Eleanor’s religious upbringing had not perhaps been of the strictest, her father tending towards clandestine secularism, but of course some qualms about the idea of selling herself in this fashion remained. Still, she had heard the women talking at the well or in the marketplace or even in the church when no man was around to hear, and it didn’t sound all that difficult. Lay on your back, open your legs, let him grunt on top of you for five minutes while you stared at the ceiling. A lot less difficult than scrubbing the floor until your fingers bleed.
But if she was going to sell herself, she was damned if she wasn’t going to get the best price possible.
Eleanor prided herself on her clear-eyed logic and hard-headed rationality, but here’s where her plan began to be tinged by a deep vein of pastel romanticism that she wouldn’t even have admitted to herself that she possessed.
She had no intention of becoming a common whore, if whore she must be. Even a town of this size had a few such, and the life they lead was nothing to envy or emulate. No, she would set her sights higher.
Why not set them as high as they would go?
The Prince. She had seen him go by in a parade once, the year before, up on a prancing roan stallion, tall and handsome, his plumed hat nodding, the silver fastenings on his uniform gleaming in the sun. She’d even had hot dreams about him, those nights when his ghost rather than Casimir’s had visited her in her bed.
She was realistic enough to know that marriage was out of the question. Princes didn’t marry commoners, even those from families with a lot more money than her own. That was so ingrained in her worldview that she never entertained the possibility that the Prince would marry her, even as the remotest fantasy.
Princes did fuck commoners, though, that happened all the time, and always had. And if they liked them well enough, sometimes they kept them. Being a royal mistress didn’t sound so bad; since she had no choice, she’d settle for that.
All she had to do was get him to want her.
Why not? He was a man, wasn’t he? Every other man she knew pursued her and tried to grope her or worse when there was nobody else around, even men three times her age. Maybe a Prince would be no different.
And if for some reason the Prince didn’t like her, she thought, with a flash of the practical shrewdness that was so typical of her, the palace would be full of other rich men. Somebody would want her.
There was a Ball at the palace every weekend when the King and his court were in residency during the summer months. Her family was not rich enough for any of them to be invited to these affairs, nor ever had been, even at their most prosperous. But she would get in somehow.
Well, we all know what comes next, of course. The dress made in secret, although there were no birds or mice to help her. Nor did she need any—she was, after all, a seamstress. There were no Fairy Godmothers either, no pumpkins turned to coaches, no magically conjured horses. She slipped out of the house while her step-mother, a woman who had been embittered and disappointed by life, was slowly drinking herself sodden with her nightly regimen of alternating glasses of tisane and brandy, and walked all the way through town to the river, the night air like velvet around her, the blood pounding in her throat, the castle slowly rising higher and higher above the houses, blazing with lights, as she drew near.
Somehow, she got inside. Who knows how? Maybe the guards were reluctant to stop a beautiful and well-dressed young woman who moved with easy confidence. Maybe she walked in with a group of other party-goers. Maybe the guards were all drunk, and she just walked by them. Maybe there were no guards, in this sleepy backwater in a time without a major war brewing. Maybe there were guards, but they just didn’t care.
However she did it, she got in, and it was everything she’d ever dreamed of.
It was glamorous. Give them their due, the aristocracy has always known how to do glamorous.
Although the grim Gothic tower with its battlements and crenellations and murder-holes still loomed darkly up behind, this part of the castle had been modernized and made into a palace instead. In the Grand Ballroom, there were floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the whole sweep of the town, which was stretched out below like a diorama on a tabletop, there were balconies and tapestried alcoves with richly embroidered Oriental hangings, there were flowers everywhere, and a polished marble floor that seemed to stretch on forever, shimmering in the light of a thousand candles like a lake of mist lit by moonlight. Out on the marble floor, people in vivid, multi-colored clothes twirled around like butterflies caught in a whirlwind, while music filled all the air, thick and rich and hot as blood, and made the nerves jump under the skin.
