The Lady or the Tower

There were many ways one could pass the time while confined to a small room in a high tower, and the girl had tried almost all of them. Practicing scales. Pacing. Identifying all the bird songs she heard every day.

But her favorite ritual was brushing her hair. She had so much hair that this took the better part of a day, especially if the weather was humid. She liked to imagine that the brush coaxed thoughts out of her head as it coaxed the tangles out of her locks.

The hairbrush was one of the few luxuries Dame Gothel had allowed her.

“It’s getting quite hard to put my hair in a plait,” she said to Dame Gothel one day. “It’s all snarled and knotted, and it’s almost impossible to braid when it gets like this.” She held up a clump of tangled blonde hair to illustrate her point.

Dame Gothel grumbled. Any request the girl made was met with this response, as if the old woman were saying I gave you this nice room in this nice tower, and now you expect me to give you something else? Mein Gott, child, where does it end?

But the girl got her brush. It was a very ordinary brush; the silver backing and handle were tarnished, and the bristles looked dingy with age and use.

However, it served its purpose well. And while the girl brushed her hair, she thought. And thought some more.

And the next time Dame Gothel pulled herself up to the room using the girl’s braid as a climbing rope, the girl had many questions for her.

“I still don’t understand why you’re keeping me up here,” she said as Dame Gothel set out the bread and cheese she had brought for the girl’s meal.

“I told you,” said Dame Gothel, filling the room with her odd scent of smoke and earth. “You’re mine. That was the bargain. I won’t have you cheating me by going back to your parents.”

“I don’t want to go back to my parents. They traded me for a salad.”

Dame Gothel looked quite affronted. “You needn’t make it sound like that. It was an excellent salad. Made from the best rapunzel in the land. Rapunzel so fine that you’re named for it.”

“Even so,” the girl said. “What would I want with people who traded me away so easily?”

Dame Gothel scowled. “Why do you want to leave? You’ve a fine life here. You’re well fed and you’re safe from all the dangers of the outdoors.”

“My head always hurts,” the girl replied. “All this heavy hair gives me a terrible headache. And that’s before you use it to pull yourself up here.”

“How else am I to bring you food? I could let you go hungry if you’d rather,” Dame Gothel replied, narrowing her eyes.

“There is a door down there, you know,” the girl replied.

“There is not.”

“There has to be. How else could you have brought me up here in the first place?”

“Enough with your smart mouth!” the old woman cried. And she snatched up the girl’s brush and struck her around the arms with it, ignoring the girl’s cries for mercy.

“Now help me climb down,” Dame Gothel said when she’d calmed herself.

The girl, biting back tears that she didn’t want the hateful old hag to see, wanted to say No. Why don’t you take a flying leap out the window, and see where that gets you?

But she didn’t want Dame Gothel in her room anymore, so she used her hair to help the woman down. It hurt terribly. Dame Gothel was a withered husk of a woman, but still, no human head was meant to hold such a burden.

And then the girl sobbed. When her pain and her rage finally subsided, she undid her plait and began brushing her hair.

What was so disagreeable about the outside world? Surely it couldn’t be worse than this place. Or was Dame Gothel right? The girl had a home and she had food, and perhaps that was all one required in life.

Dame Gothel did not return for three days, as if to punish the girl for daring to speak up. When the old woman finally called up to her, the girl was so faint from hunger that she wasn’t sure she’d have the strength to hold her head steady while the old woman pulled herself up the tower wall.

She said nothing as Dame Gothel deposited another meal of bread and cheese on the table. And then they heard hoofbeats outside, and Dame Gothel frowned at the woods outside the window.

“Hmpf. That prince is looking up here again,” she said.

The girl had seen the prince a few times. He sat on his horse and gawked up at her in a manner the girl thought looked rather unintelligent. She called “Hallo!” to him once, but he’d made no reply.

“He just sits there and stares,” the old woman griped. “What’s he want?”

“I imagine he finds it quite odd that you use my hair to climb up here,” the girl said, forgetting that she didn’t want to speak to Dame Gothel.

Dame Gothel glared at the girl with her pitiless gray eyes. “I warned you about that smart mouth of yours, did I not?”

The girl didn’t want to be beaten with her own brush again, and so she averted her eyes and said nothing else.

After Dame Gothel was gone, the girl looked around her room. She pulled back the threadbare blue rug on the stone floor, hoping to find a trap door. But there was nothing but stone.

An enormous oak wardrobe that held all the girl’s clothing sat against one wall. She tried giving it a push, but the thing barely moved. And the girl was already weak from three days with no food.

She fell upon the bread and cheese, and when she had devoured it all, she undid her braid and began to brush her hair. And think.

Should she just accept her fate and remain in the tower, depending on Dame Gothel?

Or did she make her escape and rely on herself?

And if she chose escape, how to do it?

As she redid her hair, she got an idea. She held her heavy golden braid in her hands and stared at it.

There was more than one use for such a rope.

When Dame Gothel climbed up the next day, the girl was pleasant and thankful. She ate her meal and made no complaints.

“Glad to see your temper has improved,” Dame Gothel said. “You should be grateful for all I’ve done for you.”

“Indeed I am,” the girl said.

And then she picked up her brush and hurled it straight into Dame Gothel’s face. It made a satisfying crack! as it struck the old woman’s bony forehead.

Dame Gothel staggered backwards in shock, letting out a howl of pain and anger. “I’ll have your skin for that, brat!”

The girl got up, strode over to Dame Gothel, and wrapped her braid around the old woman’s neck. The old woman spluttered and choked and clawed at the girl’s hands. She had far more fight in her than the girl had anticipated, and she nearly succeeded in breaking free. But the girl pulled tighter and tighter, and finally Dame Gothel fell to the floor, dead.

The girl leaped up and waited for her racing heart to slow, and then she approached the huge oak wardrobe and began to push. It was slow work, and the girl had to throw her entire body into it. But as the wardrobe ground slowly across the stone floor, it revealed a doorway.

Taking along nothing but her hair brush, the girl opened the door, made her way down a winding staircase, opened the front door of the tower, and ran. And ran some more, for the sheer joy of doing so.

When she stopped running, she found a kind person in a nearby village and asked to borrow a pair of scissors. Rapunzel hacked off her long golden braid, and her head felt so light that she thought she could soar straight through the clouds.

The prince came back later that day to stare at the pretty girl in the tower, but she wasn’t there. When she also wasn’t there the next day or the day after that, he lost interest.

But one night when he’d had too much ale with his hunting friends, he started spinning tall tales about the beautiful maiden in the tower, and how she’d helped him to climb up to her room with her long braid. And oh, the things they had gotten up to in that room! His companions roared with drunken laughter.

That was the version of the story that was retold and embellished and became a legend. Rapunzel herself never heard it, which was just as well.

She kept the brush, the only souvenir of her time with Dame Gothel. She still did her best thinking while brushing her hair. But for the rest of her days, she avoided being closed up in small places whenever possible.

The world was a large and scary place. And Rapunzel wouldn’t have had it any other way.