Ashes

Even a young prince can be jaded. I had endured countless receptions and balls, had watched an endless parade of aristocratic beauties present themselves for my approval—and for secret embraces in shadowed chambers or damp-walled gardens (giggling, rustling skirts, and then the sun too bright on a painted cheek). But this lost, thin-waisted nymphet was different. My mother noticed it first.

"Did you see that girl?" The queen stood beside me at the top of the stairs and studied the ballroom below us. "The one with Sir Lewis." Only a second before she had dismissed the gaggle of dancers, turned her back on the view from the balcony, and snapped open a perfumed fan pulled from her sleeve. Now, though, her eyes narrowed with interest, and she leaned over the railing. Like colorful gems spilled from a purse, men and women in velvet and satin moved across the marble tiles, each couple following the pattern of the pair in front of them.

"Look! She's charmed the old fool into a gavotte. It's a wonder he can hoist that monstrous frame out of bed in the morning, much less drag it about to a jig."

I glanced idly at the ragged chain of dancers beneath me. It was hard to miss chubby Lewis—bobbing up and down to his own private music while the others kept proper time—but once I had spotted the old fellow, I could not take my eyes from his partner. It was not the blue dress or the crystal slippers that shed rainbows as she twirled. It was not the lace gloves or the tiny jeweled bows that winked from her train. It was the way she carried herself—or, more accurately, the way she didn't. Instead of posing, dolblike, she floated, spinning and turning like a leaf, from hand to hand.

The queen, still focused on the great hall spread below us, must have noticed my interest. "I am glad," she told me, without taking her eyes from the pageant of the dance, "you are not like some, mongrels led here and there, driven only by their base appetites." I barely listened, already dizzied by the whirling fairy below me. "Perhaps your refusal to wed has been well advised, my son. Perhaps it will secure you now a bride of a different sort."

After I had kissed my mother's cheek and worked my way to the bottom of the stairs, the fairy dancer was my reward. As glowing and impartial as the sun, she took my arm for the next carole with the same smile she gave poor Lewis in farewell. She seemed, in fact, to have no idea who I was.

"You make the old dances seem new," I told her. "How has grace and beauty like yours stayed hidden from our court?" Something in her countenance unmanned me. The blaze of sconces twinkled behind her, and my flattery seemed empty and foolish.

"I have never been to court," she told me, training curious, unblinking eyes on mine. "Or danced like this, or met anyone like you."

"Surely I am not so different from other men." I laughed, more confident now. This was a game I had played before, over and over until I knew the script by heart, all the blushes, every whispered lie.

"Perhaps not," she replied. "But except for my father and the kind gentleman who danced with me just now, you are the only man I have ever spoken to." She cocked her head like a pretty sparrow and studied me while we spun. "You are so tall and fair, you quite take my breath away!"

She should have colored and curtsied; she should have lowered her gaze from mine. But her eyes, wide and greedy, devoured my face, and she laughed like a man, her head held back, her mouth unhidden by her hands.

I searched the weary catalogue of women I had known. Not one of them had looked like this, had danced like this, had stirred to life an open rush of affection I thought had died years before.

I learned the games early, you see. My first memory is of the endless carpet, the long trail along which my nurse led me to the tall, lovely woman who sat with her maids and laughed like music, "Mother, look what I have made for you," I cried, dropping my chain of dandelions in her lap, trying to scramble after them.

But the laughter stopped and the beautiful woman frowned. "Now look what the child has done! There is dirt all over my dress. Hannah! Hannah, come get him, quick."

As I spun around the floor with this sweet stranger, the years fell away and it seemed a child, trembling with adoration, had laid a chain of flowers in my lap. I stared at the girl in my arms and wondered if love was this simple.

"You cannot be a prince!" She laughed when I told her who I was. Her honeyed hair shook free from the combs that held it, and her hands, as if forgotten, rested in mine. "You are much too young and you do not scare me at all. Why, if you were not so important, we should be real friends!"

I forgot the lessons my mother and all the powdered ladies of the court had taught me. I neglected to bow and lie in wait, to flatter and pretend. "We are already friends," I told her. When the music started up again, I whirled us into a shadowy alcove, away from prying eyes. "Now tell me your name, sweet friend."

She stopped dancing and pulled me to a cluster of pillars at the edge of the hall. There she leaned against the sugared stone and whispered to me as if she were at confession. "I am afraid I no longer have a name of my own. After my father died, my step-mother called me nothing but Cinderella." She seemed as small and frightened as a bird I dared not flush. "I have not led an easy life."

"Your mother must have been very beautiful." It was an old formula, but I said it with new sincerity. She clung to the pillar, though, as if I had set a snare for her.

