There was once a prince who had everything a prince could want: land, wealth, good health, and a mind sharp enough to appreciate all three. What he did not have was peace, because somewhere inside him was a wound — a deep distrust of constancy, a certainty that devotion was always temporary, that virtue always had a price. He had decided, therefore, that he would not marry at all rather than marry someone who would eventually disappoint him. His court worried. His councillors petitioned him. He heard them and said nothing, which is the particular power of princes.
One morning, riding through the hills at the edge of his domain, he stopped on a ridge and looked down into a valley. There was a shepherdess below, moving through her flock with quiet efficiency, a tall crook in one hand and an easy, unhurried step. Even from the ridge he could see the way she held herself — straight and calm, as though the world had never given her particular cause for anxiety. He rode down. She looked up without alarm. He asked her name. She told him: Griselda. He asked who her father was. A shepherd, she said, and gestured toward the cottage in the valley. He rode home thinking about her eyes.
He came back several times. He spoke to her father, who was a good man and an honest one. He observed Griselda: the way she worked without complaint, the way she spoke to the people who came to her father's cottage for help, the way she was the same person whether anyone was watching or not. That last thing was what he had never been sure he would find. He asked her to marry him. She said yes — not with excitement or ambition, but with the considered manner of someone who had asked herself a serious question and arrived at a clear answer. He was not sure if he found this reassuring or unsettling. He married her anyway.
She was an extraordinary princess. She learned quickly without making a show of learning. She administered the household with a fairness that the servants noticed and remarked on. She was kind without sentimentality and honest without cruelty. When she had a daughter, she loved her with the same quiet intensity she brought to everything else. The court admired her. The prince admired her. And then, because the wound in him had never healed, he began to test her. He told himself it was not cruelty. He told himself it was necessary. This was the first of his mistakes.
"The court," he told her one morning, "is not pleased with our daughter." He watched her face. "They say she is of peasant blood. They would prefer she were removed." He was testing her. He was watching for anger, for pride, for the sharp edges he expected to find. Griselda looked at him steadily. "She is your child and mine," she said. "Whatever you decide, I trust you to decide justly." She did not waver. He took the child and gave her to a relative in another province to be raised. Griselda asked, once, quietly, if she was well. He said she was. She thanked him and said nothing more. He had expected her to break. She did not break.
Years passed. He tested her in other ways: he was cold, then warm, then cold again, watching to see which temperature would change her. She remained constant. He gave her little acknowledgement and watched to see if she would seek it. She did not. She simply continued to be who she was: patient, capable, present. He had wanted to find the limit of her virtue. He found that it did not appear to have one. This should have satisfied him. Instead, he found a new test. He told her that the court had decided their marriage was unsuitable, and that he intended to take a new wife. He watched her face with the particular attention of someone waiting to finally be right about something.
She was silent for a long moment. Then she said: "I came to this marriage with nothing that was not your gift. I cannot be angry that you take back what was yours to give. I will return to my father's house, and I hope your new marriage makes you happy, because happiness is something I have wished for you from the beginning." She paused. "May I keep my plain dress? The peasant clothes I came in, to travel home with decency." He said yes, and felt something he did not immediately recognise. It was the particular discomfort of a man who has done something wrong and cannot yet admit it to himself.
She walked back to her father's cottage. He was waiting at the door — he had heard, as everyone had — and he took her hands and said nothing, which was the right thing. She slept in her old room with the low ceiling and the smell of hay from the barn, and in the morning she put on her shepherd's clothes and went to tend the few sheep they still had. The valley was the same. The hills were the same. She was different — not diminished, but enlarged in some way she couldn't name, as though she had carried something very heavy for a long time and had not dropped it, and the carrying itself had changed her.
The prince, meanwhile, had staged the new marriage as a test. He had no actual new wife. He had wanted to see if Griselda would rage, or beg, or reveal, at last, some ordinary human weakness. She had done none of these things. He sent for her — would she please come to the palace to help prepare for the wedding? It was a strange thing to ask, but Griselda came. She arrived in her peasant clothes, quiet and composed, and began to make the preparations with the same care she had given everything else in the palace for years, as though none of it had anything to do with her own pain.
He watched her work. He watched her direct the servants, arrange the flowers, check the table settings with the same steady efficiency she had always brought to everything. And then, finally, something in him shifted. He saw what he had been doing — not testing her virtue, but trying to destroy it, and failing, because it was not the kind of thing that could be destroyed. He saw the gap between what she was and what he had been, and it was not a comfortable thing to see. He sat down in the great chair in the hall and put his face in his hands for a long moment. When he looked up, Griselda was watching him from across the room.
"There is no new wife," he said. "There never was. I was testing you. I have been testing you since the beginning, because I was afraid, and I am sorry." He said it plainly, without elaborate excuse. "Our daughter is alive and well and I would like you to see her, if you are willing. And I would ask you — though I have no right to ask — whether you could find it possible to forgive me." Griselda looked at him for a long time. She was not cold and she was not warm. She was simply thinking, honestly, as she always did. Then she said: "I have always loved you. I will try to forgive you. But you must be worth it. That is the only condition I have ever had."
The daughter was brought from the province where she had lived, a lively girl of ten who had her mother's eyes and, it turned out, her mother's manner of looking at the world as though it were a puzzle she was glad to think about. Griselda held her for a long time. The prince stood nearby, watching. He had spent years looking for the limit of Griselda's virtue, and instead he had found the limit of his own wisdom, which was a harder and more useful thing to discover. They were married again — properly, with witnesses — and the court said it was the strangest wedding they had ever attended, and also somehow the most satisfying.
