All Chapters of Cinderella, Queen of Rats: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

*The morning after the ball* Maids and servants started cleaning up the castle from the ball last night as soon as all the guests had left. They found cups and napkins among spilled drinks and lost handkerchiefs. One maid had found a patch of fabric in a light pink color with some golden accents and looked at it thoughtfully. It was too small to be a kerchief so she wondered what it was. "Gretchen?" She heard a fellow maid behind her.  "Good morning, Matilda," she greeted her with a friendly smile.  "What are you doing out here? I thought you were stationed in the kitchen?"  "I was just heading that way when this scrap of fabric caught my attention," Gretchen pulled out

* * *Drizella The greenhouse was at the furthest end of the garden, cleverly hidden by vines that grew up the sides and glass walls that almost made it hard to see.  "You have your own separate garden?" I asked Peter as we walked closer.  "Yes, you remember when I mentioned my experiments to create a blue rose?" I nodded my head when he glanced at me and he continued, "this is where I perform those experiments." The term "experiments" slightly frightened me, for some reason the word triggered images in my mind of explosions and mysterious chemicals that made me nervous. We approached the glass door to the greenhouse and stepped inside to see the most colorful array of flowers I had ever seen.

As the Prince and Ella danced in the ballroom and were just about to share a tender moment, a maid in the castle had collapsed just outside the doors. Ella and the Prince were the first to run to her aid.  "Alma, what happened?" It was the Prince who asked this question to the maid who tended to Driz and Ella earlier.  "I have no idea, your highness. She had said she was feeling warm and so I told her to take the glassware back and then to take a break and moments later she just collapsed," Alma was speaking so fast that it was almost difficult to follow what she was saying, she was hysterical seeing her friend this way. Ella knew she couldn't just stand around staring, she wasted no time rushing to the unconscious maid and feeling her temperature with the back of her hand. "She's burnin

* * *Drizella  The Prince had shown us each to our personal rooms in the guest quarters where Maddie was. Since we were already with her, there was no more harm in being around her longer. Still, we kept the door to her room closed just in case.  Ella and I were given separate rooms, but the doctor had spooked us so badly that we didn't want to be alone and spent the evening together in her room, talking.  Dr. Laënnec had ordered us to burn our clothes and wash up. We took off our dresses so that we were only left in our shifts and threw our dresses into the fireplace. We took a step back and watched the gowns burn, feeling guilt since they were both Ana's dresses. We stood in silence until we couldn't distinguish their colors anymore and then sighed.&

Across the hall from where Peter and Drizella were sharing an intimate night was the room that the sick maid Maddie was in. Maddie was the head servant Malcolm's sister, and he had come to watch over here along with a fellow maid named Alma, who was there when she first collapsed in the hallway.  The Prince and Ella were quick to arrive after hearing the glasses shatter on the ground that Maddie had been carrying and Alma was thankful for that. There may have been many maids in the castle, but everyone knew Malcolm, and so, everyone knew Maddie. She certainly did not consider them to be close friends, more acquaintances than anything, but Alma could see the pain on Malcolm's face as he watched his sister and felt a piece of her heart break for him. The doctor that came to examine Maddie earlier that day had concluded that she had the plague and it