"I suppose she must," she said without affectation. "My father always said she was. But I cannot remember her face." And when she turned back to me at last, her eyes were filled with a strange and cloudy hunger I dreamed suddenly of feeding.

"When I was little and had no one to run to if I fell and hurt myself, no one to share the games I played alone among the mops and kettles, I used to try to picture her. I cried and yearned and prayed, but I could never see her eyes, her hair, not so much as the tips of her fingers."

She studied her own small hands in silence, then raised a face to which the light had rushed back. "So I have made up my own mother." She grinned like a clever child. "She is a fairy godmother, more radiant and powerful than anyone on earth. I cannot hold or kiss her, but she protects me with her spells."

She spoke as if she were still in a nursery. I laughed now, enchanted, and bent to kiss her. When she turned away once more, I was not angry but patient and tender. "And why not have kisses as well as spells?" I asked. "Surely a woman's dreams embrace more than elves and fairies?"

She did not leave the shelter of the pillar, only looked at me from its shadow. "Perhaps they do," she told me. "I used to see my godmother as clearly as I see you. She came to me in the daytime, real as the corn, bright as dawn on a stream. Now she visits only after dark, when there is no light to see how she wears her hair or the color of her dress." She squeezed my hand tightly, and her voice rose, colored with hope. "But last night was different. She came to me, really and truly. She promised me you."

Though her face and manner held me in thrall, I could make little sense of her childish words. I took them for flattery and fell into the easy habit of flirtation. "Promises," I told her, bowing gallantly, "must not be broken." With that, I took her arm and whirled her deeper into the alcove we'd found under the arch of the marble stairs. We danced on, just the two of us, plotting like runaways, smuggling in morsels from the banquet table. We formed our own tiny kingdom there, like the make-believe land I used to inhabit when my mother and father fought.

Before he died, the king had vanquished thousands of enemy troops but never won a single confrontation with his queen. As my mother's voice rose higher, spiraling toward outrage and anguish, the servants would shake their heads and Father would retreat to his chambers, apologizing, begging forgiveness all the way down the hall.

While these battles royal raged, I would hide under these very same stairs, my hands against my ears. If I closed my eyes, I could travel far away from the yelling and from the dark, intricate oaths issuing from my father's rooms. But of course, such respites never last. Neither did my time with the fairy dancer, Cinderella.

Too soon, I saw her grow restless, watched her count from our sanctuary the guests who had begun to drift in laughing clusters toward the door. Then, high in the castle tower, above the gods and goddesses painted on the ceiling, a bell began to ring midnight. Stricken, Cinderella looked up the marble stairs toward the guards at the door. "I must go!" She grabbed her train, darted back into the sea of silk and satin from which I had plucked her, and disappeared.

"Wait!" Midnight tolled again, and my mother, determined but unhurried, moved toward me down the stairs. "You did not tell me your family's name!" I saw a small figure gliding like a skater across the field of gold and marble, then gave chase. "How will I know where to find you?"

Too late, I pushed my way through the crowd, brushed past my mother, and reached the door. I raged at the watchmen who had let her climb into the silver coach that clattered out the gate as the last stroke of midnight hammered against the sky.

One of the watchmen, a burly fellow big enough to break me in two if I had not been his prince, hung his head, ashamed, while the other two pointed to a lost star that lay glittering in the moonlight on the bottom step.

The queen followed me down the stairs and leaned over the star burning my palm. "In order to wear that shoe, one would have to be a fairy or a child," she decided, straightening. "If she is the first, you will never see her again. But if you danced this night with a human, I swear we will ferret her out."

They made a joke of the story. In the streets and markets, they laughed at the love-struck prince who sent soldiers to every town. Who had his hopes raised and dashed a thousand times before he finally found his commoner sweetheart in a merchant's kitchen beside the grate, her elbows sooty and her hair filled with ashes.

Of course, the wags made much of the fact that it was a house my father had once frequented. They took relish in reviving old scandals and the foolish boasts of a widow in the habit of bragging about her "connections" to the palace. But those gossips never saw the smile with which Cinderella ran to me that day. They did not hear her laugh, warm and triumphant, as I placed the glass slipper on her foot. "My friend," I told her, "I was not certain I would ever be this happy again."

"And I?" she replied, brushing away the soot that clung to my sleeve. "I knew I would. If not, I should have died." Now she opened her arms and I scooped her from the hearth. Her fawning sisters bobbed up and down, bowing and crying as I helped her to my horse. Her stepmother stood bemused, then waved as if she had planned it all. She smiled at last, urging her daughters and her neighbors to bid us farewell as we raced like children to our palace of dreams.

