Beauty

by Sheri S. Tepper

  We were home in time. I disenchanted my supplies, storing my mice and lizards away in a box in an empty manger and then sent Elly into the house to sleep. She did not want to rest, so I told her she would be ugly if she did not, and that decided her. I napped myself, then put on my boots about midday and went back to Prince Charming’s home, desirous of knowing what he thought and felt and, perhaps more important, what his parents thought and felt. I had seen his papa staring at Gloriana last night and knew there might be some considerations of which I was not aware.

  As there were. The prince was in full spate, screaming in a high, trembling voice at his parents.

  “She’s ugly. She’s huge. She’s dreadful.”

  “Her younger brother is heir to a large fortune. He would settle a good bit on her.”

  “He might settle the moon and all the stars on her, and I would not have her.”

  “Duty is not always pleasant. If we are to regain the throne …”

  “Throne! Until the people throw out Uncle Richard, there is no throne to gain. And if there were a throne, would you want me to marry without any possibility of an heir? I swear to you, I could easier mate with a sow in a sty than with that woman, and if I were forced, I would sooner kill myself.” He was sulky and vehement.

  “But we have no idea who this other girl is. None at all!”

  True enough, they did not. Nor would they, until Elly was safe from Gloriana’s retaliation. I felt the matter stood well enough for my purposes and went home to sleep.

  That night Elly wore blue. That night she begged to be allowed to stay until the bell rang for Lauds. It was too close to dawn, and yet I allowed it. How could I not when she begged me? How could I not, when I wanted to stay, myself. When she arrived at the ball, her eyes were dreamier yet, and her movements more sensual and languorous. The young cock might be pretty as a girl, but he had it in him to stir this little hen. I envied her. Oh, how I envied her. The only true attraction of that kind that I could remember in myself had been toward Giles and toward the ambassador from Baskarone. Even in Ylles, where I had seen what passed for love all around me, I had not cared enough to consummate it. Not so, Elly. If one touched her, she burned. I envied her lust, the lubricious waves she swam upon, the elegant titillation she was prey to.

  Envied, and emulated. Giles waited for me on the terrace and we danced again. I taught him a new dance, one I had learned in the twentieth, where one does not parade at arms length but presses tightly against one’s partner. I let enchantment happen, let us be wrapped in glamour. I was young, and so was he. We were together. Nothing separated us except the slow movement of the music, and even the music was enchanted. I held up my mouth to be kissed, drowning in his kisses. We put our hands up the sleeves of our outer garments so that nothing was between our hands and our naked flesh but one layer of thin, silky fabric. We pressed our thighs toward one another, between one another’s, letting the hours pass in passion which climbed ever higher and was yet unsatisfied.

  Matins rung and was ignored. Lauds rung. I tore myself away from him, seeing the dazed look in his eyes and knowing it was on my own face as well.

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “Oh, tomorrow.”

  Elly was already running down the stairs toward the carriage when I came out of the shadows in my cloak. I saw the prince running after her and made him trip and fall. We barely made it home before the sun rose, and if I had not been behind the carriage in my boots, hurrying the horses, she would have been too late.

  It was early afternoon before she woke. “I need not leave early tonight” she told me. “This is the last night. I will walk home, after.”

  “If you are in that ballroom when dawn comes,” I told her, “all the faery stitches will vanish from your dress and veil. The cloth will fall about your feet, and you will be there naked, with everyone sniggering at you. Best leave him at Lauds, as you did last night, and let me act the marriage broker for you.”

  “Early in the morning,” she begged. “When the bell rings for Prime.”

  “When Prime rings, the sun is already coming up,” I told her, pitying her, envying her. “When you hear it ring for Lauds, you’ll know the dawn is coming. You must run, then, or be caught out. I do not think the prince’s parents will want him to marry a girl who takes off her clothes in a ballroom.”

