Just Ella by Margaret Peterson Haddix Read Free Book Online

messed up the last five years of my life, Lucille had problems of her own. Now that I was in the castle, and she was still in the village, I shouldn’t think of her as the enemy anymore. I should probably just pity her and find some other goal to focus on. But what?
    My thread tangled then, and I had to interrupt a discussion about dressing gowns to get Simprianna to help me unsnarl it. (She was also quite skilled at that. I suppose I was too hard on her, considering her an absolute simpleton.) I apologized profusely to Simprianna, as if that could make up for all the cruel things I’d ever thought about Lucille.
    â€œI’m so sorry. I don’t know how it happened.”
    Silently Simprianna picked at the knots in my thread with a perfectly curved fingernail. Then she began to pull out my last row of stitches.
    â€œWait,” I said. “Why—” Then I saw a snarl that I hadn’t even noticed at the beginning of the row. All my stitches since had been useless.
    â€œOh,” I said. “I see. I’m sorry about that too. I guess my mind was wandering.”
    Simprianna barely glanced up.
    â€œAye, Princess,” she sighed. “Can you not ask your fairy godmother for help?”
    â€œMy what?” I asked.
    She and a few of the others giggled. I heard someone whisper, on the other side of the tapestry, “Well, of course she has to pretend she doesn’t know. . . .”
    â€œNothing, Princess,” Simprianna murmured, keeping her eyes on her work.
    I looked around. All twelve of the other ladies had their heads bent low over the tapestry. Nobody was going to enlighten me. But—fairy godmother? It reminded me of Mary asking about magic. I decided the castle folk, servants and nobility alike, were a superstitious lot. I wish I had had a fairy godmother to protect me all those years I lived with the Step-Evils. Of course, I wouldn’t need one now.
    Would I?

8
    Once he’d shared his dream for the refugee camps, Jed seemed to feel he could tell me anything. My daily religion lessons were taken up less and less with talk of the trinity or the “corporeal evidence of His Holiness”—whatever that meant—and more and more with banter, jokes, and Jed’s tales about his childhood.
    â€œI feel sorry for any child who didn’t get to grow up in this castle,” he said one sunny morning a few weeks after he’d taken over for his father.
    â€œWhy?” I asked in surprise. By then, Jed surely realized my own childhood had taken place outside of any palace walls. And if he didn’t, I hardly cared if he found out. “I would think a child in this castle was to be pitied. All those people around telling you to sit up straight, don’t speak while the minister of the treasury is speaking, and don’t spill your soup on the foreign ambassador or it’ll start a war—”
    Jed laughed.
    â€œYes, there was rather too much of that for my taste.But we children were kept mostly out of sight, so we didn’t have to worry about foreign policy. What I meant was . . . have you never noticed the length of the banisters on the main staircase?”
    I nodded, remembering my awe the night of the ball at the sight of the grand staircase, which rose from the entrance hall to a spot that would be three stories higher in a normal house. The tallest man I’d ever seen, a carpenter in my village called Tom the Giant, could have lain down on a step with neither his head nor his feet touching the sides. And the staircase was lined on each side by pillars and a banister of rare polished wood that I knew from Lord Reston’s lectures had been brought from faraway lands decades ago.
    â€œYou used to slide down the banisters,” I gasped. I did not confess that I had longed to do that very thing from the moment I’d seen them. But I’d never been near the banisters when there weren’t at least a dozen others with