Princess of the Midnight Ball (6 page)

“Thank you, Dr. Kelling,” Rose murmured. “I’ll sleep now.”

“Good girl.” He stroked her damp hair. “I’ll tell your father the news and send the orders to the kitchens.” Then he leveled his gaze at Jonquil and Lily. “You may want to sleep elsewhere, to prevent yourselves from catching Rose’s chill. And try to bar the little ones from the sickroom as well. If all twelve of you fall ill, it will qualify as an epidemic.”

Lily and Jonquil smiled dutifully at the joke, and Lily saw him to the door of the room. “Thank you, Dr. Kelling,” she said. As soon as she had closed the door behind him, she ran back to Rose’s bed and looked down at her sister with anxiety written large on her face. “Rose? Are you still awake?”

“Yes,” Rose said, and coughed some more. “Fool gardener, leaping out of the shrubbery and frightening people.”

“Rose,” Lily said urgently. “What are we to do? About the ball?”

Dr. Kelling had misunderstood Rose when she asked about the dancing. She was not worried about the state dinner, or the dancing that usually followed. She was worried about what came after: the Midnight Ball. King Gregor had no control over that. It would not be canceled due to illness. Death alone could free a soul from the Midnight Ball, as the girls knew all too well.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Rose said, and a tear slipped out of the corner of her eye and ran down to wet her pillow. “If I don’t go, he’ll be so angry.” She rolled onto her side and pulled the blankets over her head again.

The other eleven princesses dressed for dinner and sat at the long table with their father and the three visiting ambassadors. The girls were nervous and gloomy all night, and King Gregor did indeed cancel the dancing that evening. The sisters kissed their father good night at nine and went upstairs to Rose. Lily helped her sit up and drink a cup of chamomile tea, made with herbs that grew in their own garden. Jonquil peeled two oranges and fed them to Rose one segment at a time.

And then, at eleven o’clock, Lily and Jonquil helped Rose out of bed. They washed her face and applied rouge to her pale cheeks and lips. They combed her long golden-brown hair and put it up in an elegant knot atop her head, adorning it with a tiara of pearls and garnets. Then they helped her into the yellow dress and the new dancing slippers.

The eldest princess could barely walk. She was near delirious
with fever and racked by coughing spells that left her breathless and teary-eyed. Lily and Jonquil had to support her all the way to the Midnight Ball.

When Maria, their chief maid, came to wake the three eldest princesses the next morning, she found Rose’s yellow ball gown on the floor beside her bed, and Queen Maude’s pearl-and-garnet jewelry set lying on the bedside table. Rose was insensible with fever, raving about trees of silver and boats of gold crossing a lake of shadows. The maid thought that Rose had, in her delirium, attempted to dress for dinner. Maria woke the other girls and got Rose to drink some cool water while they waited for Dr. Kelling to arrive.

“I don’t understand it,” Maria clucked, tenderly washing Rose’s face with cool water. “It’s astounding enough that she managed to get that gown out of the wardrobe, sick as she is. But how did she wear out a new pair of slippers?”

“I don’t know,” Lily said innocently, kicking her own worn-out slippers under the bed.

Then Jonquil coughed.

As the princesses succumbed to Rose’s illness one by one, King Gregor became desperate. He was a good-hearted man, for all his blustering and arm waving, and it pained him deeply to see his girls suffer. Worse still, Dr. Kelling feared that Rose’s illness was turning to pneumonia, and that brought back grief-ripe memories of Queen Maude’s last illness.

To add insult to injury, the mystery of the worn-out dancing slippers continued. Every third morning when the king visited his daughters’ rooms, it was to find them sicker than ever and with their dancing slippers lying at their bedside, worn to pieces. Gregor accused their maids of stealing his daughters’ shoes at night to meet their gentlemen friends, and even fired two of them before the housekeeper could point out that none of the servants could wear the younger girls’ shoes.

King Gregor begged and pleaded with his daughters to tell him what was going on, but they refused to answer, standing there coughing piteously and looking hollow eyed. He had
hoped to marry one or two of them off to their new allies in Spania and La Belge, perhaps even to smooth things over with Analousia through marriage. But now all the girls were sick (and unattractively so, with red noses and hacking coughs), and the rumors of the constantly worn-out slippers had caught the attention of the city’s gossips.

It was Kelling who brought him that unwelcome piece of news. The shoemaker or one of the servants must have talked, because the town was awash with stories about the princesses’ nighttime activities. It was being said that they were ill from dancing with the fairy folk. Some even said the girls had caught some strange fairy ailment that could be cured only by dancing even harder than before, or by drinking goat’s milk under a blue moon, or other foolishness. Others spitefully whispered that it was God’s punishment on King Gregor for the war or for wasting so much money and labor on that fool garden.

The king put his head in his hands. “What am I to do, Wilhelm?” he moaned.

Dr. Kelling put his physician’s bag on the king’s desk and sat in one of the large leather chairs opposite. His father had been the prime minister during the reign of Gregor’s father, and the two had been boys together. They had served in the army side by side, been married the same year, and been widowed within a month of each other.