Not without cost. The fact that my sweetheart's father had been, before he died, a wealthy man did little to stop busy tongues. Like a poison that infected the court and the market alike, talk of "Cinderella, the barefoot princess" spread everywhere. Old wives giggled over their stewpots, and ladies in waiting whispered at their sewing. They chattered and cackled and chewed on the story as though it were a meaty bone. How she had won a prince's heart, how she had cast a spell and caught a kingdom. Yet my mother, who usually despised such gossip, seemed not to mind.

"This foolish prattle will pass," she told me one morning. She had taken, since I'd brought home my future wife, to summoning me every day to her chambers, to looking more flushed and eager as the marriage date drew near. It was as if she, not Cinderella, were to be wed. "Before your father died, there were rumors, too. The people love to think their rulers fall in love with commoners. It is nothing—all idle, empty talk."

I had heard the gossip myself, the tired legend of my father's dalliances, his fondness for castle servants, tavern wenches, and finally a certain comely widow whose company he enjoyed until the queen's soldiers visited her home and persuaded her it was best to foreswear royal companionship. Though the king had died more than a dozen years before, this perverse legacy lived on. It was, in fact, nearly all I had left of him. I was only a lad of four, after all, when the great bells pealed all night and my mother took to her bed. I cried then, kicking my toy soldiers from their orderly phalanxes and burying them deep in the furthest corner of the kitchen garden. Now, though, I could barely remember the face of the man whose death had made a kingdom weep.

"Our subjects will have other things to occupy their idle tongues once you take the throne, my son. When your father's bloodline is assured, there will be no stopping us. Armies will be mustered; taxes will be raised. We will live as our birthrights demand."

I considered the balls, the jewels, the damask tablecloths and mirrored halls. "We already live beyond most people's dreams," I told her. "What more could you want?"

The queen's maids sat around her that day, two whispering over a tapestry, one plucking softly at a mandolin. My mother, who had been sewing as she spoke, stood suddenly, showering the floor with brocade and ribbon. "I have waited a long time for what your marriage will bring," she told me. Her fervor, her eagerness, filled her face with light and made it younger than her years.

"And when, may I ask, am I to meet the princess apparent?" She sat again, her servants hastening to pick up the tumbled ribbons and lay them in her lap. She sighed then, her eyes closed and one ringed hand on her breast. "Am I not to see for myself the treasure you have wrested from its hiding place?"

I sat beside her. "You know very well that Cinderella and I have come to visit you every day. But you have been busy with your maids or else in your bath."

It was an old trick of hers, making me wait. I recalled running to her chambers, as a boy, with some urgent news, some childish triumph. I would stand outside that intricate, sweet-smelling realm of hers, slices of laughter fluttering out to me whenever the door opened. Like an exile from the promised land, I yearned to be let in. Sometimes it was days and days between my glimpses of her, so that at last nothing seemed as important, nothing as wondrous, as what I had been denied.

It was not until the wedding day that my wife and my mother met face-to-face. In the interim, my sweetheart and I walked in the garden, took rides in the woods, though all along I sensed that my orphaned darling, just like the motherless boy I had once been, was waiting only to meet the queen. Finally, to my sweet relief, the bells rang, our carriages lined up for the ride to church, and the horses stamped, their breath smoky in the morning air. The queen, decked in fur, put her white hand into my bride's and smiled thinly. The new princess, unschooled in subtlety, missed the condescension that set my mother's face as if it were carved. All Cinderella saw, to judge from the admiration that shone in her eyes, was a dark-haired beauty who burned like a cool taper beside her own bright flame.

And flame she did. Her dress was white silk lined with ermine, picked by my mother for its icy elegance. But my sunny love outshone her chaste gown, as lovely a bride as any dream could conjure. All the way to church, waving to the crowds from our velvet nest, the people's "barefoot princess" trailed beauty like streamers as crowds of goggle-eyed children chased our carriage down the street. Later, as we spoke the marriage pledges, our words trembling doves in the dark chapel, I watched tears trace her cheeks and melt into her smile.

That night, all the cruel gossip seemed forgotten. It was a small price to pay, as at last I led Cinderella to a candlelit room and closed the door. I took her hand and stooped to blow out the light beside our bridal bed. But her hand and her voice stopped me. "No, please. I can't see how lovely it is in the dark."

I shook my head, but obliged her. Then, with all the yearning that I had learned to stifle, with all the love I had saved, I untied her bodice and bent to kiss the brand-new face of love. She lifted her mouth to mine, but pulled back as I tried to unlace the shift that covered her breasts. "Do not take it off just yet," she said. "Let us dance first, you and I." She held her slender arms out to me and looked so like a child begging one more sweet that I walked into her embrace and held her fast. We whirled around the room while she sang off-key an old peasant song I had not heard in years.

"This is the way it was the night we met," she told me. "The magic felt just like this. The lights were shining, and you looked at me with just those eyes. Tell me what you saw."

