Just Ella Read online

  “You’ve not heard the story going around the palace?” he asked. “About how you got to come to the ball when your evil stepmother had locked you in the cellar?”

  “Lucille isn’t e—,” I started to protest, in an unusual surge of loyalty. Then I remembered Jed must have seen her, in all her frilly purple dressing-gown glory, the day I left. So he knew. “Well, she didn’t lock me in the cellar. She just told me I had to scrub it out by hand before she and Griselda and Corimunde returned.”

  “All right,” Jed said. “Close enough. And you were in tears about it. But then your fairy godmother appeared.”

  I gave him a “You have got to be kidding” look, but let him keep talking.

  “Your fairy godmother appeared and waved her magic wand and turned your rags into a ball gown, complete with glass slippers. Then she took a pumpkin and some mice and turned them into a carriage and horses. But she said her magic could last only until midnight—that’s why you were in such a rush to leave at the stroke of twelve that you left one of your glass slippers behind. Which, everyone knows, is how the prince found you.”

  By the time Jed got to the one detail that was true, I was laughing so hard tears were streaming down my face.

  “Some . . . someone . . . actually . . . believes that?” I finally sputtered between giggles.

  “It’s more plausible than you as a Domulian princess,” Jed said with a grin. “What’s the truth?”

  “Well,” I started slowly, “it wasn’t quite that exciting.”

  And yet, I felt a surge of exhilaration just thinking about that night. Not just because I’d met the prince and fallen in love and started on my course toward happiness ever after, but because I’d made something happen. I’d done something everybody had told me I couldn’t. I’d changed my life all by myself. Having a fairy godmother would have ruined everything.

  “Promise you won’t tell anyone?” I said. “I mean, it probably doesn’t matter to anyone else, but if the king and queen and the prince still want to keep up the fiction that I’m foreign royalty, I don’t want to spread my story.”

  Jed nodded. “Of course,” he said.

  I started my tale.

  “Once upon a time,” I said mischievously, wrinkling my nose so Jed would know I was making fun of the whole thing, “I was just a poor girl in rags. . . .”

  But somehow remembering everything transported me back, and I quickly settled into seriousness. I wasn’t even pretending to be Princess Cynthiana Eleanora anymore. I was myself again, Ella Brown, always hungry, always cold, always angry at my stepmother’s and stepsisters’ cruelties. . . .

  10

  I was scrubbing the kitchen floor when the invitation arrived by royal herald. There was a smart rap at the front door, and I began debating which would make Lucille angrier: me answering the door with a kerchief around my head and water dripping from the bottom of my skirt, or me not answering the door at all and leaving her or Corimunde or Griselda to the indignity of opening it themselves. I hadn’t decided yet when I heard Corimunde gasp.

  “Look, Gris, out the window.”

  I heard a flurry of swishing skirts and petticoats from the sitting room as they both apparently raced to the door. Thanks to a steady diet of bonbons, they each weighed twice what I did, and they rarely bestirred themselves for anything except to waddle into the dining room for their next meal. So I was sure whatever Corimunde was gasping about was worth a peek. Opening the kitchen door a crack, I had a direct view of the young, flaxen-haired man on the doorstep. He was stunningly handsome, with a physique I’d seen only in my father’s books about ancient gods and heroes. He wore tight black pants and a rich scarlet tailcoat, with a fancy design in gold on every pocket and lapel. He held a trumpet to his lips and blew two short blasts, then one long note of exquisite tone.

  “Your . . . Your Highness.” Corimunde was flustered, even for her.

  “S-s-sir,” Griselda stuttered.

  The man gave them both looks of withering scorn.

  “Hear ye, hear ye,” he boomed in a deep voice that somehow conveyed that he didn’t feel Corimunde and Griselda were worthy of his message, but that he was not one to shirk his work and would speak as grandly to them as he did to anyone else. “The king and queen hereby invite every young maiden in the kingdom to a ball in honor of their son, Prince Charming, on Saturday night four weeks hence, beginning at eight o’clock in the evening.”

