Palace of Mirrors (32 page)

She sniffed daintily and dramatically, fully conveying both her dedication to her responsibilities and her distaste for the subject she was about to discuss. In my first few days in the palace, when I still dared, I would have joked, “You mean, it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it?” But I’d learned.

“Now, the servants are saying—” Her inflection on “servants” carried the full weight of her disgust at being put in a position of having to quote servants. “The servants are saying you lit your own fire this morning.” “I did,”

I said in a small voice.

Madame Bisset gasped and went pale. She leaned back against the sofa. I wondered if I was going to have to call for smelling salts.

“You must never do that again,” she said in a surprisingly firm voice. “Never.”

A proper young lady would have bowed her head in shame and murmured, “Yes, Madame Bisset.” But no one had thought of training me to be proper until two weeks earlier, so my instincts were all wrong.

“Why?” I asked, truly curious.

Madame Bisset gasped again, as if I were beyond hope if I had to ask. She took a deep breath—as deep as her corsets allowed, anyway.

“You have no idea why you should not light your own fire.”

It was a question without being a question—a trick. I’d be rude to answer it, perhaps interrupting her next thought. But I’d be more rude not to answer, if she was waiting for a reply. These were the games I had to play now.

“No,” I ventured. “Or—I’m not really as stupid as you think. I mean, I know princesses usually don’t do things like that. But I was cold, and—”

“You were cold,” Madame Bisset said. A lesser woman would have rolled her eyes. Not Madame Bisset, of course, but the muscles around her eyelids twitched ever so slightly, as if they knew what was possible. “You were cold. Did you perchance remember that you have a bell to call your servants? Did you remember that it was their job to tend your fire?”

“Yes, but—” I looked down, knowing that if I kept looking at Madame Bisset, she’d see that I suddenly wanted to cry. I almost whispered, “But I didn’t want to disturb anyone.”

I looked up in time to see Madame Bisset holding back an explosion. The color in her face rose like a thermometer, first deathly white, then fiery red, clear up to the roots of her curled-back hair.

“You must never, ever hesitate to disturb a servant,” she said, shooting off each word like an arrow, precise and cruel. “That’s what they’re there for. They exist solely to serve us.”

She closed her eyes, then opened them slowly.

“You may think you’re being kind,” she said, the strain
of trying to sound understanding weighing in her voice. “But servants know their place. They like to serve. They are hurt if you make them feel useless. Purposeless. And they cannot respect a member of the nobility who lowers herself to their level, to their work.” She said “work”

like it was a curse word.

I clenched my teeth—an ugly habit, I’d been told again and again. But if I opened my mouth, I knew the angry words would spill out. What did Madame Bisset know about how servants felt and thought? Why did she think anyone would get any pleasure out of serving lazy, selfish, self-centered people like her? I knew. I’d been there—not a servant, quite, but close enough. I’d had no respect for the ones I waited on, to begin with. If they’d so much as raised a finger to help me, the question was, would I have been able to stop hating them?

“Do you understand?” Madame Bisset asked, the way you’d ask a simpleton.

I lowered my eyes and made a stab at propriety. “Yes, Madame Bisset.”

I looked up, unable to resist another question. “The maidservant—I heard she was dismissed. If I’d thought to ring for her, would she still have been—”

Madame Bisset sniffed.

“Of course. She overslept.”

So now, cold again, I dared not get up. I couldn’t start my own fire or ring for the maid, and risk getting another girl fired. I could only pray that she woke on her own, and crept down here without being discovered. I willed her to awaken, as if I could send my thoughts up three flights of narrow, winding stairs to shake her awake. I listened for the distinctive creak of my door, the one I so often pretended to sleep through, because I didn’t know what to say to people doing work for me that I was perfectly capable of doing myself. But the door didn’t open. I got colder.

This wasn’t what I’d imagined at the ball, the stars wheeling above me as I danced with the prince. Truthfully, I didn’t imagine anything. Just being at the ball was beyond my wildest dreams. And then everything happened so fast—the prince seeking me for his bendedknee proposal, everyone making wedding plans, me returning to the castle to stay, for good. I remembered an old neighbor woman cackling as I rode by, astonished, in the prince’s carriage: “Now, there’s one who will live happily ever after.”

I was cold. I was lonely. I was engaged to be married in two short months to the most handsome man I’d ever
seen—the prince of the land, the heir to the throne. But I had never felt so alone in all my life, not even shivering in rags in my garret the day they came to say my father was dead.

This was happiness?