The Night Dance (Once Upon a Time)

by Mahlon F. Craft Suzanne Weyn

  In the five years he’d been a knight he had seen and done unimaginable things. He’d helped Arthur do battle with a village of mountain people, all closely related to one another, who were so big—both tall and wide—that they were considered giants by their neighbors.

  When these giants began kidnapping young women from neighboring towns, desiring to bring new bloodlines into their gigantic genes, the townspeople prevailed on Arthur and Bedivere to save their captured wives and daughters. They’d returned every last woman, though the giants had left the warriors battered and in need of new armor.

  He had been beside Arthur when they slew a fierce cave-dwelling creature with breath so hot people claimed it breathed fire. Merlin had looked it up in his volume of ancient wisdom and identified it as a pterosaur, though the terrified local villagers had named it a dragon.

  When Arthur wed his queen, Guinevere, and began staying closer to Camelot, Bedivere had still believed that their days of adventure, merriment, and chivalry would go on forever. Even after he’d lost the use of his left hand while fighting beside Arthur against the Saxon invaders, he’d remained hopeful. He never would have believed that such a defeat as they had just suffered would ever come to them. But now he was certain that a new age of darkness had befallen.

  He stopped only to sleep on the sand. That night he woke up with the high tide nearly over his mouth and scrambled up to higher ground to resume his slumber. At dawn he awoke again to find sand and pebbles covering him. It scratched him so badly that he shed his armor until he was down to his tunic, leggings, and boots. The only piece he retained was his belt with its scabbard containing Excalibur and his own sword.

  By the time Bedivere staggered off the shoreline and into Glastonbury he looked every bit the wild madman he felt himself to be.

  “Hey, you, one hand!” a richly dressed man called to him as he withdrew a fat purse from beneath his cape. “How much will you take for the sword?”

  Bedivere’s eyes darted to his lame hand. When he was in full armor he could conceal its condition under a sleeve of chain mail, but now it was exposed for the useless appendage it had become. Stung by the humiliating insult, he glowered at the man.

  “Oh come now,” the man cajoled. “You must have stolen it from some very grand fallen knight. There are quite a few of them these days I hear tell. It can be of no use to you, but my gold coins might buy you a meal—or a bath!” Chuckling at his own words, the man poured out several coins and advanced to Bedivere, his hand offering the coins.

  Slowly Bedivere withdrew Excalibur from his scabbard.

  “There’s a bright fellow,” the man said, misunderstanding Bedivere’s intention.

  Bedivere slashed the sword over the man’s head with the lightning movement he was known for. Dropping his coins, the man fled, horrified.

  Giggles and applause made Bedivere turn. Two dirty, ragged children sat on a stone curb, pleased by the display. Bedivere scooped up the dropped coins and tossed them gently in their direction. “We know where there’s a spare straw mat in beggar’s alley, but you have to be fast to get it,” one of the children, a girl of about six told Bedivere as she stuck one of the coins into the pocket of her skirt.

  “Yeah, the old man who had it died last night,” added a boy of about seven. “If you hurry I think the mat is still there.”

  With a nod of consent, Bedivere followed the excited children into the poorest part of the town. He learned that the boy was named Amren and the girl was Evanola. They led him down a narrow alley where beggars were living. “You’re in luck,” said Evanola. “Here’s the mat!”

  “We can come back with a piece of potato for you later,” Amren offered. “Mum used to have me bring it to the old man, and I don’t think she knows he’s dead yet. I’ll give it to you.”

  “How’d you hurt your hand?” Evanola asked staring at the coarse scar running across his palm.

  “In a fight,” Bedivere replied as he settled onto the moldy mat.

  “We’ll be back with that piece of potato, don’t you worry,” Amren assured him as he and his sister ran off.

  Bedivere waved to them languidly as he turned on his side and took his place among the beggars in the alleyway.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Eleanore’s Earring

  If Eleanore did not get out of this darkness soon, she would go mad! She was sure of it. How long had they been wandering in these twisting, turning tunnels?