  She promised me. I scarcely heard her, thinking of my own lover. I went with her once again, and watched briefly through the windows before Giles arrived. Poor Gloriana had no hope and knew it now. The prince danced with no one but Elly.

  And Giles and I lay in the grass below the terrace, hidden beneath my cloak.

  “Beauty,” he sighed, and I did not correct him. I was. He was. We were. Our bodies moved and touched and held one another, with nothing between us. We grasped at stars, once, twice, three times, falling exhausted at last into the warmth of our nest. My kirtle was somewhere in the grass. My underdress was around my neck. Giles wore only his shirt. Our secret flesh was still wet and entangled, one with another’s.

  A bell rang.

  “Matins,” I said drowsily.

  “Lauds,” he said as drowsily. “Matins was hours ago.”

  Above me on the terrace, I heard a sound and looked up to see Elly in the prince’s arms.

  The little fool was going to let her clothes vanish and stand there in her skin, begging him to take her, as well he might. I could not blame her. How could I blame her? And yet her chance to marry him would be over. His parents would not permit such an impropriety. Princes had to have virgin brides, lest doubt be cast upon their heirs. I moved with a strength greater than my own, wrenched myself away from Giles, wrapped myself in the cloak, distracted the prince with a faroff cockcrow, seized Elly up beneath the cloak and bore her away.

  She struggled. She was a strong girl. I got her out to the driveway just as the carriage dissolved. The pumpkin rolled there, broken, spilling its seeds. Mice scattered in all directions as the toad hopped away into the brush with a disenchanted croak. Luckily, no one was looking at the assemblage. Everyone was staring at the terrace, where the prince was running about like one demented. Somehow I got the boots on. I put a spell of silence and compliance on Elly, gathered her up in my arms again and said, “Boots, take us to the Dower House stables.” As we went, I heard the bell striking for Prime.

  When I set her down, her clothing fell around her feet, as I had told her it would. Her breasts were still rosy with desire, her nipples like little rubies. She put one hand between her thighs as though something hurt her, then left it there. She gave me a slow, hating look. “Why did you do that?” she demanded, her hand moving slowly back and forth.

  I snatched it from between her legs and shook her. “Do you want him for one night, once? Is that all? One time, then he will marry someone else?”

  Her eyes did not focus on me, so I slapped her. That got her attention, and I asked her again what she wanted.

  “I want to go to bed with him,” she said in a voice like warm honey. “Over and over again.”

  “Then you must marry him.”

  She stepped away from me, stumbling. She still wore one of the glass shoes. The other had been dropped in our flight.

  “They didn’t disappear,” she said. “I dropped one on the stairs.”

  As soon as she said it, I realized why. They were clear. They were glass. There was no appearance to disappear. They might gradually fade, over some weeks, but they would not disappear suddenly. Which is why they had been in the story in the first place.

  “Go to bed,” I said wearily. “I need to think.”

  “He’ll marry me,” she said as though she were God, deciding fate. “He will. He has to. He can’t live without me. He said so.”

  I did not tell her that men often said such things. Even pretty princes said such things. Even Giles had said such things. I went to my room to think. To think and to get dressed. My hair was down around my shoulders. I had nothing on but a stained underdress. I looked like a w
oman who had been made love to on the grass all night. I could not let myself think of Giles, for whenever I did, I trembled.

  While I struggled with myself, events transpired without me. The first I knew of it was when I rose to a sound outside, went to the window, and saw Giles himself below, flourishing a scroll from which he was pretending to read his already memorized message.

  “Know all men, by these words, that Prince-So-and-So of Marvella announces his intention of marrying the maiden whose foot fits the shoe he found last night upon the stairs. The prince rides after me, bringing the shoe to try on all maidens of this house.” While I watched, Giles accepted a glass of wine from Lydia and told her the tale, looking about himself the while, looking for me, I supposed. I hurried to get myself dressed, thinking betimes that the work of the marriage broker had already been done by someone else. This public pronouncement was almost as good as a betrothal. The prince was determined to have his way, but Elly had no dowry that I knew of and the prince’s parents might still have much to say about that.

