Once there was a prince, and he lived in a stable . . . but before that, there was a prince who lived in a palace.
The palace was in the middle of a forest. It was not a very big palace, but it had a front door and a back door and turrets and a terrace with a peacock who stalked up and down. So it was a proper palace. Perhaps it only seemed small because the forest was so large. It was a forest of oak trees and beech trees and pines and birches and blackberries and foxgloves and bluebells and thin forest grasses that turned golden in autumn.
In the forest lived squirrels and songbirds and beetles and butterflies and great owls and hawks and foxes and wolves. The weather was very snowy in winter and very damp in spring, wonderful in summer, and wild in autumn. Then the wolf packs gathered for their winter hunting, and darkness came early, and the forest paths were hidden under drifts of fallen leaves. It was easy to get lost in the forest at that time of year.
The Prince in the palace had a Problem. He had had it for years, and at first it had not distressed him at all. However, it had grown, as such things often do.
First a little, then a lot, and then quite suddenly it had become so large it shadowed his days and stalked his nights. Also it made him so sulky and rude and bad-tempered that people who met him said, “That young man certainly has a problem!”
The Prince had been given his Problem on the day of his christening, when he was six months old. It had been an ordinary royal christening, with fireworks and trumpet fanfares and a large white cake with a blue cradle on the top made of sugar icing. They had named him Charming; a traditional name for a prince.
Fairy godmothers had arrived with gifts: the Crimson Fairy had put a bright red teddy bear and a large ruby-handled sword into the Prince’s fat pink hands. The Snow-White Fairy gave him silver-bladed ice skates, and the promise of always snow at Christmas. The Queen had thanked them both, removed the sword and the skates to keep safe for later (no royal blood was shed: she got there in time), admired the teddy bear (it had real ruby teeth), and said how much they would all enjoy the snow. The Prince had behaved perfectly; everyone said so.
Then the third fairy godmother had appeared. She was the Dust-Gray Fairy, and she arrived in a cloud of dust with her gray wolves yammering around her.
The Crimson Fairy and the Snow-White Fairy rushed to meet her, scattering a snowstorm of rubies and frost. The trumpets blared a fanfare of welcome. The crowd dipped and swayed into bows and curtsies, the Queen curtsying with the rest. But when the six-month-old Prince was carried across to meet the new arrival, he had stared, and then he had reached out his hand and grabbed . . .
“OW!” shrieked the Dust-Gray Fairy. “LET GO!”
“My dear!” exclaimed the Queen, hurriedly handing the Prince to his nurse. “Are you very hurt? Let me order you some ice!”
“Ice makes me sneeze!” snapped the Dust-Gray Fairy. “Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! What a dreadful child!”
“I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt you! He doesn’t understand how to behave!”
“He understands exactly!” said the Dust-Gray Fairy angrily. “He smiled and waved at the Crimson Fairy only a moment ago! He fluttered his eyelashes at the Snow-White Fairy and kissed her hand! She told me herself!”
“It is their glittering and glimmering that attracts him,” said the Queen soothingly. “Remember he is still very young.”
“Not too young to PULL MY NOSE!” said the Dust-Gray Fairy, and she closed one eye and squinted down her nose, to see if it was bent.
It was bent.
“NO PRESENT FOR HIM!” said the Dust-Gray Fairy. “I brought one, in a basket, but he doesn’t deserve it now! I shall give him a Problem instead!”
“Pray, don’t trouble yourself!” begged the Queen, very alarmed.
“I WILL trouble myself!” said the Dust-Gray Fairy. “I shall give him a Problem that will grow and grow until he learns who’s who and what’s what! That’s what he needs!”
“I will make sure he understands those things,” said the Queen faintly. “When he is older.”
“I will make sure he understands all those things when he is older!” replied the Dust-Gray Fairy, and she glared at the young Prince so ferociously that the Queen was truly shaken.
“You surely won’t turn him into a frog?” asked the Queen. (For this had been known to happen in royal families before.)
