“No,” I answered quietly. “Everyone says I look like my mother, but it’s not the same thing.”
“I have been given my own suite of rooms,” Raoul said. “Not far from Prince Pascal’s, A guard to keep me safe.”
“Safe,” I said. “From what?”
Raoul turned to face me then, and I could see the strange and tortured expression in his eyes.
“I have just come from speaking with the queen,” he said. “She wanted us to speak, privately. No one was present, except for your father. She says, the queen, my mother says . . .” Raoul’s voice faltered, then steadied. “That I am the elder son. That is why your father took me, all those years ago. To keep me safe. It is I who should be king when my father dies and not Pascal.”
So, I thought. It is as my stepmother and Niccolo thought. The queen would try to place Raoul upon the throne. Use him to perform a coup, now that her brother’s armies had been destroyed.
What kind of a woman could do such a thing? I wondered. To achieve her own ambition, she had deprived one son of his childhood birthright. Now, she would pit him against the brother he had barely begun to know. If she broke the king’s heart in the process, so much the better. And Etienne de Brabant had been her instrument. My father, who no longer seemed to have any heart at all.
She does not care about you, Raoul I thought. All she cares about is that we are all under her control.
“You say you have just come from her?” I said. “She has just sent for Pascal. I wonder how she will tell him what she has told you.”
“You have seen the prince?” Raoul asked, surprised. And I could not help but notice that, in spite of what he now believed he could claim for himself, he still spoke as if there was only one.
I nodded. “I came from him just now. We did not plan to meet. It just sort of . . . happened.”
Before I understood what he intended, Raoul crossed the room and caught my face between his hands, tilting it toward the candlelight.
“You love him!” he exclaimed. “I can see it in your face. You met him for the first time tonight, and yet you love him already.”
“It didn’t take you much longer to fall in love with Anastasia,” I remarked. “Let go, Raoul You’re pinching my chin. Besides, you know what I look like.”
“No,” he said, drawing out the syllable as he released me. “I don’t think I do. Not altogether. Not quite.” He stepped back, but his eyes stayed on my face. “Does it hurt, this newfound love?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” I admitted.
“Does he love you?”
“I think he does.”
“You might be queen someday then,” Raoul said. “If not for me.”
“Oh, will you stop being so stupid?” I exclaimed crossly, as I stood up. “I don’t care about that and you should know it. Neither will you, if you are smart. You have only the queen’s word about the fact that you are firstborn, Raoul. If she’s demonstrated anything, it’s that she’s someone its not safe to trust.
“What will you do if Pascal and your father object to this sudden rearranging of things? Will you fight them?”
“I don’t know what I’ll do!” Raoul cried out, his voice anguished. “How can I? For as long as I can remember, I’ve wished for just one thing, and you know it as well as I do. The same thing, year in, year out. Now, in the blink of an eye, my wish has been answered. I know who I am. I woke up a stable boy, but I’ll go to bed a prince. Who is to say that I might not be king one day besides?”
“So you would fight, “I said. “You would make war on your father and brother. The queen will have no more need for foreign mercenaries. She will get you to do her fighting for her.”
“Rilla,” Raoul said, and at the sound of my childhood nickname, my heart gave a pang. “Don 11 have the right to claim what is mine?”
“Of course you do,” I said. I went to him, my feet awkward with only one shoe, and laid a hand upon his arm. I felt the way his own trembled as he laid it over mine. “But surely not at any cost. That day we stood in the pumpkin patch and saw the ships, we made a wish together, the only time we’ve ever wished for the same thing in all our lives. We wished to find a way to make the fighting stop.
“The queen is just trying to use you, don’t you see? She doesn’t love you any more than my father loves me. She is the one who has deprived you of your birthright, not your father or brother. She sent you away, when she should have kept you close.”
Raoul stood absolutely motionless, staring down at me with devastated eyes. “I thought you would be happy for me,” he said. “I thought you would want what I want.”
“Not if it means you’re going to fight your own brother, Raoul,” I said. “Not if it means starting a war and tearing the country apart.”
“It’s because you love him, isn’t it?” he asked. He dropped his hand from my arm and stepped away. “It’s because you love Pascal.”
“It’s because I love you.” I said at once. “Of course I am happy that you have finally discovered who you really are. But I can hardly rejoice if you plan to fight the father and brother you’ve only just found. How can that be what you want for yourself? How can that be who you truly are?”
“I don’t have to explain myself to you,” Raoul said.
“No,” I replied. “You don’t. But no matter who you are, you are answerable to yourself.”
“You’ll go to him, won’t you?” he suddenly challenged. “As soon as I leave this room, you’ll go to Pascal. You’11 find him and warn him.”
“I honestly don’t know what I’ll do.” I sighed. “You’re my oldest and dearest friend, Raoul. I have loved you for almost as long as I have been alive. Don’t ask me to choose between an old love and the new. That’s no choice at all, and in your heart, you know it.”
I watched the struggle come and go across his face. “I will think about what you have said,” Raoul answered finally. “Please—I would like to ask you to do nothing tonight. Please wait, give me time to think, and let us speak again in the morning.”
