Page 36 of Historical Hotties
With Cassius out of her sight, Dacia wandered into the smaller chamber that contained her dressing table. Her maids were in their little chamber, mending the dress she’d worn yesterday when that silly dog had pushed her in the river, and that included Edie. She could hear the woman bossing the others around.
There were six maids in all, Edie plus two older women who had served her mother long ago, and then three of whom had come into service over the past few years. All of them had a function, from cleaning her bed to emptying her chamber pot to sweeping floors and lighting fires.
It was that veritable army of maids that Dacia was so unfond of, except for Edie, but they had sense enough to leave her alone when the mood dictated it.
Like now.
She was in a mood.
Next to the dressing table was a small cabinet that contained all manner of potions, creams, cosmetics, and herbs meant for the care and hygiene of a well-bred young woman. Given that Dacia was quite familiar with herbs and potions, she probably had more than most, including a potion given to her by Emmeric, the local physic, guaranteed to reduce the marks on her face.
But she had never tried it.
Her old nurse had told her once that the marks on her face were her penitence. For what, she didn’t know, because they had started developing at such a young age that she surely hadn’t had time to sin too terribly. Still, the nervous woman was convinced dark forces were at work through her young charge, somethingthat made for a contentious relationship between the nurse and the priest who taught all manner of lessons.
Growing up with that pair had been an interesting time.
Even now, Dacia smiled when she thought of the old priest teaching her about herbs and flowers, and potions that could possibly help clear her skin, and the nurse screaming about it. Even now, as Dacia looked at all of the medicaments she had collected over the years, there were at least three things in her possession that were said to ease skin blemishes.
Truthfully, she didn’t see the use of even trying them.
Until now.
Cassius had called her beautiful.
As she gazed at herself in the mirror, she began to pull off the veils, one at a time. They were carefully and artfully arranged, and they ended up in a pile on her dressing table as she stared at her reflection in the polished silver mirror.
Big, blue eyes gazed back at her from under dark brows. Her freckles went across her nose, on her upper cheeks, and faded away once they came to her mouth and chin, although she did have a big one next to the corner of her mouth.
Leaning forward, she touched the freckles, thinking they weren’t as dark as they used to be when she was younger, but to her, they were still quite obvious. And ugly. Everyone said so. Only a woman with pure and clear skin was considered beautiful.
Maybe Cassius had bad eyesight.
Even so… his words had meant something.
Dacia had never been called beautiful in her life. She was so very puzzled why Cassius would say such a thing to her. It had been unsolicited. He’d just come out with it. But he’d heard about the nurse, about her freckles, so he knew something of her embarrassing history.
But mayhap…mayhap… she could try something to ease those marks. With her nurse gone, there was no one to tell her that they were penitence. There was no one to make her feel ugly and harassed by demonic forces. It had been a habit to cover up her face, to hide behind those veils, but the truth was that she hated it even if she was resigned to it.
But maybe she didn’t need to be.
Cassius was the first man she had ever met who took the time to give her a little unexpected hope.
With that thought, she went to the cabinet that held all of the treatises and books that the old priest had given her before he’d returned to his monastery in Lincoln. She was a collector of these things, but kept them tucked away. It was considered unseemly for a woman to collect books, and with her freckles already creating an undesirable issue, she felt compelled to hide one more unbecoming trait away from the world.
Reverently, she pulled them forth.
From the pages of these leather-bound, hand-painted books came recipes for so many things, but she was looking for something in particular– recipes to banish unsightly skin blemishes. Onion and garlic were recommended, mixed with vinegar, as were various herbs and roots. She’d seen these recipes before in the quest for mixing certain potions to help with the sick that she’d been called upon to tend, but she hadn’t paid any attention to them until now.
Even as she looked through the books, she felt guilty. Guilt that her old nurse had instilled within her, that old woman who had believed in omens and demons and insisted that fae roamed the land. Ironically, the woman’s name had been Mother Mary, the name of Christ’s mother, the most holy woman in Christendom. But Mother Mary believed in the worst far more than she had faith in the good.
Thumbing through her books, she found six recipes that had to do with correcting blemished skin, but they were all for unsightly eruptions, which Dacia never had. She was looking for something specifically to remove or ease freckles. Towards the end of a book translated from an old Arabic treatise, she began to find what she was looking for. From Adnan, apothecary to Sultan Bakir ibn Faizon, she found several recipes.
Wheat flour, dragonwort, and vinegar, boiled together, and then smeared upon the skin shall remove blemishes and spots.
Or…
Buttermilk mixed with flour, applied as a paste, shall fade freckles.