  “Four weeks hence—would that be the twenty-second?” Griselda ventured timidly.

  “No, silly, the twenty-third,” corrected Corimunde. “The Saturday would have to be the twenty-third, because today’s the . . . uh . . . let’s see, I think it’s the—”

  “Four weeks hence,” the herald repeated firmly and bowed low, preparing to go.

  “Excuse me,” I said from my post in the kitchen. “Did you say every young maiden?”

  The herald looked up. By his face, I could tell he was preparing to give a disgusted retort, perhaps questioning the hearing of all the women in our household. But when he saw me, his expression softened into something I didn’t want to acknowledge as pity.

  “Aye, miss,” he said in an almost gentle tone. “Every young maiden.”

  “Now, wait just a minute.” It was Lucille, sweeping down from upstairs, where she’d been resting with a sick headache. “I would never dream of contradicting someone of your”—she looked him up and down, almost lecherously—“your stature, but surely you don’t mean that the king and queen would want their ball cluttered with mere beggars and servants and ragamuffins. My heavens—such squalor. Surely they mean only young ladies of high social standing and good breeding. Like my lovely daughters.” She waved her hand gracefully toward Griselda and Corimunde who, to their credit, at least attempted to stand up straight. Corimunde even stopped picking her nose momentarily.

  The royal herald looked from Lucille to my stepsisters to me.

  “The king has invited every young maiden,” he said. “You wish perhaps to contradict the king?”

  “Well, no, but—” Lucille laughed gently, trying to make him look foolish. “Perhaps you misunderstood.”

  “I did not,” the herald said adamantly. “Now, if you will excuse me. Good day.”

  He swept low again and departed. Corimunde and Griselda fell immediately to squabbling. “Now, why did you say that about the twenty-third? You could have looked it up on a calendar when he was gone—”

  “Oh, but I wanted to be sure—”

  “Silence!” Lucille barked.

  Corimunde and Griselda both shut up and peered up at her, still standing imperially on the stairs. Lucille’s command had certainly sounded strong enough, but now she began swaying weakly.

  “Oh, help me sit down, girls,” she demanded. Her daughters sprang to her side as quickly as they could, given their bulk. “Oh, there is so much to do, it’s a shame I’m so indisposed. . . . Let me think. . . .”

  She held the back of her hand dramatically against her brow. Then she seemed to receive an invisible surge of strength and screeched, “Ella! Ella! Oh, where is that wretched creature?”

  Since I was by then standing at the bottom of the stairs, in plain sight, her performance was hardly necessary.

  “Ye-es?” I said, stretching the word out to sound as insolent as possible.

  “Say ‘Yes, Madame’ when addressing your betters,” she snapped. “How many times do I have to tell you that?”

  “You are older than me. You have more power than me. But you are not my better,” I snapped back. “How many times do I have to tell you that?”

  She narrowed her eyes, obviously contemplating punishments. Being sent to bed without supper, her usual choice, had already been doled out for the day, because I had not folded the sheets with the military precision she expected. She should have known better than to use up the biggest gun in her arsenal before nine o’clock in the morning.

  “No lunch for you today,” she said. I did not care. Lunch
was soup and bread, which I would prepare and serve. How would she know if I ate some in the kitchen?

  But Lucille seemed pleased with herself. Her voice softened.

  “Be a dear and bring me a cool cloth for my forehead,” she said. Then, with a sweet smile, she added, “And don’t even think about going to that ball.”

  “Oh, so you think you can control my thoughts now too?” I retorted.

  “Fine. Think all you want,” she said with a shrug. “But I can assure you, you won’t go.”

  “I will!”

  “Wearing what? That?” She laughed, tilting her head back with such abandon, I was sure her sick headache was faked. After a long pause, proving just how slow they were on the uptake, Corimunde and Griselda joined in.

  “Can you see her at a royal ball?” Corimunde twittered.

  “In those rags?” Griselda replied unoriginally.

