All the Ever Afters

by Danielle Teller

  Spots appeared on Matilda’s face the following morning. Though I knew to expect the worst, I had allowed myself to hope that she would be spared, exposing myself anew to the grip of despair.

  Matilda looked deathly ill. Although her fever had not returned, she whimpered that her whole body hurt, especially her head. She lay unnaturally still, her limbs limp, her eyes closed. I held her hand, not knowing what else to do. Her fingers did not grip mine in response, and her skin felt clammy and cold.

  I left Matilda briefly to attend Catherine’s funeral; I do not remember the Mass, for while I mourned one daughter, I battled the terror that I was about to lose another. Even after that short absence from home, I was shocked by Matilda’s appearance when I returned. Her face was entirely covered by angry pox, now swelling into discrete mounds, as though a horde of red insects swarmed over her skin. Her eyelids were thick and purple, and her mouth hung slack.

  I propped Matilda against my arm and tried to feed her broth, but it trickled down her chin. She was not asleep, but profoundly lethargic, and she seemed unable or unwilling to swallow. Most of the bowlful soaked into her shift.

  To quell my rising panic, I kept busy. I brushed Matilda’s soft hair, rubbed her skin with ointments from the apothecary, gave her sips of water when I thought she could manage. I washed her clothes and blankets, and I changed her shift. When Henny brought supper, I tried to get Matilda to eat, but it was no use.

  For eight days, Matilda languished. Horrific pustules on every part of her body grew to the size of berries, then burst, releasing a foul fluid. Her features became distorted beyond recognition. I plied her with broth and water, but she wasted before my eyes. I cradled her in my arms and prayed to God and to every saint in heaven to heal my daughter, my fierce, loyal, clever Matilda. I begged God to take my life instead, to let innocent Matilda be raised by her godparents, good people who had lived a better life than I had. At night, Matilda twitched and moaned and kept me from sleeping, but I held her close, wishing that I could somehow bring her spirit inside me, so that I might shelter her and give her a new birth.

  On the ninth day, Matilda sat up in bed and asked for a cup of water. My heart leapt with joy; I would have walked all of the way to Saint Augustine’s well to fetch her a drink if she had asked me. Matilda’s strength returned quickly after that, though her skin remained hideous. The pustules turned purple and black, and some became open sores. The apothecary made new ointments to soothe her pain and promote healing.

  I brought Charlotte home, and although I tried to forewarn her, she cried out when she saw Matilda’s face. Charlotte quickly regained her composure and kissed the top of Matilda’s head, telling her sweetly how much she had missed her, but Matilda began to sniffle. “Does my face look so bad?” she asked, her voice trembling. She looked at the macerated skin of her hand, doubtless wondering if her face looked the same. In truth, it looked worse.

  “No!” Charlotte and I said in unison.

  More softly, I said, “No, sweetheart. You are my beautiful princess.”

  Journal Entry

  The Royal Court

  We are sunflowers that cannot resist Ella’s radiance; we are compelled to turn our faces to bask in her incandescent beauty when she is near. As she entered the chapel this evening, though she was shrouded in black for the queen consort’s funeral Mass, her face half-hidden in the shadow of her veil, every eye was drawn to her. She glided beside her husband to their pew near the altar, her alabaster hand resting on his arm; before she knelt, she pushed back the black lace of her veil, and a golden ringlet slipped free. The escaped curl danced in the torchlight, glinting as though shot through with gold thread, before she tucked it away.

  No doubt I will hear murmuring tomorrow about the scandal of the exposed hair, which, I concede, could be construed as disrespectful to the queen’s memory. In the moment, however, nobody looked discreetly away. Which is more profane, a loose lock of hair or a church filled with subjects who have more interest in gawking than in mourning their dead monarch?

