Chapter Thirteen
I asked Alice to hurry us home, as quickly as Arno could manage. We flew over the ruts and the bumps. “Were you successful?” she asked, raising her voice over the rattle of the chaise.
“In a way,” I acknowledged.
The panels creaked and the chains shook and the horse’s feet pounded on the stones beneath us. “What?” Alice shouted.
“In a way,” I cried, raising my voice.
“Speak louder!”
“Never mind, then!” Unable to engage in conversation, I was left to peer into the trees and make sense of the day.
I had been humiliated. Of that, I was sure.
That had been the bargain I had come to drive. All self, all me, me, me, I, I, I, bent in supplication to my greater purpose.
And in that, I had been successful: The girls would go to the ball.
But I didn’t feel relief. No sooner had I achieved what I’d wanted than I’d realized how much more there was to want: It was like summiting a hilltop to see, from a new vantage point at the top, an entire mountain range ahead.
When I’d first heard the rumors, I wasn’t afraid of not being invited to the royal ball; I was afraid of one existing.
For if it existed, we must go. And if we went, we must succeed.
And if we were successful, my daughters would be married and move away from me forever.
My own desires contradicted each other. And Sigrid’s many derisions had left me feeling sour.
But I had accomplished what I came for: The girls would go to the ball.
Everything would require management to a precise degree.
We would need dresses, and not ones easily refashioned from those we owned.
New gloves. Introduction cards. A refresher on deportment and etiquette for interacting with the royal family.
And transportation— a carriage was a potent symbol of status.
It would not do to arrive in a rented hackney.
I wished, pointlessly, and for the hundredth time these many years, that we might have been able to use some of Elin’s dowry for Elin’s share.
It seemed only fair: Rosie and Mathilde would need the dresses and the frills and every appearance of being proper ladies, for they had nothing else to recommend them.
Elin was the daughter of titled nobility and came with an inheritance.
And, I reminded myself, she hardly contributed to the work in the house.
It was unfair indeed that all our hard-earned pennies—made from Rosie’s embroidery and the fruits of all but Elin’s labor—had to be equally shared when their circumstances were anything but equal.
There were not yet any scrimpings from her ashes.
I slumped down in my seat, exhausted already.
“All’s well, m’lady?” Alice called, frowning in concern.
Whether fortune awaited or disaster loomed, the wind would only take my words. So I said nothing at all.
When we neared our gate, Alice stuck an elbow into my side.
I looked up to see: A man sat at the helm of a refitted hackney coach, half blocking the road in front of our iron arches.
His carriage was piled high with all manner of goods and instruments.
Different-sized tabors and citoles and shawms. Inside the carriage compartment, I could see a gourd-shaped hurdy-gurdy and a rebec swinging from hooks that had been screwed into the roof.
This entire mountain of chaos was pulled by a sole horse, and it was a marvel it moved at all, for the animal’s black bangs entirely blocked its view.
Unlike the man himself, who was regarding me with amusement.
“My lady!” he called, grinning widely. He had a normal-sized body—softening out in the middle—but delicate, tiny hands, which he used to twist the end of a short, pointed beard.
Above, a pair of brown eyes were marked by smile lines, which deepened as we approached.
I could see his every tooth, including the space where one was missing in the back.
The rest were bright and white against his sun-worn skin.
I climbed down from our chaise and frowned at the jongleur.
“You cannot stop right here.” Each year the itinerant minstrel came and each year I tried to send him away, with decreasing conviction.
I directed Alice to maneuver around his cart and take our own horse up the drive.
And, when she and Arno were safely past, I turned back to the man, hands on my hips. “Hello, Moussa.”
He laughed. “You are all dressed up. Are you having a party?”
“I’m quite serious,” I told him. “You’re half blocking the road. You might be seen. I am not running an inn!”
“And I haven’t asked you for your charity,” the man said, still smiling.
I began to walk past him, and almost stumbled on an apple in the road. Bending down, I picked it up. “I do not doubt you are about to ask me for something!”
“My lady!” He mocked hurt, a hand on his breast. “I am going to offer you something. I have things you will want to hear. Magic things. Things you wouldn’t believe—”
“I have no use for sweet songs today,” I cut him short. “Or any songs. And more to the point: I have no food for you.”
He nodded, unconvinced.
