Princess of the Midnight Ball

by Jessica Day George

  “So, you’re Karl and Renata’s son,” Reiner said, as if Galen had only just now showed up on his doorstep. He set his own tea aside. “Get some wine, why don’t you, Liesel? We should celebrate the arrival of our nephew.” He didn’t sound as if he took much pleasure in the idea.

  “Indeed we should,” Liesel said with exasperation. She gave Galen a peck on the cheek as she passed him.

  Reiner grunted. “I suppose you should meet your cousin. We have a daughter, Ulrike. Our son is dead.” He went to the door of the sitting room and roared, “Ulrike, come down here!”

  Ulrike arrived at the same time as her mother, blinking dreamily. She was a pretty girl, about sixteen years of age, with a good figure and long blond hair. She smiled at Galen. “I’m sorry. I was reading a book.” She took a glass of wine from her mother without asking about the occasion.

  “You’re always reading a book,” her father muttered.

  “This is your cousin Galen,” Tante Liesel explained to Ulrike. “He’s coming to stay with us. His parents, my sister and her husband, died in the war.”

  Ulrike’s fair brow clouded. “I’m sorry.” She noticed his blue tunic for the first time. “Did you fight in the war, too?”

  “Yes. Yes, I did.”

  “You’re very lucky that you weren’t killed.”

  “Yes, I am.” Galen looked awkwardly at his wine.

  “Did you ever meet—”

  Reiner interrupted her with his toast. “To family! And to the family business!” He raised his glass high and they all joined him.

  After they had drunk their wine, Ulrike persisted. “Did you know anyone by the name of—”

  “Ulrike,” Uncle Reiner said, interrupting her again. “Don’t pester the boy. You know that I want no talk of the war in this house.”

  “If my presence bothers you, I can go,” Galen said between gritted teeth. It rankled deeply that people who had never seen a battle should have such a strong aversion to the war. He’d actually seen people cross to the other side of the street to avoid passing him, and a man had spit at the sight of a crippled soldier begging outside the city gates.

  “Of course your presence doesn’t bother us.” Reiner seemed genuinely surprised at the idea. “But in this house, we do not speak of the war. My son, Heinrich, is dead because of it.” Reiner pointed to the mantel with his wineglass.

  There was a small oval picture there, with a wisp of black silk draped across it. Galen lifted the silk and looked at the picture. It was a portrait of a young man near his own age. He was standing beside a chair in the usual stiff posture of such portraits. He wore a dark suit and had his hair neatly combed, yet the artist had managed to capture what seemed to be a glint of mischief in his eyes.

  “You can have Heinrich’s old room,” Tante Liesel said, her voice a bit muffled. When Galen turned around, he saw that she was dabbing her eyes, and Ulrike was looking into the distance and turning her wineglass around and around in her hands.

  “Thank you.” Galen cleared his throat. “I don’t want to be a burden, though. I’d like to find work right away.” He had never been idle in his life, and the thought of it filled him with a sense of panic. Even if he had not felt beholden to his uncle, he would have wanted to start work soon. “I don’t know if you have need of an extra pair of hands, Uncle Reiner …?”

  He felt just as anxious about this as he had about anything so far. He could turn his hand to anything, as long as he was given a chance to learn, but with so many men returning home, there would be a glut of unskilled laborers clamoring for work. He could read and write and do sums, but that was the extent of his education, and he doubted there was much need for a man who could knit a sock in four hours.

  But Reiner nodded. “I’ve needed someone since Heinrich left. You’ll do well enough. Just as long as you’re careful with your feet, and don’t trample His Majesty’s pansies.”

  Galen felt his eyebrows shoot up. What was his uncle talking about? “Sir, I don’t quite follow….”

  “Don’t you know?” Ulrike gave a little laugh. “Papa is the king of the Folly!”

  “What?” Galen still didn’t understand.

  “Ulrike!” Tante Liesel looked shocked. “You shouldn’t say such things!”

