Cinnamon. That was what I smelled when I entered the shop. Spicy and exotic, the scent always took me back to my childhood.
My father was a merchant in the spice trade and he had warehouses filled with the aromatic packages. As a young girl I loved to go into these places. I would lift a small brown paper item to my nose and tell my father what I thought it contained. Then he would tell me a story about the place where it came from, or the journey taken to get to that place, or a person he had met there. I never found out whether all of them were true, but they were all fascinating and he always had a new one to enthrall my young self.
Cinnamon was always my favorite spice, but my father never told me stories about it. I once asked him why and he smiled a secretive smile. I never asked again. I didn't like seeing evidence that my father had secrets from me.
Since my father wouldn't tell me stories about it, I decided to make up my own. Sometimes I whispered them to my little sister when we lay in bed at nights. She promised she'd never tell. Sometimes I wrote them down instead, and I didn't tell my sister, or anyone else, about these. I kept a neat little sheaf of papers tied with a ribbon at the bottom of one of my bureau drawers. Yet, at times I thought my father suspected.
At random moments someone might be talking to me and I would suddenly get a wonderful idea that I had to get on paper. I'd plop down right where I was, take a quill pen and paper from a bag I always kept with me, and, heedless of the other person's exclamations apart from a vague aside that I'd just remembered something, I'd start scratching away. Occasionally when I did this, I'd look up to see my father looking over at me, a twinkle in his eye. If I looked up again, he would be studiously bent to whatever task he had at hand.
As I grew older I expanded my writing topics and grew ever more secretive as well. I took my cinnamon stories and revised some of them to be more factually accurate, and all of them to be sounder, and, simply, improved.
I wrote down in my own words some of the stories that my father used to tell me, as far as I could remember them, and I made up more of my own.
Spices had always been my prompt in writing, and they were still, except that now they gave me a greater variety of ideas than merely the adventures you could have in seeking to obtain them from a foreign land. One of the stories I wrote was about a girl whose job it was to sample all the food before it went to the king's table, to make sure that it wasn't poisoned. Once she ate a dish with ginger in it (a spice which had never been used before), which, it just so happened, she was allergic to. When she started to cough and weeze, and her lips to swell, everyone assumed that the dish had been poisoned. She became an instant heroine; she was taken under the queen's wing as a lady in waiting and eventually went on to marry the prince and become queen herself, all this because of a simple allergy. I finished the story by saying that, as queen, she always took care that the food taster was someone who was allergic to ginger. It was a silly story, humorous and light, and one of my favorites. Some of my stories were bleaker, but I saw to it that each one had a happy ending.
So I grew up. In my 17'th year my father started to give me lessons in figures, geography, history, economics, and other things related to the business he operated, although my mother disapproved. I wasn't sure what to think of it. He couldn't possibly be training me, a female, to take over his company, could he? Yet why else would he be teaching me such things? Despite my confusion in the matter, I did enjoy the lessons. Becoming better informed, I was sure, could do nothing but improve my writing, and by now I had my heart set on remaining a writer for the rest of my life. It was the one thing that rescued me from what otherwise would have been as monotonous a life as a female in the seventeenth century could expect. I felt more myself, more honest, more passionate, and happier when I wrote than at any other time.
But writing also scared me. That was why I'd never shown my work to my family: I was afraid that they would say it was unfitting for a young woman, or impossible for a young woman to pursue. Worse, they could say that I wasn't even a good writer. If they did, I could never have that which I wanted more than anything in the world.
Of course, neither could I have what I wanted if I persisted in hiding my work. I would have to take a risk. I knew that one day I would have to brace myself for my family's reaction. I put it off as long as I could, but eventually I had to admit, no time like the present.
I entered my room and went to the drawer which had kept my secret for so long. I gathered up my favorite stories and my cinnamon stories—they had started this; what could be more fitting than them accompanying me through the climax?—I walked out of the house and down to a print shop in the center of town. The owner ran a newspaper, a bookshop, and he was a publisher, apart from running the print shop.
I took a breath, shoved the door open, and caught the scent of cinnamon on the air.
Now I am pacing through the few shelves of books inside, trying to gather the courage to take my bundle up to the counter. Trying to avoid my lurking thoughts of self-consciousness and deficiency, I concentrate on the memory of the moment when I realized that it wasn't just for me that I wrote. I want other people to read my work. Read it, fall in lot with it, with my writing self. I want my scenes to come alive for people and take them away from their world, but also to teach them things about their world. I want for them to pick up one of my stories and not be able to put it down; but when they have to, at the end, for them to be a different person from the one who picked it up.
With these thoughts to bolster my resolve, I walk up to the counter, place my packet of papers upon it, and utter the breathless words I'd rehearsed:
"Mr. Swift, I wonder if you wouldn't mind looking at these."
He looks down at them and gives me an encouraging smile, though to me it appears slightly condescending. I straighten my shoulders and give him a breezily confident, cold smile of my own, turn away, and dart out the door, a weight visibly stolen from my shoulders despite Mr. Swift's manner. I would prove him wrong. I've now taken my first step towards fulfilling my dream.
A week has now gone by since that day. Earlier this morning I received a letter from Mr. Swift, and I have only just gotten an opportunity to be alone. I rip the envelope and pull out and peel apart the sheets inside. Sheets? Did he find so much ill to say of my stories?
I scan the first page, go back and read it carefully, then let all of them drop from my quaking hands. I collapse into a chair, but in a second I jump back to my feet.
"Father!" I yell, snatching the letter from the floor and running from my room out onto the landing where I run straight into my father.
"Father!" I gasp, and shove a sheet into one of his large hands. He casts me one bemused look and turns his attention to the paper. I let him read for perhaps three seconds before I exclaim,
"He wants to publish me! Me! He's going to put them together in a book with my name on it! He said he loved them—"
My father still hasn't looked up. There is a slight furrow between his bushy brows and it only occurs to me now to be anxious. If he doesn't approve...
But now he's looking at me... and smiling.
"I always knew you could do it," he tells me, his blue eyes mirthful.
So he had known all this time.
He takes my face between calloused fingers and looks me straight in the eyes as he whispers, "And I am so proud of you."
A bold first story, well done.
