In Sleeping Beauty's Bed

by Mitzi Szereto

  For nearly a fortnight Miroslav pondered the issue of the spoiled Krasomila before formulating a strategy. Delegating all matters of consequence to his trusted ministers, he embarked upon a journey that would be of some length, taking with him a few modest garments of little fashion along with a handful of coins that clinked sadly in his pockets. He refused to speak to anyone of where he was going or what he would do once there. Indeed, his business with the Kaiser’s daughter was not finished.

  One might well have wondered why a man in Miroslav’s position should have bothered to pursue so callous a woman when those of finer character had made their interests known. But in his mind none could measure up to Krasomila, whose icy beauty had come to be admired in empires both distant and near. Although she could on occasion be kind and even grow tearful upon hearing of the plight of those less fortunate than herself, she actively shunned beggars for fear they might tarnish her with their dirty hands. Yet the prideful daughter of the Kaiser spent her days shunning far more than the common beggar. For numerous gentlemen of importance had put forth proposals of marriage to the haughty Krasomila, without a one being met with acceptance, let alone civility. She had requirements to which few could rise, and she made no secret of her contempt for those who failed. The man she would finally deign to wed needed to be not only highly cultured, but superior in appearance and manner as well as hailing from noble birth. Should it have been surprising that so many suitors found themselves spurned?

  One afternoon as Krasomila sat in the shade of a willow tree reading her favorite prose, her father decided to seek out her company to consult her on a matter of minor consequence. “Daughter, I should very much like to solicit your good opinion on the gardener I have engaged—a most extraordinary fellow who appears to be as knowledgeable about music as he is about horticulture.”

  Although impressed by her father’s claim, Krasomila never took anything at face value. “Just the same,” she responded, “I prefer to withhold my judgment until I have met with him personally. If he is as you say, then perchance we might presume upon him to teach me to play the harp.”

  And so it was decided. Later that day, the new gardener presented himself to the Kaiser’s daughter, his cloth cap clutched in one soil-smudged hand. He looked uncomfortably out of place in the refined surroundings of the music room, with his shabby garments and mud-stained boots, which he had made certain to brush off before entering. “Your Highness, this humble servant awaits your command,” he addressed her in a husky whisper, bowing to kiss the brocaded hem of her robe. When at last he raised his head, the eyes that gazed into Krasomila’s held an expression most unprecedented for one in so lowly a position. For, unbeknownst to the Kaiser’s daughter, this scruffy fellow was no ordinary gardener, but Czar Miroslav himself.

  Of course Krasomila failed to recognize him, having only been presented with his poor likeness in a painting—and that likeness had been attired in the grand robes suited to his high birthright. In any event, the contact had shaken her wintry composure. “Tell me, Gardener, what is your name?” she asked in a quavering voice conspicuously lacking its customary authority.

  “Miroslav,” replied the Czar, noting with displeasure that the name failed to inspire even a flicker of recognition upon Krasomila’s face.

  “Well, Miroslav, for a long time I have desired to play the harp. Are you of a mind to teach me?”

  The Czar bowed again. “I shall be pleased and honored to do so.”

  Seeing no further necessity for his inferior presence, Krasomila dismissed the new gardener, surprised at finding herself so unsettled after their meeting. A fire raged within her body, setting her heart to burning like a flame in her chest and chasing out the breath from her lungs. It became so distressing that she was forced to seek out the sanctity of her bed, where her hands moved of their own volition beneath the woolen covers, the fingers rubbing and prodding with a desperation previously unknown to her. Krasomila passed the remainder of the afternoon in this fashion, imagining that it was Miroslav’s earth-stained hands upon her, her resulting cries losing themselves beneath the heavy bedclothes. She did not show herself again until suppertime, when she was joined by her father, who promptly inquired of his unnaturally flushed daughter as to whether a suitable arrangement had been made between the gardener and herself. “His name brings to mind your thwarted suitor, Czar Miroslav. Perhaps you should have considered his proposal of marriage more carefully before acting with such haste to dismiss him,” said the Kaiser in rebuke.

