Chapter One (GT) (Patreon)

Chapter One

While a lady never shirks her duty, it is also the duty of her family to remember that the lady has her own opinions.

-Lady Chatterwick

Glancing around, Maria tugged off her shoes and tucked them under her arm. They jostled the book already lodged there, and for a moment she juggled shoes and book, barely managing to hang onto them all. Involuntarily, she breathed a sigh of relief, and a bright-eyed little boy immediately tracked the sound and toddled over to where she was hiding behind a heavy damask curtain. Pudgy fingers were removed from his mouth, and the damp little digits poked at the fabric.

“Mawy?”

Maria gritted her teeth. How did he always know? Cautiously, she slid the curtain to the side, and grimaced down at her little brother. “Shh, Toby,” she whispered, desperately trying to think of a good reason for hiding from the rest of the family. “I’m playing hide and seek!”

The blue eyes grew huge. “Toby wanna pway!”

She could have smacked herself. Of course he would want to play. As the youngest, Tobias always wanted to be involved in whatever the older siblings were doing. Especially if that something was one of his favorite games.

“Um, no, not…I’m not playing hide and seek now. I was playing hide and seek. I’m, um, not dressed for the party yet.” She stuck a pants-clad leg out of the crack in the curtains. “I’m trying to get to my room so I can change. I don’t want to get into trouble.”

Toby’s lower lip quivered at even the mention of getting into trouble. He was a rule-follower, and if he even thought he might have done something wrong, he would spill a full confession of his own sins, and those of anyone else nearby.

Maria pressed a grubby finger to her little brother’s rosebud lips. “I’ll give you my dessert if you stay quiet.” Little did he know she wouldn’t be there to eat dessert at all, and the odds were good that their parents would give him the extra anyway. Fortunately for Maria, even the possibility of cake trumped confessing Maria’s sins to the nearest adult, so he nodded solemnly, offering a sticky pinky.

“Sweah.”

Maria swore, shaking the wet finger gingerly. Tobias nodded, did his own version of a wink (which was really closing both eyes, because he couldn’t do just one yet), and returned to the family. Maria hesitated just a moment, staring out at the bustling, laughing, bickering brood. There were eleven of them, counting Mama and Papa, and Maria was the seventh. The seventh, and the odd one out.

Mama was glorious, as always, in a sparkling emerald gown that matched her eyes. Her glossy gold ringlets were wound through with strings of pearls and gems that glittered and gleamed in the candlelight. The silver diadem that marked her as Queen glinted from her brow.

Beside her, Papa stood, tall and proud, clad in matching green, with a slightly more ornate crown on his gilded hair. He laughed down at a giggling Caroline, whose blue gown matched her and Papa’s eyes, and whose golden curls let her blend right in amongst the chattering crowd.

Unlike Maria. Maria, with her straight, boring brown hair, boring, plain face, and boring personality. There was nothing scintillating or sparkling about her. She did have Mama’s green eyes, but otherwise she always looked like a hanger-on, clinging to the beautiful royal family. She was fairly certain that if she just vanished one day, most people wouldn’t even notice.

Maria suppressed another sigh and sank back further behind the curtain. There was a narrow alcove back there that probably once housed some piece of priceless art, but now only gathered dust for the servants to clear away. It still held a secret, however. A secret that Maria had only discovered because she was always looking for places to hide.

Creeping back into the farthest corner of the alcove, Maria used her bare foot to quest around until she found a stone the stuck up slightly above the others. With her toe, she pushed until she was rewarded with a soft click and a trickle of fresh air. While she might have discovered this hidden door accidentally, she was not one to let a secret lie unused.

Slowly, she slid along the wall until she passed though the narrow opening and into the much wider space beyond. With a nudge of her hip, she pushed the secret door until it latched with a soft click. Dropping her shoes with a sigh of relief, she took three steps, emerging from beneath a three-foot overhang into the concealed courtyard.

As one would expect for a secret garden, it was overgrown. It, and its former owner, had been lost to time, and rose brambles fought honeysuckle and milkweed for dominance. Only one tree had survived once the underbrush became the overbrush, and it was as old and wrinkled as Maria sometimes imagined its long-ago gardener must have been.

Wading through the tall grass and a particularly dense bit of milkweed, she waved away the puffy drifting seeds the burst from the pods, sneezing loudly. When she made it to the tree, she clamped her book between her teeth and set her calloused feet against the twisted tree trunk.

With the ease of long practice, Maria scampered up the tall apple tree, pausing only to grab a few of the round, heavy fruits and shove them down her shirt into the pouch created by her embroidered belt cinching her shirt tight around her waist. The tree was fairly tall and spindly, reaching for the sunlight that filtered down between the windowless stone walls surrounding the garden.

Still, Maria wasn’t heavy, and she soon planted herself in the cleft between the two largest branches, where she had stashed a waterskin and a large pillow made from a waxed flour bag stuffed with leaves and milkweed fluff. Finally content, she leaned back, taking the book from between her teeth and pulling an apple from her shirtfront. She bit into the apple, and warm, sticky juice trickled down her chin as she began to read.

