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  SLIPPER

  Hester Velmans

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any fairy-tale character, whether real or imagined, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-0-9994756-1-4

  Copyright © 2018 by Hester Velmans

  All rights reserved.

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  “Fairy-tale motifs are not neurotic symptoms…”

  — Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment

  “Human beings never enjoy complete happiness in this world. I was not born for a different destiny to the rest of my species; to imagine such a lot befalling me is a fairy tale—a daydream.”

  — Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

  “I might have made my tales more agreeable by adding some titillating elements with which it is customary to enliven them. But I have never been so tempted by the desire to please as to break a rule I have set for myself never to write anything that might offend either modesty or propriety.”

  — Charles Perrault

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PERRAULT’S WORLD

  PART ONE

  1 Once upon a bed

  2 A silver spoon

  3 The art of love

  4 The ugly Steppys sister

  5 The cuckoo in the nest

  6 Who’s the fairest

  7 The kiss

  8 After the ball

  9 Potions

  10 The wolf

  11 Ruin

  12 Quicksilver

  13 Cindersweep

  14 The sleuths

  15 William

  16 The beaded slippers

  17 A proposition

  18 A witch

  19 The cure and the curse

  20 Pluck

  21 A tidy catch

  22 Wish come true

  23 Fond, foolish, wanton

  24 Donkey’s skin

  25 Rescue me

  26 Life’s great secret

  27 The (almost) truth

  28 Civil liberties

  29 The runaways

  30 London

  31 The quality of mercy

  PART TWO

  32 The king’s new clothes

  33 Love is

  34 The march

  35 Amends

  36 Such tiny feet

  37 Of frogs and Englishmen

  38 The fen-jade’s feather

  39 Dragon’s claw

  40 The assault

  41 Pot of gold

  42 The pumpkin

  43 A miscarriage of fate

  44 Bodegraven and Zwammerdam

  45 The hero

  46 Lost

  PART THREE

  47 A virgin

  48 The customer

  49 Beauty Asleep

  50 Awakening

  51 Puss in boots

  52 Penelope

  53 A carriage

  54 Belle of the ball

  55 The Labyrinth

  56 Patience

  57 The face that launched a thousand ships

  58 The last laugh

  59 The slipper

  BIOGRAPHY AND MYTHOLOGY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Q&A

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Asked what this novel was about, I would tell people it was the story of a woman whose life was the inspiration for one of Charles Perrault’s tales. Charles who? they’d say. The name almost never rang a bell.

  It seems I could not have been more deluded in thinking “Perrault” was a household name, like Shakespeare, Tolstoy, the brothers Grimm, or Hans Christian Andersen. No one I spoke to seemed to be aware that a seventeenth-century Frenchman named Charles Perrault was the author of our culture’s most famous fairy tales. Who knew that the author of Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, Tom Thumb, Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella lived a full century before the brothers Grimm and almost two hundred years before Hans Christian Andersen? It was Perrault who invented the clear, straightforward prose of the fairy tale as we know it, at a time when his peers were writing in ornate, flowery verse. Shouldn’t that be enough to give him a place in the literary pantheon?

  Once I began investigating, I found out there wasn’t much information about his life, either. A patient librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris was unable to dig up a significant biography of Perrault for me. There are plenty of studies of the fairy tales, to be sure, but very little about the author himself. Literary historians have shunned the poor man, it seems, leaving him to linger in obscurity for over three hundred years.

  Perrault did leave a short but engaging memoir, l’Histoire de ma vie. His life was far from uninteresting: he may not have achieved great acclaim as a poet, but he was a man of many other talents and achievements. As an important functionary in the glittering court of Louis the Fourteenth, he oversaw the decoration of Versailles; hobnobbed with fellow members of the French Academy including Racine, Molière, and La Fontaine; was involved in a famous literary feud; and helped his brother Claude design the colonnaded façade of the Louvre after conniving to have the great sculptor Bernini thrown off the project.

  It wasn’t until the end of his life, hoping to find favor with the ladies of the court, that he wrote the simple, appealing tales that embody our most basic yearnings and dreams. The fact that his stories are universally known but his name is forgotten is an irony that would surely have struck the father of Mother Goose as a fate that (as a fawning subject of the great Sun King) was entirely to be expected.

  PERRAULT’S WORLD

  A man—a gentleman once considerably richer, less corpulent and more important than he is now, retires to his closet, sits down at a table, and picks up his quill. The rays of the late afternoon sun, plumped by dust on the windowpane, give the man’s brocade coat and bulbous nose a ruddy glow. He rereads the last lines of the poem he began some days ago, a paean to his sovereign, the great Louis the Fourteenth, then puts down his quill.