  Nevertheless, the father’s sentiments were not shared by his offspring. At the mention of her snubbed suitor, Krasomila wrinkled her nose in distaste. “Please, Father, do not speak of it again. I am certain I would have been extremely unhappy as his Czarina.” And indeed, she remained wholly convinced of her words.

  With the arrival of the new gardener, much would change in the Kaiser’s household. Rather than spending her afternoons reading, Krasomila could be found sitting before her harp, as enthusiastic to learn as the gardener was to teach. Beneath his gentle coaxing and generous praise, the iciness of his pupil’s demeanor began to thaw, becoming a much-favored topic of conversation among the maidservants. “The Kaiser’s daughter is very greatly changed since taking up the harp,” they would whisper conspiratorially to each other. “Before, no one could come within a foot-step of her. Now she cares not a fig if that grubby Miroslav licks her hand!”

  Such domestic observations held more than a smattering of truth in them, for of late the Kaiser’s daughter had developed a restlessness of manner and a strangeness of temperament that did not go unnoticed by those who knew her best. Being of proud bearing, Krasomila refused to acknowledge the true reason for these symptoms. However, every morning she could be spied in the gardens, acknowledging Miroslav with a haughty nod as she loitered in the vicinity of his barrow, appearing to investigate the quality of the bulbs contained therein. Curiously enough, when it came time for her music lesson, she suddenly lost all desire for the gardener’s company and dispatched one of the maidservants with an excuse for her absence, only to dispatch a second to cancel out the words of the first. It was said that Krasomila suffered considerable confusion.

  One evening, as she entertained herself playing her harp and singing, Krasomila’s teacher unexpectedly appeared at her side. His presence did not even allow her to reach the second refrain before her fingers ceased their graceful plucking. “Play for me,” she commanded of Miroslav, her voice ragged with despair.

  Taking over the instrument, the gardener selected a melody favored by his pupil. As he sang the lyric, Krasomila began to weep, overcome by her imprudent love for the handsome young man who tended the palace gardens. She hung her head in helpless surrender, a hot tear spilling onto Miroslav’s expertly moving hand. Her sobs continued long after he had finished, especially when she heard the words that followed his sweet song: “This is my farewell, for I must depart on the morrow.”

  “But you cannot!” protested Krasomila, seizing the gardener’s soil-spattered hands between hers and pressing them to her heart. “You must never leave me.”

  Drawn downstairs by the music, the Kaiser discovered the couple in a rather compromising and inappropriate placement, the gardener’s hands having been relocated inside the swelling bodice of Krasomila’s gown. Taking note of the frantic state of his daughter, he understood what had just transpired. “Is this the man you love?”

  “Yes, Father. I love him with my entire heart and soul!” cried Krasomila, lavishing kiss after kiss along Miroslav’s warm palm, her tongue furtively collecting the salty dampness it found there and eliciting a powerful shudder from Miroslav.

  The Kaiser’s face sagged with disappointment. “Are you aware that he is greatly wanting in two of the qualities set forth by you for a prospective husband?” For Miroslav the gardener neither hailed from noble birth nor possessed a noble fortune.

  “It matters not to me. I should love him even if he swept out chimneys.”

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nbsp; “Then you must marry within the hour, at which time you are to leave this land, never to return.”

  Despite Miroslav’s protestations that he did not wish to be the cause of Krasomila’s misery and loss in stature, the die had been cast and the Kaiser’s will could not be swayed. A hasty taking of vows took place in the music room; it would be attended by only one witness—the harp that had brought the couple together. Stripped of her title and all her jewels and dressed in garments as ragged as those on the beggars she once shunned, Krasomila walked out of the palace gates with her new husband, banished from her father’s realm…forever.

  The newlyweds made their way on foot to the frontier of the land the Kaiser’s daughter had one day been meant to rule. “We might be wise to go to the town,” suggested Miroslav, indicating a miserable cluster of soot-stained structures in the equally sooty distance. “My brother lives there, and he can find a post for me.”

  “I, too, shall seek work until matters right themselves,” Krasomila assured her husband, although she had no notion of what type of work she might be qualified for, if any.

