise shook her head. Her hair was too untidy, mostly escaped from the braids as it was. “I’ll wear it for Le Sacre,” she said. “I promise.”

Satisfied, Evette continued down the path. Heloise slipped the cap into her own apron pocket, hefted her basket and followed after.

It really was a shame Evette would soon have to marry. Farm wives never found time for such dainty handwork. Evette would have to give it up entirely when it came time to have babies and manage a household of her own.

Besides, if she married a boy like Edgar, she’d never be able to keep pretty things like that clean.

I see her coming from my window. I see her and her sister approaching the Great House.
So sweet are they, so innocent! So unaware of that to which they even now draw near. They will learn soon enough, more’s the pity!

But not yet. Let not their gentle oblivion be spoiled too quickly. Le Sacre Night is nigh.

Would that I had the wings to fly from this high tower. Would that I had the legs to run, the arms to reach out and enfold them both, to protect them.

But I have none of these things. Not anymore. I have only my voice. And so I cry out to her, to the cursebreaker.

When she is far from me, she cannot hear me well. She draws nearer now. Perhaps I may say a little more. Perhaps she will understand.

SIX

“Mistress LeBlanc says you may come in,” said the housemaid once she deigned to answer Evette’s knock at the back scullery door. “But she says you”—with a significant nod at Heloise—“must stay out.”

“Oh, come now, Alphonsine,” Evette protested gently, “you know Heloise! You and I watched her together along with your own sisters not long ago. You know she will be no trouble. Or, well . . .”

Evette’s honesty would one day be the death of her. Heloise glared at the housemaid, who had only a year ago been nothing more than a miller’s daughter and no better than any Flaxman girl. But a certain amount of luck and cunning (not to mention a significant bounty of golden hair that caught the bailiff’s eye), had landed her employment in the Great House. And Lights Above forbid she should remember the peasant girls who had been her playmates!

“Mistress Leblanc’s orders,” said Alphonsine, narrowing her eyes at Heloise. “You stay out.”

Evette turned to Heloise, her face wrinkled with worry. To be permitted into Centrecœur at all, even just into the scullery, was a thrill unmatched in the experience of any farmer’s daughter. Mistress Leblanc, the housekeeper of Centrecœur, did not readily let the “unwashed urchins” of the estate into her spotless domain. But Evette, known as a neat, clean sort of girl, was sometimes allowed to pass through the scullery and around to the weaver room where she might deliver the new skeins in person.

She hated to leave Heloise behind. There was nothing to be done, however. Heloise, if known at all, was certainly
not
known as clean, neat, or anything of that sort.

“Don’t worry,” Heloise said with a dismissive shrug, though inside she really wanted to give that snobby Alphonsine Millerman’s nose a twist. “I’ll be fine out here. Go on in as you like.”

Evette looked for a moment as though she might protest. Not keen on an argument just then (particularly not one in which Evette was sure to come across as even more self-sacrificial than usual), Heloise dumped her basket in the housemaid’s arms, turned on heel, and strode off through the kitchen garden. Before she’d gone more than a few paces, she heard the door shut behind her sister.

Only then did Heloise heave a sigh. Not that she’d expected to be allowed inside the Great House. Still, sometimes she couldn’t help
almost
wishing she was a bit more like Evette.

The kitchen gardens of Centrecœur were not particularly interesting. Big, certainly, and newly tilled in preparation for the coming spring planting. But not interesting. Once the castle moat had cut through here just under her feet, but it had long since been filled in on this side, though a sort of muddy trench rimmed three other sides of the house (just deep enough to be unpleasant to wade through, but not deep enough to keep out any but the most timorous marauders). This side of the house also boasted the stables, which made things convenient both for the stable boys mucking out stalls and for the gardeners seeking to better the soil.

In another few months, the garden would be thick with thriving green things fit for the tables of lords and ladies. Just now, however, at the end of winter, there wasn’t much to see.

Look in the mirror
.

Heloise, wandering lonely through the nearly empty beds, stopped in her tracks. There was her own voice again, deep inside her head.
But she hadn’t . . . Well, after all, why would she start thinking about mirrors just now?

Look in the mirror
.

“There isn’t any mirror. Not out here,” Heloise muttered, staring down at her own dirty toes as if they were the most fascinating things she’d ever seen.

Look in the mirror
.

There might be a mirror in the Great House. As rich as the Cœur family was, there were probably rooms full of mirrors! Heloise looked over her shoulder, back at the house. Of course, she wouldn’t dare sneak inside. If Mistress Leblanc happened upon her, she’d be flayed alive for sure. But still . . .

Heloise stepped carefully out of the garden (neatly avoiding various pungent offerings from the stables) and approached the imposing side of the house. This eastern wing had been built in more warlike days as a defensive structure, and there were few windows to be had. One small slit offered the only opening, and Heloise knew even before she put her face up to it that she would never fit her shoulders through to slip inside. Nevertheless, she stood on tiptoe and peered into the gloom.

Her eyes took a moment to adjust. Once they did, she found herself gazing upon a bundle of leaves. Another glance, and she saw that it was a bundle of, of all things, nightshade. A whole, enormous bundle of dried nightshade. She could still see the dried purple blossoms, like so many withered corpses.

A rumbling hum alerted her, and Heloise ducked just as a tall, somber figure in a strange hat passed by inside the window. The humming went on, and Heloise thought that, were the voice even remotely melodic, it might have been humming a tune. Curious, she peered through the window again.

