Everyone knows the story.

Ever since that little bint in China with her talking fish and dead-lotus body, the girls have been improving on the strategy. There’s at least one every century who tries the trick that is told in the tale nowadays to catch herself a man.

And it works every time.

Those who throw marriage balls practically expect it nowadays.

No longer the pious, dutiful daughter watched over by the spirit of her departed mother and rewarded for her hard work and sacrifice, no, our current pretender has never worked a day in her life, never wanted for anything. Her family is rich, her father an ennobled merchant and her mother…rumored to have once led the demimonde lifestyle. Three sisters and two brothers; her eldest of them all.

Her dresses for the ball were imported strait from Paris, Seville; Naples lace from hands to hips. The matching jewelry pieces were cabochons of amber from Prague, so heavy that it was visibly difficult for her to stand up straight while sporting the whole set. I knew there was much squawking over the slippers, the central element to the performance, but I never got to see them – her gowns, like all the Belles, swept heavily along the floor.

Her veils were layers of seed pearls; webs of jet beading; and gold filigree with teardrop sapphires the size of my thumbnail. A single stone from the last could have kept me from needing to work for a hand-count of solstices. The cost for the floor-whispering velvet ruffles alone on her second dress could have kept a whole family fed for a month.

But curtains to cover both face and feet are a necessity for the game.

It’s custom, you see, for the ball to be held as a masquerade to keep up the pretense of the magical, unknown beauty; a poor attempt to recapture a dead magic.

The Prince would chose one by the end of the night, taking care to dance only with her as the hour drew close, and on the stroke of midnight she would “flee” out of the ballroom and down the grand steps, which conveniently twist and turn between a flanking of hedges, that no one can see her reach the bottom and summon the stableman to ready her coach.

Leaving behind, of course, one of her dancing shoes along the way.

He would find it, and declare then that he would wed she to whom the slipper belonged, and no other. Unless he thought better of his first choice and chose another on the second or third night.

He would find her, and she would prove herself to be his true intended by producing the matching slipper, putting them both on, and dancing a sweet gavotte in them to ensure their fit, and thus their proper ownership.

(I’m told that one of the Cinderellas was killed by her own sister, who then took her place. Her Prince never knew until she confessed the deed on her deathbed some fifty years later. So now precautions are taken, lest another find herself likewise inspired.)

Oh. Here she comes now. She’s going to scold the head cook again; not enough sweets served with dinner. She declares it every night, no matter how sumptuous the feast or how many variants of her favorite treats we make.

It’s not a bad life, all things told. Scullery maids get their choice of the broken meats and the leavings from the plates of the high-borns, a number of who are quite finicky. The better for us, I say. Most nights I just take my due and count my blessings I’m not one of the poor creatures who are forced to tend the fire-grates.

…Other nights, I narrow my eyes at her back and curse her in my thoughts. Little miss flawless, thinking she so much better than anyone else, so much fairer of face and body.

And yet, no matter what she croons at her mirrors as she primps, she’s really not all that special.

I mean, I could have been her. Was my hair not as gold? My complexion not as creamy-smooth, even after three years working in the kitchens? My eyes any less of the same rich tiger’s eye hazel?

Perhaps it is just vanity on my part.

All the same, I could not help but think the candlelight favored her, highlighting my faults as it shadows hers when we pass in the halls. But even in the cast of the brightest of torches, I remained invisible.

I couldn’t help but compare us beyond the surface to the very elements that made up our lives, and think that this should have been my story, not hers.

And that was when the lights really flared up.

*

My father didn’t want a daughter.

Oh, he doted on me enough when I was a child, and made me pretty trinkets to wear, but whenever he caught me watching him at his trade he would send me back to my mother’s skirts, bemoaning that he did not have an heir to his talents. I was not considered worthy; I was only a female, after all.

After my mother died I was fostered out to my aunt, a seamstress, who taught me the “womanly arts” and was my keeper until I was old enough to be proficient in them all by myself. She was tough, but not unkind. In her household I felt useful, and not a waste of blood and air.

I was sent back as soon as I was old enough to handle alone all the chores one expects to find in a cottage household; my father took it for granted from the day of my arrival until the day he died that the house would be kept in order, that meals would be ready for him when he finished work. As long as these were done I was as noticed as a mote of dust.

When they were not…during my time away from home, drink had given him a heavy hand. When the last of his patrons left him, and when a but a handful of his metalsmithing tools remained unsold, he went out in the field to the tree that he had so carefully buried over my mother’s grave. And there he lay down beneath it and died.

So I went to work as a maid in a local great household. I was a scullery maid, not so low as those who tended the fire-grates. It was there of course that I met the Belle, there that I witnessed her perfect left with its perfect fairy-tale happily-ever-after in the works. But it was in my own home, in front of my own hearth that I drew up the designs to thwart destiny, and free myself of my harness of servitude.

