I felt relieved and disappointed all at the same time.
“Very well, then,” Marci replied, satisfied. “We’ll go down together.”
“I’ll carry them,” Francesca said, squeezing the slippers tight.
“The rest of you go wash up,” Marci said.
But we were already lining up behind Francesca. Not one of us wanted to miss out. It wasn’t every day you saw Francesca clutch a pair of slippers like a dragon with a golden chalice.
* * *
—
“You found them!” Princess Mariposa cried.
She stood with Prince Sterling in the gold room. Lady Kaye had commandeered the closest comfortable chair.
We crowded behind Francesca as she presented the slippers to the Princess.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Francesca said. “I found them.”
“How can I ever thank you?” the Princess said.
“All the Girls searched, Your Highness,” Marci put in.
“Indeed,” Prince Sterling said, looking especially handsome in his blue-and-silver coat, garnet-colored sash, and tall, polished boots. He rewarded us with a bow. “Good job, all of you.”
Ann and Kate nearly swooned. Several Girls giggled nervously. Dulcie smoothed her unruly braids, smearing more dust through her hair. Gillian beamed. I sighed.
“Now your wedding will be perfect,” Francesca added, annoyed at the Prince’s acknowledging all of us.
“They’re filthy,” Lady Kaye commented. “Not that I’m not pleased you’ve found them,” she hastened to add. “But still, Mariposa, you can’t mean to wear them?”
The Princess turned the slippers over in her hand. “They do appear as if they could use a good washing,” she said.
“I could send them down to the Head Laundress,” Marci said, as if that were the last thing she wanted to do.
“Try them on,” the Prince urged. “Allow me.” He held out his hand for the slippers. Then he knelt at her feet.
Marci grabbed my arm. I held my breath as the Princess stepped out of her shoes and Prince Sterling helped her into the slippers.
They fit as though they’d been made for her.
I waited, twisting my hands together. Marci’s grip bit into my arm. But nothing else happened. The Princess was herself. The slippers were ordinary shoes. I exhaled and pulled against Marci’s hand. Marci blinked and let me go.
Princess Mariposa twisted her foot this way and that.
“See the starlight opals!” she exclaimed. “They’re beautiful.”
“Posy,” Prince Sterling said, gazing up at her, “no jewel can compete with you.”
Posy!
A collective gasp escaped the Girls. I choked. Even Marci turned crimson. Lady Kaye cleared her throat, but the Prince smiled at the Princess as if she were the only person in the room.
“Thank you,” the Princess said, blushing. Then she took a gold ring off her little finger and held it out to Francesca. “For you,” she said.
An awestruck Francesca took the ring.
Next to me, Ann tossed her hair.
“Princess’s pet,” she muttered under her breath.
My father’s papers were precious to me. They scintillated with hints of magic and flashes of his great mind at work. One torn page gave me a frightening glimpse of what he meant when he’d told me, “They don’t realize what it is.” He’d poured the magic into the castle, and we’d all assumed that it was safe there. Fixed. Contained. But as the fog descended and people’s memories blurred, I wondered. Did I understand this magic at all?
Did I know what it could do?
Was it really safe? Was it truly contained?
At the King’s request, I collected the papers from Father’s desk and bound them in a book.
Francesca paraded the ring through the castle. We Girls trailed after her with a despondent shuffle.
“We’re all getting new uniforms,” Gloria whispered, “because we’re all just as important as she is.” Gloria kept peppermints hidden in her pillowcase. Francesca called her Sugar Baby.
“She only opened that trunk by dumb luck,” another Girl said.
“If she’d been a little slower emptying the one before—” Kate agreed.
“Or we’d been a little faster—” a third added.
“One of us would have found the slippers,” Ann finished.
They nodded in miserable agreement.
“It’s only gold,” I said. “There isn’t even a jewel on it.”
“None of us has a gold ring,” Gillian said, twisting a curl around her finger. “I don’t even have a locket like you do.”
The other Girls eyed me suspiciously. My hand crept guiltily toward my chain.
“I have a bracelet with a pearl on it,” Ann said. “And Darling got that from her mother.”
“That makes it okay, I guess,” Kate said.
“The worst of it isn’t that Francesca got that ring,” Gloria said. “It’s that she’ll never let us forget it.”
Francesca flounced along ahead of us, showing the ring to everyone we met. Flashing it under noses. Announcing where it had come from. Polishing it on her sleeve.
Ann rolled her eyes so many times, I thought they’d fly out of their sockets.
At last, just when we’d reached the end of the main hall and arrived at the juncture to the servants’ back stair, Francesca saw her mother and called out to her.
Mrs. Pepperwhistle stood at the bottom of the main staircase. As always, she was neat and contained, from her high, tight collar to the ebony braids coiled at the nape of her neck to the self-composed gleam in her gray eyes. Her slender fingers sorted through the keys on her silver chatelaine.
“Look!” Francesca crowed. “It’s the Princess’s very own!” She bounded over to her mother, waving her hand in the air.
We trooped after her as Mrs. Pepperwhistle examined the ring closely.
“A reward for finding the starlight slippers,” Francesca said, as if she were the only who’d looked for them.
