Free Charm by Sarah Pinborough Page A

waved him off.
    A small brown mouse ran in between their legs and sat shivering on the floor, half under the stove. Rose reached for the broom to shoo it out, but Cinderella stopped her. ‘The little thing will die out in that weather. Leave it be. I think it’s rather sweet.’ She then broke a small chunk of the cheese off and dropped it on the floor. ‘Now come on, let’s go upstairs. We can’t hide in here forever.’
     
    C inderella’s step-mother had heard about the slipper by lunchtime. Everybody had. In a city that was besieged by bad weather it seemed gossip could still travel faster than the icy wind. A fevered light came on in her eyes as she gathered all the information she could about the shoe, paying money they didn’t have to the servants of those whose houses had already been visited for every tiny detail. She clapped her hands together and smiled and laughed. There was still a chance for Rose – there was still a chance for her .
    ‘But it’s not my shoe,’ Rose said. ‘And he doesn’t want me.’ It was a plaintive, quiet protest of one who knows they’re already defeated.
    ‘He wants whoever that shoe fits,’ Esme countered. ‘If it fits you, he’ll marry you.’
    She spent a lot of time examining Rose’s feet. They were too wide for the slipper, she decided, and so she bound them so tightly in bandages that the poor girl could barely walk without crying. Cinderella’s father tried to stop it, but Rose said it was fine and that it didn’t hurt that much and she just wanted to make her mother happy. Every morning and every night the bandages would come off and Esme would force her poor daughter to try to squeeze her bruised foot into a shoe which was purportedly the exact size of the sparkling one that was stopping at each house in the city. It should be – Cinderella’s step-mother had paid enough for it.
    Rose’s foot never fit. It wasn’t the length that was the problem, it was the width. Rose might have lost weight but her feet were still wide. After five days of binding, Cinderella’s step-mother decided more drastic action was needed. She plunged her daughter’s bare feet into buckets of ice for hours at a time and then bandaged them up again.
    Cinderella wasn’t sure what was the most disturbing – her actions or the soothing way she spoke to Rose as she did them. She loved her, she said. She just wanted the best for her, she said. And all the time Rose cried and the storm outside continued to rage. Cinderella just wished the prince’s procession would hurry up and get to them. This madness needed to stop.
    The night before it happened, the storm finally broke. The skies cleared and the wind dropped, leaving the city in an icy calm.
    Rose finally broke too.
    Upstairs on the top floor two middle-aged people, once brought together by true love, now shouted and sobbed at each other. Cinderella heard the words, ‘menopause’ and ‘hormones’ and then her step-mother completely lost it, attacking her husband with a barrage of insults whose targets ranged from his manhood to his wages. Cinderella had been keeping mainly to her room. No one was paying her any attention anyway, and once she’d done her chores for the day she’d go and lock herself away with her lover’s picture, close her eyes and turn time back to the night of the ball. This time even that daydream couldn’t block out the fighting. It was gone ten at night when she crept into the kitchen and found Rose.
    At first she couldn’t quite take it in. The bandages were undone and spread all over the floor. Rose, her hair free around her shoulders, was sitting on a wooden chair, one knee tucked under her chin. She was sobbing and muttering incoherently, focused intently on whatever she was trying to do. Cinderella’s eyes widened. What was she trying to do?
    Rose had gripped her little toe with one hand, separating it from the rest, and was cutting at it with a small knife. She paused, and with a bloody hand