Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac.
Before the lamp is lit, one small thing. If these stories carry you to sleep, subscribe now, while your eyes are still open, and tomorrow night's tale will be waiting for you. A like helps other tired souls find this room. That is all. Let's light the lamp together now.
The lamp is lit again.
The same small flame as last night, in the same quiet room at the edge of the world.
The storyteller is already here. She was here before you arrived. She will stay until you sleep.
There is a chair for you. There is a blanket. The night outside is doing all of its slow, dark work, and none of it is yours to carry until morning.
The storyteller opens the old book, and turns past the tales already told, to a page that waits for tonight.
Tonight, she says softly, we go to an old kingdom of clipped gardens and tall clocks, where a girl called Cinderella sleeps in the warm ash beside a kitchen fire, and out in the dark of the garden a pumpkin is quietly becoming the most famous coach in the world.
And there is no hurry at all as she begins.
Settle in, now. Let the chair take your weight, all of it, even the weight you did not know you were carrying. Let the blanket be heavy in the good way, the way snow is heavy on a roof that has nothing to do until spring. The day is over. It has been paid everything it was owed. You do not have to watch this story. You do not have to remember any of it in the morning.
You may believe you know this tale. Everyone believes they know this one. But what you know is a copy of a copy, and tonight the storyteller reads from the old book itself, written down in France more than three hundred years ago, and by lamplight it wears a different face. There are two balls in it, not one, on two nights running. The coachman, an hour before the coach rolls, is still a rat, and is rather proud of his whiskers. The footmen were six lizards, drowsing behind a watering pot. And the ending is kinder than the one you remember, kinder than almost any ending in any old book, and it is not the fairy who makes it. It is Cinderella herself.
If you drift, drift. This tale has been carrying listeners down to sleep for three hundred years, gently, on purpose, the way a slow coach carries a tired traveler home. It does not need you to finish it. Drifting is not leaving. Drifting is how a listener says thank you. We begin.
Chapter One.
The House with the Cold Hearths.
Long ago, and not so very far from here, there was a kingdom that loved order by daylight and candlelight after dark.
It was a tidy kingdom. Its gardens were clipped into green rooms and green corridors, so that walking in them was like walking through a house made of hedges. Its avenues ran straight as rulers between double rows of lime trees. Its clocks were the finest in the world, and it knew it, tall clocks in walnut cases that stood in hallways like patient grandfathers, each keeping its own private opinion of the hour. And in the heart of the capital stood the palace of the king, a palace with a hundred windows, and at dusk the hundred windows lit up one after another, so that the whole building seemed to be slowly remembering something pleasant.
In a good street of that capital, behind a gate of black iron, stood a tall stone house with a walled garden at its back.
A gentleman lived there. He was kind in the soft, unfinished way that some men are kind, which is to say that he wished everyone well and hoped this would be enough. He had married young, and his wife had been the gentlest soul in the parish, a woman who spoke to servants and duchesses in exactly the same voice, and they had one daughter, and for years that house was the kind of house where the fires are always lit and the bread never burns.
Then the gentle wife died, quietly, as she had done everything.
We will not stand long in that sorrow. The old book itself does not. It is enough to say that the girl was still young when she lost her mother, and that the best of her mother had already been given to her by then, the way the best of a candle is passed to the next candle before the first goes out. The girl had her mother's sweetness of temper and her goodness of heart, whole and entire, and whoever carries those is never quite alone in the world, not even when the world does its worst.
For a while, the father and the daughter kept the house together, and the house was quieter than before, but still warm.
Then the gentleman married again.
The old book is very plain about the second wife, plainer than it is about almost anyone. It says she was the proudest and most haughty woman that was ever seen. It does not say she was cruel in any interesting way, because pride is not interesting, and the old book knew it. Pride is only a cold room a person chooses to live in, with the door shut, and the curtains drawn, and a mirror on every wall.
She came to the tall stone house with two daughters of her own, and the two daughters resembled her in all things. That is the whole of their introduction in the old book, and, says the storyteller, turning the page, it is the tidiest sentence of warning ever written.
The wedding was a fine one, with white ribbon on the gateposts and a fiddler in the hall. And the wedding was hardly over, the ribbon hardly down, before the new wife let her temper out of its cage.
For she could not bear the goodness of the young girl. This is the true reason, the oldest reason, and the old book gives it straight. The girl was gentle, and the girl was lovely, and beside her the new wife's own daughters appeared exactly as agreeable as they were, which would never do.
So the girl was given the meanest work of the house. She scoured the dishes and scrubbed the tables. She carried the water and blacked the grates and washed the stairs. She cleaned the chambers of madam her stepmother, and the chambers of the two young misses her stepsisters, and when everything shone, she was told it did not shine, and she did it again.
And her father said nothing.
The old book is gentle with him, and so shall we be. It says only that he was governed entirely by his wife, and that the girl dared not complain to him, for it would have gone the worse for her. Some kind men are like lanterns with the shutter closed. The flame is in there. It simply never reaches the road, where it is needed.
But here is what pride never learns, and what this whole night is for. You can give a person the coldest room in the house, and the oldest dress in the chest, and every hard chore in the cupboard, and if the warmth is on the inside of them, you have taken nothing. You have only rearranged the furniture around a lit candle.
Evening after evening, when her work was done at last, the girl came to the kitchen, where the great hearth was, and the fire had burned down to its embers, and that is where we shall find her, in a moment, in her rightful place at the very center of this story.
Chapter Two.
Cinders, and the Two Names.
The kitchen of that house was below the street, half sunk into the earth, the way old kitchens are, and it was the one honest room in the building.
Everything in it did what it said it would do. The long table was scrubbed pale as bone and smelled of a hundred years of bread. The copper pans hung in ranks on the wall, holding the firelight, a row of small warm moons. Onions and dried herbs hung from the beams. A cricket lived somewhere behind the oven, and sang in the evenings, unpaid but reliable. And the hearth itself was wide enough to roast for a wedding, with a chimney corner at each end, two little alcoves of warm stone where a person could sit almost inside the fireplace itself, close to the embers, out of the drafts.
When the girl's long day was finally done, and the house above her had gone quiet, she would come down to that kitchen and sit in the chimney corner, in among the warm cinders, because it was the warmest place in the house, and the nearest thing she had to a room of her own.
For upstairs, under the roof, they had given her a garret with a wretched straw bed in it, at the top of a cold stair, where the winter came in around the window like an unwanted guest. While her two sisters, mind you, lay on the newest fashion of beds, in fine rooms with inlaid floors, with looking glasses so tall they could admire themselves in them from the buckle of the shoe to the ribbon of the cap.
So she sat in the cinders, in the evenings, where it was warm. And her sisters, seeing the gray ash on her apron and the smudge of it on her cheek, thought this the funniest thing in the world.
The elder, who took after her mother the most, called her Cinderwench.
The younger, who was not quite so rude, or not quite so brave in her rudeness, softened it to Cinderella.
