The Ordinary Princess (3 page)

She was very old and rather deaf, and her temper was always inclined to be a little uncertain when she was on dry land. But for all that, she was a very powerful and important lady, and all the guests made way for her as she hobbled up to the cradle.

The Queen bowed most graciously to her, and the King muttered something about being pleased to see her, while the old fairy peered at them over the top of her horn-rimmed spectacles.

“I wish,” said the old fairy crossly, “that people who give large parties would take the trouble to see that the traffic is properly controlled. Your police appear to be quite useless. Would you believe it, I was held up in a crush of carriages for over half an hour?
Me!
At
my
age!! I cannot endure dust and I am almost as dry as a bone!”

And indeed her long seaweedy robe was hardly damp, instead of nice and seawatery as she liked it.

The Queen was full of apologies and sent out at once for a bowl of salt water from the royal fish ponds.

Old Crustacea poured some of it over herself and drank the rest and said she felt better. The water trickled down her seaweedy robe and made messy pools on the polished floor, but nobody liked to mention it.

“And now,” said old Crustacea, “let’s have a look at this brat of yours.”

She hobbled up to the cradle and peered down at the seventh princess.

The seventh princess had been snoozing, but now she opened one blue eye, and then the other, and she smiled at the old fairy.

Old Crustacea put out a long bony finger and touched the seventh princess’s pink cheek. Then she looked at the King and Queen and the resplendent guests and the six little sister princesses, each more beautiful than the last, and finally she looked at the huge pile of glittering presents and the list that the Lord High Chamberlain had made of the gifts bestowed by the other fairies.

“Hmm!” said the Fairy Crustacea. “Wit, Charm, Courage, Health, Wisdom, Grace ... Good gracious, poor child! Well, thank goodness my magic is stronger than anyone else’s.”

She raised her twisty coral stick and waved it three times over the cradle of the seventh princess. “My child,” said the Fairy Crustacea, “I am going to give you something that will probably bring you more happiness than all these fal-lals and fripperies put together. You shall be Ordinary!”

And nodding her head briskly the Fairy Crustacea turned away and hobbled rapidly out of the throne room, leaning on her twisty coral stick and leaving a faint smell of seaweed and a damp track on the polished floor behind her.

For quite a minute after she had gone there was a stunned silence in the red and gold throne room of the palace. It was broken by the King.

“I told you so!” said the King triumphantly. “Rash,” said the King. “I knew it was rash. Didn’t I say that something like this was bound to happen?”

Words cannot describe the scene that followed. The Queen wept, and the King went on saying, “Rash,” and “I told you so,” until the Prime Minister felt like resigning on the spot. Everybody talked at once, words like “Impossible!” “Horrors!” and “Disgraceful!” flew in all directions, and the noise became so great that you could hardly have heard yourself think.

It was then that the seventh princess proceeded to show how quickly the Fairy Crustacea’s gift had worked.

She screwed up her apple-blossom face into something that resembled a small squashed tomato, and, opening her mouth as wide as possible, she screamed and screamed—as any ordinary baby would have done after a tiring day and with all that noise going on.

Everybody stopped talking at once and rushed forward to the cradle. But the seventh princess just kept right on screaming. She didn’t like all these strangers, she was tired and bored and hungry, and she didn’t care who knew it.

“Yaaaaaaa! Oooooooo! Gwwowow!”
screamed the seventh princess, doubling up her small pink fists and turning quite purple in the face.

The Queen fainted away and had to be revived with smelling salts. The King said, “I told you it was rash,” for the seventeenth time, and the Prime Minister resigned on the spot, while the Lord High Chamberlain sent half a dozen gentlemen-in-waiting hurrying after the Fairy Crustacea to beg her please to come back and change her mind.

But alas! By the time the panting messengers reached the gates, the Fairy Crustacea had gone.

So that was that.

The christening party broke up in confusion and the guests said good-bye, and how sorry they were, but perhaps it wouldn’t turn out to be so bad after all, one must look on the bright side, mustn’t one, and all the other gifts were very beautiful and—er—gratifying, so perhaps ...

The last coach of the last guest rumbled out of the palace yard, and the footmen and pages and servingmen began to clear away the remnants of the feast. They took the leftover cakes and pastries and the broken bits of marzipan trees, sugar-candy castles, and ships and dragons home to their friends and relations, while the Queen took to her bed in a state of nervous prostration and the Prime Minister took to his with a headache.

But as for Her Serene and Royal Highness the Princess Amethyst Alexandra Augusta Araminta Adelaide Aurelia Anne of Phantasmorania, she was taken back to her royal nursery still screaming as determinedly as ever.

PART II

L
ong sunny years drifted by in the kingdom of Phantasmorania. And with every passing year the old Fairy Crustacea’s gift became more and more noticeable, as the seventh princess became more and more ordinary.