  Reiner shook his finger at his daughter. “It’s the king’s so-called Folly that keeps clothes on your back and food on the table, not to mention buys those books you spend all your time with.” He turned away from his daughter to look at Galen. “Our family has the very great honor of being King Gregor’s own gardeners,” Reiner said with obvious pride.

  Princess

  Rose bit her lip as she stood before her father. King Gregor was not happy. He was so very much not happy that a vein on his left temple throbbed and his face was nearly purple.

  “This, this, this!” He waved the worn dancing slipper under her nose, unable to say anything else. “This!”

  She heard one of her sisters snicker, and nudged the next in line, Lily, with her elbow. Lily passed the nudge on until it reached the snickerer. Poppy, probably. The thirteen-year-old thought everything hilarious of late. Rose wished that Poppy would follow her twin’s example more often. Daisy was a model child.

  “Do you think this is funny?” King Gregor whirled away from Rose and turned his attention to Poppy, who apparently was the snickerer, as Rose had suspected. “Do you find this amusing?”

  “N-n-no, Papa,” Poppy stammered.

  Rose closed her eyes and prayed for strength. Poppy wasn’t stammering from fright, but from the effort of not laughing aloud. Curse the girl! There really was nothing funny about their situation, and yet Poppy found every opportunity to make light of it.

  “Kingdom in a shambles! No money! Wounded soldiers everywhere I look!” King Gregor threw the slipper at the wall in frustration. “And night after night you girls sneak off and do who-knows-what, and expect me to pay for more fripperies!”

  “No, Father,” Rose said.

  “What?” The king turned back to his eldest daughter. “Are you saying that you aren’t sneaking off? I have the evidence right here!” Now the slipper’s mate was waved under her nose. It was one of Orchid’s, pink satin with silver ribbons. There was a hole in the toe and one of the ribbons dangled by a thread.

  “No, Father,” Rose said, remaining as calm as she could. “I’m not denying the evidence. I only meant that you shouldn’t have to pay for our ‘fripperies.’ We will pay for new slippers ourselves, out of our pin money.”

  The other girls all groaned, but Rose’s offer deflated the king somewhat. “Well!” He huffed. “Well! It’s not as if you could expect much pin money anyway. Not with the state of affairs this country is in.”

  “You must not worry, Father,” Hyacinth said gravely. She stepped out of line—King Gregor insisted that his daughters line up like soldiers to take their punishments—and held out her hands to their father. Hyacinth was only fifteen, but already she had the pale, serious face and painfully thin body of an ascetic. She spent her days in the chapel, praying for all their sins, and for their deliverance. She was, surprisingly, an exquisite dancer.

  King Gregor did not take Hyacinth’s outstretched hands. Instead he glared at her. “You! You have the most sense of all of them, or so I thought! How did they convince you to do this?” He waved the slipper in her face now. “And how is it that you get out of your rooms to begin with? I lock you in every night my own self! Hey? Hey? Answer me! Put you in different rooms, and I wake to find all the doors open and you all lying about the rug in Rose’s sitting room like a litter of puppies! What was that about, hey?”

  But Hyacinth just bowed her head and backed into line again. Rose heard Hyacinth sigh. She couldn’t tell the truth, and Hyacinth would never lie.

  “You may well sigh, my girl,” Gregor said. Then he softened, most of his ire having been worked out by the shouting. “Now, be off with you all. I will have Herr Schmidt come and make you a new set of dancing slippers. You’ll
need them: Breton’s new ambassador will be arriving this afternoon. But the cost will come out of your pin money,” he warned. “It will have to,” he muttered under his breath as he walked away.

  “Poor Father,” Lily said when he was out of earshot. “Things are so very bad these days and to have this to contend with makes it even worse.”

  “I don’t want new slippers,” Petunia said. She was the youngest, at six. “I want to buy sweets, and then I shall dance barefoot!” And she began to twirl around the room. “La, la-la, la!”

