Page 79 - Nuts to You - The Nutcracker Retold

a painful abnormal reaction of the small blood vessels in the skin when exposed to cold temperatures. The cold causes constriction of the small blood vessels in the skin, and if rewarming of the skin happens too rapidly, there is leakage of blood into the tissues.” In other words, your fingers swell up; get hard and blue and sore and cracked all over, while feeling like they’re on fire. No wonder Mademoiselle Lesue was cranky!) M. Lesue must have avoided the chilblains, because proof of her needle- wielding abilities claimed over three-fourths of Clara’s room. And she was still stitching away in the corner, on what Clara feared was dress number eight.
When a succession of maids carried in half a dozen curling irons of all shapes and sizes and stuck them over the fire to heat up (no electricity – remember?), Clara cringed, remembering other special occasions when her hair was curled and she had been singed, because the hot iron got too close to her neck. In a final attempt to prevent the night from happening, Clara unhooked the ties of the drapes and pulled them shut, creating a little cocoon of silence on her window seat, between the drapes and the icy window.
With a sigh of relief, Clara leaned back against her pillows and pulled out a book by some author named Da Vinci, which had some great drawings of impossibly crazy contraptions, like a flying machine, that she was dying to figure out. However, before Clara could even open the book, the flicker of lights outside her window in the dark night caught her eye. It seemed to her that hundreds of lamps were coming down from the hills in all directions. She was mesmerized as the tiny dots grew and grew – until she realized that all the lamps were headed to her gate, and at the end of each lamp was a man, invited by her mother as a potential partner, for life, for none other than herself.
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