Beauty's Daughter: The Story of Hermione and Helen of Troy Read Online Free PDF Page B

host’s wife away with him. What an insult!
    Once, when I heard laughter coming from the cook house at the rear of the palace, I crept close to the door where I could gather snatches of conversation: about how the queen had not found her husband to be a real man, and how she had run off with the first man who dared to ask her.
    “Maybe it was her idea in the first place,” one of the servants suggested.
    “Maybe she bribed the Trojan prince with the king’s treasure,” another said.
    I stood fuming, hands balled into fists, until I could bear it no longer and burst through the door, bringing about a shocked silence among the meat roasters, cheese makers, and bread bakers. “I know what you’re talking about,” I shouted. “If you want to gossip about my mother, you should know the truth. Queen Helen did not leave willingly. Paris forced her to go with him. She would never have left King Menelaus!” I insisted passionately. “Aphrodite cast a spell on Helen so that she could not put up a fight. I saw it with my own eyes as he dragged her away!”
    That last part was not true. I had no idea what had really happened. I had seen the looks Helen and Paris exchanged, his message of love scratched in the sand. I hated the thought that it may have even been her idea to leave. I liked the explanation I was inventing so much better, and the more I spoke, the more it seemed like the truth. My mother was abducted! Kidnapped! She had not wanted to go. Paris was holding her against her will. She would come back as soon as she could get away from her captors. I believed the lie I was inventing, because I had to. It was better than admitting to myself that my mother had chosen to abandon me.
    “King Menelaus will rescue Queen Helen!” I cried while everyone gaped at me, open-mouthed. “He will bring her back to us!”
    I turned and fled, back to my sleeping room, where I flung myself on my bed of fleeces and sobbed.
     
    THEN I HAD TO deal with Pentheus. As Father’s vizier, he oversaw the overseers—those who made sure the fields were planted, tended, and harvested, the grapes turned into wine and the olives pressed of their oil, the horses groomed, goats and cows milked and their milk turned into cheese, meals prepared, and sheep sheared and their wool woven into cloth. Pentheus was even in charge of our personal servants, the women who bathed and dressed us, the man who trimmed Father’s beard.
    The vizier was also the king’s confidant. He had been with him since boyhood. Father loved him like a brother, but my mother didn’t trust him. I’d heard my parents argue about him.
    “Pentheus sticks his nose where it has no business,” Helen had complained. “He has spies among my slaves who listen to my conversations with my women and report to him every word that’s said.”
    Father always defended Pentheus. “
Everything
is his business,” Menelaus answered mildly.
    “I don’t like it,” Helen insisted. “I’m entitled to some privacy, surely.”
    “I think you’re exaggerating, my dear,” said Menelaus. “But I’ll speak to him. The slaves need to be more discreet.”
    I agreed with Helen. But I thought I knew why Pentheus paid so much attention to my mother: he was in love with her. This was to be expected. There wasn’t a man who didn’t adore her. What she didn’t admit to Father was that she encouraged Pentheus’s affection. My mother loved to be loved. I supposed she couldn’t help herself.
    Pentheus seemed dazed when I confronted him. “Queen Helen is gone?” he asked incredulously.
    “The Trojan prince abducted her,” I said, now completely believing that myself. “Pleisthenes is with them. I have no doubt that Paris intends to carry them back to Troy.”
    “But how could I not have known?” he asked, his voice thin and cracking. “Why was the alarm not raised?”
    I explained about Aphrodite and the spell she had cast on everyone—including him. I added nastily, “But of course he