Chapter Eighteen
We repeated our story breathlessly to Wenthelen and Alice and, I am sure, individually picked it apart and wove it again as we lay in our beds that night, each with our own details to hold and examine.
How the sun caught on a golden carriage.
How a lock of hair shone when twisted around a finger.
How the air itself shifted and melted, reducing the entire world down to the size of one carpet.
During our picnic, as I watched the prince alternate between teasing each of my daughters, I had asked myself what either—or any woman—had to intrigue a man in his position.
Beauty was a given, but even the most splendid trifles can lose their allure when countless trifles are on offer.
My girls had no money, but a prince needed none.
An accomplished woman—one well read and properly trained and polite and virtuous—was appealing in words but perhaps not in flesh.
But I had seen—had felt—a flash of interest in his eyes. The way he had fingered Rosie’s hair.
Perhaps it was only the removal of life at court.
The placement of two women in pretty dresses in an empty field.
It had also occurred to me, as Simeon moved his attention from Rosamund to Mathilde and back again, that it might have been the very contrast, the tension of two, the attention of two, that had worked in their favor.
Either way, my instincts were right. Two days after the picnic, a gift arrived.
All of us were in the hall: In one corner, Rosie pinned Mathilde’s hem.
At the table, Wenthelen tied little bundles of herbs with a ball of twine beside Alice, who was repairing a basket.
Even Elin, who had made herself scarce since we’d had words, was nearby, kneeling at the hearth and using a scoop to fill her ash box.
“The other thing,” Rosie said, apropos of nothing, “is that he handed us into the carriage. He did not have to do so. He might have had one of his footmen do it, but he chose to help us himself.”
“He didn’t gift you his carriage; he just held your hand as you climbed into it.” Mathilde frowned down at the top of Rosie’s head.
“I think he seemed lonely.” Rosie ignored her sister. “A kind of sadness about his eyes. But it detracted from his looks not a little.”
“Maybe it’s that he doesn’t know who to trust,” Mathilde mumbled.
“Yes!” Rosie agreed. “Exactly.”
Mathilde turned so Rosie could get to the next section of the hem. “What with everyone fawning over him everywhere he goes.”
“He knew he could trust us because there was no artifice,” Rosie protested. “He stumbled upon us in a field!”
“No artifice,” snorted Alice, without looking up.
Wenthelen paused her bundling and squeezed Alice’s knee. “Let them enjoy it.”
“The girls had no artifice.” I paused the stitching in my lap and narrowed my eyes at Alice.
She returned the expression, placing one of her hands on top of Wenthelen’s. “You gained a prince but lost a chaise. What now?”
“A trade anyone in their right mind would make.” I stabbed my needle into the cloth in front of me.
“And what will that right-minded lady do next Thursday, when there is no chaise to take to market?”
Over at the hearth, Elin let out a sneeze, sending a cloud of dust into the air. Mathilde stepped backward, into Rosie, to protect her dress. “Watch yourself!” she exclaimed, as Rosie let out a yelp of pain.
“I cannot help it!” Elin cried.
“If you did not make such little scoops,” Wenthelen suggested, “you might finish sooner. Just as I showed you.”
“Wenthelen—” I warned.
Elin released another sneeze and, after a small ash cloud resettled across her skirts, looked down at herself in dismay.
“Bear your head high,” I called. It was satisfying to see her like this, after so many years. To watch her working. “For they’ll wash off fine. Just don’t touch any nice cloth until then.”
“I need to work on my dress,” Elin protested, eyeing the pinned flounces on her stepsisters.
“You’ve had plenty of time for that.” I tutted.
“Simeon said he does not like to hunt. I wonder if he is an animal lover,” Rosie said, now through a mouthful of pins.
No one responded, for we all heard at the same time the noise of a carriage outside.
“Who is that?” Mathilde asked.
“Not another royal messenger,” Wenthelen worried.
Elin stood in alarm. She had her hair tied under a rag and soot on her face.
“Is it—” Rosie stood, hope cresting on her face and lighting her from within.
“No,” I said firmly, tossing my mending into the basket. I went to the window. “It’s our chaise.” Otto was in the driver’s seat, his own horse hitched and pulling him forward.
I turned to Elin as I made toward the door. “Go upstairs to your room—you’ll be mistaken for a chambermaid looking like that.”
“I cannot be seen as such.” Elin stood straight, consoling herself. “Internal charm always translates to external grace.”
“Regardless of internal charm, I advise that you peer into a looking glass,” Mathilde said. “For you are covered in cinders.”
Downstairs, Otto was dismounting.
I insisted: “Elin, for God’s sake, and for your own sake, go upstairs. Before you’re seen.”
I ignored Alice’s and Wenthelen’s looks of admonishment.
“Very well,” Elin said, meekly, adding more soot to her face as she wiped the bridge of her nose with the back of her hand.
Otto was waiting in the gravel, standing next to the chaise. When I came out the door, he frowned down the drive. “You have a peddler camping at your gate.”
“A jongleur,” I corrected, reproaching myself for not thinking ahead and entreating Moussa to move.
