The Magic Princess Dress

by Gwyneth Rees

  ‘She’d better be,’ Dad said sharply.

  ‘Well, she isn’t.’ Marietta sounded defiant. ‘She’s gone travelling!’

  ‘I don’t believe she’s gone through a mirror already,’ Dad snapped. ‘She wouldn’t be that reckless.’

  She could hear her father stomping about angrily downstairs after that, searching for her. Any minute now he would come up the spiral stairs and find her, and then she would be in big trouble for disobeying him. Not only that, but she was sure he would forbid her from using the magic mirrors again – and then how was she ever going to find Cindy.

  She looked at the music box, still open on the table.

  As she heard her father opening and closing more doors downstairs, Ava knew what she had to do if she wanted to avoid being found by him. But would the magic portal transport her to fairytale land a second time?

  As soon as she looked into the mirror, the light began to glow. Holding her breath, she closed her eyes, keeping them closed until the bright light had passed – and when she looked again she found, to her relief, that not only was she back in the palace music room, but that the room was empty.

  It wasn’t empty for long however. Just as Ava was starting to look around for Cindy, an older lady in a plain blue gown came sweeping in through the door. She was followed by five pretty girls who all wore bridesmaids’ dresses identical to Ava’s. Each girl had her hair piled up on her head and wore either a small crown or a tiara and Ava was certain they must all be princesses.

  The ugly sisters were nowhere to be seen, thank goodness.

  The older woman (who Ava guessed was some sort of governess) stopped when she saw Ava. ‘Our sixth bridesmaid. Excellent!’ She walked past Ava to the piano. ‘As you can see, girls, here we have some music to practise with.’

  ‘What are we practising?’ Ava asked the nearest princess, who looked quite friendly.

  ‘Our dance for Cinderella’s wedding of course,’ the girl replied. ‘This is our dress rehearsal.’

  ‘Really?’ Ava’s head felt spinny with sudden excitement. She could hardly believe that she had arrived in a place where not only was she one of Cinderella’s bridesmaids – but she would actually be dancing at her wedding!

  The friendly princess giggled as she added, ‘You’ll never guess who we just met in the corridor. Astrid and Ermentrude! They looked really pale. They said there’s a ghost in here – a vanishing ghost who looks like a bridesmaid!’

  Ava gulped as all the bridesmaids started giggling.

  The older woman clapped her hands for silence. ‘I pity any ghost who is unfortunate enough to meet those two on its travels,’ she said briskly. ‘They may be Cinderella’s sisters, but they are two of the rudest, most unpleasant, most hysterical creatures I have ever met. Now come on, girls . . . Let’s move some of this furniture out of the way so that we have room to practise.’

  As the princesses started to move chairs and tables to the edge of the room to clear a space to dance, Ava asked them, ‘Have any of you seen a little tabby cat with a white patch on her front paw? She’s my pet and she’s gone missing.’

  ‘A cat as a pet!’ one of the princesses exclaimed. ‘What a strange thing!’ She looked down at the skirt of Ava’s dress and added a little snootily, ‘Do you know there’s a bow missing from your gown?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ava replied apologetically. ‘I think my cat has it.’

  All the princesses started to giggle again then, until the older woman clapped her hands together a second time. Looking sternly at Ava, she said, ‘Your Highness, no princess with a less than perfect gown may attend Cinderella’s wedding. You must visit the palace seamstress without delay. There is a servant just outside the door and I’m sure he will show you the way.’

  Realizing she had been dismissed, Ava headed curiously for the door. She stepped out into a corridor with a plush red carpet and royal portraits hanging on the walls, and immediately saw the servant. He was standing very still, staring straight ahead and wearing smart knee-length breeches, a tight jacket with long tails and a white powdered wig.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Ava asked him politely. ‘Have you seen a tabby cat anywhere? She might have a gold bow caught in one of her paws.’

  The servant looked down at her as if he suspected she was making fun of him. ‘There are dozens of cats in the palace grounds, Your Highness, though I have not, as yet, seen one with a bow.’ He gave her a cool stare as he added, ‘Will that be all?’

