Perhaps I am, simply, someone who was never meant to be a princess. Perhaps I am someone who prefers the daily joy of using her hands.
And for the first time since escaping the palace, I am visited by a feeling that everything may still work out somehow—that everything will be fine.
On the fifth day, I gather my mops and pails and trudge up the carpeted stairs to the top floor. Darkening tapestries of purple parrots poised along silver branches line the long corridor, and when I touch them with my duster, soft clouds of oblivion bloom before me, making the insides of my nose itch. The rooms on both sides of the corridor are all sleeping chambers, the beds like elaborately garlanded four-poster tombs in their undisturbed brocade magnificence, each with an ornate chamber pot hiding coyly beneath the cascading frills of stiff coverlets. In the last room, the curtains are fully drawn, the windows shuttered, and my steps stir graying cobwebs that hang dense upon the air. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust in the swaying shadows—and then I stifle a cry.
A silver-haired woman in an antique bridal dress gone gray with age is lying stretched out on top of a mauve bedspread.
Once my heart slows down, I see the waxy pallor of her profile in the gloom, the hands folded on the motionless chest, the immense amethysts on the lifeless fingers. The rings are those of an old woman, yet the smooth, slender hands seem young somehow. I do not want to look closer, for fear that, unlike the birds, the woman is truly dead. My face averted, I make a few sweeps at the furriest cobwebs, then tiptoe to the door, forcing myself not to break into a run—and just as I reach the threshold and am about to exhale, I sneeze, and it is not a delicate, ladylike sneeze, either, but the most deafening, earsplitting sneeze of my life, which makes my broom crash onto the floor and my pail explode in a symphony of metallic clangs and rattles.
My blood freezes. I brace myself, steal a backward glance. Her eyes are still closed. Gingerly I pick up the broom and start once again for the freedom of the tapestried corridor—and it is then that the languid, coquettish purr intercepts me.
“My prince!”
Her body has not moved, but the yellowing layers of Flemish lace on her bodice are heaving theatrically, and her pale lavender lips are unmistakably puckered up for a kiss. I notice a gray glint behind the trembling lashes of her lowered eyelids.
“I am the new maid, milady,” I whisper.
The eyelids fly open.
“I know that, I’m not blind,” she says loudly, peevishly. “You could have humored me for a moment, of course. But sympathetic maids are hard to come by nowadays. Bring me a cup of tea, why don’t you. Plenty of milk, no sugar.”
Downstairs, all the birds are awake and chirping madly. When I return with the loaded tray, she is sitting up, propped against the pillows, shuffling a pack of Tarot cards with an intricate cobweb design on their backs. I set the tray down on the bed—a puff of dust rises to meet my face—then move to draw the curtains open.
“Leave it, leave it!” she snaps. “My eyes are too weak for the light.”
I bow and hasten toward the door.
“No, stay,” she orders. “Cool the tea for me. What year is it?”
“What… year?”
In the dimness, it is impossible to tell how old she is. Seen from across the chamber, she appeared young, so young, sixteen or seventeen, no older, and breathtakingly lovely, her silvery hair the palest shade of blond, like the delicate wing of a nighttime moth, her slight, birdlike gestures filled with an ethereal grace. Yet now, as I bend down to blow on the steaming cup, I catch a sour smell of dissolution or ill health masked by some ancient perfume, and her hair has lost its luminous sheen, become a dull gray of long years, while her brittleness resembles the frailty of age.
“Oh, never mind, it makes precious little difference.” Listlessly, she drops the pack of cards, scattering suns, moons, and winged angels all over the bedspread, and yawns. Her tongue is like a cat’s, neat and shockingly pink, trembling tensely in the dark, hot cave of her malodorous mouth. I shrink back. “Who can keep track? Things are different every time I wake up—sometimes only a little, but I can tell, I am quite sensitive, you know. Once, they replaced all the candles in the house with strange new lamps, gaslight, they called it. Another time, they had a man come who made new, magic kinds of portraits. He did one of me. He had a sinister apparatus on legs, and he covered his head with a black cloth, like this, and there was a bright white flash that blinded me. I cried out—I was quite frightened, I am delicate like that—but the likeness was better than any artist’s hand could have made it, only it had no color, it was all gray. I would show you, but my birds pecked it apart. Well, but they are always inventing new things, it’s the age, you know. And the maids change. Almost every time I wake up, it seems, there is someone new. Of course, that is to be expected. Sometimes I sleep for only a day or two, but other times it will be five or ten years at a stretch. On one occasion, it was thirty or forty, I myself was not sure how long. True, the same queen was still on the throne, but so much had moved past. You can take the tea away now, I want to go back to my dreams. You will find your wages in the purse with the beaded peacock, over there by the vanity.”
When I reach downstairs, the birds are asleep once again, heads hidden under their wings. But the next morning, they are jumping on and off their perches, chattering frenziedly, and in the bedroom the silver-haired woman in her rotting bridal gown is ensconced amidst the dusty pillows, counting out her faded cards, primly covering her yawns with the amethyst-studded hand.
“Are you a princess?” she asks without greeting me first, as though continuing our conversation of the previous day. “I thought so. Born or made? Ah. Well, we cannot all be born princesses. And really, being born to it is not as desirable as I once thought. There are just so many expectations, you know. The world expects things from you, that goes without saying, but you also expect things from the world. Sometimes, when I feel really blue, I even wonder if my expectations will ever be realized. Of course, I know they will be, because it was foretold, and every time I ask the cards, I always see the same lovely man in my future—but now and then, you know, all this waiting gets to be a trifle tedious. Now, don’t just stand there, bring me a cup of tea. Plenty of milk, no sugar, and add a spoonful of sherry while you’re at it—you will find the sherry in the drawing room cupboard, unless they’ve moved everything again. And say ‘Yes, Miss Rosa’ when I give you an order. And always curtsy.”
“Yes, Miss Rosa,” I say as I curtsy. But when I return with the tray, she is asleep again, her mouth hanging open, the Lovers card, a naked woman reaching out to a naked man, clutched in her mottled hand, the fusty lace on her shrunken chest stirring faintly with her exhalations—just as I will find her on most days when I tiptoe in to freshen up her stale-smelling chamber, which is entangled in new cobwebs every morning, fat gray spiders busy spinning and spinning and spinning their dreamlike threads above the slumbering woman’s face. When awake, Miss Rosa reads her fortune, exclaiming with a somewhat forced delight over the lovely groom invariably promised her in the brittle, graying constellations of the ancient cards, then requests cups of tea with increasingly generous splashes of sherry, and talks in breathless, fluttering monologues. Slowly I piece her story together.