The Alyssa Chronicle

by Michael Strelow

  Praise for Michael Strelow

  Some Assembly Required illuminates the beautiful and mysterious transformation that occurs when we listen carefully to the world.

  Scott Nadelson, author of Between You and Me

  Fascinating, humorous, and wise, The Greening of Ben Brown deserves its place on bookshelves along with other Northwest classics.

  Craig Lesley, author of Storm Riders

  First published by Our Street Books, 2018

  Our Street Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., No. 3 East Street, Alresford, Hampshire SO24 9EE, UK

  office1@jhpbooks.net

  www.johnhuntpublishing.com

  www.ourstreet-books.com

  For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our website.

  Text copyright: Michael Strelow 2017

  ISBN: 978 1 78535 835 7

  978 1 78535 836 4 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951469

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

  The rights of Michael Strelow as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Design: Stuart Davies

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY, UK

  We operate a distinctive and ethical publishing philosophy in all areas of our business, from our global network of authors to production and worldwide distribution.

  Other Books by Michael Strelow

  The Princess Gardener

  (Our Street Books: 978-1-78535-674-2)

  Some Assembly Required

  (Roundfire Books: 978-1-78535-627-8)

  The Moby Dick Blues

  (Roundfire Books: 978-1-78535-701-5)

  Dedicated once again to my cadre of story tellers and story lovers: Ava, Audrey, Lewis, Jackson and Zephyr.

  Chapter One

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  I couldn’t tell where the woman’s voice was coming from.

  “Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.”

  I stood still, hands by my sides. I was stopping it, I thought, whatever it was. I was stopping everything. After a minute, the voice came again, softer this time.

  “You leave my garden alone, and I’ll see that you have dried corn each day. Yes. Every day. Silly birds. Fly away now and leave my garden alone.”

  And then her laugh. And my sigh of relief. She was talking to crows. And I sat right down in the grass on the edge of the woods and laughed at myself.

  I could see the garden, the rising crows like black, whirling specks against the sky. And finally, I could see the old woman wagging a finger at the spring clouds.

  She was barely taller than the budding flowers around her, her hair sticking out gray against the bright green. She carried a watering can and her apron seemed stuffed with bulky cargo. Her free hand was throwing something over all the parts of her large, square garden.

  Then I noticed, far off on the other side, an old man, his head down, slowly making his way across an open patch of ground. And he was making a kind of throwing motion with one hand, too. Maybe he was sowing seeds.

  I watched while they moved on opposite sides of the garden like a dance to music only they could hear.

  That was the first time I saw them. My mother had mentioned them and where they lived: down the path and through the woods near our farm. And that they seemed to prefer living apart from everyone else—I found out later why.

  It was four years ago when I was eight, and old enough to wander the farm by myself for the first time. And usually I had to take my brother, Jake, with me everywhere, but that time he was at the knee of my father learning to mend harness. Jake, I knew, would much rather be in a tree than oiling and sewing leather.

  The old couple had whirled into my life. I could never have seen then how large the whirling, how big the circles.

  Oh, before I forget, my name is Alyssa and in the years after I first saw the old couple—especially the last two years—my life changed. It changed more than any farm girl’s life ever changed, I think. Like the moon becoming the sun. Or like a turtle learning to fly.

  It happened quickly, but I’d been ready my whole life. The princess Eugenie—all of us had seen many pictures of her painted for school walls—floated into our classroom as part of some kind of ceremonial blessing of the school, I think. The pictures, it turned out, didn’t look exactly like her. But, I did.

  Well, not my hair, but just the length. And not my skin color, but that was just my tan from working in the fields. But our eyes were blue with flecks of brown, our noses, in eleven-year-old nose-glory. And then there were her gestures, as soon as she stopped doing the princess waving thing. The way she tugged her earlobe, my ear lobe. The way she smiled to be polite, my smile. The whole business was very, very strange as if someone were playing a kind of mirror joke on both of us. And yet, somehow the clothes, the tan, and the hair length made us seem, to everyone else, just as different as I am from my friend Sheila Susan Brodie. That is, Tuesday from Sunday, cat from dog.

  But there we were, the princess looking at me, me looking at her, for what seemed a long, long time. So long that I was sure everyone else would stop their gabbing and catch us looking. But no one did.

  She opened her mouth as if she were going to say something to me, then she stopped herself. We stared. All the rest of the children were looking at the Princess, of course. I think my mouth fell open a little bit. But she quickly recovered herself and began to make, what I learned later, were the princess moves that were designed to make everyone comfortable because they were so predictable. Wave, smile—just the right number of teeth showing. I wish I had counted the teeth, because later I had to learn that very same smile, that wave. Fifteen teeth was the right number. Okay, sixteen was acceptable. Any more, I was told, and, well, she explained later, you might eat someone up. And then she had laughed

  And that was how it started. I, Alyssa Rankin, the farmer’s daughter, would swap places with Eugenie Von Troppen-Goss, from the house of, I guess, both Troppen and Goss. I wasn’t sure exactly how that whole name business worked with the royal family. I was sure someone was keeping track of it all. And, as I learned, I was right. But I couldn’t know how hugely a big deal it was.