“Yes, it’s very nice to be noticed by Her Highness,” Mrs. Pepperwhistle said. “But if you’d had your wits about you, you would have asked for a promotion.”
Francesca’s face fell.
“You should be more forward-thinking,” Mrs. Pepperwhistle added, rubbing the marcasite butterfly pinned at her throat. Her gaze traveled across us, noting our grubby appearance with a frown. “All of you ought to be making the most of your opportunities.” Her gaze settled on me. “One of you has.”
They stared at me like a fly that had landed in their porridge.
If I’d wondered whether the Head Housekeeper was pleased by my promotion, I didn’t any longer. Dulcie inched closer to me, fists balled.
“But Marci helped Darling! Just because she’s her friend,” Ann protested.
“Then be more selective in your choice of friends,” Mrs. Pepperwhistle replied.
Francesca twisted the ring on her finger. A tear trembled on her lashes, but she held her chin up.
“Gillian has been,” Gloria said. “She’s friends with the Baroness.”
They all turned to glare at Gillian.
“I haven’t done anything wrong,” Gillian protested.
“No, she hasn’t,” I agreed. “The Baroness knows quality when she sees it.”
That earned me a calculating glance from Mrs. Pepperwhistle. I held her gaze. She pursed her lips as if she were about to reprimand me, but then she turned back to Gloria.
“Really, Girls, you’ll never be important to the Princess if you fail to exert yourselves.”
“We work hard,” Kate argued. “We do everything we’re asked to.”
“The choice is yours,” Mrs. Pepperwhistle replied, dismissing us with a wave of her hand. “Make what y
ou will of it.”
* * *
—
“How are we going to get back into the library, climb those stairs, and try all those locks without getting caught?” I asked Gillian later that evening.
We were sitting cross-legged on the carpet in the closet, hiding from Dulcie. Roger had been right; showing her the hidden passage had only roused her appetite for more. Roger refused to show her anything else on the grounds that she was a nosy little twerp and therefore apt to get—as he put it—“caught or hurt or poofed.”
“Well…,” Gillian began.
The dresses leaned in as if interested in her reply.
“Can you help us?” she asked them. “Another nice visit to the library? One that involves avoiding the Librarian? Snooping?”
Ribbons dropped. Flounces fell. Collars flattened.
“What do they mean by that?” she asked me.
“I suppose there isn’t anybody in the castle who can get away with all that,” I told her.
A jet button winked at me.
Lady Kaye could get away with anything, but I’d been her with one of the dresses already. The dresses didn’t do repeats. Which also meant that I couldn’t be the Duchess again either.
“I know you’d help if you could,” Gillian told them. She dug a piece of toffee out of her apron pocket. “Want one?”
“Sure,” I said, taking it.
I knew she had a source in the kitchen who slipped her candy every now and then. But I’d never figured out who it was. I pulled the wax paper off the sticky sweet and popped it into my mouth.
“Where does Gloria get her peppermints?” I asked.
“Her mother sends them in parcels, hidden in socks,” Gillian answered. “Kate told me.”
I waited for her to volunteer where her treats came from, but she didn’t.
“Do you think that desk really belonged to that Magnificent guy?” she said instead.
“It’s old, his initials are on it, it’s got lots of locks, it fits Cherice’s six-and-seven thing,” I said, ticking the items off on my hand. “And the keys are missing.”
“I’ve been thinking about inheritances,” Gillian said. “Lots of time they’re property—like a farm or a house. Cherice could have meant a deed. You could roll that up and stash it in one of those drawers.”
“Yeah?” I said. That hadn’t occurred to me.
“Or a mansion,” she continued. “Maybe that’s it.”
“Hmm,” I replied. “Cherice kept going on about being royalty. Maybe—”
“A castle,” Gillian exclaimed, sitting up straight. “What if she meant this castle? What if she was secretly some long-lost princess?”
“No,” I said, my chest contracting with a breathless squeeze. An ache bloomed under my rib cage. The Star Castle belonged to Princess Mariposa. And I wouldn’t let anyone take it away from her. After all, Magnificent Wray wouldn’t have shielded the castle with magic for Queen Candace if it had really belonged to his heirs. Would he?
I shook my head, suddenly dizzy. “Cherice said she is the last Wray, not some princess.”
“You are the last Wray, though,” Gillian insisted. “So maybe she got it all wrong and it’s really your inheritance. Maybe you’re royalty. Maybe you’ve got a castle; maybe you are a long-lost princess.”
For a moment I could see it, rising like a soap bubble above the scrubbing-room mist. Me, Princess Darling, long-lost heir to a shining castle tucked in a forest like a cherry in a bonbon. Then the dream bubble burst.
I was the Under-assistant to the Wardrobe Mistress. And fortunate to be that. Cherice was simply crazy.
“Even a little cottage in the woods would be a nice inheritance,” Gillian continued. “Somewhere you could live with Jane.”
I winced at the thought of Jane; for weeks I’d been too busy to spend time with her. Poor, loyal Jane had never had a home of her own. She’d raised me in the castle kitchens.
