Ella: A bent fairy tale

“Ella, Ella. Pretty Ella...”

I can hear her singing. Her voice is loud enough to reach us in the attic, breaking past the raucous whoops and hollers of the guests she has brought in to drink and gamble. If her voice can reach us up here, Mother can certainly hear it down in the dungeons.

I can see the scene as if I am present. The bottles of wine rolling across the top of the piano, spilling dark red on an instrument I had painstakingly polished just this morning. Their corks flung aside. Tomorrow, I’ll find them in planters. Chewed up as well, and spat out in a mess of undigested food in the rushes of the lush rug Stepfather had purchased years ago. Some of the guests will have their messes providing fertiliser for the bamboo plants Mother had carried from our old house, their heads buried in the flower pots like ostriches. The drawing room and the game room will smell rank and foul, stale and sour. The odour of spoiled food and drying wine and sweat from men steadily losing family fortunes to her. The air will be heavy with swearing and cursing and her delight at getting her ‘friends’ drunk and broke.

I cannot sleep.

Not when I can hear the sound of music playing from the band she had hired from the tavern down the road. The music is at odds with the caliber of guests in the house. Low brow entertainment for wasted high brow men nuzzling the bosoms of whores brought in for the night. In the morning, I will find the women gone and the men, bare as the day they were born, draped on couches and the floor. She had spared no expense to make this party was just as debauched as all the rest she had thrown since Stepfather’s passing.

Grize is sleeping in the bed next to mine. In three hours, we will have to get up to clean the house. Not only will the party add to our work, she would want the house spotless from top to bottom. “Take it as my way of making sure you always have a roof over your head,” she had cackled as she threw the ratty maid’s uniform at me after the funeral. The house’s maintenance, as large as it was, was our payment for existing in her life.

Stepfather had thought it a grand day when we moved into the chateau with him and Ella after the wedding. “No longer an only child,” he had joked to a quietly fuming Ella standing beside him. “You have sisters now!”

She never took it well. She had liked being the only child just fine.

I cannot wait any longer. Another night lost to Ella’s parties and the promise of exhaustion before midday. I turn to Grize and shake her awake.

“Grizella, get up! Let’s start our chores.”

She groans and pulls her threadbare covers over her head. “Stop calling me Grizella. I keep telling you.”

“I’m sorry,” I tell her, “But there is no use in us waiting until daylight. Let’s, at least, start cleaning the second floor. By the time dawn breaks, we would be finished and we can start breakfast.”

She groans again before pulling her covers back and sitting up. “Whose turn is it to deliver food to Mother?”

“Mine,” I answer as I button up my uniform and tie on my apron. I do not like going below stairs. The dungeons are not pleasant. Yet, we knew Mother liked to see us. So, we rotated the meal delivery as our way of buying a few moments with her.

“What is that?” Grize points to something outside. I move closer to the porthole window and squint. There is a distant light, steadily coming closer. I have to see what it is.

While Grize heads to the storeroom for the brooms and brushes, I make my way outside. I can feel the bite of the cold in every part of me. The early morning dew soaks my worn work slippers and wets my toes. How I hate coming outside before the sun comes up! But, I have to find out what it is. Ella hates interruptions to her revelry.

I walk briskly down the kitchen path to the cobblestone carriageway leading to the main gates of the chateau, remembering the time I had first crossed its gates. What a difference ten years makes. Two sisters and their mother sitting side by side in a carriage riding up the road to the doors of a house where a man and his daughter awaited them. Grize had been the first to come out of the carriage. I came after and Mother came down last. “My daughters, Anya and Grizella,” Mother introduced us. Ella’s eyes had narrowed and her glare fixed on Grize. Her father had been delighted. He thought having two Ellas was a great joke.

I shake the memory from my head as I reach the gates. From my apron pocket, I pull out the rusty key and thrust it into the lock with force. The gates groan from my actions as I turn the key. Just a little ways beyond, there is a man there waiting on a horse with a lantern.

“How can I help you?” I ask with a curtsy once I am outside.

“A letter for the Tremaine household,” the man says. I look him over, noting the fine horse and the glint of a gold pin on his shirt. He is a court messenger. I begin to shiver.

