Perhaps another girl would have been paralyzed with the grief that shook her — but Elena had learned to work even while her heart was breaking and her eyes overflowing a long time ago. And if her hands shook as she carefully picked up and shook out her spare skirt, bodice, and blouse, her worn-out shawl and kerchief, and folded them up to set them in the window-seat, what was left of her bits and souvenirs in a mound atop them, well, there was no one to see. And if she sprinkled the straw she regathered from the floor with her tears, there was no one to mock her grief. But it was hard, hard, to have the little she had saved of her past life ground into dust as those poor flowers had been. At least she was wearing the locket with her mother's portrait in it around her neck on a ribbon — Daphne had stolen the chain long ago.
She sobbed quietly as she collected every bit of straw; she would need something to sleep on tonight. It had to be done, and no one would do it for her.
She stuffed it all back into the empty canvas sack that had been her bed. And at least there was one small blessing; she always kept her needlecase in the pocket of her apron, and had they found that, they probably would have taken it as well. So she was able to stitch the mattress back up again, sitting cross-legged on the bare floor. They had torn the seams open, rather than ripping up the canvas, and although she had to remake it a little smaller, when she finished it was not in much worse shape than it had been before it had been torn apart. It was a hard thing, though — to find that men whom she had never harmed, who should realize that she had been just as ill-treated as they, should take out their anger on her.
And when she thought about how the flowers from her mother's grave had been crushed, the few things she could call her own left in ruins, her eyes burned and new sobs choked her —
"Ahem."
She squeaked and jumped, and cast startled eyes on the open doorway.
There was a man standing there. He stepped into the light, and she saw that it was Monsieur Rabellet. He carried a bundle under one arm, and his face was suffused with guilt.
"I am sorry, Ella," he said, flushing with shame when he caught sight of her tear-streaked face. "They were looking for valuables, and they started in on your room before I could stop them. It was the latecomers, you see, the ones who got nothing because — "
She sniffed, and wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand, but said nothing; she just stared at him, and let the tears come, weeping silently. She was not going to make this easy on him. If he'd cared to, he could have stopped them. He was a big man, only the blacksmith was bigger.
"At least I kept them from tearing up your clothes!" he protested, and flushed again. "At least — no more than they already were...." He coughed, and swallowed audibly as she fixed him with a look that she hoped would stab him to the heart and double his guilt. "The wife gave me a piece of her mind when she found out."
Well, Madame Rabellet had always been kind to Elena, who had given her the respect due to a fine craftswoman, and always been ready to lend a hand at the fittings, proving herself so useful that Madame Rabellet had never needed to bring her Apprentice-girl with her.
"Anyway, when she found out, she sent me back here with this — " The man took two steps forward into the room and thrust the bundle at Elena, who automatically put out her hands to take it from him. "She said it wasn't fair — said God gives blessings to the charitable — said — " He was backing up as he babbled, as if the accusations in her eyes were arrows, wounding him, and when he reached the door, he whirled, and fled, leaving her alone as his hasty footsteps on the floor and the staircase echoed through the empty rooms. She sat there, unmoving, until the slamming of the front door woke her from her shock.
She looked at the bundle in her hands. It was fabric — it was woolen, dyed a golden-brown. Not new, but sound, in good condition, and so far as she could tell, not stained, either. She unfolded it, to find that it was a large, plain shawl, and it was only the covering for a bundle of clothing.
A skirt, a blouse, and a bodice; like the shawl, the fabric was not new and the skirt and bodice had been re-dyed. The skirt was a heavy twilled linen, and there was a kerchief that matched, dyed a dark brown, the bodice was black, and the blouse a pale color that was not quite white. They all looked to have been made from much larger garments, cut down when the seams were too worn to hold, but the fabric itself was still good.
They were not patched, not torn, not darned. In fact, they were stoutly-sewn and well re-dyed. These were the sorts of things that a dressmaker assigned to a new Apprentice to make, simple garments to teach her to sew a "fine seam."
They were the best pieces of clothing that Elena had owned since her father had died. They were also exactly what she needed to carry out her plan.
When the rest of the town discovered — as it must, given that Madame Blanche and Madame Fleur were two of the most inveterate gossips in the Kingdom — that Elena had been left behind to live as best she could in the empty house, a few of the more guilt-stricken arrived to leave small offerings at her doorstep. Most she never saw; she heard footsteps on the path, and by the time she got to the front door, the gate was swinging shut and there was a basket or a bundle on the doorstep. In fact, except for Monsieur Rabellet, she didn't get much more than a glimpse of a skirt or a pair of legs.
But the offerings were welcome — indeed, desperately needed. A warm woolen shawl, a kitchen knife and a very old and very small frying pan, a loaf of bread, a ball of cheese, a blanket, a pat of butter, a pannikin of salt and a twist of tea. So she wouldn't go hungry tonight, nor cold. Madame Blanche completed the offerings in person, delivering a half dozen eggs and some bacon just as the sun began to set.
