And the only payment he desired was the queen’s beautifully melodious vocal chords. For, he added unnecessarily, he was an avid collector of such things, as lesser people collected butterflies.
Naturally, the queen was sorely tempted to have him executed on the spot for his impertinence. The problem being that he hadn’t actually delivered the bed yet (a problem that many people will immediately recognise). Moreover, executing a fairy usually resulted in unforeseen and extremely ironic disasters.
She agreed to his proposal, thinking that her voice was of no consequence against having her legendary beauty forever restored.
She could always communicate, after all, through written commands, using quill and parchment.
Indeed, her very muteness, in combination with her great beauty, might even endear her with a totally ethereal quality. If she continued to age, however, her voice would only become irritatingly harsh and grating anyway.
Besides, the fairy assured her that she would only need to fulfil her side of the bargain when she awoke with her youth restored. If she felt that this wasn’t the case, then no payment could obviously be demanded of her.
The bed was delivered and installed within the queen’s bedchamber.
Once it was installed, she gave instructions that from this very moment on, no one should ever enter her bedchamber again. Not even to change the bedclothes, or prepare the fire in the grate, of bring her breakfast.
She wanted no one else to benefit from the powers of the wondrous bed as they gradually spread throughout her room. What’s more, she hoped that soon everyone would forget that her continuing youth and beauty was all down to the magical bed; she much preferred that everyone believed her beauty was all her own, all perfectly natural.
That night, as she prepared for bed, she dressed only in her flimsiest nightgown, reassuring herself that she wouldn’t be needing it in the morning.
Normally, an elaborate dress would be laid out for her, complete with all its many and varied under-dressings, ready for when she awoke and a gaggle of servants descended on her room to painstakingly help her into them all. But that would no longer be either necessary or possible, of course.
The servants were no longer allowed to enter, so she required something much simpler she could slip into. She could always change into her regal finery, with the help of a full platoon of maids, later in the morning.
Besides, when she was reborn with her youthful figure and energy, she didn’t want it all to be hidden and restricted beneath so many heavy, stiff layers. She wanted clothes more befitting the young, vibrant woman she could already imagine herself to be: that girl so full of life whose body and looks had started wasting away soon after she had married and had children.
She was so excited that night, she found it hard to sleep.
All she could think of was the wonders the morning would bring.
But sleep she did, of course.
Not that anyone would realise this until many, many years later.
*
The next morning, the queen slept in.
She slept in a very long time.
With strict instructions that no one should enter her room, the maids and servants kept their distance. Eventually, it was only the king himself who dared knock on her door to enquire what was keeping her so long.
There was no answer to his knocking, no matter how hard he knocked.
At last, the king entered the room: and saw immediately that the room was empty. The bedclothes had been thrown right back, as if by an excited girl eager to experience another wonderful day.
The simple, youthful clothes the queen had insisted on taking to her room the previous night had gone. The nightdress remained.
Obviously, the wondrous bed had worked! An incredibly youthful queen had dressed early and gone out exploring.
Or so, naturally, everyone in the palace told themselves. But by the evening, there was still neither sign nor news of the queen.
By nightfall, the king had sent out large parties of riders with orders to search the immediate countryside.
By the next day, the king had begun to consider sending out proclamations to every town and village, commanding everyone in his kingdom to join in the search for his queen: but that would be a foolish move, he realised, for how would he even begin to explain her strange disappearance?
Would he have to admit they should be looking for a young girl, not the older woman his people knew the queen to be?
Would this finally reveal to everyone the queen’s obsession with youth, to the extent that she had recruited the dark arts into her quest to retain her beauty?
Would the disappearance of innumerable young, beautiful girls throughout his kingdom be finally linked to the queen’s murderous intent?
After a month of fruitlessly searching for the queen, it began to be whispered everywhere in court that the queen had been tricked by the fairy; who, naturally, could no longer be found anywhere either.
After a year, it was agreed that it should be proclaimed that the queen had died quietly in her sleep. A week of mourning in respect of her deceased majesty was also announced.
After another year, she was just another queen who had once helped rule the kingdom, the only reminder of her once towering beauty being the portrait of her that still hung in the great hall. (But of course, painters were renowned for flattering their subjects, particularly regal ones; so how could anyone be really sure that this was indeed how she had looked?)
As for her bedroom, no one dared enter it, for fear that they too would vanish, a victim of the fairy’s cunning enchantment. The room was sealed off, the door nailed into place (for, it was agreed, to board it up, or even to plaster over it, would spoil the look of the elegant hallway).
It was only ever opened once more, and this was to use it as storage for another unwanted and dangerous magical object (for, it was agreed, to use another room would be to inconveniently waste two rooms).
