Beauty did not make ready to go off in search of her mother! Instead, she found reasons for delay!]
ANOTHER TIME. ANOTHER DAY. I DON’T KNOW WHEN, YET.
In the days that followed Giles’s departure, while I was still supposedly nailed into the tower, I moved freely about the stables, fretting about the three significant events soon to occur: my approaching birthday (which I was determined to survive without being victim of the curse), Papa’s postponed marriage to Sibylla (to take place when he got matters straightened out with the church), and my departure in search of my mama, happenings that would occur, I presumed, more or less in that order even though I knew I should forget about the birthday and the wedding and just go, now, while I had the chance. Good sense said go, voices in my head said go, dreams said go, but my stomach said stay.
I found myself making excuses to go into the great hall and look at the dome, excuses to walk along the walls, peering at the mosaic floors, excuses to go upstairs and downstairs, slowly, listening to the sounds, smelling the smells. I found myself crying at odd moments at the thought of leaving Westfaire at all, and besides, as I frequently told myself, it is hard to plan a journey when one has no idea where one is going.
I’d never felt quite so alone and lost before. Always before, in the back of my mind, Giles had been there, sturdy and dependable. I’d always known I could go to him if there was real trouble. Or, Father Raymond had been there. Now Giles was gone, and since Father Raymond had sent him away, I couldn’t count on him either. Papa and the aunts were just useless. Martin didn’t have time to help. Doll was busy, bustling around, directing the other maids who were carrying water up and chamber pots down. I grabbed her arm and made her listen to me.
“Mama said she left me means to find her, but all she left me was this box,” I told Doll. “I can’t find anything helpful in it.” I showed it to her. She looked at it and its contents, quickly, between doing two other things, at the packet of needles and at the signet ring with what I now recognized as a fairy on it and the three hanks of thread: heavy brown, medium black, and fine, silken white. She shook the box to see if there was anything else inside, but there was no secret compartment. It is just a wooden box, and not a very big one.
“If the Lady your mother said she left something for you, then she did,” said Doll. “And if this box is all you have, then this box is what she meant. You keep it safe. Sooner or later, you’ll find out what it’s for.” She turned away from me to tell a new servant not to use the Duchess’s Staircase, which is what they called the wide curving graceful flight which comes up from the great hall.
“I wish I knew what to do with it,” I complained, wishing Doll would pay attention to me. Wishing somebody would.
“Well, you could sew with it,” suggested Doll, glaring at me. “That’s what people usually do with needles and thread, and it would keep you from bothering me while I get this work done.” She ran off after the new maid, who’d gone in the wrong direction.
My feelings were hurt, but the suggestion made sense. I went into one of the attics and scruffed around, discovering some lengths of black tussah silk, probably left over from Grandma’s time. I took them and a handful of nuts and some dried apples into the empty stall I’d been occupying to keep me out of the aunts’ way and sat myself down on a pile of straw to sew, which was one thing I’d learned to do pretty well in sixteen years, believe me. In the winter there’s not much else to do. I’ve done enough cushion covers and mended enough tapestries to stretch from Westfaire to East Sawley, plus all the hours spent with Aunt Marj mending bodices or starting new tapestries that won’t get finished for a hundred years. I told myself that if the curse got me, and if they went on working while I was asleep, the tapestries might be finished in time for my awakening a century from now, in 1447. The fifteenth century!
For the first time, I realized what that meant! If I slept for a hundred years, all the aunts and Papa would be dead. Papa would probably die before Sibylla did. With him gone, Sibylla would probably store my sleeping body in a cellar somewhere, if she didn’t go ahead and bury me, out of spite! And then, when Sibylla died, who would come after her?
I imagined Westfaire abandoned, wrecked, sold off to pay Sibylla’s debts, and I wanted to scream. And who was going to take care of a sleeping person for a hundred years? I simply couldn’t see Sibylla or her children caring whether I lived to wake up or not!
I made myself stop thinking about it by laying out the fabric and the thread and measuring both carefully to see whether there was enough to make a cloak. Straight cloaks are very easy. Father Raymond taught me the pattern, because they’re almost the same as the monks wear, except the monks’ don’t open down the front. First you cut one flat piece as long as from your shoulders to your heels and wider across than your shoulders, for the back. Then you cut four more pieces, the same length and half that wide. Two of these are for the front. The third one gets cut in half, and then each piece folded in half again for sleeves.
