Chapter Fourteen
After I regaled everyone with the story of my day—the many stiff-backed guards, the queen’s mountain of whipped cream—I took supper in the kitchen, hunched over a wooden bowl of soup, eyeing our cook as she moved around me.
“You must not help Elin with the ashes,” I instructed Wenthelen, pausing to blow on a spoon of hot broth.
“What’s the difference if you get your pennies?” Wenthelen scoffed. She stopped her bustling and settled into a wooden chair by the hearth, crossing her tired feet in front of her.
“Fairness.”
She removed one of her boots and scratched her heel on the floor. “Nothing about this life is fair.”
“You don’t help the other girls.”
“They don’t need my help.”
“Elin won’t learn how to be on her own.”
“Mayhap she won’t need to!”
“I think that is the same gamble she’s been willing to make.” I finished the last of my stew and pushed the bowl away. “But listen to me—I forbid you from helping her anymore. It’s a deal she and I made, and she must do her part.”
“Forbid me?” Wenthelen crowed, tilting back in her chair with some delight.
“Yes.” I nodded. “You are henceforth proscribed. Now, fetch me an extra bowl. I’ll bring some supper to our guest.”
I found Moussa in his camp, crouching by the light of a small fire. I handed him the stew and a small pitcher of cider and sat down on a roll of carpet he had laid on the ground.
“One for me,” I commanded. I waited, watching him pour the cider into two wooden cups.
“I pour, you choose,” he suggested, squinting as he ensured the drinks were even.
“Oh, come along. We have plenty more cider.”
“That you keep under lock and key. You should be selling this cider.” He held his cup aloft. “I think about it every time I have pond-water ale.”
I crossed my arms. “A lady doesn’t sell things.”
“A lady doesn’t sit with a minstrel on a roll of carpet.”
“Hush, you old graybeard.” Moussa had come through seasonally since that first year, and we had learned to barter what we could—a dry place to sleep for dance lessons, a warm meal for a night of song.
But his circling of the territory had begun to slow down.
“It is not just your carriage that creaks when it moves.”
He grinned and then laughed.
“I’m quite serious, Moussa! You are getting older.”
“So are you.”
“I am not forty years. You are—”
“Young at heart.”
“And gray at the chin and crown.”
“And when you are gray, you will see it is nothing but a color.”
“When I am gray, I will accept that my years of labor must come to an end.”
He took a drink from his cider, unbothered by the thoughts I was voicing out loud. “May you be so lucky.”
“Well, the alternative is the house collapses upon my head. Hopefully the girls will be long gone by then.” I stuck my feet closer to the warmth of the fire. “Now, tell me of your travels.”
He looked at me over the rim of his cup and then lowered it.
“I played last week at a home that was to have a grand feast. All day they prepared. They were to serve mutton and pork and veal and teal and snipe and curlew. There were marzipan confections in the shapes of wild animals. They had, they said, slaughtered an ox, just for the occasion.”
I interrupted. “Are you saying you are above the stew?”
He held up his hands to quiet me. “But my patroness, the wife of a rich gentleman, grew increasingly distraught as the day wore on, embarrassed by her daughter’s behavior.
You see, her daughter had picked up my bandora and was practicing playing upon it.
Her mother thought it beggarly and kept insisting she play something more appropriate, like the virginals.
I did not mind. She was quite adept. But it’s been on my mind ever since.
An accomplished young woman is meant to learn some instruments behind closed doors, yet is scorned for playing others.
I, unaccomplished, by most estimations, am paid for playing any of them. Not well, I might add.”
“Are you pointing out an inequity or complaining about having to share an instrument?”
“I am just telling you a story. And I am not done. My patroness grew so frustrated that she canceled the feast. The ox was already dead. The food was prepared.” He shook his head.
“So much food—the jellies alone—went to waste. I could have taken some with me. And there was no feast, and so no need of music. I did not get paid.”