The magical object in this case was a mirror, one that showed you where to find those responsible for all your problems. Which seems innocent enough, even something that could be quite usefully employed; but then, of course, a bed that restores youth could be regarded in similarly highly positive terms.
Two footmen were offered a day’s extra pay (which actually wasn’t much, as they weren’t actually paid) to quickly deposit the mirror in the room.
Although disgruntled that their lives were being put at risk, they reassured themselves that they wouldn’t remain in the room long enough for anything untoward to befall them.
Carrying the mirror between them, the two footmen dashed into the room as a third held the door open for them.
They quickly placed the mirror towards the bottom of the bed. Even so, one of them was already peevishly complaining that the other was letting ‘his end slip’, that it was ‘so unfair that he was doing all the work’.
By the time they had made it out of the room, the youngest footman was just six years old. Which was particularly odd as, when they had first entered, he had quite easily been the eldest of the two. The second footman had got off more lightly, now being all of twelve years old.
The door was nailed tight once more, with strict instructions that it should never, ever be opened again.
*
The queen, it turned out, hadn’t vanished.
Like the servants, she had had her youth restored by the bed, as the fairy had promised.
Fortunately for her, as the bed had only been recently installed within the room, its magical power hadn’t spread throughout the entire room at that time. Neither was it quite so powerful (naturally magic, like the best wines, can mature and gain in strength), nor so swiftly effective.
Far from being appalled, or even merely disappointed, by her magical bed, the queen was overjoyed by its effects.
As she had hoped, as she had dreamt of, she awoke in the morning as the beautiful, youthful woman she had once being so long ago.
&nb
sp; She thrilled at her ease of movement. The softness and flexibility of her skin. The luxuriousness of her hair.
She leapt gleefully from her bed, carelessly throwing back the sheets as she used to do as an impetuous young woman.
She laughed at the ridiculous frumpiness of the nightdress she had thought so elegant only the night before.
She was so glad she’d had the foresight to ensure she had clothes fit for her youthful, energetic figure. She eagerly slipped into them.
She ran from the room, laughing and skipping in her joy to be young once more.
The only people around so early in the morning were the staff either cleaning the hallways, or leaving outside of doors the firewood and coal that would be required when fires were lit in the rooms.
They were all far too busy at their tasks to notice this excitable young girl lightly and almost silently tripping down the long flights of stairs. Even if they had noticed her, they would have simply returned to their work after a disapproving shake of a head.
The queen dashed outside into the courtyard: a ride, she wanted to go for a ride! She rushed towards the stables.
She was thirsty, she realised. She hadn’t had any breakfast, thanks to her insistence that no maids should enter her room!
She drew water up from the stables’ well, amazed at her strength.
She began to drink from the large bucket, laughing rather than being upset that her carelessness resulted in her spilling the cool water over her clothes, even her hair.
She went into her personal stable, where her favourite horse was housed. She instantly swung up onto the horse with the intention to ride him bareback, as she had used to ride him so long ago whenever it had taken her fancy to do so.
Unable to recognise the queen, the horse protested at this unwanted intrusion. He bucked, whinnied.
The queen tried to calm him with a few reassuring words; but naturally, no words came from her mouth. The fairy had taken her vocal cords as payment.
Not to worry, the queen thought: you don’t need words to use a whip!
But the horse had had enough of this stranger. He bucked wilder than ever, rearing up, kicking out with his hind legs.
The queen was thrown, landing awkwardly amongst a pile of evil-smelling dung and old hay, the sweepings of the stables left for clearing away later in the morning.
She leapt back to her feet, determined to severely punish her horse for making her smell and look as filthy as the very worst of her peasants.
As she reached for a nearby whip and swung it wildly towards the horse’s flanks, her action was abruptly stilled, a powerful hand grasping her by the wrist.
‘How dare you!’
Of course, no words came from her mouth. Yet the stable master quite obviously recognised her furious and threatening behaviour to both him and the queen’s horse.
He brutally pushed her back into the pile of dung, snatching the whip from her as she fell back.
‘I’ve no idea who you are girl,’ he snarled ferociously, rolling up his sleeves as he approached and bent over her, ‘but we know how to reward peasant girls who try and steal royal horses!’
*
How did this latter part of the story ever come to light?
Why, it came at last from the queen’s own hand, of course.
Eventually someone had wondered why this crazy, dumb peasant woman continued to ludicrously claim that she was in fact their queen! They’d reluctantly granted her the incredibly expensive quill and parchment she’d been demanding for so, so long!
Not that it did her any good.
You see, by this time she was old beyond her years, having suffered a lifetime of arduous servitude and regular beatings.
And in all that time, she’d hardly got any sleep at all; for her bed had been nothing more than the filthiest hay.
