An adaptation from the book, Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts by Patrick Kennedy, 1891.
Cover art and all art by Aubrey Beardsley
Once there was a king who had two fine children, a girl and a boy. When their mother died he married again, and a wickeder woman never drew breath than the one he put over them.
One day when the king was out hunting, the stepmother came to where the daughter sat alone. She had a cup of poison in one hand and a dagger in the other, and she forced the girl who was only fifteen to swear on her life that she would never tell any christened soul what she was about to witness. The poor child took the oath, and the queen killed the king’s favourite dog before her eyes.
When the king came home and found his pet lying dead in the hall, he flew into a rage. “Who has done this?” The queen smiled sweetly. “Who but your favourite daughter? There she is let her deny it if she can.” The poor girl burst into tears but could not speak a word in her own defence because of the oath she had sworn. The king cursed and raged and barely touched his supper.
The very next day, while he was out hunting again, the queen killed the little boy and left him propped on his head on the window seat of the lobby.
The king went mad with grief. “Who has done this?” he roared. “Who but your pet daughter?” said the queen. He called two of his footmen. “Take this vile creature into the forest,” he said, “and cut off her two hands at the wrists. Bring them back to me or your own heads will be off before sunset.” As he stamped the floor in his fury a splinter drove up through the sole of his boot into his foot. He hardly noticed it at first, but by evening he could not pull the boot off, and the more the surgeon cut and probed the deeper the splinter went. He was laid up on a sofa and could not rise.
The princess thought she would die when her hands were taken from her. But she remembered there was a holy well in the wood, and to it she made her way. She pressed what remained of her arms into the cool moss that grew over the stones and the bleeding slowed and the pain eased. She washed herself as best she could and fell asleep beside the water. In the night the spirit of her dead mother appeared to her and told her to be good, to say her prayers every morning and night, and that she would escape every snare laid for her.
When she woke she said her prayers and felt the bite of hunger. Hearing a noise she climbed into a broad tree that hung low over the well and hid herself among the branches. Before long a serving girl came with bread and butter and a pitcher to draw water. She leaned over the well, and looking down into the water she saw a beautiful face looking back at her and thought it was her own. She stared again and again, and then, without eating her bread or filling her pitcher, she ran back to the young king’s palace at the edge of the wood. “Where’s the water?” demanded the housekeeper. “Water?” said the girl. “It would be a fine thing for a girl as handsome as I’ve grown since yesterday to be fetching water for the likes of you. It’s married to the young prince I ought to be.” The housekeeper locked her in the storeroom and kept her on bread and water.
Two more girls were sent to the well and came back with the same delusions and the same punishments, until such uproar rose in the kitchen that the young king himself came to hear what the trouble was. When the last girl told him what she had seen in the water he would not rest until he went to the well himself. He stooped and saw the shadow of a beautiful face. But he had the sense to look up, and there in the branches above him was the princess.
He helped her down with great tenderness and was near to tears when he saw her poor arms. She would not tell him who she was or how she had come to be in such a state, for the oath still bound her. But the short and long of it was that he brought her to his palace and declared he could not live without her. They were married, and in time they had a fine little boy. The young queen made one unusual request that the child not be baptised until her husband came home from the wars, which the King of Ireland was then fighting against the Danes. The king agreed, pressed a beautiful jewel into her hand, and rode off to the camp.
They wrote to each other faithfully, every second day. But not one letter reached either of them. The wicked stepmother had been watching the princess all along, and she had bribed the messenger to bring all the letters straight to her. The young king’s heart broke wondering what he had done wrong. The young queen wept from morning to night.
Then a letter reached the king written by the stepmother herself, but made to look as though it came from the young queen, naming a meeting at the well in the forest with one of the officers. The king had the innocent officer thrown in irons and sent two soldiers to put the queen to death and bring the child home safely.
The night before the soldiers came the spirit of the queen’s mother appeared to her in a dream. “Dress yourself in your maid’s clothes tomorrow morning,” she said, “and take your child to the well. Wash your arms in the water one more time and fill a bottle to bring with you. Then go to your father’s palace. The water will cure the illness he suffers, and no one will know you.”
The queen did exactly as she was told. When she washed her arms in the holy well her hands were restored to her, soft and whole but her face, which had been as white as cream, came up red as a berry. She fell to her knees in prayer, filled her bottle, and set out for her father’s court with the baby in her arms.
The sentries at the palace gate let her through when she said she had come to heal the king, and she reached him before the stepmother who was herself unwell that day knew anything about it. The king felt a strange love for the red-faced woman the moment he saw her, she reminded him so strongly of his lost wife and daughter. When she washed his wound with the holy water the splinter shot out of his foot and he stood up as strong as the day he was born. The stepmother could do nothing to shake his affection for her, though she tried everything.
Two or three weeks later the wars ended and the young king was riding home. The road brought him past his father-in-law’s palace, where a great celebration was held in his honour. As he dismounted in the courtyard a red-faced woman stepped forward holding up a small boy. The child held a jewel in his little fist the very jewel the young king had pressed into his wife’s hand the day he rode to war.
He was shaken to the core. The woman’s face had the look of his wife about it, but so red, and the hands were whole, not as he remembered. Yet the child was his own living image. He kissed the boy and said little until dinner was over. Then he asked his father-in-law if the brown woman and her child might be brought inside so he could speak with her.
“Indeed they can,” said the old king. “I owe that woman my life.”
She came and sat beside him. He asked her gently who she was and who was the father of the child. She shook her head. “I cannot tell you that, sir, because of an oath I swore never to tell my story to any christened soul.” She looked down at the boy in her arms. “But this little one has never been baptised, and to him I can tell everything.”
She turned to the child and spoke. She told him of the stepmother who killed the dog and killed her own little brother and made her swear silence on pain of death. She told him of the hands cut off and the holy well that healed her. She told him of the king’s son who married her and the forged letters that made him send soldiers to kill her. She told him how her mother’s spirit had watched over her, how her hands had been restored, how she had healed her father’s wound. “And now,” she said, “I place you in your own father’s arms. Now you may be baptised, God be thanked, and that is the whole of my story.”
Then she took a damp cloth and wiped her face, and the red faded and she came back as white with rosy cheeks as on the morning of her wedding day.
Her husband and her father very nearly pulled her in two between them pulling her close, and such weeping and laughing was never heard before or since. As for the wicked stepmother, if she did not escape she was torn apart by wild horses. And if they did not all live happily ever after, that you and I may!