the bearded lady

A girl was married without a dowry to a man much older than herself. What was she, this bride with empty hands? Nobody special. Not a princess. But she was pretty, and her husband liked pretty girls better than anything.

He took her away to his castle, deep in the forest, and he gave her the keys and told her to be the mistress of the place. Then he took her to bed, brutally, and afterwards he left, saddling up his horse and riding out through the forest to who knew where.

The young wife was alone for the first time in her life. She walked around the castle, jangling the keys in her hands. She jumped on the beds and let the dogs into the kitchen and she rode the horses around the yard. She cooked extravagant meals and shared them with the cats and the mice and they all grew fat and happy and warm, for she made fires in all the rooms. She took up reading, and spent hours playing the instruments in the music room. She even wandered in the forest, gathering plants and mushrooms, and she dried them and stored them in jars, along with rabbitsfoot and toadspawn and other such things.

In short, she was happy and content, until the day her husband came back to the castle. He was furious with her for her wastefulness, making fires in the middle of the day when he wasn’t even home.  He put the dogs out and shot the horses and damped the fires and smashed the jars and drowned the cats and burned the books and broke the instruments and built a huge iron fence around the castle so that she could not escape. Then he left again, because he could not stand to be in the ruined home, with his wife crying and complaining. He left her scrubbing blood off the kitchen floor.

After that, the wife kept to her room, eating plain meals and keeping a small fire going. She was always hungry and cold, but too frightened of her husband coming back to give herself any more warmth than this. She confined her comfort to one room. But here she soon became at home. She found pencils, and drew pictures of the forest flowers and the animals that she missed. She wrote stories like the ones she had read in books, and told them to herself. She sang and danced. And her spirits rose, and her hope.

The next time her husband came home, he brought his friends. They wanted to meet his pretty wife. They had heard so much about her looks and her carefree ways. But the castle was cold, and the wife was thin and unsmiling, and there was no joy to be had, except to torment her. They took away her pictures and stories. They laughed and pushed her from one to the other. And the husband was the worst of all. He was so ashamed of his ugly, miserable wife, who could not stop crying, who could not even keep a house warm, that he beat her until she was half dead.

Then they left, all of them, leaving nothing behind except her. They did not even bother locking the gates, for there was nowhere for such a wretch to run to. She crept into the forest, looking for herbs to heal her bruises and herbs to mend her spirits. And when she was in the forest, alone, her heart rejoiced. She listened to the birdsong and watched the sunlight slant between the trees, and she felt she was blessed. I am alive, she thought, and I can feel the sun in my head.

And when she looked up from the forest floor, back towards the castle, she saw that it was burning to the ground, and turrets of smoke and ash plumed up towards the heavens. The fire gave off a wonderful heat, and she held out her hands to it. Her cheeks grew rosy and hot. The fire warmed her through and through, until she was glowing, until she could believe that she would never be cold again.