Black Pearls (13 page)

"Is it not time, my love, to put away your godmother's imaginary spells? To give up these sad old dreams?" I led her to the mirror beside our bed. I turned her to face the two of us in its glass. "Here is your present and your future. Here is your new life."

She studied our reflections, but her eyes seemed to peer deep inside the glass, behind my consternation, past her own loveliness. "'Old'? 'Sad'?" she said, mocking me. "Sad enough to turn a house wench into a princess! Old enough to make a queen my mother! A mother who will stay with me always, just as I dreamt."

"
I
am with you, too." My tone was petulant; even I heard the small boy's whine behind my words.
(I am sorry I made you unhappy, Mama. I have been so lonely without you.)
Perhaps moved by my pitiable tone, Cinderella came to bed then, sat beside me while I unbuttoned her jeweled vest. Like an obedient pet, she allowed me to undress her until I tried to slip away the long layers of petticoat that rustled around us.

"Wait," she begged as before, her eyes staring so deeply into mine, I thought she had found a new mirror there. "Tell me how it was that night. How you fell in love with a fairy princess. How she danced and whirled and stole your heart away."

When a kitten slips its head beneath your hand, it is little enough trouble to pet it, to stroke the soft head and back until it purrs. She required only a few words, a memory that pleased us both. So I told her again how she shone at the ball. How no eyes could look away from the lovely dancer, how the hours were like minutes as the blue satin swept round the room and the glass slippers spun webs of light across the floor.

As I recited the litany, she held me tight, her nails digging through my shirt. Each time I paused, she pulled away and held me at arm's length, laughing. "More!" she demanded, tossing her head like a spoiled child. "Tell me more!" And like a doting fool with a pretty changeling on his lap, I helped her see it all again: the grand hall lined with glittering torches, the tapestried walls, the carved satyrs holding up a painted sky. And at the center of it all, whirling like a firefly, a fragile golden girl catching us in her spell.

My hands under the petticoats, I retold the rings that had sparkled through her lace gloves. Against her ear, her neck, her damp white breast, I whispered of the satin bows at which the queen had stared in fascination from her balustrade decked with flowers. When the story was done, Cinderella sighed softly and drew me to her.

I woke again to an empty bed. Sweating, I rolled away from the stream of sun that striped the pillow, dressed hurriedly, and went in search of my bride. There was no one in the queen's chambers but an aged servant who had been ordered to wait for me. "They are in the east garden," she told me over her sewing. "They request you to join them there."

Fussing with roses and chattering amid stalks of lilies, my wife and mother looked up with mild annoyance when I arrived. "Oh, good. You're here at last." While she spoke, the queen advanced on the lilies, cutting blooms with a precise and practiced hand. The huge white heads dropped one by one into a basket held by the princess beside her. "We have a boon to ask, have we not, my dear?"

A small rose the color of egg yolk peeked from my wife's hair. "Yes," she said, smiling uncertainly into my mother's steely eyes. I had to laugh now at my foolish fear that the queen could mold Cinderella into an image of herself. Standing together, the two could not have looked more different. One was dark and stately, with a sharpness that had already hardened her beauty. The other was fair and changeable as sunlight, as innocent as a new day. "That is, your mother thought, and so did I..."

"It would be a wedding gift," my mother finished for her. "A way of announcing your choice to all the world." She bent to snip a calla, then stood again, the silver shears flashing. "A way, too, of putting an end to vicious talk and preserving honor in the wake of your somewhat hasty match."

I knew the talk of Princess Cinders was painful, not only to the queen, but to my love as well. "Worthy goals all," I admitted warily. "But why are the means so long in coming?"

The queen turned to cut another flower while my sweetheart raced to place the basket by her side. "Not long at all," Mother announced, "provided a little decisiveness can be mustered to undertake a somewhat distasteful task."

"Such as?"

She faced me now, forcing the princess to scurry to her other side. "We want your bride's stepmother and sisters executed."

