by M. M. Kaye
“Kitchen maid,” said the nice young man suddenly, flipping an acorn at the Ordinary Princess, “what is your name?”
“Amy,” said the Ordinary Princess, catching the acorn neatly and handing it to Mr. Pemberthy.
“Nice name. It suits you,” said the nice young man, adding in tones of immense scorn, “Persephone, indeed!”
“Who?” said the Ordinary Princess, rather startled.
The young man looked a little confused.
“I was only thinking,” he said, “what silly names some people have. Why, I should like to know,” inquired the young man hotly, “can’t more people have nice, sensible, pretty names like Amy?”
“I suppose you mean the Princess Persephone,” said the Ordinary Princess. “I don’t know why it is, but princesses always do seem to have rather fussy names. You couldn’t imagine a princess called Amy, now could you?”
“I don’t see why not,” said the nice young man. “Perfectly good name for anyone. I know we haven’t been properly introduced, but I shall call you Princess Amy.”
The Ordinary Princess smiled to herself.
“And what shall I call you?” she asked.
“My friends call me Peregrine,” said the nice young man.
“Well, I’m your friend, aren’t I?” said the Ordinary Princess, and she stood up and held out her hand to him.
“Of course,” said Peregrine the man-of-all-work, jumping up and taking it.
So they shook hands and laughed at each other.
“Peter Aurelious and Mr. Pemberthy,” said the Ordinary Princess, “permit me to introduce you to a friend of mine—Peregrine.”
“Qwa!” said Peter Aurelious politely.
“Princess Amy,” said the man-of-all-work, “allow me to present a friend of mine—Prince Peregrine.”
“I am honored, sir,” said the Ordinary Princess, sweeping an elegant court curtsey.
“You said that just like a real princess,” laughed Peregrine.
The Ordinary Princess straightened up from her curtsey rather hurriedly and said that it was high time they started back to the castle. “Look!” she said. “You can see the evening star already.”
And sure enough, the sun had gone down, and between the tree trunks of the forest they could see the evening star twinkling in the apricot-colored sky above the distant rooftops of the city.
“We shall have to hurry,” said the Ordinary Princess, “or we shall be dreadfully late and get locked out when they close the castle gates at sundown. Besides, I’m on duty after dinner.”
So they ran back to Amber in the twilight and arrived at the back gate that leads to the kitchen quarters quite breathless and very dusty.
“May I come and picnic with you and Mr. Pemberthy and Peter Aurelious this day fortnight, if I can manage to get off again?” asked Peregrine.
“Do,” said the Ordinary Princess.
“Then I’ll meet you at the three silver birch trees again,” said Peregrine, “and I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed myself so much before. Good night, Princess Amy.”
“Good night, Prince Peregrine,” said the Ordinary Princess, and she slipped through the back gate and vanished into the kitchen.
After that the hardest or messiest work never seemed quite so hard or so messy to the Ordinary Princess. The days seemed to fly past, and she would sing to herself as she scoured pots and pans, peeled potatoes, or washed dishes...“Lavender’s blue,
”Rosemary’s green,
“When you are King
”I shall be Queen.“
She sang it so gaily that even the grumpiest cook had to smile.
Every second Thursday she would fetch Mr. Pemberthy and Peter Aurelious, and they would all go off to meet Peregrine by the three silver birch trees at the edge of the forest.
They spent the most delightful afternoons exploring and paddling in the pools and streams. Peregrine made her a bow and arrows out of willow stems and taught her how to shoot at a circle that they cut with his penknife in the bark of an oak tree.
One day he brought a large bundle under one arm, as well as the picnic basket.
“What’s that?” asked the Ordinary Princess.
“Wait and see,” said Peregrine.
When they reached their favorite oak tree, he opened the bundle. Inside was an axe, a little saw, a box of long nails, a hammer, and some rope.
“I thought it would be fun to build ourselves a house to picnic in when the winter comes,” said Peregrine.
The Ordinary Princess clapped her hands with joy.