She found Elena on her knees at the hearth in the kitchen, getting the fire going again, and ready to toast some bread and cheese for her supper.
"Well!" she said, looking with approval at the food. "I was hoping someone would have a guilty conscience! Good." Her mouth firmed with satisfaction. "So, now the robbers have taken care of what you need for now, but have you thought about what you're going to do?"
Elena sat back on her heels and looked up at her kindly old neighbor. "I have, actually — I thought it up the day Madame told me that she and the girls were going. I just — " She shook her head. "I wanted to tell you, but Madame swore me to secrecy.
She told me that she was going to leave me here to look after the house, and that was when I made up my mind what I was going to do when she was truly gone."
"You did? Well, good for you!" Madame Blanche went out into the kitchen garden and came back with some bits of herbage pinched off the new growth in the herb bed. "Here you are, dear. Those will go nicely in coddled eggs. So, what are you going to do?"
She took a deep breath. "I'm going to leave. I'm going to leave here and never come back."
Madame Blanche blinked, as if she could not quite believe what she had just heard. "I don't suppose you would care to explain that?"
"Tomorrow is the Mop Fair," Elena elaborated. "Anyone who is looking for a servant is going to be there. And you said yourself that everyone in the town knows that I've done every bit of cleaning, mending and tending in this house for — years, anyway. I'm only a plain cook, but anything else, I can do."
"But — but you're not a servant!" Madame Blanche said, looking blank. "You're from a good family, Elena! Your poor mother — if she knew, she'd be weeping at the thought. It's one thing for me to do my own cooking, but — "
"I may not have been born a servant, but that's what I am now," Elena said firmly. "I'm too old to become an Apprentice in any decent trade even if I had the fee, so that is what I am good for now." She bit her lip, and continued, bitterly, "You know that's the truth, that it's all I'm good for, now. Madame Klovis saw to that; I have no dowry, no prospects, nothing to offer a young man but myself, and what young man would marry an old maid of twenty-one who brings him nothing but her two hands and a few housekeeping skills? Unless I dispute it, within days, the magistrates will turn t
his very house over to the creditors. Even if I do dispute it and win, what am I to do? It won't be long before Madame Klovis returns — for you surely don't think that she'll have any better luck elsewhere in her fortune hunting any more than I do — and I will be back to being her unpaid slave."
"Well," Madame Blanche said, blankly, "I suppose that all of that is true...."
"So there you are," Elena said, trying to sound determined, and not bleak. "This is my only chance to get away from her. And if I am going to have to spend the rest of my life, mending and tending and cleaning, then I am — by Heaven! — going to be paid for it!"
And at least I'll have three meals a day and two suits of clothing a year as well, she reminded herself. Every servant, no matter how lowly, was entitled to that and her bed and board and pay. It would be more than she had ever gotten out of Madame Klovis.
Madame Blanche took a deep breath, as if she was about to dispute Elena's view of the situation, then let it all out in a tremendous sigh. "I am afraid, my dear," she said sadly, "that you are correct. And you are a very brave girl."
Elena shook her head. "I am not brave at all," she replied, and a little of her despair crept into her voice, despite her attempts to keep it out. "I am terrified, Madame Blanche. If I were brave, I would go to the King and find some way to get everything back again. If I were brave, I would reclaim this house at least, and sell it, and use the money to set myself up in a little cottage somewhere, with a cow, and some chickens and geese, and a little garden of my own. But I am not brave. I am afraid to face all of the creditors and the magistrate, I am too terrified to even think seriously of going to the King. I am running away, Madame Blanche, and I was not even brave enough to face my stepmother and tell her what I am going to do. When she returns, she will find the house has been sold and I am gone, and if I am working for some family here in town, I will hide until she goes again."
Madame Blanche regarded her gravely for a long moment, the light from the fireplace casting strange shadows on her face. "You may be right, Elena, in saying that this is the only thing you can do. But I think you are wrong in saying that you are not brave." She paused. " May I tell Fleur what you have told me?"
"Of course!" Elena replied. "I would be happy to have — " now it was her turn to pause, to choose the right phrase " — her kindly thoughts."
"And I am sure you will have them, my dear," Madame Blanche said warmly. "Well, I will leave you to make your supper in peace."
And she bowed a little, before she turned and left.
Elena sighed, and put a pat of butter in the skillet to melt. After everything had been taken, there were two things left; there had been wood in the woodshed, and a bucket on the pump. She made and ate her dinner — eggs and bread and a little tea. She cleaned the dishes in the light from the fire. Then she banked the fire until morning, washed her face and hands, and, for lack of anything else to do, went up to bed.
