“I’ll leave, my lord,” she said with great dignity. “I wouldn’t want to be the cause of your unhappiness.”
“No, no, that’s all right,” he said. He took another sip of wine and patted her hand. “You stay. You stay and tell me all about what you did today. What did you and that harpist talk about, hm? Did you talk about me?”
“You? No, my lord.”
“No,” he said. “Well, what then? Plots, conspiracies? What do you talk about behind my back?”
For a moment she thought he had heard about the revolution and that they were lost. Her fingers twisted under the table. “I don’t feel well,” the prince said suddenly. “I don’t feel well at all.”
“Quick!” the princess said, motioning to one of the soldiers standing at the door. “The prince is unwell. Take him to his room.”
The prince lay back in his chair, gone very pale. Two soldiers came and escorted him out of the room. “Very good, my dear,” the king whispered to her. “Very good indeed. You handled that very well.”
And the princess thought that she had handled it well, too. She went to bed that night and slept till dawn, woke and bathed and dressed. It was only when one of the clerks came to see her about a minor problem, a dedication ceremony at one of the churches, that she began to cry.
“My lady?” the clerk said.
“Go away,” she said. “Oh, please, go away.”
She went to bed. She cancelled all her lessons and engagements, and she stayed in bed, crying. The prince came in to see her and said that he was very sorry, that he had been drinking and that he would never go hunting again but would stay and take care of her, but she told him to go away, and he moved into another room. She cried for her dead parents, for all the years she had spent sleeping on the hard floor and being taunted by her stepmother and stepsisters, for all the months locked away in a stone castle, her happy ending. And, after a while, after a month or so, she stopped.
She sat up in bed. Her first feeling was surprise, surprise that there were no more tears. Sun came in through the high windows. She stood up, pleased to feel the hard stone floor under her feet, and went to her closet. None of the maids was around, and she dressed herself carefully, feeling pleasure in the act of doing something for herself. Things weren’t so bad, after all. There was nothing that she couldn’t live with. She sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the room.
There was a broom in one of the corners that a careless maid had left. Without even thinking about what she was doing she took the broom and began to sweep, a slow, pleasant motion that drove all thoughts from her mind. It was good to be up again, good to be doing something besides lying in bed.…
A sudden movement at the door made her look up. One of the maids stood at the doorway, looking in. The maid turned and ran down the hallway. The princess wasn’t sure, but the woman at the door had looked like the maid who had laughed at her on the first day of her honeymoon, that day long ago when she hadn’t known what to expect.
Dinner that night was a disaster. Somehow everyone in the court had heard that she had swept her room like a common kitchen girl that morning. The gossips stood in the corner and laughed, glancing at her often from behind their fans. Once she even heard her old nickname, the one she had hated, spoken in whispers—Cinder Girl. She looked up sharply and saw Flora watching her coolly. She looked away quickly and tried not to cry.
After dinner she went straight to her room, speaking to no one. As she left the dining-room she saw the prince and Flora deep in conversation. Flora was laughing. She told her maid she wanted to see Alison in the morning and went to bed. She turned on the soft mattress all night trying to get comfortable, trying to forget the sound of Flora’s laugh.
Alison came to her room the next day. “I’m glad to hear you’re better,” she said.
“I wasn’t really ill,” the princess said. “Just—I don’t know—disappointed.”
Alison nodded sympathetically. “I know what that’s like,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” the princess said, feeling stupid again. “You must have had much worse disappointments in your life—I mean—I’m sorry. If only I wouldn’t complain so much.”
Alison nodded again.
“But why are people so cruel to each other?” the princess said. “That maid who laughed at me my first day here—why does she hate me?”
“She hates you because you didn’t sack her,” Alison said. “That was your mistake. You should have gotten rid of her immediately.”
“Because—but why?” the princess said. “I don’t understand.” But she did understand, or was beginning to. She had been a peasant long enough to know that an aristocrat who let you take advantage, an aristocrat who was easy, was someone to be hated. You hated him or her just because you could.
“Oh, God,” the princess said. “What a mess. Should I get rid of her now? She’s got friends now, the Lady Flora—What do I do?”
“I don’t know,” Alison said. “I’ve never been a princess.”
“I’m sorry,” the princess said. “I just said I wasn’t going to complain. How’s your revolutionary?”
Alison laughed. “Oh, he’s fine,” she said. “I think he’s gotten enough men to start the uprising.” She looked around exaggeratedly and laughed again. They had both long since decided to trust each other. “I’m staying there now, sometimes, though luckily I wasn’t there when you sent me your message. He’s hiding out in that abandoned fortress near the forest. But—I don’t know—I think if he ever decides to go through with it I won’t be there. It’s time to travel again.”
“You won’t?” the princess said. “But—I thought—”
“You thought I was a revolutionary too,” Alison said. “So did I. But I’ve watched him for a while now, and I think—well, I think he doesn’t love the people so much as he loves himself. That if he does win a war he’ll set himself up as king and start all over again. And I’ve had all the dealings I want with kings.”