  By the time I got my hair braided and got downstairs, however, Giles had already ridden away. I found Lydia in the garden, agog. When she had finished repeating the tale three or four times, with embellishments, I asked her what marriage portion Edward had settled upon Elladine before he died.

  She flushed. “I’m sure he meant to,” she said. “He didn’t mean to die so soon.”

  “You mean he didn’t provide for her,” I challenged. “Surely, then, you intend to make up for his lack of foresight.”

  She pursed her lips. “I’ve thought of it,” she said, not looking me in the eye. “But it’s really up to Edward to say. As soon as he’s reached his majority, I’m sure he will do something about it. He won’t be of age, of course, for a number of years.”

  “Fifteen years,” I said drily. “Elladine will be a bit old by then. Thirty-some-odd. A confirmed spinster.”

  “She could enter a convent,” Lydia suggested eagerly. “I’ve been meaning to mention that to her.”

  Foolishly, I did not advise Lydia that she reconsider and talk with me again before making any such suggestion. While I went on thinking of ways and means, Lydia went straight to Elly and suggested she enter a nunnery. I heard Elly’s scream of rage and got there just in time to prevent her killing her stepmother, though not in time to prevent the attack. The expression on Elly’s face was one I did not want to see. It was Jaybee’s face, as it had been when I had last seen it, full of towering fury and indomitable determination. She could have killed Lydia gladly, and I feared somewhat that she might do so yet, or do something even more dreadful.

  The prince arrived with the shoe in midafternoon. Gloriana was first to try it on, able only to get her big toe into it. She retreated in tears, while Griselda tried. I was there, with Lydia. The prince was there, with a couple of his men, but not Giles. Casually, I asked after Giles and was told he had not returned from his heralding, which had somewhat surprised the prince. There was some courtly chit-chat, though not a lengthy conversation, and Griselda gave up the attempt.

  I said, “There’s another girl in the house who must try it on.”

  Lydia glared at me, but I sent a maid after Elly, whose voice I could hear in the kitchen.

  We were waiting for Elly to appear when we heard the scream. Gloriana’s voice. Lydia and I ran. We found Gloriana in the kitchen, the great meat cleaver still in her hand, her left foot cut half through and blood spurting in all directions. Gloriana had done it herself. In the corner, Elly watched with a remote smile.

  “What did you do?” I hissed at her.

  “I just told her her feet were too big,” Elly said indifferently. ‘That they might fit if she cut them in half.” She took the other glass slipper from her pocket and went out to the waiting gentlemen while we struggled mightily to stop Gloriana’s bleeding. The huge girl was too strong for us. She fought us off until she had lost so much blood that it was too late to help her. While Elly melted into the arms of her prince outside in the garden, Lydia and those of us in the kitchen gathered around the body of her stepsister and wept. Gloriana was not a pleasant girl. She was a great cow of a girl, with a cow’s mute and intransigent hungers. She had little intelligence. Still, there was something monstrously tragical about the manner of her death, not the least that it has shown me what my daughter is. Of the two of them, Elly had been the more brutish.

  ST. WILFRID’S DAY, OCTOBER,

  YEAR OF OUR LORD 1367

  Gloriana was buried in the chapelyard at Wellingford. Elly lay on her bed in her room and dreamed lascivious dreams. The prince had a tantrum in his own suite at his own house, but his parents remained adamant that they would not allow his marriage to a woman without a dowry. It was no more than I had expected. I got the warrant out from the hole where I’d hidden it and took it to London, where I sought the man who had issued it, a Jew named Yeshua ben Levi. Yeshua was dead of plague. I found his son. His house had advised my papa, some years before the first great Death, to use the money in the purchase of grain. During the times of plague the price had soared. The two warrants were now worth so much that Papa could have settled all his debts and found it unnecessary to marry Weasel-Rabbit. I told the House of Levi to keep the other warrant upon their books, for some heir would come to claim it, perhaps hundreds of years later. They stared at me strangely, but one of the bearded sons made a note of it.