  Miroslav let for himself and his wife a shabby room from a sickly old widow whose house smelled of boiling cabbages. “I must seek out my brother,” he told his apprehensive bride as they arranged their few paltry possessions inside their cheerless quarters. “If good fortune shines upon me today, he may know of a post for the both of us.”

  The bridegroom was absent for the entirety of the day, leaving Krasomila in the company of their landlady, whose rattling coughs came straight from the grave. Finally Miroslav returned at sundown, bringing with him a parcel containing fine linen, which he placed expectantly before his wife. “If you can sew with a perfect stitch, you shall be well recompensed.”

  The young bride set to work with a vengeance, determined to sew the most precise stitches anyone had ever seen. She toiled night and day, leaving the linen unattended only to prepare her husband’s meals. When the pieces were completed, she delivered them to a grand house located in the center of town, placing them in the hands of a lady’s maid. The maid immediately found fault with the stitches and refused to grant payment. Unused to being the recipient of such cavalier treatment, Krasomila appealed to the woman’s sense of fairness, adding provocation where none was needed. For the maid possessed a most vinegary temperament, especially when dealing with the more well-favored members of her sex. Greatly humbled by the experience, the disowned daughter of the Kaiser kept the incident to herself, too embarrassed to speak of it to her husband.

  Miroslav next made it known that the post of maid to a very fine lady had come available. Certain that she would make a lady’s maid far superior to the disagreeable specimen to whom she had earlier handed over her sewing, Krasomila accepted, giddy with delight to leave behind the wretched room that served as the couple’s home so that she could move into the lady’s stately residence for a trial period. As it happened, the new maid would not be allowed to take the weight off her feet long enough to draw a breath. Krasomila performed her employer’s bidding from sunup to sundown, running errands, bathing the lady and dressing her heavy black hair, lacing the lady’s voluptuous curves into her fine garments—and all with a cheerful smile and an offer to do still more.

  Indeed, the lady of the manor summoned this recent addition to the household at all hours, each request being more toilsome and tiresome than its predecessor. The deeds were often quite peculiar in nature, the undertaking of which left the new maid with an uncomfortable sense of wrongdoing. During the lady’s bath, Krasomila would be required to spend a considerable amount of time in the laving of her demanding mistress, who disliked the coarseness of a cloth against her skin and preferred that the comely young domestic use her hands. They felt extremely soft for one employed in the lowly capacity of servant, an admission that, when offered aloud, inspired a shameful flush to stain the Kaiser’s daughter’s cheeks. For, like the lady to whose pampered flesh she now found herself attending, this high-blooded underling had once been accustomed to having a maid assist her with her bath.

  Settling into her new routine, Krasomila spent the early hours of each evening drawing soapy circles on her mistress’s back and shoulders, rinsing them away with fresh water that had been heating over the fire, only to begin the process all over again by directing her attentions to the fore. Although this might not have sounded particularly difficult in itself, the lady had been endowed with two very large conical objects that she wore proudly upon her chest, and the maid was required to employ both hands in their simultaneous laving, kneading the soft doughy sections with her palms and tweaking the stiff mahogany tips between thumb and forefinger—tips the overworked domestic was instructed to pinch with such severity that the mournful sounds soughing upward from her employer’s throat could only have been those of agony.

  However, it would be those unseen parts that lay far beneath the warm sudsy water that always seemed to demand the most care. Krasomila could not for the life of her fathom how such a fine lady could possibly get so dirty. She often spent upwards of an hour rubbing at the soiled areas with her fingers, reaching her hand deep into the bathwater until even the crinkles of her elbow had disappeared. No matter how thoroughly she scrubbed at the wriggly little knurl she found and the two furry puffs encasing it, her mistress refused to be satisfied. “Do not stop just yet,” the lady commanded in a strangled whisper, “for I am certain that there are many more particles of dirt in need of unearthing.” Hence the new maid continued to scour the region with fatigue-numbed fingertips, applying them with a palpable lack of gentleness in hopes that the infernal woman might see fit to release her from her toils. Why, not even her husband when in her father’s service as gardener had been in need of so aggressive a wash!

