The Spinning Girl
Ursula blew on her fingers mechanically in time with the foot that pressed down, down, down on the pedal of the spinning wheel. The wheel hummed and the spindle rattled, whirling and wavering golden like a summer cattail in the candlelight in the tower. It was nothing like summer here. Ursula shivered and pulled her cowl around her as if by making it tighter she could make it thicker. When the spindle was full, she pulled the new skein of wool off it and dumped it into the basket by the door. She glanced over at the heap of bales of raw wool in the corner that never seemed to get any smaller. Groaning, she put her frozen hands in her stiff back, stretched, and walked to the little window. Even though it was dark out, warm light shone in weakily through the grimy panes because all the bonfires were lit in anticipation of Graf Leopold’s return from the Crusade. They had been lit every night for a week. At first, everyone had hovered near the gates, talking, craning their necks to look through the portcullis grating for any sign of torches out on the snowy road. But after so many nights of waiting, folks were going about their usual business in the market.
Ursula wished she could be down in the Christmas market with her friends instead of up here spinning. But she realized with a shudder that had nothing to do with the cold that her friends probably wouldn’t even recognize her or talk to her now. She was no longer the precious only daughter of a respected burger, a wine merchant. Her father had died, his stock had been sold to pay his debts, and her mother had remarried one of her father’s business partners in Weidenburg. As her stepfather’s house there was too full of his own children to take one more, she had been left behind here in Kiefersheim, housed with a distant aunt who was a maker of knitwear and rented this tower with her shop at its bottom and a stack of increasingly drafty and cramped rooms going up; for her part, the aunt was all too glad to take in a pair of hands she didn’t have to pay to spin her wool in the freezing attic.
Ursula couldn’t resist. She struggled with the rusty latch on the window and threw it open, not minding the blast of frigid air that came in because with it came the sound of voices and laughter, the wafting smells of baking bread and roasting meat and mulling cider. It was just a few weeks to Christmas now, and the market would be full of traveling merchants with their exotic wares and sugared treats. She couldn’t see the market from her tower, but she could hear it. She stuck her head as far out as she could. As she did, a flash of color caught her eye. In the lovely glazed balcony that jutted out from the upper storey of the burgermeister’s hof, someone was putting an enormous vase of red roses on a table in the window where the whole town could see it. Ursula’s jaw dropped. Where had those roses even come from at this time of year? Some prince’s glazed hothouse in Salzburg? And how had they made it here through the freezing winter? The extravagant redness of the flowers made Ursula feel faint, even through the warping of the glass and over the distance between her garret and the burgermeister’s hof. She clutched the windowsill and sank to her haunches on the floor. Just then, there came through the window a great shouting, the portcullis rattling open, horses hooves clattering in the gate. Ursula shot back to her feet just in time to watch Graf Leopold himself ride back into Kiefersheim.
The Rookery 