  ‘Yes . . . I mean, no . . . Could you please show me the way to the palace seamstress?’ she blurted.

  ‘Follow me, Your Highness,’ the servant replied in a haughty voice. And he led the way along the corridor, down a flight of spiral stairs, along another corridor, up two further flights of stairs and along yet another corridor until he came to a halt outside a plain wooden door.

  ‘The palace seamstress is within,’ he declared, knocking on the door. Without waiting for a reply he swung open the door and stood with his back against it so that Ava could enter. ‘Your name, Your Highness?’ he asked her.

  ‘It’s Ava – but you don’t have to—’ she began, only to be interrupted by the man’s booming proclamation.

  ‘Her Royal Highness, the Princess Ava!’ he bellowed.

  A young servant girl, with big dark eyes and a single plait that fell halfway down her back, immediately jumped up from her stool and curtsied. She looked a few years older than Ava – twelve or thirteen maybe. Behind her a small elderly lady, with wrinkled skin and grey hair done in a bun, who was sitting in a chair by the window, put down her needle and thread and struggled to her feet to do the same.

  Ava felt embarrassed and very guilty about an old lady curtsying to her like that. ‘Please sit down,’ she said as the manservant left them.

  ‘You must sit first, Your Highness,’ the old woman said. ‘Here. Take my chair. It is the most comfortable.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ Ava insisted. She quickly dropped to the ground, where she sat cross-legged as if she was in her school assembly hall. From there she looked around the small room, which was filled with clothes in various stages of being made or repaired – all of them much grander than the clothes worn by the seamstress and the girl, who were now exchanging looks as if they thought this was very strange behaviour for a princess.

  ‘I am Dinah, the palace seamstress, and this is Tilly, my apprentice,’ the old lady told her, sounding a little guarded. ‘Have you a dress or some other garment that needs repairing, Your Highness?’

  ‘Well . . . do you have . . . I mean, do you think you could . . . find another bow for this bridesmaid’s dress?’ Ava asked, bunching up the material at the front of her skirt to show where the missing bow should be.

  Tilly gave a little grin and pulled something out of her sewing box. ‘What about this one?’ she asked, holding up a gold silk bow identical to the others on Ava’s dress.

  ‘That’s it! That’s the missing bow!’ Ava exclaimed. ‘Where did you find it?’

  ‘Dinah found it yesterday in the palace kitchens,’ Tilly told her. ‘She was there speaking to the palace cook, when she noticed one of the kitchen cats had something caught in its claw.’

  Ava turned to Dinah excitedly. ‘Was it a tabby cat?’

  The old lady frowned as if she was trying her best to remember. ‘I believe it might have been a tabby, Your Highness . . . yes . . .’

  ‘Where is this cat now?’ Ava asked, jumping to her feet. ‘Is it still in the kitchen?’

  ‘I expect so – Cook likes to keep them there because cats are so good at keeping the mice away.’

  ‘We have to go and look for her!’ Ava exclaimed, taking an impatient step towards the door. ‘She’s not a kitchen cat, you see. She’s my pet cat, Cindy, and I have to find her!’

  ‘A pet cat!’ Dinah looked surprised. ‘Well I never!’

  ‘I can take you to the kitchens if you like,’ Tilly offered. She looked at Dinah. ‘If you can spare me for a little while.’

>   Dinah nodded. ‘Hurry back though. We’ve a lot of work to do before the ball tonight.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll just show Princess Ava the way and I’ll come straight back,’ Tilly promised.

  Ava almost blurted out that she wasn’t really a princess – because somehow she felt bad about lying to these two servants – but she stopped herself. After all, she was very close to finding Cindy now, and she didn’t want to say or do anything that might ruin things.

  6

  Tilly led Ava along the corridor and through a doorway that led to a narrow flight of spiral stairs. ‘This is the servants’ staircase,’ Tilly explained. ‘It’s the quickest way to the kitchens. You don’t mind, do you, Your Highness?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Ava said.

