Princess Ben Read online

  Princess Ben

  Being a Wholly Truthful Account of Her Various Discoveries and Misadventures, Recounted to the Best of Her Recollection, in Four Parts

  Catherine Gilbert Murdock

  * * *

  GRAPHIA

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Boston · New York

  * * *

  Copyright © 2008 by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Graphia, an imprint of

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Originally published in

  hardcover in the United States by Houghton Mifflin, an imprint of

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2008.

  Graphia and the Graphia logo are registered trademarks of

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.graphiabooks.com

  The text of this book is set in Perpetua.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Murdock, Catherine Gilbert.

  Princess Ben : being a wholly truthful account of her various discoveries and

  misadventures, recounted to the best of her recollection, in four parts /

  written by Catherine Gilbert Murdock.

  p. cm.

  Summary: A girl is transformed, through instruction in life at court, determination,

  and magic, from sullen, pudgy, graceless Ben into Crown Princess Benevolence, a fit

  ruler of the kindgom of Montagne as it faces war with neighboring Drachensbett.

  HC ISBN-13: 978-0-618-95971-6

  PA ISBN-13: 978-0-547-22325-4

  [1. Fairy tales. 2. Princesses—Fiction. 3. Kings, queens, rulers, etc.—Fiction. 4.

  Magic—Fiction. 5. Courts and courtiers—Fiction. 6. Self-actualization

  (Psychology)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ8,M942Pri 2008

  [Fic]—dc22

  2007034300

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  * * *

  To James,

  my prince and super genius

  * * *

  Part One 3

  Part Two 83

  Part Three 167

  Part Four 249

  * * *

  Having for many decades been forced to endure ever more ridiculous tales of the circumstances surrounding my coming of age, holding my tongue through each long-winded narrative for fear that my cautious interjections would only prolong the blather, I now in the solitude of my dotage at last permit myself the indulgence of correcting the erroneous legends and embroidered falsehoods that to this day expand, heady as yeast, across the land. The country people say that to understand a sausage one must know the pig; so it is that this white-haired sow (as I dub myself with great fondness) is uniquely suited to provide the most accurate chronology. I freely acknowledge that had I myself not experienced every moment recorded herein, my narration at times would sound worse than implausible, but nonetheless, accept my solemn oath that each anecdote and interaction chronicled within these pages is as truthful and exact as my recollections permit.

  Part One

  IN WHICH FATE DEALS ME A SAVAGE BLOW, LEAVING ME TO MY OWN PITIABLY MEAGER DEVICES

  ONE

  How many times I have wondered what my fate might have been had I accompanied my parents that rainy spring morning. Such musings, I recognize, are more than a trifle insane, for envisioning what might have been has no more connection to our own true reality than a lunatic has to a lemon. Nevertheless, particularly in those bleak moments that at times overwhelm even the happiest of souls, my thoughts return to my dear mother and father, and again I marvel at the utter unpredictability of life, and the truth that our futures are so often determined not by some grand design or deliberate strategy but by an ordinary run-of-the-mill head cold.

  To be honest, my sickness did not occur completely by chance. I had exhausted myself in preparing for my fifteenth birthday fete the week before, had gorged myself during the party on far too many sweets, and had then caught a chill during a lengthy game of stags and hunters with my guests in the twilight forest. Now, however, denying all my symptoms, I begged to join my parents.

  "I have to go!" I insisted from my sick bed. "It's my grandfather."

  My mother sighed. "Your grandfather would never approve of his granddaughter of all people making herself twice as ill on his account." She replaced the cloth, soaked in her own herbal concoction, on my forehead, and coaxed some tea across my lips. "Why don't you draw him a picture instead? I promise to leave it in a place of honor."

  "A picture?" I scoffed. "I wish you'd realize I'm not a child.."

  She kissed my flushed cheeks with a smile. "Try to sleep, darling. We'll be back before dusk."