"I saw my dream," I said. "I saw the fairest, most wondrous creature that ever walked the earth." She laughed, tossing her head and letting me slip my hand beneath the shift. "I saw a princess dressed in light, a fairy sporting moonbeams in her hair."

I laid her on the bed and began to kiss away the shift. Still she stopped me, begging for another dance. "Tell me how it was. How the magic made me look."

I could hardly speak for the knot of longing in my throat. But I held her gently, wooed her with tenderness and a patience born of years. "You looked as you do now." I touched her under the frothy gown she could not bear to part with. There would be time, I thought, for wearing away this shyness. Long chains of days together, filled with growing ease and love. She fell into the cloud of linens around us and her arms circled my neck. "As fair as any woman I hope to know."

***

When I woke my bride was gone and a single streak of sun shot across the floor and up the sheets. Once I had stowed the chamber pot and made my way to the window, the world seemed fresher, more promising than I had ever seen it. The trees trembled with excitement and every hill sloped toward some undiscovered joy. I dressed quickly, eager to find Cinderella, to spend our first day in the sweet intimacy I had nursed in my imagination for weeks.

I heard them laughing as I passed my mother's chambers. The sound stopped me in the cold hallway and drew me to the door. It was swung wide and I could see most of the sitting room from where I stood. A tiny tremor, not as sharp as disappointment, kept me on the threshold, watching the women at my mother's feet. They were clustered on pillows and footstools, some sewing, others working on the hair of the fair-headed beauty at the queen's knee. Her laugh was the gayest of all, as they fussed and giggled, rearranging combs and braiding tresses. "Is this the style you meant, Mother?" my sweetheart asked, turning to face the queen, then bringing a nervous hand to a curl that had strayed from its place. "Is it really French?"

My mother looked down from her perch above them. Her inspection was thorough and emotionless. "Exactly," she concluded at last. "It's perfect for you, my dear." There was a hint of a smile on her face, until she glanced up and saw me at the door. All the women followed her gaze, staring blankly, as if I were a curious menagerie specimen that had somehow wandered into their human society.

In that instant, something ancient and dispiriting gripped me, but I shook it off. When the frozen tableau spilled into action, bits of silk flying, a gilded mirror winking its bright eye at the ceiling, all the women rose and my mother walked to meet me. She stopped me just inside the door, and turned her face aside to be kissed.

Behind her trailed my Cinderella, flushed and self-conscious in her new coiffure. Again she touched a loose feather of hair. "Your mother has been showing me how they dress in the French court," she told me over the queen's shoulder. "Do you like it?"

I hardly heard her question. Her presence in my mother's chamber, her wild hair caught up in a stylish prison, disconcerted me. "I woke just now," I said, ignoring my mother's cheek and the ring of rustling skirts around me, "and you were gone."

She laughed nervously. "I am afraid I shall never be a stay-abed princess. I was up with the birds, and your mother was kind enough to send for me." She withdrew further behind the queen, deferential and shy, but her eyes swam with secret, hidden delight.

"Well, now that you are abroad," my mother announced, "your new bride is at your disposal. All that remains is to secure her Parisian look with a pin or two. Then she will join you in the garden." She moved forward, forcing me to step backwards out of the room. "Surely," she said, smiling at the women around her, "a prince's passions can be reined for fashion's sake." She nodded at one of the women who reached for the door. "And French fashion at that!" As they were shut away from me, I heard the laughter start up again and saw my princess giggling with the rest, one hand raised delicately to hide her mouth.

She spent most of that day with the queen. She stole back to me between her lessons in royalty, rushing to share each fresh marvel, each trinket or mannerism that removed her further and further from the sweet openness with which I had fallen in love. When dinner was over and night pried her from my mother's side, I proposed a different sort of lesson.

"Let us ride tomorrow, just the two of us," I said. "I know a stream that will take us far from courtly courtesies and gossip. A place made for whispers and long embraces."

"Oh, no, we cannot," she told me, alarmed. "We must not. Your mother has arranged for three of her finest seamstresses to fit me tomorrow. Besides, why on earth would we want to leave the castle?" Her question stung only a little, a tiny prick like a spring bumblebee's. "Who would ever want to leave such happiness?"

"My love, your heart and not your eyes should tell you where happiness lies." I took her in my arms, remembering the night we had met, the way she had laughed without affectation, had looked at me with the steady, direct gaze of a child. "Surely you know that gowns and perfumed lace conceal and deceive? Sweep them away, toss them aside, and there is truth."

She pulled back from me, her sparkle turned hard. "'Sweep them away'?" Her lips pursed as if she had tasted something bitter beyond words. "'Toss them aside'? Who are you to preach simplicity? I have done without your sweet deceptions my whole life, while you were playing at draughts and bending your knee to nothing more demanding than a dance tune!"