  When I returned to Wellingford, I carried with me a more than adequate fortune for Elly’s marriage portion. I went to the prince’s parents and represented Elly’s interests. I signed the documents as her guardian, as her father’s nearest kin. I arranged the nuptials. I did it all without meeting with her or discussing it with her. The prince’s father negotiated with me, his ponderous mind plodding after me, step by step. He was not quick, but he missed nothing. It was like being tracked by a bear. Still, I did not give him everything. I saved some for myself.

  I attested to the fact that Elly was a virgin of noble birth. True. She would not have stayed a virgin long, but she was still, technically, a virgin. And yet I lied. I wanted to say, “I fear she is a monster. Her father was a monster, and she is like him. I fear she is both sensual and cruel, a succubus who will twine herself around your son and suck him dry, making him rue the day he ever saw her.” I said none of that. For all his intelligence, the prince’s father did not ask. He cared only about the money, her virginity, and that she was nobly born.

  I should have stopped it, somehow. And yet, wasn’t it fated? Hadn’t the story been told for hundreds of years? Wasn’t my daughter to have her prince and live happily ever after?

  While I was there, I asked again for Giles, saying I had known him for many years. He had gone, they said. He had never returned after delivering the glass-slipper message.

  I don’t know what has happened to him. I don’t know where he is. I want more than anything to go looking for him, but I can’t do that just now! First I must arrange this wedding. When it is over, I’ll find him. Then he and I will come back to Wellingford. There are fields to harvest and geese to pluck. There are apples to store and cider to make. I can’t decide what to do next. There’s an old pain burning in me and a new love. Between them both, it’s hard to decide what to do.

  Was this what Carabosse meant when she asked me to be merely ordinary? Is being a mother ever ordinary? Is caring about one’s children ever ordinary? Is there always this much pain?

  FEAST OF THE HOLY INNOCENTS,

  DECEMBER, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1367

  Elly became pregnant even before the wedding. I had not thought to tell her anything about that. Neither had anyone else. Now that she understands there is no way to escape it, she has settled into a sullen resentment at the facts of life.

  “I don’t want it,” she told me. “I just wanted the other, not this.”

  I told her I understood. I did understand, for I had not wanted it either. At least she had enjoyed the begetting.

  Her eyes grew dr
eamy. “I like the other,” she said. “I like it a lot. More even than he does.”

  I think perhaps I blushed. There is something so frankly lecherous in her tone when she talks like this, an insatiable hunger totally untinted with affection or humor. I tried to change the subject.

  “It’ll be fun for you to have a child. If it’s a girl, she’ll probably look like you.”

  “She can’t,” Elly said flatly. “I won’t let her. No one looks like me. She can look like someone else. Someone pale, like him.”

  “She’ll have your dark hair.”

  “His pale skin. His red lips. This baby can look like that.”

  “Like that,” I agreed, feeling sick inside. On several occasions I have tried to get her to talk with me about other things: religion, gardening, pets. She doesn’t care about any of them. She has some lingering affection for Grumpkin, but it is only a passive thing. Except toward the pleasures of her body, she is closed away. She likes warmth and frequent good food, and, most of all, fucking. She does not read, does not think, does not care. She would ride twenty miles in bad weather for her lust’s sake, and would not walk twenty paces down a hallway to do a kindness. She emptied her ashes, not out of any sense of cleanliness, but only so her fire would burn so she could be warm. If she wants something, she could kill to get it, and if she does not want something, it might as well not exist so far as she is concerned.

  I blame myself for her nature, though I keep coming back to the real cause. She is not like me. She is like Jaybee. Elly should never have been born, and but for him, she would not have been. But for him and for the fact I remembered too well the things Father Raymond used to teach me. I had told myself it was God’s will when it was nothing of the kind. It was only man’s stupidity.