“Is it the new prince or my old friend who asks me this?” I said.
“It is both,” Raoul replied. “I’m trying to find the way to make them both fit inside my skin. It’s harder than I thought. I haven’t learned how to be both yet. Please, Rilla. Give me some time.”
“Very well,” I said. “I will give you until tomorrow, as you ask.”
“Thank you, Rilla.” Raoul said. “You are a good friend.”
“And you are good at getting your own way,” I replied.
For a moment, I thought he would say something more, then I saw the way his eyes shifted to take in something over my shoulder.
“It must be midnight,” he said. “The lights are going out.”
I turned to face the city then, and saw that he was right. Through the window of our suite of rooms, I could see the lights in the town below us begin to go out, one by one. Then, as if a great wind had suddenly come up, the streets went dark, all at once. I felt a quick shiver slide straight down my back.
It looks like an omen, I thought. Of what, I wasn’t sure I cared to guess.
I turned back toward Raoul, and heard the click of the closing door.
“He’s gone, isn’t he?” Anastasia’s voice said.
“Yes,” I said. “He’s gone.” I turned to face her, saw the tears upon her cheeks. “If you love him, go after him,” I said. “Don’t let him go.”
“How can I?” she said in a low and tortured voice. “I made so much of the differences between us. What will he think if I go after him now?”
“You’ll never know unless you do it,” I said. “Help him, Anastasia. Don’t throw away love.”
“I’ll never understand why you don’t hate me,” she said. “But I’ll tell you this. I’m grateful that you don’t.”
She moved swiftly to the door and pulled it open. “Raoul,” she called in a low voice.
The moment she stepped into the hall, I knew he
had turned back. Anastasia darted forward, and I moved to stand in the open door. I saw the way she moved toward him swiftly, then faltered. And as she did, Raoul stepped forward in his turn, and pulled her into his arms. She put her head upon his shoulder. He, an arm around her waist. Entirely heedless of the guard who still stood several respectful paces off, they moved off together down the hall.
I’ll never know what made me sense the danger. A change in the air, perhaps. A strange scent. An unexpected hint of sound. It didn’t matter, as it turned out. Because I wasn’t quick enough. Before I quite realized what was happening, something thick and dark and stifling was being thrown over my head. Strong arms banded around mine from behind. I felt myself being lifted, kicked out once, and felt my second shoe go flying. I heard the chime of broken glass as it crashed to the floor.
And then, nothing.
EIGHTEEN
It was Anastasia who first told me the story of what happened next, who helped me see what I could not. How, after settling things between them, pledging to love each other now and forever, no matter who they were or might become, she and Raoul had walked back to the rooms we shared and there discovered the heel of one glass shoe and a scatter of broken glass outside our door.
When a quick and frantic search failed to produce any additional sign of me, Raoul did not hesitate, but, accompanied by my stepmother and stepsisters, went directly to the king and Prince Pascal, He told them of the queen’s treachery, of his fear that my father had seized me and carried me from the palace. The king sent for my father at once. When he did not answer the summons, when he, too, could not be found, Raoul knew his worst fears had been realized.
“Where would he take her?” Pascal asked, the fear in his eyes and in his voice telling anyone with eyes and ears of their own all they needed to know about what was in his heart, “He could be anywhere by now. Where would he go?”
“I think I know the answer to that,” Raoul had said. “He will take her to the great stone house by the sea. He will take her home.”
“Then we must go after her at once,” Pascal said.
“If I may, Your Highness.” Amelie had surprised them all by speaking up. At a gesture from Pascal to continue, she turned to Raoul. “You should take Niccolo. He will want to help. And he knows the road better than you do.”
“That is a good thought,” Raoul said at once. “And let us send for Old Mathilde.” He turned back to Pascal. “She raised Cendrillon. No one knows her better or loves her more.”
“I will trust your judgment in this,” Pascal said.
And so Niccolo and Mathilde were sent for. As soon as they arrived, the party set off, the two princes and Niccolo taking swift horses and riding ahead, my stepmother, stepsisters, and Old Mathilde following in a carriage. Only the king stayed behind. His first act once the others had departed was to see that the queen was close confined. Save for the members of her immediate household, all carefully selected by the king, she was never seen in public again.
The story I told in return goes like this: That I awakened to find myself slung across the back of my father’s horse like an unwanted parcel. All that night, and all the day that followed, Etienne de Brabant spurred his horse along the road. His only concession to my presence was to allow me to sit up behind him once he knew I was awake.
Just before nightfall at the end of the second day, we came to the great stone house. The journey had taken a full day less than the one which had brought me to the palace in the first place, so great was my father’s desire to reach his destination. Etienne de Brabant dismounted, pulled me from the horse, carried me up the steps. With one booted foot, he kicked open the front door, all but scaring the wits out of Susanne, who had come to see what all the commotion was about, and had gotten no farther than the great hall.
At a sharp command, she scurried to get out of the way. My father set me down. Then, with a yank that had my head rocking on my shoulders, he set off across the great hall and up the stairs that led to the second story. Down the corridor to the very end we went, until at last we stood outside my mother’s door.
“Open it,” he commanded.