  For what is the use? His work will only be met with sneers by his colleagues in the Academy, chiefly Boileau and his little coterie—Racine, La Fontaine, and all the rest. They accuse him of being a sycophant, an untalented hack who owes his sinecure to favoritism and graft. Years ago, when he was Comptroller-General of the King’s Buildings, Gardens, Arts and Manufactories, he wielded considerable influence, and they have never forgiven him for it. Everything he writes is twisted around and flung back in his face. If he expresses reverence for a patron, or even the king himself, he is excoriated as a hypocrite or a toady. Show a little enthusiasm for modern artistic endeavor, and he is deemed a traitor to antiquity. Every triumph is turned by his enemies into yet further proof of his mediocrity.

  He groans softly to himself, fiddling with the lace emerging from his sleeve. Who in this scheming world has been as much maligned as he?

  His mind strays to the young Englishwoman whom he once helped when he was in a position to do so, Madame Sunderland, a talented painter whose spirit captured his imagination. The story she told him of her misfortunate origins, her unwise choices, the tricks fate played on her, would break your heart. Once upon a time she asked him to write down her history, as a cautionary tale for other naïve damsels. He loved her dearly, this aristocratic orphan—as a sister, a friend, a daughter. But his enemies, naturally, found a way to turn even that harmless liaison into a tawdr
y scandal.

  Charles thumbs through a stack of papers on his desk, a collection of tales he is readying for publication. It is a late-life hobby, a mere bagatelle, which his learned confrères will no doubt take as further proof of his frivolity. Stories to amuse the court at Versailles; instructive, yet at the same time entertaining. He hopes they will find favor with the ladies; perhaps they will even help him return into the king’s good graces. In order to disarm his critics, he muses, he will probably attribute them to Madame Sunderland’s old nurse, la mère l’Oie—mother Goose. Or perhaps he’ll just call them ‘Tales and Stories of the Past, with Morals’; he hasn’t quite settled on a title. The setting, however, is one he knows well—a world of scheming courtiers, capricious kings, opulent palaces and cruel stepmothers. The difference is that in his stories, beauty, patience and virtue are rewarded in the end, and the wicked always receive their just deserts.

  This is the world according to Charles Perrault.

  PART ONE

  1

  ONCE UPON A BED

  Once upon a bed and long ago, there lay a maid. And the maid had to huff and to puff, and to puff and to huff, until finally she gave birth to a small bundle of child.

  “Go to sleep now,” the midwife told the maid who was now a mother, “You must rest, you’re so exhausted, lamb.”

  But the mother was too elated to sleep. “Bring her to me, please, please nurse, I just want to hold her again,” she pleaded.

  She spent the next seventy-two hours staring into the new infant’s eyes and playing with the tiny fingers when it was awake, or nuzzling the downy head and sniffing the honey smell when it was asleep. She even experimented with crooning lullabies of love into the translucent shell of its dainty ear. The enormity of what had just occurred dazzled her: the idea of a baby, a new human being, had never seemed real when it was still inside her. Now that it was out, and wrapped in its own separate package of broody skin, it was so tangibly, deliciously real, that the thought of her previous indifference blurred her eyes with tears. She surrendered abjectly to this new and terrible tenderness. It pounded through her veins, and surged from her to the child and back again. For even though the cord had long been cut, there was clearly a connecting thread still between her battered womb and the infant’s taut belly; both felt it achingly.

  In the midst of this ecstasy, a blood clot no bigger than the tip of your thumb dislodged itself from one of the mother’s blood vessels and began to wend its way along the passages of her bloodstream. Skirting the liver and the spleen, it clambered upward, bulldozing legions of blood cells out of its way. Nonchalantly it rolled and floated along, bumping into walls and trailing along avenues, until it flipped into the right-hand chambers of the heart and, somersaulting out again, reached the spongy region of the lung. There, in narrowing corridors, it finally stuck fast, unable to move forward or backward, causing a fatal gridlock. And the young mother, on her way to answering a call of nature, fell down on the chill cobbled stones of the bedroom floor.

  They said she died of a broken heart.

  2

  A SILVER SPOON

  To ward off evil fairies and a lifetime of bad luck, it is customary to place a coin on the infant’s tongue at birth. Sensible godmothers, however, mindful that the lucky coin presents its own hazard, since infants are inclined to choke to death on it, advise that the coin be replaced with a spoon—preferably a silver spoon, if the family can afford it; an item, in short, that is more difficult to swallow.

  The midwife made the decision to take care of the nursling until the young woman’s relatives showed up to claim her. A good soul of no fixed abode, she made herself indispensable whenever called for, as midwife, wet nurse or even, in happier days, as temporary occupant of the master’s bed. Her full name was Elizabeth Sarah Goose, but being a humble person, she always referred to herself as Bessie.

  Despite a somewhat questionable reputation, her services were always much in demand, for she had what was called the Touch. This meant she was one of that rare breed who can give a woman in labor a shot of relief by resting a finger just so on the exact spot where pain or panic are at work, filling the bewildered mother with renewed strength and resolve.

