"Take a helper and go bring in the pigeons! There's two hundred of them waiting out by the back entrance, all of them with their necks fresh wrung."
"Necks wrung, Cook?" The pulley boy gulped. He liked birds, had even kept a few as pets back in the village, before he took this job.
"We can't eat 'em with their wings flappin', now can we?" she replied with a wide grin.
"Well, no, I guess not," the pulley boy acknowledged, though to himself he was wondering why anyone had to eat them at all. If he had his way, he would eat nothing but carrots and beans and bread. Maybe a fish now and then. He didn't like the thought of poor creatures becoming food. If any living thing had to have its neck wrung, he wished it were the princess's large yellow cat, which tended to hide behind draperies, then leap out and scratch the servants. Luckily the pulley boy rarely had call to go above-stairs. But he knew chambermaids with long scratches on their ankles from the claws of the cat.
"Delicious, you are so capricious," the princess had been heard to say fondly, picking up the cat after it had attacked a footman one day.
"Blimey, that critter's savage," one pudgy girl had complained, returning to the kitchen with blood on her stockings.
Too bad we can't roast and eat cats, the pulley boy thought as he looked around for someone to help him bring in the birds. All of the regular kitchen staff was hard at work, chopping and simmering and parboiling and plucking. Some were counting pink salmon that were contained in a huge tub of water. One young chopping lad, an apprentice still, was doing nothing but truffles, mincing them into a large pile. Another had been assigned to peel asparagus and stood behind a mountain of green spears hardly knowing where to begin. Others were polishing silverware from enormous deposits on a long table.
The pulley boy was about to call on his little brother, who was playing with a marble near the bell wall, when a tall, freckled girl wearing a shabby dress under her apron volunteered shyly.
"I could go with you," the girl said.
"Get them goats on the spit!" Cook bellowed to the staff. "They have to cook all day and through the night!" She turned back to the kitchen, and the elderly serving boy, who usually tended only pets, shuffled reluctantly over to help lift the large goats that would be roasted for the banquet.
The pulley boy looked at the freckled, eager girl. He recognized her as the seventeenth chambermaid, the one who tended the princess and who sometimes, in the kitchen, joined in the singing with a sweet, clear voice. Then he looked at his brother, who continued to roll his green marble back and forth on the floor. "I suppose he should stay in case a bell is pulled," he mused, "though that girl—the princess?—she's off for the day somewheres. She hasn't called for lunch all week. And I already sent the queen's lunch aloft, and the king is in his counting house, so I don't think—"
"Your brother had better stay," the chambermaid said, "in case the butler pulls a bell cord or sumpthin'."
"Right, then. Come along." He gestured, and the girl followed him through the hall, chattering happily as they went. "Creamed pigeons, she's making," she told him. "Can you believe it? For two hundred! And some of them villagers, not nobility! I lived in the village once, and I never heard of a creamed pigeon—"
"I remember you did." He pushed open the heavy door.
"Remember I did what? Heard of a creamed pigeon? I never!"
"No. I remember you lived in the village. With your pa. I remember he beat you. Everyone knew."
The chambermaid grew flustered. "Well, he said I was a useless great galoomph, and I suppose I was."
"But you went to school. I used to see you going to the schoolhouse and your pa yelling after you, and throwing things sometimes."
The chambermaid nodded. "I did. I wanted to learn to read, and the schoolmaster taught me. He was very strict and rapped your knuckles if you didn't pay attention, but he taught me my letters and how to read! And now I'm reading the best book, about a girl named Alice, who has adventures you wouldn't believe! Maybe you could borrow it when I'm done!"
"Look: here they are. We should load them in the barrow, I suppose." They had stopped at the large pile of dead pigeons. The boy picked one up and looked at its staring eyes. After a moment he dropped it into the wooden wheelbarrow standing nearby. Then he sighed and reached for more. "I can't read. Worked all my life since I was a tot. Never went to school," he said. "Here: grab some. You said you'd help. Don't just stand there."
"Poor pidgies—they look like sumpthin' you'd feed the cat. Maybe with cream sauce, though..." The chambermaid leaned over, filled her apron with limp birds, and walked to the wheelbarrow. "My name's Tess," she told him, spilling the birds into it. "I could teach you, Pulley Boy."
"Cream sauce? No thanks."
"To read."
"You could do that?" He scooped up another armful of birds. Then he nodded to her, and blushed. "I'm John," he said.
"Pastry!" They could hear the cook shout in the kitchen. "Clear some tables for rolling out the pastry!"
"I could!" the chambermaid said. "It's easy. Look: A is first, all stiff and upright, like this." She drew the letter with a stick in the ground beside the wheelbarrow. The pulley boy, his arms filled with pigeons, stared down at it.
"A is for Alice, in that book I told you about." He dropped the pigeons onto the top of the pile they had already made. "Lemme try it, then," he said, and took the stick from her. Carefully he made an A in the dirt.
"Nuts to be shelled!" the cook called. "Where's that boy went to get the pigeons? He could be shelling these pistachios!""
Quickly they loaded the last of the limp birds and pushed the wheelbarrow toward the corridor. "I'll show you B later," Tess whispered.
"B is for birthday, and for ball," she explained.
The Birthday Ball
14. The Suitors
From three different directions they started out, early Saturday morning, as the sun was rising. Each suitor had an entourage of servants, horses, a coach in which to ride, and long lines of bearers carrying trunks of clothing, toiletries, and trinkets.
A hawk, soaring high on the cloudless morning, peering below, his keen eyes alert for rodents or snakes to descend on for his breakfast, saw the processions from a great distance. From his place in the sky they looked like scores of ants moving steadily toward a destination where they would all converge on some edible mound, perhaps the leavings of a peasant picnic. But the hawk, no stranger to humans and the complicated lives they led, knew exactly what and who these caravans were.