Stitched Smiles in Red
Every morning, Queen Isolde of Varenne read about herself in the newspapers.
There were eleven broadsheets printed in the capital, and the palace delivered all of them to her breakfast table, ironed flat and stacked by the silver coffee pot. She read them because she had to. Because somewhere in those columns of tiny black print was the version of her that the people believed in, and she needed to know what that woman had done yesterday.
HER MAJESTY RADIANT AT HOSPITAL OPENING, said the Morning Herald.
QUEEN’S GLOVES: TOO SOMBER FOR SPRING? asked the Courier.
ISOLDE SMILES ONLY ONCE DURING THREE-HOUR CEREMONY: IS ALL WELL IN THE PALACE? wondered the Gazette, which had a reporter whose only job was counting her smiles.
She was thirty-four years old. She had been queen for nine years, since the carriage accident that took her father and her brother on the same wet road in the same terrible instant. She had not been raised for the crown. She had been the spare, the second child, the one allowed to climb trees and ride too fast and laugh too loudly at dinner. And then, in one afternoon, she had become the most watched woman in the kingdom.
She had learned quickly. She had to. She learned the queen’s walk, slow and even, never hurried. She learned the queen’s voice, low and calm, never raised. She learned the queen’s smile, a small, gracious curve of the lips, held for exactly as long as a photographer needed. She learned never to frown in public, never to yawn, never to show surprise or boredom or anger or grief.
She learned, most of all, never to say what she actually thought.
The ministers wrote her speeches. The wardrobe mistress chose her gowns. The chamberlain arranged her days down to the quarter hour. And every evening, when the last guest had bowed and the last door had closed, Isolde would sit alone at her dressing table and look at the woman in the mirror and not entirely recognize her.
Sometimes she wondered if that woman was still in there at all. The girl who climbed trees. The girl who laughed too loud.
It was Pell who had taught that girl to laugh.
Pell had been her grandfather’s jester, and then her father’s, though by the time Isolde was born, a court jester was already an old-fashioned thing, kept on mostly out of habit and affection. He was a small, wiry man with a crooked nose and quick black eyes. He wore a red hood with a long, drooping point, and he painted his face white with black diamonds over the eyes, and he could juggle anything: oranges, teacups, knives, once memorably a live chicken.
But it was not the juggling Isolde remembered best. It was the way he talked to her father.
Pell was the only person in the entire palace who could say anything to the king. Anything at all. He could mock the ministers to their faces. He could call a royal decree foolish, in rhyme, in front of the whole court, and everyone would laugh, and somehow, often, the decree would quietly be changed the next week.
“How do you get away with it?” Isolde had asked him once, when she was nine.
Pell had grinned at her, his painted smile stretching wide. “Because nobody takes a fool seriously, little bird,” he said. “A queen must be careful with every word, because everyone is listening. But a jester? A jester can say whatever he likes. Nobody is listening at all. That’s the secret. The mask doesn’t hide the truth. It sets it free.”
Pell had died the winter she was crowned. She had not had time to grieve him properly. There had been too much else to grieve.
It was eight years later, on a gray spring afternoon, searching an old storeroom in the north tower for a lost portrait her ministers wanted, that she found his trunk.
It was small and battered, with his initials painted on the lid. Inside, folded in yellowed newspaper, were his things. Three juggling balls. A tin of white greasepaint and a little pot of black. A stick of red lip color, worn down almost to nothing. And at the bottom, carefully wrapped, his red hood.
It was worn and faded, mended over and over with black thread in big clumsy cross-stitches wherever the fabric had torn. The long, curling point at the top still had its shape. When she lifted it out, it smelled of dust and old greasepaint and, very faintly, of him.
Isolde stood in the dim storeroom holding it, and an idea came to her, so ridiculous and so dangerous and so wonderful that she laughed out loud. A real laugh. Too loud. The kind she had not laughed in nine years.
That night, after the palace had gone to sleep, she locked her dressing room door and sat in front of the mirror.
She painted her face white, all of it, from her hairline to her chin, until the queen disappeared under a smooth, blank mask. She drew the black diamonds over her eyes, the way Pell used to, one sharp point stretching up across each brow and one stretching down her cheek like a dark tear. She painted her lips red. Then, on an impulse, she took the black pencil and drew a long thin line from one corner of her mouth up across her cheek, and crossed it with little stitches, like the mended seams of the hood. A smile sewn on. A smile that would stay put, no matter what she felt underneath.
She pulled the red hood over her hair and tied it beneath her chin.
The woman in the mirror stared back at her with dark, startled eyes. Not a queen. Not anyone. A painted stranger with a stitched smile and a crooked red hat.
Isolde had never seen her before in her life. She liked her enormously.
She slipped out through the old servants’ passage behind the laundry, past a guard dozing in the lamplight, through a gate in the garden wall that had not been locked since her grandfather’s day. And then she was out in the city, in the cool spring dark, alone, and no one in the world knew where she was.
She ran.
She hadn’t run in nine years. Queens do not run. But she ran down the cobbled hill from the palace with the red hood flapping behind her and her skirts hiked up in both fists, and nobody stopped her, and nobody stared, and nobody wrote it down.
She followed the music to Lantern Square.
