Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER 1 - Gracepearl’s Calling
CHAPTER 2 - The Ships Arrive
CHAPTER 3 - The PITs
CHAPTER 4 - The Rhymes
CHAPTER 5 - The Hospital
CHAPTER 6 - Mackree, My Heart
CHAPTER 7 - The Welcome Banquet
CHAPTER 8 - Five-Star Flirting
CHAPTER 9 - The Glory of Girlfriends
CHAPTER 10 - ʺChop, Chop!ʺ
CHAPTER 11 - Three Signs
CHAPTER 12 - Coal
CHAPTER 13 - Confusing Dreams
CHAPTER 14 - Taming Onions
CHAPTER 15 - A Miramore Moonlight Sonata
CHAPTER 16 - Mermen
CHAPTER 17 - Trading Day
CHAPTER 18 - Heart to Heart with Father
CHAPTER 19 - Dancing in the Woods
CHAPTER 20 - The Whale
CHAPTER 21 - Field Trips
CHAPTER 22 - The Sabbath
CHAPTER 23 - Proposals
CHAPTER 24 - The Tournament
CHAPTER 25 - Princes Before Peasants
CHAPTER 26 - Nobility
CHAPTER 27 - A Revelation
CHAPTER 28 - Pearl’s Place of Peace
CHAPTER 29 - The Summersleave Ball
CHAPTER 30 - Something More than Miramore
Acknowledgements
DIAL BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
A division of Penguin Young Readers Group
Published by The Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa • Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright © 2009 by Coleen Murtagh Paratore
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
is available upon request
eISBN : 978-1-101-13379-8
http://us.penguingroup.com
To my wonderful brothers,
Kevin, Danny, Jerry,
and Michael Murtagh—every one a prince.
With love always,
Col
CHAPTER 1
Gracepearl’s Calling
Old Mother Goose when
She wanted to wander
Would ride through the air
On a very fine gander.
Soon, Gracepearl, my girl, soon. Your time approaches, destiny calls.
My mother’s strange words dance through my mind as I climb the stone steps of the old bell tower. “What time, Mother? What destiny? Oh, how I wish you were here.”
When I reach the turret, the wind lifts my hair and I breathe in gusts of fresh salty sea air. Raising my spyglass, I turn the gold rim for a bird’s view of the world.
There below is Miramore. Lush trees waving, red and yellow flowered fields, rows of thatched cottages; there’s mine, my friends Lu’s and Nuff ’s, the gardens and orchards, then a turn to the coal yard, the farms, sheep grazing, the rooster-vane atop Mackree’s stable, ohh, a cry escapes, my heart still stinging . . . then up the bend to the forest, the dancing circle, my pine place of peace . . . then off in the distance, the flitting banners of the royal lodge, the dining hall where my father, Cook, toils preparing tomorrow evening’s Welcome Banquet, then down now toward the beach, the trading stalls, the fishermen’s sheds, the black-robed professors assembling in the stands, clusters of Miramores in their finest garb gathering excitedly to await the arrivals . . . the docks, the piers, and then the water, ahh, the water, always the water, a vast flat wild blue indigo seacake frosted with white capped waves.
Miramore is a paradise, but paradise is not enough. Where does all that water lead? What lies beyond that horizon?
I have been happy here, well provided for and lucky in the love of my father and friends, but this past year something has changed. I have changed.
Haunted by strange and confusing dreams, faces of people I do not recognize, I wake with a mounting anxiousness, an overwhelming sense that I must go to them. To where or for what reason I do not know. I feel sure, though, with the same certainty that Mother guides me from the heavens above, that the moon will rise tonight, and the sun tomorrow, there is something more than Miramore for me.
My life must have greater purpose than digging coal and peeling potatoes. There is a longing, a rising, a storm-surf pounding, foaming in my heart. I want something more meaningful, more useful . . . more. I am convinced my fate lies beyond this sea. But what will it be? Who will I be? And what of the people in the dreams? Who are they? Somehow I sense they need my help.
Your time is coming, Gracepearl, my girl. Mother’s sweet strong voice sings inside me again. The wind strokes my cheek like the palm of a hand, the wild sea beckons, come. Come, Gracepearl, come away.
“But where?” I shout. “How? There is no way to leave.”
The dotted-tail gull on the ledge caw-caws and the pigeons at my feet coo too. “Easy for you,” I say to them. “You have wings!”
Old Mother Goose when she wanted to wander would ride through the air on a very nice gander. The familiar rhyme flits through my mind. The only way to leave the island is by boat. The only boats sturdy enough are the royal ships that come each summer, the ships that arrive today. By birth, all Miramores serve the Order here, as our ancestors have done before us. The sons of farmers become farmers, the daughters of seamstresses, seamstresses, the sons of fishermen, fishermen. By lineage I will garden or cook. I hate to cook.
However . . . there is a way, one way to leave the island.
Should one of the visiting princes arriving today choose a Miramore girl to marry, she could sail off with him. This is a very recent change. Much to the giddy delight of the Muffets, those goose-brained girls set on nothing but marriage, the Royal Order of Bark has decreed that the rules of royal matrimony be amended.
