The Little Mouse Girl ch2

Elenora didn’t cry at the funeral either.  There was hardly time for it and it seemed to her as if it were the funeral for someone else that she had never known.  The casket was closed - the bandits had not been kind to her father - and there was no formal ceremony.  A priest said a few short words of prayer over the casket before it was lowered into the ground and buried.  Lady Romano had let the ceremony pass in silence rather than pay for professional mourners.  There had been a representative from the Merchant League, but he had seemed more interested in discussing her father’s will than expressing sympathy.
Ten minutes after they had gone to the grave sight, the ceremony was over and they were all back at the house.  Elenora was ordered to sit outside Lady Romano’s office while the will was discussed.  While she waited, she watched the servants going about their business.  They tried to avoid looking at her, but on occasion Elenora caught a brief, pitying glance.  Rosa tried once to sit down next to her, but Dante quickly called her away for something trivial.  She supposed that she wasn’t crying because nothing had happened that seemed very much out of the ordinary.  Nothing had happened to convince her that things had changed.
So she sat outside her stepmother’s office, waiting dry-eyed and strangely detached, hardly noticing the hours pass.  When at last the door opened and the Merchant League’s lawyer came out, he expressed sympathies that could hardly be called sincere before leaving her to the mercy of Lady Romano.
Her stepmother’s office was like the woman who spent her time in it.  The mahogany bookshelf that dominated the back wall was filled with carefully arranged books bound in the finest leather.  A carpet with an intricate pattern of golden ivy vines covered the floor and beneath great window with velvet curtains, a cherry wood desk stood on little feet carved into lion’s paws.  It looked pleasing to the eye, but it was a superficial beauty draped like a blanket over a cold, rigid heart.  That heart was Lady Romano, lounging bloated and opulent in her ornate cushioned chair and drumming her fingers together with a wholly sinister satisfaction that reflected in her icy blue eyes.  She wore a dress of deep midnight blue with flowers embroidered into the bodice with precious stones.  Her great, black raven perched on the back of the chair, watching Elenora enter with coal-black eyes as cruel as the smile on its master’s face.
“So,” Lady Romano said, her voice triumphant, “I have discussed the will with the Merchant League’s representative and it is very clear.  All of your father’s money and possessions are to be given over to my estate, provided that I see to your care until your marriage.”
Elenora kept silent.
“Have you nothing to say?”
Elenora shook her head.
“Good.  You may go back to you chores as soon as you change back into your servant’s clothes.  I know that you are still mourning the loss of your father, but I do not wish for that to affect the other servants, so please try not to weep while you are working.”
Lady Romano rose laboriously from her chair and went to her bookshelf.  At any other time, Elenora might have left and said nothing more.  The fear of her stepmother’s temper was overwhelming.  She was quick to strike those who disobeyed her and, when she was especially angry, she would use her magic to discipline those who defied her, but Elenora didn’t care then.  That day, Elenora felt nothing inside her but the certainty that nothing her stepmother did could be worse than what she had already done.
When she turned around, Lady Romano saw her stepdaughter still standing there, unmoving, her jaw set in firm, angry defiance.  Lady Romano’s eyes thinned to a pair of hateful slits as she set her book down on the desk and stepped around it to face the young woman.  Elenora was almost as tall as her stepmother, but Lady Romano loomed over the girl by virtue of a corpulent girth large enough to challenge a dwarf.  Still, Elenora did not move from where she stood.
“I said you were dismissed.”
Elenora met the gaze evenly, not out of courage or desperation, but simple apathy.  She no longer cared.
“No.”
The blow followed instantly, a flat-palmed slap across the face.  Elenora rubbed the burning, red mark it left on her face, but didn’t move from where she stood.
“What did you say?” Lady Romano demanded.
“I said no.”
Another blow fell on the other side of her face.  Lady Romano’s face was livid with rage, but Elenora didn’t care.
“Why should I do anything for you?  You aren’t my mother.  You never even loved my father.  Why shouldn’t I just leave here?”
“Silence!”
Elenora felt her throat tighten as the weight of her stepmother’s magical power sank into her mind through her command.  Lady Romano sneered down at her, placing a finger with a long nail like a knife under her chin, tapping the girl’s neck.