  Our fascination with feminine beauty is elemental. It is said that men wish to possess the princess and women wish to be the princess, but I believe that is only part of the truth. We are drawn to extraordinary beauty mindlessly and purposelessly; we flutter on dusty moth wings toward the effulgence with no understanding of why we do it. Perhaps when we see a woman with the aspect of an angel, our souls are tricked into following her, mistaking her for a guide to paradise.

  The opposite, of course, is also true. I have watched ladies whisper to one another and detour to the far side of the fountain court to avoid crossing paths with Matilda, and I have seen how a crowd of courtiers parts to give her a wide berth. Her face is infinitely precious to me, yet I understand the impulse to avoid her. The pox scars have distorted her features, so that one eye cannot open fully, and her nose is bulbous and cratered. When I run my fingers over the cragged surface of her skin, an odd pain courses up my arm and lodges its fangs in my heart. I can only imagine the jolt of pity and revulsion a stranger might feel when beholding her for the first time.

  It upsets me when my daughters are referred to as Princess Elfilda’s “ugly stepsisters,” but in Matilda’s case, the label is sadly accurate. Charlotte is not homely, if one discounts the unsightly scar on her neck, but I understand that she lacks the fine features, fair coloring, and silken hair that our nobility so treasures. I can accept that nobody admires my daughters, but if God bestows beauty according to His inscrutable plan, there should be no shame in being uncomely or even ugly. Yet the “ugly” in “ugly stepsisters” is not mere description but moral repudiation.

  I had hoped that Charlotte and Matilda could participate in the care of young George, Ella’s son, but his nurse is frightened of them. She seems to believe that their ugliness will contaminate the little boy, or that their appearances are the result of inner corruption, an indication of wicked intent. She refuses to let Charlotte or Matilda hold their nephew, and when they try to play with him, the nurse hovers nearby, squawking and interfering. When George visits with his mother, my daughters have more freedom to engage with him, but those occasions are rare.

  I am not ungrateful for our miraculous good fortune, but this is the sort of injustice that makes me wish that we could flee this gilded cage, just the three of us, to live in peaceful seclusion. Despite our rarefied circumstances, we have no control of our destinies.

  13

  Return to Aviceford Manor

  Workers from the manors traveled to Ellis Abbey every autumn to harvest the grain, and I decided to take advantage of their migration for an escort on my way to petition the abbess. The road to the abbey passed through Old Hilgate, and near Michaelmas each year, workers flocked to the alehouse for a drink. I hungered for tidings of my family, and whenever I discovered that one of the workers came from Aviceford, I plied him with free ale in exchange for news. In this way, I learned about my father’s death and about my brother’s modest success. Thomas had inherited our father’s half-virgate and had painstakingly expanded his landholdings, first through hard work and clever alliances, and then through marriage to his second wife, who was a daughter of the reeve.

  Few women traveled for the harvest, and the men knew nothing about Lottie, except that she was still alive, as was her husband. They could not tell me how many children she had, whether she had enough to eat, or whether she was happy. Such details do not interest menfolk.

  I did not recognize most of the villagers from Aviceford, and none of them recognized me. My transformation into the daughter of a baronet would not have fooled gentry, but the villagers doffed their caps and called me “m’lady.” They gave me curious looks when I asked after Lottie and Thomas, but they were too respectful to question me. It was not that they had heard the false tale of my parentage, but that I dressed in silks and imitated the diction and conduct of my betters. Rose House had provided my first template of gentle manners, and I had learned to emulate Fernan’s court-bred
speech and bearing. Even though I worked as an alewife, the peasants assumed that I had been born into a respectable family.

  When I requested an escort to Ellis Abbey, a group from Cothay Manor accommodated me willingly. I left Charlotte and Matilda with Henny, promising to return within the week. The workers made space in their cart and laid down rough woolen blankets so that I would be comfortable. To reward their kindness, I brought loaves of bread, cheese, and two cold legs of mutton to supplement their suppers.