  They sounded like a pair of dimwitted birds. But they had a point. I was wearing my only dress. It had once been nice, back when my father was alive. But after I’d spent two years in it carrying wood in, carrying ashes out, scouring pots, scrubbing floors, boiling laundry, and doing everything else that needed to be done since Lucille had dismissed all our servants as “an unnecessary expense,” even I could no longer discern the pattern in the dress’s threadbare weave. Even I was at pains to see how it could possibly be mended again, just to keep me decent. I had kept silent about it, making it a battle of wills: Would Lucille buy me something new before I was forced to go about in my underclothes? Maybe the ball would force her hand.

  “You’ll buy ball gowns for Corimunde and Griselda,” I said. “So you shall buy one for me as well.”

  Lucille’s laughter swelled again.

  “Why?” she said. “So I can be held responsible for forcing a beggar upon the prince? Never!”

  I turned on my heel, the laughter seeming to follow me down the hall. I did not get Lucille’s cool cloth—I wagered she’d forgotten it as well. But I was muttering, “I will go. I’ll show you. You’ll see.”

  So my plot began.

  In the attic, I knew, my mother’s wedding gown had lain untouched for years. The memories it evoked had been too painful for my father, too sacred for me. I don’t think any of the Step-Evils even knew it was there. (Had any of them ever stepped foot in the attic, with all its dust and spiders?) Late that night, after I knew they were all asleep, I crept up the stairs, pulled the gown out of the trunk, and tried it on. I had only moonlight to see by, and no mirror, but I could feel the elegance of the folds of satin against my skin. I felt like a different person—not Ella Brown, former tomboy and bookworm and current all-purpose drudge, not Cinders-Ella, as Corimunde and Griselda sometimes derisively called me—but an Eleanora, maybe even a Princess Eleanora. Had my mother felt this elegant, walking down the aisle with my father? I tried to imagine it, taking halting, silent steps around the attic. But the sight of my dirty bare feet poking out from beneath the skirt ruined the effect. If I went to the ball, what would I do about shoes?

  I bent over the trunk to search for whatever footwear my mother had worn, and the dress slipped forward. I could feel it gaping open at the bodice. I looked down and could see clear to my thin, bare thighs. Of course. The dress was much too big on me. My mother had been well nourished and healthy, and I had been living for the past two years on whatever food I could pilfer from the kitchen without Lucille noticing. When was the last time I hadn’t been ordered to bed without supper?

  I resolved then and there that the ball was just a first step. Two years was more than enough time to serve as a slave in my own home. I had been holding on to my father’s memories and my father’s house, doing the work Lucille ordered me to do with enough insolence and back talk that I was sure she’d have to break down and admit I had rights of my own. But staring down at my emaciated rib cage, I realized suddenly that Lucille was winning. No—Lucille had won. She had reduced me—literally reduced me—to feeling that I didn’t deserve food or a new ball gown or a life.

  Dizzily I sat down and reviewed my choices. I could walk away. I could hire myself out as a servant—I certainly had enough experience. But I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life hauling ashes. I could get married—the butcher’s boy was a willing candidate, if not a particularly desirable one. But I’d seen enough of loveless marriage to know that that wasn’t what I wanted. No, I’d wait for someone capable of making me swoon. That left only one possibility, and a slim one at that: Could I find work as a tutor of sorts for rich children? If I brushed up on my Latin and Greek, I was sure I could do that quite well. I could save my money and someday come back and buy the house from Lucille. That way, leaving wouldn’t be like giving up. The only problem was, I didn’t know anyone willing to pay to have their children educated.

  Maybe I could meet someone at the ball.

  That decided, I felt much better and resumed digging through the trunk.

  11

  Over the next two weeks, I planned my strategy with more forethought than some kings put into entire wars. I took in my mother’s dress, sewing late at night by the light of a precious candle. I considered reshaping it somehow, to match the current beruffled, bespangled fashions I saw in the books Griselda and Corimunde had begun poring over endlessly. But I had so little faith in my dressmaking skills, and such great fear of ruining one of the few things I had of my mother’s, that I dared not cut into the fabric at all. So I was sure my upper body would look like a stick with breasts above the great tulip flower of the skirt. My waist had shrunk to such a degree that I could practically circle it with my own hands. But that could not be helped.

