There was an evening when Dementia and I were driving the hour or so down to visit my parents, and we fell into a comparative analysis of fairy tales, and specifically of fairy tale romances. There is a heroine, a lover, and an enemy, and there is magic. In “Sleeping Beauty”, the enemy has the magic; in “Beauty and the Beast”, the lover has the magic; in “Cinderella”, the magic comes in out of left field, most recently in the form of the “Fairy God Mother”, but in older versions of the tale as the ghost of the girl’s mother. And I thought, “Well, that’s lame; it’s clear that this SHOULD be the third permutation, in which the girl herself has the magic.”
An interesting thing about this story is that it really illustrates how stark my writing tends to be. The starkness is usually hidden by nuances of character and dialog, which are things that I have worked hard on portraying, but those things don’t really belong in this format. There are, relatively speaking, few sounds and smells and colors in my writing, mostly because that is the way I perceive the world, and when I have tried to add such things, they have invariably rung false. I can write female characters tolerably well, but I sincerely doubt my ability to write a believable gourmet cook…
Uncle Hyena
The Girl on the Hearth
Once upon a time there was a beautiful young parlor maid, who, through no fault of her own, came to the attention of her master’s singularly handsome son. Nature took its course, and in due time the girl found that she was going to have a child.
The young man swore that he would do right by the girl, by which he meant that he would demote her from the parlor to the scullery, but allow her to remain employed; the girl had rather different hopes, but no one asked after them. The young man’s father, on the other hand, insisted that the girl be thrown into the street at once, and the argument between father and son became so heated that the old man suffered a stroke and died. So the young man got his way.
The child was a girl, and she was named Ember for her hair. Some time after she was born, the young master married a woman appropriate to his social status, and some time after that, the couple produced a daughter, and then later, another daughter. And then Ember’s mother died, and Ember was left to grow up with her two half sisters.
Ember was never allowed to forget that she was a servant, and a servant’s daughter, but she was also allowed to take part in her half-sisters lessons if they did not interfere with her chores. Ember made very sure that her chores did not interfere; she was as eager a student as her half sisters were indifferent.
As the three girls came of age to be married, the old housekeeper died, and Ember took over as the senior female servant. And shortly after that, the girls’ father was killed in a riding accident, leaving his wife with full control of his estate. Ember’s life became very busy, and not very pleasant.
And then one day the word was spread that the King was sponsoring a festival in honor of the marriage of his daughter, which would include full state balls on three consecutive nights. It was also rumored that one of the goals of the festivities was to allow the King’s heir to choose a bride from among all of the available noblewomen.
Ember found herself buried in the task of outfitting her stepsisters for the festival. She herself was a commoner, and not eligible to attend, but she did have an opportunity to examine all that was fashionable. And she decided exactly what she would wear, in every detail, if the opportunity to attend did arrive.
There was one other thing about Ember that no one in the household even suspected: she could talk to ghosts. Her mother’s ghost was friendly, though of little use, but her grandmother’s ghost knew many forbidden things, and her great-grandmother knew more still. And late at night, deep in the bowels of the house, Ember would learn all that she could from generations of dead witches. And they found her just as eager a pupil as any of her other teachers.
On the first night of the festival, after her step mother and half sisters had been safely shipped away, Ember went to the stable and climbed onto the back of an old plow horse, and rode him to the palace. And along the way she wove a glamour, so that by the time she arrived, she seemed to be riding in a huge and beautiful carriage drawn by four magnificent horses.
She stopped at the foot of the grand entryway, and a footman who wasn’t there (though no one else knew that) helped her to the ground, and the carriage pulled away. No one questioned her right to attend, though no one knew who she was; only someone of the highest nobility could possibly dress with such a combination of elegance, taste, and fashion.
The prince was drawn to her as a moth to a flame; she danced with him, and she talked with him, and he marveled at her depth. And as soon as he (very reluctantly) allowed himself to be taken from her company, she vanished. Not literally, of course; she simply withdrew from sight for a moment, dropped the glamour, and then blended in with the royal servants to make her escape.
She repeated the performance the following night; she responded to the prince’s questions about her name and origin by saying that it was a riddle, and surely he did not wish to give up so easily.
By the third night the prince was beside himself. He waited at the entrance for Ember to arrive; he would dance with no one but her; he could not get enough of her conversation. And then, as midnight approached, she prepared to take her leave. The prince tried to stop her, but she would not be dissuaded; she said that if she did not leave before midnight, the prince would never get the key to the riddle.
The prince followed her to her carriage and watched her climb in; as she did, she kicked off one of her shoes and left it in the road beside the carriage. She called to the prince that it was his key, and that when he found the shoe’s mate, he would have solved the riddle.
For thirty days, the prince tried to find the matching shoe. No one knew who had made it; no one knew where it had come from. And certainly no one knew where the matching shoe was. As the days went by the prince became increasingly distraught; for a while he even experimented with having every woman he met try the shoe on, but even in his despair he soon recognized the madness of that.
On the thirtieth day following the ball, a withered old woman visited the prince and told him that she could solve the riddle if he was certain that he wanted the answer. The prince answered that of course he wanted the answer; he was in love with the girl; he would do anything to find her.
The old woman asked if the prince would marry her, and the prince said that that was his intention. The old woman asked if he were certain, if he would marry her even if she were a commoner. The prince swore that he would marry her as long as she were a human woman, and the old woman smiled.
The old woman then called to one of the prince’s dogs, which came to her as if it knew her, and asked the prince for the shoe. She tied the shoe to the dog’s collar, and said that the dog should be allowed to run free, but followed, and that it would reach its goal at noon on the next day. And then the old woman left.
At noon the next day, the dog led the prince to the house where Ember lived. Ember’s stepmother was very surprised to see him, and even more surprised when he told her that he intended to marry one of the women of the house. Ember’s half sisters were summoned, and dismissed, and then the servants were brought out; Ember carried with her a loaf of freshly baked bread.
Ember’s stepmother protested that there must be some mistake, but the prince recognized Ember at once. The stepmother protested even more, and Ember tore open the loaf of bread to reveal the missing shoe.
Ember and the prince were married, and eventually became King and Queen, and Ember, at least, lived happily ever after. The prince was forever haunted by the knowledge that he would never again know when he was acting of his own free will, or merely dancing as Ember pulled his strings.
Paul Haynie
2/21/2000