I did not tell her that men often said such things. Even pretty princes said such things. Even Giles had said such things. I went to my room to think. To think and to get dressed. My hair was down around my shoulders. I had nothing on but a stained underdress. I looked like a woman who had been made love to on the grass all night. I could not let myself think of Giles, for whenever I did, I trembled.
While I struggled with myself, events transpired without me. The first I knew of it was when I rose to a sound outside, went to the window, and saw Giles himself below, flourishing a scroll from which he was pretending to read his already memorized message.
“Know all men, by these words, that Prince-So-and-So of Marvella announces his intention of marrying the maiden whose foot fits the shoe he found last night upon the stairs. The prince rides after me, bringing the shoe to try on all maidens of this house.” While I watched, Giles accepted a glass of wine from Lydia and told her the tale, looking about himself the while, looking for me, I supposed. I hurried to get myself dressed, thinking betimes that the work of the marriage broker had already been done by someone else. This public pronouncement was almost as good as a betrothal. The prince was determined to have his way, but Elly had no dowry that I knew of and the prince’s parents might still have much to say about that.
By the time I got my hair braided and got downstairs, however, Giles had already ridden away. I found Lydia in the garden, agog. When she had finished repeating the tale three or four times, with embellishments, I asked her what marriage portion Edward had settled upon Elladine before he died.
She flushed. “I’m sure he meant to,” she said. “He didn’t mean to die so soon.”
“You mean he didn’t provide for her,” I challenged. “Surely, then, you intend to make up for his lack of foresight.”
She pursed her lips. “I’ve thought of it,” she said, not looking me in the eye. “But it’s really up to Edward to say. As soon as he’s reached his majority, I’m sure he will do something about it. He won’t be of age, of course, for a number of years.”
“Fifteen years,” I said drily. “Elladine will be a bit old by then. Thirty-some-odd. A confirmed spinster.”
“She could enter a convent,” Lydia suggested eagerly. “I’ve been meaning to mention that to her.”
Foolishly, I did not advise Lydia that she reconsider and talk with me again before making any such suggestion. While I went on thinking of ways and means, Lydia went straight to Elly and suggested she enter a nunnery. I heard Elly’s scream of rage and got there just in time to prevent her killing her stepmother, though not in time to prevent the attack. The expression on Elly’s face was one I did not want to see. It was Jaybee’s face, as it had been when I had last seen it, full of towering fury and indomitable determination. She could have killed Lydia gladly, and I feared somewhat that she might do so yet, or do something even more dreadful.
The prince arrived with the shoe in midafternoon. Gloriana was first to try it on, able only to get her big toe into it. She retreated in tears, while Griselda tried. I was there, with Lydia. The prince was there, with a couple of his men, but not Giles. Casually, I asked after Giles and was told he had not returned from his heralding, which had somewhat surprised the prince. There was some courtly chit-chat, though not a lengthy conversation, and Griselda gave up the attempt.
I said, “There’s another girl in the house who must try it on.”
Lydia glared at me, but I sent a maid after Elly, whose voice I could hear in the kitchen.
We were waiting for Elly to appear when we heard the scream. Gloriana’s voice. Lydia and I ran. We found Gloriana in the kitchen, the great meat cleaver still in her hand, her left foot cut half through and blood spurting in all directions. Gloriana had done it herself. In the corner, Elly watched with a remote smile.
“What did you do?” I hissed at her.
“I just told her her feet were too big,” Elly said indifferently. “That they might fit if she cut them in half.” She took the other glass slipper from her pocket and went out to the waiting gentlemen while we struggled mightily to stop Gloriana’s bleeding. The huge girl was too strong for us. She fought us off until she had lost so much blood that it was too late to help her. While Elly melted into the arms of her prince outside in the garden, Lydia and those of us in the kitchen gathered around the body of her stepsister and wept. Gloriana was not a pleasant girl. She was a great cow of a girl, with a cow’s mute and intransigent hungers. She had little intelligence. Still, there was something monstrously tragical about the manner of her death, not the least that it has shown me what my daughter is. Of the two of them, Elly had been the more brutish.
ST. WILFRID’S DAY, OCTOBER, YEAR OF OUR LORD 1367
Gloriana was buried in the chapelyard at Wellingford. Elly lay on her bed in her room and dreamed lascivious dreams. The prince had a tantrum in his own suite at his own house, but his parents remained adamant that they would not allow his marriage to a woman without a dowry. It was no more than I had expected. I got the warrant out from the hole where I’d hidden it and took it to London, where I sought the man who had issued it, a Jew named Yeshua ben Levi. Yeshua was dead of plague. I found his son. His house had advised my