  So Eugenie and I swapped places. Well, not at once, of course. We plotted, schemed and practiced. The important thing was that we both liked our new places so much that we hatched plans to keep up the disguise. She loved manure smell, her huge garden plot that fed my whole family, my old creaky bedroom with the window that looked out on woods, my mother and father, and even my younger brother Jake and his monkey-like ways. And I, as I said, I took to the princess stuff like a horse takes to rolling in the dust. I felt as if I had been plucked out of the barn and dropped into a field of fairies, each with a light in her hand on a summer’s evening. Which is just like one of the stories I wrote for my little brother, and that was one of my best, if I do say so myself. I specialized in fairies for him, and since he knew absolutely nothing about fairies, I could make up any kind I wanted. What Jake liked was action fairies, so that’s what I gave him. When Eugenie and I were working out our little exchange, Jake’s likes and dislikes were an important part. There were no romances in his stories, but fairies were not only acceptable, they were required. They could come and go as needed. For example, if a hero needed help, he or she could call in the fairies like a special kind of army, and save the day—any day. Jake liked it if I armed the fairies with some
kind of fire weapons, so that’s why they roamed the evening fields with lit lanterns in their hands.

  Jake was more than a minor detail in working out the swap. But once we got the whole thing rolling and Jake decided he liked Eugenie better (or, I claim, just as much) and I managed the castle complications, then we were all set to keep up the swap as long as we liked. So we settled into the new lives we loved. But the problem dealing with the little things is that if you don’t take care of the little problems, they become big problems. Like this one.

  The castle was buzzing with the news: it was rumored that Arbuckle Beauregard the Third, renowned minister of water and savior of the kingdom’s health, was engaged to be married. While that would be of only mild interest in a minor dignitary, Arbuckle had recently, he declared modestly, saved (with some help from Eugenie and me) the kingdom from a polluted water supply and thereby joined his illustrious ancestors, many of whom had been very important in founding the kingdom long ago. Daily I walked corridors with paintings of them. Still no painting of Arbuckle, but that honor would only be a matter of time.

  I wanted to take Arbuckle to the old couple’s garden, I don’t know exactly why. I wanted to plunk him in the grass and have him watch those old folks circle their garden in a dance to music no one else could hear. I felt that the garden might fix what was wrong with him, maybe. But Arbuckle, no matter how big a jerk he was, knew what Eugenie and I had pulled off—the switch. There were very good reasons he wouldn’t tell anyone. And for less good reasons, Jake, who knew too, wouldn’t tell either.

  These days I wander the castle and everyone thinks I am the Princess Eugenie. My own name fades even for me, like something I knew a while ago but can’t quite recall now. But the garden, ah. That garden stays right there on top of my brain. The old woman moves there. The old man sows his seeds, the wind pauses for them—holding the world’s breath.

  The castle had been built over many years and in many pieces so that, it was said, no one person actually knew all the secret passages and rooms and sealed-up dungeons. You could walk down and down into passageways that seemed to be going toward the center of the earth, getting warmer as you went. And it would smell, not bad, but distinct, like nothing else anywhere—not like anything on the farm of my other life, nor any other part of the castle. Then if you kept on walking, suddenly the passage would narrow and stop, blocked by a wall. The smell would be like something burnt long ago and then abandoned, sort of sharp, like a strong cheese, but also like wood smoke carried from far away on a wind.

  I am now at the age when I am allowed to go where I want, when I want. That is, outside my duties, outside my shoulds and ought-tos, and outside the plans of my King and Queen father and mother. They assume I am protected by being a princess. In some very important ways, the entire castle staff is here to make sure I get what I want. And I have to admit that being raised on a farm with lots of hard work and then school only when the farm work was less in the winter, well, the pampering and smiling and bowing of the castle, kind of went to my head at first. Okay, so maybe some of it stayed there too.

  “Watch out for ‘princess head,’” Eugenie once advised me. She said it could come on very quickly and my head would swell up and (sort of) explode. And then it would be too late—after the explosion. So, she said, I must try to catch it before it happened. Much easier to prevent than to fix. And then she laughed as she always did when she was issuing princess advice, as if the laughter were a way to wash down the bitter medicine.

  Eugenie then told the story of a cousin, Bilda, living in a distant castle who had a bad case of “princess head.”

  Eugenie said, “There she was ordering around the servants, especially older servants who knew everything much better than she did. Bilda stamped her foot before insisting the tea was too cold, or the meat was not cooked right. She raised her voice, then her hand, and finally her scepter with its golden orb. She was ready to strike. Then her father took everything away: her scepter, her title as princess and her power over anyone in the castle. He reduced her to ‘stray girl’ with an official decree and had it posted everywhere. It said that, until her head grew small again, her sense grew large and she got just a little bit wiser, she would not be in charge of anything. ‘Princess head’ ruined everything.” Eugenie laughed.

