Beauty, Beast, and Belladonna
Page 29
Prue wrinkled her nose. “Will I have to milk the cows?”
“Certainly not.”
“Snatch it, you’re just being nice. You’re always being too nice. Just because Mr. DeLuxe sent me packing don’t mean you should’ve quit.”
Ophelia said nothing as she yanked off the boots. But she knew exactly what became of pretty, silly, penniless girls who didn’t have a protector, and the idea of Prue alone on the streets of London didn’t bear thinking about.
“You could’ve been a lead actress someday, Ophelia. And now you’re just a maid.”
“Fiddlesticks. Acting has merely been a way to pay for my daily bread.”
“When you filled in as Cleopatra when Flossie broke her arm, you got a standing ovation and enough roses to fill three bathtubs. You were a stunner.”
“In a wig and greasepaint,” Ophelia said. “Gospel truth, it doesn’t concern me in the least that without Cleopatra kohl-lined eyes or Marie Antoinette rouged cheeks, I blend nicely into the backdrop. I’m five and twenty years of age, plenty old enough to have made peace with myself. I’m not saying I’m some mousy thing who gets stepped on—”
“Course not. You’re a beanstalk.”
“Not as tall as that, perhaps.” In truth, Ophelia was tall, and she had large feet, and no corset could mold her straight figure into a fashion plate’s hourglass. But her oval face, molasses-colored eyes, and light brown hair were presentable enough. “Anyway, since I’m an actress, a knack for blending in is an asset.” She wiggled her blissfully freed toes. “Now. If we’re ever to get back home in one piece, we ought to prepare ourselves for our new roles as maids.”
* * *
“Where in tarnation are they taking us?” Prue said three days later. She scrubbed at the grimy coach window with her fist. Their coach creaked and jostled up the mountainous road like a rheumatic mule. “Everything was all right until we got off at that bad railway station—”
“Baden-Baden,” Ophelia corrected from the opposite seat. “Baden means baths—it’s a thermal resort town.”
“That in your book?” Ophelia had had her nose stuck in some book she’d borrowed from Miss Amaryllis for the whole of their railway and boat journey between Southampton and Germany. It was called a Baedeker, Ophelia had told Prue. Whatever that meant. Prue hadn’t bothered to thumb through it. She considered herself a doing kind of person. Book learning gave her the jitters.
Besides, Ma had always cautioned that reading gave a lady a scrunched-up forehead and a panoramic derriere.
Baden-Baden, a German town nestled in plush hills, was called the Paris of the summer months. Leastways, that’s what the Baedeker said. All the cream of Europe’s crop, from Polish princes and British nobles to Italian opera stars and Russian novelists, gathered there to socialize, dance, take the waters, and gamble at the races or in the opulent gaming rooms.
But their coach had left Baden-Baden miles behind, and they were headed up into the mountains.
“I reckoned,” Prue said, “when we took that boat to Brussels, we were headed to civilization. But this!” She scowled out the window. Mountains reared up into the chambray-colored sky. “This looks worse than Maine.”
“We’re in the Black Forest, Prue. Haven’t you heard of it?”
“Never.”
“Your mother didn’t read you those fairy stories by the Grimm Brothers?”
“Read me stories?” Prue bit into one of the strawberry jelly sweets she’d spent her last penny on, back at the railway station. “Not her. But I sure know how to tell real diamonds from paste, and if a gentleman’s got a walloping bank account or is just trying to dupe a lady.” She chewed hard. The topic of Ma made her feel sore somewhere under her ribs. “Looks like the first-class carriage is getting away from us.”
“We are servants now,” Ophelia said. Her voice was gentle. “We can’t expect to ride with the family.”
“Can’t expect a decent coach, neither.”
“I allow, this coach isn’t the most comfortable—”
“It’s a rickety old rattletrap.” Prue eyed the black wood fittings around the window: carved thorny vines. “Or maybe a hearse.”
“We are fortunate to have found employment.”
“Well, don’t that beat all!” Prue exclaimed. “Look at that castle.”
“Where?”
“Up there.”
Ophelia followed Prue’s pointed finger. “That,” she murmured, “beats all indeed.”
High on a jutting stone outcrop, framed by pine trees, was a castle. It was built of pale stone, with turrets of various sizes, battlements, walls, parapets, and balconies. It glowed like an enchanted wedding cake in the afternoon sun, and hazy mountains stretched endlessly behind it like a painted theater backdrop.
“Ain’t got those in Maine.” Prue popped another strawberry jelly in her mouth.
“I think,” Ophelia said, “that’s where we’re going to live.”
A finalist for the 2004 Romance Writers of America Golden Heart Award, Maia Chance is the national bestselling author of the Fairy Tale Fatal mysteries, including Cinderella Six Feet Under and Snow White Red-Handed, as well as the Discreet Retrieval Agency Mysteries. A Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington, she is writing her dissertation on ninenteenth-century American Literature. Visit maiachance.com.
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