  I’d also found long, elegant gloves in my mother’s trunk—a stroke of good fortune, since my hands were rough and chapped and cracked from the constant work. With gloves, no one would ever know. Not that it mattered, unless I did find a potential employer at the ball.

  For a long time I was stymied on the matter of shoes, since my mother’s wedding slippers flapped on my small feet like sailboats. My sole footwear was a pair of old boots of my father’s, which I laced high up on my legs just to keep them on. They would hardly do. I had practically decided to go barefoot, and just keep my feet out of sight, when I happened to pass the glassblower’s shop one day on my way to the market. Jonas, the village glassblower, was a pompous fellow, and that day he was out in the street bragging of the quality of his work.

  “I can make anything,” he boasted to his neighbor, the cartwright. “Name an item, any item, and I wager I can make it.”

  “Glass slippers I can walk in without breaking them,” I said, slipping between them.

  The cartwright, Harold, looked from Jonas to me.

  “Aye,” Harold said. “I’d put some money on that.”

  Jonas looked startled, and I saw a flash of uncertainty cross his face. Then the greed took over.

  “How much?” he asked.

  Harold and Jonas began haggling. I could tell each was confident. They pushed the wager to ten pounds.

  “How long will it take?” I asked. Lucille had been watching me more closely than ever now. I think she suspected something. If I took a minute more than my allotted hour for marketing, she’d be screaming at me as soon as I walked in the door.

  “Half an hour,” Jonas said. “Then another fifteen minutes for them to fully cool.”

  “I’ll be back, then,” I said, though I longed to stay and watch. Glassblowing had always fascinated me. What if Jonas needed an apprentice? All the way to the market, I toyed with the idea of asking him. But, as much fun as the work might be, I didn’t relish the notion of working with someone as arrogant as him. And I’d never heard of any of the craftsmen in the village apprenticing girls. Just boys. No, I’d stick with the tutoring plan. After the ball.

  I rushed through the shopping, taking even less care than usual sorting through the turnips and rutabagas. It was spring, and fresh greens were available out in the meadows, so the shopkeepers were trying
to get rid of last autumn’s leftovers at practically any price. But I didn’t want to think about feeding the Step-Evils when there were glass slippers to be had. I stuffed vegetables into my sack without looking at them.

  “Ah, the girl who will win me ten pounds,” Jonas proclaimed as I returned to his shop. He presented the slippers to me on a velvet pillow. They were stunning, catching the sunlight from every angle. To my untrained eyes, they looked like diamonds. Jonas leaned his head close to mine. “Just don’t come down too hard on the heels.”

  “I won’t,” I promised. I bit my lip, then said the words I’d been rehearsing since I left the market. “But if I win the money for you, I get to keep the glass slippers.”

  Jonas squinted, sizing me up. I tried to look resolute. I must have succeeded, because Jonas slowly nodded.

  “Aye,” he said. “If you win.”

  I turned around, and it seemed that every man, woman, or child within three blocks was lined up outside the glassblower’s door.

  “Six steps,” Jonas said. “That’s what Harold and me agreed on.”

  I took a deep breath and slipped the shoes on. They were not comfortable. But they held together as I stepped out the door.

  “One!” the crowd shouted. “Two!”

  I kept my eyes on my feet, trying to avoid getting the heels caught between cobblestones.

  “Three! Four!”

  For the first time, I considered what would happen if the shoes broke. Would I be digging shards of glass out of my feet the rest of my life?

  “Five!”

  I stepped gingerly, my ankles wobbling.

  “Six!”

  The crowd burst into cheers, and Jonas let out a triumphant whoop. For the first time I looked up. Those who weren’t cheering were giving me strange looks, and I realized what a sight I must be, in rags and glass slippers. I stepped out of the shoes and went to find Jonas, who was collecting money not just from Harold, but from a whole lineup of men.