The Kitchen Maid’s Trickery
A fantasy short story
Once upon a road . . .
. . . that led to a castle tower, an older king and an older woman married for “convenience.” Theirs was an arranged marriage. But they soon fell in love as they conversed with each other and realized they were of the same mind on so many things. Unfortunately, it was not long before the King went away to the summer battlefields. His wife wrote him through the household steward. She missed him terribly.
The King could not write, and he did not want his queen to know, so the steward read pretend letters to her.
Now, before the marriage, a kitchen maid had become pregnant by the king. She was just beginning to show, but she made sure everyone knew her child belonged to the king. The new queen had pity upon the maid and left her there in the kitchen instead of banishing her, as she would have every right to do.
However, in order to cause trouble, the conniving, jealous kitchen maid got a message to her master, the King, that his wife was cheating on him with the steward.
When the king returned, he immediately put his steward to death and imprisoned his wife in the tower.
As you know, towers are the strongholds of castle defense. The tower projected above and out from the wall, and this gave the archers a clear view down and sideways. Walkways ran along the curtain walls so crossbowmen and archers could swiftly move to quell the danger. They posted a watch on the tower turret to keep a lookout along the base of the castle walls.
Soon, the king asked for a decree of divorce. Once the queen finally discovered what had happened, she refused. She would not sign a lie. So she remained in the tower, and she soon learned that no matter where the body is, the mind is free to go elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the kitchen maid had the king’s baby, a child born on the wrong side of the blanket, and she brought it to the older woman in the tower to see. The maid did this in order to anger the woman and make her jealous.
Now the queen knew she had an appointment with death and that the ring of protection that she wore was the only thing between her and her demise. She remembered an old legend she had heard about a servant in Baghdad who saw Death in the marketplace.
Death made a threatening gesture, and the servant ran to his master and asked to borrow a horse to speed to Samaria, where he would hide from Death. Later, his master saw Death and asked him why he had threatened his servant.
“I did not,” Death replied. “It only surprised me to see him in Baghdad, for I have an appointment with him tonight in Samaria.”
While looking at the baby, the queen took off her ring of protection and gave it to the girl child. When she slipped the large ring on her finger, it resized itself to a small, baby-sized ring.
The ring of protection was now gone. When the kitchen maid suggested not feeding the queen in the tower, the king agreed. The plan was that the woman would get so hungry that she would allow the king to divorce her. However, she died in the tower, the lingering, terrible death of starvation.
Once his queen was gone, the king realized what kind of woman the kitchen maid really was. He sorely regretted his haste in believing his wife had been adulterous. He was still too kind-hearted to take their lives, so he sent the maid and his child away to the village, and he was never happy again.
Thanks for reading,
Amy Potter
Read the sequel, The Kitchen Maid’s Baby at https://readmedium.com/the-kitchen-maids-baby-24b675b2ed16?sk=22a7096b5d2134ca229b7c3168a06209