“Certainly not!” said the Dust-Gray Fairy. “I’m sure he would enjoy it, lurking around the lily leaves waiting to be kissed, but he would learn no manners at all!”
“Nor send him to sleep for a hundred years?”
“That’s for girls only,” said the Dust-Gray Fairy. “Boys are lazy enough as it is.”
“True, true,” admitted the Queen.
“So, quite the opposite. I shall give him a problem that will keep him awake! Now listen, when he marries . . .”
“Marries?” asked the Queen, looking down at the Prince, now back in his cradle and busily gnawing his own left foot.
“MARRIES!” repeated the Dust-Gray Fairy. “Please don’t interrupt! He must either marry a true princess—”
“Well, of course he must!” the Queen could not help saying.
“OR . . . ,” said the Dust-Gray Fairy, “put up with the consequences!”
“Is that all?” asked the Queen, after a quite long pause, for fear of interrupting again. “That’s perfectly reasonable. You are quite right! Naturally, since he is a prince, he must marry a princess. It shouldn’t be a problem. There are princesses by the dozen in the castles around here.”
“But are they true princesses?” demanded the Dust-Gray Fairy.
“Is there a difference?” asked the Queen.
“There are princesses and there are true princesses,” said the Dust-Gray Fairy. “I will explain to you how to tell the difference. It is important that you understand, because the consequences of not marrying a true princess will be the fall of this palace!”
“Literally or metaphorically?” asked the Queen shakily.
“Literally!” said the Dust-Gray Fairy. “The walls will tumble and the turrets will topple and the roof will slide to the ground!”
Then the Queen forgot the need to be polite and exclaimed, “I am sorry about your nose (of course) but that is a Bit Much and I think you are overreacting!”
“Overreacting!” shrieked the Dust-Gray Fairy, and at once went off in a great huff of gray dust without waiting to tell the Queen how to distinguish a true princess from the other sort. However, a week or so later, when she had calmed down a little, she sent the Queen a wolf with a message explaining the secret. She also sent a very small gray bag containing the necessary equipment.
Or part of the necessary equipment.
The other part was too large for the wolf to manage. “And anyway,” wrote the Dust Fairy, still clearly very annoyed, “I’m sure you have at the palace ten spare mattresses and ten feather beds! My NOSE,” the letter continued, in gray angry letters, “is still very much SWOLLEN. Please do not forget my words, and teach that Prince some manners before it is too late!”
Of all the fairies, the Dust-Gray Fairy was the most powerful. She reached into every corner and she could not be forgotten. No matter how often the palace was swept and rubbed and polished and scrubbed, her dust came back to remind them of her words.
Meanwhile the Queen grew old and the Prince grew up. Princesses came and went. None of them were true princesses. The Queen was very disappointed. The Prince said he didn’t care about any of them, true or otherwise. However, they both agreed that the problem given by the Dust-Gray Fairy was very bad luck indeed.
The Prince’s manners, if anything, grew worse. He was nearly always grumpy, and the times when he wasn’t he stared out of his bedroom window, or ran frantically down the stairs, or wandered distractedly through the forest, calling “Hey!”
Most of the time, however, he was sulking or arguing or slamming palace doors.
The forest grew wilder. Sometimes, even in the royal bedrooms, they heard wolves howling at night. This did not please the servants, and neither did the dust, nor the grumpiness of Prince Charming. They said he was not charming, not at all. All except one of them, who murmured, very quietly to herself, “He is, to me.”
But what was the use of that, when the Prince had such a Problem?
Sometimes, when the Queen was feeling particularly old, she wrote messages in the dust to the Dust-Gray Fairy, such as “Help!”
There was a princess in the castle on the other side of the forest. Her name was Hatty and she lived with her grandparents. Since her grandparents were very old, Hatty did all the royal duties by herself. She attended parliament and helped with the laws. She visited banks and helped with the money-counting. And she popped into hospitals and helped with the medicines. Also she cut the castle grass and scrubbed the mildew off the castle walls and darned the castle flags and hung them straight on their flagpoles. And every afternoon she put on her silk dress, with the green-and-gold stripes, and her gilt crown with the velvet lining, and went up to sit with her grandparents. She read them the newspapers, and listened to their slow stories of long ago. Her grandparents enjoyed telling the stories more than they did listening to the news because they were so very old.