  As we pulled away from the alehouse, I examined its familiar facade; the upstairs windows looked back at me like a pair of consoling eyes. I had known that building in so many moods. The old hunched thatch roof, damp and disheveled in gloomy drizzle, had given way to a smart new slate roof that the alehouse wore like a jaunty hat. In autumn, crimson ivy wrapped the walls in flame, and in summer, misty clouds of miniature white roses climbed the trellises. I had lifted the children on my shoulders to pluck gnarled icicles from the lintel and sweep away the snow that crouched plumply above our heads, waiting to drop. It did not seem possible that we could be evicted from our home.

  The villeins had been on the road since first light, but they maintained a good pace; we left Old Hilgate in the late morning and arrived at our destination before dusk. When the white spires of the church came into view, time melted away, and I felt the same awe that I had a decade earlier. We made our way up the tree-lined avenue to the road that led to the stable, and when we passed the rose garden and the pond, I had a fleeting urge to jump from the cart and run to Rose House. I wondered what had become of Mary since the countess’s death and whether anyone lived at Rose House now.

  The party left me at the guesthouse and went on to the barracks at the edge of the compound where they would spend the night. I could not find an empty room, but a woman from Healdshead Manor offered to share hers. It was a tidy, narrow chamber with two simple pallets and a basin, a palace compared to the housing for the workers.

  I could not sleep that night. It was not only that the other woman snored and that I was away from my daughters for the first time. It was that I could no longer shut my mind to the worry that the abbess could deny my claim to the alehouse. What future could I offer to Charlotte and Matilda if my living were taken from me? It would not be easy to find Charlotte a husband even with a dowry, and it would be even harder for Matilda if her pox did not heal well. Without either money or beauty, they would have to become servants or settle for a husband nobody else would want.

  Lying awake, I thought of my stone collection. The stones had sat for years on the lid of a chest at the alehouse, where the girls liked to sort them by color and size or arrange them in patterns. Though I was a grown woman, a stone in my palm would have calmed me that night.

  I had to wait two days for an audience with Abbess Elfilda. The overcast sky sent down a constant, halfhearted drizzle, but I spent my time outdoors, walking restlessly around the compound. As I passed close to the fishpond, sleek frogs leapt from the grass by my feet and splashed into the jade water. The lavender had gone to seed, but there were frowsy blooms left on the rosebushes, nodding their heavy heads in the wind and rain.

  I had been little more than a child when Fernan and I had strolled through those grounds and flirted in the garden. I had allowed his brown eyes to become the whole of my world, allowed myself to believe that I would be there to witness the blooming of roses every spring and to collect petals from their fading coronas every autumn. Since then, eight years had passed, more than a third of my life. I was a mother, a widow, an alewife. I felt incomparably older, but the gardens that had bloomed in my absence still beckoned to me. My romantic vision had shifted: I wanted to hold my daughters’ little hands and show them the frogs and flowers, hunt for wild strawberries, recline on the grassy banks of the pond to sing songs. The nobility imagine that we peasants are too brutish for fanciful dreams. They should ask themselves why, then, are fairy tales so popular with the masses?

  I saw Sister Marjorie, and a few other familiar faces, but they did not recognize me. My sorrow made me shy and apathetic, and I could not bring myself to approach them. Besides, I did not want to answer questions about my years in Old Hilgate. I had built my life on lies, and I was not proud of it.

  The sun broke through the clouds as I made my way to the chapter house on the third day, and I chose to see the change in weather as a good omen. I fiddled with my veil, hoping that I had selected the best clothing to project competence and respectability. Although my name was toward the end of the list of petitioners for the day, I arrived early, having nothing else to keep me occupied. I watched the anxious faces of other petitioners in the anteroom, wondering who would leave successful that day. The expressions on their faces as they left the chapter house told me who had received a favorable response and who had not. I prayed silently that I would be smiling when I left. The afternoon stretched on. My stomach grumbled and I felt light-headed, for I had been too nervous to eat.