  These words, too, I ponder. No matter how loudly I may have denied it, all evidence demonstrated I was still very much a child. After all, I had brought this illness upon myself. Worse, I had sensed the head cold brewing yet petulantly refused to follow my mother's advice, so sacrificing that pinch of prevention for cup after cup of homemade cure. My bedroom remained crowded with piles of fairy tales, many of the pages illuminated with my own crude drawings, and dolls in varied displays of dishabille. How easy it would have been for my mother—indeed, were the tables turned, I would have so responded without hesitation—to point out my childishness. I told you so may be painless to utter, but that does not diminish the anguish these four words inflict upon a listener already in pain. That my mother held her tongue and gave me only love when I merited chiding demonstrates her empathy. So many times in the decades since I have reminded myself of her innate compassion, and on my best days have striven to match it.

  At the time, though, I simply sulked, and so my father found me as he strode in to wish me well. Even in the gloom of that overcast morning he looked magnificent, his dress armor polished to a high gleam and his prince's circlet, excavated from the woolen trunks for its semiannual outing, shining against his graying curls.

  He settled on my bedside with a clank or two. " 'Tis a great shame you can't join us today."

  I pouted. "I could go. If you let me."

  "And have your mother put my head on a stake? Do you have any notion what that would do to my handsome good looks?"

  I refused to be cheered.

  He eyed me with a twinkle. "What if I returned with a dragon?"

  Through enormous focus, I maintained my glower.

  "A wee green one that whistled like a kettle? It could roast chestnuts for you on winter mornings."

  Despite my best efforts, up crept the corners of my mouth. "And warm your chilblains when you're old," I added.

  " 'Ben,' I'd call out, 'where's that blasted dragon of yours? My old toes are freezing!' "

  "And I'll go and find the dragon—"

  "Where it's playing with my grandchildren—"

  "And ask it, quite nicely, to come inside and attend to the needs of His Royal Highness, the Prince of Montagne." I giggled; I could not help it.

  "Oh, bosh! You say that to a dragon and it'll gobble me up, as sure as salt's salt."

  "And what would that do to your handsome good looks?" I teased him.

  "Improve them, I'd wager," he answered with a grin. "Now, you be good and drink that wretched concoction, and I'll take you up there next week. Just the two of us."

  "Truly? With a picnic? A big one?"

  "Absolutely." He, too, kissed my cheeks, and with a last exaggerated bow in my direction, he c
lattered down the stairs.

  Wrapping myself in a quilt, I crept to the window. In the courtyard below, Mother frowned as she struggled to fit her own golden princess circlet, for she had little skill at ceremony. With a flourish of trumpets, Uncle Ferdinand appeared at the great entrance to the castle proper, looking every inch the king in his robes of state. Unlike my father, Uncle Ferdinand truly was handsome, tall and lean and solemn. At his side stepped the group's martial escort, Xavier the Elder, a grizzled warrior who had shaved so thoroughly that several nicks still oozed blood. Queen Sophia appeared as well, displaying the precise gestures and expressions expected of a woman of her rank.

  A quintet of soldiers played a military hymn, and then Mother, Father, Ferdinand, and Xavier strode across the drawbridge through a double phalanx of saluting guards. Father glanced back to smile a last greeting at me as Mother slipped her arm through his and lay her head on his shoulder. His armor must have been cold, given the unseasonable chill of the day, but the love between them transcended such trivial discomfort.

  Seeing them off, the queen stood at attention for exactly the amount of time that a queen should, and then with a cool flick of her gown turned back toward the castle, the footmen falling in behind her.

  Alone at last, the quilt about my shoulders, I sighed as I considered all the tasks that awaited me. A wool vest I had begun for Father the previous autumn lay half finished, my efforts immobilized by a plethora of dropped stitches. Clearly it would not serve him this winter; at the rate I was progressing, years could pass before the thing warmed him. My mother had delegated to me the task of transcribing her grandmother's yellowed recipes, the goal being to learn the art of cooking while improving my penmanship. Unfortunately the assignment always left me famished, rooting through the kitchen pantries like an autumn bear. Hunger was a burden I could not tolerate for even a heartbeat, a truth that my physique amply demonstrated. Simply glancing at the stack of stained and curling recipes sent my stomach to growling.