No one ever called her by her grand name now. From the townsfolk in the city down to the smallest page at the palace, she was always known simply as “the Ordinary Princess,” while even her own family never called her Amethyst. They called her Amy. And what could be more ordinary than that?

After the day of her christening, she had begun to change from a beautiful baby princess into just an ordinary baby. Her soft golden curls stopped curling and became darker, and her blue eyes turned a gray ish-brown neither-here-nor-there color. And as she grew older, her little nose turned up and her hair hung down straighter and straighter, and not all the curlpapers in the world could make it look as a proper princess’s should.

Her six lovely sisters, with their rose-petal complexions, their straight, white little noses, rippling golden hair and perfect deportment, were a delight to see. But Amy—! Oh dear, how ordinary she was!

Her Mama the Queen who was a very determined woman, would not give up hope that something could be done to correct the distressing ordinariness of her youngest daughter. She hired dancing masters from Spain to teach her elegance and deportment and hairdressers and beauty experts from France to improve her hair and complexion. But all to no avail.

Even the court magician was no use. His card, which he always carried with him, had printed in one corner, ALL KINDS OF CHARMS ON APPLICATION. VANISHING DONE. But none of his charms made any difference to the ordinariness of the Ordinary Princess, and in spite of his best efforts, not one single freckle ever vanished off the Princess Amy’s little snub nose.

She grew up as gawky as possible, with a distressing habit of standing with her feet apart and her hands behind her back, and hair of a color that not even a court poet could describe as anything but just plain mouse. But though she proved every day how strong the old Fairy Crustacea’s magic had been, her other christening gifts were not entirely wasted.

True, the splendid jewels and brocades of the kings and princes and barons were quite out of place on her homely little person, but the fairy gifts had been very useful, for though she was ordinary, she possessed health, wit, courage, charm, and cheerfulness. But because she was not beautiful, no one ever seemed to notice these other qualities, which is so often the way of the world. Not that it ever worried the Ordinary Princess.

She was sometimes sorry that she was such a disappointment to her royal Mama the Queen. “But after all,” said the Ordinary Princess, “Mama has six perfectly scrumptious daughters, so I don’t think that one not-so-goodish one ought to matter very much.”

There were also times when (being a very ordinary sort of person) she felt a little envious of her sisters’ beauty. “But oh! what a lot of fun they miss by not being me,” said the Princess Amy as she leaned her elbows on the windowsill of her room and looked out over the forest. “They have to keep their complexions white and play the harp and embroider tapestry, and the only game they ever play is throwing each other a golden ball. But I do such exciting things!” said the Ordinary Princess. And she smiled a little secret smile to herself as she leaned far out of the window to sniff the breeze from the forest.

Her room was in one of the turrets on the palace wall, a big round room with tall pointed windows on three sides of it, so that from one window she could see the sunrise and from another the sunset. It was the same room in which she had lain as a baby in her golden cradle and blinked at the painted ceiling. Amethyst-colored tapestry still covered the walls, and outside the window grew a great wisteria hung with pale purple blossoms. The wisteria had a strong twisty gray stem that climbed and clung to the old weather-beaten stones of the turret, and the Ordinary Princess smiled again as she leaned out and touched that rough knobbly stem with her little brown hand.

She shared a particular secret with the old wisteria that nobody in the palace ever suspected—not even Nurse Marta.

Since the time when she was three years old she had always longed to escape from the palace gardens and play in the forest—the great, beautiful, mysterious Forest of Faraway that swept right up to the very walls of the palace. From her window she could watch the rabbits frolicking among the ferns and moss, and the shy deer picking their way through the leafy aisles between the tree trunks.

Then one summer evening, when she had been put to bed while it was still light outside, she had a great idea—a wonderful idea. It was so wonderful that she could not wait to carry it out, and the very next minute she was climbing out of her turret window and down the twisty curves of the old wisteria and had run off into the forest to play.

Since that first time, when she was little more than six years old, she had done it many, many times. The old wisteria became a ladder into her secret world, and almost every day, rain or shine, she would scramble down the turret wall and be off into the forest, leaving her crown behind and tucking up her trailing dresses, and making believe that she was a peasant girl or a woodcutter’s daughter, living alone in the greenwood.

The Forest of Faraway is surely the most beautiful place in the world. Between the great tree trunks the ground is carpeted with deep emerald moss, all starry with flowers. Countless wild birds build their nests there, and on moonlit nights in spring it is full of the song of many nightingales. No fierce animals ever roam there but only the dappled deer, the frolicsome rabbits, and little gentle woodland creatures. And sometimes in the spring you would think that the sky must have fallen into the forest, for thousands upon thousands of bluebells spread their sapphire carpets through the glades.