  Pansy, who was seven, sat down on the floor with a flump. “I don’t want new slippers either. I don’t want to dance anymore!” And she began to cry.

  “There, there!” Lily rushed to her side and picked up the little girl. Their hair was the same shade of glossy brown and both wore blue dresses today. Pansy liked to match clothes with her favorite sister.

  “I’m sorry, sweeting,” Rose said, rubbing Pansy’s back. “But you know that we have to dance.”

  “Now I can’t have the new music I wanted to buy,” Violet grumped. At fourteen, she was a prodigy on the pianoforte and sang like an angel. “I have to pay for dancing slippers instead!”

  “I’m sorry,” Rose said automatically.

  She felt like she was always apologizing these days: for wearing out her slippers, for her sisters’ exhaustion, for the poverty of the country. And none of it was her fault. “I’m sorry.” And then, rather than have to see eleven pairs of sad eyes looking at her any longer, she walked away. She was the oldest, and their mother had charged her with caring for her sisters, but sometimes the burden was too great.

  Rose went out of the long gallery where she and her sisters had been assembled, down a flight of steps, and through the tall doors that led to her mother’s garden. Once in the garden, she paused to breathe deeply. The palace smelled of stone and paint, of people and food and beeswax floor polish.

  The garden smelled only of flowers and earth.

  Her mother, Queen Maude, had been from Breton and had not liked the cold, harsh winters of Westfalin. She hadn’t liked the dark evergreen trees or the scruffy little edelweiss flowers and holly bushes that had comprised the palace garden before she came, either.

  To make his new bride happy, King Gregor had ordered the old garden redone. Flowers from Breton had been imported, along with ornamental trees, climbing vines, and even Bretonermade iron benches and marble statuary, all to make Maude feel at home.

  Unfortunately, Westfalin and Breton did not share the same climate. The gentle misting rains of Breton, the soft winter snows and warm, humid summers transformed in Westfalin into freezing sleet, blizzards, and summers so hot and dry that many less hardy plants perished. In order to keep the Queen’s Garden flourishing, a team of gardeners had to work daily, watering, weeding, fertilizing, and coaxing the tea roses, lilacs, and ivy.

  It seemed only natural when the queen named her daughters after the flowers in her garden, calling them her own garden of lovelies. But then, when little Petunia was only two years old, Queen Maude died. In memory of his beloved wife, King Gregor kept her garden exactly as it had been.

  This caused no little resentment among the Westfalian people. The kingdom had been at war for more than six years, and there had already been protests over the extravagance that was the Queen’s Garden. It was thought wasteful to spend the manpower and the resources to keep the garden flourishing, and the queen’s death was seen by some as a reason to put a stop to what had become known as Gregor’s Folly.

  But King Gregor did not dig up his wife’s roses to plant wheat. There were no potatoes among the daisies, nor carrots in the primroses. It was still a pleasure garden, even when there was little pleasure to be had outside the palace walls.

  Rose was grateful for the garden. Not only for the reminder it provided of her gentle mother, but also for the privacy it afforded. Here were endless paths that wound between shielding trees. There were bowers of climbing roses, artfully trained to arch over benches where a girl might sit and think, out of sight of her sisters, her governess, and maids. There were always gardeners at work, but the head gardener, Reiner Orm, was not a talkative man and did not hire gossips to work for him. They respected the privacy of the royal family, and left them alone.

  As she rounded a corner, Rose came upon one of the under-gardeners. Walter Vogel was a grizzled man with sparkling blue eyes and a wooden leg. He had showed up at the gates of the palace on the day Rose was born, looking for work, and by now was as much a fixture of palace life as the king. Walter was seated on a boulder, his wooden leg propped on his good knee, and his chin propped on a fist.

  “Good morning, Walter,” Rose said.

  “Good morning, Princess Rose,” he said gravely. “I was just sitting for a moment and pondering the state of the world.”

  “I see.” She smiled a little. It was very like Walter to say such obscure things, but she really wanted to be alone. She began edging past.