“She could keep a couple of chickens. Maybe a cow…,” I said. I thought about living far away from the castle with nobody but Jane for company. Far away from the Princess. And the dresses. “Wouldn’t Jane be kind of lonely in the woods?” I said, not wanting to admit that it was me I was worried about.
“You could sell it.” Gillian dug out another toffee for herself. “And give Jane the money.”
“True,” I said, relieved to be rescued from the woods.
I leaned back into the velvety folds of the dress behind me. Daydreams were all well and good, but we’d never know what Cherice meant by her “inheritance” unless we found a way to use the key.
The hem of the dress lifted, and Bonbon peeked out. Gillian was unwrapping her candy; I shook my head at Bonbon, shooing her away with my hand. Gillian looked up.
“I was thinking,” I said, and twisted the wax paper from my toffee around my finger to distract her from looking down. “Servants can’t use the library without permission. After I borrowed that book last winter…,” I trailed off.
“You’re afraid to ask,” Gillian finished. “So?”
“What if you could get permission?”
“You want me to ask the Princess if I can use the royal library?” Gillian said.
“It gives you an excuse to be in there. It’s a start.”
Gillian clicked her toffee against her teeth, mulling that over. “It would have to be the right moment,” she said, offering me another candy. “When Her Highness was in just the right mood.”
“She’s been so busy, I’ve hardly seen her,” I said.
“And I see her even less than you do,” Gillian replied.
“If we don’t find the right moment before the wedding, we’ll have to wait until after she returns from the honeymoon,” I said.
“She’ll be gone for months.” Gillian sighed.
“There has to be a faster way.” Finding the right keyhole was so close; I could feel the key turning in my grip.
“I know!” Gillian said. “Roger!”
“You want Roger to ask her?”
“Silly,” Gillian said, swatting my knee. “Wouldn’t that be funny? No. Roger’s been making all those maps. What if there’s a passage into the library?”
A shiver went down my spine. The idea was so clever, I wished I’d thought of it.
“We could sneak in late at night when Master Varick is snoring away!” I said.
“Now we just need to get Roger in a good mood,” Gillian replied, fishing out another toffee.
“Wait,” I said, holding out a hand to stop her. “Save that candy. It’s Roger bait!”
Gillian grinned in agreement. She dangled the wax paper rectangle in the air. “Here, fishy, fishy,” she said.
We giggled together. We were about to unlock the greatest secret in the realm.
* * *
—
The next morning, a storm of wedding preparations swept the castle, catching Gillian and me in its wake. Lindy loaded mountains of napkins and tablecloths onto Gillian’s already monstrous pile of ironing. And Rose, the Head Seamstress, appeared at Marci’s desk with a bundle of sky-blue silk.
“I’ve heard what a deft hand with a needle Darling has proved to be,” Rose said. She had the tone of someone who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“Yes?” Marci said, looking up from scribbling in one of the wardrobe logs.
I parked my needle in the hem I was stitching.
“We’re rather overwhelmed in the sewing rooms,” Rose said. “The Princess has ordered new clothes for all the head servants, new coats for the Footmen, new vests for the Messenger Boys, and new clothes for her own Girls. It’s a wonder she hasn’t wanted new aprons for all the kitchen staff.” Rose broke off with a blush. “And for heaven’s sake, Marci, don’t suggest that to her!”
“I wouldn’t
dream of meddling in the affairs of the Under-servants,” Marci said drily, blotting her writing. “I take it that you’ve come for a little help.”
“I have. I’ve never asked before, and I know you’re swamped with the Princess’s wedding clothes and whatnot.” Rose paused to catch her breath. “But Darling—” Rose cast a pleading glance in my direction.
“I can help,” I said. “If it’s all right with Marci.”
“Would you mind terribly if she did?” Rose said.
“Did what exactly?” Marci asked.
Rose plunked her bundle on the desk. “Piecing bodices together. Straight seams. I’ve marked all the pieces with chalk; two goes with two, three goes with three. Simple as pie.”
A silk piece labeled six in white chalk sat on top of the pile, along with three spools of sky-blue thread.
“Are these the Girls’ dresses?” I said, admiring the fabric.
“They are. And we’re in a rush to finish them,” Rose said. “They’re needed for the wedding. And on top of this”—she poked the bundle—“we’ve all the lace aprons and an entire set of new work clothes to sew for the Girls. We’ve worn our fingers to the bone, and we aren’t half-done yet.”
“You’ll have to finish your regular chores first,” Marci said to me.
“Yes, ma’am.” I draped a piece of the glossy silk over my hand. It was as soft and light as a spring day. I could already picture myself twirling down the corridors in a sky-blue dress. “Whatever you say, Marci.”
“If you’re sure,” Marci said pointedly.
“I’m sure,” I said.
“Thank you,” Rose breathed as if she’d been holding her breath for hours. “I’ll owe you a favor, Darling, and you too, Marci.”
“As you wish,” Marci replied.
Once Rose had left and I was sorting the pieces in the pile by number, Marci tapped me on the shoulder. “I hope you know what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, still picturing myself waltzing about the castle. “Rose said it’s just straight seams.”
The Starlight Slippers Page 7