  The staircase went down a long way. After a while Ava became aware of cooking smells, and finally they reached the bottom, where Tilly stopped to push open a heavy oak door.

  Now they were in a vast kitchen full of servants. It was very like the one Ava had seen when she’d visited a National Trust stately home with her mother. Except that there the servants had been waxwork figures, whereas here they were real. At one end of the room there was a massive stone fireplace with a huge fire that was giving off a terrific amount of heat. An enormous pig was being roasted over the fire while a maid (who was dripping with sweat) poked at the logs underneath. Elsewhere in the kitchen other maids were standing at big stone work surfaces, chopping up vegetables, rolling out pastry and performing various other tasks with great speed. Two maids stood at a massive cooking range stirring the contents of several huge pans. The noise of all this activity, in addition to the shrill voices of the senior maids shouting orders at the junior ones, was deafening.

  Tilly leaned closer to Ava and said, ‘I’ll ask Cook to come and speak with you.’

  Ava watched Tilly dodge across the kitchen, skirting around the hard-working maids in order to approach an older, plumpish woman on the other side of the room, who was overseeing the plucking of a pair of pheasants. The young maid who was doing it was obviously too slow for the cook’s liking, because the cook kept prodding her and shouting that she would box her ears if she didn’t speed up.

  Ava thought Tilly was very brave to interrupt the impatient cook – but clearly the fact that she had come on an errand for a princess made all the difference. As soon as Tilly pointed to Ava, the cook quickly used her apron to wipe the sweat from her brow and came to greet Ava with a polite smile on her face.

  She gave a little curtsy before saying, ‘Tilly says you’re looking for your cat, Your Highness.’

  Ava nodded and the cook shook her head sadly. ‘If only you’d come just a few hours earlier, Your Highness . . .’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Ava asked, starting to feel butterflies in her tummy again.

  ‘Well, only this morning we had a visit from Cinderella’s fairy godmother. She was collecting animals, you see. You know how she likes to turn mice into horses and lizards into footman and rats into coach drivers and the like? Well, we gave her all the mice from the mousetrap – she’s given us a special one to use that catches them but doesn’t actually kill them – and a rabbit that was too skinny to make stew out of, which we kept alive for her too. I mean, after all that, I felt we’d done our bit down here in the kitchens, I really did, but then she said she was looking for some cats and dogs as well. I said we couldn’t help with the dogs but since we’ve got quite a few cats here she could have the first one she could catch. Well – that tabby one went up to her the second she wafted some fish under its nose.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Ava murmured, thinking how much Cindy loved to eat fish. ‘Where did the fairy godmother take her?’

  ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t say, Your Highness,’ replied the cook politely. ‘I expect she’s taken her off to wherever it is that she concocts her spells. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must be getting back to my work.’

  ‘I have to find Cindy before anything happens to her!’ Ava exclaimed to Tilly as they left the kitchen together. ‘You don’t think the fairy godmother would actually hurt her, do you? After all, she’s a good character . . . I mean, person . . . isn’t she?’ she added quickly.

  ‘She’s certainly a character-and-a-half and no mistake!’ Tilly answered, grinning. ‘Most people reckon she means well most of the time – but she’s very temperamental and she tends to fly off the handle on a regular basis! She’s obsessed with inventing new spells and nobody’s ever quite sure what she’s going to come up with next!’

  Ava frowned. Somehow she had expected the characters in fairytale land to be a lot more straightforward – like they were in her fairytale book. ‘Do you have any idea where she might be right now?’ she asked Tilly anxiously.

  ‘I don’t know about right now,’ Tilly answered. ‘But tonight she’ll definitely be at the ball.’

  ‘The ball?’ Ava queried.

  ‘The special eve-of-the-wedding ball. Everybody is going to it. And the fairy godmother will definitely be there because she has to help at the dress competition.’

  ‘The dress competition?’

  ‘Surely you’ve heard about it, Your Highness,’ Tilly said. ‘When Cinderella and Prince Charming got engaged they announced that there would be a special competition in honour of their marriage – a competition that absolutely anyone in the palace is allowed to enter – even the servants! Cinderella is going to award a prize to whoever makes the most original and beautiful dress – which they may wear tonight to the ball. Cinderella is to choose the winner and the prize will be to have a magic wish granted by the fairy godmother!’