A prince now may marry any girl he so chooses, even a peasant Miramore girl.
I could be the first.
“Tell me, Mother, would it be wrong to marry a prince for his ship?”
I giggle. The gull squawks. Today it all begins.
This is the twenty-first day of June, the very birthday of a new summer, and for decades upon decades, centuries now, this is the day the royal boys come to study the charming arts. They stay until September. “Princes in training” they are. Lu nicknamed them the “PITs” when we were little and now she, Nuff, and I couldn’t call them otherwise.
Most Miramore girls, especially those silly “Muffets” who work in the fabric mills and dress alike in pink shawls, dream of marrying a prince. The Muffets imagine a life of luxury—servants and gowns and baubles and balls—like they’ve read about in fairy tales. And now that the rule change makes the fairy tale actually possible, they’ve even gotten worse.
Me? I prefer true tales. I have never met a PIT who impressed me. Too full of themselves they are, rude and arrogant, self-centered and smug.
Not one holds a candle to my Mackree. Mackree Byre, my life’s best friend.
<
br /> But Mackree is mine no longer. My throat clenches and my lips tremble at the thought of his beautiful face. I have loved Mackree since we were playmates, swimming free as fish in the warm shallow bay, climbing trees wild as monkeys, riding his ponies on the beach. When we were ten Mackree wrote “Purl Will U Maree Me?” with a stick in the sand on Heart’s Day. I wrote my answer: “Yes.” We wove each other callaberry crowns. He was king; I was queen, of the sea and forest too.
Mackree loved me then, he loves me still. I know for certain he does. But why . . . the tears come again . . . why is he now so cruel? He avoids me like a swarm of locusts. What did I do to lose his affection? Why does he scorn me so?
This past Heart’s Day there was no bouquet of violets tied with a ragged string, his usual gift to me. And when I brought him my Heart’s card and a sack of his favorite skipping stones, which I’d collected especially for him, he ignored the card and tossed off the sack. “I’m a child no more,” he said.
Then, on May Day, Mackree broke off with me for good.
“Summer’s coming,” he said, “you’ll be sixteen. You want to leave here, Pearl. You’ve made that plain. Do us both a favor, and be done with it. Go. It’s time you said yes to one of those princes always flirtin’ with ya each year. And it’s time I found a girl content with Miramore.”
Your time is coming, Gracepearl, my girl. Mother speaks to me again.
Your destiny awaits you, darling. Soon, you will choose.
CHAPTER 2
The Ships Arrive
Three wise men of Gotham
Went to sea in a bowl,
And if the bowl had been stronger,
This rhyme would be longer.
“Choose what?” I call out, but Mother does not answer. Her simple words confound but intrigue me. A foghorn bellows in the distance. I point my spyglass out to the water now, hoping to spot the ships.
The Jaspian Sea encircles the island, a mighty and masterful moat. On this warm morning after spring impishly sent one last goose-bump night to remember her by, the ever-present sheet of fog off shore hangs heavy as an ermine stole.
The PITs come from the twelve branches of the Royal Order of Bark, fewer and fewer of them each year as the mothballed monarchies fade into history books. “The days of kings are numbered,” Nora Baker, the baker, says. “People are starvin’. Them gold crowns have lost their glory.”
Each summer, I help Nora serve a meal to the captains who transport the princes here before they set off home again. These past few years I’ve heard the old seamen talking of the lands across the water, whole villages of people suffering, as the never-ending war wages on. Last summer, especially, they spoke of neighbors, good men and women, with no work to be found, no way to put food on their families’ tables, forced out of their homes, as they cannot pay the tariffs, some begging for bread now, hungry.
“It’s shameful,” Nora said, raising her fist, then slam ming it down on her chopping block. “A disgrace, ’tis. Them royals oughtta sell them castles and spread the coins round.”
Nora Baker and I don’t often agree, but on that note we were rock solid.
I move my spyglass to my left eye to give my right a rest.
There, now, the tip of a ship nudges out of the mist, a sharp black nose on a white fog face. “Yes!” I shout to the pigeons and gull. “The first one has arrived.”
I scan the sea searching for others. How many will come this year?
Last summer there were only nine princes in training, a small and disappointing class. The tournament lacked spirit and the Summersleave Ball was a bore. Even I, a common servant girl, knew there wasn’t a true prince among them.
Time passes and the mist curtain rises. A flock of geese flies by. They form an arrow. I follow their path. They lead me to the mast of another ship and then onward to a third, its boisterous sails billowing in the breeze.
“At least there will be three students this summer. Maybe even a prince for me.”
I look to the clouds. “Tell me, Mother. I ask you again. Would it be so wrong to marry a prince for transport? ” I laugh and wait, but Mother doesn’t answer.