Everything and everyone in the castle was old, except for Hatty and the kitten.
The kitten had bright blue eyes and bright silver fur. Hatty had discovered it one chilly morning, clinging to a lily pad in the middle of the castle moat. From the moment she fished it out, she was enchanted. She was also twice as busy. The prancing, prowling, purring kitten was a reckless explorer. It needed to be rescued from its explorations almost every day.
After it had been rescued it would curl up tidily and go to sleep, looking very small and perfect. But its tail would twitch, and Hatty would guess that it was planning mischief in its dreams.
The old people at the palace said the kitten was trouble, but Hatty loved it.
As the kitten grew older its adventures became wilder and wilder. One gray and stormy evening the Princess glanced out of her tower-room window just in time to see a streak of silver scamper over the drawbridge, cross the castle gardens, and then disappear, like a blown-out star, into the shadows of the forest.
My goodness! thought Hatty, remembering all the tales she had heard of owls and hawks and foxes and wolves, and she raced out of her room and down the long staircase and across the halls and through the front door and over the drawbridge and into the garden, still wearing the green-and-gold dress and the sparkling gilt crown that she had put on to please her grandparents.
Under the forest trees it was very nearly dark, so it was lucky that the castle kitten was so silvery bright. It glimmered like a firefly in front of the Princess, just bright enough for her to see where it was. It scampered very merrily and quickly, deeper and deeper into the forest . . . and after it, ran Hatty.
“Stop!” she called, but it wouldn’t stop. It didn’t stop for miles, until finally, in a clearing made by the falling of a huge old oak, Hatty managed to pick it up.
Then at last she could pause to catch her breath and look around.
The wind was rising. Black and silver clouds were being blown across the sky. There was moonlight, and then splatters of rain, and then moonlight again. There were also small green stars.
The stars were low down, among the tree trunks.
They were stars that blinked.
They were stars in pairs.
They were golden green.
They came closer.
When the Princess saw them, she clutched the kitten, rolled it in a bundle of gold-and-green skirts, and ran. As she ran, the moon was blotted into darkness and the wind rose to a howl and the splatters of rain became a hard, icy deluge. Although not quite hard and icy enough to scatter the wolves. Each time the lightning flashed, their eyes blinked again, and every time they were a little closer.
“Don’t worry!” panted Hatty to the kitten as she ran. “It’s only another adventure!”
The kitten purred. Its silvery whiskers were in perfect order. Its small velvet paws were dry. It was as warm as a bundle of sunshine, wrapped in the gold-and-green silk, and it liked adventures. Already that day it had explored the dizziest part of the castle battlements and the shiveriest corner of the cellars. And when things had become too dizzy or shivery, the Princess had arrived and scooped it to safety, just as she always did.
So the kitten was not worried at all, but the Princess was, quite a lot. When at last she saw a glow ahead, she gasped with relief. And then a flash of lightning outlined the palace, and she ran for the front door, and as she got closer she saw that the glow was the door knocker, made of glimmering golden brass.
“Saved!” she cried triumphantly, and grabbed it and knocked: Bang! Bang! Bang!
Bang! Bang! Bang!
All the people in the palace who might ordinarily have opened the door were fast asleep in bed. The maid in the kitchen was too far away to hear. There was only the Prince and the Queen.
The Prince sank deeper into the sofa, crossed his boots on a royal silken cushion, and closed his eyes.
“Darling,” said the Queen, poking him with a silver knitting needle. “There’s someone at the door!”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said the Prince, not opening his eyes.
“Banging very hard!” said the Queen.
“It’ll be the wind,” murmured the Prince. “S’been a horrible day. Horrible weather. Horrible everything. And now you’re imagining noises!”
BANG!