There were no candles, of course, for even if her stepmother had left any, the creditors would have taken them, so Elena climbed the stairs to her room in the dark, and made up her bed (with the new shawl bundled around her old clothing for a pillow, and the new blanket over the old, tattered ones) by the light of the moon coming in her window. She carefully took off her outer clothing and slid into the bed in her shift, and if the pallet was a little lumpier than it had been, it was also warmer beneath the new blanket.
And this was the earliest she had been able to go to sleep in as long as she could recall. Usually she was awake until after midnight with all of the tasks she had to finish — later than that, if the Horrids had been to a ball or a party, and she had to stay up to help them undress. She usually didn't get to go to sleep on a full stomach, either.
It had been a very long day, nevertheless, and an emotional one. She was tired, as tired as she ever had been.
And no one is going to wake me with a scream for something, she realized, as she felt her muscles relaxing in the unaccustomed warmth. The empty house felt — odd. There was a hollowness to it. There were no little sounds below her, of people moving about or making noises in their sleep.
Through her open window, which overlooked the kitchen-garden, she heard voices coming from the house next door. Not loud enough to make out what was being said, but loud enough to know that it was Blanche and Fleur, and a third, unfamiliar voice.
She smiled a little. It was probably a client of Fleur's; someone like Fleur usually saw a lot of clients after dark. Few people wanted to be seen patronizing a Witch, even if that Witch was someone who had a heart full of only good, true as a priest, and honest as a magistrate.
Everyone knew that Fleur was a Witch of course, and had been since she was very small indeed, though no one every actually said the word aloud. This was why they called her "Madame," although, unlike her sister, she had never had a husband. You just called a Witch "Madame" — it was respectful, and it didn't do to treat a Witch with disrespect. That was why Elena had chosen her words so carefully when she'd asked for Fleur's "good wishes," and why Blanche had asked so carefully if she could "tell Fleur." Words took on extra weight, and extra potency, when there was a Witch involved. You were careful about words around Witches.
Not that Fleur had a great deal of magic of the sort that tales were made of. No, Fleur's power lay in healing and herbs; she was a very small Witch, as Witches went. Ask her to cure your child or get your dry cow to give milk again, and there was no problem. Ask her to cast a love spell or break a curse, and she would look at you helplessly, and shrug.
As she had the day that Elena, weeping after having had yet another possession appropriated by one of the Horrids, had come running into the neighbor's garden and begged Fleur to make Madame go away.
Fleur had only looked at her, sadly. "I cannot, dear," she said, slowly. "I am bound to tell you the truth, my pet. Somewhere, Madame obtained a very powerful love spell, and your father is entrapped in it. I cannot break it, though I wish with all my heart that I could. I could not even begin to guess how to break it, in fact."
Elena stared at the moon framed in her window as she remembered that dreadful moment. It had been an epiphany of sorts. Until that moment, she had believed that all endings were happy ones, that all good adults could help children, if only the children asked, and that good things happened to good people, if only they were brave enough. In that moment, she had learned that sometimes good people were helpless, that terrible things happened to good people, that there were sad endings as well as happy ones.
Worst of all, she had learned that no matter how brave and good you were, bad people often won, and that her father was lost to her forever.
From that moment, she mourned him as if he was dead — and indeed, for all intents and purposes, he might just as well have died. He came less and less to protect her from her stepmother and stepsisters, until at last he did nothing at all. He scarcely seemed to realize that she existed. He totally forgot that he had ever been married to anyone else, and spent his every waking moment trying to find some new means of pleasing "his Madeleine."
It almost came as an anticlimax when he sickened and died within that year of wedding Madame. She thought, looking back on it, that she had known, deep in her heart, that this was what would happen. Love spells did not last forever, not even powerful ones, and Madame was not the sort to allow her power to ebb away.
But this was the peculiar thing; Elena had spent her time since her father's death wrapped in a growing sense of tension and frustration, as if something was out there, some force that would make all of this better, if only she knew how to invoke it. That there was a way to turn this into a happy ending, and that her life was a coiled spring being wound ever tighter until it would all be released in a burst of wonder and magic that would give her back everything that had been taken, and more. The longer things went on, the more she felt that climax rushing towards her, or she towards it —
But it never happened. Not on her sixteenth birthday — the primary
moment of magical happenings according to every tale that she had ever read or heard — nor on her eighteenth, which was the other possibility. No, things stayed exactly as they had been. No Fairy Godmother appeared, not even Madame Fleur, somehow empowered to take Elena out of her miserable existence. No handsome prince, no prince of any kind, appeared on the doorstep to save her. There was not even a marriage proposal from the blacksmith's son or the cowherd, both traditional disguises for wandering princes. Nothing. Only more and more back-breaking work, and the certainty that nothing was going to change, that Madame had things arranged precisely as she wanted them, and that Elena would be "Ella Cinders," the household slave, until she died. And her despair grew until it matched the tension inside, until it overwhelmed the tension inside, and the only escape from either she ever had were a few stolen moments inside the covers of a book.
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