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Ella: A Historical retelling of the classic Cinderella story

By Lisa J. Flickinger

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Washington D.C. 1870


Chapter One

Ella pulled the long sliver from her finger, squeezed her eyes at the sight of the crimsondroplet, and popped the digit into her mouth. Iron flowed across her tongue.
The wide oak planks of the parlor should’ve been as smooth as a baby’s bottom by now. It was her mother’s design, the pretty, two story brick house with its symmetrical windows and tall, white columns and it was older than Ella – who would be nineteen years in one month. Three times alone since Monday, Ella’s bruised shins had carried her around the vestibule, the guest parlor, and the music room. When her stepsister Dru couldn’t come up with another, floor scrubbing with a stiff brush and lye soap was Ella’s assigned task. Dru must have been busy today, but at least Ella escaped the more tedious and demeaning chores.
Ella’s eyelids snapped up at the clatter of the screen door. Dru giggled and a male voice chuckled in response. Had her stepsister found a new love so soon? Last week she’d been leading George, Ella’s oldest friend, around by the nose.
Two figures stepped to the doorway of the parlor.
It was George. Ella pulled her finger from her mouth and her cheeks warmed at the resounding “slurp”. She dropped her head and tucked her finger into the folds of her dingy homespun skirt.
Why was he chuckling in such an obnoxious, metered tone? The George Ella loved would clutch his stomach with both hands as sweaty, blond curls bounced around his chin, and beg her to stop making him laugh.
They’d spent most of their childhood afternoons in the narrow thicket between the two homes, building makeshift castles and barricades for holding off the enemy. He’d promised to protect Ella forever; but it wasn’t the only promise George had broken.
Dru lifted a gloved hand and fixed her hateful green eyes on Ella. “Dear ... sweet…Ella,” she said, and emphasized each word by plucking the glove off her fingers one at a time.
“Yes, Dru?”
“I see your scrubbing the floor again.” Her glance landed on the wooden bucket sitting a few feet away.
Of course Ella was scrubbing the floor; Mother Adeline had said it was what Dru wanted.
“I’m assuming this means mother neglected to give you my list of chores for today.” Dru pulled the glove off her other hand and beat the silky pair against the peach taffeta of her skirt.
So Dru had left a list – not surprising. Ella glanced up at George. The skin above his starched, linen collar was turning a soft shade of pink. She reached up and tucked several wayward, white-blond strands of hair into her tidy cap.
George coughed and averted his gaze.
Tears prickled behind Ella’s eyes, but she would not let them fall, not when the others could watch. “I’ll finish the scrubbing and then look for your list.”
“I don’t think the day is long enough. We have some special occasions coming up and I need to make sure everything is perfect. I’ll fetch the list and you can begin immediately.
Mother!”
Ella flinched at the nasal screech. What did Dru mean by “she needed to make sure everything is perfect”? Were the girls thinking of entertaining? They hadn’t until now. It would come as a welcome distraction even if Ella had to polish the silver, clean the windows, launder the curtains, or whatever else Dru could come up with.
“Come along, George.” Dru swished by Ella, and as she passed the cleaning bucket, Dru’s boot shot out to catch it on its side and tip it over. A murky puddle spread across the floor boards and began to disappear between the cracks.
George bent to right the bucket; as his hand grasped its rim, Ella reached out to do the same. Her hand closed over his. George flashed an angry look and uttered a foul word under his breath while jerking his hand back.
Was Ella that repulsive to him now?
He straightened up and scurried after Dru whose bustle bounced with vigor as they trotted through the archway to the dining room.
Ella stood the bucket upright and used a rag to sop up the remaining water before she dropped to her knees and resumed her scrubbing.
How could George be so faithless? Why didn’t he care that she was being kept like a prisoner in her own home?
And where was the Lord in all this? She’d been faithful to God her whole life. She read her Bible, prayed every day, and attended Pastor Dartley’s services unfailingly. Her mother had always promised a pious life meant the Lord would protect you. Forsake me not, O Lord: O my God, be not far from me.
Dru took great delight in devising evil plots to make her suffer. Egbertha, for the most part, kept to herself and didn’t interfere. Their mother Adeline’s energies ran only to finding the best outfit for the day’s weather. And with a dressing room full of new clothes it took until early afternoon to be outfitted as woman of her new station.
Mother Adeline wasn’t mean like Dru though. Silly, inept, and easily manipulated, but Ella’s father, Isaac Goodwin, had married Adeline for her beauty. Beauty she still carried in her delicate shoulders and porcelain features, much like the doll now hidden upstairs in an old musty trunk in Ella’s attic bedroom.