“I’ll receive it on their behalf,” I tell him, eager to get away. Whatever that letter is, I want to know what is in it. As the man rifles through his bag, I see a glimpse of a stack of papers. Other letters, I am sure. From the stack, he pulls one out and holds it out impatiently. I take it from him and mutter my thanks. He does not waste any time riding off.

Under the flickering lights from the lampposts at the gates, I turn the letter over. The royal seal and tassel are attached. From the looks of it, it seems important. I hurry back inside, leaving the gates open for the day.

“Anya, come here!” A shrill voice commands. I freeze on the path to the kitchen door at the back of the house. “Come here at once!”

I obey, turning slowly and walking back down the way I came. Not too far in front, Ella is leaning against one of the columns at the front door, picking her nails as she fixes me with a look of disgust. Even under less than ideal lighting, Ella is still as beautiful as the day I first saw her. There was no denying it. Her fair hair and startling blue eyes have made her the toast of the court. Her money as well, makes her even more attractive.

“Why were you at the gates?” She does not wait for me to reach the door before asking.

“Someone came to deliver a letter,” I answer, looking away from her piercing gaze.

“Give it to me.”

Slowly, I pull out the letter from my apron, and she reaches out and snatches it. With her long nails, she breaks open the seal and unfolds the letter.

The sight of her reading the letter pulls me into another memory: one where Ella is laughing as Stepfather shows her a proposal letter. It had been a week after her presentation at court, her success as the most beautiful of all the debutantes still ringing in my head. She had made light of it, brushing the attention off as if it happened everyday. Her indifference only made the court rave even more about her and by the end of the week, Stepfather was inundated with requests for her hand in marriage.

“It looks like the King is hosting a ball.” Her voice pulls my attention and my eyes dart about, wondering if she is talking to me.

“A b-ball?” I stutter.

“Indeed,” she answers, a slow smile stretching her plump pink lips, stained with red from the wine she has been drinking and her lip paint. It’s a contrast to her pale skin which she bathes in five gallons of goat’s milk that Grize fills her bath with every morning. Ella’s looks are shocking. Almost blinding in their intensity.

“We are invited?” I want to know. I want reprieve from all of this. A day or a night off to rest. Grize and I are the only ones who take care of the chateau and its grounds. All the other staff were dismissed not long after Stepfather passed.

“We?” She chuckles. “Who is ‘we’, Anya?”

I swallow before answering. “Us. The Tremaine household. That’s what the messenger said.”

“Ah, yes,” she nods as if I have finally clarified something for her. “The Tremaine household.”

“Except, I do not remember there being a Tremaine household, Anya. I remember two girls of formerly noble parentage, their gold digging mother and me, Lady Tremaine.”

My cheeks heat in anger. Mother was never a gold digger! She had even refused Stepfather’s proposal at first, asking to be put on a pension as the widow of his business partner. Their marriage had been out of pity and his desire to be able to take care of us without scandal. Ella knew it and I knew that she knew it.

“My apologies for the assumption, my lady,” I grind out through gritted teeth and curtsy.

Ella grins at me and waves it away. “Oh posh!” She laughs.

I want to leave her sight and go back to work. Simply being in her presence alone might remind her to send me on some obscure errand.

“I will let you go to the ball. After all, the letter is addressed to‘the Tremaine household.’You are mysister,are you not?” Her grin grows wider and a shiver runs down my spine.She is lying, I tell myself. She does not mean it. The other shoe is about to drop.

It does not take long to do so.

“One condition is all I have,” she says as she moves closer to me. “Just one.”

“Name it, my lady.”

“You and the other one have to make me the most beautiful dress I have never seen between now and Friday. If you do that, you can come to the ball. If by eight o’clock, I do not see the dress, you will not only not come to the ball, you will sleep in the pig pen for two days.”

My eyes begin to water. What kind of condition is this? With all our tasks and chores, what time would we have to make a dress?

“Why are you doing this?” I ask in a choked whisper. “Why won’t you just let us go?”

Her grins vanishes and in its place, a sneer. Fire burns in her eyes as her mouth opens to speak.

“You know why, you diseased piece of flesh!” The insult slaps me square in the face.

Or was that her hand?

Either way, I felt it and I clutch the side of my face in pain.

“You have three days to make that dress or consider yourself bound to this house until you die.”