Free While Beauty Slept by Elizabeth Blackwell

bloodshot and her cheeks damp with tears.
    “Pass me a cloth.” Her accent gave the simple words a melodious rhythm.
    I took a square of folded linen from a pile next to the basin and handed it to her. She ran the fabric over her eyes and beneath her nose before passing it back to me. As she reached out, the sleeve of her nightdress fell back to reveal an angry red gash on her inner arm, a wound that had only recently begun to heal. How could a woman of such privilege have come by such a cruel injury?
    I should have taken the cloth from the queen without speaking and disappeared as I was expected to. But her drawn expression made me want to linger, to divert her from that grief.
    “Madam, the poem,” I said, glancing back at the paper on the table behind me. “Did you write it?”
    Her eyes widened with surprise as she nodded.
    “It’s beautiful,” I said.
    “You can read?” Her tone carried no hint of mockery. “What is your name?”
    “Elise.”
    “That will be all, Elise.”
    I curtsied and turned away, belatedly shocked by my own forwardness. I had taken a great risk, yet the encounter had gone in my favor. Despite Lady Wintermale’s glares, my position might be secure after all.
    And so it appeared in the following weeks. Every morning I lit a fire as the queen awoke and brought her a cloth to wipe her face, as if it were perfectly normal to greet each day with tears. Day after day we followed the same routine. The queen never said more than a few words to me, yet I felt a bond of affection for her out of all proportion to the time I spent in her presence. She had an innate warmth of manner that made me sympathize with her plight, despite the vast difference in our ages and ranks. Like me, she was an outsider, cut off from her family, an object of disparaging gossip with no natural allies at court. Yet, like my mother, she carried herself with dignity and resolve. Is it any wonder I should feel drawn to her?
    As Petra had predicted, my appointment to the royal ladies’ chambers had set off a storm of complaints to Mrs. Tewkes, and jealousy cut me off from those who might otherwise have been my friends. The other maids’ distaste for me was only reinforced by my ignorance of the Lower Hall’s pecking order, where the hierarchies were murkier than in the royal apartments. One night at supper, finding the bench where Petra was seated already full, I slid onto an empty seat at a nearby table. The women seated there—clearly fellow maids, for we all wore the same gray wool dresses—glanced at me in silence, then at one another.
    I introduced myself, and still not a sound was uttered. Confused and ashamed, I stared down at my bowl and ate as quickly as possible, my face flushed with humiliation. As I rushed out from the hall, tears trickling down my cheeks, I heard Petra calling after me.
    “Never mind them,” she said airily as I wiped my face with my apron. “It was an easy enough mistake.”
    “Why wouldn’t they speak to me?”
    “They’re seamstresses.” Seeing my continued confusion, she sighed and explained. “They think they’re better than us, just because they’ve never had to pour out a pitcher of piss. Fancy themselves quite the fine ladies.”
    A smile began to creep up one side of my mouth, and Petra went on, gratified by my reaction.
    “You’d think no one else here could even thread a needle, the way they carry on. As if I’d want to be trapped in the sewing room all day, bent over a pair of Lady Wintermale’s underclothes. You watch, they’ll all end up hunchbacks and we’ll have the last laugh.”
    I did giggle then, and Petra convinced me to return with her to the hall. In hushed tones, she explained the seating patterns that so mystified me. The pages sat with the valets, never the footmen. The footmen occasionally ate with the carpenters and other skilled laborers, but anyone from the stables who dared to join them would be shunned—unless of course it was the head