The somber figure in the pointed hat could have been a magician straight out of one of the old stories. But Heloise knew that couldn’t be true. She watched as he wafted around the room, tall, almost skeletal, his face a solemn mask incongruous with the tune in his throat. He selected certain leaves from various dried bunches of herbs hung about the dark chamber and, even as Heloise watched, ground them to powder and mixed them in a dark tincture.

Then he reached for the very bunch of withered greens hanging just before Heloise’s face, tore out a handful of crackly leaves, and added them to his mix.

He must be a doctor. The doctor who, so rumor had it, the marquis had sent to Canneberges just a few months ago. It must be he, for who but a doctor—trained in his own weird arts—would dare to handle nightshade?

“I say, is that
you
, little girl?”

A startled thrill ran up Heloise’s spine, and she whirled about, nearly falling over in her haste. There before her, atop his tall horse, wearing the blue cape and the cap with damaged peacock plumes, was Master Benedict. He stared down at her, almost as startled as she was. “It is you!” he exclaimed and swung down from his horse to approach her. “You’re the girl from the wood, and—”

“Hush!” Heloise whispered, indicating the window behind her with a toss of her head. Master Benedict’s eyes darted to the window, confused for a moment, then suddenly filling with recognition. A shudder passed through him, as though he’d just thought of something nasty, with too many legs, crawling down his arm. He beckoned Heloise to step away from the window after him.

He was, after all, the lord’s son. What else could she do? Casting a last uneasy glance behind her, Heloise did as she was bidden and approached Master Benedict and his horse. He started toward the stables, leading the horse on a loose rein. Since he seemed to expect Heloise to follow him, she fell into pace at his side.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” she said, defensive suddenly. Then, remembering that he was a marquis’s son and she was a flax-farmer’s daughter, she added an awkward walking-curtsy and murmured, “Master Benedict. You see, my mother’s a spinner, and we brought up some skeins—”

“No, no, I mean—” Master Benedict cast a nervous glance about as though afraid of being overheard. But out here in the empty kitchen gardens, still a good many paces from the stable, there was no one about. “I mean, what about that . . . that
thing?
That voice we encountered? I rode back as soon as I caught my horse and I tried to find you and I saw the damage and I thought . . .”

His voice trailed off. Heloise, wondering if he was embarrassed again, gave him a sideways glance, expecting his face to be ripe with blushes. Instead, she saw that it had gone strangely pale. Master Benedict stood suddenly quite still, holding the reins of his horse’s bridle, but limply. A single tug, and the horse would easily get free.

“Master Benedict?” Heloise said. “I, um. I’m quite all right, as you see. Not to worry at all. I don’t think it was dangerous, whatever it was, and . . . and . . . Master Benedict?”

His eyes closed. He swayed where he stood. Though he was quite tall, Heloise had the sudden impression that she could knock him over with a single flick of her finger.

But the next moment he shook his head quickly, and his eyes opened and focused on her face. “I’m glad you’re all right,” he said. The color slowly returned to his cheeks, and he took a few breaths, blinking slowly. Heloise saw his grip tighten on his horse’s reins. “Perhaps,” he continued, “it’s better not to speak of it. You’re alive; I’m alive. No harm done.”

Look in the mirror.

The thought appeared in her head with such suddenness, Heloise couldn’t stop herself. Her mouth opened, and she was asking the question before she quite realized that she intended to. “Master Benedict, do you have a mirror?”

Benedict frowned and turned his head to the side, like a bird studying an interesting beetle. “A mirror? Yes, of course. Why do you ask?”

“Well, I—”

“Heloise!”

Benedict, Heloise, and the horse all turned their heads at the sound of that startled voice. All three saw Evette, the empty skein baskets in her arms, approaching with all haste across the empty garden. She, thinking her sister was bothering one of the busy grooms, called in her gentle but firm way, “Heloise dearest, do come away and let the poor man—Oh!”

Heloise saw Evette’s eyes fix upon Master Benedict’s cap. She too knew all about the fabled peacock feathers. Her gaze flicked from Benedict to Heloise and back again. “Oh! Good sir!” She dropped a quick curtsy, then, thinking better of it, dropped another, deeper one just to be safe.

It was possibly the first time in her life Heloise had seen her sister at a complete loss. She smiled wickedly and addressed herself to the marquis’s son. “Master Benedict, meet Evette, my sister. Evette, meet the Honorable Master Benedict de Cœur.”

Somewhere, sometime in the long history of the worlds, there was probably a moment in which someone had done something more brazen. But one would never have known it by the look on Evette’s face.

Master Benedict, flushing royally, tipped his cap. “I’m sorry,” he said, though neither he nor anyone else knew what he apologized for. “Well, good day. Good day, Miss Evette. Good day, erh, little girl.”

With that, he tugged on his horse’s reins and led it away to the stables, casting only one final nervous glance back.

“Heloise!” Evette exclaimed, dashing to her sister’s side and dropping one of the empty skein baskets so that she could clutch Heloise’s arm. “That was
the marquis’s son!
Talking to
you!
”

“Oh yes,” said Heloise, as though it really wasn’t worth mentioning, though inside she was nearly drowning with pride. “He broke a feather in his cap. Did you notice? What a fool he looks, riding around like that with a broken feather.”

“Oh, Heloise,” said Evette, “I do hope you didn’t
say
that to him!”

Heloise only smiled.