  It would be the fault of her parents if she did lose her mind. Her mother, going off and abandoning them, then suddenly appearing, years later, in some sort of a bowl—of all things!

  It was their mother that Rowena had seen; she had no doubt of it. She and Mathilde were the ones who remembered her best, being the oldest. They all looked like her in one way or another.

  Their father was to blame too. Locking them inside like prisoners! Making them so desperate to escape that they’d scramble into a tunnel with no heed for where they were going or where they might end up! And now they were lost—hopelessly lost in the dark.

  Something scrambled by her foot and Eleanore jumped back. “Careful!” cried Isolde who was right behind her. “You nearly knocked me down.”

  “I’ve caught a mouse,” said Ione, who was never squeamish about such things. “It ran across my slipper and I grabbed it.”

  “Hold on to it,” Eleanore said to her. Groping her way forward past her other sisters, she came to Ione. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness well enough to let her see Ione and the mouse a little. Bending, she pulled the ribbon from the lavender silk slippers she wore. She removed her earring and fastened it to the ribbon, and then she tied the ribbon around the end of the mouse’s tail. “Now let it go,” she instructed her sister.

  Just as she’d hoped, the earring clattered as the mouse scurried away ahead of them. “Come on, hurry, while we can still hear it,” she told her sisters. They followed the sound, as quickly as they could go, and it wasn’t long before they saw a dim light in the distance—it was the trapdoor opening.

  They climbed back into their bedchamber just as there came an urgent pounding on the door. “Yes,” cried Eleanore, reaching to pull Bronwyn through the opening.

  Bronwyn, in turn, helped pull the next sister, Isolde, through while Eleanore opened the door a crack. On the other side was short, plump Mary, the head housekeeper. “Thank goodness,” she cried when she saw Eleanore.

  She was about to come in but Eleanore blocked her way. She needed to give her sisters time to shove the bed back over the trapdoor. “Is there something you need?” she asked Mary.

  “Something I need?” Mary cried incredulously. “I’ve been pounding on that locked door since supper. Where have you girls been?” Red splotches formed on her cheeks as she pushed past Eleanore.

  The sisters had managed to get the bed back into place and had piled onto it as if to further cover the opening with their long dresses. “We’ve been right here,” Eleanore told her.

  “You have not been!” Mary scolded. “When I called you to eat there was no one in here. I heard not a sound! You may thank me for I told your father that you were all feeling ill being that it was your time of month.”

  “All of us at once?” Cecily questioned, raising a skeptical brow.

  “It happens among females who live in close quarters: Their cycles become attuned to one another,” Mary maintained. “Besides, I had to say something. I didn’t want to worry the poor man. Now I must know the truth! Where have you been?”

  “We’ve been right here,” Eleanore insisted once again.

  Mary pointed an accusing finger at the eleven pairs of dirty, tattered silk slippers dangling from the bed just above the floor. “And your slippers got into that sorry state because you have been here in your room all the while, I suppose!”

  “We were dancing,” Eleanore said.

  “What? In a dust bin?” Mary demanded.

  The sisters glanced at one another. How could they explain the disastro
us state of their slippers?

  They couldn’t. So they stared at Mary, dumbfounded but unwilling to reveal their secret. After a long, uncomfortable moment Mary breathed a sigh of resignation. “It’s very late and I have not gotten any sleep. Give me those slippers. In the morning I’ll discard them and bring you new ones from the storage chest.”

  The sisters removed their slippers and handed them to her. “Look at these expensive slippers—ruined! Your father would get into a state if he saw these,” Mary muttered crossly as she collected them in her outstretched skirt.

  “What are you going to do with them?” Rowena asked as she bent to pull off her slippers.

  “I don’t know—burn them before your father sees them I imagine,” Mary replied as Rowena dropped them into her apron. “There are replacements in the storage cabinet, but I know he would not be pleased. These shoes are not a month old.” Mary scowled at the sisters, encompassing them all in a sweeping glare of disapproval, before leaving with the slippers.