  I always loved those first sessions when we would breathlessly swap details from our lives so that the other one could take it over. Sometimes we talked both at once and laughed so hard that neither of us could remember exactly what the advice was.

  I remember offering, “Put your hand on the horse’s rump before you walk behind her, to let her know you’re there. Remember horses are prey animals, and they don’t like the feeling of anything sneaking up on them.”

  “Noted,” she replied. And then she told me how the curtsy was done only one way, and was not to be done by inventing any old way I felt like doing it at the time. The curtsey was a holy gesture of sorts and the right foot had to know exactly where the left foot was.

  And on and on we went in those first days of plotting the switch. It’s been two years now and we have become each other. The wonderful lark of it! The giggling at getting away with it for a while! Now both gone. Not only did we get away with it, now it would be very hard to go back. And, of course, that was why—that was exactly why—we thought we should do it when Arbuckle’s coming wedding was announced.

  At first it was all my idea because I hated the thought of what I knew would come. We could swap back, just for a short time, for Arbuckle’s wedding when all the relatives of the King and the Queen would come streaming in from the far corners of the kingdom. Some of them hadn’t seen Eugenie since she was little. But they would know her and begin tales and stories that I would have no idea about. I’d have to stand and nod and smile. And be completely lost. If Eugenie could just substitute for me for that week of aunts and grand uncles and cousins and second cousins once removed, all would be fine. We thought.

  And so in the sweaty old castle, I made for her my list of things to remember. And on the farm, she made her list for me—things we’d have to know to go back temporarily to our old lives.

  For example, I loved to cook, so when I first came to the castle I had to insist, and insist again, that the castle cooks let me into the kitchen and let me learn to prepare food—chopping and washing vegetables at first. I already knew these from home on the farm. What I wanted to know was the secret to those tasty sauces served in the dining room, the secrets to perfectly roasted beef cuts we rarely saw at home. And how did the fish get brined and smoked and then sprinkled with dill in the middle of winter? The Queen thought my interest in food something—like the gardening of old—that would go away in time, and that I was just being a headstrong girl insisting on my princess privileges. She was busy; she gave in very quickly, and I was soon in the kitchen reducing an entire bottle of wine to a cup as the base of a fine sauce, and whipping egg yolks into Béarnaise—vinegar, lemon juice, the yolks… So now I had to record it all for Eugenie who had never been interested in cooking when she had lived in the castle.

  At the same time, Eugenie recorded all the things she had done differently than I had when I lived on the farm. She had begun a project that required a long list of preparations, though it was exactly the opposite of my new food skills. She operated at the other end of the beast, so to speak. She concocted an elaborate mixture of manures (pig, cow, chicken, rabbit) with some kind of “tea” she brewed that she claimed was alive and quickly broke down the manures into a usable form much faster than before. And the tea-manure “soup” she called it, was going well. Within ten days she could mix it with soil, she said, and use it on her garden or even mix it with the seeds her father (okay, my father) planted in the fields. Plants seemed to grow almost magically on the mixture, like Jack’s beanstalk. She had learned to make this soup from the old lady neighbor.

  So there we were. Two girls cooking up two very different soups, but, I suspect, out of the same curiosity.<
br />
  It was all a little confusing for us—the princess had become the farm girl, and I, the farm girl, had become a princess. Now we had to switch it all back for a time.

  We decided to meet to compare our lists and notes and to laugh.

  The garden the old couple kept was about halfway between us. Their house was nearby, really a large shack, but they had made it comfortable with tight windows, a solid door, and paints they made from berries and roots. Blue and a deep red were their best colors so the house stood at the edge of a wood and looked like elves or faeries must live there. But it was just the two of them, and the old man couldn’t see very well. The old woman led him out to the garden each day, and then he seemed to know what to do, as if he could see much better there among his flowers and vegetables. I had known about the couple since I was small, but Eugenie discovered them by accident one afternoon, she said, while picking wildflower seeds to try out in her own garden. The old man had heard her and had beckoned her to come and see his flowers and sit awhile.

  So Eugenie had become a regular visitor, and when we were looking for a safe meeting place, she had suggested the garden. And so it was that we met up there, both clutching our lists.

  If the old people knew we were princess and princess look-alikes, they didn’t let on. And if they knew that one of us was the farm girl from just over the hill, they didn’t mention that either. As if they somehow knew that we two with the same face needed space to talk alone, they left us on the beautiful stone bench they had built in the garden among the great nodding heads of dahlias and lacy trim of baby’s breath around our feet. We felt like no princess and farm girl had ever felt before, I think. We laughed and pretended we had been dropped into a magic garden where we could talk and have a conversation, each with our own face, our own other self. It was funny and very strange at the same time. Perfectly normal and wildly weird.