I shook my head at his story, less inclined to feel sorry for Moussa than for myself; I could not hear stories of other people’s splendor without noting the lack of my own. “Well, you are not the only one who has encountered wasted opulence.”
“Oh?” Moussa raised an eyebrow.
I told him how I had gone to see the queen, and his eyes grew round, and the pupils dilated, for there was nothing Moussa liked better than the tales of those better off.
“Tell me,” he demanded. “Were there any musicians?”
I thought of the castle. Of all those empty and beautiful rooms. “Not that I saw or heard—I was too busy trying to memorize the details. The tassels on the curtains looked like they were woven from gold.”
“Ah.” He waved me away. “The royals have smelly jakes just like the rest of us.”
“The palace has quills that bring water, right into its walls.”
“Yes, and if an eel swims up into those pipes, they, too, have to wait until the fish decomposes for the supply to resume.” Moussa winked at me. “I would have been good at being rich.” He paused. “But I’ve settled for being good-looking.” He twirled his little beard and smirked to himself.
I sighed. “There is always someone richer.”
“And now you are rich with company. Mine.” Moussa put an elbow on his knee and held his face in the cradle of his small hand. “At the ball—you are going to introduce all three daughters at once?”
“What do you know of introducing young women?”
“I play music in their halls! I see and hear every little thing. Lace sleeves, you must have them. Pompons all the rage. Are the little women ready for it all?”
“Ready enough. Except…”
He pursed his lips, the smile only in his eyes, as he waited for me to finish.
“You know the latest dances, do you not?”
“Give me another cup of that cider.” He winked. “And you shall find out.” He rubbed his hands together. “I can picture it. One of these young ladies in the castle. Mathilde’s neck is stiff enough for a crown.”
“I suppose,” I said. With cider in my belly, thinking of all those rooms—their gold leaf and sparkling crystals, the statues, frozen in time—had unhinged something inside of me, an unruly, wild kind of desire. But here I was sitting on a carpet roll.
“You wouldn’t want that for them?”
“I would,” I admitted. I stared off toward the house, which was dark against the dark sky.
I felt myself grasping. If I had golden tassels, I would have had to sell them long ago.
What would happen to my girls? What could I do for them?
I had not felt this kind of longing in a long while.
My desires—insatiable, and yet, they had to be satiated, for I could not accept failure—were a prism that, in refracting and repeating my hunger back to me, only served to amplify my appetite.
I wondered: Was it possible?
“It is possible,” Moussa reasoned, as if he could hear my thoughts, and I glanced up. “The prince, after all, is having a ball for a reason—to select a potential wife!”
“Your company is corruptive.” I frowned at him.
But what was to stop me from at least examining the possibility of the prince considering one of my girls?
What was to mark them in any lower esteem than every other woman who would be at the ball?
I did not meditate on the delta between my own crumbling walls and the many-windowed halls of the castle.
I did not believe this line of thought was a kind of moral failure.
It was not opulence I wanted for Rosie and Mathilde; it was permanence.
Maybe this desire was a kind of strength.
Maybe, more than just hoping and wishing for something to come true, you could create change by your own volition.
For what use is a named desire if there is not also a decision to pursue it?
What is there to do in the face of humiliation except to climb to stand and face it all head-on once more?
“So,” Moussa interrupted my thoughts. “What do you think? Shall you endeavor to aim high?”
“As in a prince?” I looked back at the house again, where everyone was already in their beds.
Opportunities came and they were small and unlikely and easy to overlook.
You had to stick your fingers into them and pinch the edges and pull.
You had to widen the aperture of possibility.
“Yes,” I agreed, finishing my own cider, and turning to face Moussa. “Yes.”
“Good.” He nodded, pleased. “We’ll have our first dance lesson tomorrow.”
“Very well. But Moussa,” I said, standing to go back to the house. “What happened to the girl? The one from the feast?”
Moussa twisted his beard, lost in thought. “I don’t know. But I left her my bandora.”