“You do have the nicest ideas of anyone I know,” she said. “Now where shall we build it?”
In the end they chose a lovely spot in a tiny open glade in the forest. Two silver birch trees grew in the middle of it, and a little spring bubbled out of the moss close-by. They cut stout branches of oak, beech, and fir, sawed them into proper lengths, and hammered them deep into the earth to make the walls. Across these they nailed other pieces of wood and made a roof of willow branches, pine boughs, and ferns.
They worked tremendously hard and got very hot, breathless, and happy.
It took several second Thursdays before it was finished, but at last it was done. They had carpeted the floor of the little house with the brightest green moss they could find and had cut more squares of moss to thatch the roof. The house had two windows and a door that opened and shut. And though the windows had no glass in them and the door did not lock, that did not worry them at all. They were extremely proud of their work.
“What shall we call it?” asked the Ordinary Princess. “Don’t let’s call it anything palacey or castle ish. Let’s give it a nice ordinary sort of name.”
“Let’s call it ‘The Birches,’ ” said Peregrine. “That’s ordinary enough, and besides, there are two silver birches right beside the door.”
So “The Birches” it became, and next time they came to the forest Peregrine brought a bottle of ginger ale with him, and the Ordinary Princess smashed the bottle over the door, exactly as she had seen her royal Mama smash bottles of champagne over the prows of her royal Papa’s new ships, and said, “I name you ‘The Birches.’ ”
The ginger ale trickled down the door and soaked into the moss, and Peter Aurelious tried to drink it.
Autumn had come again, and in the forest the leaves were turning red, amber, and gold, and the thickets were full of blackberries, hazelnuts, rose-hips, and thorn apples. But at the castle Queen Hedwig and her daughter the Princess Persephone still stayed and stayed. It did not look as though they were ever going to leave.
“I do wish to goodness they’d go, or that the King would make up his mind and marry her, or something,” said the Ordinary Princess one day to Peregrine.
“Why?” asked Peregrine—his mouth rather full of blackberries.
“Because having so very many visitors makes an awful lot of extra work for kitchen maids,” sighed the Ordinary Princess. “You wouldn’t believe how much! And Ethelinda says that Queen Hedwig won’t go until she’s managed to marry her daughter to King Algernon.”
“Perhaps he doesn’t want to marry her,” said Peregrine, taking another mouthful of blackberries.
“Well, she’s awfully pretty,” said the Ordinary Princess. “I saw her once. Haven’t you ever seen her up close?”
“Once or twice,” said Peregrine.
“What’s she like?”
“Like a princess,” said Peregrine.
The Ordinary Princess threw a very squashy blackberry at him and hit him on the nose. “That’s a silly answer,” she said.
“No it isn‘t,” said Peregrine, wiping blackberry juice out of his eye. “I’ve worked at the castle for quite a long time, and if you’d seen as many princesses as I have, you’d know what I mean. They are almost as alike as peas in a pod!”
The Ordinary Princess smiled a little secret smile to herself and said, “Tell me about princesses, Perry.”
“Well, first of all, they are very beaut
iful,” said Peregrine, leaning back against a tree trunk and ticking off the points on his fingers. “Then secondly and thirdly and fourthly, they all have long golden hair, blue eyes, and the most lovely complexions. Fifthly and sixthly, they are graceful and accomplished. Sev enthly, they have names like Persephone, Sapphire, and Roxanne. And lastly,” said Peregrine, running out of fingers, “they are all excessively proper and extremely dull ... except when they are make-believe princesses who are really kitchen maids!”
“That’s just what I’ve always thought about princes,” said the Ordinary Princess.
“All of them?” asked Peregrine.
“All except the make-believe ones who are really men-of-all-work,” said the Ordinary Princess.
Then they both laughed and went back to the castle hand in hand.
Now just about this time it happened that the Ordinary Princess’s old nurse, Marta, came to the city of Amber on a visit to her sister’s niece, who had married a merchant of Ambergeldar.
