The Stepsister's Tale

by Tracy Barrett

  They walked in a silence that grew more and more awkward the longer it lasted. Jane cast about for some neutral topic of conversation, even while knowing that her mother would find it only fitting that she and this woodcutter’s son would have nothing to say to each other.

  But it was Will who broke the silence when the hunting lodge came into sight. “My father asked me to tell you that he regrets that he didn’t leave you meat from the Christmas pig this year.” He sounded awkward, as though reluctant to pass on his father’s apology. “We didn’t have any ourselves. Late in the fall the king’s men found our livestock and took all the beasts.”

  “Took them?” Jane asked, shocked. “They took them? Why?”

  Will didn’t meet her eye. “We live in the king’s forest. Whatever is in it belongs to him. If the soldiers had found us as well as the pigs and the goats...” He left the sentence unfinished and extended the basket, still without looking at her. She took it in both hands. Before she could thank the boy, he had vanished.

  Chapter 16

  Just like a fairy, Jane thought as she trudged to the door, and her mouth crinkled into a smile at the thought. Will was even less fairylike than his sister. The last few yards to the house were difficult with the heavy basket.

  The big front door was ajar. Why did the hall look different? It suddenly seemed so enormous, so cold and so filthy. But she knew that the hall had not changed; it was her own eyes that were different after her time spent in the cozy little hut in the woods. She saw now why Hugh had always stopped and gaped on the rare occasions when he came in here, usually after being ordered by Maude to be a third in some game they were playing. She knew that it wasn’t only the hugeness of the hall that had astonished him; it was the ruin and the mess of it.

  She entered the South Parlor. The others were sitting by the hearth, staring dully at the small flames. Maude glanced up as Jane came in, then back at the fire, and then, realizing that her sister was carrying something, up again, with a bit of light in her eyes for the first time in days. “What’s in there?” she asked.

  Isabella rose to her feet and stumbled a little. Without thinking, Jane caught her elbow. “All right?” she asked.

  To her surprise, Isabella didn’t pull away and even smiled with trembling lips. “Just a little—a little light-headed,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” Jane tried to hide her surprise at Isabella’s civility. It had been a day full of surprises.

  Mamma sat in the big chair with her feet drawn up and a shawl around her. She, too, appeared different. Jane noticed new lines in her face, new gray streaks in her frowsy hair, a new trembling of her pale lips. “Maude, make Mamma some tea,” she said as she turned away. She couldn’t stand to see it.

  That evening they feasted. It would have seemed a scanty meal just a few months ago, but tonight a shared half cabbage boiled with smoked fish, and some hard biscuits made of brown flour and lard, felt like luxury. Mamma didn’t even seem to notice that they had not laid a cloth on the table and that they ate without bothering to take the tiny nibbles she usually insisted on. While Jane and Maude cleaned up, Isabella put all the coal in the fireplace before Jane could stop her, and they sat by the flames for a long time, warming their hands, feeling their cheeks flush in the blessed heat. Maude told a rambling story about a boy and a giant, clearly making it up as she went, and when she had drawn to an unsatisfactory close Isabella said shyly, “I know some tales, too.”

  “You do?” Maude sounded shocked. “Why didn’t you ever tell them before?”

  Without explaining, Isabella began, “Once there were twin princesses. Both were beautiful, but one had a warm heart and the other only a cold stone where her heart should be....” When the story came to its satisfying end, with the warmhearted princess wed to the king of a neighboring country after many trials and the coldhearted one left to tend sheep in a lonely field, Maude begged for another.

  “She’s too tired.” Jane saw Isabella’s eyes drooping. “Let’s go to bed.”

  The next day, and then almost every day after that, Jane found food—under an upturned bucket, weighted with stones to protect it from wild beasts—on the path, and almost every day she also found clothing to mend. One day she carefully cut open the seams of Maude’s long-outgrown church dress and sewed the few whole pieces together into a gown for the baby, guessing at the size as best she could.

  Maude tried to help, but her stitching was clumsy, and Jane knew that the work had to be done well. Keeping warm and dry in this damp early spring was just as lifesaving as having enough to eat. She was not taking charity or stealing food from the mouths of the people of the woods if she left a pair of woolen stockings, holes smoothly darned, on the path and found a precious piece of salted pork waiting for her the next day. Each was helping the other and making a fair trade. So she sewed tight seams and made sure that the patches were as firmly placed and smooth as if they were part of the original garment.

  The hollows in Maude’s cheeks began to fill in, and Isabella’s skin no longer looked as though a strong light would shine through it. Jane found that she had more energy and did not need to sleep half the afternoon. Even Baby lost her skeletal look after a bale of hay appeared in the barn one day, although Jane knew that the cow’s milk would not return until after she’d had another calf. She faithfully fed and watered the animals, turning them out in the pasture to crop at the few tender shoots of grass that were finally coming up. The chickens went back outside and pecked eagerly at bugs. Maude brought in a few brown eggs almost every day.