I could hardly believe my ears. I searched Cinderella's face for a trace of the horror I felt myself. But in the countenance she raised to the queen's, I saw only adoration. "Three lives lost for honor's sake?" I could not hide my outrage. "What sort of honor is it, Mother, that requires human sacrifice?" The basket of lilies dipped as I raised my voice, the ponderous heads rolling around its rim. "If honor breeds such schemes, I would hate to see the work of knaves."

"Is it knavish, then, to right wrongs?" The queen, hooking her shears to a chain around her waist, bore down on me, and the princess backed away. "To avenge the trials and strife your wife has undergone?"

"Those are avenged in her every day with me." I stepped to my bride, forcing her to face me and look into my eyes. "My friend," I told her, "you are my princess and my wife. Do you need to draw blood in confirmation of our love?"

Like the sun drawn to the earth, my wife's eyes left mine and sought support in my mother's tranquil smile. "I—I only want to know that love is stronger than fear, that those horrible women can never hurt me again.

"Last night while you were sleeping, I thought I woke beside the grate again, covered with ashes. My eyes were filled with smoke and my head ached from the names they had hurled at me like stones." She lowered her head now, and her voice dropped to a whisper. "'Cinderella' was the least of them. I cannot tell the rest."

I took the basket from her and would have put my arms around her, but the queen drew her aside. "You shall not suffer so again," she said, an overblown, theatrical pity in her voice. She looked back at me as she led the princess away. "Not if you have a consort who will strike a blow for love." She paused, and both women turned to face me. "Not if he can overcome his fine scruples long enough to set us free from the past."

They left me with the blank-faced lilies. I circled the garden until the flowers had closed and the grass was wet with dew. "To set
us
free," my mother had said. I remembered now the stone house where I'd found Cinderella, and the three women who had stood, open-mouthed, as I carried her off. My bride's stepmother, I realized with a dawning horror, might have been the very widow in whose easy embrace my father found solace so long ago. I thought of the simpering pair who had called Cinderella sister and kissed her farewell as we rode away. Perhaps those sorry women were more my sisters than hers! Had my mother waited, biding her time until she could work this hideous revenge? Had it been in her mind the night of the ball, when she'd leaned over the balcony and pointed out my love?

***

I did not go to supper that night but spent hours in my father's deserted chambers, reading his old decrees. There were edicts governing taxes and farming, commerce and war. There were gifts to churches and convents and bans on unfair tolls and tithing. In all these instruments, I found a voice I dimly recognized. Though many of these documents had been canceled by the queen's council, they spoke with kindness and respect to people who supported the crown through long days of endless toil.

This voice, this kindness, brought back a moment that until now had been lost to me. I saw myself and my father, on one of his rare stays at home, a brief sojourn between foreign wars. I was perhaps three or four years old and had played all day, without remonstrance, by his side. "You shall be a dandy prince, will you not, lad?" he asked, laughing as I put both my small feet into one of his boots. I laughed, too, hopping about in that giant buskin until I tumbled to the floor.

"You must not be a cruel king, eh?" He leaned down from above me, his smile suddenly vanished. "You must not rise by oppressing those below you." I remembered nodding then, because he looked so solemn, though I had no idea what he meant.

And now I searched through his legacy, the whole body of Royal Law. I saw no countenance of arbitrary execution there, no circumstance that allowed for punishment without a crime. When my taper at last failed and my eyes were closing on my own frightful visions, I stole softly to our bedroom and lay down beside my sleeping wife. I hoped I might dream, might travel back to that day spent with my father, and ask him for advice. But I never slept at all, only lay awake listening to Cinderella's light and easy breaths.

The next day, neither my mother nor my wife left me any peace. The queen made speeches about loyalty and duty, while my love sat beside her, nodding like an eager puppet. Though I had hoped her natural kindness would dissuade her from such madness, she found every chance, even when we were alone, to plead for the death of her family. For three nights, she wept and relived the hurtful past, and nothing would move her from the queen's plan.

I did not realize how completely and with what horrible fidelity Cinderella was emulating her new mother until the fourth day after our conference in the garden. I woke that morning to find her still in bed beside me. At first, I was delighted to think she might have chosen my company over the queen's. As if to assure myself she was real and not a dream conjured up by my greedy heart, I touched a spun-glass curlet by her ear. "Good morning, friend," I whispered. "I am glad to find I married a stay-abed, after all."