  He climbed down off the boulder. “But if I don’t get to work pruning the weeping cherry tree, I’ll need to worry about the state of my hide.” He winked at her and picked up his pruning shears.

  Rose held a finger to her lips. “I won’t breathe a word, should I see Master Orm,” she promised.

  “Thank you kindly, Princess Rose,” Walter said. “O’ course, the master gardener’s caught up with training a newcomer. Seems his nephew returned from the war yesterday. A fine young man, but he can’t tell a lilac from a peony.”

  Rose nodded in sympathy.

  “They’re down that-a-way,” Walter said, jerking his thumb to the left. “You might want to take your ease by the swan fountain, Princess, instead of the yellow-rose bower.” He was well acquainted with Rose’s favorite haunts.

  “Thank you, Walter,” she said, and turned toward the fountain.

  He saluted her with the shears as she passed.

  Rose went along the westward path until she came to the swan fountain. It was one of the smaller ones, though the bowl below the statue of the larger-than-life swan was still large enough to bathe in. The bird’s bronze neck curved over the floating lilies, its beak just touching the clear water. There were benches all around the fountain, and it was on one of these Rose liked to sit and think. The palace peacocks, with their strange creaking cries, could be heard only faintly from here, making it a place of quiet reflection.

  Literally. Rose could look through the clear water and see her image in the burnished bottom of the fountain. She wished that Master Orm and his gardeners weren’t quite so conscientious about keeping it clean. There was something disturbing about looking into the water and seeing a vision of your drowned self looking back.

  Rose tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. She hadn’t realized that she looked so tired. She was barely seventeen years old but thought she looked much older. She stirred the water with a finger, breaking up the image, and turned her back on the fountain to gaze out over the garden.

  Why shouldn’t she appear tired? She had eleven younger sisters all looking to her for guidance. She had taken her mother’s place as the designated hostess for all social functions at the palace, and there had been a great many lately in the wake of the victory against Analousia. Just now there were three different foreign ambassadors at the palace, being wined and dined and hopefully signing lucrative trade agreements.

  And almost every night there was the dancing.

  There was always dancing after state dinners, and as the crown princess she was never “humiliated” by having to sit out a dance without a partner. King Gregor believed that an excess of revelry was unwholesome, however, so the dancing always ended promptly at eleven o’clock.

  Which gave the twelve sisters just enough time to freshen up before they attended the Midnight Ball.

  Rose turned back to the water and leaned over to look at her reflection again. Did it show on her face that she was cursed? Tired, yes, she certainly appeared tired. But would a curse—her curs
e, her sisters’ curse, her mother’s curse—leave its mark too?

  A sudden scuffling of the gravel on the path startled her, and she lost her balance, slipping headfirst into the water. But before she could crack her skull on the bottom of the fountain, a strong arm was around her waist, pulling her back.

  “Easy, there! Easy!”

  Sputtering, Rose found herself back on her favorite bench, only now she was sopping wet and embarrassed besides. A tall, rather handsome young man was standing over her, looking concerned. His brown gardening smock was open at the collar, despite the chill in the air, and she could see a thin white scar slashing the tanned skin it revealed. Curious, she couldn’t stop staring at this.

  “Um, fraulein?’

  His voice drew her gaze upward. His voice was young, but his face was tanned from long hours in the sun, and there were even a few lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth. His hair was very short, but looked like it might curl if given the chance.

  “Fraulein? Are you all right? Did I frighten you?”

  Rose stopped staring and mustered her dignity. Of course he had startled her—she hadn’t suddenly decided to dive into an icy fountain for her health!—but she felt it would be rude to mention that. Instead she nodded graciously.

  “Thank you for your help,” she said, trying to ignore the cold water that was dripping off her hair and soaking her dress, or the fact that most of her shawl was still in the fountain, with only a corner of it hooked over her elbow.

  “I’m Galen,” the young man said, picking up the rake he had dropped to help her. He held out his free hand.