The King had ordered so much straw heaped in the barn that it rose past the old woman’s ankles and stuck to her woolen tights, pricking her skin as she wound between the great piles to where the miller’s daughter, Myrtle, sat with her knees tucked up, crying into her skirts. The old woman offered the young one a rag, stained but softened with time. “Dry not your tears on that coarse garment. Your eyes are raw and your nose cracked.”
Myrtle blew and dabbed. The rag smelled of roses.
“That’s better,” said the old woman, taking her gloppy rag back and examining it.
“Are you my magical Auntie come to spin this straw to gold?” asked Myrtle, twisting her mother’s wedding ring, which she’d planned to offer the Rumpelstiltskin, but the ring wouldn’t budge. Myrtle’s finger purpled and pulsed.
The rosy light of the dying day seeped through the plank walls of the barn and illuminated the bloody clots on the old woman’s rag. Hay fever. The old woman dug through the bag sewn to her skirt and withdrew a waxy cake as smooth as a moonbeam. “My magic soap will have you fresh as a rosebud!” She tossed it into the girl’s lap just as a large rat and a small cat burst out of the neighboring heap in a dervish of hisses, claws, and straw that whirled into the darkening recess of the great barn. Clutching the soap so hard it squished between her fingers, Myrtle held it to her still running nose, closed her eyes, and inhaled the intoxicating rose aroma.
The old woman bent and plucked the soap from Myrtle’s hand. “Your ring.”
The cat padded back casting a huge silhouette. Myrtle sucked mucus back up her nasal passageways and dragged her sleeve across her nose. Shadows made ogres of the straw heaps, the spinning wheel crouched like a giant spider, but the iron chain binding the doors remained an iron chain. “How did you enter?” Myrtle asked.
“Through the root cellar,” the cat said, weaving under and through the tent of Myrtle’s skirt, rubbing her silky self against the girl’s thighs.
Presuming Myrtle did not speak cat, the old woman said, “Even the dark can’t hide those welts on your neck. Come morning, he’ll throw you to the lepers.”
“Throw my corpse!” Myrtle cried. “If I don’t spin this straw to gold by dawn, he’ll hang me. Fie on your soap! I’m giving my ring to the little man.”
“He’ll never come. The last queen cheated him and now everyone knows his name.”
“I don’t! I swear!”
“Rumplestitskin.”
“I didn’t hear you! I don’t know it!” Myrtle covered her ears.
The cat raised her tail and commenced licking the girl’s cheeks in such salt-drunken ecstasy that, despite the dark, the old woman knew Myrtle was crying and hadn’t heart left to push the creature away. She pressed the soap back into the girl’s hand. “My name is Saggysudsocks, and you may shout it to the heavens, for heaven is so dry that the angels forgive my every sin if only I emolliate their skin.”
Myrtle scoffed.
“Go to the kitchen. Demand a tub of water steamy enough to force blooms, but too cool to poach eggs. Tell them denying this means denying the King his gold—a hangable offense.”
“What next?” Myrtle asked.
“Clutch this bit of heaven, sink into that tub so fragrance enfolds you, massage this balm into your skin, let the mists kiss the lining of your lungs, dew your lips while oils melt you into an eel that the king may embrace while his love dissolves your past like a crumbling chrysalis, and you emerge a nascent Queen.”
Myrtle trembled.
“For to bathe in this soap is to drench in eternity, luxuriate in the divine until time itself stops, not for death, nor for birth, nor even re-birth but for sheer bodily bliss. You will drip immortality, the substance Kings crave beyond gold.”
Myrtle could not remove her ring fast enough, but having worn it since childhood, her flesh bulged tight around the metal. Myrtle winced and pulled. Then with three strokes of her soap, Saggy slicked the circle free.
Mimicking Myrtle’s voice, Saggy rattled the iron chains and demanded a bath. The guards took Myrtle to the kitchen and, hoping to finagle Myrtle’s necklace upon her return, Saggy curled under a haystack to sleep.
“You ought to be ashamed,” said the cat, snuggling into the crook of the old woman’s neck.
“Why? Her father and the King struck the bargain; I merely granted her one lovely bath.”
“I meant,” said the cat, kneading her claws into her mistress’s shoulder, “that ridiculous name.”
The two woke to stable hands shouting and shoveling straw into wagons. “— and she’s smelling like the rose on his blooming coat of arms——”
“—and she’s beautiful—”
“Not like my Bessie.”
“No, but the King’s never seen Bessie wet and in the altogether!”
“So, it’s a wedding?”
“Ding Dong as we speak!”
The cat nudged her keeper. “Tell her she’ll get chilblains without more soap.” The kitty stretched as only kitties can. “Imagine: a hearth, a goose down pallet, hairless pink mouslings in my idle claws.”
“A pretty picture, Pussy, but no beggar like me can pass a message to the queen.”
The cat licked the gouge where the rat bit her. “Use your name as a password.”
Queen Myrtle dubbed her savior Saggysudsocks, Royal Soap Maker, a title bestowing both cottage and rights to a stall on the fairgrounds. Saggy grew so fat her skin closed about Myrtle’s ring and she lived happily until the fishmonger, two stalls over, caught her conversing with her cat (whom he’d long suspected of trout lifting) and had her hung for witchcraft.
Fearing chilblains, Queen Myrtle confiscated Saggy’s entire inventory. With no soap to be found, the poor hangman had to axe the witch’s finger before presenting Myrtle’s ring to his betrothed.