  When my name was called, I squared my shoulders and forced myself to walk with a firm step. The chapter house had not changed, except that there was now a desk beside the lectern, and this was occupied by an officious-looking nun with a scroll and quill. Jeweled light splashed momentarily across her parchment as the sun darted from behind a cloud and disappeared again. She read out my name and the reason for my visit as I curtsied to Mother Elfilda. I did not recognize the new prioress who stood next to her on the dais. She was younger than the prioress I had known, but she had the same rigid posture and stern face; doubtless she also had the same talent for enforcing discipline.

  The abbess was even slighter than I remembered. She could not have been much taller than my Charlotte, and I doubt that she weighed as much. She turned her tranquil gaze toward me. “You are the girl who left with Fernan.” It was not a question.

  “God be with you, Reverend Mother.” I noticed fine lines at the corners of her eyes, radiating like spiderwebs. It struck me as an odd placement of wrinkles, since I had never seen her smile.

  “And you are here because you claim that his alehouse belongs to you.”

  “I bought the alehouse from him, Mother. I paid every penny.”

  “I suppose that you have brought the new deed?”

  I flushed. “We did not sign a deed, my lady. He was my husband.”

  “Then according to our documents, the alehouse belonged to Fernan. After his death, the property reverts to Ellis Abbey.”

  “But I am his widow! I am at least due my piece of the inheritance, my lady!” I curtsied low to apologize for the forcefulness of my statement.

  The abbess beckoned to the prioress, who stooped toward her. They conferred in low voices, and then Mother Elfilda said, “I am told that we have no record of your dower either. In fact, we do not have a record of your marriage.”

  “God bless you, Mother, it is true that I had no dower. I was penniless. There may be no record of the marriage, but that is not uncommon. We lived together as man and wife. Surely, my lady, the abbey’s court will recognize the law of inheritance for widows!”

  The abbess’s blue eyes were cold. “The law specifies no such thing. It may be customary for widows to inherit, but in a case where there was no dower—and I suspect no wedding—nothing is owed to you by law. Vir caput est mulieris. Man is head of the woman.”

  “Forgive me, Mother, but I have two young children. What will become of us?” My voice shook with frustration and fear.

  “You will return to Aviceford, and Emont will find you a new husband.”

  “No! Pardon me, my lady. I cannot. Please. I am begging you. Please give me the opportunity to buy back the alehouse from the abbey. I can pay for it in less than two years!”

  Abbess Elfilda looked to the prioress, who asked sharply, “What can you offer for it now?”

  “I have two pounds in savings. I shall have more soon!”

  “This girl is wasting our time, Mother!”

  I thought of George and his
offer of a loan. “I can get twenty pounds!”

  The prioress sighed impatiently. “Where will you find such money?”

  “A friend.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me, but Abbess Elfilda held out her hand and spoke mildly. “Usury is prohibited, and I weary of this discussion.”

  Not knowing what else to do, I prostrated myself on the stone floor. “Mother, I am begging you, in the name of Jesus our Lord, please help my daughters! They are innocent. I have raised them to be courteous and godly, and their father was the son of a knight. Surely God’s plan is not for them to be the wives of coarse and brutish peasants!”

  “Get up!” the prioress snapped. “Mother Elfilda is finished with you!”

  “No, it is all right, Eleanor.” The abbess sounded tired. “They are the daughters of my ward, after all. What do you request on their behalf?”

  Much as I had hoped to keep the alehouse, I had prepared myself for rejection during my lonely walks around the pond. I knew what to ask next. “My lady, Charlotte and Matilda would be ideal students for your convent school. They are good girls. They are clever, obedient, and devout.”

  “How will you pay for their education?” demanded the prioress.

  “With respect, Mother Prioress, the abbey’s coffers were enriched once when Fernan bought the alehouse, and they are being enriched again now because of his death. I have improved the building, and it will fetch far more than the last time. These monies, along with Fernan’s savings, will pay for his daughters’ educations many times over.”