It was glamorous, as long as you didn’t get too close to the privies (it was a warm summer night, after all). This would bother you, though, more than it bothered Eleanor, who was already used to an everyday level of stink that would have turned the stomachs of most moderns.
Cranking her charm to its highest setting, palms damp, she swallowed her fear and mingled.
She didn’t really fool anyone, of course. She was a good seamstress, but the materials she’d had to work with were nowhere near fine enough for court fashion. But it didn’t matter much. She was beautiful, and charming, and vivacious, and still had enough of the remnants of society manners learned before her family fell on harder times to get by—although she wasn’t fooling anybody there, either. No matter. She was an exotic amusement, someone new in over-familiar court circles where everyone had worked through all possible permutations of their relationships with everyone else long before. They’d have tired of her within days, of course, but by then she might well have found some rich young gentleman willing to take her on as a toy, and perhaps even keep her for awhile…so her plan might actually have worked, if she’d been willing to settle for someone less exalted.
But then the Prince crossed the floor, and stood at the edge of the ring of preening young men who now surrounded her, and their eyes met, and his first grew round with surprise, and then slowly grew hot.
He strode forward, the crowd of lesser men melting away before him, and held out his hand, imperiously commanding her to dance, all the while his eyes smoldered at her. She’d never seen anyone so handsome.
Eleanor took his hand and they spun away, and for a second, gliding across the softly gleaming marble floor, moving with him with the music all around them, it seemed like the perfect culmination of every fairy-tale she’d ever read.
Then he yanked her roughly aside into one of the curtained alcoves, tugging the hangings shut behind them. There was a divan in there, and an oil-lamp, and a small table with a nearly empty bottle of brandy on it. The air was thick and foul, with a strong reek of pungent animal musk to it, like the den of a panther or a bear, and the divan was rumpled and stained.
Startled, she started to speak, but the Prince waved her brusquely to silence. For a long moment, the Prince stared at her, coldly, sneeringly, contemptuously, almost as if he hated her. His heavy, handsome face was harsh and cruel, cold as winter ice in spite of the heat that burned in his small hard eyes. He was viciously drunk, his face flushed, swaying where he stood, and he reeked of brandy and sweat and old semen, a streak of which still glistened on his pants from some previous encounter earlier in the evening. He made a wet, gloating noise, like a greedy child smacking its lips, and swept Eleanor crushingly into his arms.
All at once, he was kissing her brutally, biting her lips, forcing his tongue into her mouth, his breath like death, the taste of him sour and rancid and bitter. He grabbed her breasts, squeezing them savagely with his powerful hands, mashing and twisting them, so that sudden blinding pain shot through her.
Then he was forcing her down onto the divan, bearing her down under his crushing weight, tearing at her clothes, forcing a knee roughly between her legs, prying them open.
If she’d been as hard-headed and practical as she thought she was, she would have laid back and let him force himself on her, endured his grunting and thrusting and bat
tering either in silence or with as much of a simulation of passionate enjoyment as she could muster, let him contemptuously wipe his dick on her afterward and then tell him how witty that was. But as he bore her down, smothering her under his weight and stench, bruising her flesh with his vise-like fingers, all her buried romanticism came rushing to the surface—it wasn’t supposed to be like this!—and as she heard her dress and undergarments rip under his tearing hands and felt the night air on her suddenly exposed breasts, she fought herself free with a sudden burst of panicked strength, and clawed the Prince’s face.
They both leaped to their feet. The Prince stared at her in astonishment for a moment, three deep claw marks on his cheek dripping vivid red blood, and then came for her again, murder rather than sex on his mind this time.
Eleanor had been attacked before—once by a stablehand and once by a greengrocer in a lane behind the market at dusk—and she knew what to do.
She kicked the Prince hard in the crotch, putting her weight and the strength of her powerful young legs into it, and the Prince mewed and folded and fell, wrapping himself into a tight ball on the floor, for the instant too shocked by pain even to scream.