But I heard what was in his voice. I had been frightened when my father first seized me, and for many moments on our long, wild ride. But I was not afraid of anything within the great stone house, not even him, and it was fear that I heard inside my father’s voice. Fear of what he had tried, without success, to lock away from the world, and from himself. And so I lifted my chin and stepped back.
“I am not the one who is afraid of what lies beyond that door,” I said. “Open it yourself.”
He started then, staring at me as if seeing me for the very first time. Not as what he had imagined for nearly sixteen long years, but as what I truly was: Constanze d’Este’s daughter, his own true child. For the time it took my heart to beat six times, he did not move. Then, slowly, my father reached out, seized the latch, lifted it up, and opened my mother’s bedroom door.
Gone were the cobwebs, the dust that had greeted me on my first glimpse of this room. Old Mathilde and I had taken down the bedhangings and the curtains to launder and iron them. We had scrubbed the floors and washed the windows till they shone. In the glow of twilight, the room looked warm and welcoming, as if its occupant had stepped out of it just minutes before. Slowly, his feet making absolutely no sound, my father crossed the room until he reached the alcove. I knew the second he saw my mother’s face. He faltered back a step, then stood as still as stone.
“She loved you,” I said from where I stood within the open door. “You can see it in her eyes. Old Mathilde told me once that a love that strong and pure never really dies. It lives on in all who live and remember, teaching them how to discover such a love for themselves. I try to imagine how I would feel if I had known a love like that, then had it snatched away. All my life, I’ve tried to understand how you could love her, and not love me.
“But when I look into her face, I cannot do it. I do not understand it at all. Constanze d’Este loved you, and all you might create together. You thought you loved her, but you loved yourself more.”
I pointed to the window behind him, and, as if my gesture was a summons, my father slowly turned around.
“From that window, you can see my mother’s grave, the only piece of earth on all your lands where not a single living thing will thrive. But it is not my mother’s heart that is buried there. Instead, I think that it is yours.”
With a cry my father whirled back, strode across the room to seize me by the arms. He pulled me to the window, turning me so that I, too, looked down.
“I have carried the image of your mother’s grave with me for sixteen years,” he said fiercely, “Nothing I have ever done has been able to drive it from my mind, Don’t think you can stand there and lecture me. You can never understand what I have lost.”
“You did not lose!” I cried, as I struck his hands away. For the first time, I thought I tasted his bitterness in my own mouth,” You gave it away of your own free will. You gave me away. You gave away love.”
And because of it, he had wasted the span of my entire life, I thought. What might my father and I have learned together, shared together, if he had not been so swift to give up on love? Regret shot through me then, swift and sudden as the plunge of a knife straight through my heart, I staggered, and put my hand upon the windowsill. Felt my father reach to hold me up.
Oh, Mathilde, I thought, I see what you were trying to tell me now, that day in the kitchen so long ago.
Grief and sorrow are one and the same. But until you feel regret for what is now forever out of reach, you do not truly mourn.
Finally, I felt my anger for my father turn to ashes, I saw the desolation in his face now. Saw the way it ran bone-deep.
“I know what you wished for me,” I said softly. “The one and only time you ever saw me until now. You wished that you might never see me again unless the sight of me could give you back the peace I stole. But I am not the true
thief, father. You have robbed yourself. You have no peace because you cling to sorrow and to anger.
“You have no peace because you do not mourn.”
“No,” Etienne de Brabant answered, with a shuddering breath. “No, That cannot be right; it cannot be so.”
“Go to my mother’s grave,” I said. “Kneel down beside it. Feel the dead grass with your hand. Place your palm on the dead trunk of the tree Constanze d’Este planted as your bride. Then tell me you have no regrets. That you do not see all the things that you have stolen from us both, but from yourself most of all.
“Then do what, in my heart, I think my mother would have wished. Make a new wish for yourself.”
He released me then, his movement so unexpected that, had I not caught the back of the chair, I might have tumbled to the floor. Without a backward glance my father ran from the bedroom, down the corridor, I heard the clatter of his boots as he hastened down the great hall stairs, the sound of the front door as it opened, then slammed closed.
Slowly, I sank down in the chair, the one in which Old Mathilde had sat the night I had been born. Gazing out the window, by the light of the moon, I saw my father stagger to my mother’s graveside. He fell down upon his knees, lifted his face up to the heavens as he had so many years ago. Perhaps it was some trick of the light, but I swear that, even from the second-story window, I saw the tracks of tears upon his cheeks. After almost sixteen years, my father wept beside my mother’s grave, while I wept to see him, looking down.
I will make a wish for you, Father, I thought. The fourth most powerful kind of wish there is. One you make when you discover that, against all odds and appearances to the contrary, you have not quite given up hope after all.
I wish that the tears you shed may make what you wished for sixteen years ago come true. I wish you peace, at last.
NINETEEN
Late that night, I heard the sound of horses in the courtyard. Long before then, I had moved through every room on the ground floor in the great stone house, placing a lighted candle in every single window, as if to guide travellers home. Outside the moon had risen, gold and full, its light bright enough to read a book by.
Once Upon A Time (5) Before Midnight Page 14