Will it happen to me?
All at once, she felt she understood very little about life.
The duchess was speaking, in hot, angry hisses.
“You think you’ve won, little princess, and maybe you have, maybe good, boring girls do come out ahead in the end. But you know something? When you’re old and your precious little children are all grown up and gone and your eyes are too weak for embroidery, you will have nothing, nothing to think about, nothing to remember, because good as you are, you haven’t lived, haven’t dared, you’ve just slumbered your years away in your precious little palace. You want to talk about Prince Roland, do you? Let me tell you about your prince. Your prince was never yours. I knew right away when I saw him at that reception, knew the kind of man he was, the kind of woman he needed. His mouth was hungry, so hungry—and there you were at his side, empty as a canary, stupid daisies in your hair, chirping to my buffoon of a husband about the weather. Oh, I remember it all like it was yesterday. Our eyes met, and he smiled, such a slow, dirty, delicious smile, I bet he’s never given you a smile like that, and I knew without a doubt, I knew just what would happen when he offered to show me some funny old tapestry.”
The duchess was talking, she understood with a recoiling of her entire being, of that long-ago visit—the visit in the third, unblemished year of her marriage. She wanted to protest—more, she wanted to scream—yet she said nothing, could say nothing, and the horrid woman with the vulgar beauty marks atremble on her chins went on hissing spitefully.
“We both knew neither of us gave a hoot about sightseeing, even if the tapestry really was delightful, some faun having his way with a nymph, quite outrageously, too, his red cock smack in the middle of the daft thing! But wouldn’t you know, there was a secret room behind the tapestry, and there we spent some delectable hours together. Such a lover he was, so strong, so inventive, with an arsenal of moves that took even me by surprise, tricks he’d picked up from an earlier mistress in some exotic southern land. Of course, then you had to spoil all the fun with your pathetic little suspicions. We never did go behind the tapestry again, and the floor in his study wasn’t nearly as comfortable. Oh, but a year later he paid me a visit here, and what a visit that was. Because you know what, little princess? I may be all alone now, youth gone, beauty gone, and that fool of a duke went and got himself dead and left nothing but gambling debts behind—but there was a time when I was alive, and your prince and I, we were alive together. The games we played in this very bed, let me just tell you—”
But she was already running, her hands over her mouth.
Somehow, she did not know how, she found her way outside, and into her carriage, and, after a blank ride through the deserts of non-time, was back in her own palace, her own chambers, her own dressing room. There she threw a handful of gowns into a pile on the floor, to reveal a hidden shelf at the back of the closet and, folded on it with great care, the shirt made of nettles. She dragged the shirt into the light, looked at the three pearly buttons along its collar for one full, demented heartbeat, then viciously ripped the third button off.
The nettles, all along the seams, split and gaped.
Her legs gave way. She slid down to the floor, sat frozen for some minutes, her soul near to bursting. Then, all at once hectic, she jumped up, grabbed her sewing kit, tried to repair the damage—to patch up the holes, pull the edges together, close up the wound now gaping where the prince’s heart would be—but her hands shook, the needle kept slipping, and the leaves grew brittle and crumbled at her touch.
After an hour of her mutely hysterical efforts, the shirt was ruined.
She stared at it with stark, bereft eyes. There was no time to fix it now. It was not a Monday, there was no full moon, the kitchen was fresh out of nettles. The next day would come and go, and the spell would remain unbroken. A year of her life. A year of blistering, burning fingers, a year of silence, a year of hopes—all gone. Her mouth taut, she swept away the nettle dust, crawled into bed, and slept the heavy sleep of the defeated—slept, as it happened, all through her eleventh wedding anniversary and straight into the twelfth year of her marriage.
When she awoke, everything looked simple once again. Her love for the prince was a bit dimmer, perhaps, but he needed her help, and help him she would. She would spend another year in silence, she would weave another shirt. And this time, there would be just two buttons attached to its collar; but of those two, she was absolutely, resoundingly, certain—as, in truth, she had never been of the third.
For, once she calmed down, she mulled over the duchess’s story, and understood that it was not all that unexpected. Indeed, if she were to be unflinchingly honest with herself, the third year of her marriage had not been one of cloudless contentment. She recalled the emptiness she had felt when Nanny Nanny had taken over Angie’s care and she had found herself, quite simply, with nothing to do. There had been so many hazy, flat, lonely days—the hours spent listening to that ranting ghost of the minstrel whose bellicose epics she had detested, the battalions of pickles and preserves she had labored over in a swoon of sticky-fingered boredom, the afternoons she had stood before that faded tapestry, obsessively guessing at the meaning of the red spot in its center, willing everything to make sense. She remembered gazing at the prince across banquet tables and ballroom floors, wishing he would stop being so considerate and, her need of rest notwithstanding, start spending nights in their bedroom again. And of course, she remembered hearing the woman’s low laughter and the man’s soft voice in that tapestried hallway—but she remembered something else, too, something she had forgotten, had made herself forget, until now.
She remembered knowing, for a few brief hours.
And so, in a way, the aging mistress’s revelations had been a relief, for it was clear now that none of it had been her dear Roland’s fault: the prince had already been cursed. And the dimming of that particular stretch of her marriage only made the glorious luminescence of their first two years together stand out all the more dazzlingly in her mind. Devoid of doubts, sure of her purpose, she worked on her shirt with a steady hand, and somehow, without her noticing, the year was over almost as soon as it had begun. On the eve of her twelfth anniversary, she hung the new shirt, complete and impeccable, on the chair by her bed and went to sleep in the full knowledge of a different, blissful life that awaited her in the morning.
She dreamed of wandering in a nighttime wood. Trees loomed, leaves rustled, owls cried above her head. She was lost—there was no path before her—yet she did not mind; she liked the freedom of moving alone in the dark. After a while, she saw lights ahead and walked toward them, and soon came to a row of bright windows hanging on branches like laundered sheets on a clothesline, with no dwelling behind them. She stood on tiptoe and peeked into one, and there was her own blue-and-white bedroom, immaculate like a nun’s cell. The window next to it opened onto the palace ballroom; the window beyond, onto the dining hall. All the rooms seemed deserted, but something dashed behind the windows—curtains swayed and teaspoons rattled at someone’s passing—and then she heard knocking, as on a door. She glanced about, but there was no door to be seen. The knocking intensified, became urgent, turned into a desperate pounding. She rushed from window to window, her gaze scrambling over satin sofas and flocks of porcelain rabbits, unsure whether she herself was inside or outside, whether whoever was knocking was begging to be let out or fighting to be let in—and the urge to run, the urge to help, was still beating like some wild creature against her chest when she sat up all tangled in the sheets and listened to the frenzied knocking on the door of her bedroom.