Eleanor’s practicality returned with a rush. She was moments away from being arrested, and probably jailed for the rest of her life, certainly for many years. Maybe they’d even execute her. What the Prince had tried to do to her wouldn’t matter, she knew. No one would care. All that would count was what she had done to him.
She gathered her ruined dress around her, hiding her breasts as well as she could, and fled the alcove. Straight across the Grand Ballroom and out of the palace, as fast as she could go without actually running, as voices began to rise in the distance behind her, and the palace clock chimed midnight.
You know the rest, or you think that you do.
The next day, the Prince did begin searching obsessively for her, but it was for revenge, not for love; the three red weals across his handsome face filled him with a rage that momentarily eclipsed even drinking and screwing, his usual preoccupations, and goaded him to furious action.
Fortunately for Eleanor, she had been wise enough not to use her real name, or her full name, at least, with those she’d talked with at the Ball, and as she was not a regular in court circles, nobody knew where to find her.
That was where the famous slipper came in. Yes, there was a slipper, but it was an ordinary one, not one made of glass. “Glass” is a mistranslation of the French word used by Perrault; what he really said was “fur.” It wasn’t fur eit her. For that matter, it wasn’t really a slipper. It was an ordinary dress shoe of the type appropriate to that time and place.
But it had slipped off Eleanor’s foot while she struggled with the Prince in the alcove, and it was infused with her scent. By mid-afternoon the next day, the secret police were using teams of keen-nosed hunting dogs, following her scent on the slipper, to try to track her through the streets to her home.
There was, of course, no nonsense about trying the slipper on the feet of every woman in the kingdom. Nor did Eleanor’s step-sisters cut bits of their own feet off in order to try to get them to fit into the slipper, as some versions of this story would have it. Nor did flocks of angry birds fly down and peck out their eyes and bite off their noses (a scene Disney inexplicably missed somehow), as in other versions.
In fact, except for a glimpse of her step-mother lying down in a darkened room with a wet cloth over her eyes, seen when Eleanor sneaked cautiously into the house late the previous evening, Eleanor never saw her step-mother or her step-sisters again.
The Prince had his hunt organized and moving by noon, pretty early for a Prince, especially a mammothly hung-over one, which shows you how serious he was about revenge. Fortunately for Eleanor, she was used to rising at the crack of dawn, so she got the jump on him.
In fact, she hadn’t slept at all that night, but had spent the night with plans and preparations. She didn’t know about the slipper-sniffing dogs, of course, but she knew that this was a small enough town that the Prince could find her eventually if he wanted to badly enough, and she was shrewd enough to guess that he would.
So by the time the sky was lightening in the east, and the birds were twittering in the branches of the trees in the wet gray dawn (perhaps arguing about whether pecking out the eyes of Eleanor’s step-sisters was really a good use of their time), Eleanor was out the door with a coarse burlap sack in which she’d secreted a few hunks of bread and cheese, and what was left of her father’s silver service, which usually resided in a locked highboy—the key for which was kept somewhere that Eleanor wasn’t supposed to know about.
Her next stop was to intercept Casimir on his way to the glass foundry and talk faster and more earnestly than she’d ever had in her life, for she’d suddenly realized that although she still wanted to get out, she didn’t want to go without him.
What she said to convince him, we’ll never know. Perhaps he wasn’t all that difficult to convince; having no family and only minimal prospects, he had little to lose here himself. Perhaps he’d wanted to run away with her all along, but was too shy to ask.
Whatever she said, it worked. He slipped back into his room to retrieve from under a loose floorboard a small amount of money he’d been able to save—perhaps against the day he could convince Eleanor to marry him—and then they were off.
By now, everybody in town knew about the slipper and the hunt for the Mystery Girl, and you could already hear the hounds baying in the distance.
They escaped from town by hiding in a dung cart—Eleanor’s idea, to kill her scent.
