CNN was now running through a quick inventory of all that humanity’s new friends had given the Earth so far. Once the Ambassador had used the living fabric of its body to form and trigger an interstellar Gate, new technologies had poured through in a seemingly endless stream: Defensive weapons that really were defensive, for they couldn’t be used offensively…an end to disease…medicines to expand the human lifespan a hundred years or more…safe and plentiful energy…the transmutation of elements…gold from lead…lilacs from mud…silk purses from sows’ ears…a partridge in a pear tree…blah, blah, blah.
They were like children on Christmas morning, with bright wrappings strewn about and nothing but presents as far as the eye could see. To listen to them go on, it seemed that the entire human race was going straight to Heaven. Everybody was going to be healthy and beautiful and tall. They were all going to be transformed into gods.
Except Jennifer. She didn’t get to be immortal and go to the stars. She got to lie at the bottom of a grave in Brattleboro, rotting in the cold unforgiving ground, while worms ate her.
Alma Kingsley sat staring at the screen and listening as voices far older than any god spoke within her. Their words were dark and poisonous. They ate at her heart like acid.
She got up and fixed herself another Manhattan. Bitterly, she drank it down, wishing—as she would wish every day for the remaining two hundred years of her life—that she’d killed the damn thing when she had the chance.
FAIRY TALE
It wasn’t a village, as is sometimes said these days, when we’ve forgotten just how small the old world was. In those days, long ago in a world now vanished with barely a trace left behind, a village was four or five houses and their outbuildings. A large village was maybe ten or fifteen houses at a crossroad, and perhaps an inn or gasthaus.
No, it was a town, even a moderately large one, on the banks of a sluggish brown river, the capital of a small province in a small country, lost and nearly forgotten—even then—in the immensity of the Central European steppes that stretch endlessly from the Barents Sea to the Black, and from the Urals to France. The nearest electric light was in Prague, hundreds of miles away. Even gaslighting was newfangled and marvelous here, although there were a few rich homes on the High Street that had it. Only the King and the Mayor and a few of the most prosperous merchants had indoor toilets.
The Romans had been here once, and as you followed the only road across the empty steppe toward town, you would pass the broken white marble pillars they had left behind them, as well as a vine-overgrown fane where, in another story, you might have ventured forth at night to view for yourself the strange lights that local legends say haunt the spot, and perhaps, your heart in your throat, glimpsed the misty shapes of ancient pagan gods as they flitted among the ruined columns…but this isn’t that kind of story.
Further in, the road would cut across wide fields of wheat being worked by stooped-over peasants, bent double with their butts in the air, moving forward a step at a time with a sort of swaying, shuffling motion as they weeded, sweeping their arms back and forth over the ground like searching trunks, making them look like some strange herd of small double-trunked elephants, or those men who wear their heads below their navels. The bushes are decorated with crucified rabbits, tarry black blood matting their fur, teeth bared in death agony, a warning to their still-living brethren to stay away from the crops.
As the road fell down out of the fields and turned into the High Street of the town, you would see old peasant women, dressed all in black from head to foot, spilling buckets of water over the stone steps of the tall narrow houses on either side of the narrow street, and then scrubbing the steps with stiff-bristled brooms. Occasionally, as you passed, one or another of the old peasant women would straighten up and stare unwinkingly at you with opaque agate eyes, like a black and ancient bird.
At the foot of the High Street, you would see a castle looming above the river, small by the standards of more prosperous countries elsewhere in Europe, but large enough to have dominated the tactical landscape in the days before gunpowder and cannon made all such places obsolete. It’s a grim enough pile, and, in another story, cruel vampire lords would live there—but this isn’t that kind of story either. Instead of vampires, the King lived there, or lived there for a few months each year, anyway, as he graciously moved his court from province to province, spreading the considerable financial burden of supporting it around.
He was what was called “a good King,” which meant that he didn’t oppress the peasants any more than he was traditionally allowed to, and occasionally even distributed some small largess to them when he was able, on the ancient principle—sound husbandry—that you get more work out of your animals when they’re moderately well-fed and therefore reasonably healthy. So he was a good King, or a good-enough King, at any rate. But in many a dimly-lit kitchen or bistro or backroom bar, the old men of the town huddled around their potbellied stoves at night and warmed their hands, or tried to, and muttered fearfully about what might happen when the Old King died, and his son and heir took over.
But as this isn’t really a story of palace intrigue, either, or only partially so, you must move on to a large but somewhat shabby-genteel house on the very outskirts of town, the kind of neighborhood that will be swallowed by the expanding town and replaced by rows of worker’s flats in thirty years or so. That girl there, sullenly and rather uselessly scrubbing down the flagstones in the small courtyard, is the one we’re interested in.
For the kind of story this is, is a fairy-tale. Sort of.
There are some things they don’t tell you, of course, even in the Grimm’s version, let alone the Disney.