"My dear bride," I told her. "My mother is full of beguilements, but you must—"

"I dreamt of your despised courtesies while I lived a life of truth and ashes. Your gowns and your gossip kept me alive and warm with desire." She walked to the window, pulled back the curtain, and stared at the garden, frosted with moonlight. "Sweep them away? I would sooner die!"

Her back was as straight and narrow as a flame. From the bed, I spoke to that small, imperious spine. "Can you not see what the queen is doing?" I asked. "She wants to mold you, change you." Impossibly, her back grew straighter still. "She wants to put out your spark, to leave you cold and false. My love, you are to be a mirror in which she sees herself."

Cinderella let the drape fall back, pale fists at her sides. "I hope she can mold me! I pray she will!" She moved forward like a sleepwalker, her voice low, her eyes misted, unfocused. "When I lay by the hearth without a mother or father to warm me, when I scrubbed and slopped and hoed, when my hands and feet turned raw from the cold of the barn, I dreamt of a beautiful woman who would love me."

"But dearest—"

"And now I have found her at last. Your mother looks precisely like the fairy guardian I conjured out of loneliness and hurt. She has come back to me, more beautiful even than my childish hopes."

"Is it not time, my love, to put away your godmother's imaginary spells? To give up these sad old dreams?" I led her to the mirror beside our bed. I turned her to face the two of us in its glass. "Here is your present and your future. Here is your new life."

She studied our reflections, but her eyes seemed to peer deep inside the glass, behind my consternation, past her own loveliness. "'Old'? 'Sad'?" she said, mocking me. "Sad enough to turn a house wench into a princess! Old enough to make a queen my mother! A mother who will stay with me always, just as I dreamt."

"I am with you, too." My tone was petulant; even I heard the small boy's whine behind my words. (I am sorry I made you unhappy, Mama. I have been so lonely without you.) Perhaps moved by my pitiable tone, Cinderella came to bed then, sat beside me while I unbuttoned her jeweled vest. Like an obedient pet, she allowed me to undress her until I tried to slip away the long layers of petticoat that rustled around us.

"Wait," she begged as before, her eyes staring so deeply into mine, I thought she had found a new mirror there. "Tell me how it was that night. How you fell in love with a fairy princess. How she danced and whirled and stole your heart away."

When a kitten slips its head beneath your hand, it is little enough trouble to pet it, to stroke the soft head and back until it purrs. She required only a few words, a memory that pleased us both. So I told her again how she shone at the ball. How no eyes could look away from the lovely dancer, how the hours were like minutes as the blue satin swept round the room and the glass slippers spun webs of light across the floor.

As I recited the litany, she held me tight, her nails digging through my shirt. Each time I paused, she pulled away and held me at arm's length, laughing. "More!" she demanded, tossing her head like a spoiled child. "Tell me more!" And like a doting fool with a pretty changeling on his lap, I helped her see it all again: the grand hall lined with glittering torches, the tapestried walls, the carved satyrs holding up a painted sky. And at the center of it all, whirling like a firefly, a fragile golden girl catching us in her spell.

My hands under the petticoats, I retold the rings that had sparkled through her lace gloves. Against her ear, her neck, her damp white breast, I whispered of the satin bows at which the queen had stared in fascination from her balustrade decked with flowers. When the story was done, Cinderella sighed softly and drew me to her.

I woke again to an empty bed. Sweating, I rolled away from the stream of sun that striped the pillow, dressed hurriedly, and went in search of my bride. There was no one in the queen's chambers but an aged servant who had been ordered to wait for me. "They are in the east garden," she told me over her sewing. "They request you to join them there."

Fussing with roses and chattering amid stalks of lilies, my wife and mother looked up with mild annoyance when I arrived. "Oh, good. You're here at last." While she spoke, the queen advanced on the lilies, cutting blooms with a precise and practiced hand. The huge white heads dropped one by one into a basket held by the princess beside her. "We have a boon to ask, have we not, my dear?"

A small rose the color of egg yolk peeked from my wife's hair. "Yes," she said, smiling uncertainly into my mother's steely eyes. I had to laugh now at my foolish fear that the queen could mold Cinderella into an image of herself. Standing together, the two could not have looked more different. One was dark and stately, with a sharpness that had already hardened her beauty. The other was fair and changeable as sunlight, as innocent as a new day. "That is, your mother thought, and so did I..."

"It would be a wedding gift," my mother finished for her. "A way of announcing your choice to all the world." She bent to snip a calla, then stood again, the silver shears flashing. "A way, too, of putting an end to vicious talk and preserving honor in the wake of your somewhat hasty match."