After scrubbing in a fast-moving stream, while she shyly hid her breasts from him and he pretended not to look, they set off on foot across the countryside, walking the back roads to avoid pursuit, hitching rides in market-bound farmer’s carts, later catching a narrow-gauge train that started and stopped, stopped and started, sometimes, for no apparent reason, sitting motionless for hours at tiny deserted stations where weeds grew up through the tracks and dogs slept on their backs on the empty sun-drenched platforms, all four legs in the air. In this manner, they inched their way across Europe, slowly running through Casimir’s small store of cash, living on black bread, stale cheese, and sour red wine.
In Hamburg, they sold Eleanor’s father’s silver to buy passage on a ship going to the United States, and some crudely-forged identity papers. Before they were allowed aboard with their questionable papers, Eleanor had to blow the harbormaster, kneeling before him on the rough plank floor of his office, splinters digging into her knees, while he jammed his thick dirty cock that smelled like a dead lizard into her mouth, and she tried not to gag.
Casimir never found out; there were some of the harbormaster’s companions who would have preferred for him to pay their unofficial passage fee rather than her, and Casimir, still being a boy in many ways, would have indignantly refused, and they would have been caught and maybe killed. She considered it a small enough price to pay for getting a chance at a new life in a new world, and rarely thought about it thereafter. She figured that Casimir had nothing to complain about, as when she did come to his bed, after they had been safely married in the New World, she came to it as a virgin, and they had the bloody sheet to prove it (just as well, too—Casimir was a good man, and a sweet-natured one, but he was a man of his time, after all, and couldn’t be expected to be too liberal about things).
They made their way eventually to Chicago, where work for seamstresses and glaziers could be had, and where they had forty-five tumultuous years together, sometimes happy, sometimes not, until one bitter winter afternoon, carrying a pane of glass through the sooty city snow, Casimir’s heart broke in his chest.
Eleanor lived another twenty years, and died on a cot in the kitchen near the stove (in the last few days, she’d refused to be taken upstairs to the bedroom), surrounded by children and grandchildren, and by the homey smells of cooked food, wood smoke, and the sharper smells of potash and lye, all of
which she now found oddly comforting, although she’d hated them when she was young. She regretted nothing that she’d ever done in her life, and, except for a few moments at the very end when her body took over and struggled uselessly to breathe, her passing was as easy as any human being’s has ever been.
After the Old King died, the Prince only got to reign for a few years before the monarchy was overthrown by civil war. The Prince and the rest of the royal family and most of the nobility were executed, kind or cruel, innocent or corrupt. The winning side fell in its turn, some decades later, and eventually a military junta, run by a local Strongman, took over.
Years later, Eleanor’s grandson was in command of a column of tanks that entered and conquered the town, since one of the Strongman’s successors had allied himself with the Axis.
Later that night, Eleanor’s grandson climbed up to the ruins of the royal castle, mostly destroyed in an earlier battle, and looked out over the remains of the floor of the Grand Ballroom, open now to the night sky, weeds growing up through cracks in the once brilliantly polished marble that still gleamed dully in the moonlight, and wondered why he felt a moment of drifting melancholy, a twinge of sorrow that quickly dissipated, like waking from a sad dream that fades even as you try to remember it, and is gone.
THE PEACEMAKER
Roy had dreamed of the sea, as he often did. When he woke up that morning, the wind was sighing through the trees outside with a sound like the restless murmuring of surf, and for a moment he thought that he was home, back in the tidy brick house by the beach, with everything that had happened undone, and hope opened hotly inside him, like a wound.
“Mom?” he said. He sat up, straightening his legs, expecting his feet to touch the warm mass that was his dog Toby, Toby always slept curled on the foot of his bed, but already everything was breaking up and changing, slipping away, and he blinked through sleep-gummed eyes at the thin blue light coming in through the attic window, felt the hardness of the old Army cot under him, and realized that he wasn’t home, that there was no home anymore, that for him there could never be a home again.
Morning Child and Other Stories Page 21