  When the door closed behind Mary, Eleanore was suddenly extremely tired. Rowena had wandered to the window and was gazing dreamily out into the night. The other ten had fallen asleep where they lay, bundled in a heap on her bed.

  Stretching wearily, Eleanore laid down on an empty bed and her eyes began to close. Just as she was about to fall asleep, a familiar noise brought her back to waking.

  The mouse that had guided them out of the passage scurried along a floor board, her earring still attached to the ribbon tied to its tail. The mouse stopped and regarded her, its pink nose twitching.

  She rose off her pillow and considered attempting to get her earring back. But she’d need Ione’s help for that and it appeared that she was already sleeping. Just then Eleanore desperately needed to sleep, as well. She lay her head back on the pillow and allowed the mouse to continue on its way, still bouncing the earring off the floorboards as it departed the room.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Sir Ethan’s Outrage

  “Stop right now!” Sir Ethan’s authoritative voice boomed in the kitchen hallway.

  Mary froze in front of the blazing fireplace with her arms wrapped around a straw basket containing twenty-three tattered, jewel-toned, ribbon-trimmed, silk slippers. Though it was barely dawn, she’d only had the chance to pitch one slipper into the flames before Sir Ethan appeared.

  “Why are these slippers going into the fire?” he demanded to know.

  Mary tried her best to smile casually at him. “Oh, they’ve simply been worn out,” she said as if it were quite normal.

  “Worn out?” he questioned, lifting one of the slippers from the basket and turning it in his hand. “These floors are polished marble, and the courtyard is covered in slate. How could they be wearing their slippers out so quickly on such smooth surfaces?” He ran his other hand along the scuffed, torn, dirty sole of the slipper he held, and his eyes narrowed suspiciously.

  This slipper had obviously been worn outside over some kind of rocky surface. Apparently all the slippers had been worn outdoors, judging from the sight of them. He was not a fool. “Tell me, Mary. Last night when you told me that the girls were…indisposed…and could not come to supper, are you sure they were actually in their room?”

  Mary was not naturally inclined to lie, and at the moment it seemed fruitless to try. Her master was clearly on the trail of the truth. “I did not see them exactly,” she admitted sheepishly. “I simply assumed they were within and felt it likely that they might be down with womanly ills when they did not answer my call to dine.”

  Sir Ethan harrumphed unhappily. “I see. And were these slippers in such disrepair yesterday?”

  “I could not tell you,” Mary replied.

  Sir Ethan took the basket of slippers from Mary and headed out of the kitchen, striding purposefully to the bedchamber his daughters shared. He pounded forcefully on the door. “It is your father, open up,” he bellowed. When he got no reply, he banged on the door even louder.

  Still no reply came. Cracking open the unlocked door, he peered in.

  Ten of his daughters were asleep on one bed, heaped on one another in a tangle of arms and legs. Eleanore was sprawled on another bed, in such a sound sleep that she snored. And Rowena slumbered on the floor, slumped against the wall below the bedroom window.

  Not one of them wore a nightgown; all were still fully clothed for daytime. “They look like a pack of drunken revelers passed out after a night of riotous merriment,” he said to Mary, who had hurried into the room and now stood beside him wringing her hands anxiously.

  She stepped beside Rowena and attempted to jostle her awake, but the young woman simply murmured incoherently and repositioned herself on the floor. “Let her be,” Sir Ethan told Mary.

  He left the room with Mary at his side. “Issue a new pair of slippers to each girl. Every morning the slippers are to be lined up outside this bedchamber for my inspection. In that manner I will quickly get to the bottom of whatever is going on with them.”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing of great concern,” Mary said.

  Sir Ethan was not as sure. If his daughters were going out into the world through some route he did not know, any manner of harm could come to them. He would not have it and could not even bear the thought of it.