Nurse Marta’s sister’s niece had a large and jolly family of children who loved going for picnics, and Nurse Marta’s sister’s niece’s husband was particularly fond of blackberry-and-apple pie. So one late autumn day, when there was beginning to be a nip in the air, Nurse Marta and her sister’s niece, and her sister’s niece’s husband, and all eight children went picnicking in the forest to collect blackberries.
Now Nurse Marta was rather stout and short of breath, so instead of rambling through the forest with the others, she sat herself down on a nice comfortable clump of grass with her back to a tree trunk.
In spite of the time of year, the sun was very warm that day, and there was not a breeze stirring in the forest. Nurse Marta dozed.
And so it happened that the Ordinary Princess, coming running round the tree trunk, tripped over Nurse Marta’s feet and fell right into her lap!
“Help!” cried Nurse Marta, waking up very suddenly.
“I am so sorry,” apologized the Ordinary Princess, picking herself up. “I didn’t know that anyone was—” She stopped rather quickly. “Why, Marta!” gasped the Ordinary Princess.
“Mercy me! Your Highness...” gasped Nurse Marta. “Oh, Your Highness!”
“Oh do hush, please!” begged the Ordinary Princess.
But it was too late. “What’s all this about Highnesses?” asked Peregrine, who had been running after her. They had been playing tag.
“Nothing,” said the Ordinary Princess hurriedly. “Nothing at all. I—I think this old woman has made a mistake,” and she frowned very hard at Nurse Marta.
But her old nurse was far too excited and upset to take any notice of mere frowns.
“Oh, Your Highness, wherever have you been!” she cried. And she caught the Ordinary Princess in her arms and kissed her and hugged and cried over her. “We thought you were lost! Oh, Princess Amy, how could you, my lamb? Your dress! It’s got holes in it—and no shoes on; you’ll catch your death of cold! What would your royal Mama say if she could see you now!”
She went on and on, and the Ordinary Princess could do nothing to stop her, until at last she ran out of breath and sat down heavily among the tree roots and wrung her hands.
By which time, of course, it was far too late to pretend anymore, and the Ordinary Princess patted Nurse Marta’s plump shoulder and said that she was quite all right and that if Nurse Marta would write down her address she would come and see her and explain everything.
So when Nurse Marta had stopped panting, she gave the Ordinary Princess her address, and having promised faithfully not to breathe a word of the affair to anyone, she curtsied several times in an agitated sort of way and went off between the tree trunks still wringing her hands.
After she had gone, there was a long silence.
The Ordinary Princess was looking rather ashamed of herself, and Peregrine was frowning.
Presently he said, frowning more than ever, “So you were a real princess all the time. Amy, you are a little fibber! And for two pins,” said Peregrine, “I’d give you a good hard spanking!”
The Ordinary Princess stopped looking ashamed of herself and giggled instead.
“You can’t spank a Royal Highness,” she said.
“Can’t I!” said Peregrine, looking quite as if he could.
But the Ordinary Princess tugged at his velvet sleeve with her little blackberry-stained hand and said, “But it’s not my fault, Perry! I can’t help being a princess. And anyway it doesn’t make any difference, does it?” she added anxiously.
“No,” said Peregrine, and he smiled his nice smile. “It won’t make any difference to me. But what about you? You are a Royal Highness, and I ... I’m only a man-of-all-work.”
“What does that matter? I should like you every bit as much if you’d turned out to be a—a coal heaver!” said the Ordinary Princess hotly. “So there!”
“I’ll remember that when I’m a coal heaver,” promised Peregrine. “And now suppose you sit down and tell me how it is that a princess came to be a kitchen maid.”
So they both sat down on the moss and the fallen leaves, and the Ordinary Princess told him all about everything, right from the very beginning. And he laughed such a lot that they quite forgot the time and had to run all the way back to the castle, for fear of being locked out when the gates were shut.
“Good night, Prince Peregrine,” said the Ordinary Princess, slipping in at the back door.
“Good night, kitchen maid,” called Peregrine.
“Qwa!” said Peter Aurelious.
