Don't Bet on the Prince by Jack Zipes

Author:Jack Zipes [Zipes, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136789533
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

4

How young Anna looked. She was in her twenties. She wore a scarlet gown and a scarlet cloak lined with pale fur and heavy brocade. It resembled Lisel’s cloak but had a different clasp. Snow melted on the shoulders of the cloak, and Anna held her slender hands to the fire on the hearth. Free of the hood, her hair, like marvelously tarnished ivory, was piled on her head, and there was a yellow flower in it. She wore ruby eardrops. She looked just like Lisel, or Lisel as she would become in six years or seven.

Someone called. It was more a roar than a call, as if a great beast came trampling into the château. He was a big man, dark, all darkness, his features hidden in a black beard, black hair — more, in a sort of swirling miasmic cloud, a kind of psychic smoke: Anna’s hatred and fear. He bellowed for liquor and a servant came running with a jug and cup. The man, Anna’s husband, cuffed the servant aside, grabbing the jug as he did so. He strode to Anna, spun her about, grabbed her face in his hand as he had grabbed the jug. He leaned to her as if to kiss her, but he did not kiss, he merely stared. She had steeled herself not to shrink from him, so much was evident. His eyes, roving over her to find some overt trace of distaste or fright, suddenly found instead the yellow flower. He vented a powerful oath. His paw flung up and wrenched the flower free. He slung it in the fire and spat after it.

‘You stupid bitch,’ he growled at her. ‘Where did you come on that?’

‘It’s only a flower.’

‘Not only a flower. Answer me, where? Or do I strike you?’

‘Several of them are growing near the gate, beside the wall; and in the forest. I saw them when I was riding.’

The man shouted again for his servant. He told him to take a fellow and go out. They must locate the flowers and burn them.

‘Another superstition?’ Anna asked. Her husband hit her across the head so she staggered and caught the mantel to steady herself.

‘Yes,’ he sneered, ‘another one. Now come upstairs.’

Anna said, ‘Please excuse me, sir. I am not well today.’

He said in a low and smiling voice:

‘Do as I say, or you’ll be worse.’

The fire flared on the swirl of her bloody cloak as she moved to obey him.

And the image changed. There was a bedroom, fluttering with lamplight. Anna was perhaps thirty-five or six, but she looked older. She lay in bed, soaked in sweat, uttering hoarse low cries or sometimes preventing herself from crying. She was in labor. The child was difficult. There were other women about the bed. One muttered to her neighbor that it was beyond her how the master had ever come to sire a child, since he got his pleasure another way, and the poor lady’s body gave evidence of how. Then Anna screamed.

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