I knew the talk of Princess Cinders was painful, not only to the queen, but to my love as well. "Worthy goals all," I admitted warily. "But why are the means so long in coming?"

The queen turned to cut another flower while my sweetheart raced to place the basket by her side. "Not long at all," Mother announced, "provided a little decisiveness can be mustered to undertake a somewhat distasteful task."

"Such as?"

She faced me now, forcing the princess to scurry to her other side. "We want your bride's stepmother and sisters executed."

I could hardly believe my ears. I searched Cinderella's face for a trace of the horror I felt myself. But in the countenance she raised to the queen's, I saw only adoration. "Three lives lost for honor's sake?" I could not hide my outrage. "What sort of honor is it, Mother, that requires human sacrifice?" The basket of lilies dipped as I raised my voice, the ponderous heads rolling around its rim. "If honor breeds such schemes, I would hate to see the work of knaves."

"Is it knavish, then, to right wrongs?" The queen, hooking her shears to a chain around her waist, bore down on me, and the princess backed away. "To avenge the trials and strife your wife has undergone?"

"Those are avenged in her every day with me." I stepped to my bride, forcing her to face me and look into my eyes. "My friend," I told her, "you are my princess and my wife. Do you need to draw blood in confirmation of our love?"

Like the sun drawn to the earth, my wife's eyes left mine and sought support in my mother's tranquil smile. "I—I only want to know that love is stronger than fear, that those horrible women can never hurt me again.

"Last night while you were sleeping, I thought I woke beside the grate again, covered with ashes. My eyes were filled with smoke and my head ached from the names they had hurled at me like stones." She lowered her head now, and her voice dropped to a whisper. "'Cinderella' was the least of them. I cannot tell the rest."

I took the basket from her and would have put my arms around her, but the queen drew her aside. "You shall not suffer so again," she said, an overblown, theatrical pity in her voice. She looked back at me as she led the princess away. "Not if you have a consort who will strike a blow for love." She paused, and both women turned to face me. "Not if he can overcome his fine scruples long enough to set us free from the past."

They left me with the blank-faced lilies. I circled the garden until the flowers had closed and the grass was wet with dew. "To set us free," my mother had said. I remembered now the stone house where I'd found Cinderella, and the three women who had stood, open-mouthed, as I carried her off. My bride's stepmother, I realized with a dawning horror, might have been the very widow in whose easy embrace my father found solace so long ago. I thought of the simpering pair who had called Cinderella sister and kissed her farewell as we rode away. Perhaps those sorry women were more my sisters than hers! Had my mother waited, biding her time until she could work this hideous revenge? Had it been in her mind the night of the ball, when she'd leaned over the balcony and pointed out my love?

***

I did not go to supper that night but spent hours in my father's deserted chambers, reading his old decrees. There were edicts governing taxes and farming, commerce and war. There were gifts to churches and convents and bans on unfair tolls and tithing. In all these instruments, I found a voice I dimly recognized. Though many of these documents had been canceled by the queen's council, they spoke with kindness and respect to people who supported the crown through long days of endless toil.

This voice, this kindness, brought back a moment that until now had been lost to me. I saw myself and my father, on one of his rare stays at home, a brief sojourn between foreign wars. I was perhaps three or four years old and had played all day, without remonstrance, by his side. "You shall be a dandy prince, will you not, lad?" he asked, laughing as I put both my small feet into one of his boots. I laughed, too, hopping about in that giant buskin until I tumbled to the floor.

"You must not be a cruel king, eh?" He leaned down from above me, his smile suddenly vanished. "You must not rise by oppressing those below you." I remembered nodding then, because he looked so solemn, though I had no idea what he meant.

And now I searched through his legacy, the whole body of Royal Law. I saw no countenance of arbitrary execution there, no circumstance that allowed for punishment without a crime. When my taper at last failed and my eyes were closing on my own frightful visions, I stole softly to our bedroom and lay down beside my sleeping wife. I hoped I might dream, might travel back to that day spent with my father, and ask him for advice. But I never slept at all, only lay awake listening to Cinderella's light and easy breaths.

The next day, neither my mother nor my wife left me any peace. The queen made speeches about loyalty and duty, while my love sat beside her, nodding like an eager puppet. Though I had hoped her natural kindness would dissuade her from such madness, she found every chance, even when we were alone, to plead for the death of her family. For three nights, she wept and relived the hurtful past, and nothing would move her from the queen's plan.

I did not realize how completely and with what horrible fidelity Cinderella was emulating her new mother until the fourth day after our conference in the garden. I woke that morning to find her still in bed beside me. At first, I was delighted to think she might have chosen my company over the queen's. As if to assure myself she was real and not a dream conjured up by my greedy heart, I touched a spun-glass curlet by her ear. "Good morning, friend," I whispered. "I am glad to find I married a stay-abed, after all."