And the name stayed, the way names do. The whole household used it. In time she answered to it as if it had been given to her at a font with godparents standing by, and the strange thing, the lovely thing, says the storyteller, is what the name became. They meant it to be a small cruelty, a name made of ash. But say it now, anywhere on earth, in any language, and every face in the room goes soft. It is one of the most beloved names in the world. The ash blew off it long ago. That is worth remembering, whenever you are given a name you did not choose. It is not the givers of a name who decide what it means. It is the wearer.
And the old book says one thing more, and says it without raising its voice. It says that Cinderella, in her old gray gown, with the ash on her hands, was a hundred times more lovely than her sisters, though they went dressed in the finest that money could fetch. The old book does not argue the point. It simply sets it down, the way you set down a fact of arithmetic, and moves on.
Her days were long, but they were not empty, because no day is empty to a person who pays attention, and attention was her particular gift.
She knew the house better than anyone in it. She knew which stair sighed and which stayed silent. She knew the mice that lived in the kitchen walls, and heard them at night, a small dry rustling, like someone turning the pages of a very little book, and she never had the heart to begrudge them the crumbs they found, for the crumbs were few and honestly swept. She knew the fat old rats in the cellar were down there among the cider barrels, living their low, comfortable lives. And she knew the garden.
The garden was her other kingdom. She had charge of the vegetables, since the cook would not stoop to them, and so the walled garden behind the house became, an hour here and an hour there, the one place her time was her own. She grew beans up strings. She grew herbs in a gray green row. And along the south wall, where the sun collected all day in the old bricks, she grew pumpkins, great slow golden creatures that lay in their leaves all summer, ripening without the least anxiety, and she was fond of them, the way you become fond of anything you have watched over from the beginning.
On that same warm wall, in the afternoons, the lizards came out to sit. Six of them, more often than not, small and green and solemn, lined along the brick like ornaments, or dozing in the shade behind the old copper watering pot. She took care never to startle them. Remember the pumpkins, and remember the lizards. This story remembers everything.
In the evenings, then, with the house asleep above her, Cinderella sat in the warm chimney corner, in the ember light, with the cricket singing behind the oven. Sometimes she mended by that light. Sometimes she only sat, with her arms around her knees, and watched the embers breathe, going brighter and dimmer, brighter and dimmer, the way embers do, as if the fire were sleeping too, and dreaming. And she told herself, very quietly, the stories her mother had told her, and in every one of them, somewhere, there was a door that opened when no one expected it, onto a bigger and kinder world.
She was not waiting. Waiting is anxious, and she had let anxiety go, the way you let a bird out at a window. She was only keeping warm, and keeping kind, which, in the arithmetic of the old stories, is the whole of the work.
The door was coming.
Chapter Three.
An Invitation Sealed in Red Wax.
It came on a bright morning, carried up the good street by a royal footman who walked as though the street were lucky to have him.
The king's son was giving a ball.
And here the storyteller lifts one finger, because here is the first thing the copies got wrong, and the old book gets right. It was not one ball. It was two. Two balls, on two nights, one following the other, the way one lamp is lit from another. Hold on to that. A single night can be an accident. A second night is a choice, and half of what happens in this tale happens because there was a second night in it.
The invitation went out to all persons of fashion and quality, and the two sisters were invited, for they cut a very grand figure in the town, whatever figure they cut at home. The letter was thick cream paper, folded three times, sealed with red wax, with the prince's own cipher pressed into the seal, and when it was opened in the morning room, the shriek of joy that went up frightened the pigeons off the roof.
And the tall stone house went, in an instant, from a quiet house to a ship fitting out for a voyage.
Oh, the councils that were held. The debates, the reversals, the treaties. For days the two sisters talked of nothing in the world but what they should wear, as though the ball were a battle and the gowns were the armies. Wardrobes stood open. Chests were emptied onto beds and sorted and emptied again. Ribbons lay in drifts on the floors like autumn in a very expensive forest.
For my part, said the elder at last, laying it down like a law, I shall wear my red velvet, with the French trimming. She said the words French trimming the way you would mention a personal friendship with the queen.
And I, said the younger, shall wear just my ordinary petticoat. She let that sit a moment, for effect, watching her sister brighten. But then, she went on, I shall put over it my mantle with the gold flowers, and my stomacher of diamonds, which is not to be met with every day. And her sister stopped brightening.
Do you know these words, or do they wash over you like water? Either way is right, at this hour. A mantle is a cloak of state, a cloud of cloth that goes over everything. A stomacher is a stiff piece for the front of a gown, shaped like the ace of spades turned point downward, and this one was sewn with diamonds edge to edge, so that walking toward a candle in it, you arrived a little before you arrived.
But gowns were only the beginning. There were heads to build.
They sent for the best tire woman in the city, which is the old word for a dresser of hair, an architect of hair, and she came with her own case of instruments like a surgeon, and stayed two days, to build the headdresses and to adjust the double pinners, the little lace caps with two long streamers that the old book is careful to mention, for no detail of that campaign was small to the two sisters. Hair in that kingdom, in that year, was not combed. It was constructed. It went up and up in rolls and towers, powdered white as a sugar loaf, until a lady stood a full head taller than the truth, and had to go through doorways with the caution of a ship entering a small harbor. And they had their red brushes, and their patches, from Mademoiselle de la Poche herself, the finest maker of patches in the town, whose name the old book keeps like a pressed flower. Patches were little shapes of black silk, moons and stars and hearts, that a lady wore on her cheek or her chin, one or two, placed with enormous strategy. An entire language of the face, spelled out in tiny black stars, and everyone at court could read it.
All this, you understand, took money and took noise. But it also took work, quiet work, needle work, iron work, and every stitch of that fell to Cinderella.
It was she who washed and starched and ironed the fine linen, till the lace lay like new frost. It was she who plaited the ruffles, goffering every fold with the hot iron, a hundred little waves in a row, exact as the sea. She sat late in the kitchen with the irons heating on the fire, two in the fire while one was in her hand, working her way down cuffs and collars by ember light, and the work was beautiful, because she did not know another way to do it.
And, says the storyteller, here is a small strange thing that the old book sets down without comment. The sisters, who consulted nobody about anything, consulted Cinderella about everything.
They called her up from the kitchen to their fine rooms, and stood turning before the tall glasses, and said, well, which. And she told them, honestly and well, for she had excellent taste, the best in that house and better than most in the palace. She had an eye. She could look at a gown, a ribbon, a shoe, and see the one small change that made it right, the bow moved two fingers higher, the second bracelet taken off. Where such an eye comes from, in a girl who owned one gray dress, the old book does not say. But you and I may guess that taste is only attention wearing its good clothes, and attention, as we know, was her particular gift.
So she advised them the best in the world. She meant it, too. That is the part that is hard to believe and true. She wanted the red velvet to look well. She wanted the diamonds to sit straight. It was work her hands were proud of, and they were her family, the only one she had, and kindness of her sort does not first check whether it is deserved.