“You must be able to hear that!” said the Queen.
“Mmm?” asked the Prince. “A slight rustle, perhaps. Ignore, ignore, ignore!”
BANG! BANG!
“Charming!” snapped the Queen. “I am running out of patience.”
“Poor you,” said Prince Charming. “I’m not.”
BANG! BANG! BANG!
“Darling Charming,” said the Queen. “Answer the door or I shall be forced to disinherit you!”
The Prince gave her a quick glance to see if she meant it, saw she did, rolled off the sofa, hitched up his royal trousers, and slammed out of the room.
There was the sound of him stamping across the hall. There were a rattle of latches and a sudden icy-cold draught. There were a breathless voice and the Prince replying and the thump of a door slamming shut, and then, in a very short time, the Prince was back on the sofa again, and his boots were back on the cushion.
“Says she’s a princess,” he remarked.
“Says she’s a princess!” repeated his astounded mother. “WHO says she’s a princess?”
“Girl at the door,” yawned the Prince. “Don’t they all?”
“There was a girl at the door? What have you done with her?”
“Nothing,” said the Prince.
“You surely didn’t leave her standing on the doorstep?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to bring her in,” said the Prince, sleepily. “She was dripping!”
“Dripping?”
“Mmm.”
“Dripping what?” demanded the Queen. “Diamonds? Pearls? Blood?”
“Dripping wet,” said the Prince peevishly. “It’s coming down in buckets.” And then he snuggled into the sofa and gave a small but meaningful snore.
“Really!” said the Queen, once more using her silver knitting needles to help the Prince stay awake. “For all you know you’ve left a true princess drowning on the doorstep!”
“You and your true princesses!” groaned the Prince.
“You’ve got to marry sometime!”
“Yeah, yeah,” said the Prince.
“Charming, you forget you have a Problem!” said his mother.
“I don’t EVER forget I have a Problem!” snapped the Prince. And with that, he went slamming out of the room.
He exaggerates everything! thought the Queen, but just in case, she went and opened the front door and peered out into the storm.
But there was no one there.
When nobody answered her knocking, the Princess did not wait. Nor was she downhearted. She had crossed the wolf-hunted forest. She had survived the storm. She had the silver kitten safe and dry. She was not going to be defeated by a closed front door. Besides, she knew that even the smallest palace has a back door as well as a front. So she set off to find it, staying close to the dark rainy walls, and holding the kitten very tightly. And presently, after several corners and buttresses and leaking gutter pipes, she came to the kitchen. There she saw a dim glow of firelight shining in the window and a slender shadow wavering against a whitewashed wall.
Perhaps because the shadow was so slender and so wavering, perhaps because the fire glow was so dim, this time the Princess did not bang on the door. Instead she put her mouth to the keyhole and called, “Cooee!”
At once the wavering shadow jumped, a swirl of shadow hair spun, and a voice gasped, “Oh!”
“It’s just me!” called the Princess reassuringly. “And my kitten!”
But evidently the shadow belonged to a person as brave as the Princess herself, because already the door was open, and there was a girl in a white nightgown saying, “Please come in.”
So there they were, the Princess laughing and dripping on the doormat, the girl smiling and rushing for a towel, and the firelight making the puddles glow like pools of copper and bronze and gold.
Then the door was closed and the kitten wriggled free and leaped to the hearthrug, and the Princess’s crown was put to drip in the sink and her shoes by the fender, and the Princess herself was wrapped up in a tablecloth.
“Wait!” said the girl. “I’ll lend you my dress!”
In hardly any time after that, the silk gown was steaming on the clothes horse by the fire and the Princess was sitting on a kitchen stool, dressed in a shabby brown frock.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m Hatty.”
“I’m Meg,” said the girl. “I’m the maid.”
“Were you going to bed?” asked Hatty, looking at Meg’s nightgown. But Meg said no, she had crept downstairs to the fire so as to be able to mend her brown dress before morning, and she showed Hatty where she had sewn it, very neatly, and put a pocket over the darn.
