My Last Duchess - Cherryblossom

We knew her since she was 17. An orphan of a noble family she was when she came to us. Her mother had passed away after the girl‘s birth and her father had died unexpectedly when she was 15. After the father‘s death, her stepmother could not stand to have the girl in the same building anymore. The girl‘s face reminded her of the beloved, yet forever unreachable man she had shared so many years with and the teenager‘s beauty underlined more and more that she herself had already passed the cenit of her life.

The girl never told us if her stepmother had send her away or if she herself had chosen to run away. To us it did not matter, we were thankful for a helping hand in the household as we worked most of the days and hardly found the time to do housework or look after the garden. We are seven men, we live in a flat-share and work day and night in the mines. Some people in the village call us dwarfs, but actually we are all very tall. Only the work in the mines and the heavy burden we carry on our backs has made us walk buckled and look smaller than we actually are.

In our garden, there has always been a beautiful cherry tree. The girl especially liked this one as it fully bloomed on the day she came to us. She said, she had seen this tree as a sign from fate that in our house friendly people were living. She was always of a dreamy kind.

She hated the actual name her parents had given her, so we decided to call her Cherryblossom. Her skin was as pale as the white blossoms of her favourite tree were and her hair was ravenblack. She would have looked unhealthy if her lips had not been the deep red of cherries. Cherryblossom fitted her perfect: Young and beautiful, only at the beginning of her live.

Cherryblossom lived with us for three years. Sometimes, when we came home earlier we caught her singing alone, songs we did not know and which were basically about what she was doing in the moment she sang. We were sorrowed that being alone the whole day would not be good for her emotional well-being. When I asked her if she wished for some companion during the day, she answered that her friends, the animals of the wood would help her with the work and comfort her. I did not dare to ask whether she was serious about this or only joking.

Let‘s face it and be honest: Cherryblossom was slightly suicidal. I do not blame her for being this way, I guess she had gone through many unpleasant things in adolescence.

When we came home one evening, she aced herself up so tight that she had fainted and probably would have died without us untieding her in a hurry. When we asked her how this had happened, she could not remember anything. Another day when we came home, she had poisened herself with a envenomed comb which we found in her hair. This time, she blamed her stepmother for having dressed up as a peddler, trying to take her life because the old woman‘s enchanted mirror had told her that Cherryblossom was the most beautiful girl in the whole kingdom. We were not sure whether she was still hallucinating from the poison or if she was sincerely mentally disordered.

That night, the seven of us sat down around our kitchen table and held a counsel. We loved Cherryblossom from the bottom of our hearts and knew that we would have to help her. So we decided that we would have to send her to a place where people would be able to take better care of her, where she was under a helpful supervision.

When we confronted Cherryblossom the next morning with our decision, she was broken-hearted, devastaded and could not stop crying. We told her that when we returned that evening, we would bring her to the next order.

When we came home that night, she lay dead on the floor, the half of a poisened apple still in her cold hands, her black hair framing her beautiful white face. Snow White her parents had called her, and in this moment she was no longer Cherryblossom, but Snow White, the girl that had always looked close to death.

We put her into a coffin made from glass and put that coffin on the top of a hill. There we camped for the next two days after her death, not able to bid farewell for ever and so staring at our warmheated, always a little too dreamy friend in the cold box. When the sun rose on the third day of her death, the Duke riding on a white steed found us, sitting and wheeping around Snow White‘s body. He was astonished by her beauty and begged to kiss her. We became furious and disgusted. What kind of person would long to kiss the dead? A strange face he had and we saw an unfamiliar sparkle in his eyes whilst he was staring at the numb body. Sudenly he went towards the casket and tried to open it violently, a bizarre passion in his eyes. The seven of us went between him and our marble friend and suddenly his white horse became more and more nervous until it bolted and kicked against the coffin which tilted over and opened and Snow White fell out and a piece of apple fell out of her mouth and she coughed and her cheeks became redder and she was Cherryblossom again.

To make the long short: Cherryblossom and the young Duke with necrophiliac tendencies married. I guess she only did it because she was scared of having to go to the nuns and he loved the fact that her skin was even in life white as snow. That was when he forced her to take her old name back.

We were invited to the marriage and visited the girl as often as possible. At first, she seemed to be contend with the situation. She was now the Duchess and people showed her a respect which she had not been used to. She smiled at everything, bringing joy into the life of her husband, servants and everyone else she met. She did not speak to animals any more and never mentioned another word about her stepmother or any kind of magic mirror. Oftentimes we came along and brought her cherries from the tree she had once so loved. Then we secretly called her Cherryblossom again and listened to the stories she told us about her husband and the life she was living. A dominant man he was, jealous of everyone she was looking at. She assured us that she was trying to give him everything she could to make him feel special, to make him feel like other people around him were no threat at all. One day she said, she feared he had fallen in love with her being death and that as a living being she would not please him anymore.

When the Duke called for an artist to paint his wife, we considered this to be perfectly normal. When the Duke was jealous of the artist who had to stare several hours at his wife during the painting process, we also considered this as at least normal for him. When Snow White smiled at the artist, after the process had been completed and the outcome was perfect, the Duke had the same bizarre sprakle in his eyes we had encountered before.

The day she was presented the painting was the last day we ever saw Cherryblossom again.

Some say, it was the Duke who ordered to kill her, out of jealousy. Some say, the Duchess killed herself after the Duke had forbidden her ever to smile again. And some say, they saw an old beggerwoman on her way to the castle, in her wrinkled hands a basket full of green apples and one beautiful, red apple only for the Duchess. Some say that several options are true: That the Duke told the witch where her stepdaughter was, knowing she would kill Snow White. And that Snow White recognized the old woman and decided to eat the one, special apple in order to die because she was forbidden to smile again.

We will never find out and we could not do anything about the fact that she was found dead the next morning. The only thing we did was the following: The night after the funeral we went down to the graveyard, took the Duchess casket and brought her back to our home. There we lay her back into the glass coffin and burried her under her favourite cherry tree.

On the gravestone we deleted Snow White and gave her back her true name: Cherryblossom