  ‘Wow!’ Ava exclaimed. ‘That sounds amazing!’

  Tilly had a strange look on her face as she blurted, ‘It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance! At least, it could have been.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Ava asked, puzzled.

  Tilly sniffed and rubbed her nose. ‘It’s just that I’ve always wanted to have my own dress shop one day, but – as Dinah says – a poor servant like me could never afford it. So I thought . . . I thought with the help of a magic wish, maybe it could happen, so . . .’

  ‘You decided to enter the competition?’

  Tilly nodded. ‘I’ve spent all my spare time for the last few months making a dress from the material that was left over after we’d made gowns for the queen and the princesses and the ladies-in-waiting and all the other members of the royal household. Just small scraps that would have been thrown away otherwise – but together they made a beautiful multicoloured dress fit for a princess. I was sure I had a real chance of winning!’

  ‘So what happened?’ Ava asked, guessing from Tilly’s face that something must have.

  ‘One day last week my dress was stolen from the sewing room. Dinah had gone to lie down because she wasn’t feeling well, and I went to measure one of the ugly sisters for a new gown. When I got back the dress was gone.’

  ‘That’s terrible!’ Ava exclaimed. ‘But who could have taken it? And why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ There were tears in Tilly’s eyes as she continued, ‘But now there’s no time to make another dress for the competition.’

  Ava was looking thoughtful. ‘Are the two ugly sisters entering this competition too?’ she asked.

  Tilly nodded. ‘But neither of them can sew very well so I don’t think they have much chance of winning!’

  ‘You said you were measuring one of them when your dress went missing?’ Ava reminded her.

  ‘That’s right – Ermentrude wanted a new gown.’

  ‘Was Astrid there as well?’

  ‘No. She was taking an afternoon nap.’

  ‘Hmm . . .’

  Tilly sighed as if she already knew what Ava was thinking. ‘You’re wondering if Astrid stole the dress while Ermentrude was keeping me distracted with her fitting, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, they do seem like the most likely thieves,’ Ava agreed.

  ‘That’s what I thought too. I mean, I know they can’t
wear my dress, because neither of them would fit into it. But at least by taking it they’ve knocked me out of the competition, which gives their own dresses a better chance of winning. But when I said that to Dinah she said I had to be very cautious about accusing them, because they’re Cinderella’s sisters, which means they’re practically royalty too. She said I’d need to have proof first – and I haven’t got any.’

  ‘I see what she means,’ Ava murmured, thinking about how dangerous it could be for a servant to get on the wrong side of the ugly sisters.

  ‘So even if Ermentrude and Astrid did steal my dress, there’s nothing I can do about it,’ Tilly said sadly. ‘I guess I’ve just got to accept that I’ll never have my own dress shop now.’

  Ava thought about what she did when she wanted something really badly, but couldn’t see any way of getting it. ‘Have you talked to your mum and dad about it?’ she asked.

  ‘My parents died when I was very small,’ Tilly told her.

  ‘Oh.’ Ava was shocked and didn’t know what else to say. ‘That’s awful,’ she finally mumbled.

  Tilly nodded. ‘But I was lucky because Dinah saw me begging outside the palace that winter and asked if I’d like to learn how to be a seamstress like her. I was very little then and the winter was so cold that year that I’d probably have died myself if it hadn’t been for her. Even though I was too young to be much help to her to start with, she still shared her food with me and let me snuggle up in bed while she worked into the night. She even made me a doll to play with – a little ragdoll with buttons for eyes and soft woollen hair.’

  ‘Dinah must be a very kind person,’ Ava said.

  ‘She is,’ Tilly agreed. ‘She’s taught me everything she knows, plus she says I have a natural flair for sewing. Now, because her eyesight isn’t so good and her hands are getting shaky, I’m better at it than she is – and a lot faster. She can’t even thread a needle very easily any more so I have to do that for her.’