Bella at Midnight Read Online Free Page A

cannot even write my name! A crow cannot raise a nightingale!”
    â€œNo one expects you to train her in the lady arts, Bea. But you can teach her to work hard—same as you taught Will—and to say her prayers and to be kind and to respect her elders and suchlike. You can teach her to do the right things in life.”
    â€œTrue enough,” Mother said. “I can do that much.”
    â€œAye, and far better than her father could, I’ll warrant—as he does not seem to know himself what is right and needful. All the same, he may remember he has a daughter one day and send for her.” Then after a long pause he said, “Until then, well—we have our own little princess.”
    â€œAye,” Mother said, “I suppose we do. Though how we are to explain it to the child, I cannot think.”
    â€œOh, we’ll find a way when the time comes, when she is older,” Father said. “For now we’ll just let her be.”
    I lay back on my pallet and closed my eyes, trying to imagine how that conversation would go. But I could not think of any nice way to tell her the truth: that she had been cast off, unwanted by her father. That the family she thought she belonged to was not truly hers. That they were only the people she was left with, and that they were being paid to look after her.
    No, it did not bear telling—and the passage of time would not make it any easier. I am sure my parents thought they would explain it to her one day. But that night, young though I was, I knew they never would.

Bella
    M y first memory is of war.
    It was late summer, near to harvesttime, and it was hot. I was sprawled in the dust of the yard, playing with a kitten. I had a little twig and was drawing it along the ground so that the kitten would chase after it and pounce upon it. Will had showed me how to do this. “That’s how they learn to catch mice,” he’d said. I thought it very droll how the kitten would follow wherever I led him.
    I was much absorbed in this game when I began to hear shouting from the cottages nearby and then the startling sound of the church bell, ringing the alarm— clang! clang! clang! clang! I put my hands over my ears.
    Around me the whole village seemed to fly into action, and there was such a lot of noise, with the bells and the screaming and the barking of dogs! I saw men sprinting away toward the upper pasture to drive in the sheep. Mama came running into the yard, telling me to stay where I was, her voice uncommonly hard. I thought she was angry with me, and so I sat there, whimpering and clutching my kitten, while Mama ran about calling for Will to come in from the garden and pulling things off the shelf and putting them into a sack. Then she got baby Margaret out of her cradle, took firm hold of my hand, and told me—in that stern voice again—to stop crying. Soldiers were coming, she said. We must make haste.
    I had a little poppet that Mama had made for me out of rags, and I was very fond of her because her cross-stitched eyes were blue, like mine, and her yarn hair was like to my color, which is reddish gold. And I remember asking Mama to go get the poppet, which I had left in the cottage somewhere, but she said we had not the time to look for it.
    We joined the stream of people and animals making their way toward the great entrance to the castle. A few men rode horseback; others pulled handcarts piled high with household goods—even small pieces of furniture—not to mention blankets and pots and hams and farm implements and all such things as were deemed precious.
    I don’t know how old I was then—four or five, I would guess. I know I was small, and all I could see were the legs of people and animals. Everyone was pushing. I grew terrified that the crowd would crush me, and so I started screaming for Mama to pick me up. She couldn’t, of course—she had Margaret to carry, and the sack of food—so she