“You would hardly know it was torn,” said Hatty admiringly, and then she showed Meg how she had straightened out one of the points on her crown and replaced a lost ruby with a little painted pebble, and Meg said that she could barely tell the difference.
“I didn’t know crowns could get worn out,” she said.
“They get bent when they fall off,” Hatty told her. “They fall off a lot if you don’t tie them on with string or something, and of course the jewels get loose with all the bumps. Mine is a very old crown; at least two hundred years. It belonged to seven people before me.”
This explanation made Meg, whose dress was only four years old and had only belonged to one person before her, feel quite well dressed and confident, and she asked, “Please may I stroke your kitten?”
“Of course. Do you like cats?” asked Hatty.
“I love them,” said Meg. “There used to be a cat at the orphanage when I was little. A very old cat . . .” Then she swallowed and blinked back a tear and Hatty lifted the silver kitten and put it onto her lap and after that they were friends forever, best friends.
And so, of course, they began to explain their lives to each other, starting there in the kitchen and working backward through time, to Hatty’s castle, and Meg’s orphanage (“I left five years ago next Wednesday,” said Meg), and all the stages in between of dusting and grass-cutting and grandparents and kittens and door knockers and the wolves in the forest and the beetles in the kitchen and the Prince at the front door.
“His name is Charming,” said Meg.
“Prince Charming?”
“Yes. Did you like him?”
“Well,” said Hatty doubtfully, “I’ll tell you what happened. I knocked and knocked and he opened the door at last and I said, ‘Hello, it’s me, Hatty from the castle,’ and he said, ‘Who from the what?’ and I said, ‘Princess Hatty from the Old Stone Castle,’ and he said, ‘No thank you! Not today!’ and shut the door!”
“Oh,” said Meg, and dropped her head to hide a smile in the kitten’s fur. “A lot of princesses come here to the palace,” she continued, after a pause. “The Queen invites them. There is even a special princesses’ bedroom. It has a golden bedroom door, and no one but princesses is ever allowed to go in, not even to make the bed.”
“Who does make the bed, then?” asked Hatty.
“The Queen, I think,” said Meg. “The Queen is very particular about everything to do with princesses. I don’t know what she would say if she knew I had one here in the kitchen!”
“Perhaps I’d better tell her I’m here,” said Hatty, seeing Meg’s suddenly worried face. “What about the kitten? Will she mind the kitten? Does she like cats?”
“She hasn’t got cats,” said Meg, thinking aloud. “She likes diamonds and she has diamonds, and she likes yellow lilies and she has yellow lilies, and she likes green shoes and she has green shoes, but she hasn’t any cats so I think perhaps she doesn’t like cats, because Queens can have anything they like, can’t they?”
Hatty said, yes, probably some of them really could, and since the kitten was asleep she would leave it with Meg, if Meg didn’t mind, and Meg said of course not, she loved it. Then they both looked at Hatty’s shoes, which had become quite sodden during her journey through the forest, and Meg offered to lend her her boots, but Hatty said, no need, she would explain to the Queen, and bare feet were quite comfortable indoors.
And so the Princess, barefoot and empty-handed, with her hair dangling down her back in damp strings, made her way from the kitchen by long chilly corridors to the royal sitting room at the front of the castle. There she found the Queen putting away her knitting and feeling very old.
“And who are you?” asked the Queen, after Hatty had made a rather shivery curtsy in her cold bare feet.
“I’m Hatty from the castle,” said Hatty. “I got lost in the forest for hours and hours and at night it grew dark and there were wolves.”
“Well, of course it grew dark at night!” said the Queen severely, after looking at Hatty from top to toes. “And naturally there are wolves! Very careless of the castle, to let their maids go running around the forest willy-nilly! What were they thinking of to allow it?”
Hatty explained about being a princess, not a maid, and therefore allowed to do anything she pleased, and the Queen looked at Meg’s old brown dress with the pocket over the darn and sniffed and said, “I see.”
Dust specks floated in the lamplight.