  And almost every day Jane had some sewing to do. She found she enjoyed the challenge of mending a complicated tear, of lengthening a dress whose wearer had grown tall despite the severity of the winter. She knew that many of the clothes she had been given did not come from the family she had met—the little girl’s dress, for example, and the trousers made for a man stouter and shorter than the woodcutter. She saved scraps cut from one garment to patch another, and her stitches became even neater, stronger, and less visible. Isabella joined her, showing a talent for embroidery that hid a stain and could change a man’s work shirt into a girl’s smock.

  One day Jane left a pair of heavy work trousers on the bucket and picked up the loaf of bread wrapped in a clean rag that she found under it.

  “Miss!” A tall figure emerged into the open. It was Annie. “My mother asks if there is any way to make this wider.” She handed a bundle of brown cloth to Jane. Jane unfolded it, revealing a woman’s dress. It was of finer fabric than most of the garments that the people of the woods had been giving her for these weeks, and it even had a bit of fancy stitching around the neck and at the ends of the long sleeves.

  “It’s her best gown,” the other girl explained. “Now that spring is almost here, Father Albert will be coming back. Mother hasn’t been churched since before Frances was born, and she wants to wear this when services start again. She hasn’t had it on for years, and now it’s too small.”

  Jane held up the dress and looked at the seams. There wasn’t much fabric to let out, but she thought she could see ways to make at least a little difference. “I’ll try,” she said.

  The next day she inspected the dress. She carefully snipped apart the bodice and the full, gathered skirt. If she took out some of the gathers, she might be able to make two strips from the skirt that she could then seam into the sides of the bodice, adding a few inches. The skirt wouldn’t be as full as before, but it looked like there would still be enough for some pleats that would ease the fit around the woman’s hips. Then she could... Her fingers moved almost as quickly as her thoughts.

  She turned the skirt inside out, so that the most faded spots would be hidden, and sewed up the hem at the back, where the wearer must have trodden on it and created a ragged spot. Maude stitched the pleats, measuring them with a piece of string to make sure that t
hey came out even. She had always been clever with that kind of thing.

  And now it was done. The work had been long even with Maude’s help, and it was past the hour that Jane usually left repaired clothing on the path. She suddenly decided to take it to the woodcutter’s hut rather than waiting a day. She was eager for Annie to see her success with her mother’s gown, she told herself. The days were starting to lengthen, and she would have more than enough time to walk to the cottage, leave the dress, and return home before dark.

  The rain had finally stopped, and faint sunshine poked through the branches, which showed a little green on their tips, as if they had been dusted with green powder. Jane’s golden tassels still hung limply from some of the lower limbs. Odd how she had lived so close to the people of the woods her whole life and had even occasionally seen them in church, but she had never before known how close to her home some of them lived. Once, she remembered now, on one of her rare visits to the village, she had seen a family that might even have been the woodcutter’s, but she had paid them no attention. She had not even really noticed them until now.

  She was struck again by how nearly invisible the little cottage was. She went to the door and knocked, softly at first, in case the baby was asleep, and then louder when there was no answer. Silence.

  A step behind her made her whirl around. It was only Will, surveying her with what looked like suspicion. He carried a wood ax over his shoulder. They stood in silence, each eyeing the other, until Jane extended her hand, showing him what she was carrying. “Your mother’s dress. Your sister asked me to—”

  He nodded, then reached past her and unlocked the door. He pushed it open and stepped back to let her inside. “She’ll be here soon.”

  Jane took this to mean that she was to wait for the mother’s return. Who was this boy to tell her what to do? “I’ll just leave it here.” She stepped into the dark cottage and laid the gown on the table.

  “She’ll be here soon,” the boy repeated, turning back to the woods. Then he did a very surprising thing. He sang. It wasn’t a full song, just a few notes, and they were strangely familiar.

  “Fairy singers!” Jane blurted. She blushed as Will looked at her quizzically. “I mean, you’re the people who sing in the night.”

  “In the daytime, too, but it’s quieter in the woods at night. You can hear us better.” A few notes, in what sounded like a woman’s voice, came back from the hill behind the cottage.

  “It’s how we talk when we’re separated,” he explained. “Like the huntsman’s horn that tells the others that the hounds have found the game. My mother says she’s on her way home. Did you really think we were fairies?”

  “That’s what our grandmother and our mother always said it was.” Jane hoped the boy couldn’t tell how embarrassed she was.

  “I’ve lived in these woods all my life,” the boy said, sounding amused, “and my father before me, and his father before him. And none of us have ever seen a fairy. Not that I don’t think they’re in the forest,” he added hastily, looking around as though worried that someone might have heard him, someone who would be angry that he doubted their existence. “It’s just that they’re too shy to show themselves when they don’t have to. I don’t think they’d draw attention to themselves by singing.”

  Jane was spared having to go on with the awkward conversation by the appearance of the woman, carrying the baby in a sling. Jane stepped forward. “Here’s your gown.” She unfolded it and shook out the creases. “I had to alter it a little to find enough material to make it fit you.” The woman picked it up and held it against her front. It did look large enough now, and the change from gathers to pleats would suit her ample figure.

  “You’ll stay for a meal,” the woman said. Jane knew that Mamma would expect her to say no, she wouldn’t, but the thought of food made her light-headed.