  Outside, the master of hounds returned with his pack, the dogs gleeful and wet from a long run and a swim in the Great River. But even their prancing enthusiasm did not lift my own misery. With only the ubiquitous murmur from the soldiers' barracks to comfort me, I crept back into bed, seeking refuge from the oppressive mist that cloaked the castle's turrets. Perusing my shelves, I could not find one volume to satisfy me. The fairy tales I had read countless times. The more recent additions held even less interest: dry histories of Montagne, geometry textbooks, a medical treatise on bloodletting that my mother appeared never to have opened and that she now put to use as a bookend.

  I squirmed further under the covers. My mind drifted, wondering if the foursome had yet arrived at my grandfather's tomb, what they would say there in his honor. I had practiced my own speech for weeks, and had been quite proud of my little poem praising the Badger's courage, the last stanza in particular:

  You perished to save all of us.

  I hope your armor never rusts.

  A dramatic conclusion, I believed at the time, though it now occurred to me that any armor entombed with a corpse for thirty-odd years would doubtless experience some corrosion. This realization only deepened my malaise.

  At last I drifted into a fitful sleep. Though slumber should remove us from the trials of our waking life—surely I always settled my head with this expectation, and ere this day had always found satisfaction—my present nap did rather the opposite. Almost at once, it seemed, my rest was disturbed by haunting images of the castle corridors. Not my familiar apartment, constructed scarce a century earlier with the new perimeter fortifications, but the castle proper, noble and ancient, with walls as thick as three men, and the Montagne hedgehog, emblem of the kingdom, carved in countless obscure corners.

  In this dream as I walked the corridors, one of these hedgehogs uncurled itself and turned to stare at me with black, unblinking eyes. Try as I might, I could not escape this piercing glare; I was trapped as utterly as a fish on a hook, though unlike a fish I could not even thrash about, for the paralysis of nightmare held me immobilized. Larger and larger those eyes grew, until their impenetrable blackness filled my vision. I had the sensation, provided by that sporadic omniscience that accompanies dream-state, that I must creep forward, though I had not a notion in the world whereto I was headed, or whether the floor below me would dissolve in abyss. At once a voice, opaque and unidentifiable, filled my ears: "It is time."

  With a great jerk, I awoke to darkness, perspiration drenching my body. My fever, at least, had broken. Gradually my beating heart slowed; I was in my own bed, my parents nearby, with naught to fear. The flickering shadows came only from the parade ground lanterns that I had known every night of my life.

  Another consideration troubled my mind. My parents had promised to return by dusk, and clearly night had fallen. They should not have left me to sleep, I thought crossly, particularly given that awful dream. Did they not notice my tossing and turning?

  I wandered into the kitchen, chiding words on my lips.

  But the kitchen stood empty, the hearth cold. My irritation progressed to unease, highlighted by the torch-lit shadows that moved ever more rapidly across the walls, casting Mother's jarred remedies and bundled herbs into grotesque shapes. I shivered.

  The drum of hoofbeats across the drawbridge caught my attention. Faint though the noise be, as soldier's daughter I had been trained from early age to note such sounds as might bode ill. I hurried to the window. Outside, a rider on a steaming horse gestured to guards already racing to quarters. Other horsemen hurried in, and townsfolk as well, as torches smoked between the raindrops.

  Anxiously I threw a cape over my nightgown and made my way outside. "Ancienne herself is crying," a woman muttered as she huddled beneath a dripping eave. A trio of soldiers on horseback, desperate to pass, shouted at the growing throng.

