Short Story: A Woman's Touch

Short Story: A Woman's Touch

Even in the dim light of the cluttered grey stone barn, the shoes radiated a glow that lifted the gloom. Aurelia looked up from the orris root and dried rosebuds she was busy bashing into a powder in the mortar and pestle on the great oak table and paused to admire them.

‘So beautiful,’ she thought, ‘The Murano glassblowers have proved their worth. Now it’s my turn.’

She turned to a large, leather-bound book on a bench behind her and flicked through a few crackling parchment pages, searching with a stubby fingernail on the end of wizened working woman’s hands. She tapped the page and commanded “Read!”

“Grind together the root of orris and several dried rosebuds into a powder,” the book had a slow, sleepy voice. Aurelia waited until it was finished.

“That is done Book, what is next?”

“Add thereto sufficient heated gum tragacanth to bind them into a paste and speak the following spell as you use a dock leaf to apply the polish…”

“Book, stop!” she said with a groan. “I must visit the apothecary for gum tragacanth; I used the last of it to make protection beads for tonight.” Her sister was not as gifted as she, but there was a lot at stake.

She crossed the tiny paved yard in half a dozen steps and pulled the latch on the heavy wooden door to the three-roomed cottage she had always called home.

Reaching up on the hook behind the door for her winter cloak she called out to the only other living creature in the room, a large irish wolfhound.

“Cully, take care and make sure you let no one in while I am out. I have locked the other creatures in the barn out of the cold.” The dog whimpered as if in reply and Aurelia closed the door firmly behind her.

The late October sun had barely climbed above the treetops although it was almost noon. Aurelia wrapped her cloak tightly around her barrel-shaped body and marched briskly along the top road to the village. When she rounded the bend at the crest of the hill by the boundary stone she sat and rested a moment, as was her habit.

“Do you know Eleanor that it is exactly twenty years ago that I first saw you here,” she said to the air, to a memory forgotten by all but her. “As I came round the bend you were standing here by this stone, the bright sun shining from behind you bathing you in light like a halo. I truly thought I was in the presence of an angel.”

Aurelia sniffed and pushed a tear across her cheek.

“No good sitting here crying over what is done Aurelia,” she chided. She raised her large bulk stiffly, then spoke more stridently, warm words carried off in steam on the cold air. “This time tomorrow Eleanor, justice will be ours.”

She picked up her basket and turned body and mind towards the village ahead.

It was market day and the village was full of life. People buying, people selling, people laughing, arguing, gossiping. Stalls lined both sides of the main road for the whole two miles from the church to the Castle, piled high with produce from near and far. Here was the place where, with one word, human life could be elevated or cast down.

A fanfare from behind nearly startled the skin from her.

“Make way for the Baroness and her party…” a large voice from a grand uniformed page bellowed as he walked beside the Baroness’s horse, guiding it gently through the crowded market.

Aurelia frantically turned to try and bury herself in the curious throng, but the wall of people would not let her through. She turned back as the Baroness stopped her horse and leant toward her.

“Sister,” the Baroness hissed. “It is such along time since we last met. My how you have changed. But then, of course so have I!” her laughter was cruel with a hint of sneer.

“Good morrow sister,” answered Aurelia calmly, defiantly meeting her sister’s glare. “How fares my god-daughter?”

Aurelia could feel the ice in her sister’s frown.

“The useless girl is just where she should be,” the Baroness replied haughtily. “We are off to the palace for an audience with the Prince today,” she continued. “I am sure that he is about to ask one of my daughters to marry him.” She smiled slyly then abruptly turned her face to the castle and signalled to the page to continue.

Aurelia wondered whether the sister she had once loved still resided in this twisted emotional wreck of a woman, all brown-eyed temptress on the surface, age kept at bay by potions gleaned many years ago from Book. Beneath the false good looks smouldered a soul misshapen by greed and heedless ambition. She watched her two nieces, like their mother in everything, looking down their bulbous noses at the people in the market as they rode up to the castle.

"This time tomorrow my god-daughter will be just where she should be," Aurelia muttered under her breath, and a sweetly-mournful memory wrapped itself around her. A remembrance of one of the proudest days of her life, when her truest friend Eleanor stood smiling her stellar smile across the font in the church and she, Aurelia became godmother to Eleanor’s beautiful daughter. At that time her whole life had centred around Eleanor, her Eleanor. No other person she had met had triggered such a deep wellspring of affection in her before or since and she marvelled in it.

She had tried to tell Eleanor. The words had been on her lips a hundred times or more but had never been uttered. Once or twice she had begun the sentence that she knew would change everything; “Eleanor, I have something to tell you…” but she never finished it. Something in Eleanor’s face stopped her every time, an unsuspecting innocence that Aurelia could not bring herself to sully. She settled instead on intense companionship and complete devotion no matter what.

But no matter what came too soon. And she still felt it was all her fault. She should have seen it coming.

Eleanor had invited Aurelia to the Baron’s great house to celebrate her daughter’s first birthday. Aurelia's recently-widowed sister and her two young and very spoilt nieces were staying with her at the time and they accompanied her. They were a lively, good-natured party, or so Aurelia thought.

Aurelia presented her god-daughter with a silver charm bracelet. She remembered personally infused each charm with a different gift to help keep the child safe and well. "Yes I made charms to keep her safe and well..." Aurelia shivered as reality intruded, dissolving the warmth of her daydream.

‘I should have made charms for you Eleanor. I mis-read the signs. I failed you in so many ways.’

A year later Eleanor was dead and it was a different kind of gathering in the church. Aurelia remembered the unbearable fragrance of funeral flowers, the blurred shadows of a hundred well-connected mourners, the sick dread in her guts and the heaviness in her feet, as if they were being slowly dissolved into the earth along with her lovely Eleanor.

She was so plagued with grief that it wasn’t until the wedding of her sister and the Baron was announced a short time after that she began to understand. And she began to suspect. The suddenness of Eleanor's death, the unexplained suddenness of it she could only explain in one way, in one person. The only person she knew with the skill and the bleakness of conscience to kill and not be discovered. When her sister discovered her suspicions she made sure Aurelia never saw her god-daughter again. To even whisper of Aurelia’s existence in the presence of the new Baroness was considered disloyalty of the worst kind. Aurelia heard about her sister every now and then; and the more she heard, the more determined she became to wait her time and avenge her Eleanor. Like the spokes on a wheel, little by little, spell by spell she had engineered events to meet at one point in time: tonight.

Back at the barn Aurelia added the gum tragacanth to the potion and polished the shoes with it according to Book's instructions. She gathered together the rats, mice and pumpkins that would be placed ready for the evening’s work. Then she sat back and studied the glittering shoes as she waited for the cry for help that she knew would come.

‘Yes, sister, tonight my beautiful god-daughter Cinderella will be just where she should be.’ She laughed. But the thought did not bring her pleasure, just the bitter anticipation of closure.