And more than this. She offered, herself, to dress their hair for the great night.
They accepted at once. Of course they accepted. They knew what her hands were worth, none better, whatever names they called the rest of her.
And so the last day before the first ball arrived, and found the whole house upstairs at the mirrors, and Cinderella in the middle of it, with her sleeves rolled, and her combs and pins laid out in a row, like a small calm general before the only kind of battle she would ever fight.
Chapter Four.
Dressing the Sisters.
The dressing of the two sisters took the whole of the afternoon, and it is one of the quietest and strangest scenes in the old book, if you stand still in it. So we will stand still in it.
Picture the fine bedroom at four o'clock, with the low sun coming in over the garden wall and lying along the floor in long panes of gold. Picture the powder in the air, drifting in that light like the finest snow that ever refused to fall. There are gowns laid out on both beds like queens lying in state. There is a smell of hot iron and starch and violet water. And in the middle of it all stands Cinderella in her gray dress, with ash still under her fingernails, building, with her two hands, tower after tower of beautiful hair.
She worked slowly and surely, the way she did everything. Rolling, pinning, powdering. Stepping back to look, stepping in again. The younger sister's head first, then the elder's, and each one, under her hands, became a small white architecture, and the sisters watched themselves grow grander in the glass, and were happy, in their way, which was the only way they had been taught.
And while she was combing them, one of the sisters, watching Cinderella in the mirror, over the rim of her own reflection, said, Cinderella, would you not be glad to go to the ball?
Now, a question like that can be a door or it can be a pin, and this one was a pin, and everyone in the room knew it.
Alas, said Cinderella, you are laughing at me. It is not for such as I am to go to a ball.
You are quite right, said the sister, comfortably, settling back into her own reflection. Folk would laugh indeed, to see a Cinderwench at a ball.
And there it might have stung, and stayed stinging. But the old book tells us exactly what Cinderella did with it, and what she did was this. Nothing. She went on combing. And, says the old book, anyone else in her place would have dressed those heads awry, and who could blame the hands that did it. One pin, half an inch wrong. One curl let down out of a hundred. Nobody would ever have known. But she was good, and she dressed them perfectly well, to the last curl, to the last star of black silk laid on the last powdered cheek.
Hold that a moment, says the storyteller, and never mind the fairy for now. People speak of this tale as though the magic arrives later this evening, in the garden, with the wand. But the oldest magic in it is already in the room, right here, in a girl doing flawless work for two people who have just laughed at her. That is the hardest trick in this whole story. Pumpkins are nothing beside it.
As for the sisters, they were, the old book says, almost mad with joy. For two days they had scarcely eaten a thing, they were so transported. That detail is in the book, and it is somehow the fondest thing we know about them, that under all the velvet they were two girls too excited for supper. And in the lacing of them, that evening, more than a dozen laces were broken, snapped clean, one after another, in the pulling and the straining to give them each a fine slender shape, and a maid was kept running for fresh laces, and the sisters stood gripping the bedpost with both hands and instructed the pullers, between breaths, to pull harder. And from morning till the coach came, they were before their looking glasses, turning, and turning back, and asking the mirror the mirror's one great question, and hearing, as everyone hears, only their own hearts answering.
At last, at dusk, the coach stood at the door with its lamps lit.
Down the steps they came, the red velvet and the gold flowered mantle, enormous, glimmering, rustling like weather, each head of hair riding above its owner like a white ship under sail. Their mother went gleaming before them. The father came behind, in his quiet best, looking, as he always looked, like a man slightly surprised to find himself in his own life. The door of the coach shut with a rich little click that only money can buy. The coachman spoke to the horses.
And they were gone, down the good street, into the blue evening, toward the palace where a hundred windows were coming alight one after another.
Cinderella stood at the gate and followed the coach with her eyes as long as she could see it, down the whole length of the street, past lamp after lamp, until it turned by the church and the sound of it faded, and the street was only a street again.
And when she could not see it any longer, she fell to crying.
She went back through the quiet house, through the kitchen, out the low door into the walled garden, and sat down on the old stone bench by the south wall, among her pumpkins, in the last gray of the light. And she let the tears come, at last, all of them, the whole day of them, the whole year of them. And the garden, which was her kingdom, sat quietly around her and let her cry, the way old friends do, and the first star came out over the wall, and the warm bricks let go of the day's sun slowly against her back.
She did not hear anyone arrive. There was no gate sound, no footstep on the gravel.
But between one breath and the next, someone was sitting beside her on the bench.
Chapter Five.
The Godmother in the Garden.
She was an old woman, or she was dressed as one, in a cloak the color of dusk itself, so that where the cloak ended and the evening began was anybody's guess. Her hands were folded over the head of a cane that may not have been a cane. And she was looking at Cinderella with the particular expression of someone who has known you since before you could walk, because, as it happened, she had.
For this was Cinderella's godmother. The old book says it plainly, and then adds, in the most offhand way, as though mentioning that an aunt lives somewhat far out of town, that the godmother was a fairy.
The storyteller pauses here, to say the obvious thing softly. Where had she been, all those hard years. The old book does not tell, and three hundred years of listeners have wondered. But fairies, by every account we have of them, keep a different calendar than we do, and arrive neither early nor late but exactly at the turning point, the way spring does. However long the winter, no one ever accused spring of laziness once it was in the garden. And she was in the garden now.
My child, said the godmother, what is the matter?
I wish, said Cinderella, and the tears took the sentence. She tried again. I wish I could. And that was as far as it would go, twice, the wish too big and too old to fit through her voice all at once.
Her godmother watched her kindly, and finished it for her, the way you finish a stitch for a tired seamstress.
You wish you could go to the ball. Is it not so?
Yes, said Cinderella, with a sigh that had the whole year inside it. Oh, yes.
Well, said the godmother, and she stood up, and the garden seemed to stand up a little with her. Be but a good girl, and I will see to it that you shall go.
And then, because fairies waste no time on astonishment, she looked about the walled garden in the dusk, at the beans on their strings and the herbs in their gray green row, like a cook taking stock of a pantry, and she said the sentence that has made children sit up straight in their beds for three hundred years.
Run into the garden, she said, and bring me a pumpkin.
Now Cinderella, whatever she expected, and she can hardly have known what she expected, did not expect groceries. But hers was not a nature that argued with kindness. She went down the path to the south wall, where her great slow golden creatures lay in their leaves, and she chose the finest of them all, the queen of the bed, the one she had watched over since it was a blossom no bigger than her thumb, and she cut it free and carried it back up the path in both arms, walking carefully, the way you carry a sleeping cat, and set it on the bench beside her godmother. And she could not, the old book admits, for the life of her imagine how a pumpkin was to get her to the ball.