But the eyes she turned on me were moist and ringed with blue shadows. Her skin was pallid, her voice small and tired. "It is not for pleasure I lie here," she said, "but rather for the lack of pleasure once I rise."

"Why? What is lacking for you, love?" I asked. "You need only tell me and it is yours."

She raised a pale hand to her forehead and looked at me through half-closed eyes. "I have already told you, and yet you will not save me from the demons that pursue me."

"What demons? Name them and they are gone."

"My stepmother and stepsisters," she said. "The ghosts who trail shame and pain, who walk abroad and flaunt my humble past. They are free to spread gossip while I am imprisoned by their evil tongues and cannot show my face beyond these walls."

"Nonsense!" I told her, cupping her chin in my hand. "Who would look on this countenance and believe it anything but noble and divine?" In truth, though, I was unnerved by her white lips and the feverish drops between her brows. "Why all this talk of blood and death from someone who lived for dreams only a few short weeks ago? Which of them has not come true?" I left the bed and pulled aside the drapes. The room grew brighter, but I felt strangely chilled. "What did you long for that has not come to pass?"

"You know well what it is I long for," Cinderella told me. She rolled onto her back and stared vacantly at the ceiling. "I want them dead. And if you loved me, you would want it, too."

The princess stayed in bed from then on. And because she claimed to be too ill for visitors, I was banished to my father's chambers. Each day when I knocked on her door, I heard muffled sounds, the scrambling of servants, and then was greeted by a maid, who told me Cinderella was in her bath ... or with her ladies ... or too weak for conversation. As spring turned to summer and summer to fall, I was admitted to her rooms only seldom, and on each of these precious visits found her more wasted and wan than before.

So long as I refused to consider sending her family to their deaths, my wife lay exhausted in her bed. Her face, gaunt and anguished, reproached me, though she spoke few words now, only stared at me like a forlorn ghost. And if I sometimes caught sight of a brightly colored morning dress peeking from beneath her sheets, if I heard, occasionally, the vestiges of laughter and gay conversations cut short when I entered her domain, it mattered little. What pressed on me, what weighed on me night and day, was the absence of what I craved. The feeling that I had an ally who would stand with me against the cunning contrivances of court had dissolved. In vain, I waited for dreams of my father at night; in vain, I waited for my sweet friend to come to me by day. Until the waiting wore me down and I could stand it no more. The day I signed the order for the arrests, Cinderella began a steady, glowing recovery.

Which meant, of course, I saw even less of her than before. With her health, her appetite for royal amusements was restored, even doubled. There was no parlor game, no ballet or theatrical, no audience with pandering gossips, that did not find her sitting, deweyed and worshipful, beside my mother. Unless I chose to join in these empty pastimes, and I seldom did, I missed my wife more than ever. From my lonely waking to the evening meal, I was again deprived of the tender companion I had met at the ball. Only night drove her to our chambers, which she could no longer deny me. But when we were alone at last, she would sigh deeply, as if to remind me that our time together was the price she paid for the glittering company of the queen.

The morning of the execution dawned chilly and fair. In the sewing room, where I went to find Cinderella, my mother pretended over her loom to have forgotten what day it was. She spoke of dresses and poets, but as her needle disappeared and reappeared above the cloth, I noticed an immodest shine in her eyes, an expectant, nervous gleam. "The princess," she answered my unspoken question, "has not joined us yet this morning. Perhaps she has need of some privacy today."

I hoped that it was true, hoped that, after all, my wife had found again the gentle heart I'd felt beating beside mine when we first danced. This ugly business must, at last, have sickened her soul. I paced the length of the room, feeling the same dizzy ing revulsion that had undoubtedly sent her into hiding. But where?

I decided to search the garden, thinking to find her weeping at the site where she had first begged me to put her family to death. I was determined, as I raced outdoors, to pull her from her knees, to forgive her pauper's greediness, to welcome home the bright and passionate child for whom I still pined. Perhaps, if we acted quickly, there was yet time to save her family's lives.

But the garden was empty, save for the blood-red roses and the new buds that had sprouted to take the place of the blooms the queen had cut. As I started back to the palace, I met one of my mother's serving maids coming back from market. Wearing a rough brown cloak over her head and scrambling up the rock-studded path from town, the girl was in such a hurry, she nearly ran into me.

There was something in her furtive, headlong rush that made me certain of her mission. Though my mother feigned indifference, I knew she must be eager to confirm the executions. There seemed little doubt she had sent a servant to witness the gruesome spectacle. Suddenly, all my own guilt and anguish over the event seemed focused on this innocent messenger, and I stepped into the middle of the path to block her way. I could not bear to let her run to my mother with her bloody news; as if I could prevent the deed by barring its report, I grabbed the poor creature by the shoulders and ordered her to stop.