“Moussa, no food. None.” I glanced down at the apple in my fingers and tried to move it out of sight.
The creases around his eyes deepened. “My wagon can fit many, many apples…”
“Benefitting you, it seems, more than me.”
“Which you might be able to take to the market—and sell.”
“In exchange for some price you have not yet named.”
“A price that costs you nothing. A place to park my coach. A bit of cider you’ve already brewed. The market is in a few days,” he sang.
We regarded one another. And I calculated, weighing, weighing: apples and balls and money.
He wiggled his fingers, conjuring unseen riches. “I can fit four times as many bushels as your own carriage.”
“All right,” I finally agreed. “Pull in, up behind the hedge, where they can’t see you from the road.”
Maneuvering Moussa’s towering cart through the gate took a good quarter of an hour.
To make the hard turn up through the arches, he painstakingly marched the horse—inopportunely named Lucky—one step forward and one foot back, again and again, until the load was appropriately oriented.
Then, as if I hadn’t been standing watching the whole time, hands on my hips and a scowl on my face, he dismounted and came over to me. We clasped hands.
“It is good to see you,” he said.
“Poor Lucky.” I shook my head. “Next year she may outright refuse.”
“She has nothing to complain about.”
I raised my eyebrows and looked at the burdened cart. A small tambourine fell from the top and landed on the ground.
“A sign!” Moussa clapped his hands. If the traveling singer was capable of anything, it was reinterpreting events in his favor. “We must drink.”
“And I suppose you’d like me to supply the ale?” I went over to the horse and gave her a pat. “Hello, Lucky.” I offered the apple, which she took in her teeth, her lips tickling my palm.
“She gets to see the whole world. The moorlands and the cliffs and the ocean. She is the—”
“Luckiest horse in the world,” I finished for him. “I’ll add her to the stable with Arno.”
I could hear Rosamund and Mathilde talking as I entered the hall. Rosamund, sitting in a deep-set chair by the window, was using the day’s last light to sew a ribbon to a hat. She held it up to look at her work. “Perhaps I will wear it to market this week.”
Mathilde, reclined on a chaise next to a low-burning candle, turned a page of her book and did not look up. “I would not.”
The room offered evidence of their afternoon’s labor.
Mathilde’s ledger lay open, the ink still drying across one of its pages.
A spinning wheel had been brought out, and a fresh bobbin of thread sat on the table.
A set of clean sheets lay folded on a bench.
And a new pile of firewood had been carefully stacked next to the lit hearth, which filled the room with a weak warmth.
Rosamund frowned. “Well, I did not offer it to you; it is my hat!”
“Allow me to rephrase—you should not. It is an unbecoming hat.”
“You dunderhead! You only wish you could have a new fontange.” Rosie huffed, dropping the hat back into her lap. “And now I shall never make you one!”
Mathilde used a finger to hold her place in her book and leaned forward to address her sister.
“It is I attempting to offer you wisdom. One might presume that you want to wear a new hat to draw attention and impress people and perhaps have an excuse to flirt. None of that can be accomplished in the ugliest, most regrettable hat in the kingdom.”
“Neither of you are going to market this week.” I stepped into the room. “So, you do not need to concern yourself with the hat any longer.”
“Mama!” Rosamund sprang up and rushed to my side. “What happened?”
Mathilde followed and kissed my cheek.
“Hello, darlings.” I kissed them each in turn.
“Tell us everything. Every single detail,” Rosie demanded. “Do not leave out even the tiniest observation. Were the queen’s slippers pigskin or silk? Does she reveal her petticoats or keep them covered?”
“In good time,” I promised. “But first…” I turned to the curtains in front of the window seat, under which I could see the tips of two shoes peeking through. “Elin, would you please join us?”
The window dressings twitched, and, after a moment’s hesitation, were pulled aside. Elin stepped forward, pressing, between her hands, her constant companion.
“You were in there this whole time?” Mathilde scowled.
Elin nodded, eyelashes fluttering like escaped pieces of down. “Far be it from me to disturb such sisterly revelry.”
We all stared at her, and she, only slightly abashed, continued: “And I must thank you both. To listen to the silence between words is a wonderful opportunity to meditate on meaning.”
“Yes.” Mathilde’s frown deepened. “And the space between curtains makes a good place for eavesdropping. What does your little book say about that?”