The bird in the woods, the broken cart, a peddler’s camp—every circumstance of our interaction seemed designed to lower me in Otto’s esteem.
Not that he mattered. I only cared about those he influenced.
But, for my daughters’ sakes, I would once more try to curry his favor.
“We owe you our thanks for returning the carriage.”
I realized, belatedly, that if the carriage had been driven, then the wheel had also been fixed. “And mending it,” I added.
“Couldn’t have brought it back to you if it wasn’t mended.
” Otto’s expression didn’t change. His presence was a mystery—any attendant could have returned the chaise.
But that question soon answered itself. Without looking at me, he turned and marched back toward our carriage. “Prince Simeon wanted to send a gift.”
“A gift,” I repeated.
Otto reached the back compartment of the gig, which, I now saw, had a cloth-covered rectangle and a horse saddle inside. He shifted the saddle to retrieve the rectangle and pulled off the cloth. It was a painting. Of apples.
“For your daughters,” Otto explained.
“Apples,” I said.
He coughed. “Prince Simeon said it is because they like pictures of them.”
His discomfort provoked within me a deep sense of satisfaction. As did the fact of the gift—regardless of what the canvas portrayed. “They will be honored.”
Otto thrust the painting, which was surprisingly heavy, into my arms and began to unhitch his horse from the chaise. “I need to return before it grows dark.”
I stood aside, uncertain what to do with myself or the unwieldy artwork. “Prince Simeon was quite thoughtful to send a gift when it is he that saved us. I do not know what got into Arno. Our horse.”
Otto nodded. “Simeon possesses an undeniable skill for charm.”
“Skill implies practiced effort,” I mused. “I would say his charm is more constitutional.”
Otto only tilted his head in response and then went to the back of the chaise to retrieve his saddle. He concentrated on putting it on the horse, while I, arms growing weak from holding the heavy painting, attempted to sustain our foundering discourse.
“You know your way around this area well,” I observed.
“Yes,” he agreed.
I waited half a minute. Then: “Have you been in the kingdom a long time?”
“Yes.”
“You are not from here.”
“No.”
It was clear he did not wish to have a conversation. After many long moments—him fastening the girth and adjusting the stirrups— I exclaimed: “You have a penchant for silence.”
Otto straightened, ran a hand through his hair, and fixed me with his dark eyes. “You, it is clear, do not.”
I glanced at him, sharply. His hand dropped to rub his mouth. Half shutting his eyes, he said: “I apologize. That was impolite. I am preoccupied today.”
“I thank you for the painting,” I told him, voice tight. “And I’ll trust you to see yourself down the drive.”
I was finally willing to concede: I would not win over Otto Abensur.
Rosie and Mathilde came to my chambers that night. They climbed up into the bed beside me and settled, one at each of my sides.
“Mama,” Rosie whispered. “We finally finished our dresses.”
“With almost no time to spare.” Mathilde sank back into the pillows next to me.
The ball was the day after the next. I held a hand in the air, the candle causing a flickering, oversized shadow on the canopy above us. “You have done the impossible. A gown in a week, and all the other work as well. Not to mention, charming an actual prince.”
“He is just polite, not charmed,” Rosie said. She waited hopefully, and both Mathilde and I laughed and contradicted her.
“I saw his eyes lingering on you,” Mathilde cried. “Polite eyes do not linger.”
“Who would not be charmed by your sweet, happy disposition?” I asked. “And any argument should be put to rest with one glance at that painting.”
Rosie pawed at the blankets. “What could he mean by it?”
“That he is thinking of you. That he wanted to do something for you,” I ticked off the list. “That he is a prince and can send grand gifts on a whim.”
She nuzzled into my shoulder. “Do you think he might ever love me?”
I considered. “Your father and I were an unlikely match. He wasn’t a prince.
Or anything close to it.” I laughed to myself.
“But it wasn’t expected.” I took each of their hands and laid them in a little stack upon my lap and pretended to climb them with my fingers.
“You must learn the rules and then climb them like a ladder.”
“We have a surprise for you!” Rosamund cried, pushing herself up off the mattress.
“Go on,” Mathilde told her, and then we both watched as Rosie rushed from the room and returned a minute later, her arms full of layers of taffeta.
“You are going to a royal ball, too. And you need something to wear, even if you won’t have feathers in your hair.” She spread the dress out across the bed, on top of me.
“Rosamund did most of it; she is so quick.” Mathilde watched my face.
“But Mathilde did all the seams along the hem, and the petticoat.”
“Yes, and,” Mathilde continued, taking a hesitant breath, “we know you pawned your cameo.”
I wiped my cheek with the back of my hand, careful not to wet the material in front of me.
“I was going into your jewelry because I wanted to match your wrap to the color of the shell,” Rosamund explained.
Mathilde continued: “We feel you should take the frame off the prince’s painting and you can use that to get your necklace back.”
I could not think of the words to express exactly what I felt, so I gathered each of them in my arms and kissed their shining, twin braids. One after the other.