Tomorrow is my sixteenth birthday. I do not suppose it necessary to explain the furor this has occasioned in the kingdom. ’Tis a heady occasion. Each year on my birthday, guests come from around the world to celebrate—and they bring gifts! Diamonds from Africa, crystal from Ireland, cheese from Switzerland. Of course, my sixteenth birthday is of special import. Rumor has it that a ship has sailed the world over, collecting items and persons for my pleasure. They say it has even visited the British colony on the other side of the world. I believe it is called Virginia.
But more than guests, more even than presents, is the actual hope that this whole spindle business will end today. Before her sixteenth birthday. That was what the witch Malvolia had said. So tomorrow Mother and Father will rejoice at having completed the Herculean task of keeping their stupid daughter away from a common household object for sixteen years, and then I can live the ordinary life of an ordinary princess.
I am ready for it.
It is not merely spindle avoidance that has been my difficulty thus far. Rather, because of this, I have been effectively shut out from the world. Other young maidens of my station have traveled to France, India, and even the wilds of Virginia. But I have not been permitted to make the shortest trip to the nearest kingdom, lest one of the populace there wished to attack me with a spindle. In the castle, the very tapestries seem to mock me with their pictures of places I have never seen. I am barely allowed outside, and when I am, it is only under the boring chaperonage of boring Lady Brooke or some other equally dull lady-in-waiting. I am fifteen years old, and I have never had a single friend. Who would want to be friends with an oddity who has never seen anything or done anything and is guarded night and day?
Likewise, a young princess my age would ordinarily have dozens of suitors questing for her hand. Her beauty would be the subject of song and story. Duels would be fought for her. She might even cause a war, if she were beautiful enough, and I am.
But though my beauty has been spoken of, raved of even, there has not been one single request for my hand. Father says it is because I am young yet, but I know that to be a lie. The reason is the curse. Any sensible prince would prefer a bride with freckles or a hooked nose over one like me, one who might fall into a coma at any instant.
There is a knock upon the door. Lady Brooke! “Your Highness, the gowns are ready for viewing,” she calls from outside.
The gowns! They have been prepared especially for tomorrow. It will be the grandest party ever. The guests will arrive at the palace door in carriages or at the harbor in ships. There will be a grand dinner tonight, and tomorrow a ball with an orchestra for dancing and a second orchestra for when the first tires. There will be fireworks and a midnight supper and magnums of a special bubbling wine made by Benedictine monks in France, then a week of lesser parties to follow. It will be a festival, a Festival of Talia. I will be at the center of it, of course, courted by every prince and raja, and before it is over, I will have fallen in love—and I will be sixteen, cured of the curse.
“Your Highness?” Lady Brooke continues to knock.
The gowns—I need one for tonight and several for the ball tomorrow and a dozen or so more for the coming week—must be perfect. And then, perhaps Father will speak with the tailor who designed the loveliest one and have him create fifty or so more for my wedding trip around the globe.
Truth be told, it is the trip, rather than the wedding, which appeals to me. I care not for marriage at someone else’s whim. But it is my lot in life, and a cross I must bear to gain the wedding trip. I am more than ready to leave Euphrasia, having been trapped here for almost sixteen years. And, of course, my husband shall be handsome, and a prince.
I fling the door open. “Well? Where are they?”
Lady Brooke produces a map of the castle.
I take it from her. One has to admire her organization. I see now that Lady Brooke has marked out the rooms which will be used to house our numerous royal guests. Other rooms are marked with a star. “What is this?”
“On the occasion of your last birthday, you told your father that, upon the occasion of this birthday, you required ‘the most perfect gown in all the world.’ Your father took this request quite literally and sent out the call to tailors and seamstresses the world over. China’s entire haul of silk-worms has been put to this task. Children have been pulled from their cottages and huts to spin and sew and slave, all for the pleasure of Princess Talia of Euphrasia.”
“Very good, Lady Brooke.” I know she thinks I am silly and spoiled. Was I not gifted with intelligence? I also know this not to be the case. How can I be spoiled when I never get to do a single thing I want? I did not ask that children be pulled from their cribs to slave for me, but since they were, is it not only courteous to gaze upon their efforts and, hopefully, find a dress or two that will be acceptable? I can already picture the gown in which I shall make my grand entrance at the ball. It will be green. “The map?”
“Yes, the map. Each tailor was asked to bring his twenty best creations, all in your exact measurements. Your father believed that you might be overwhelmed, gazing upon so many gowns at once. Therefore, he decreed that they be placed in twenty-five separate rooms of the castle. In this way, you may wander about, choosing as you will.”
Twenty gowns times twenty-five tailors! Five hundred gowns! I grow giddy.
“We had best get started,” I tell Lady Brooke.
We begin to walk down the stone hallway. The first rooms are on the floor above us, and as we climb the stairs, Lady Brooke says, “May I ask what you will do with the gowns which do not meet with your approval?”
This is a trick question, I know, like all of Lady Brooke’s questions, designed to prove that I am a horrid brat. Why care I what Lady Brooke thinks? But I do, for much as I loathe her, she is my only companion, the closest thing I have to a friend. So I rack my brain for an acceptable answer. Give them to her? Surely not. The gowns were made to my exact measurements, and Lady Brooke, who has not been blessed with the gift of beauty, is an ungainly half a head taller than I, and stout.
“Give them to the poor?” I say. When she frowns, I think again. “Or, better yet, hold an auction and give the money collected to the poor. For food.”
