Werewolves & Glass slippers

Jaq, Gus and Perla

*Ella*

By the time I escape to my room hours later, I am exhausted. I got up at five this morning to do three hours of accounts, then was in my wolf-form at eight... not to mention the emotional toll taken by the day’s charming revelations. At dinner, Minna was snappy even with the Alpha, and Anastasia wept softly through three courses.

And now the dogs… the ‘rats’… are waiting for me, sitting in a little semicircle.

There is no more fashionable accessory than a small dog, and Anastasia and Minna, with their characteristic belief that twenty-three ball gowns are better than one, have acquired not one small dog, but three.

Three small, yapping, silky Malteses.

They are absurdly small, smaller than most cats. And they have a sort of elegant sleekness about them that I find an affront. If I ever have a dog, I’d want it to be one of the lop-eared, grinning dogs that run out to greet me when I stop by the cottages on Minna’s lands. A dog that barks rather than yaps.

Though at the moment they aren’t yapping. As I enter my small room, they rise in a little wave and surround my ankles in a burst of furry waving tails and hot bodies. They are probably lonely. Before the bite, they were always at Anastasia’s side. Perhaps they are hungry. Or worse, they might need to visit the garden. If only I had a bell in my room… but she-wolf of my status have no need to call servants.

“I suppose,” I say slowly, thinking of the stairs and my aching legs, “I have to take you outside.” In point of fact, I should be grateful that they have not urinated in my room; it is so small and the one window so high that the smell would last a month or more.

It takes a few minutes to figure out how to attach ropes to their jeweled collars, not helped by the fact that they have begun yapping, jumping up and trying to lick my face. It is hard not to flinch away.

I trudge down the back stairs that lead to my room, my steps echoed by the scrabbling little claws of the rats. I am so tired that I can’t even remember their names, though I think they are all alliterative, perhaps Fairy and Flower.

“What do they eat?” I ask Cherryderry a few minutes later. He has been kind enough to accompany me to the kitchen garden and show me the area fenced off for the dogs’ use.

“I sent Richard up to your chamber an hour or so ago; he fed them and brought them out for a walk. I will admit to disliking those dogs, but they’re not vicious animals,” he says, watching them. “It’s not really their fault.”

They are all piling on top of each other, a mass of plumy tails and sharp noses.

“Jaq didn’t intend to bite Miss Anastasia,” he continues. “You needn’t worry that he’ll bite you.”

“Jaq? I thought they were all named after flowers.”

“That’s part of their trouble,” Cherryderry says. “Miss Anastasia never quite settled on names for them. She changed them every week or so. They started out as Ferdinand, Felicity, and Gustave. Currently they are Perla, Jaq, and Chester. Before that, they were Mopsie, Maria, and something else. The lead dog… see the slightly larger one? That one is Jaq. The other two are Perla and Chester, though Chester never learned to respond to any name other than Gustave or Gus.”

“Why did Jaq bite Anastasia, anyway? I never thought to ask.”

“She was feeding him from her mouth.”

“What?” I ask.

He shakes his head, “Holding a piece of meat between her lips and encouraging him to take it from her. Foolish business, coming between a dog and his meat.”

I shudder. “That is disgusting.”

“Princess Charlotte has trained her dogs to do the same by all accounts,” Cherryderry says. “The princess has a lot to answer for.”

“So how do I keep them quiet at night?” I ask, longing for my bed.

“Just treat them like dogs, with respect, but firm-like. Miss Anastasia made the mistake of thinking they were babies, and then she would get annoyed and send them down to the kitchen whenever they misbehaved, so they never learned better. I’ll give you a little bag of cheese scraps. Give them a piece every time they do something right and they’ll be fine.”

Back in my room, I discover that the dogs have their own personalities. Jaq is remarkably unintelligent. He seems to believe that he is very large: He prowls and pounces and keeps issuing promises to attack anyone who enters the room. In fact, he reminds me of an imperial general; his name befits him.

Gus is lonely, or at least that’s what I surmise when he jumps onto the bed, licks my knee, and wags his tail madly. Then he gives me a dramatically imploring look, quickly followed by a roll onto his back with his legs in the air. In short, he is silly, and Gus suits him better than Gustave.

Perla shows every sign of being remarkably vain. Anastasia has glued tiny sparkling gems into the fur around her neck, and rather than trying to scratch them off, as would any self-respecting mongrel, Perla sits with her paws perfectly aligned and her nose in the air. She shows no sign of wishing to approach my bed, but arranges herself elegantly on a velvet cushion that has appeared on my floor along with a bowl of water.

I pull Gus out of my bed and drop him on the floor, but he jumps straight back up again. And I am too tired, too bone-deep tired, to do anything about it.

So I lie there for a moment thinking about my father, little pulses of anger going through my body. How could he have done this? He must have loved Minna; otherwise, why would he marry his mistress?

It is a good thing that I never made my debut. I know little of society, all things told, but I know that no one would befriend a young lady whose stepmother is a woman of ill repute, even given that Minna did marry her protector.

And yet Minna and Anastasia have simply marched into London, opened up my father’s townhouse, and established Anastasia as a beautiful young heiress.

There is a lesson there, I think sleepily.