While Beauty Slept by Elizabeth Blackwell Read Free Book Online Page B

not long after I learned to speak. She also taught me to read and write passably well.”
    “Ah.” Mrs. Tewkes looked pleased and motioned toward the table behind her. “The housekeepers before me barely knew their letters, and none could tend to the kitchen accounts as I do. The queen is a great proponent of education for ladies. She has even been gracious enough to give me a few books. If you can read, it may serve you well here, once you’ve proved yourself.”
    “Thank you,” I said. “Whatever learning I have is thanks to my mother.”
    “I am glad she did right by you.”
    There was a pause in the conversation, long enough to make me fear that Mrs. Tewkes was searching for a polite way to reject me. I have wondered since if she considered telling me all she knew of my mother’s disgrace. Was she weighing, even then, the danger that might fall on me as a consequence? She could have warned me off, sent me away. But she did not. She kept my mother’s secrets—and her own.
    “You’re very presentable for a country girl,” Mrs. Tewkes said at last. “Still growing into yourself, of course, but you have great potential. Never discount the importance of looks, especially here. You also have a modesty I find very pleasing. Yes, yes, I think you will be quite to the queen’s liking.”
    The queen? Before I had time to ask Mrs. Tewkes what she meant, she was saying, “I will put you in Petra’s charge. You’d do well to learn from her example. Petra!”
    The maid who had escorted me to Mrs. Tewkes’s room rushed into the doorway, so quickly I wondered how closely she had been listening outside.
    “Show Elise to the chambermaids’ room. There’s a spare bed, is there not?”
    “More than one.”
    “Good. Have her follow you the next few days. If all goes well, she can take over your duties, and I’ll move you to the hall.”
    “Thank you, ma’am,” Petra said with a delighted smile.
    Mrs. Tewkes turned her attention back to me. “Come here the first day of each month for your pay. Two gold pieces to start, and we’ll raise it to three if you perform well.”
    It was more than I had ever dreamed of. “Thank you.”
    “Off with you, then,” Mrs. Tewkes said with a good-natured laugh. “Petra, see me Saturday and we’ll talk about your prospects, shall we?”
    After Mrs. Tewkes and I finished saying our good-byes, Petra grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me back into the Lower Hall.
    “You’re a sly one, aren’t you?” she said, looking me over appreciatively.
    “I don’t know what you mean.”
    “Mrs. Tewkes doesn’t take on every groveling girl who appears at her door! Are you a relation of hers?”
    I shook my head.
    “Yet she places you in the royal apartments rather than setting you to haul kitchen slops. Quite a mark of favor.”
    All I had done was invoke my mother’s name, yet something told me to keep that revelation to myself. There would be others here who remembered Mother’s disgrace, and she would not have wanted me tainted by her shame.
    Petra, unperturbed by my silence, linked her arm in mine and led me forward. “Well, thanks to you my days of carting wood and chamber pots will soon be over. We’re friends now.” She spoke in a quick, lively manner that immediately put me at ease.
    We walked to a small alcove off the hall, where a narrow circular staircase wound up above our heads into darkness. The smell of the dank, musty air provoked a sudden moment of panic. My entire body protested against entering such a place, cut off from all light, encased in a ring of stone.
    “Come on!” Petra called out from the stairs above me. I hurried to follow, terrified of being left behind. She must have seen the fear on my face, for she paused a moment to reassure me. “It’s rather a maze, I know, but you’ll find your way around soon enough.”
    The staircase traversed the center of the original fortress, built in the time of the king’s forefathers, when the building had