“Why shouldn’t you leave?” she asked.  “For one, I will not let you leave.  Your father’s will is explicit.  His money only belongs to me as long as I take care of you.  If you try to run away from this place, I will find you and bring you back.  For another, you have nowhere else to go.  You have no magic, no money and no family.  No one will help you.  You are no one - just another mundane girl - and no one cares about you.”
Lady Romano withdrew her finger, but did not release the spell.  She waddled back to her chair.  It creaked loudly as she plopped herself down and her raven fluttered its wings uncomfortably, letting out a surprised squawk.  She held her hand and the bird hopped onto her finger, letting the woman ruffle the feathers of its neck.
“You think that I did not love your father?”
She paused, as if waiting for a reply, but the spell still held any words Elenora might have said.
“Well, in that you are correct.  It was a marriage of gain; he had what I wanted, so I married him to get it, but if you think that means anything, then you are gravely mistaken, my dear.”
Though her face was serious, there was a cruel smile in Lady Romano’s eyes.
“Such a marriage is quite common in this kingdom.  In fact, quite often they are arranged by the head of the family to benefit the noble house.  I did not love your father and I need not fear admitting it.  Not to you, not to the other nobles, not to the king of this land himself, should he ask.  It was within my right to arrange the marriage for any purpose I saw fit and so long as he did not object, neither will the law.  And your father never objected.  I never gave him the chance.  And as for not being your mother, I am quite grateful that much is true.”
Elenora turned away, no longer able to endure that cold gaze that so delighted in her pain.  She tried to loose herself in the twisting vines of the carpet’s design, tried to block out her stepmother’s victorious tone.
“And what else was it that you were worried about?”
She turned to look at her raven as if waiting for an answer.  The bird cackled at her.
“Oh, yes,” she continued.  “Why should you do anything for me?  I should think the answer to that is obvious.  You will do as I ask because your life will be made much more miserable if you do not.  The will states that I must take care of you, but it does not say anything about you needing to be happy.  Until now, I have always held myself back in disciplining you.  Your father would never have done what I wanted if he had any proof that you were being mistreated in this household, but he is dead now.  He cannot object to anything.”
Lady Romano leaned forward over her desk, her voice soft and menacing.
“And if you are not imaginative to think of what that means, feel free to test my wrath.  I am more than happy to help you understand your situation clearly.”
It was all too much.  Tears in her eyes, Elenora turned away, but Lady Romano commanded her to hold and she found her feet wouldn’t move from the spot.
“I can see that you will not be able to control yourself, so you will go directly to your room and stay there until you can, even if it takes all week.  And for your cheek, you’ll get no food for the rest of the day.”
Released from the spell, Elenora fled the room, weeping openly all the way to the attic, where she threw herself onto her mattress.  The tears that had been hiding since she first heard of her father’s death flooded out of her in a torrent.  What she had been unable to convince herself of before, Lady Romano had forcefully thrust upon her.  Father was gone and with him, every moment of happiness she had ever known.  He would never come home to stop her stepmother’s abuse.  She would spend the rest of her life as a slave, living in the attic, shunned and hated as no human had the right to be.  And there would be no end to it; Lady Romano would never give up her father’s money by letting her go.
So she wept.  For hours she wept, bitter tears dampening the mattress.  The sun began its descent to the mountains on the western horizon and still she wept.  When Rosa came up to the attic to try to comfort her, still she cried.  She barely heard the hollow words the housemaid spoke and when she left, Elenora was still weeping without respite.  
It was not until the moon was making its way into the night sky that her tears finally dried.  Eyes red and burning, she opened the window and stared silently into the starry blackness.  She knew that she could not endure living in this place any longer.  Lady Romano had said she had no place to go, but when she turned her head away from the stars to look at the cobblestones on the road bellow her, she realized that there was somewhere to go.  It was the same place that Father had gone.  She leaned further out the window, considering the fall.
And then she heard a voice behind her.  It was clear and beautiful, like the sound of a gentle spring rising out of the mountain stones.
“It would be a waste to die so young.”