While Beauty Slept Read Free Page A

against her chest, something she had not done since I was a small child.
    “There, there,” she murmured. “You must hold your head high. I will see you make something of yourself, no matter what the circumstances of your birth.”
    “Do you think I might be accepted in service? At the castle?”
    I could imagine no greater accomplishment, so I was surprised to see my mother hesitate, her face tense with concern. She does not want me to go, I thought, seeing her reaction as a mother’s natural inclination to keep her child close to home. Now, so many years later, I wonder if she was planning to warn me away. Given her own sad history, she knew only too well the malevolent intrigues that hide behind courtly manners. Had a cart not come rattling up behind us, causing Mother to extract herself from our embrace and offer a curt nod of greeting to the farmer who passed us by, what might she have said?
    “Come along,” she urged, self-consciously straightening her sleeves as the cart rumbled off. “Your father will be expecting his dinner.”
    My heart sank as I imagined his harsh complaints if we were late. Mother ran a finger gently along my cheek.
    “Your face is so browned from the harvesting,” she said. “Time your brothers took on more of the field work. I won’t have you grow up with the skin of a country bumpkin.”
    “Then you agree?” I asked hesitantly. “That I might find a place at court one day?” My stomach fluttered with expectation.
    “Now is hardly the time for such a discussion,” she said. “We shall see, when you are older.”
    At ten years old, I felt my future stretch before me as an unending horizon, with the years of my adulthood impossibly distant. There was time enough to ponder my prospects, to plot the course of my life. But whenever I tried to discuss going into service, Mother changed the subject, and in time I stopped asking.
    We did not speak of the castle again until the day she died.

    The spring I turned fourteen, fierce rainstorms turned our fields into rivers of mud, delaying the planting even as our winter food stores dwindled. Father had begun to speak of marrying me off early, saying that it would be one less mouth to feed, and such was my hunger that I might have said “I do” to any man who offered me a warm meal. While some trade on their looks to improve their marriage prospects, I did not think such a tactic could work in my favor. When I gazed at my reflection in the river, I saw no signs of the beauty that was remarked upon in certain other girls of the village. While their hair was golden blond and their eyes blue or green, my thick, wavy hair was a deep chestnut brown. My dark eyes, while large and pleasingly framed by long lashes, were incapable of mimicking the flirtatious glances other women had perfected; I looked upon the world with a direct, forthright gaze. I did note a few marks in my favor: My complexion was clear and even, and the curves of my hips and chest gave my body a healthy solidity. With the right clothes, I might make a fitting shopkeeper’s wife, a fate that had become the height of my ambition.
    In the end, another village wedding allowed me to delay my own. A wealthy landowner’s wife hired Mother to embroider linens for her soon-to-be-married daughter, saving us from starvation. I shouldered as much of the burden as I could, sitting by the fireside well into the night with a needle in hand, squinting at the flowers I created with colored thread. Life in our one-room cottage revolved around the fireplace, the only place one could be assured of warmth. My mother spent hours there, cooking and heating water for washing; when it was too cool to dry laundry outside, damp underclothes hung on a line in front of the hearth, and we had to fight with the swaying fabric to claim a spot for ourselves. The flour, salt, and oats we were paid for the needlework allowed our family to survive another month, and we thought the worst behind us.
    Then the