Mr. Pemberthy said nothing at all, because he was sound asleep already, curled in a little furry ball in the Ordinary Princess’s apron pocket. He continued to sleep so soundly that she hadn’t the heart to disturb him, so she hung up her apron on a hook in her cupboard and went down to help with the dishwashing without it.
There appeared to be more dishwashing to be done than ever that night. The piles of greasy dishes seemed as if they reached the ceiling. The Ordinary Princess broke three dinner plates and was severely scolded by the fourth assistant senior cook, whose temper was never very good.
You have to pay attention when washing dishes, what with the slipperiness of wet plates, and the Ordinary Princess did not have her mind on plates! She was wondering whatever she was going to say to Nurse Marta.
“Oh dear,” thought the Ordinary Princess, “why did she have to come and spoil it all?”
She sighed heavily and dropped a soup plate.
It broke into eighteen quite small pieces, and one of these flew up and caught the fourth assistant senior cook on the nose.
As we already know, his temper was not of the best, and what with so much extra work, on account of Queen Hedwig of Plumblossomburg and her daughter and all her attendants staying on and on, and a bad attack of toothache that had been keeping him awake for the past three nights ... Well, the end of it was that the Ordinary Princess found herself dismissed.
The fourth assistant senior cook did not put it as elegantly as that.
“You’re fired!” shouted the fourth assistant senior cook. “Take a week’s wages!” And with that he had ordered her out of the kitchen.
“I don’t care!” said the Ordinary Princess, climbing wearily up the fourth flight of stairs on her way to the attic. “I don’t care a bit!” and a large tear rolled down her cheek and dripped off the point of her chin.
“Oh dear, oh dear,” sobbed the Ordinary Princess, sitting down suddenly on a step. “Whatever am I going to do now?”
Someone was whistling somewhere...“Lavender’s blue,
”Rosemary’s green ...“
“Hi!” called Peregrine in a loud whisper, appearing unexpectedly at the bottom of the staircase. “I’ve been waiting to catch you. There was something I wanted to say.”
But the Ordinary Princess went on sitting on the stairs, while her tears splashed onto her shabby dress.
Peregrine came up the stairs four steps at a time.
“I say,” he sai
d, “what’s happened?”
“I’ve been f-f-fired!” sobbed the Ordinary Princess.
“You’ve been what?”
“D-d-dismissed,” wept the Ordinary Princess. “I b-broke f-f-four plates, and Cook f-f-fired me!”
“Good!” said Peregrine approvingly.
“How can you say that?” flared the Ordinary Princess. She stamped her foot and suddenly stopped crying. “How can you be so horrid when you know quite well that I haven’t saved nearly a hundred pfennigs and I don’t know where I am to get another job.”
“Darling Amy,” said Peregrine, “don’t cry. I only said ‘Good’ because I think it’s awful, your having to work so hard. You shall have all the pfennigs you want and all the dresses in the world!”
He lent her his pocket handkerchief, and the Ordinary Princess mopped her eyes, blew her freckled nose, and sniffed.
“I’d have given you a hundred pfennigs weeks ago,” said Peregrine, “only I was afraid that if I did, you’d just buy a new dress and run off to live in the forest, and I should never see you again.”
He smiled his nice smile at her, and the Ordinary Princess could not help smiling back. Suddenly she felt much better.
“You see,” began Peregrine—but just at that moment a door on the landing below opened, and through it came a very gorgeous person indeed.
He wore a suit of crimson and violet taffeta, all laced with gold and embroidered with twinkling jewels, and wherever there was room for one he seemed to have added a bunch of ribbons. The toes of his purple velvet shoes were quite half a yard long, and he carried a tall golden stick.
“Now we shall catch it!” thought the Ordinary Princess, for she was quite sure that tearful kitchen maids and sympathetic men-of-all-work were not supposed to sit about on staircases and gossip—even on back staircases.
The very gorgeous person stood quite still and stared at them. His face got redder and redder until it was almost purple, and his eyes seemed as though they would pop out of his head in horror and amazement.