  Suddenly a great cry arose in Market Town, followed by a thick silence, as if a hand descending from the heavens snuffed the living noise from the earth. The crowd parted to reveal a soldier leading a horse and wagon. In the sputtering light I could not make out the soldier's face, but the slump of his shoulders announced tragedy. The shaggy draft horse moved with the inherent nobility of all honest laborers, and so caught up was I in the power of this image that it took me a moment to realize the wagon, still loaded with some poor farmer's seed potatoes, contained a body as well. Only when the women beside me dropped to their knees did I notice the golden crown and realize I was beholding the bloody, rain-drenched corpse of my uncle, King Ferdinand.

  Behind the cart came other soldiers, and a spontaneous procession of mourning citizens, the women, and many men, weeping openly. Silence grew as the throng drained into the castle's inner courtyard; then the drawbridge rang again with clopping hoofbeats. Another cart horse appeared, led by a pair of heartbroken soldiers.

  Shaking, willing myself to awaken from this horrible nightmare, I clung to the wall behind me. The cart passed. Inside I beheld the waxen and immobile face of my mother.

  I staggered forward, deaf to my own cries, and clambered beside her. I twined my fingers in her icy hand, wiping the sodden hair and bits of grass from her face, searching for her sweet smile. Her body, still and twisted, did not move but for the rocking of the cart.

  I spread my cape over us both, doing my best to protect her from the rain. "You'll be fine," I murmured. "Just fine. Sleep now..." Though my mind knew she had left this world, my heart could not accept it, and I poured all the love I knew onto her lifeless form. Suddenly, I turned to the soldiers: "Father! Where is my father?"

  They shifted, avoiding my eye.

  "Please! Tell me, I beg you..."

  At last, one of them spoke. "No one knows, miss." He swallowed convulsively. "He's gone."

  ***

  All that night King Ferdinand's body lay outside the castle. Every Montagne man, woman, and child capable of travel came to pay respects, their tears mingling with the desolate rain, and by morning the
windows, flagpoles, and people were draped in black crepe as the wool merchants of Market Town emptied their warehouses.

  My mother lay in the castle courtyard as well, and I refused to leave her side. I can scarce recall any detail from that swirl of sodden pain, the useless words of solace offered by neighbors and friends. I craved every moment with her, and moreover wanted to hear immediately any news whatsoever of my father. Hour by hour, soldiers replaced the lantern at her head with a fresh taper. Search parties, filthy and exhausted, returned for reinforcements, and by their stance alone I could tell they had naught to report. The entire valley roiled with confusion, the terror abetted by the downpour. Dawn arrived at last, lightening the cold fog, with no sign of Xavier the Elder or my father. Soldiers returning from the tomb reported in whispers that their nocturnal efforts had reduced the site to mud, defeating any further tracking. The news drove me closer still to my mother's icy corpse.

  As tradition dictated, interment took place that afternoon. A formal memorial service would occur months or years hence following completion of a tomb for King Ferdinand, and for my mother as well, a princess by marriage if not temperament. At the moment, however, the bodies required burial without delay, however much the sky cried its relentless drizzle.

  In the confusion and turmoil, I was overlooked or indulged by everyone, allowed to accompany my mother's body to the gravesite and to give her one last embrace as she was sealed in a simple wooden coffin. I still wore the heavy cape I had donned when first I left our home so many hours before, and the sopping wool dripped cold water down my neck whenever I peered toward Ancienne, forever anticipating that the fog would part to reveal some sign of my father. The chill mingled with my grief and exhaustion, and standing at the graveside, listening to the drone of the priest, his words devoid of intimacy or comfort, I broke down completely.

  "Why do you all stand here?" I shrieked, my voice carrying across the throng. "Why aren't you looking for him? He's out there, somewhere, and you don't even care! I'll find him myself, then. I will! I'll find him myself..." My rush toward the mountain was stopped at once by kind hands, and unkind hands as well, accompanied by hisses that I must behave myself before the queen, who stood at the graves' head in a black veil, as rigid and unmoving as a corpse.