“Well,” said the Queen, remembering her manners as she watched them, “there was somebody knocking, and my son did say something about a princess! I thought he must be mistaken . . .”
Once more she looked doubtfully at Hatty, but then again at the dancing dust.
“. . . but perhaps not,” she continued. “Anyway, it’s very late and I’m sure you must be tired.”
“Very tired,” agreed Hatty.
“Then you must go to bed. We have a spare room that we keep especially for . . . er . . . princesses. The bed is made, I did it myself, and the room is all aired and dusted.”
Hatty, very much cheered at the thought of any bed at all, replied that she did not mind dust in the least, and that parts of the castle where she lived were very dusty indeed.
“I’m sure they are,” said the Queen, and despite her good intentions she glanced down at Hatty’s feet.
“The forest,” said Hatty apologetically, “was muddy.”
“Ah,” said the Queen. “Never mind. Here we are!”
All this while, she had been leading Hatty up staircases and along corridors. Now she paused at a golden door, and took a key from the chatelaine she wore at her waist.
“I think you will find everything you need!” she said, as she turned it in the lock. And before Hatty could murmur politely that all she really needed was a bed, she found herself being pushed gently into a shadowy room, lit by a small lamp hanging high among the rafters.
“Goodnight!” said the Queen, and then Hatty was alone.
So there was Hatty, in the most surprising room that she had ever seen.
The astonishing thing, and the only thing, about the bedroom was the bed. There was absolutely nothing else in the place, not a chair, or a table, or a window seat, or even a mat. Except for the bed and the bare floor, there was no other possible place to sleep.
It was an absolutely staggering bed. It stood all alone in the middle of the room, and Hatty walked around it and around it, staring.
The bed had layer after layer of mattresses, in all different patterns of stripes, and layer after layer of feather quilts, in every color of the rainbow. Hatty counted them: ten striped mattresses, ten bright feather quilts.
The other thing the bed had was a ladder. That was because the mattresses and quilts made it so high above the floor. Higher than Hatty’s head, quite close to the ceiling rafters.
After some time of gazing at this bed, Hatty went to the bedroom door and opened it. Dark corridors stretched in both directions. There was not a sound to be heard.
Hatty looked back at the bed.
After a while, she climbed the ladder.
There were pillows at the top, and a golden coverlet that matched the door. Hatty pulled it over herself, and lay down very carefully.
Then she sat up and looked over the edge. The floor looked very far away.
This room, thought Hatty, a long time later, is lonelier than the forest.
She had left the door a little bit open. She wondered if she would feel better if it was shut. She climbed down the ladder and closed it, and then, after a few minutes of sitting in bed, looking at it closed, she climbed down once more and opened it again.
Then she went back to bed.
She was sure she could hear something. The tiniest sound in the world, but very nearby. A tiny, very close, scratchy sound.
Sometimes Hatty was sure she could hear it. Sometimes not. And there was something about that small sound, in that empty room, that was very worrying. Just as Hatty had reached a point when she could not bear it any longer, and could not face the dark corridors either, something absolutely wonderful happened . . .
The kitten arrived. And, even more wonderful, after the kitten came Meg.
“Oh Meg, oh Meg, oh Meg!” cried Hatty, tumbling down the ladder to hug her. “Oh thank goodness!”
“I had to come!” said Meg. “The kitten woke up all of a sudden and ran! Fancy it finding you, down all those corridors! WHATEVER . . . ,” she asked, emerging from the hug to blink and stare, “kind of a bed is THAT?”
And she burst out laughing, and with Meg’s laughter everything became suddenly and brilliantly much better.
“I KNOW!” agreed Hatty. “LOOK at it! Ten stripy mattresses and THEN ten feather quilts!”
“The kitten likes it,” said Meg. And it was true that the kitten was having a very joyful mountaineering time, exploring the bed. It didn’t need a ladder to race up and down the quilts and mattresses. It hung on with its claws and dodged when Hatty tried to pick it up, and then sat at the top, purring and twitching its tail.