Her godmother took out a knife and scooped the pumpkin hollow, working quickly and neatly, leaving nothing at all but the rind. That is a detail to fall asleep on, the great fairy of this tale bent over a garden bench in the half dark, doing kitchen work with her sleeves pushed back, the smell of cut pumpkin rising sweet and raw into the evening air, the seeds set aside in a pale little heap on the stone. Even magic, in the honest old stories, begins with the chores.
Then she straightened, and she touched the hollow rind with her wand.
There was no thunder. Understand this about the magic in this garden. It was quiet magic, garden magic, the same power that turns a seed into an oak, only run at the speed of a held breath instead of a hundred years.
The pumpkin drew itself upward. The ribs of it stretched and smoothed and became carved panels, and the carving ran along them like frost growing on a pane, leaves and vines and blossoms of worked gold. The rind deepened from orange to a lacquered, glowing gold, gold all over, gold through and through. The stem arched high and curled and became the driver's seat with its lamp bracket. Windows opened along the sides and glazed themselves, catching the first stars. Wheels grew from nothing like water lilies opening, rimmed and spoked and delicate, and the whole of it settled on its springs with a creak of newness, rocked once, and stood still.
And there, on the garden path, between the bean rows and the herb bed, where no coach could possibly be, stood a fine coach, gilded all over with gold, glowing softly in the dark like a lamp made of autumn.
Cinderella walked around it once, slowly, with her hands pressed together at her mouth.
The inside smelled, faintly, and would always smell, of pumpkin, of October, of the sweet cellar smell of harvest. Persons at the palace, later that night, would find themselves thinking, without knowing why, of their grandmothers' kitchens, of pies cooling on deep windowsills, of being small and safe somewhere warm at the turning of the year.
Well, said the godmother, looking at her work with a gardener's satisfaction. A coach.
But a coach, she said, is furniture until something pulls it.
Chapter Six.
Six Mice, Three Rats, and Six Lizards.
Go and look in the mousetrap, said the godmother.
The mousetrap of that house stood in the pantry, and it was the old kind, the humane kind if we are honest about it, a little cage of wood and wire into which mice went for the sake of the cheese and then sat, comfortable and cross, waiting for morning. Cinderella fetched it out to the garden, and inside it that evening there were six mice, all alive, all well, all regarding the proceedings with the deep suspicion of the small.
Lift the door of the trap, said the godmother, and let them out to me one by one.
So Cinderella lifted the little trapdoor a finger's width, the way you open anything when you are not sure what will happen next. And the first mouse stepped out onto the gravel, whiskers first, one paw at a time.
The wand came down and touched it, lighter than a leaf lands.
And between one step and the next, without any fuss at all, the mouse simply continued upward. It rose and lengthened and gathered, gray into gray, until where a mouse had been walking there was a horse standing, a tall, fine horse, and it stamped once, softly, surprised at the new distance to its own feet.
Then the next mouse, and the next, and the next, and each one rose in its turn like smoke settling into a new shape, until six horses stood in harness on the garden path, a matched set, and their color, the old book takes care to tell us, was a fine dapple gray, mouse colored still, the loveliest of all the grays. They had kept, too, something quick and bright and small about the eye, and all their lives, whatever else they were, they would be gentle around pantries, and would never once step on anything little.
The godmother looked them over, and then she said, in the voice of a person consulting a colleague, and it is worth noticing that she said it to Cinderella as to an equal in the work, well. And what shall we do for a coachman?
And Cinderella, whose tears were quite dry now, and whose attention, that lifelong gift of hers, was awake in her from head to foot, said, I will go and see whether there is not a rat in the rat trap in the cellar. We may make a coachman of him.
You are right, said her godmother. Go and see.
Fetch that sentence up twice, says the storyteller, because the copies always leave it out. The rat coachman was Cinderella's own idea. The old book is quite clear. The fairy made the magic, but the girl was already learning to think in it, the way you learn a language by hearing it spoken well. Remember it whenever anyone tells you she was only swept along to her fortune. She helped build the coach that carried her.
She came back from the cellar with the rat trap, and in it were three huge rats, three barrel fed cellar rats of great age and dignity. The godmother looked the three of them over slowly, like a queen reviewing her guard, and she chose the one with the grandest beard, the longest and most sweeping whiskers of the three.
The wand touched him.
And up he came, unfolding out of himself, and stood on the path a coachman, a fat, jolly coachman, round as a barrel and pleased about it, in a great coat with rows of buttons, and on his lip, mark this, the finest pair of whiskers that any eye in that kingdom ever beheld, sweeping, silver, magnificent, whiskers with an entire opinion of themselves. He took up the reins as though he had driven six horses through fifty winters, and sat above the golden coach with the calm of a man at last given the position his soul had always held.
Then the godmother said, go into the garden again, and behind the watering pot you will find six lizards. Bring them to me.
And Cinderella went down the path to the south wall, to the old copper watering pot standing in its place by the pumpkin bed, and there behind it, sure enough, in the warm shadow of it, her six small green neighbors lay drowsing, the same six who had kept her company all the slow afternoons of that summer. She gathered them up gently in her apron, all six, and they hardly woke, and she carried them up the path and set them down before the fairy.
Six touches of the wand, soft as rain beginning.
And six footmen stood behind the coach, tall and straight in liveries laced with gold and silver, and they swung up onto the footboard one after another and stood there motionless, chins high, eyes forward, holding on exactly as if they had done nothing else in all their lives. The old book makes its one joke here, quiet as everything in it is quiet. No one, it says, would ever have guessed they had been anything but footmen. Standing very still in a warm place was, after all, their life's whole art. They had merely changed walls.
And then the garden was still. The coach glowed. The horses breathed. The coachman's whiskers stirred in the evening air. Cinderella stood in the middle of it all in her old gray dress with the ash on the hem.
Well, said the godmother softly, are you not pleased?
Oh, yes, said Cinderella. And then, looking down, in a voice that tried very hard to be no voice at all, but must I go in these clothes?
Her godmother did not laugh. She only touched her, once, on the shoulder, with the wand, the way you would wake someone gently on a winter morning.
And the gray dress turned to gold and silver as she wore it. It did not vanish. Understand it rightly. It became. The old wool turned to cloth of gold and cloth of silver, running with light like water at noon, and jewels gathered at the seams the way dew gathers on a web, thick and bright and trembling. The ash itself, they say, went to silver thread. She stood in the garden dressed as the daughter of a king, and under it all her own heart going like a bird.
Then the godmother stooped, and from under her dusk colored cloak she brought out the slippers.
Glass, both of them. Little slippers of true glass, clear as spring water, catching every star then out over the garden and keeping a little of each. No cobbler in this world has ever known what to make of them, and cobblers have thought about it, believe me, for three hundred years. Glass does not bend, and glass does not lie. A glass slipper fits its own foot and no other on the round earth, and that, as the whole kingdom was shortly to learn, was precisely the point.
She put them on. They fitted as though her feet had been the pattern all along, because they had.