Ella’s father had brought the doll home from one of his postings abroad when Ella was a small child. Egbertha had been the first to remark on the similarity between the doll’s wide, blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and sweet Cupid’s bow mouth and their own mother’s face. After Egbertha had done so, her lips had curled into their telltale smirk and her eyes had filled with the mocking laughter she liked to bestow on Ella when she finally emerged from her room. The remark was almost enough to make Ella lift the china doll above her head and let it drop to the floor – break into a hundred pieces. But she hadn’t given Egbertha the satisfaction.
Ella’s father had left with only a half-day’ notice two months after marrying Mother Adeline and only three months after Ella’s mother’s death. A foreign minister had been recalled from the office in Bombay. And although retired, her father had agreed to cover the post for a few months, no longer than a year, until a suitable replacement could be found or manufactured.
Isaac had no idea Adeline had moved her daughters into the home shortly after he left for Bombay. In fact, he had no idea Adeline even had daughters of her own, she’d never told him. Because of his hasty marriage to a woman he hardly knew, Ella suffered daily.
He’d been gone five months without sending Ella a single reply to all the letters she had written him detailing the extent of Dru’s cruelty and Mother Adeline’s allowing it. Ella glanced through the doorway toward the empty silver tray on the hall table. Perhaps today would be the day she would finally have word.
“Ella, darling.” Adeline entered through the dining room doorway; Dru and George trailing behind her. She tipped her pretty head and her brows furrowed into a tiny vee.
Ella almost blurted out Egbertha’s daily warning. “Mother, relax your face or you’ll ruin your looks.” Which was always followed with Egbertha’s whispered “and we all know it’s all you’ve got” behind a polite hand.
“Ella, why is your dress sopping wet?” Mother Adeline asked.
Ella glanced at the wet stains in the folds around her knees and then glanced over Mother Adeline’s shoulder toward Dru. “The buck – ”
“The silly girl spilled the cleaning bucket again. It’s the third time in as many weeks, Mother. I guess she needs more practice.” Mockery filled Dru’s words. “Here, let me help you up.” Dru brushed by her mother and gripped Ella above the elbow digging her fingernails into the flesh on the inside of Ella’s arm.
Ella didn’t need the warning. Of course she wouldn’t tell Mother Adeline Dru had kicked the bucket over. There was no way to prove it. She couldn’t rely on George to side with her, and telling would only bring further wrath from Dru in the future.
Ella tugged her arm from Dru’s grasp and formed a tight knot with her hands to keep from lashing out. A steady drip, drip hit the floorboards from the hem of her skirt.
“I must be going,” George said as he nodded curtly at Mother Adeline and then Dru.
Please do. His presence made Ella’s humiliation so much more complete.
“George, aren’t you forgetting something?” Dru spoke to his back as he retreated through the vestibule doorway.
He turned to face them and Dru tapped the side of her cheek with a single finger. George coughed twice before returning to plant a single, swift kiss where Dru’s finger had pointed.
Ella couldn’t help the gasp which escaped her chest.
Dru’s plump lips turned up into a tight smile and she fluttered her eyelashes as George left the parlor.
Why was George behaving like some sort of a trained dog?
“Ella, would you please go and change your skirt?” Mother Adeline asked.
“But, Mother, we were going to talk about my list.”
“Dru, you can see the girl is soaking wet.” Mother Adeline lifted her hands, palms up, and fluttered them. “Hurry now, Ella, up to your room quickly. You will find us in the music room when you return.”
Ella trudged up the flight of stairs at the back of the front hall one leaden foot after another. Dru’s insistence that Ella rose with the roosters made for a long day and further cruelty as the others didn’t awake until mid-morning. Her eyelids drooped momentarily, blurring the delicate roses on the carpet runner; Ella shook her head and took a deep breath to wake herself.
Why wasn’t George doing anything about her situation? Surely he couldn’t be blinded by love for Dru regardless of their display in the parlor. The thought was preposterous. The mother’s looks had definitely not passed down to either girl.
Dru’s sturdy frame was topped by a broad head covered in frizzy black hair. Her cheeks were plump and often covered by the sheen of overexertion. Not from work — to be sure. Her full lips pursed in a pout at the slightest provocation and her upturned nose spent most of its time in the air.
So if it wasn’t her looks that held him, what was it?
“There you are.” As Ella reached the top stair, the languid voice spoke from the darkness of Egbertha’s bedroom.
