The Spinner and the Slipper

by Camryn Lockhart

  It wasn’t really a thought. At least, it wasn’t like any thought she had experienced before. It was more like an impression. Or a suggestion. Lying there in the pile of straw that was her bed, wrapped tightly in a woolen blanket, she whispered softly, so as to make no sound but so that her breath formed little curls in the air above her lips, “What mirror?”

  A foolish question. There was only one mirror. Oh, she knew as a distant sort of truth that other mirrors existed. She knew this just as she knew there was a world beyond Monsieur de Cœur’s estate of Canneberges. It may be true, but she never expected to see it, so it didn’t particularly matter. The same held true when it came to mirrors. As far as her immediate world was concerned, the only mirror that mattered was her mother’s small glass.

  Mirror.

  There it was again. That word tugging at the ear of her consciousness. Heloise’s frown deepened.

  Her name was Heloise Flaxman, though when she was younger she’d thought it ought to be Flaxgirl, which would make more sense. A few years ago she’d asked her older sister, Evette, about the incongruity of her name. Evette had told her that “Flaxman” let everyone know Heloise was the daughter of one of the many flax farmers on the estate. The name gave her a place. It gave her standing.

  Heloise, only nine years old at the time, had gone about her daily tasks, her brow knitted in serious contemplation of this new knowledge. Later that same afternoon, while she and Evette fed Gutrund the pig, she’d asked, “Since Meme is a spinner, can’t I be Heloise Spinnerwoman? Then everyone would know I’m the daughter of a spinner. And spinning is more interesting than farming.”

  “No,” said Evette. “That’s not how things are done.”

  Thus ended their discussion. When it came to questions of “how things are done,” Evette could not be convinced to think creatively. So Heloise had resigned herself to being Heloise Flaxman for the foreseeable future.

  This morning, however, when she awoke as always to the passionate crowing of Rufus the Red, she didn’t feel quite like a Heloise Flaxman anymore. She felt changed. Not older, necessarily, but . . . bigger. As though there were more of her than there had been the night before.

  Sitting up and unwrapping herself from the tangle of her blanket, she cast a quick glance to the nearby pile of straw where her sister slept. But of course Evette had already risen, dressed, and had climbed down from the loft to the kitchen below, where she helped Meme get breakfast for Papa and the boys. Evette was never one to sleep late. It’s not how things were done.

  Down in the main room Heloise heard the scuffle and shouts of her brothers Claude, Clement, Clotaire, and Clovis engaged in their morning brawl, accompanied by the high-pitched squeals of baby Clive goading them on. Underscoring all other noises murmured the patient voice of Evette in her accustomed role of peacekeeper. Heloise woke to this chorus every morning, but today these familiar sounds seemed strangely distant.

  Mirror.

  The word was in her head still. She climbed out of the straw and crawled across the loft floor to a carved cedar box tucked away in the corner. Heloise’s grandfather had made that box for her mother when her mother was a child. Its contents were as familiar to Heloise as her own two hands. She lifted the lid, breathed in the scent of cedar, and looked down at folds of creamy linen: Meme’s wedding gown.

  Heloise had no interest in this whatsoever. Meme often spoke of how Evette would soon wear it in her own wedding; Evette was at an age when their mother could scarcely look at her without speaking of weddings and babies, as though Evette were already betrothed and settled. Lately she’d taken to saying on a near-daily basis, “We’ll have a wedding in the family before this spring is done; you mark my words!” To which Evette always smiled and made no reply.

  Weddings and Evette—they went together like dye and mordant in Heloise’s mind. She never pictured herself in the bride role. After all, she was not Evette.

  Wrapped up inside the gown, tucked away for safekeeping, was the little black-framed mirror, the prized treasure of the Flaxman household. This Heloise unwrapped from the gown with great care, leaving the mounds of linen to lie unheeded in her lap. Gently she lifted the mirror, angling it so that she could not see her face. She wasn’t afraid, exactly. Maybe a mite anxious. But not afraid. Certainly not.

  Mirror, said the thought in her head.