Now, said the godmother, and her voice put on just enough weight that the horses turned an ear. Go, and be happy. But remember this, above all things. Do not stay one moment past midnight. Not one. For on the last stroke of twelve, the coach is a pumpkin again, the horses are mice, the footmen are lizards, the coachman is a rat, and the gown is the gown you cried in. All of it goes back at midnight. That is the shape of the gift.
I will remember, said Cinderella. And she said it, the old book tells us, with a joy so entire that there was no room in her anywhere for doubt.
She promised her godmother, above all things, to leave before midnight. The footmen handed her up. The door clicked its rich little click. The coachman spoke to the grays.
And the golden coach rolled out of the walled garden and down the good street, softly thundering, throwing warm light on the housefronts as it passed, and away toward the palace, where a hundred windows stood blazing now like a shelf of lanterns, every one of them, though the palace did not know it yet, lit for her.
Chapter Seven.
The First Ball.
The palace, that night, was full to its hundred windows.
Every coach in the kingdom stood in the forecourt, wheel to wheel, while the coachmen gossiped under the torches. Inside, the great hall ran with light. There were chandeliers like frozen fountains, and mirrors facing mirrors down the long walls, so that every candle burned a hundred times, and the violins were playing, and the whole bright field of the court turned and bowed and turned in the figures of the dance, velvet and silk and powder, like a garden set slowly spinning.
And into all of that, a little after the hour of ten, came a whisper.
It ran along the hall the way wind runs over standing wheat. A great princess is arrived, said the whisper, a princess nobody knows. Nobody had seen her coach enter, or everybody had, they argued about it afterward. Gold, said someone, gilded all over, with six dapple grays, and a coachman with the whiskers of a field marshal.
The king's son himself went out to receive her.
You may as well know him now, this prince, for the old book gives him no name, only a heart. He was young, and he had bowed that evening to every jewel in the kingdom and remembered none of them. He came out onto the great steps as her coach drew up, and one of the six footmen opened the door, and the prince handed her down himself, and the first the court ever saw of Cinderella was this, a girl all light, stepping down out of a golden coach into a blaze of torches, with her hand resting in the hand of the man who, though neither of them knew a thing about it yet, would love her all his life.
He led her into the hall.
And the hall stopped.
The old book says it as plainly as it says anything, and it never wastes a word. There fell, it says, a deep silence. The dancing stopped, mid figure, every dancer stilled where the music left them. The violins ceased playing, bow after bow drifting down like birds landing. The whole vast, bright, roaring room went quiet, all of it, at once, and every face in it turned one way, to the doorway, to her.
And in all that silence there was nothing to be heard, the old book says, but a confused noise, a murmur running low around the walls, hundreds of voices whispering one thing, the same thing, over and over, the way surf whispers.
Ah. How beautiful she is.
The old king himself, and he was old, and had seen every beauty of three reigns come and go under those chandeliers, could not stop looking at her, and he leaned to the queen and told her softly, under the murmur, that it was a long time since he had seen anyone so beautiful and so lovely. And all the ladies of the court, even as they gazed, were busy at the work of court ladies, studying her gown and her hair stitch by stitch and pin by pin, so as to have the same made up for themselves tomorrow, if any looms in the kingdom held such stuff, and any hands in it were able. They never found the stuff, of course. There was one loom for that cloth, and it stood in a walled garden, and its shuttle was a wand.
The prince led her to the most honorable seat in the hall.
And then he led her out to dance.
The violins began again, softly, as though asking permission. And she danced. She danced with so much grace, the old book says, that they all admired her the more, the whole court standing around the floor to watch, and the mirrors repeating her down their long silver halls a hundred times, and none of the reflections half so bright as the girl.
Where does a kitchen girl learn to dance so, at her first ball, in her first hour among the great. But you already know. Grace is not taught in ballrooms. Ballrooms only rent it. Grace is learned in long patience, in work done beautifully for its own sake, in a body that has carried water up four flights without spilling and swept a floor as though the floor were worth sweeping. She had been in training all her life, in the one school that never fails, and tonight the lesson simply put on gold.
Late in the evening a fine collation was served, a supper of a hundred dishes, and the young prince sat beside her and ate not one morsel of it, not a mouthful, so taken up was he with gazing upon her. That is in the old book too, and the storyteller has always loved it, the great feast of the season going cold on golden plates beside a boy who had forgotten food existed.
And what did she do, our Cinderella, at the top of the world, with the court at her feet and the prince beside her?
She went and sat down by her two sisters.
Think of it. Of all the seats in that glittering hall. She sought out the red velvet and the gold flowered mantle, and sat herself beside them, and paid them a thousand civilities, kind words, kind questions, all the small warm attentions of a great lady to two strangers, and she shared out to them with her own hands the oranges and citrons the prince had given her, which were the rarest sweets of that season, fruit of the south, worth their weight in compliments. And the two sisters were amazed, and flattered half out of their senses, at such notice from the unknown princess, and they never knew her. Her own family, at the distance of one gown, and they never knew her at all.
They knew her hands, if they had looked. The same hands had built the towers of hair they were wearing that very minute.
But no one at a ball looks at hands, says the storyteller. They had looked at that girl every day for years and seen nothing but the ash. Tonight they looked at the same girl and saw nothing but the gold. They never once saw her, and each mistake was the same mistake, worn first one way round and then the other. Only two people in this story ever look at Cinderella and simply see Cinderella. One is a fairy. You will meet the other in a moment, holding a small glass shoe.
The evening rose and turned like a slow golden wheel, dance after dance, and she was happy. Let the tale rest here a breath, for it has earned it, and so has she. A girl who cried in a garden at nightfall is dancing under a thousand candles, and the murmur of the hall is warm around her, and nothing in this night wishes her anything but well.
And then, far above the music, out in the stone throat of the clock tower, the great palace clock cleared its wheels and struck the three quarters past eleven.
She heard it. Through the violins and the voices and her own happiness, she heard it, the way you hear your name across a crowded room. Eleven, and three quarters. Fifteen little minutes stood between one world and the other.
She rose, made a great curtsy to the whole company, low and lovely, a farewell to every soul in the hall at once. And she was gone, as quick as she could go, so lightly and so suddenly that afterward half the court could not say which door had taken her, only that the hall was dimmer, all at once, in no way the candles could account for.
Chapter Eight.
The Day Between.
The golden coach came home through the sleeping town with a quarter hour to spare, wheels soft on the empty streets, and turned in at the walled garden as the clock of the near church was still gathering itself to strike.
And midnight came, and the gift went back, all of it, gently, in the garden, like a wave sliding back down the sand. The coach settled and shrank and was a pumpkin again, a hollowed one, resting on the path with the starlight on its rind. The six grays dwindled into six mice, who sat up, whiskered, entirely calm, and went off along the wall in single file. The footmen were six lizards in the cool grass. The magnificent coachman was a fat old rat with a very long beard, who groomed his whiskers once, as if to confirm that they, at least, had made the journey home intact, and waddled off with dignity toward the cellar. And on the stone bench by the south wall sat a girl in an old gray dress, in the dark, hugging her own shoulders, glowing like a banked fire.