  But now Bessie found herself saddled with a newborn in an empty gentleman’s house on the Thames west of London. Summoned there to deliver a maiden too young to be a mother of an infant about to become an orphan, she had found no one in the house besides the young lady moaning on the bed. Later a charwoman had come in to clean and make the fires, but she too knew nothing about her employer and told Bessie she’d stop coming if she weren’t paid for the extra days.

  On the day following her patient’s death, Bessie took it upon herself to notify the parson’s wife, Mrs. Dunes. Mrs. Dunes often found work for Bessie in Chiswick; she was the person you first thought of if you had a wedding, a funeral or a lying-in to arrange. She was a large woman who sighed frequently out of a loose, wet mouth, helplessly out of breath at the thought of all the busy things expected of her.

  Bessie had found a family crest embroidered on the pouch containing the young mother’s personal knife and spoon.

  “This should not be too difficult to trace,” wheezed Mrs. Dunes, twisting her head around to make out the emblem. “Two boars rampant on a field of lilies, and the motto Pecuniae Fiducia. Let me have this, and I shall see what I can find out. She died of the fever, then?”

  “No, no sign of the childbed fever, nor tearing, either,” said Bessie eagerly. “It was an easy birth, and she was mending nicely. It came up very sudden-like. From one moment to the next, no life in her. But the poor thing had been grieving, and then the baby filled her with such joy. With such a confusion of humors, no wonder her little heart cracked…”

  Mrs. Dunes snorted. “Just retribution more like, if you ask me. Delivered of the child all alone, and neither husband nor relative in sight? Come now. Don’t tell me all was well and proper.” She smacked her lips wetly, reproachfully, and turned her attention to the bundle in Bessie’s arms. “Now, Bessie—the nursling. Are you able to, er, provide, or shall I ask Brandy Nuthatch…?”

  “Ah, no thank you, ma’am,” said Bessie, “the milk is still in, I make sure of that. It must be, oh, a good twelve-month since my little Jonas passed, God rest his soul…” she piously wiped away a tear…“But the milk’s the more precious for it, so I tell my ladies. A glass of ale at bedtime does wonders for the flow, old Annie Coles used to swear by it. ‘Bessie,’ she used to say, ‘a glass of dark ale—dark, mind you—that’s the way to increase the flush’…”

  She gathered that this subject was not one upon which Mrs. Dunes was eager to have her elaborate further, since that lady now closed her eyes and, taking in another rattling breath, heaved herself to her feet.

  Bessie hastily tried another gambit. “Poor soul. Must be quite the fancy folks, wouldn’t you say? The little miss spoke so prettily, I thought she must be well born, with her heavy knife and spoon—real silver, they are—and you should feel the silk of her niddy-hose…”

  There being no hint from Mrs. Dune that she was interested in examining the aforementioned undergarments for herself, Bessie took her leave, wedging the wellborn infant between her abundant side and the shell of her rough woolen cloak.

  The baby brooded over its loss, trying to find the thread that had connected it with its mother. It did not cry much, but waved its little fists, rooting with its mouth for the missing link.

  “Don’t fret, my lamb,” whispered Bessie as she stopped the searching mouth with her own breast. “We’ll take good care of you, I promise.” It occurred to her that the baby did not yet have a name. “Lucinda we’ll call you,” she said solemnly—a name that to her epitomized everything that was grand, noble and expensive. “And you’ll be a lady,” she promised, “just like your mama.” Then, underscoring each point with a touch of her forefinger to the tip of the baby’s nose, she chanted,

  “And you’ll be rich, and you’ll be famous, a
nd you’ll be loved-loved-loved…”

  As it turned out, it soon became clear that if Bessie Goose wanted this baby to be loved-loved-loved, it would be entirely up to her.

  Within a week, the parson’s wife sent word that the deceased girl’s family had been found. Bessie was to take the infant by stage and hired coach to Wriggin Hall, in Hampshire. This was the country seat of William Steppys, Earl of Hempstead. He was the child’s grandfather.

  The midwife duly set out for that destination dreaming of a world she had never seen first-hand (a world of silver soup tureens and ladies in taffeta dresses), the aristocratic Lucinda tightly wrapped in her muslin shawl.

  “Oh my Lord!” exclaimed Bessie, who had fallen asleep during the last leg of the journey and had to be jogged awake by the coachman. “Are we here, then?”

  She could not believe her eyes. It was just as she had pictured it, only grander. Reverently she peered up at the mansion before her.

  What Bessie saw was an imposing stone structure three stories high. Spaced out along the façade was a line of stone pillars, which upon closer inspection turned out to be statues of beautiful ladies with vacant eyes and indecently draped undergarments. There were heavy carved doors rich with brass, sumptuous stone urns brimming with petrified fruit, and wide steps leading to gardens crisscrossed with meticulously shorn hedges. Bessie had never seen the likes of it.