Penelope

by Marilyn Kaye

  He didn’t have any problem meeting eligible women. From the age of eighteen, he had attended coming-out balls and other special occasions designed for the sole purpose of introducing the young men and women of a certain class. The women were of different shapes and sizes and appearance, but they were all moral and upright, well groomed and well mannered. Ralph’s problem was that they didn’t appeal to his romantic nature. He thought they were dull.

  If he’d been a little more ambitious, or had the tiniest spark of imagination, he might have left home, traveled, gone beyond the small circle of local aristocracy. But Ralph never even considered the possibility that there were other options in life. He could only fantasize and wish for romance to come knocking at his door.

  By the time his older and even his younger brothers had married or become betrothed, the Wilhern patriarch and matriarch were becoming concerned, and so more effort was put into Ralph’s social schedule. He found himself escorting Sibyl, Caroline, Elizabeth, and every other woman who met the basic criteria of family and class. Dutifully, he obliged, but none of the women could fulfill his fantasy of romance. And then, he met Clara.

  As a large and wealthy family, the Wilherns employed a substantial number of servants. Most of them lived in sparse rooms in the mansion’s attic, though a few came daily from local farms. Like his brothers, Ralph wasn’t terribly aware of them, and he never thought about them. When he put on a clean, pressed, white shirt every morning, he might have experienced a brief moment of satisfaction at the sense of well-being it provided, but it never occurred to him that some actual human being had washed and ironed it. He might exclaim about the tastiness of the Sunday roast chicken and not give a thought to the fact that someone had cooked it.

  Like most people of his class, he lived a comfortable life without thinking about why or how it had come to be so comfortable. And he couldn’t tell the difference between Mary who did the washing or Sally who swept the floors or Martha who made the beds. Or Clara, who chopped the vegetables for the meals that Cook produced.

  But one Sunday afternoon, Clara turned Ralph’s comfortable world upside down.

  The family had just finished their extensive Sunday lunch. While the food had been excellent and plentiful, Ralph was feeling somewhat empty. At church that morning, he’d sat with Sibyl Harrington. His parents then spent the entire meal extolling Sibyl’s virtues, and urging Ralph to ask Sibyl’s father for her hand in marriage.

  Ralph didn’t have any problem with Sibyl. She was no different from Caroline or Elizabeth or any of the other potential wives. He’d actually begun to contemplate complying with his parents’ desire. He was thinking that perhaps he was a fool to long for romance and joy, the passions that were obliquely described in his favorite novels. Perhaps such feelings as these were reserved for poetry alone and didn’t exist in the real world.

  Restless and depressed, he decided to go for a walk, something that would have disturbed the family if they’d known, since Sunday walks were not a part of their routine. The weekly promenade was always taken through the Great Park on late Saturday afternoon, when all the others of their kind did their promenade. To walk at any other time suggested that one could not afford a carriage.

  Fortunately for Ralph, no one knew he was about to take a Sunday walk, since the after-luncheon ritual on Sundays was a long nap. The other members of his family were all asleep when he slipped out of the house. And in order not to be spotted by anyone who might pass him in a carriage and then report his peculiar behavior to his parents, he decided to do something seriously bizarre: he would take a walk in the woods.

  He had been in the woods once before, as a boy, on a nature hike led by the local schoolmaster, who could provide the Latin names for vegetation and identify poisonous mushrooms. So he knew that there was a path, and that there were no wild animals. What he didn’t know was that a certain kitchen maid from his own household often spent Sunday afternoons picking wildflowers there. She also searched out herbs for her mother, a noted local witch (not notable to Ralph, though, since, like all the Wilherns, he only knew his own kind).

  As Ralph ambled down the narrow path through the woods, his senses (not particularly acute) picked up on a sound that wasn’t being made by birds. It took more than a minute for him to realize that what he was hearing was singing, an activity that was considered inappropriate on a Sunday (except for hymns at church) and that was never encountered in the Wilhern household anyway.