When the cloak fell away to reveal Cinderella's spun-glass hair, I backed away, astonished. "I saw it all," she told me, a broad, ingenuous grin lighting her face. "I even got a lock of Lucinda's hair!" Triumphant, she held up a curlicue of fine dark locks. I turned my head away as if it might burn my eyes.

"You should have seen the people!" she went on, her eyes shining. "They were all pushing and shoving behind me, but I stayed right up front. That is how I managed to get this lock. I walked up and pulled it off her before anyone could stop me."

I had not seen my bride so animated since the night of the ball. She had forgotten all her lessons in refinement and was aglow with her old unbridled eagerness. "Their bodies did not twitch at all afterward, but you should have seen their eyes roll. I looked right at them, and I swear those three horrible heads knew just who I was!"

She was panting with excitement, as if she could not part with the details fast enough. "There really was not very much blood, you know. Stepmother bled the most, but that is because she fought the ax man hardest. You would not believe how she wriggled and cried out. Why, she was down on her knees before they even put her neck on the block. 'Fetch my stepdaughter,' she cried. 'Send for the princess! Tell her what they are doing to us!'"

Pausing for breath, she undid the cloak from her neck and stood, proud and radiant, in a pale yellow gown. "How I wanted to speak up and tell her I was there! I wanted her to look straight at me when the ax fell!"

My head was spinning, and a poisonous, bitter taste filled my mouth. I closed my eyes on her brightness, but her happy voice found me still. "Of course, a princess cannot afford to be seen in the streets like that. So I kept my peace and pulled this old cloak tight around me." She paused again, a touch of indignation softening her relish. "I only wish they had let me take a lock of Stepmother's hair, too. If the executioner had known who I was, he would never have dared push me away."

***

That night it was I who took to my bed. Pleading illness, I bid my wife good night at the door to our chamber and went to sleep again in my father's old rooms at the end of the hall. I was hardly guilty of deception, since the minute I lay down I was swept by trembling and nausea. I closed my eyes and, sweating mightily, let the waves of sickness wash over me. Their rhythm was somehow reassuring: the pain and then the brief reprieve, the quiet, hopeless space into which I could fit one or two breaths, succeeded by the harsh, grinding pain. Absorbed in this pattern, surrendering to its awful symmetry, I fell at last into a dreamless sleep.

It was next day I met Lynette, a dairy maid in the palace stables. Of course, I had seen her before, plump and charming and careless. She laughed too loud, slapped her thighs, and was forever picking straw from her hair. It was not hard to guess how it had gotten there. All the stable boys and several of the kitchen crew found endless excuses to tarry in the milking barn.

I could not blame them. As my own days grew emptier and my nights more hounded by guilt, I began to spend hours at a time lulled by her guileless chatter and her generous impulses. "If you like the milk of cows," Lynette took to telling me, winking naughtily and cupping her mountainous breasts, "you shall find much sweeter here."

Day after day, I was drawn back to her like the rest. The queen and my princess never missed me, so there was nothing to prevent my trips to the barn. Besides, there was something cleansing about the sweet breath of the cows and the steady rhythm of the buckets filling as Lynette milked. At first she took no special notice of my presence, but soon she must have sensed my need, my desperate case. She sent the others away and saved all her jokes and sly teasing for me.

In the beginning, these meetings were merely a way to fill idle hours, but now the scamp affords me pleasures as rich as any I fancied at that long-ago ball. My dairy maid is no princess, nor does she wish to be. But she lifts her skirts and wraps her dimpled thighs around me with a will. And I tarry longer and longer with her in the loft. As each afternoon fades into dusk, I rise reluctantly from our bed of hay. I push her from me, laughing. "Stop, Lady Lynette," I protest, bidding her cover herself and cease our play. "If I am any happier it must show upon my face. And for the sweet Lord's sake, help me brush this straw from my clothes."

Though in truth there is no need to hide, to proffer proof of my fidelity to Cinderella. She requires no troth, no lust, no love. She asks merely for the same tired recitation each night. As we lie in our silken bed, three times the size of the loft that I prefer, it is only the story she begs for, the same words over and over. And because it frees me in so many ways, I am not loath to tell the tale again. "The palace was bedecked with torches," I begin, "and young women from across the kingdom had come to the ball to meet their prince."

"And then?" she asks, her voice hoarse with longing.

"And then," I tell her, "a lovely stranger stepped out of a silver coach and into the prince's heart. She was more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen, more dazzling than a fairy queen."

Cinderella listens and nods, prompting me if I forget any part of the tired tale. She sighs and smiles, even as her eyes close and the story sends her off to sleep.