  To Krasomila’s dismay, this intentional roughness only made matters worse. Within minutes her other hand had been drafted into reluctant service, the soapy middle digit of which would find itself sluicing in and out of a snug trough located at the terminus of a graceful slope of back—a trough so fiery hot it scorched the flesh of her finger. Just when the poor, forsaken daughter of the Kaiser feared her cramped hands were in danger of being permanently crippled, her mistress suffered a fit, gasping and moaning and hurling herself about in the tub, heedless to the sudsy water splashing over the rim and onto the serviceable surface of her attendant’s shoes. “Yes, yes!” howled the aggrieved bather. “Oh, yes-s-s!”

  The startled maid nearly called out for assistance, concerned that her hysterical employer might drown—and that she would be blamed for the mishap. Then, as suddenly as the fit had arrived, the woman returned to normal, stepping out from the tub as if these extraordinary events had never occurred. A relieved Krasomila wrapped the heat-suffused body standing before her within a fluffy white towel and proceeded to dry it off, too discreet in her duties to reflect upon the bright-red snippet jutting out from a nest of fur as she knelt to wipe the moisture trickling down the insides of her mistress’s legs, most of which did not look at all like water.

  It might be expected that the lady should have retired to her bed to spend the remaining hours of darkness in contented slumber, thereby allowing her hard-working domestic to get on with the normal business of laying out her garments for the morning. Instead Krasomila discovered her implacable mistress sitting up in bed, waiting impatiently for the summoned reappearance of the comely young woman in her service. “Krasomila, I fear you were very negligent in your washing,” scolded the lady, throwing down her embroidered coverlet and revealing the furry creature that had only moments ago been lurking beneath the steaming bathwater.

  The maid found herself shivering, for what next took place struck terror into her heart. With a hand situated upon each pampered knee, her employer extended them fully and salaciously outward, coaxing this bristling denizen of the bath even further into view. The creature appeared quite fierce as it was forced out of hiding from the safe haven between the woman’s thighs, no doubt irritated at havin
g been disturbed. A vermilion tongue of a dichotomous structure stuck rudely out from a dense coat of black fur as if in silent rebuke of this seemingly incompetent servant. Krasomila took several steps back, frightened that it might attack, as it had begun to salivate most profusely from its blood-red gash of a mouth.

  The lady cleared her throat in a not-so-subtle prompting, her eyes glowing with an eerie luminosity. All at once it became clear to the weary domestic that her unappeasable mistress expected additional efforts to be expended with regard to her ablutions—as did the hirsute creature glowering at her from between the exaggerated V of the woman’s thighs. For it, too, stood by in a state of expectancy, its flickering tongue distending farther and farther away from the furred halves of its body and bringing into exposure the dripping red maw below. As Krasomila moved to fetch a bowl to fill with warm water, her employer gripped her wrist, this minor physical contact most uncharacteristic and, indeed, most unprecedented for one in her mistress’s position. “I shan’t be requiring water or soap. They contain properties that have proven to be an irritant to my delicate skin.”

  Although she yearned very much to do so, her lowly status in the household prevented the maid from remarking that perhaps her delicately skinned mistress should not have lingered for such a long time in the bath, for, indeed, the woman’s flesh always looked as puckered as a prune’s after stepping from the water. But before Krasomila could inquire as to precisely what method her tiresome employer expected her to use for this washing, the answer had already reached her ears. “I believe your tongue shall suffice quite nicely,” her mistress replied matter-of-factly.

  With no allusion to ceremony, the lady launched her loins high into the air, drawing her knees up to her shoulders and extending them wide, propelling her furry companion completely and helplessly into the open. Left without their safe camouflage of thighs, still more of its ferret-like features had become visible. The creature appeared to observe the anxious maid from upside-down. A solitary, crinkle-edged eye as black and unfathomable as midnight peered at her from beneath its drooling mouth, blinking with such frequency and intensity that the bifurcated tongue above had taken to flickering right along with it.