It was the beating heart of the old city, a crooked square ringed with taverns and bakeries and print shops, where the night market ran until dawn. There were food stalls hissing with sausages, a fiddler on an upturned barrel, children who should have been in bed hours ago chasing each other between the legs of the crowd. Isolde had driven past it a hundred times in a closed carriage. She had never once set foot in it.
She stood at the edge of the square, her heart hammering. Then she reached into her pocket, took out Pell’s three battered juggling balls, and tossed the first one into the air.
She was rusty. She dropped one almost at once, and a small boy giggled. She picked it up and bowed to him with a great flourish, and he giggled harder. She tried again. This time all three balls went up and around and up and around, the way Pell had taught her in the palace gardens when she was eight, and a little crowd began to gather.
So she gave them a show.
She juggled. She tumbled, badly, and turned the bad tumbles into jokes. She stole a baker’s hat and wore it on top of her hood. And then, because the crowd was laughing and the fiddler was playing and some reckless, joyful thing had come loose inside her, she did the queen.
She drew herself up very tall. She folded her hands just so. She walked across the cobblestones with tiny, slow, perfectly even steps, nodding graciously to the left and to the right, and she smiled the queen’s smile, the small, polite one, held for exactly as long as a photographer needs. Then she let it drop off her face all at once, like a plate falling off a shelf, and looked around in exaggerated, wide-eyed panic, and pretended to search the cobblestones for it.
When she found it at last, she stuck it back on, crooked, climbed onto the edge of the fountain, raised one gloved finger in the air like a minister about to give a very important speech, and recited:
“Our Queen is the model of grace,
With never a hair out of place;
But they say, late at night,
When she’s well out of sight,
She lets down her hair…
and her inner garments of lace!”
Not one person in Lantern Square knew that the queen was, at that very moment, a very long way out of sight.
The crowd howled. A fat tavern keeper laughed so hard he had to sit down on a beer barrel. Someone threw a copper coin, then another, and they rang across the stones.
Isolde stood in the middle of Lantern Square in a dead man’s hood with her face painted white, and laughed until there were tears running through her greasepaint. She had never felt so free in her life.
Nobody knew who she was. Nobody expected anything of her. She could say anything. Be anything.
Later, when the crowd had thinned, she sat on the edge of the fountain to catch her breath, and an old woman selling roasted chestnuts shuffled over and sat down beside her.
“That was a good bit, the queen,” said the old woman. “Very good. You’ve got her walk exactly.” She cracked a chestnut with her thumb. “Poor thing.”
Isolde looked at her in surprise. “Poor thing?”
“Well, look at her. In the papers every day. Smile, wave, smile, wave.” The old woman shook her head. “My granddaughter brought me to see her ride past at the jubilee. All painted up and pretty and never a hair out of place. And I thought, that girl’s smile is drawn on, same as yours. Somebody stitched it there for her.” She held out a chestnut. “You’re lucky. At least you can wash yours off.”
Isolde took the chestnut, because she did not trust herself to speak.
She stayed in the square until nearly dawn. And she listened. She learned that night what nine years of ministers’ reports had never told her.
She learned that bread in the lower city cost three times what it had a year ago. That the price had climbed ever since the new grain tax, the one Minister Corbel had proposed, the one she had signed because his report said it would hardly be felt. She learned that the baker whose hat she had stolen had laid off two of his apprentices. She learned that the Morning Herald, which praised the grain tax nearly every week, was owned by Minister Corbel’s brother-in-law.
Nobody in Lantern Square was careful around a jester. Why would they be? A jester was nobody.
She was back in her bed an hour before the maids came. At breakfast, the broadsheets were stacked by the coffee pot as always. QUEEN APPEARS TIRED AT MORNING AUDIENCE, the Gazette would report the next day. It was the first thing they had ever gotten exactly right.
She could not simply accuse Minister Corbel. A queen did not act on gossip from a night market, and he had a dozen allies on the council. She would need proof, and pressure, and time.
But she remembered what Pell had said. "A jester can say whatever he likes."
So the Red Jester went back to Lantern Square. Again, and again, every few nights. She juggled and tumbled and did the queen’s walk, which became the most famous act in the city. And at the end of every show, she sang a little song. A silly, catchy rhyme about a fat minister named Corn-Belly, who taxed the bread to fill his barns and bought himself a newspaper to tell everyone how slim he was.
Within a month, every child in the capital was singing it.
Within two months, the Gazette, which hated the Morning Herald, had sent a reporter to look into Minister Corbel’s barns. And his brother-in-law. And his accounts.
Within three, the grain tax was repealed, Minister Corbel had resigned to spend more time with his family, and the price of bread in the lower city had fallen by half.
The Queen, the newspapers reported, had approved the repeal with her usual quiet grace. She had made a short and dignified speech. She had smiled once.
Every morning now, Isolde still reads the eleven broadsheets at her breakfast table. She still reads about the queen: her gowns, her gloves, her single gracious smile. But on the inside pages, more and more often, there are stories about someone else.
THE RED JESTER STRIKES AGAIN, says the Courier.
WHO IS THE MASKED CLOWN OF LANTERN SQUARE? asks the Gazette. A disgraced actor? A palace servant? A spy?
The reporters have many theories. Not one of them has ever come close.
And the queen sits at her breakfast table with the stacks of newsprint and the silver coffee pot, and reads every word, and smiles. Not the queen’s smile, the small polite one held for exactly as long as a photographer needs.
The other one. The one that nobody stitched there. The real one.
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