For one thing, no one ever called her “Cinderella,” although occasionally they called her much worse. Her name was Eleanor, an easy-enough name to use, and no one ever really paid enough attention to her to bother to come up with a nickname for her, even a cruel and taunting one. Most of the time, no one paid enough attention to even taunt her.
There was a step-mother, although whether she was evil or not depended on your point of view. These were hard times in a hard age, when even the relatively well-to-do lived not far from hunger and privation, and if she chose to take care of her own children first in preference to her dead husband’s child, well, there were many who would not blame her for that. In fact, many would instead compliment her on her generosity in giving her husband’s by-blow a place in her home and at her hearth when no law of Man or God required her to do so, or to lift a finger to insure the child’s survival. Many did so compliment her, and the step-mother would lift her eyes piously to Heaven, and throw her hands in the air, and mutter modest demerrals.
For one of the things that they never tell you, a missing piece that helps make sense of the whole situation, is that Cinderella was a bastard. Yes, her father had doted on her, lavishing love and affection on her, had taken her into his house and raised her from a babe, but he had never married Eleanor’s mother, who had died in childbirth, and he himself had died after marrying the Evil Step-Mother but before making a will that would have legally enforced some kind of legacy or endowment for his bastard daughter.
Today, of course, she would sue, and there’d be court-battles and DNA-testing, and appearances with lots of shouting on daytime talk-shows, and probably she would eventually win a slice of the pie. In those days, in that part of the world, she had no recourse under the law—or anywhere else, since the Church shunned those born in sin.
So the step-mother really was being quite generous in continuing to supply Eleanor’s room and board rather than throwing her out of the house to freeze and starve in the street. That she didn’t as well provide much in the way of warmth of familial affection, being icy and remote to Eleanor—the visible and undeniable evidence of her late husband’s love for another woman—on those rare occasions when she deigned to notice her at all, is probably not surprising, and to really expect her to feel otherwise is perhaps more than could be as
ked. She had problems of her own, after all, and had already gone a long mile further than she needed to just by continuing to feed the child in the first place.
There were step-sisters too, children of a previous marriage (a marriage where the husband had also died young…but before you’re tempted to cast the step-mother in a Black Widow scenario, keep in mind that in those days, in that place, dying young was not an especially rare phenomenon), but they were not particularly evil either—although they didn’t much like Eleanor, and let it show. However, they were no more cruel and vindictive—but no less, either—than most young girls forced into the company of someone they didn’t much like, someone of fallen status whom their mother didn’t much like either and made no particular effort to protect. Someone who, truth be told, had probably lorded it over them, just a little bit, when she was her father’s favorite and they were the new girls in the household.
Neither were the step-sisters particularly ugly; this is something that came in with Disney, who always equates ugliness with evil. They were, in fact, quite acceptably attractive by the standards of their day.
Although it is true that when Eleanor was around, they tended to dim in her presence, in male eyes at least, as bright bulbs can be dimmed by a brighter one.
Eleanor was beautiful, of course. We have to give her that much if the rest of the story is going to make any sense. Like her step-sisters, she had been brought up as a child of the relatively prosperous merchant class, which ensured that she had been well-enough nourished as a babe to have grown up with good teeth and glossy hair and strong, straight bones—unlike the peasants, who were often afflicted with rickets and other vitamin-deficiency diseases.
No doubt she had breasts and legs, like other young women, but whether her breasts were large or small, whether her legs were long or squat, is impossible to tell at this distant point in time.
We can tell from the story, though, that she was considered to be striking, and perhaps a bit unusual; so, since no-one knows what she really looked like, let’s cater to the tastes of our own time and say that she was tall and coltish, with long lovely legs and small—but not too small—breasts, a contrast to many around her upon whom a diet consisting largely of potatoes and coarse black bread had imposed a dumpier sort of physique.
Since this tale is set in that part of Central Europe that had changed hands dozens of times in the past few hundred years and was destined to change hands again a few times more before the century was out, with every wave of raping-and-pillaging Romans, Celts, Goths, Huns, Russians, Mongols, and Turks scrambling the gene-pool a bit further, let’s also say that she had red hair and green eyes and a pale complexion, a rare but possible combination, given the presence of Russian and Celtic DNA in the genetic stew. That should make her sufficiently distinctive. (It’s possible, of course, that she really looked like a female Russian weight-lifter, complete with faint mustache, or like a walking potato, and you’re welcome to picture her that way instead if you’d like—but if so, you must grant at least that she was a striking and charismatic weight-lifter or potato, one who had had men sniffing around her from the time she started to grow hair in places other than her head.)
In truth, like most “beautiful” women, who often are not really even pretty if you can catch them on those rare occasions when their faces are in repose, her allure was based in large part on her charisma and elan, and a personality that remained vital and intense in spite of a life that increasingly tried to grind her down.