But the eyes she turned on me were moist and ringed with blue shadows. Her skin was pallid, her voice small and tired. "It is not for pleasure I lie here," she said, "but rather for the lack of pleasure once I rise."

"Why? What is lacking for you, love?" I asked. "You need only tell me and it is yours."

She raised a pale hand to her forehead and looked at me through half-closed eyes. "I have already told you, and yet you will not save me from the demons that pursue me."

"What demons? Name them and they are gone."

"My stepmother and stepsisters," she said. "The ghosts who trail shame and pain, who walk abroad and flaunt my humble past. They are free to spread gossip while I am imprisoned by their evil tongues and cannot show my face beyond these walls."

"Nonsense!" I told her, cupping her chin in my hand. "Who would look on this countenance and believe it anything but noble and divine?" In truth, though, I was unnerved by her white lips and the feverish drops between her brows. "Why all this talk of blood and death from someone who lived for dreams only a few short weeks ago? Which of them has not come true?" I left the bed and pulled aside the drapes. The room grew brighter, but I felt strangely chilled. "What did you long for that has not come to pass?"

"You know well what it is I long for," Cinderella told me. She rolled onto her back and stared vacantly at the ceiling. "I want them dead. And if you loved me, you would want it, too."

The princess stayed in bed from then on. And because she claimed to be too ill for visitors, I was banished to my father's chambers. Each day when I knocked on her door, I heard muffled sounds, the scrambling of servants, and then was greeted by a maid, who told me Cinderella was in her bath ... or with her ladies ... or too weak for conversation. As spring turned to summer and summer to fall, I was admitted to her rooms only seldom, and on each of these precious visits found her more wasted and wan than before.

So long as I refused to consider sending her family to their deaths, my wife lay exhausted in her bed. Her face, gaunt and anguished, reproached me, though she spoke few words now, only stared at me like a forlorn ghost. And if I sometimes caught sight of a brightly colored morning dress peeking from beneath her sheets, if I heard, occasionally, the vestiges of laughter and gay conversations cut short when I entered her domain, it mattered little. What pressed on me, what weighed on me night and day, was the absence of what I craved. The feeling that I had an ally who would stand with me against the cunning contrivances of court had dissolved. In vain, I waited for dreams of my father at night; in vain, I waited for my sweet friend to come to me by day. Until the waiting wore me down and I could stand it no more. The day I signed the order for the arrests, Cinderella began a steady, glowing recovery.

Which meant, of course, I saw even less of her than before. With her health, her appetite for royal amusements was restored, even doubled. There was no parlor game, no ballet or theatrical, no audience with pandering gossips, that did not find her sitting, deweyed and worshipful, beside my mother. Unless I chose to join in these empty pastimes, and I seldom did, I missed my wife more than ever. From my lonely waking to the evening meal, I was again deprived of the tender companion I had met at the ball. Only night drove her to our chambers, which she could no longer deny me. But when we were alone at last, she would sigh deeply, as if to remind me that our time together was the price she paid for the glittering company of the queen.

The morning of the execution dawned chilly and fair. In the sewing room, where I went to find Cinderella, my mother pretended over her loom to have forgotten what day it was. She spoke of dresses and poets, but as her needle disappeared and reappeared above the cloth, I noticed an immodest shine in her eyes, an expectant, nervous gleam. "The princess," she answered my unspoken question, "has not joined us yet this morning. Perhaps she has need of some privacy today."

I hoped that it was true, hoped that, after all, my wife had found again the gentle heart I'd felt beating beside mine when we first danced. This ugly business must, at last, have sickened her soul. I paced the length of the room, feeling the same dizzy ing revulsion that had undoubtedly sent her into hiding. But where?

I decided to search the garden, thinking to find her weeping at the site where she had first begged me to put her family to death. I was determined, as I raced outdoors, to pull her from her knees, to forgive her pauper's greediness, to welcome home the bright and passionate child for whom I still pined. Perhaps, if we acted quickly, there was yet time to save her family's lives.