*
Chapter 34
Luna was surprised by the tale: but not in the way the rose had expected her to be.
‘But how could you know that Natalie – Natalie the violin – had overheard us talking about this mirror? She never had chance to tell you this.’
‘There seems to be some weak connection remaining between the violins and the flowers,’ the old woman explained. ‘The violins, I believe, still contain a great deal of the original child’s soul: for it’s that which gives them their – as it were – soulful power, the incredible emotion inherent in their playing.’
‘A soul? A soul to unlock?’
While carefully holding the broken Natalie in one hand, Luna reached into her pocket, where she had safely stored the small, white mistletoe key. She produced it, letting it glow in the light mystically as she held it up for the old woman to see.
‘I think,’ she said uncertainly, ‘we might be able to give Natalie back some form of her old life.’
*
After the four of them – for naturally they included the rose in their discussion, as she had the most to lose and the most to gain from their proposal – had considered the best and worst ways of setting about their task, they immediately got to work.
They had at one point discussed baking a child of gingerbread. But, although flattered that Luna thought so highly of her cooking skills, the old woman had insisted that Natalie’s body would have to be of soil and clay. For it was the earth, she reminded everyone, that drew out the individual qualities of each flower-child. And she saw no reason to doubt that that would also be the case here too.
They drew the soil they needed from the riverbed that, the old woman assured them, would be more clay-like than that which she’d made her garden of.
As they dragged up the clay in a large pail with a rope tied to its handle, and emptied it onto the small lawn, it was immediately obvious that there were far too many large, sharp stones amongst it for it to be smoothly moulded. So Rouger painstakingly set to clearing it all of as many stones as he could find, many of which were so sharp they cut into even his skin of semi-wood, his blood mingling with the soil he handed onto Luna for moulding.
As for Luna, as she had done before in her creation of Rouger, she began by mixing a small quantity of the soil with the spume-like liquid of the key. She was surprised once again by the way that its white glow flowed into the red, a red of actual blood this time rather than berries.
The clay expanded in her hands, became increasingly malleable and quickened, and she even began to hope that this wasn’t such a foolish idea after all.
Even if it did work, she wondered, would they have to wait a whole night, as had happened with Rouger? And, even then, would Natalie simply be of clay, as opposed to flesh and blood?
Of course, she believed that, at best, the answer to both of these questions would be a definite ‘yes’. But once again, she could hope that, like Rouger, Natalie would gradually take on ever-more human characteristics.
When she felt she had produced enough of the quickened clay, she began to build it up around the broken violin as if its wood formed the heart, leaving a gap in her creation that left the hole in the sound box easily accessible.
When she felt she had a reasonably formed child – in fact one as crudely constructed as the boy she had made when hoping to grant Rouger life – she stood back, gave her hands a satisfied wipe.
She approached the rose once more.
‘You do realise,’ she said to Natalie the rose, ‘that we have to cut you from your stem? And that this probably won’t work, if I’m being honest.’
The rose gave the slight movement that sufficed as a nod of agreement.
‘We’ve already discussed this Luna: we have to give it a try.’
The old woman was standing by with a gardening knife. Sadly, with a regretfully doubtful grin, she cut the short stem keeping the rose alive.
Tenderly, the old woman cupped the little rose in her hands. Equally tenderly, she placed it within the hole of the violin, where the heart of a real child would be.
Quickly, deftly, Luna covered the hole with
more quickened clay.
‘Now,’ she said, stepping back from her creation with a pensive pursing of her lips, ‘all we can do is wait: and hope this works.’
*
Chapter 35
Luna’s hands were still covered with a light sheen of bloodied clay.
Amongst it all, she noticed once more that moon-like glow that seemed to give the clay a life of its own.
As she stared at the glowing streams of viscously white liquid, the glow appeared to expand; to rise up slightly from her hand, forming into a bright sphere.
Like a mistletoe berry.
Like a miniature moon.
She curled her thumb towards the glistening sphere, touched it lightly; squashed it a little more.
The sphere quickened, fluctuated, its shape changing.
In her hand, Luna now held another small, mistletoe-berry key.
*
Chapter 36
‘She…she’s alive!’
Rouger gasped in surprise, in awe.
On the ground, the clay figure was coughing, spluttering.
Like a child who had just been rescued from a river, she was expunging from her lungs and body everything that was bad, everything preventing it from living.
She rolled slightly, vomited up a mess of wood. An unrecognisable black bile.
She opened bleary eyes of white pebbles.
She looked up. She sat up slightly, ungainly, uncertainly.
She tried to smile.
‘It worked!’
She spat, coughed, chuckled harshly as she tried to clear her mouth once more.
‘I can’t believe it – but I’m back! It’s me: Natalie!’
*