Her godmother was there, as the last of it settled.
And Cinderella thanked her, with her whole heart, sitting beside her on the bench in the dark garden, telling it all over, the silence, and the violins, and the murmur along the walls, and the oranges, and the citrons, and the prince who would eat nothing. And then she asked, in a small voice, the great question of that night. Might she go again. Tomorrow. For the ball was to be given again tomorrow, and the king's son had begged her to come.
And her godmother smiled in the dark, and it may be that the smile had known this question was coming since before the pumpkin was cut. Yes. She might go again.
And while Cinderella was still in the middle of telling all that had passed, there came the sound of the sisters' coach in the street, and the knocker went on the house door, and the godmother was gone, the way dusk is gone when you look for it, and Cinderella was hurrying up through the kitchen to let them in.
She opened the door to them yawning.
Yawning, rubbing her eyes, stretching herself, blinking against their candle as though she had been asleep for hours, and saying, in the furred voice of the just wakened, how late you are. And the old book leans close here and tells us, with a perfectly straight face, that she had not felt the least wish for sleep since they left the house.
The sisters came in trailing powder and triumph, too full of the night to hold it.
If you had been at the ball, said one, you would not have been tired of it, I promise you. There came to it the finest princess. The most beautiful princess that ever eyes beheld. Nobody knows her. And, sister, she was gracious to us. To us above everyone. She sat by us and would talk to nobody else, and she gave us oranges and citrons with her own hands.
Cinderella asked, was she indeed so very beautiful. And who was she. What was her name.
Ah, said the sisters, that was the mystery of it, that was the cream of the whole affair. Nobody knew her name. Nobody knew anything. And the king's son was in such a state over it as never was, and would give all the world to know who she might be.
All the world, said Cinderella, from inside her own secret, which sat warm in her chest like a coal carried in a lantern. She smiled at the fire. She must be beautiful indeed. And how happy you both have been. Might not I see her, somehow. Oh, Miss Charlotte, and here she turned to the elder, lend me only the yellow gown, the one you wear about the house on common days, and I might go tomorrow and stand at the back, and see her too.
Now watch the elder sister closely, says the storyteller, for this is her one whole sentence of the evening, and it is all of her in a nutshell.
Truly, said Miss Charlotte, lend my gown. To a dirty Cinderwench. I should be quite mad.
And Cinderella bowed her head, and did not press it. The old book tells us why, and it is the finest little turn in the whole chapter. She had expected exactly that answer. She had counted on it. And she was very well pleased to get it, for what on earth would she have done, poor girl, if her sister had said yes, and pressed the yellow gown on her, and there had been nothing for it but to go to the ball dressed as her own shabby self, one night after arriving as the wonder of the kingdom. The refusal fit her plans as neatly as a slipper. There is a kind of cleverness, says the storyteller, that consists in knowing precisely how unkind the unkind will be, and letting them be it, at the moment it serves you best. She had learned it in a hard school. She used it like a feather.
The sisters went up to their beds and dreamed, we may suppose, of red velvet and unknown princesses. And Cinderella banked the kitchen fire and climbed to her garret, and lay on the straw bed with her eyes open in the dark, not minding it, hearing the church clock divide the night into quarters, and somewhere below in the walls, faint and dry, the small sound of mice, of six mice in particular perhaps, telling it all over again in whatever language the pantry speaks.
The day between the two balls was the slowest day that house had ever contained.
The sisters slept till noon and woke cross with excitement. The whole afternoon was lacing and unlacing, powder and patches, the tire woman sent for again, fresh ruffles wanted, and Cinderella in the middle of it all once more with her pins and her irons, dressing the two of them for the second night, perfectly, to the last curl, while they talked across her, over her head, through her, of the great unknown lady, and of where in the world such a person could come from, and of whether she would appear again tonight. She would, Cinderella thought, pinning a star of black silk to a powdered cheek. She had it on rather good authority.
And at dusk the coach came, and took them, and the street swallowed the sound of it.
And a girl walked out through a quiet kitchen into a walled garden, where the first star stood over the wall, and the pumpkin bed lay dim along the warm bricks, and an old woman in a cloak the color of dusk rose up from the stone bench to meet her, smiling, with a wand in her hand.
Everything was done again. And the gown, the old book says, was more magnificent than the first by as much as the first had been more magnificent than anything ever seen in that kingdom, so that no description of it survives at all. The tellers simply gave up, all of them, three hundred years running. Some things are only safe to look at through a story, and even then you must squint. The coach stood taller and brighter on the path. The six grays arched their necks like parade horses. The coachman's whiskers had, if anything, gained ground.
The glass slippers were the same. There was never anything to improve in those.
Do not stay one moment past midnight, said her godmother at the garden gate, one last time, gently, the way you say a thing you fear has already been decided otherwise by the stars.
I will remember, said Cinderella.
And the coach rolled, and the housefronts lit and dimmed one after another as the gold went by.
Chapter Nine.
The Stroke of Twelve.
The second ball was warmer than the first, the way the second night of anything is warmer, the strangeness gone, the gladness left.
The court had spent a whole day hoping she would come again, and when she came, the hall did not fall silent this time. It did something better. It brightened, all over, at once, the way a room brightens when the person it was waiting for arrives. The violins found her a melody. The old king smiled from his chair. The ladies had worn their nearest guesses at her gown, a hundred loving failures, and she was kind about every one of them.
And the king's son was beside her from the first dance, and stayed beside her, all evening long, and never left her side, and never stopped speaking to her, all the kind and pleasant things that a heart says when it has waited a whole day and a whole night to say them. The old book puts it simply. He said a thousand sweet things to her. And she, it says, was very far from being tired of it.
There it is, the whole of the matter, in the gentlest words the old French had. She was happy. She was so happy, and so deep in the evening, and the music and the voice beside her had so filled the hours, that time did what time does in the good hours. It folded itself small and hid in her pocket.
She forgot what her godmother had charged her.
Not carelessly. Never think it was carelessness. It was the opposite. It was the fullest attention of her attentive life, all of it turned for once on her own happiness, and no sentry left at the gate. When the great clock high in its tower began to strike, she counted it in her heart, as we all count clocks half heard, and made it eleven.
It was not eleven.
On the first stroke of midnight she knew, all at once, the way a sleeper knows the dream is ending even before the eyes open. She rose from the prince's side without one word, for there was no time for even one, and she fled.
She was as nimble, the old book says, as a deer. Down the long hall between the mirrors, a flash of gold repeated a hundred times, and gone. The prince sprang up and followed her, calling, but no living man was catching that girl across her own last minute. Through the anteroom, the second stroke. Out the great doors, the third. And down the wide stone stairs of the palace, flight after flight, with the torches streaming, the fourth stroke and the fifth, and it was there, on the palace stairs, at the turn where the torchlight was brightest, that one of the little glass slippers left her foot behind and lay where it fell, on the stone, shining, still.