  Curious (an attitude also unusual for Ralph), he followed the sound of the voice, and eventually discovered its source. At some distance from his trail, he saw a young woman in a small clearing.

  The women in the Wilhern social circle had certain common elements of appearance. Their hair was worn in the popular sculpted style known as a pompadour, where each lock was fastened with some sort of pin that held it in place. Perhaps it was unfastened at night when the women went to sleep, but Ralph wouldn’t have known about that. Faces were kept out of the sun, and therefore pale, and cosmetics were only used by women of ill repute. The women they knew socially all seemed to have the same type of body too—fat or thin, they wore stiffly wired corsets that forced their bodies into a similar shape. All items of clothing were in dark colors, and designed to cover every inch of flesh.

  So one could only imagine Ralph’s shock when he saw Clara in the woods. She was not in the black uniform worn by all female servants in the Wilhern household, nor was her hair pulled back in the requisite tight bun. Thus, Ralph could not recognize her as a servant (especially since he never bothered to look into any servants’ faces), but he had to be aware that she was not of his kind.

  Clara was a slight, wispy girl with delicate limbs and a tiny waist. She wasn’t a great beauty, but her face had a sweet prettiness. Her eyes were blue, and her hair was fair and long, hanging without restriction almost to her waist. In Ralph’s eyes, she looked like a nymph, a sprite, the kind of untamed fairy-like creature he found in poetry.

  Her feet were bare, and she wore neither hat nor gloves. She was dressed in a skirt and top of some very thin material that was practically transparent, and the warmth of the sun had provoked her to roll up her sleeves. She was showing a great deal more feminine flesh than was normally seen in public, but it wasn’t at all provocative. The word that immediately came to Ralph’s mind as a way to describe her was romantic. A word he’d never expected to be able to apply to something alive and real.

  She appeared to be in the process of gathering wild-flowers, and as she picked them she sang.

  “Let me linger in the valley with my own true love, let us dance in the moonlight under starry skies above …”

  He ventured off the path, stepping on a twig that cracked loudly. The sound made the girl jump and she turned in his direction.

  Although, as noted earlier, Ralph wasn’t the best-looking of the Wilherns, his appearance wasn’t unattractive. He was tall and slender, with dark wavy hair, heavy-lidded eyes, and generally patrician features, although a large droopy moustache hid a weak chin. He was well dressed in the fashion of the day and well groomed, unarmed (with the exception of a walking stick), and he presented to Clara a figure that was not at all threatening.

  And yet, she was alarmed, and dropped her flowers.

  “Sir!” she gasped. “Oh, sir, I’m so terribly sorry, forgive me.”

  He found her subservience oddly appealing. “What are you sorry for?”

  “Why … because I have disturbed your walk, sir.”

  “Nonsense,” Ralph said. “It is I who have disturbed your flower gathering. And why do you call me ‘sir’?”

  “Because you are my master, sir.”

  He rather liked the sound of that. “Are you speaking in a romantic context, miss?”

  “No, sir. I work for your family. I am Clara, the kitchen maid. I assist Cook.”

  Ralph pouted. Kitchen maid had a decidedly unromantic flavor.

  “I chop the vegetables,” Clara added.


  He raised his eyebrows hopefully. “Is it you who creates the little flowers from radishes?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  That lifted his spirits. He’d always thought those radishes looked like little rosebuds, and rosebuds were certainly romantic.

  “So your name is Clara,” he said. He rolled the name around in his mouth. “Cl-a-a-ra.” Well, it wasn’t Dul-cinea or Desdemona but at least it wasn’t Gertrude. “And do you know my name?”

  “Yes, sir. Mister Wilhern.”

  “There are five Mister Wilherns in the house, six including Father. Do you know which Mister Wilhern I am?”

  She hesitated, and he thought he knew why. He’d always disliked his first name. There were romantic names for men, like Edmund or Jonathan. But Ralph … he couldn’t have known in 1860 that it would one day become a slang expression for vomiting, but perhaps he was prescient, because he sensed an unpleasant connotation.

  “It would not be appropriate for I, a servant girl, to use your first name, sir.”