  “Yes. Yes, I know,” Heloise whispered. By now she thought she knew why the thought was there: Today was her birthday. On every birthday Heloise could remember she’d awakened wondering if she was any different than she’d been the night before, but one furtive glance in the spotted glass always showed her to be the same as ever. Maybe a little taller than she’d been a year ago. Perhaps with a few more freckles. But still very much herself.

  Not this morning. This morning she knew that she was still herself . . . but something more besides.

  Heloise heard Papa say goodbye to Meme, and then he and Claude and Clement, the two oldest brothers, set out for the flax fields. She heard Meme tell Evette that the south-end dye house had sent a request for more oak bark and could she please inform her sister as soon as she saw fit to rise? Then, not waiting to see her younger daughter or wish her a fortunate birthday, Meme gathered up baby Clive and left the cottage. Out to the spinning shed, where she would spend the rest of the day. At any moment Evette would call up the ladder, asking in her sweetest, most patient voice whether or not Heloise planned to join them that morning.

  If she was going to look at herself, it had better be quick.

  And really, what was there to worry about? A strange feeling? What did that even mean? Nothing and nonsense, certainly.

  Heloise flicked the mirror upright.

  The glass was warped along the top, making the viewer’s forehead look much fatter than it was. But it still gave a much better reflection than Gutrund the pig’s water trough, which was the only other place Heloise had ever seen her own face. No other farmer’s cottage in all Canneberges boasted a mirror, at least not as far as Heloise knew. It made her wonder if her batty old grandmother’s wild claims that they came from “noble stock, way back when” might hold some kernel of truth, if this mirror might be the last heirloom of a highborn heritage.

  Heloise gazed at her reflection. No new freckles. Well, that was something. She had not yet braided her hair for the day, and it stood out around her head in an enormous halo of fuzzy curls, giving her a wild, fey aspect which she rather liked. Her brows bunched in a tense knot, which was not unusual for Heloise, who tended to look upon the world through pensive eyes.

  But was she changed?

  “Heloise! Will you be joining us this morning?” Evette called from below, exactly as predicted.

  “Yes, coming!” Heloise shouted back. Still she did not move. Her hands clutched the polished frame of the mirror, drawing it closer to her face until her breath fogged the glass. That was no use. Frowning harder, she caught the hem of her sleeve in her fingers and rubbed away the fog. And there was her face again, looking up at her through the spots and speckles.

  Something was different. She knew it.

  Mirror.

  “Heloise, there’ll be no pottage left if you don’t hurry your feet.”

  “Coming! Coming!” Heloise tossed the words over her shoulder and slowly lowered the glass into the pile of wedding gown, then began to fold up the soft fabric.

  Her hands froze. Her frown deeper than ever, she leaned down close to the glass, pulling back the linen once more.

  Slowly, with extreme deliberation, as though determined that she wouldn’t miss it . . . her reflection winked at her.

  “I saved some for you,” Evette said, holding up a bowl of salvaged pottage. “It’s gone cold, but you’d better eat it anyway.”

  Heloise, her hair still wild about her face, jumped the last three rungs of the ladder and landed with a thud in the floor rushes. Ignoring Evette’s exclamations that now she’d have to sweep the rushes flat again, Heloise took the proffered
bowl and squeezed onto the hearth bench between brothers Clotaire and Clovis who, having called a truce, were finishing their own breakfasts. She rolled a piece of stale flatbread into a spoon and shoveled a glob of pottage into her mouth. It was clotted and cold. She swallowed without noticing.

  She was too busy thinking: I must be going mad.

  Before her eyes swam the image of her own face, fat forehead and all, gazing up at her from the mirror glass. She took another bite and a third, chewing the bread slowly and saying nothing even when Clovis pinched her arm and Clotaire tugged at a curl.

  Oblivious to her sister’s uncharacteristically taciturn mood, Evette bustled. She often bustled, for it was the right, farm-maidenly thing to do, and she always did the right thing. Evette bustled while Heloise galumphed; so it was no wonder that half the boys on Canneberges estate were bringing Evette clusters of posies tied up with string while Heloise had yet to receive even one wilted blossom from a single daring admirer. Evette was the perfect example of everything a young man looked for in a future farm-wife. Heloise was just . . . Heloise.