“Oh,” the princess said. “I’m almost ready to think that’s too bad.”
“My lady!” Alison said, laughing again. “You weren’t going to join the revolutionaries, were you? He still asks about you, you know.”
“No,” the princess said. “Not after what you’ve told me. Still, it’s a disappointment. Just one more disappointment. How do you live with it?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Alison said. “You just keep going, that’s all. You do the best you can.”
After Alison left the princess went down to join her ladies-in-waiting to do embroidery. If everything ended in disappointment then one disappointment was just as good as another. If this was her fate, to sit and sew and wait for her husband to come home from the hunt, then so be it. It could be worse. It had been.
There was a hush when she came in the room, and she knew immediately that they had been talking about her. “Sit down, my lady,” someone said, and they moved to make a place for her. “I’m glad to see that you’re feeling better.”
“Thank you,” she said.
The talk started up again, words weaving like thread. Stories were taken up, tapestries displayed, the whole panoply of names and dates and countries she had never learned. “And then I said to Lady Flora, I said—” one of the ladies said.
“Hush!” someone else said, with a meaningful look at the princess.
“Oh,” the first lady said, as if to say, It doesn’t matter what you say in front of her, she won’t be here much longer anyway. And a few minutes later the two had started up again, talking in low tones, and once again the princess heard the hated nickname, Cinder Girl.
Something snapped. The princess excused herself and stood up, pretending that her work was finished. She went upstairs to the prince’s room and opened his closet, taking out an old vest, a pair of riding-breeches, a shirt that needed mending. She went back to her room and dressed in the prince’s clothes, her heart pounding loudly. Then she opened the door and looked out.
Th
e corridor became hazy. Something shimmered like water boiling. A woman dressed in blue the color of a summer evening formed out of the haze. “Good day, my lady,” the woman said in a low, beautiful voice.
“Hello, Godmother,” the princess said. “You’re not going to stop me.”
“I don’t want to stop you, my child,” the fairy godmother said. “I’m only here to make you happy. I guess you can’t be very happy here—I should have seen that. But you wanted it so badly. What would you like now—the brave young revolutionary?”
“No, Godmother,” the princess said. “I don’t want anything—I only want to be left alone. When I went to the ball you promised me I’d live happily ever after. Well, there’s no such thing. Nothing lasts forever, not even a prince and a castle and all the jewels I could ever dream of. This time I want to make it on my own.”
“But where will you go?” the godmother asked. “What will you do?”
“I’m going to join Alison in the abandoned fort,” the princess said. She was calm now, despite the pounding of her heart. “I think I’d like to travel with her, learn to play a harp for my supper. That reminds me—I should probably take the jewels.” She overturned her jewel case and stashed the rings and necklaces and brooches in the vest pockets. “I wish these things had bigger pockets,” she said, almost to herself. “And after that,” she said to her godmother, “who knows?”
“But—But happily ever after—” the godmother said.
“I don’t want it,” the princess said. “Give it to someone else. Give it to Flora, she could probably use it. Oh, don’t look so sad. You’ve done all you can for me, and I’ll always be grateful. But right now—” The bell rang for dinner. “I’ve got to go. Good-bye.” She kissed her fairy godmother on the cheek. “Good-bye, and give my love to Flora.” She ran down the corridor lightly, happy as she’d been in years.
AFTERWORD
I’d had the idea for “Ever After” for years and years, and one day on a long walk I worked the whole thing out in my mind. Were Prince Charming and Cinderella at all suited to each other? What would a peasant woman have in common with the aristocracy? Now, rereading the story, I see that I wrote it around the time of the marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana; perhaps that was at the back of my mind. I’ve always been suspicious of happy endings.
I’m fond of this one because it was my first published story. I’d already sold two novels, but it seemed as if I was under some sort of short-story curse until Shawna McCarthy bought it for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
TOURISTS
He awoke feeling cold. He had kicked the blankets off, and the air conditioning was on too high. Debbie—Where was she? It was still dark out.
Confused, he pulled the blankets back and tried to go to sleep. Something was wrong. Debbie was gone, probably in the bathroom or downstairs getting a cup of coffee. And he was—he was on vacation, but where? Fully awake now, he sat up and tried to laugh. It was ridiculous. Imagine paying thousands of dollars for a vacation and then forgetting where you were. Greece? No, Greece was last year.
He got up and opened the curtains. The ocean ten stories below was black as sleep, paling a little to the east—it had to be east—where the sun was coming up. He turned down the air conditioning—the soft hum stopped abruptly—and headed for the bathroom. “Debbie?” he said, tentatively. He was a little annoyed. “Debbie?”
She was still missing after he had showered and shaved and dressed. “All right then,” he said aloud, mostly to hear the sound of his voice. “If you’re not coming I’ll go to breakfast without you.” She was probably out somewhere talking to the natives, laughing when she got a word wrong, though she had told him before they left that she had never studied a foreign language. She was good at languages, then—some people were. He remembered her saying in her soft Southern accent, “For goodness sake Charles, why do you think people will understand you if you just talk to them louder? These people just don’t speak English.” And then she had taken over, pointing and laughing and looking through a phrasebook she had gotten somewhere. And they would get the best room, the choicest steak, the blanket the crafts-woman had woven for her own family. Charles’s stock rose when he was with her, and he knew it. He hoped she would show up soon.