  “Then I shall give you a special name to call me, Clara. I am …” He ran through the names of heroes in his latest readings. “You may call me Roderigo.”

  “Roderigo, sir?”

  “Just Roderigo, not Roderigo sir. We cannot have a proper relationship if you call me sir.”

  “Relationship, sir? I mean, Roderigo?”

  “Yes, my dear. I believe you are the woman I have been waiting for all my life.” He took her hand and kissed it.

  Clara was very young, barely sixteen, and she had little experience of men. Her mother saw to that, keeping her close in the little hovel they shared in the woods, only allowing her out for her job in the Big House, and to gather the herbs and bits of animal remains necessary for spells. She tried to teach Clara the tricks of her trade, but she had come to realize that Clara showed little natural talent for witchcraft, and had decided that her daughter’s pretty face and sweet nature would be her ticket to the good life. At that moment in time, she had her eye on a local blacksmith, which would be a big step up from the family’s current social status.

  When Clara came home with news of Roderigo, her pet name for one of the Wilhern heirs, the witch was astonished and delighted. Never could she have expected her slightly dim daughter, who had a tendency to break out in rashes, to rise so high on the social ladder. She immediately went to work on preparing various potions and spells to keep the flames of love burning.

  But there didn’t seem to be any real need for her to utilize magic. Before she’d even had a chance to administer any potions or cast any spells, Roderigo/Ralph and Clara had joined together and become inseparable (except, of course, for when she was chopping her vegetables—Ralph didn’t know where the kitchen was located in the Wilhern mansion and it would have been unseemly for him to make an appearance there anyway).

  They would meet in the evenings, when the other members of the family had retired to their private bedrooms. Ralph would slip out of the house and meet her in the clearing, where she would sing that little song she liked, and they would follow its instructions, dancing in the moonlight under the stars. And they would lie in the grass, holding each other, and he would recite poetry she didn’t understand (but then, neither did he).

  He’d found what was missing in his life. The Sibyls and Carolines of the world, those proper, corseted young ladies, would never sing love songs, or dance, or run barefoot through the woods, or engage in certain other activities that Ralph and Clara enjoyed immensely. He thought about her incessantly, which made him smile and caused his mother to be constantly inquiring as to his digestion.

  In time, she asked him to meet her mother, and he was enthralled with the notion. Having never met a real witch, he envisioned someone fantastical. He’d read his childhood fairy tales so he knew she would not be particularly attractive, but still, she was magical, and that was romantic.

  He wasn’t prepared, however, for the extreme ugliness of Clara’s mother. Emerging from the rundown wooden shack was an old, bent-over woman, with a pimpled nose, a jutting chin, and long wild gray hair, leaning on a crooked stick. He was much relieved to learn that her appearance was a by-product of her career, that every spell cast left a mark on the spellcaster, which was why working witches always looked like she did. She assured Ralph that Clara had absolutely no inclination to become a witch herself, and therefore would never look like her mother.

  Mother and daughter seemed to have a pleasant relationship, although the witch kept telling Clara she was becoming plump. As weeks passed, Clara’s stomach continued to grow. Eventually, they all figured out why, and Ralph asked the witch for Clara’s hand. The witch told him he could have all of her daughter’s body parts, and Ralph happily went to convey the glorious news to his parents and brothers.

  The Wilherns gathered in the library for the announcement, and Ralph, after only a few wrong turns, was able to make it to the kitchen to fetch Clara. Clara, however, was mashing potatoes and at a particularly crucial point, and said she would join them all as soon as she was through. Ralph alone met the family in the library.

  “Mother, Father, dear brothers, I hope you will share in my joy as I tell you I have decided to marry.”

  The brothers gave a rousing cheer, and his mother sighed. “At last.” The father nodded his approval and said, “Very good, my boy, Sibyl will make an excellent wife.”

  “Oh, I’m not marrying Sibyl,” Ralph said.

  “Caroline?” his mother asked. “Elizabeth?”

  “No,” Ralph said.