  Evette fetched the broom and smoothed out the ruffled floor rushes—which she had only just finished smoothing in the wake of her brothers’ morning fracas. But that was Evette for you: The more fruitless the task, the more sweetly she pursued it.

  “Meme let you sleep long since it’s your birthday, Heloise,” she said, touching Clovis’s bare feet with the broom bristles. He obliged by lifting them, and she swept beneath. “But she asked me to tell you that the south-end dye house sent a request for more—”

  “I heard!” Heloise snapped even as she pushed more pottage into her mouth.

  Evette paused, broom upraised mid-swish. Her eyes took on that expression of, not anger, not irritation . . . but compelling disappointment.

  There was never any satisfaction to be had in snapping at Evette.

  “There’s no call to be short,” she said in her kindest, most long-suffering voice, the voice usually reserved for the rowdiest of the five brothers. “You are a young woman now, Heloise, not a child. It’s time you started behaving with some decorum.”

  Clotaire and Clovis glanced up at Heloise’s face. They saw the dark clouds gathering. As one, they hunched over their bowls, battening down against a storm.

  Evette, unmindful, resumed her sweeping. “And you know, you really must learn to tame that hair of yours. It’s not seemly to leave it loose like that. You look like a dandelion about to burst. And long braids are unbecoming on a girl of fourteen. I started pinning up my braids on my twelfth birthday. You don’t want to look like a child, do you?”

  Really, it wasn’t the things she said. It was the way she said them.

  No, honestly, it wasn’t even the way she said them. It was the way Heloise knew she meant them. Always just shy of truly belittling, but in a tone so well-meaning that, no matter what, Evette would come across as the sweet, kind, endearing sister and Heloise as the unpardonable beast for not appreciating her. Sometimes it was just too much to be borne.

  Heloise dug her fold of bread into her pottage. She tested the balance.

  The next moment, Evette screamed, dropped her broom, and put both hands up to her face from which a great glob of pottage dripped.

  To a chorus of yells and laughter from her brothers—and an immediate outbreak of pottage-flinging that would keep Evette busy cleaning up for ages—Heloise dropped her bowl, leapt to her feet, grabbed her basket, snatched her peeling knife down from its hook, and fled out into the cottage yard. Even as Evette called futile protests after her, she vaulted over the gate and darted on beyond to the flax fields above the bogs.

  Others have heard me in the past. Many others, most long dead. I think of them often as I sit in my window. I think of them as I never used to think of mortals when I lived in these worlds. They are each dear to me in their way, and I am sorry for what became of them. Such brave young hearts attempting the impossible!

  The impossible to which I call them.

  But what choice have I? Or they, for that matter?

  Sometimes I wonder if it would be kinder to never call to them at all. To let them mourn. To let them forget . . .

  THREE

  Grandmem Flaxman was an old, old woman who lived according to old, old ways. This meant that she rose several hours before dawn every morning, even though it was many years since there’d been any need for her to do so. She had long since moved herself and her belongings out of her dead husband’s cottage—making way for her son, Cerf, his wife, and their ever-growing brood—and into a humble, shack-like dwelling up above the south-end bogs. She didn’t even keep a goat anymore. Cerf always made certain she had food and milk enough brought to her every few days by one of her grandsons or by young Heloise.

  So Grandmem had settled into an existence of . . . well, much though she hated to admit it, of uselessness.

  But then, she thought, you’ve been useless all your life. Especially when it counted most.

  Nevertheless, she always rose before dawn and sat, as she did this particular morning, watching the sunrise from her doorstep. It was a passable sunrise as far as sunrises went. A clear sky, a pale sheen of color fanning rosy-pink and then warm gold across all the world to wash away the frost that gathered here on the verge of spring. A thin film of ice on the edges of the cranberry bogs sparkled then melted away into nothing, like a Faerie’s jewel when glimpsed by mortal eyes. Painters sitting where Grandmem now sat would be inspired to mix new pigments; poets would feel the need to sharpen their penknives and pare their goose quills down to delicate points. Oh yes, it was a very nice sunrise, truly.