Egbertha had said earlier she would be running errands in the afternoon.
“Come here.”
Ella stopped outside the bedroom door. “I’m to change my clothes and return to the music room straightaway.”
“I said come here.”
Ella put her hand to the ornate, walnut door and applied pressure slowly. If Egbertha was having one of her headaches even how the door opened could make her vomit.
The room was warm. Ella wrinkled her nose at the scent of lavender cloaking old sweat. Egbertha lay across the large, feather bed, Ella’s former bed, with one arm shielding her eyes. “Did you have to stomp up the stairs like an elephant when you know I have a headache?”
Ella hadn’t stomped, neither did she know Egbertha had a headache, but there was no point arguing with her at the best of times, let alone when she was in pain. “I’m sorry, can I get you something?”
Egbertha lifted her arm to expose one eye and scowled. “Of course you can get me something. No one else seems to care.”
Egbertha’s lean torso and bony limbs were a severe contrast to her sister’s plumpness. Her narrow face and small, dark eyes reminded Ella of the voles the gardener trapped after they munched his carrots. And the large, lumpy wart in the middle of one cheek did nothing to add to her features.
“What would you like? A glass of water, a cool cloth for your forehead, both?”
“My powders are in the drawer of mother’s beside table. Bring me some.”
“But your mother said I wasn’t - ”
“Bring me some,” Egbertha ground out between her misshapen teeth.
Ella scuttled out of the room and two doors down to her father and Mother Adeline’s bedroom. After they’d married, it was the only room Ella’s father had allowed his new wife to redecorate and only after Adeline had whined incessantly for a week.
How sad he had given in. The hired decorator suggested bold contrasts and the room had become a mish mash of oranges, blues, and greens. From the ornately patterned owl wallpaper to the intricate Turkish rug, Ella’s gaze darted around like it had nowhere to land.
She crossed the room to the bedside table and looked over her shoulder. Ella wasn’t allowed in the room; Adeline would be furious if she caught her. Ella opened the top drawer too far and stooped to catch it before it fell. As she did so, a packet of letters appeared in the gap behind the drawer.
Ella put the drawer on the carpet and reached for the packet. It held ten letters tied in a white ribbon. She flipped through them; they were all dated in the last five months, the address written in a familiar scrawl – her own. Her stomach clenched into a tight ball. That’s why her father hadn’t replied to her letters. Adeline hadn’t posted them. Isaac had no idea he’d left his daughter in the hands of such cruel taskmasters. Ella swallowed the bitter taste in her mouth. There would be no help coming from her father.
Ella placed the letters in their hiding spot and snatched the small brown bottle labeled Dover’s Powders from the drawer before sliding it into the table. She returned to Egbertha’s room where she lay exactly as Ella had left her. “How many would you like?”
“Two, I need at least two,” Egbertha’s voice tremored.
“Two then, and no more. Remember last time, when you took three? You were violently ill.” Ella pulled the cork and upturned the bottle until two white tablets rolled into her palm. Extending her hand to Egbertha, she said “I’ll fetch you a glass of water.”
Egbertha sat up and her hand snaked out to take the tablets from Ella’s palm. She stuck them in her mouth and chewed vigorously. “I don’t need any water; I’ll be fine in a moment.”
“You know your mother will be angry if she finds some missing.”
“I’ll find a way to replace them. Mother needs to mind her own affairs.” Egbertha smoothed the ruffles of her blue silk sleeves before planting her dark gaze on Ella. “And so do you. You won’t mention a single word of this to anyone if you know what’s good for you.”
What would be good for Ella would be to leave this house — a house full of terrible secrets.
“Ella! Where are you?” Dru called up the stairway.
Ella ran from Egbertha’s room. “I’ll be down in a moment,” she said over her shoulder as she raced down the hall and up the narrow attic steps. The girls had thought supplanting Ella from her beautiful room on the second story to the long, narrow room under the eaves would be a punishment. It was a godsend.
The others didn’t bother to navigate the narrow stairway so it had become her sanctuary. Ella had tucked most of the storage along the far wall in a tidy stack leaving lots of room for three tables and two dressmaker’s forms she’d found amongst the stored clutter. Several bolts of fabric rested on one of the tables; several sketches and a hand drawn pattern on the other.
Ella crossed to the other end of the room where a narrow cot and a bulky wardrobe formed her sleeping quarters. After removing the sopping skirt, she grabbed another drab one from the wardrobe to replace it. If she took much longer, Dru might decide to come and find her and that would spoil everything.

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