"Gardner Dozois - Fairy Tale" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

they’re moderately well-fed and therefore reasonably healthy. So he was a good
King, or a good-enough King, at any rate. But in many a dimly-lit kitchen or bistro or
backroom bar, the old men of the town huddled around their potbellied stoves at
night and warmed their hands, or tried to, and muttered fearfully about what might
happen when the Old King died, and his son and heir took over.
But as this isn’t really a story of palace intrigue, either, or only partially so,
you must move on to a large but somewhat shabby-genteel house on the very
outskirts of town, the kind of neighborhood that will be swallowed by the expanding
town and replaced by rows of worker’s flats in thirty years or so. That girl there,
sullenly and rather uselessly scrubbing down the flagstones in the small courtyard, is
the one we’re interested in.
For the kind of story this is, is a fairy-tale. Sort of.


There are some things they don’t tell you, of course, even in the Grimm’s
version, let alone the Disney.
For one thing, no one ever called her “Cinderella,” although occasionally they
called her much worse. Her name was Eleanor, an easy-enough name to use, and no
one ever really paid enough attention to her to bother to come up with a nickname
for her, even a cruel and taunting one. Most of the time, no one paid enough
attention to even taunt her.
There was a step-mother, although whether she was evil or not depended on
your point of view. These were hard times in a hard age, when even the relatively
well-to-do lived not far from hunger and privation, and if she chose to take care of
her own children first in preference to her dead husband’s child, well, there were
many who would not blame her for that. In fact, many would instead compliment her
on her generosity in giving her husband’s by-blow a place in her home and at her
hearth when no law of Man or God required her to do so, or to lift a finger to insure
the child’s survival. Many did so compliment her, and the step-mother would lift her
eyes piously to Heaven, and throw her hands in the air, and mutter modest
demerrals.
 For one of the things that they never tell you, a missing piece that helps make
sense of the whole situation, is that Cinderella was a bastard. Yes, her father had
doted on her, lavishing love and affection on her, had taken her into his house and
raised her from a babe, but he had never married Eleanor’s mother, who had died in
childbirth, and he himself had died after marrying the Evil Step-Mother but before
making a will that would have legally enforced some kind of legacy or endowment
for his bastard daughter.
Today, of course, she would sue, and there’d be court-battles and
DNA-testing, and appearances with lots of shouting on daytime talk-shows, and
probably she would eventually win a slice of the pie. In those days, in that part of the
world, she had no recourse under the law—or anywhere else, since the Church
shunned those born in sin.
So the step-mother really was being quite generous in continuing to supply
Eleanor’s room and board rather than throwing her out of the house to freeze and
starve in the street. That she didn’t as well provide much in the way of warmth of
familial affection, being icy and remote to Eleanor—the visible and undeniable
evidence of her late husband’s love for another woman—on those rare occasions
when she deigned to notice her at all, is probably not surprising, and to really expect
her to feel otherwise is perhaps more than could be asked. She had problems of her