  “It don’t compare though, do it, Cateline?” Grandmem muttered. In one hand she held a carrot, which she gummed occasionally, too tired just now to fetch her grinding stone and mash it into edible mush. She took it from her mouth and heaved a great sigh. “It don’t compare to the sights you’re seeing. But I think you’d be happy to trade. I know I would if I was you.”

  It had become so much more difficult in the last few years to drive away these melancholy thoughts, accompanied as they always were by lashings of self-reproach.

  The sun continued to rise. Dawn lengthened into morning. And still Grandmem could not bring herself to get up from her doorstep and hobble inside. So she watched the morning, watched the flocks of songbirds singing their many choruses (which, she knew in her unromantic soul, were really nothing more than territorial battle cries but no less lovely for that), and continued to mutter to herself as she often did these days. “Are you eating finer things than last year’s carrots, Cateline? Or do you even need food where you are?”

  Then she saw a shadow that should not be there.

  Long and low, it passed along the edge of the nearest cranberry bog. It had no source to cast it—at least, none that Grandmem could see. But Grandmem knew she did not have to see something for it to be there. She knew this better than anyone.

  She slid the carrot back into her mouth, rolled it around thoughtfully, and watched the shadow lurk its way along. It was the lurkingest shadow that ever existed. “So,” she said around the carrot. “He’s back. He’s come for her now.”

  Then she frowned, the many wrinkles of her face piling into a single point between her hairless brows. Thoughts came much more slowly than they once had. But they could be sorted through and arranged in coherent order if she was careful about them. The shadow . . . the melting ice . . . the vanishing frost . . .

  Cateline . . .

  “I wonder,” Grandmem said even as the shadow slipped away up the hill and vanished into the still-deeper shadows of the Oakwood, the largest plot of forest on the estate grounds. She removed the carrot again and spun it slowly between her quivering fingers. “I wonder if young Heloise has met herself yet?”

  So saying, she got to her feet. This in itself took some doing, but she was fired with a determination unlike anything she had felt in years. She dropped the munched-on carrot in the dust and, clutching her ro
ugh-spun shawl about her shoulders, set off toward the little track that wound its way over the flax fields and on to Cerf’s cottage.

  Before she’d taken more than a few tottering steps toward the path, she saw her granddaughter, Heloise, fly past in such a rush that one half expected to glimpse the Black Dogs themselves snapping at her heels. Heloise hadn’t even seen her old grandmother. On she sprang like a barefoot rabbit over the fields, around the bogs, and up the same way the lurking shadow had gone.

  “Hmmmm,” said Grandmem.

  She dismissed the ridiculous notion of following after the girl, of giving her some warning. What was the use? Besides, she’d never catch her. No, best continue to the cottage. Wait for her there. She’d be back, after all.

  It wasn’t quite time. Soon, but not yet.

  Tightening her grip on her shawl, Grandmem continued on her way. Moments later a breeze blew past, trailing bits of paper in its wake. Grandmem’s ears were not as sharp as they’d once been, but she distinctly heard a mad little laugh. She watched the paper trail until it too vanished up into the forest.

  “Hmmmm,” Grandmem said.

  Disembodied laughs are enough to disrupt the balance of most minds. Not hers. Her old memory was too stuffed with strange sights, sounds, smells, and sensations to have room for disruption. She continued on her way.

  The beat of a horse’s hooves approached. Grandmem peered ahead, squinting against the morning sun. A tall horse—an elegant horse. That could only mean gentry. With a muttered curse, Grandmem tottered off the path and nearly fell into a ditch. She was only an old serf-woman, hardly worth the four walls of the shack in which she lived. She couldn’t share even a humble farm path with a great lord or lady. It wouldn’t be decent.

  She kept her head bowed, wondering if her knees still had it in them to curtsy. The horseman drew near and cast a long shadow across her.