The King’s Daughter

Today Pegman took us to Versailles. What a beautifully opulent choice.

Twelve-year-old Giselle sits on the floor, skirts tucked neatly between her knees, silently thinking, dreaming, really.

Tonight this hall will be filled with flirtation and wine. Men and women alike will display themselves in dresses or jackets and pants tailored in pink, gold or baby-blue silk. Their faces and wigs powdered, eyebrows darkened with charcoal and cheeks stained cinnabar-red they will slip handkerchiefs from lacey sleeves while keeping feathered fans ready to cover smiling lips as their wide-open eyes beg for more. More wine, more food, more trysts upstairs or down, no one cares. All they desire is more, more and more.

Who pays for it all? Why the king himself. For he relishes everything and always expects more.
But who really pays?  People like our Giselle conceived on such a night. She rises, picks up her mop, looks down the long hall and begins her never-ending task.

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Detective’s Notes

This 150 word piece is for What Pegman Saw – in Dubrovnik.

Let’s say Tanya and Stewart had an affair.
Met at the bottom of the stairs
to grope one another in the dark.
Her whispering, “But my husband!” like a mantra
even as her clothes dropped on the cobblestones.

Scratch that. Stewart was a painter, Tanya his student.
They despised one another.
Still, they shared ideas about color and texture and the effects of wine.
And, after too much wine, they…?
You decide.

Or perhaps they were siblings –
they certainly looked alike –
with a deliriously dark secret
about what their father did at night.
Tanya’s room? Stewart’s? Both?
And that twisted them until they had no one but each other?
Alas, there are no definite answers to these questions, either.

What do we know?
At 5 a.m. both were found dead beneath the paintings.
Clothes flung across the cobblestones –
wine sloshed between them –
holding hands and smiling.
No signs of a struggle.