The Dagger

A short story concerning enticement, greed, power, deception and poverty. Excerpt: A sickly smiled materialized on her heavenly face, an offence to cherubic beauty.

It was dark.

 

The candles were extinguished, silence was ensconced within stonewalls, and Felicity was sitting still on the well-cushioned featherbed in her chamber. Her nail was pushing down on her cuticle, a rather nasty habit attained during her formative years that still revealed itself from time to time. Lost in thought, quite burdened by the predicament her son had been placed in, she contemplated the way she was aiding the imprudent boy, but her mind drew to a blank whenever she commenced to ponder. Her heart drummed in her ears... dub, dub, dub... which, quite frankly, was reasonably vexing and unhelpful in the endeavour she had taken upon herself.

 

“Princess,’’ she heard a timid voice emit from behind the mahogany door of her chamber. Felicity was startled by the intrusion. Slowly, she rose from her bed, her gait awkward and unbalanced, as her feet touched the cold ground. Upon nearing the door, her pale hand tremblingly rose to the aging latch and unlocked it; the mousey-face of her maid, Mary, revealed behind the threshold. The maid stood quivering, a pitiful spectacle.

 

“Princess,’’ she whispered again in her thin, unpleasant voice.

 

Felicity, ignoring her presence and dismissing her arrival, bobbed her head out the door and glanced about hastily, searching for any onlookers or servants, before letting her maid in without a word of welcome.

 

The maid ambled slowly into the room, knowing her status all too well, knowing she did not belong within the richly decorated space. Her slumped eyes gazed about, taking in the chamber; and although aware that she had come here before on her daily duties, this time her arrival into the chamber felt different... was sinister.

 

“The dagger?” Felicity probed, a fair figure standing before the barred and shielded window. The red, velvety, curtain draped down to the ground mellifluously, while she stood before it, in all her angelic, daunting and misleading beauty. Pale blue eyes, framed by golden locks, of the royalty penetrated the maid’s murky dark, sending shivers through the peasant.

 

The maid nodded. An object or a contraption of some sort, bounded in a humble white cloth, sprung down from the sleeve of her unattractive frock. Felicity’s eyes enlarged in hunger as she gazed at the object. “Good, good,” she whispered. “Hand it to me, will you?” Her haste was evident.

 

“Yes, milady.” The maid offered the object to the princess, trembling when her lowly fingers brushed against the royalty’s palm, while the craving in Felicity’s eyes amplified as the object finally sat still against her skin.

“At last,” the Princess whispered. “He is dead.”

 

Her brother breathed no more.

 

“And I am Queen.”

 

Her son would be King.

A sickly smiled materialized on her heavenly face, an offence to cherubic beauty. The maid trembled upon its appearance; her bones had run cold. She had known she had made a pact with the devil, but only now was it so clear. Mary took in a breath; there was nothing else to do.

 

Dub-dub-dub, two hearts drummed, an identical tune, but thumping for a much dissimilar celebration.

 

“The...the gold, milady?” Mary’s thinly voice escaped, stuttering, while her ribcage had seemed to yearn to constrict the uttered. 

“There,” the royalty said, nonchalantly flexing slender, pale fingers at the drawer of her dressing-table, while the other hand held snugly onto the knife, fevered eyes fixated on the crimson blood that plummeted like tear drops to the marble floor, and the crimson curtain the backcloth.

The maid scurried towards her target, fingers quivering, as she pulled open the drawer and found her lot. Jewelry greeted her, gold at its finest. Her lips twitched into a half-smile. Father will be well, was her only thought, a slight meditation, as her plump fingers wrapped around the fortune.

 

“Thank you, milady,” she then murmured, voice quivering like her hands, as she released the jewelry from her tight fists into the pockets of her worn gown, which she had mended with stitches the preceding day, a difficult job if one bore in mind her far-sightedness.

But, “Leave,” was her only response.

--O--