She did not stop.
The prince, a moment behind, did stop. That is the difference between their two nights from here on, and the hinge of everything to come. He came down the steps and found the stairs empty and the forecourt a confusion of ordinary coaches, and no golden coach anywhere, and nothing in the world left of her at all but the little shoe of glass, catching the torchlight.
He took it up. The old book says he took it up most carefully, in both hands. And, holding it, he walked slowly back up the stairs into the light and the music, a young man carrying, as gently as if it breathed, all that remained of the finest evening of his life.
The guards at the palace gate were asked, that night and the next morning, whether they had not seen a great princess go out. The guards looked at one another. They had seen no princess. Nobody had passed the gate at the stroke of twelve, they said, but a young girl on foot, very poorly dressed, in a plain gray gown, who had more the air of a poor country girl than of a fine lady.
She heard the last stroke fall as she ran, and the gift went home all around her at a dead run, gold to gray, coach to pumpkin behind her in the dark, and she never broke stride. She came into the walled garden out of breath, barefoot on one side, laughing and gasping both at once, with her heart going like the church bells at a wedding.
No coach. No footmen. No gown. Only the night garden, and the mice gone into the wall, and the lizards in the grass, and, held tight against her, carried all that wild way home without a thought, one little glass slipper, the fellow of the one lying on the palace stairs.
She was sitting by the kitchen embers, in her old gray dress, breathing softly again, by the time the sisters' coach came home.
Had they been well entertained, she asked them, at the door, with a candle. Had the beautiful lady been there again.
Oh, she had been there, they said, both talking at once. More beautiful than before, if such a thing could be. But such an ending as it had. On the stroke of midnight she had leapt up and run from the hall as though the palace were afire, and dropped one of her little glass slippers on the stairs, the prettiest slipper in all the world. And the king's son had picked it up, and had done nothing, nothing at all, the whole remainder of the ball, but sit apart and gaze at it. It was perfectly plain, said the sisters, nodding together like two tall ships agreeing about the wind, that he was deep in love with the beautiful person to whom the little slipper belonged.
And Cinderella said, only, that the lady must be happy indeed. And she bid her sisters goodnight, and banked the fire, and went up the cold stair to her garret with her candle.
And under the loose board by the window, where her few treasures lived, a little slipper made of glass lay wrapped in a clean rag, with the candlelight inside it, waiting.
Chapter Ten.
The Slipper Tried Through the City.
The sisters, for once in this tale, had said a true thing. He was deep in love.
A few days after the second ball, the whole city heard it together. The king's son caused it to be proclaimed, by sound of trumpet, in every square and at every gate, that he would marry her whose foot the little glass slipper should exactly fit.
You can imagine the morning the trumpets went round. A prince, and a kingdom with him, to be won by a shoe.
But the prince knew, says the storyteller, what he was about, and so did the old tellers who kept this detail bright for us. Glass does not stretch, and glass does not lie, and glass does not care whose ambitions are pinned to it. A silk slipper can be crushed into. A leather shoe gives way and holds its tongue. But a slipper of glass fits the one foot it was made for, and no other in the wide world, and the prince had held it to the light, we may suppose, and understood what the fairy had understood before him. He was not searching for a size. He was searching for the only person on earth the gift had ever belonged to.
So the trying began, in proper order, at the top.
It was brought first to the princesses. It did not fit the princesses. Then to the duchesses, and it did not fit the duchesses, and then to all the ladies of the court, in their order, salon by salon, and it fit no one at all. The little shoe traveled through the great houses of that kingdom like a lantern carried down a long dark corridor, lighting proud face after proud face, and going out again, and everywhere it went, feet were soaked and powdered and pleaded with, and everywhere the glass said, gently, no.
And at last, in its patient circuit of the whole city, it came to the tall stone house in the good street, and was carried into the morning room, where the two sisters were waiting for it with their shoes already off.
They did all that could be done. The old book says they did their utmost, and lets us look away. They pointed their toes like dancers. They curled them like squirrels. They pushed, and winced, and rested, and turned the slipper the other way about, and tried again, each of them certain, to the very last push, that the glass would relent for her particularly. The glass did not relent. Glass never does. It sat on the velvet cushion between attempts, small and clear and perfectly calm, and waited to be taken to its owner.
Who was standing by the door of the room, in her gray dress, watching. For she had seen all this, and she knew her slipper, none better.
And Cinderella said, laughing, let me see if it will not fit me.
The sisters burst out laughing on the instant, and fell to mocking her, the old jokes, the cinders, the wench at a ball, all of it. Let the kitchen try the slipper. It was the best joke of a remarkable week.
But the gentleman of the court who had been sent about with the slipper, a careful man grown very tired of feet, did not laugh. He looked earnestly at Cinderella. The old book marks the look, so we shall too. He looked at the girl in the ash gray dress standing quietly under the mockery, and he found her very beautiful, plainly, right through the gray, and he said, why, it was but just that she should try. He had his orders, said he, to try the slipper upon every girl in the kingdom, and every girl meant every girl.
He set the chair himself. This small nameless courtier, who gets three sentences in the old book and honor in every one of them, handed the kitchen girl to the chair before her sisters' faces as though handing a queen to a throne, and knelt, and put the slipper to her foot.
It went on at a touch. Sweetly, easily, all the way home, the way a key turns in the one lock it was cut for. It fitted, says the old book, as if it had been made of wax upon her.
The room went very quiet.
And in the quiet, while the two sisters stood staring, and the courtier still knelt with her foot in his hand, Cinderella reached into the pocket of her gray dress, and brought out the other slipper, and put it on her other foot herself.
Chapter Eleven.
Forgiveness, and Two Places at Court.
And then, as if a second slipper had been a knock at some invisible door, the godmother was in the room.
No one saw her come in. No one ever did. She crossed to Cinderella and touched the gray dress once with her wand, and the gray went to gold and silver and gathered jewels as it went, richer, the old book says, more magnificent than either gown before it, and the girl in the kitchen dress stood in the morning room dressed as she had stood in the candlelight of the palace, and the last veil in the story fell away.
The two sisters knew her then.
They knew her for the beautiful lady of the ball. The lady of the oranges and the citrons. The lady who had sat by them and been kind to them above everyone, on the greatest evenings of their lives. And she was Cinderella. She had been Cinderella all along. The kindness at the ball and the kindness at home had been the same kindness, wearing first ash, and then gold, and they had returned the one with flattery and the other with mockery, and every morning of all those years came back to them now with its true name on.
They threw themselves at her feet.
Both of them, down on the floor of the morning room, red velvet and all, crying, and begging her pardon for all the ill treatment she had suffered at their hands, all of it, the garret and the cinders and the names. It was not dignified, and it was the first fully honest thing we have seen them do in this whole tale, and the old book, which never mocks anyone in its power, does not mock them now.