“Mrow?”

The interrogative sound made her blink, and she looked around. She quickly spied a half-grown black kitten with one white paw, and a white tail tip. Smiling, she clicked her fingers together. “Here, puss puss,” she called softly, holding out her hand.

Yellow eyes took in Maria, and with as much disdain as if the cat had been the princess, and Maria nothing more than a slightly scruffy stray, the kitten minced her way along the branch on which she sat. Pausing just out of Maria’s reach, she considered the girl.

Maria laughed. “We do this every time,” she said, offering her hand again. “I’m the only person who ever comes here. You should know me by now.”

The little pink nose sniffed Maria’s sticky fingers suspiciously before the cat graciously allowed the young princess to pet her. Maria didn’t know how the kitten had gotten into the garden, or if she could escape the same way, but she’d been there every time Maria came for the last week. Maria had tried bringing her scraps from the kitchen, but the black kitten turned up her nose at every offering except for fresh water.

After a moment, the kitten put one little paw on Maria’s leg. Yellow eyes watched to see if Maria would make any move to grab at the cat, but Maria knew how this worked by now. If she showed any sign that she noticed the little feline, the kitten would dart away, and wouldn’t return for the rest of Maria’s visit. So, Maria held very still, pretending to be completely absorbed in the thick book she’d brought with her.

After a moment, the kitten settled into Maria’s lap and began to purr. The soft warmth of the little animal was comforting, and the girl wished she dared try to pet her small friend. Unfortunately, any such attempt on her part had been met with hissing and bared claws, so Maria had learned to simply hold still and enjoy what the little creature was willing to allow.

Music began in the distance as the garden party began. The rest of Maria’s family would be trooping out onto the perfectly manicured lawn, among the carefully maintained topiary and gauze-draped tables. Their perfect manners and delicate beauty would awe the courtiers fortunate enough to attend, and no one would even notice that there were only ten members of the royal family in attendance instead of eleven.

Maria looked down at the snoozing animal in her lap. “Mama will have sent the servants to look for me. They won’t try very hard, though. Even if they found me, it’s too late to bathe and get into that itchy dress before everyone sits down to eat. They’ll get on with their day and Mama will scold me at dinner.”

One yellow eye opened, and the cat peered up at Maria. It sneezed a tiny, adorable sneeze, as if to say that it didn’t care about all that, and would the human please be quiet?

Maria laughed and sniffled a bit herself. “Just allergies,” she assured the uncaring feline, and dashed a tear away from the corner of her eye.

Maria’s book was titled Lady Chatterwick’s Journey, and was a memoir penned by the rather infamous daughter of a Count. While Lady Chatterwick herself had died more than a decade before, her story was still read often by the more rebellious daughters of the nobility. The lady had refused to marry the man her father had chosen for her, and had, instead, fled the country. Using money from the sale of her gowns and jewels, she had funded a series of nearly unbelievable adventures. It was one of Maria’s favorites, and Maria had read it often enough that she had nearly memorized it from cover to cover.

Thus it was that in spite of the thrilling nature of Lady Chatterwick’s desperate flight from a lost tribe of pygmy monkeys, Maria found herself drifting off to sleep. The warm spring sunshine, the soft pillow, and the purring warmth of the cat mingled with the hum of insects and the distant string quartet, serving to send the princess deep into the land of dreams.

Maria found herself fleeing from a whole horde of black and white kittens, their dagger-like claws and sharp little teeth flashing in the bright savannah sunlight. Several flung themselves toward her, and she swung her arms wildly, attempting to knock them loose. One clinging to her chest looked straighjt into her eyes and sank a mouthful of needles into her arm.

Screeching, Maria sat up. Looking toward the source of the pain, she saw the wild-eyed kitten pressed against her, nearly crushed by the heavy weight of Lady Chatterwick’s Journey. The small animal’s teeth were buried in Maria’s upper arm, and bright blood was already beginning to spring up from the wound.

The world tilted, and Maria blinked, then realized that she was beginning to fall. The book slid from atop the kitten and crashed through several branches, landing in the dense foliage below. A moment later, Maria followed, the kitten still clinging to her with what felt like a hundred tiny daggers. Maria closed her eyes as leaves and branches whipped around her, and braced herself for impact.

When it came, it wasn’t nearly as painful as she had expected. Instead of crashing hard through the thin branches of the honeysuckle and tearing herself up on the wild rose brambles, she almost…bounced. The thin, springy boughs bent but didn’t break, and when she blinked open here eyes, it was to find herself surrounded by large, green leaves.

Very large, in fact.

Looking around, she saw that everything suddenly looked much larger than it should. The stunted apple tree seemed enormous, and the little tea roses were the size of her mother’s favorite grandiflora. Opening her mouth, she tried to speak, but all that emerged was a strangled, “Mew!”

Maria lifted a paw, staring at the soft brown and cream fur. She stretched apart her toes, examining the little pink pads with stunned fascination. There was no denying it. Maria was a cat.