Feeling nearly as exhausted as his daughters, Gregor leaned back in his tall leather chair. It was like watching his Maude fade away all over again. He promised her he’d take good care of their girls, but she hadn’t seemed to believe him. Her eyes
had been filled with such despair toward the end. And last night, visiting with Rose, he’d seen the same look. And why? If they could only show him the root of the trouble, he would seek it out and destroy it. But there was only silence and tears and hopelessness.

“Wilhelm, I …” The king’s voice trailed away. He didn’t know what to say, what to do. When war with Analousia had been inevitable, he had made the decision that had seemed best, and they had triumphed in the end. But how to triumph when you didn’t know what battle you were fighting?

Dr. Kelling leaned forward. “We’ve got to get to the bottom of this, Gregor,” he said. “It does no good to ask them; they cannot or will not tell. Now, I’m not one to indulge in talk of fairies and the like, you know that. But it seems to me that something is very wrong here. Something beyond youthful high spirits and a love of dancing.” He snorted. “Which doesn’t seem to be there, by the way. Poor little Pansy, when she was delirious with fever, kept sobbing that she wanted to stop dancing. God alone knows why they keep it up. Now, Maude was a good woman, but you and I both know that she brought some fanciful ideas over from Breton, along with her love of roses.”

“What are you saying?” King Gregor shook his head, confused. “You think Maude had something to do with this?”

“No-o, but …” Dr. Kelling scrubbed his hands over his face. “I don’t know, Gregor. Perhaps I’m just tired.” He sighed heavily. “But Rose grows weaker by the day. I know you’ve tried separating the girls at night, but have you had them guarded, or followed, to see where they go?”

King Gregor’s shoulders slumped. “I want to trust my girls. I feel like their jailer as it is, locking them in at night. Has it come to that?”

“It has, if we are to make Rose well again,” Dr. Kelling said gently. “Tonight’s the third night since their last … disappearance or what-have-you. Separate rooms, and windows and doors firmly latched. Guards in the hallway.”

In silence they finished off a decanter of brandy and smoked a number of fine cigars. In the end, King Gregor sighed, stubbed out his last cigar, and nodded.

“Very well. The ambassadors have moved to their manors in the town now. That frees up all the bedrooms on the third floor. You’ll stay tonight in case the girls need you?” the king asked.

“Of course.”

Galen sat on a large rock and knitted a pair of socks. Well, just one sock. He had already made the other the evening before, and was hoping to have this one done before the next day. The socks he had brought back from the war were so worn they had disintegrated when his aunt washed them, and he had spent the past few weeks trying to replace them.

Good-hearted Tante Liesel had offered to knit his new socks, but Galen had politely refused. The truth was, knitting was the only skill he had learned during the war that he enjoyed. There was something soothing about watching stitch after stitch pass across the needles, something meditative about the process. It also gave him a sense of pride to create something, as opposed to the destruction of shooting other men.

His cousin, Ulrike, was fascinated to see a man knitting. “Who would think that a man—and a soldier!—would do such a thing?” she marveled.

“Many soldiers do,” he told her. “There is no other way,
on a battlefield, to get new socks or a warm scarf when winter sets in.”

“But all of my friends and I knitted endless socks and scarves. Hats and mittens, too,” Tante Liesel had protested. “We sent boxes of them to the army! Ulrike made nine stocking caps last winter. Didn’t you,
liebchen?”

Galen shook his head. “I’m sorry, Tante. They went astray somewhere, or there were not enough to go around. I’ve never had a sock that wasn’t knit by my mother or myself.”

“Well,” his aunt had assured him, “Ulrike and I can keep you in socks and caps now.”

But Galen couldn’t sit idle. He had spent too many years knitting socks, or polishing weapons or building camps. So every day he slipped his needles and yarn into his satchel, along with the hearty lunch his aunt provided.

“What are you doing, boy?” Uncle Reiner came down the path to stand, frowning, before the rock on which Galen sat with his knitting.

The obvious answer was “knitting,” but Galen knew that his uncle would not find that answer amusing. “I’m waiting for Walter to bring the mulch for this bed,” Galen said, pointing with one sharp needle at the flower bed nearby. “I offered to help but he insisted on doing it himself.”

Walter Vogel had taken Galen in hand after his first day, training him in the use of the various garden tools and teaching him the names and natures of the plants that they cared for. There were nearly a dozen other gardeners under Reiner Orm, who variously regarded their work in the King’s Folly as an
embarrassment or a privilege. Either way, they were not that friendly toward the newcomer. Many of them had sought work in the gardens to avoid going to war, and seeing someone they considered a mere boy who had fought while they pruned hedges made them uncomfortable. So Walter made Galen his assistant, and Galen ignored the other gardeners as they ignored him.

Galen and Walter had already trimmed the winter-dead flowers down to dirt level and were preparing to cover them with mulch to protect their roots from the cold. In the past Galen had thought that gardening, like farming, was a matter of luck. You planted something, you watered it, you hoped that it grew.