All of the PITs aren’t princes, of course. In fact, most are not. They are of royal lineage though, descendents of dukes and earls. The Muffets spend countless hours prettying themselves for the summer boys, working on their perfect gowns for the Summersleave Ball. This is where the princes test out their ballroom dancing skills, and as there are no royal girls here, we Miramore girls get to play princesses for the evening. Even before the rules of the Order changed, the summer visitors always had an interest in us Miramore girls, hoping for a no-hearts-attached summer fling. Now the stakes are raised. Now they may come searching for a girl to make a princess.
Not that the boys of Miramore aren’t worthy of our attention. For the most part, they are fine, hardworking young men, but they are bound to service here on the isle. They have neither the freedom nor the means and, as far as I can tell, not the desire either, to leave. They’ll never make a girl a princess.
Not that I have ever wanted that. I only wanted Mackree.
There have been some PITs who caught my attention—standing out at first because they were witty or handsome, smart or brave—some even turned my head a bit as they whirled me about at the ball, but then they spoke or acted in a way in which their true character was revealed, and poof, the spell was broken.
So many PITs, never a prince.
Another ship approaches now. I turn the rim of my scope. There’s a garishly painted mermaid carved on the hull, an audacious yet silent mascot. The mermaid’s arms are clasped prisoner-like behind her neck, yet her chest is thrust forward, chin out, face upturned, braving the waves, leading the way.
My stomach grumbles and I reach in my satchel for a still-warm strawberry muffin, tossing some bits to my feathered friends. I brush a crumb from my blouse and wrap my fingers around the oyster shell on the braided seagrass rope. The necklace was a gift for my fifteenth birthday last August.
“Happy birthday, dear daughter,” Father had said, placing the simple necklace over my bowed head. He lifted my chin to look at me. “You have your mother’s raven hair and her emerald eyes, and her heart open wide as the sea.”
“Papa, how you flatter me so.” I dusted flecks of flour and cocoa powder from his thick gray beard, remnants of the scrumptious cake he had personally baked for me, much to Nora Baker’s annoyance.
“Your mother, Miriam, made this necklace,” Father said. “She found this shell as she walked the beach so happily, carrying you nine months heavy inside. It was on that day she chose your name, Gracepearl. ‘Our Grace will be a pearl among princes and the world her oyster shall be.’”
Oh, how I miss my mother. She died when I was eight.
My mind’s album is filled with vivid scenes—lullabies and nursery rhymes, beach walks, forest talks, picnics and adventures, reading snuggled side by side, dancing by the firelight. Then my memory book ends abruptly, so many pages blank.
It could have ended there, but no. My beautiful and brilliant mother had a wonderful idea. In the months before her death from consumption, unbeknownst to me, she planned ten years’ worth of birthday presents, one special surprise a year, which she instructed Papa to give me in the precise order outlined in a letter.
Father keeps Mother’s birthday presents stowed in a purple trunk with a brass lock beneath his bed. He wears the key on a thin leather rope around his neck—silly goose of him, really, as I would never peek. I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise!
Each year when Father gives me the next gift, he tells me the story connected with it. The spyglass was a gift to my mother from her father, the jewel-framed mirror from her mother. The eider-bark journal contains my own mother’s skillful sketches and descriptions of every flower and tree on Miramore, each animal, fish, and all things with wings. And so, every year on my birthday, my mother’s treasures become my treasures.
Soon I will be sixteen. Mother
said that “soon” I would choose. How soon is soon? Does she mean on my birthday? If so, choose what? Choose to stay or leave?
The only way I can leave is to marry a prince. Why doesn’t that notion inspire me?
When I was little I play-dreamed that I would one day marry Mackree. Then for near a decade we were as sister and brother, best-best friends. But this past year things grew awkward between us. Mackree’s feelings for me altered in a way I was not ready for. He hinted of marrying. Me? I know now I want something more than the wifely life on Miramore, cooking and cleaning and such. I want to make a difference out there in the world beyond, serve in some purposeful way. I want to mark my footprints, my handprints, on a bigger beach. And besides, I’m a horrible cook.
In school, when we would read the stories of noble heroes throughout time, the Muffets swooned, seeing themselves swept away by charming princes. Me? I wondered how Joan of Arc felt as she charged forward to save her people.
Mackree is right. We’re too old for skipping stones. Now that he rebukes me, it is good that I set my sights elsewhere. Maybe this is the summer. Miramore, however lovely, has grown smaller than a water closet. I feel a pull like the powerful tide, but where, where, does it lead me?
More time passes and the sun finally claims its throne in the sky, uncurling long finger rays of gold. “Good. An eighth ship.” I scan wide across the horizon and then I see them. One . . . two . . . three . . . four more. Twelve.
A banner year indeed! Every branch of the Royal Order has sent a prince for training. “To the docks!” I stuff my spyglass in my satchel and turn.
Caw, caw, the gull screeches. I look back.
The bird hops off the sill and flits toward me, landing at my feet. Its beady black eye meets mine for a second, then it caws meaningfully again and flies up to ledge.
What is it? I move to the ledge and look down at the water.
A Pearl Among Princes Page 1