  The father and Annie came in, Annie smiling when she saw Jane, the father giving her a nod before sitting down at the table. The woman filled the wooden plates with porridge into which she had stirred dried peas and herbs this time. They had all cooked together into a savory, pale green mass. Jane ate as slowly as she could, but the taste of the porridge made her suddenly ravenous. The woman, without asking if she wanted more, ladled out another spoonful.

  When Jane rose, her bowl finally empty, she saw to her dismay that the sun was casting long shadows. “I have to go,” she said, her mind suddenly filled with the stories that Mamma had told about witches who trapped wandering strangers and trolls that came out of their caves only after dark, when respectable people were in their beds.

  “William will go with you,” the man said as before. Without a word, the boy stood and shouldered his wood ax. Did he even take it to bed with him? Jane wondered. And what if she didn’t want him to go with her?

  But of course she needed someone, and Annie was busy with Frances. Jane had rarely been out in the woods alone, and never after dark. She wasn’t sure whether she would be able to find her way when the few familiar landmarks would be obscured by the night. This fierce-looking boy was better than no escort at all. So she thanked them for her supper, took the basket that the woman handed her, and set out for home.

  When they reached the hunting lodge, she paused. Should she thank the boy? At least say goodbye? But he had turned away and was headed back down the path.

  “Stop!” Jane called, without really knowing why. He paused and then turned—slowly, as if to tell her that she couldn’t tell him what to do.

  “Why do you hate me?” she asked. Her voice squeaked, making her sound like a pitiful child and not the dignified young woman that Mamma kept telling her she had to be. She cleared her throat and tried again. “I’ve never done anything to you.”

  “Oh, you have.” His confident tone infuriated her.

  “Never!”

  “You and your family,” he said. “Here you live in this—this—” words seemed to fail him, and he waved his hand in the direction of her house “—with everything you could ever want, and you take food from us. You don’t know want. You don’t suffer hardship.” He glared at her. “You didn’t pay us when we repaired your roof, even though Jeremy’s family has had to do without his work ever since he fell off it. And we’ve heard about your house. Floors of polished stone. A separate room just for dancing in. A bedroom for each person.” He laughed without humor. Words poured out of him as though he had been thinking them for a long time. “And of course you don’t want to let someone like me into your house, after you’ve been in mine and eaten food that we couldn’t spare—”

  “I never asked for food,” Jane said. “Not after that first day. We were starving and freezing. And I’ve worked...” She paused. Halseys didn’t work, did they? But what else could she call it? “I’ve worked for every scrap of food I’ve had since then.”

  “Starving? Freezing?” The scorn in Will’s voice curled her toes. “How can you say that, when you live in a place like that?”

  She didn’t know want? She didn’t suffer hardship? She thought of plump little Frances and saw again the dead body of little Robert, so small that the priest’s man had carried him to his grave tucked under his arm like a loaf of bread. How could she ever convince this boy of the truth about how she lived? Would Mamma ever forgive her if she did, if she let a boy of the woods know how miserable their lives were? A derisive snort from Will made up her mind. “Come with me. Come see the plenty and comfort that we live in.”

  “I don’t need to.”

  “Oh, you do. You think you know something, but you’re wrong. And you think you’re better than we are—”

  “No, it’s you who think that!”

  She shook her head violently. “You think that just because my parents and grandparents had money and owned a lot of land, that we’re somehow not as good as you because you live in the woods.” This time he didn’t answer, and
she felt a small glow of satisfaction.

  Jane suddenly regretted that Will had goaded her into asking him in. She didn’t want him to see the staircase fallen into ruin, to smell the decay, to hear the scuttle of mice and rats, to hear Maude whining about not having any food, to see her sister and stepsister huddled on the hearth. But she had asked him, and now she continued up the path.

  They stopped on the drive. “Well?” Jane asked.

  “What?” Will looked at the house, still visible in the last rays of the sun.

  “Don’t you see?” She pointed at the ivy growing up the walls, its little roots, she knew, pressing into tiny cracks in the stone and pushing them apart, making them wider until they weakened the very bones of the house. Bird droppings streaked the few panes of glass that were still in the big windows. She glanced at Will.

  “So?” he asked. “I’ve seen it before. I worked on the roof without getting paid, remember? It needs some repairs and some cleaning. I don’t—”

  “Come inside,” she said, too galled now to care if it upset Mamma. They climbed the broken steps and passed through the big door, now always left standing ajar, and then into the front hall, where the fragments of the staircase swept up one wall and across to the big landing. The remaining tasseled red velvet curtain still hung on one side of the large door that led off to the ballroom. The blank space where the other one used to hang made the doorway look like a child’s mouth with a gap where a front tooth should be.

  The stink of rats and mice was even stronger than Jane remembered. Perhaps with the warmer weather all smells became heavier, or perhaps more of the filthy beasts were living under the stairs and in the angles of the doorways. Or was it that she was smelling her home with an outsider’s nose? She found Will’s expression difficult to read. Surprise, certainly, and perhaps disappointment that this grand house was not what he had heard about all his life.