Soft Muzak played in the corridor and followed him into the elevator as he went down to the coffee shop. He liked the coffee shop in the hotel, liked the fact that the waiters spoke English and knew what an omelet was. The past few days he had been keeping to the hotel more and more, lying out by the beach and finally just sitting by the hotel pool drinking margaritas. The people back at the office would judge the success of the vacation by what kind of tan he got. Debbie had fretted a little and then had told him she was taking the bus in to see the ruins. She had come back darker than he was, the blond hairs on her arm bleached almost white against her brown skin, full of stories about women on the bus carrying chickens and temples crumbling in the desert. She was wearing a silver bracelet inlaid with blue and green stones.
When he paid the check he realized that he still didn’t know what country he was in. The first bill he took out of his wallet had a 5 on each corner and a picture of some kind of spiky flower. The ten had a view of the ocean, and the one, somewhat disturbingly, showed a fat coiled snake. There was what looked like an official seal on the back of all of them, but no writing. Illiterates, he thought. But he would remember soon enough, or Debbie would come back.
Back in his room, changing into his swim trunks, he thought of his passport. Feeling like a detective who has just cracked the case he got out his money belt out from under the mattress and unzipped it. His passport wasn’t there. His passport and his plane ticket were missing. The traveller’s checks were still there, useless to him without the passport as identification. Cold washed over him. He sat on the bed, his heart pounding.
Think, he told himself. They’re somewhere else. They’ve got to be—who would steal the passport and not the traveller’s checks? Unless someone needed the passport to leave the country. But who knew where he had hidden it? No one but Debbie, who had laughed at him for his precautions, and the idea of Debbie stealing the passport was absurd. But where was she?
All right, he thought. I’ve got to find the American consulate, work something out.… Luckily I just cashed a traveller’s check yesterday. I’ve been robbed, and Americans get robbed all the time. It’s no big thing. I have time. I’m paid up at the hotel till—till when?
Annoyed, he realized he had forgotten that too. For the first time he wondered if there might be something wrong with him. Overwork, maybe. He would have to see someone about it when he got back to the States.
He lifted the receiver and called downstairs. “Yes, sor?” the man at the desk said.
“This is Room 1012,” Charles said. “I’ve forgotten—I was calling to check—How long is my reservation here?”
There was a silence at the other end, a disapproving silence, Charles felt. Most of the guests had better manners than to forget the length of their stay. He wondered what the man’s reaction would be if he had asked what country he was in and felt something like hysteria rise within him. He fought it down.
The man when he came back was carefully neutral. “You are booked through tonight, sor,” he said. “Do you wish to extend your stay?”
“Uh—no,” Charles said. “Could you tell me—Where is the American consulate?”
“We have no relations with your country, sor,” the man at the desk said.
For a moment Charles did not understand what he meant. Then he asked, “Well, what about—the British consulate?”
The man at the desk laughed and said nothing. Apparently he felt no need to clarify. As Charles tried to think of another question—Australian consulate? Canadian?—the man hung up.
Charles stood up carefully. “All right,” he said to the empty room. “First things first.” He got his two suitcases out of the closet and went through them methodical
ly. Debbie’s carrying case was still there and he went through that too. He checked under both mattresses, in the nightstand, in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Nothing. All right then. Debbie had stolen it, had to have. But why? And why didn’t she take her carrying case with her when she went?
He wondered if she would show up back at the office. She had worked down the hall from him, one of the partners’ secretaries. He had asked her along for companionship, making it clear that there were no strings attached, that he was simply interested in not travelling alone. Sometimes this kind of relationship turned sexual and sometimes it didn’t. Last year, with Katya from accounting, it had. This year it hadn’t.
There was still nothing to worry about, Charles thought, snapping the locks on the suitcases. Things like this probably happened all the time. He would get to the airport, where they would no doubt have records, a listing of his flight, and he would explain everything to them there. He checked his wallet for credit cards and found that they were still there. Good, he thought. Now we get to see if the advertisements are true. Accepted all over the world.
He felt so confident that he decided to stay the extra day at the hotel. After all, he thought, I’ve paid for it. And maybe Debbie will come back. He threw his towel over his shoulder and went downstairs.
The usual people were sitting out by the pool. Millie and Jean, the older women from Miami. The two newlyweds who had kept pretty much to themselves. The hitchhiker who was just passing through and who had been so entertaining that no one had had the heart to report him to the hotel management. Charles nodded to them and ordered his margarita from the bar before sitting down.
Talk flowed around him. “Have you been to Djuzban yet?” Jean was saying to the retired couple who had just joined them at the pool. “We took the hotel tour yesterday. The marketplace is just fabulous. I bought this ring there—see it?” And she flashed silver and stones.
“I hear the ruins are pretty good out in Djuzban,” the retired man said.
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