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Once upon a time

by Andrew Macintyre

In the mornings I hated her most. She bounced out of bed all perfect and rosy-cheeked, perfect as a painting. While she could prance off to whatever fairytale beginning to the day she wanted, for us the bathroom awaited. Wrinkle weapons and face drowning pastes stood racked up in their hopeless rows. There was an artisan who made the rounds of the still-hopefuls, as in Hi! Magazine still euphemistically called us. Her rickety trawl of potions rattled in a way guaranteed to alert the neighbours as she came to the gate. At first I had hated her as well, with her half smile as she arrived from the town gossip to the homes of the not-yets. But I had learnt her story too. Her intended had never come back from one of the summer sport wars the King used to indulge. The wars hadn’t been about anything of course, they’d simply run out of music and poetry for the long winters. So they’d have a sport war, knocked out on one of the plains in the valley. The Kings and their entourages would sit in the royal tent drinking sherry and watching developments through spyglasses. To increase the sport, sometimes they’d stack the odds in favour of one of the armies, denying one side cannons, or outfitting the other with the cutlasses and swords of our grandfathers. The Royal Bard would compose an ode about the day’s events and more memorable matches would be reinvented by the Royal dance troupe in January. Apparently they pirouetted through the death-agonies of our face cream seller’s beloved during a particularly boring snowstorm.

C. knew none of this. She still read the Royal Review and noted the pleasingly comfortable gap in ages between herself and the Royal not-yet. She still believed the lies they printed - I suppose she still thought she could live happily ever after. It had all come too easy for C. While father had lived, he had built up an impressive portfolio of steady earners, eschewing the Prince’s more fanciful exchange flutters. It didn’t take much more than careful eye on the morning FT to make sure that we remained comfortably well off. We prided ourselves on paying the tradesmen on time, which even father as Royal stockbroker (with all its manifest insider trading opportunities), hadn’t always managed. He had nearly got it right, till he married again.

We’d been both against it, not that we had anything against the little moneygrubbing trollop herself, you understand. But she was not much older than us when they held that Saturday morning service, just five of us with a vicar who looked as though he had just rolled out of bed. It had been war, undeclared but unrelenting. Father knew nothing of it all and thought we were living happily ever after. We laid siege by little movements, like the rattle of a teacup or the supercilious smile at another of her cake attempts. But the pregnancy, that had been her sweet revenge. An heir! That changed everything - we couldn’t count on a long comfortable spinsterhood now: we’d have to find...husbands.

When it came time for the birth Father arranged for everyone to be there - the King even lent one of his prize magicians, but all his spells managed to produce was the golden child’s intestinal fortitude. What we hadn’t counted on was that she would counterattack in such a final way. She died bringing it into the world. Father, with the fury of grief that shamed us for our petty injustices to her, lived only for the new-born C., shutting us out of his life as if we’d never existed. For Gertrude, the prettier, I could see what a relief this was after her previous travails. Then he was gone, like a clifftop walker so fascinated by the ship on the horizon that the sudden fall is just an aesthetic disturbance.

So now we were daughters of the late stockbroker. There had been the usual arrangements to make - the question of who should have his watch and so on. C., despite her hopeless youth had tried to get involved: it was then that Gertrude had hit upon the idea of hiding her away from the Royal not-yet. Although he was still five years away from being of age, there enough stories about him around the court for Gertrude to know the inevitable. Even his ironically chosen nickname that did the rounds - Charming - was turned on its head when Hi! began to use it in earnest.

It was an almost unaccountable flowering of love for C. that made us dress her in servant’s clothes and muss her hair. At first Gertrude had sobbed over her prayers at the names she had forced herself to call her, but she soon hardened to the task. It didn’t take much to work out the odds: impeccable upbringing arrested just at the moment when twittishness and affectation might have taken over. Still, sometimes I caught sight of myself in the mirror and I saw what we must have seemed to C., and C.’s readers: a plot functionary. Ugly.

There was an underground newspaper that I slipped the housekeeper a gold penny to buy on market day. It wearily recounted the horsey gatherings in the Prince’s annexes, the white packets brought by fast horse from tropical lands and his ballooning corpulence, which was beginning to tax the inventiveness of the royal portrait artist.

C. read Hi! and wept bitterly at her exclusion from the anaesthetically scrubbed accounts of Palace life. Perhaps if we’d confided in her; our plan, our hopes for protecting her until the danger was past...but nothing could have prepared us for the deus ex machina that carried her away from us.

Last night Gertrude and I had managed to look ghastly enough for the prince to carry straight past our courtesies to the fresher not-yets - a pity for them, but as Gertrude says you know it’s us or them darling. Amongst the intelligentsia that remained in the room as the Prince prepared to retire with his selected party, there were a few that I had passed the time of day with. Last year, there had even been whispered words of a resistance movement, but only words. Since we were deemed useless for the purposes of war, we never found out anything more.

Then C. arrived. Of all the things! How she had found the money for the dress, for the carriage, I still don’t know. Perhaps Father had a secret part of the will even we hadn’t seen. It’s too late now, anyhow. Of course his corpulence whisked her off straight away, his intentions all too plain. Around midnight we saw her again, the dress now paw-printed, her eyes wide with terror at the terrible new knowledge. The old network swung into action, as we had for some of the other girls before her. We diplomatically blocked the exits while a Latin professor from the university rode her back to the house on horseback. The Prince snuffled around in vain search of the scent. When we got home we found her back in her servant disguise, sobbing as the mice ran around her feet. We thought for a while that we might just get away with it.

What I wasn’t ready for however, was the house to house search they started in the morning: she must have really got up his nose.

As I said, in the mornings I hated her most. Usually. But today I looked on her as you might, well, almost as a sister. But I’d be a liar if I didn’t say I was relieved when the slipper didn’t fit.