  “I’m going into town,” he told Mary abruptly. “I will return with the locksmith and have him fit the entire manor with new, stronger locks. The bolt on the girls’ door will be the first to be changed. No longer will it lock from within, but rather every night you will be charged with the duty of bolting it from the outside.”

  “As you wish, sir,” Mary said as he dashed away toward the front door.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Rowena Meets Millicent

  The boy who tended the geese in the yard always left his muddy dung-caked boots outside the kitchen door, so Rowena was confident they’d be there when she came to find them. With a quick check to see if she was being observed, she lifted her hem and slipped her stocking feet into them—a nearly perfect fit.

  She had arisen an hour earlier, stiff limbed from sleeping on the cold floor, and looked outside just in time to see the boy pass through the front gate with her father, who had no doubt recruited the servant to attend him on some errand in Glastonbury. It would be hours before he had need of these rough boots again. But she needed them.

  She had awoken to find her only footwear, her slippers, gone. Then she recalled that she’d given them to Mary for burning. No replacements had yet been delivered to the room. On the previous days she’d found it difficult to walk barefoot through the rocks and sticks, which was why she hoped to borrow these boots for today’s trip into the forest.

  “Going somewhere?”

  Looking up sharply, Rowena faced the woman who had spoken. She’d never seen her before, and as she took in the sharp features, sunken cheeks, and beady, peering eyes, her first impression was overwhelmingly negative.

  The woman offered her something small and glittering, holding it out in the palm of her hand. “I found this,” she said, and Rowena saw she held Eleanore’s earring. “I’ve just started here, and I don’t want to be accused of stealing. Take it.”

  Rowena plucked it from her hand, inwardly recoiling at the touch of the woman’s cold palm. “Thank you,” she said as she recovered from her initial revulsion. She remembered that Eleanore had told her there was a new kitchen servant, Millicent. Rowena assumed this was she.

  “Where are you headed in the goose boy’s boots?” the woman asked with a swaggering insolence and hint of menace that put Rowena further on her guard.

  Rowena forced a smile. “Where is there to go?”

  Millicent responded with a tight, joyless grin and nodded toward the boots.

  “Millicent!” Helen shouted from inside the kitchen. “Where have you disappeared to now?”

  Millicent’s eyes darted toward the kitchen door, but she made no move to go as she stubbornly awaited Rowena’s answer.

 
; “I was simply wondering what they felt like,” Rowena told her, stepping out of them.

  “Millicent!” Helen shouted again, this time in a more exasperated tone.

  Millicent reluctantly moved toward the kitchen door. Rowena snapped up the boots and thrust them at her as she opened the door. “These need to be cleaned,” she said in her most imperious tone.

  She did not want this woman with her bullying manner to think she was afraid of her. And she needed to prove that she did not intend to go anywhere wearing the goose boy’s boots.

  With a hate-filled glower, the woman took them from her and went inside.

  Rowena glanced at Eleanore’s earring and put it in the pocket of her gown. She no longer felt sure it was a wise idea to go out into the forest as she’d intended. Was Millicent watching her? She struck Rowena as the kind of angry, resentful person who might delight in causing trouble for her.

  But the trees were swept by the spring breezes and rustled above the manor wall. Her sisters were asleep; her father was out. If Millicent had not delayed her she’d be in the forest now.

  Glancing in the kitchen window, she saw Millicent fiercely plucking the feathers from a chicken while Helen pounded and kneaded a mound of bread dough. Mary led two servant boys into the kitchen and put a pile of cutting utensils before them for sharpening on a stone.

  Rowena rolled off her stockings and padded across the slate courtyard in bare feet. She was quickly through the opening she’d made in the wall and once again wandering through the forest.

  There was so much she wanted to think about. Everything that had happened in the past days was so confusing. Who was the mysterious soldier who had touched her heart so profoundly? Did he even exist? Had he died in that battle? Why had she seen him, even changed places with him?