And now comes the ending that the copies traded away, and the reason the storyteller chose this tale for tonight.
Cinderella raised them up.
She took them up from the floor with her own hands, the same hands, and she embraced them. And she said that she forgave them with all her heart. And then she said the thing that no one in three hundred years has ever quite gotten over. She desired them always to love her.
Not to serve her. Not to be sorry forever. To love her. She stood there in the gown of a queen with every hurt of her life kneeling on the carpet in front of her, and the whole of her revenge was to ask for their love, and to hand them back her own with it. Some fairy tales end with a wedding, says the storyteller. The true Cinderella ends with this, and the wedding is only what comes after.
They took her to the young prince, dressed as she was, and the old book allows itself one smile here. He thought her more charming than ever. And a few days after, he married her, and the city put its lamps in every window, and where her coach passed, the smell of oranges and citrons went down the streets like a blessing.
And Cinderella, who was no less good than she was beautiful, and the old book has waited its whole length to weigh those two words for us in that order, brought her two sisters to live at the palace. She gave them apartments of their own, in the palace itself, under her own roof and her own protection. And that very same day, she matched them with two great lords of the court, and saw them settled, and honored, and provided for, all their lives long.
That very same day. She did not wait to be sure they had changed. She did not set terms. The girl who was given the coldest room in the house gave away two of the warmest rooms in the kingdom before her wedding flowers had wilted.
Of the stepmother, the old book says nothing more at all, and the storyteller will not guess where the book keeps its silence.
The old teller, when he had written down this tale, added a word at the end for the listeners, as the tellers of that age liked to do, and it has ridden along with the story ever since. Beauty, he said, is a rare treasure, and we will always admire it. But there is a rarer thing worth more, and it is the good grace, the kind and gracious heart, and that was the fairy's real gift to Cinderella all along. Without it, he said, nothing is possible. With it, anything. And then he added, more quietly, that gifts sleep in us, all of us, and are worth little until someone kind wakes them, a godmother, a teacher, a friend, one person who looks through the ash and sees.
Pumpkins go back to being pumpkins, says the storyteller. Gowns go back to rags. Everything the wand touched went home at midnight. But look once more at what never turned back. The love between the prince and the girl. The wisdom she carried out of the kitchen. And two sisters, raised up off a floor, forgiven, embraced, and asked for their love. What kindness transforms, midnight cannot touch. That is the deepest law in the old book, and it is the last thing this tale asks you to carry, and it is not heavy.
Chapter Twelve.
Goodnight. And the Lamp at the Edge of Morning.
The night is deep now over that tidy kingdom, and the kingdom is doing what it always did best. It is sleeping.
The palace of the hundred windows has gone dark, window after window, like a mind letting go of its thoughts one at a time. The great hall stands empty and vast in the moonlight, the mirrors facing the mirrors down the long walls with nothing to repeat but the quiet. The violins lie in their cases. The chandeliers hang still, a hundred candles cold and content, resting for the next festival, whenever it should please to come. There is no hurry about it. There is no hurry about anything, anywhere, tonight.
In the royal kitchens the fires are banked, breathing under their blankets of ash, keeping tomorrow's warmth the way a secret is kept. And the cooks asleep in their beds have left, on the long table, a little heap of crumbs, swept there kindly and left on purpose, for it is well known in that palace, from the queen's own example, that one must be gentle with mice. No trap has been set in those kitchens for years. The mice of that palace live like small honored pensioners, and if six of them, old ones now, gray as dapple, sometimes stand very still together in the pantry doorway at midnight, with their faces lifted, as though remembering the weight of harness and the singing of torchlit streets, the night cat has orders to let them dream.
In the palace gardens, down along the south wall, there is a pumpkin bed. The queen planted it herself, the first spring, with seeds saved in a twist of paper from a certain garden in a certain good street, and the gardeners tend it as though it were the crown jewels, and are not altogether wrong to. The great slow golden creatures lie out there now in their leaves under the stars, ripening, unbothered, and the starlight moves over their ribbed sides, and any one of them, you feel, looking at them, might be a coach only resting.
Behind the old copper watering pot, which came to the palace too, because she asked for it, the lizards sleep in a warm green row.
And in a coach house that smells of leather and hay, the palace coachman, an old man with the most magnificent whiskers the kingdom has grown since a certain famous night, for the queen would have no other kind, snores in the good bed above the stalls, and six dapple gray horses stand asleep below him, trusting their own bones, the loveliest of all the grays, for the queen chooses the palace grays herself, and everyone at court believes they know why. All of it together, wheels and whiskers and hooves, is home, and known, and kept.
The tall stone house in the good street sleeps too. Its garret window is dark and its hearths are swept, and it is only a house now, holding no one unkindly, and even the memory of those years drifts through its rooms like the smell of bread long after baking, faint, and getting fainter, and by morning it will be gone another little bit.
And in the palace, in a small room off the great apartments, on a cushion of velvet, under a dome of clear glass, the slippers stand together, the two of them, side by side, mended into a pair again, with the moonlight finding them from the high window. A road of midnight and pumpkin still shines faintly inside the heels, if you look, but no one is looking now. They are done with roads. Everything they were made to find has been found.
The queen sleeps. The prince sleeps. Down the corridor, in two warm apartments, two sisters sleep, and are loved, exactly as they were asked to be, and love back, better than anyone ever expected, which is often the way once someone has gone first.
The kingdom breathes slowly, all together, rings within rings of rest, out from the palace, over the clipped gardens black and silver under the moon, over the straight avenues and the sleeping lime trees, out to the far farms, where the pumpkin fields lie mile on quiet mile under the turning stars. And every clock in every hallway keeps its own opinion of the hour, softly, and nobody minds, because midnight holds nothing now, in the whole of that kingdom, that anyone needs to run from.
And here, at the edge of everything, in this room, the shelf at the border of the lamplight has its slipper back.
The storyteller sets it down without a sound, on its own small cushion, in its own place, between an old brass lamp with a dent in its side and a pair of silver shoes scuffed at the toes. The glass takes the lamplight and keeps a little of it, the way it kept the stars over a walled garden, the way it keeps everything it is given, being glass, which cannot lie, and cannot forget, and cannot be anything but exactly what it is.
The flame is small now. The size of an almond. It leans, and rights itself, and goes on with the oldest work there is, keeping the dark kind.
The words have nearly finished being words. They are mostly warmth now, with a rhythm in it.
Like embers breathing in a chimney corner.
Like mice turning the pages of a very little book, somewhere safe inside a wall.
Like a coach far off on a quiet road, carrying someone home, and in no hurry at all.
The storyteller closes the book, but slowly, the way a door is closed on a sleeping house.
The lamp is turned low.
Whatever became of them after, they are safe now, and so are you.
The lantern will be lit again. There are more tales in the old book than there are nights in a year.
Goodnight.