There! That should satisfy the old bat!
And perhaps it does. At least, she is quiet as we enter the first room. Quiet disapproval is the best I can expect from Lady Brooke.
Dresses line the walls, covering even the windows. Twenty of them, in different fabrics, different shapes, but every single one of them blue!
“Was it not communicated to the tailors that my eyes are green?” I ask Lady Brooke in a whisper loud enough for the tailor to hear. I want him to. Of all the stupidity!
He hears. “You want-a green dresses?” He has an accent of some sort, and when he moves closer, I see beads of sweat forming upon his forehead. Ew. I certainly hope that he has refrained from sweating over his work, which would make the fabric smell.
“Not all green,” I say. “But I would not have expected all blue.”
“Blue, it is the fashion this year,” the sweaty tailor says.
“I am a princess. I do not follow fashions—I make them.”
“I am certain one blue dress would be acceptable.” Lady Brooke tries to smooth things over with this peasant whilst glaring at me. “Talia, this man has come all the way from Italy. His designs are the finest in the world.”
“What?” I say, meaning, what does this have to do with me?
“I said…oh, never mind. Will you not look at the dresses now? Please?”
I look. The dresses are all ugly. Or maybe not ugly but boring, with boring ruffles. Boring, like everything else in my life. Still, I manage to smile so as not to call out another lecture from Lady Brooke. “Lovely, thank you.”
“You like?” He steps in my way.
Would not I have said if I liked? But I tell him, “I will think upon it. This is the first room I have visited.”
This seems to satisfy him. At least, he gets his sweatiness out of my way, and I am allowed to pass to the next room.
This room and indeed the two after it are little better. I find one dress, a pink one, which might be acceptable for a lesser event like Friday’s picnic, some event at which I would not mind looking like the dessert, but nothing at all to wear on the Most Important Night of My Life.
“Talia?” Lady Brooke says after the third room. “Perhaps if you gave more than a cursory glance—”
“Perhaps if they were not all so hideous!” I am devastated and hurt, and Lady Brooke does not understand. How could she? When she was young, she could go to shops and choose her own clothing, even make it if she liked. I will never be normal, but barring that, I would like to be abnormal in a lovely green dress without too many frills.
“Here is a green one,” Lady Brooke says in the next room.
I glower at it. The ruffles would reach my nose. “This would suit…my grandmother.”
“Could the ruffles be removed?” Lady Brooke asks the tailor.
“Could you create a gown that is not entirely hideous?” I add.
“Talia…”
“It is naught but the truth.”
“Pardonez moi,” the tailor says. “The frock, I can fix it.”
“Non, merci,” I say, and flounce from the room.
In the next, I spy a lavender velvet with a heart-shaped neckline. I reach to touch the soft fabric.
“Beautiful, is it not?” Lady Brooke asks.
I pull my hand back. I am thoroughly sick of Lady Brooke and dresses and my life. I am certain she despises me as well and, suddenly, the company of even Malvolia herself seems preferable to that of the detestable Lady Brooke.
“Do you have anything better?”
“Talia, you are being terrible.”
“I am being truthful, and I would thank you to remember that you are in my father’s service.”
“I know it. Would that it were not the case, for I am ashamed to be in your presence when you are behaving like a horrible brat.”
She says it with a smile. The tailor, too, smiles stupidly. I stare at him. “Are there any gowns which are less likely to make me want to vomit than this one?”
The man continues to smile and nod.
“He speaks no English,” I say. “So what care you what I say to him?”
“I care because I am forced to listen to you. You have grown more and more insolent in recent weeks. I am ashamed of you.” She nods and smiles.
I feel something like tears springing to my eyes. Lady Brooke hates me, even though she is required to like me. Probably everyone else hates me, too, and merely pretends because of Father. But I hold the tears back. Princesses do not cry.
“Then why not leave me alone?” I ask, smiling as I was trained. “Why does no one ever leave me be for one single, solitary instant?”
“My orders—”
“Were your orders to yell at me and call me a brat?” I begin to pace back and forth like a caged animal. I am a caged animal. “Tomorrow I shall be sixteen. Peasant girls my age are married with two and three babes, and yet I am not permitted to walk down a hallway within my own castle without supervision.”
“The curse—”
“You do not even believe in the curse! And yet it has come true, not the spindle part, but the death…. I am living my death, little by little, each day. And when I am sixteen and the curse ends, I shall be given over to a husband of someone else’s choosing, who will tell me what to do and say and eat and wear for the rest of my life. I can only pray that it will be short, pray for the blessed independence of the grave. I will always be under someone’s orders.” I begin to cry, anyway, to sob. What difference does it make? “Can I not simply walk down a hallway on my own?”
Through it all, the tailor smiles and nods.
Lady Brooke’s expression softens. “I suppose it would be all right. After all, the tailors have been thoroughly searched and the spindle regulations explained to them.”
“Of course they have.” I sigh.
Lady Brooke turns to the man and speaks to him in French.
“Thank you!” I sob. I point to the lavender gown and say, in French, “It is beautiful! I shall take that one, and that one as well.” I point to a charming scarlet satin with a neckline off the shoulders in the style of Queen Mary of England, a gown I had purposely ignored before, which now looks quite fetching.
“Very well.” Lady Brooke hands me the map. “Just point to what you want, and they will put it aside.”
I nod and take the paper from her. I am free—at least for an hour!