Eleanor didn’t wait on the others to the degree shown in the Disney version, of course—this was a hard society, and everyone had to work, including the step-mother and the two step-sisters. Much of the cost of maintaining the house (which was not a working farm, regardless of what the stories tell you, too close to the center of town, although they may have kept a few chickens) was defrayed by revenues from land that Eleanor’s father had owned elsewhere, but those revenues had slowly declined since the father’s death, and in order to keep a tenuous foot-hold on the middle-class, they had been forced to take in seamstress work, which occupied all of them for several hours a day.
It’s true, though, that since her father died, two years before, and since revenues had declined enough to preclude keeping servants, that much of the rest of the work of maintaining the household had fallen on Eleanor’s shoulders, in addition to her seamstress chores.
She found it bitterly hard, as would you; in fact, spoiled by modernity, we’d find it even more onerous than she did, and suffer even more keenly. Housework was hard physical labor in those days, especially in the backward hinterlands of Central Europe, where even the (from our perspective) minimal household conveniences that might be available to a rich family in London would not arrive for a long lifetime, or maybe two. Housework was brutal and unrelenting labor, stretching from dawn until well after dusk, the equivalent in its demands on someone’s reserves of strength and endurance of working on a road-gang or in a coal mine; it was the main reason, along with the rigors and hazards of childbirth, why women wore out so fast and died so young. Not for nothing did the phrase “Slaving over a hot stove” come into existence; doing laundry was even worse, a task so grueling—pounding the clothes, twisting them dry, starting over again—that it was rarely tackled more than once a week even in households where there were several women to divide the work up amongst them; and scrubbing, inside or out, was done on your knees in any and all weathers, with a stiff-bristled brush and raw potash soap that stung your nostrils and blistered your hands.
Of course, every other woman in this society, except for the very richest, had to deal with these kind of labors as well, so there was nothing unique about Eleanor’s lot, or any reason to feel sorry for her in particular, as the stories sometimes seem to invite us to do…the subtext pretty obviously being that she is an aristocrat-in-hiding, or at least a member of the prosperous upper class, being forced to do the work of a peasant. Think of that! Being made to work just like a common, ordinary girl! As if she wasn’t any better than anyone else! (Oddly enough, this reaction of indignation usually comes from people who have to work for a living every day themselves, not from whatever millionaires or members of the peerage might be lurking in the audience.)
In fact, though, Eleanor had also been spoiled, not by modernity but by her father, sheltered by his money from most of the chores even a child of the merchant class would usually have had to become inured to…so perhaps she did feel it more keenly than most women of her day would have. Her father had also spoiled her in other, more significant ways, teaching her to read (something still frowned upon, if no longer actively forbidden by law), teaching her to love books and learning, teaching her to dream. Teaching her to be ambitious—but ambitious for what purpose? She had a good mind, and her father had given her the beginnings of a decent education, but what was she supposed to do with it? Further formal schooling was out of the question, even if there had been money for it—that was for men. All the professions were for men as well. There was nothing she could do, no way her life could change. She was doomed to stay here in this once-loved house she had come to hate, working like a slave day and night for people she didn’t even like, much less consider to be family, until her youth and strength and beauty drained away like water spilled in the street, and she woke up one day to find herself spavined and old.
She could feel this doom closing in around her like a black cloud, making every day a little more hopeless and bitter and grim. She could feel herself dying, a little bit every day, her mind dulling, her strength and resiliency waning.
Somehow, she had to get out of here.
But there was no way out…
After several months of this bleak circle, she decided at last that there was only one possible way to escape: she would trade sex for a better life—or at least a more comfortable one.
It was a choice that untold thousands of young women—and not a few men—had made before her, and that thousands more would make after her. She�
�d looked her situation over with cold-eyed clarity, and realized that she had no commodity to offer that anyone would ever value except for youth, beauty, and virginity—and that none of them were going to last long. A few more years of constant grinding toil would take care of the youth and beauty, and sooner or later one of the men who had been circling her with increasing persistence would corner her in the stables or behind a market stall or in an alley somewhere and rape her, and that would be the end of her virginity (a valuable commodity ever since syphilis had started to ravage Europe a few centuries back) as well. If he got her pregnant, she’d be stuck here forever.
Young as she was, she was not unaware of the trick that her body could be made to do when she huddled alone in the darkness on her cot at night, biting a dish-cloth to keep anyone from hearing the sounds that she couldn’t stop herself from making, and she was not so hard-headed as to be immune to thoughts of love and romance and marriage. In fact, she’d exchanged hot glances, longing words, and one quick delicious kiss with Casimir, a big, lumbering, sweet-natured boy who worked in the glass foundry a street away. She was pretty sure that she could win his heart, perhaps even get him to marry her—but what good would that do? Even if they could somehow scrape up enough money to live on, she’d still be stuck in this stifling provincial town, living much the same kind of life she was living now. And then the children would start coming, one a year until she wore out and died…
No, love and marriage were not going to save her. Sex was going to have to do that. She’d have to trade her body to someone rich enough to take her out of this life, perhaps even, if things worked out for the best, out of this town altogether.
Morning Child and Other Stories Page 20