  One of the brothers asked, “Do we know the woman?”

  Ralph was enjoying the suspense. “My bride-to-be is no stranger to this household.”

  The lumps in the mashed potatoes were being unusually tenacious that day, so Clara never made it to the library. It was just as well, as she might not have appreciated the family reaction.

  “I am going to marry Clara.”

  “Clara?” his father repeated. “Clara?” He turned to his wife. “Do we know a Clara?”

  “Clara who?” Ralph’s mother asked him.

  It dawned on Ralph that he’d never learned Clara’s family name. “Clara! The maid, the one who works in the kitchen with Cook. The one who chops the vegetables. Mother, you’re always saying how much you relish those little radish roses. Clara has assured me that even when she becomes Mrs. Ralph Wilhern, she will continue to make those little roses. Just for special occasions, of course.”

  None of the Wilherns, especially Ralph, was known for having a great sense of humor, which may have explained why the sudden eruption of laughter made no sense to him whatsoever.

  “I am pleased to see that this news makes you happy,” he said uncertainly.

  “Very funny, my boy, very funny,” his father exclaimed. “A good joke.”

  “Highly amusing,” his mother agreed.

  “Meet my sister-in-law, the scullery maid,” his eldest brother chortled. “I must remember to tell this story at the Club.”

  “Yes, I was thinking perhaps we could hold the wedding reception there,” Ralph said, and that set off another round of guffaws.

  It took Ralph a while before he caught on to the joke. Ultimately, it was left to his father to explain that a Wilhern did not, could not, would not marry a servant girl. It wasn’t done. The rules of society would not permit it. A century or more later, a duke might marry a nanny, a millionaire could marry his secretary, but back then the mere thought of a blue-blooded Wilhern exchanging vows with a member of a lower class was unthinkable.

  Ralph was surprised. He thought he knew the codes of conduct, but apparently some of them hadn’t sunk in. And although Clara had touched his romantic side, he really wasn’t a rebel. He wasn’t the type to flout convention in a really public way. Maybe his father threatened to cut him off without a dime, I wasn’t sure. But it didn’t really matter—Ralph Wilhern agreed to uphold the family’s standing, and asked Sibyl to marry him instead. (She turned him down, but Caroline, who
would have married the Hunchback of Notre Dame to get out of her family home, accepted him.)

  And poor, despondent, pregnant Clara threw herself down a well.

  That was the end of Clara, but it wasn’t the end of the story. Needless to say, when the witch learned of her daughter’s suicide, she was devastated; and when she learned the reasons for it, she was furious at the Wilhern family. And on one dark, moonless night, she hobbled over to the Wilhern mansion with a special mix of herbs, spices, and one finely ground hog’s tail. Leaning on her crooked stick, she recited an incantation of her own invention and sprinkled her nasty little marinade around the house. Then she raised the stick, pointed it toward the house, and declared her revenge on the family.

  You’d think, in all fairness, she would focus her curse on Ralph, who had dumped her daughter. Or simply extend the curse to the parents who forbid the marriage and the brothers who laughed.

  But the curse she placed on the family had farreaching repercussions—namely, me. Because what really irked the witch was the whole class thing, the idea of this uppity aristocracy who considered others—like servants and witches—to be way beneath them. So she cursed them with something that would hurt a random member of their blue-blooded dynasty.

  The witch declared that the next female born into the Wilhern family would have the face of a pig. And the curse could only be lifted when someone of their own kind, a true blue blood, would claim her till death they did part. Only when an aristocrat could accept the pig-girl as she was would the curse be broken.

  It was a pretty nasty curse, but given what happened to her daughter, you couldn’t really blame her.

  Considering that all this happened more than a hundred and fifty years ago, you’d think the curse would have manifested itself long before my birth. Unfortunately—for me, at least—the Wilhern men seemed to have been abundantly endowed with y chromosomes or something. For a hundred years, only male progeny were produced. Then, around fifty years ago, my great-uncle Leonard Wilhern and his wife, Ella, had a baby girl, Isabel.