*

It is an irony indeed that as much as I profess my hatred of the trick and all its various incarnations that my plan would have died when still only a spark without the intervention of my godmother. In truth, she was my nurse when I was growing up, before pa- before my father sent me away. He dismissed her the same day, but her own family connections landed her a job in the palace proper itself; she certainly did well enough by it, for it ranked her a much higher class of servant. But I remember her defense of me as a child, the wonderful stories she told, and how she wept when she learned my father was to foster me out. I was in touch with her, my sole ally, even before my father’s death- and I knew she would help me in my new intrigue. I just did not know how far she would go, for when I asked just for descriptions of the current fashions, my heart dreading after how to get the materials to make a worthy for the masque, she conjured up three old-fashioned gowns from the depths of the closets of the now-dead dowager. Twenty years out of fashion but in marvelous care, and with ample material from which to make alterations. And I blessed my mother for passing on to me quick fingers, and my aunt for her teachings, for that endeavor would be mine alone.

Yes, they were worthless in the eyes of the court, but had she been caught it would have been her neck- to steal anything from the King is treason, and merits a death by hanging in this Kingdom.

The eve of the ball drew upon me like a hunting wolf. In a blink I had smuggled myself and my cache into the palace proper- nobody saw anything but another nameless drudge hauling supplies for the nightly revel. In a closet beneath a back stair I gave up my air to slide myself into bindings of silk and satin, and followed the scent of begonias, roasted meat, and avarice to the ballroom. As I floated down the halls the servants bowed to my studded feline mask and exquisite costumed plumes.

He did not dance with me; is there any doubt in you with whom he immediately became besotted?

It was a quarter to the appointed hour, and nausea brewed in my belly; my raiment was a vise and oh, in that moment, I longed for the sweaty garb I wore to scrub dishes. But I held my piece, and reassured myself that a gilded cage was preferable to one made of bone. I had no other options.

I made it to the stair minutes before she did, and ensconced amid the shrubbery lining I saw her struggle, and then succeed, placing it on the steps and hying off.

No, my dears, some times it takes more than a simple token to buy the heart of a man.

I snatched it up, and drew back through the hedge, the brambles catching and tearing at my silks. I remained hidden there, even as it remained hidden in the folds of my skirt, until the last of the high-borns left. My nanny saw me back home on her husband’s horse-cart, and it wasn’t until I was sheltered in the safety of my own home that I took out what the pretender-princess had left behind.

It was a slipper- made all of glass. How she could have danced in such a thing, I cannot fathom, but the blood smeared around its rim accounted for her efforts.

It was beautiful, echoing the lights of the fire as I held it up in the darkness of the room. Oh, yes! Shimmering and magical, as lovely as its owner.

…and just as useless.

I smashed it upon the hearthstones, and in a trice had strewn the glittering fragments among the cinders to be carried out to the rag and bone heap in the morning- along with the charred remains of the ruined dress. I then went to work re-tailoring my next two gowns to closer resemble the styles I had seen at court. Dawn’s light touched my weary eyes before I felt them suitable, and I slept as though bespelled until the trees swallowed up the sun.

Night saw me back in the great marble hall, smiling demurely from behind my mask and avoiding conversation. I could not afford to be distracted, even as I heard the whispers and saw with my own eyes the tight look in the Prince’s eye, and the sharp way she turned her hands as they danced.

The shoe was silver; I smelt it in a crucible as I recalled my father doing, and poured it into the form of a circlet. I watched it cool in the ruddy light as I ate a small piece of bread dripped with honey, and smiled as I held court with malicious thoughts. An irate prince, wondering why his chosen refused to play the game, and the Belle in the arms of her mother fretting that the prince had changed his mind. Petty, yes, but she had a life full of empty entertainments; surely you would not deny that I was owed a single one of my own?

It was gold, this last time, and so malleable it was already dented in places by the night’s activities. Dancing can do much to such fragility. I worked it free of the sap and tucked it in my drooping sleeve, setting my own simple squirrel fur pantoufle in its place with shaking hands. My sleeve rasped across my lips, as I did my best to ignore the bile that burned in my throat. I can scarce pick another moment out of the blur from the time I had confined myself within the glamour until I was again home, stripped free.

By now the proclamation will have been given, they will be driving from house to cottage in search of the girl with the matching slipper. I sit, dressed in the last of my fine gowns, blood red with a single jet bead strapped to my pale throat. A coronet of interwoven gold and silver and copper curls graces my brow; I have the hair, I have the eyes, I have the gold of a lost princess and I have the answer to his riddle…what does it matter that we have never shared words, and that it was not I whom he so gallantly courted on the dance floor? He won’t know me from her, and she can buy another with ease. Yes, this is the best way; what better life could there be than that of a Belle-Princess?

I hear the horses as they strike up the path, bringing an end to my tale. I hold the last remaining slipper as I wait before the hearth, and ponder the flames.

*