Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Foreword
PART I - Lavender’s Blue
How It Began
PART II - Rosemary’s Green
Amy
PART III - When You Are King
The Forest
PART IV - I Shall Be Queen
“The Birches”
PUFFIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers,
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London.WC2R ORL, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcom Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published in the United States of America by Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1980
New edition published simultaneously by Viking and Puffin Books,
divisions of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 2002
10
Copyright © M. M. Kaye, 1980, 1984
All rights reserved
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE VIKING EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Kaye, M.M. (Mary Margaret), 1911—
The ordinary princess / written and illustrated by M.M. Kaye
p. cm.
Summary: At her christening, a princess is given the gift of “ordinariness” by a fairy,
and the consequences of that eventually take her to a nearby palace where, as the
fourteenth assistant kitchen maid, she meets the prince for her.
eISBN : 978-1-101-14257-8
[1. Princesses—Fiction. 2. Fairy tales.] I. Title.
PZ8. K28 Or 2002
Fic—dc21 2001026545
http://us.penguingroup.com
For
my granddaughter
Mollie Miranda Kaye
Foreword by the Author
This story was written many moons ago under an apple tree in an orchard in Kent, which is one of England’s prettiest counties.
It was springtime and I was staying with a school friend whose parents owned an old manor house that was full of pictures and books: books for grown-ups and books for children. Among the latter I was delighted to discover some that I knew well, for I had once had a whole set of these myself, only to lose them when a London warehouse, in which most of our family belongings had been stored after my father died, caught fire and burned to the ground.
They were the Andrew Lang fairy books, which Lang had compiled from stories that he had collected from all over the world. From China and India, Persia and Arabia, France, Britain and Spain, Germany, Russia and the Netherlands, and, in fact, from anywhere where generations of people have told their children fairy tales at bedtime—which means practically everywhere!
Nowadays The Blue Fairy Book, The Green Fairy Book, The Lilac Fairy Book, and so on, right through the list of colors, are collector’s items that fetch high prices at book auctions. Their charming illustrations were mostly the work of an artist called H. J. Ford, and I had admired them so much, particularly the colored ones, that I had made up my mind at a very early age that I too would be an illustrator of children’s books when I grew up.
During the next few days I reread most of them, and it was only after I had read at least twenty of the stories that I noticed something that had never struck me before—I suppose because I had always taken it for granted. All the princesses, apart from such rare exceptions as Snow White, were blond, blue-eyed, and beautiful, with lovely figures and complexions and extravagantly long hair. This struck me as most unfair, and suddenly I began to wonder just how many handsome young princes would have asked a king for the hand of his daughter if that daughter had happened to be gawky, snub-nosed, and freckled, with shortish mouse-colored hair? None, I suspected. They would all have been off chasing after some lissome Royal Highness with large blue eyes and yards of golden hair and probably nothing whatever between her ears!
It was in that moment that a story about a princess who turned out to be ordinary jumped into my mind, and the very next morning I took my pencil box and a large rough-notebook down to the orchard and, having settled myself under an apple tree in full bloom, began to write it. England was having a marvelous spring that year, and the day was warm and windless and without a cloud in the sky. A perfect day and a perfect place to write a fairy story. For what could be a better spot for a princess—even an ordinary one—to be born in than an apple orchard in spring?
Apart from the fact that it was my hand that scribbled it all down, I cannot honestly claim to have written her story, for in fact it wrote itself. And at such breakneck speed that it was all I could do to make my pencil keep up with the tale that my head was telling me. It was an experience that has only happened to me on one other occasion, and I only wish it would happen more often, since except for those two occasions I am an extremely slow writer. Snails are not in the same league with me, and I always write in pencil so that I can rub out my mistakes. Yet I cannot remember using my eraser even once when I was writing The Ordinary Princess, and I sometimes think that Amy herself must have been doing the dictating. If so, she couldn’t spell any better than I can. I never could spell. And still can‘t, worse luck!
When the story stopped of its own accord, I copied it out tidily from my rough-notebook onto lined paper, and once I was back again at work in London, a friend typed it out for me. After that, whenever I had any spare time, I would do one of the illustrations for it. The trouble was that I never had much spare time in those days, and that is why the manuscript, and as many of the illustrations as I had managed to do, eventually got put away in a portfolio and forgotten.
It is nice to know that at long last it is seeing the light of day, and I hope very much that readers will enjoy it. For if a time ever comes when children turn up their noses at such things as fairy tales and Father Christmas and Halloween, the world will be a lot duller—and not nearly such a nice place to live in!
PART I
Lavender’s Blue
How It Began
Long and long ago, when Oberon was king of the fairies, there reigned over the fair country of Phantasmorania a monarch who had six beautiful daughters.
They were in every way all that real princesses should be, for their hair was as yellow as the gold that is mined by the little gnomes in the mountains of the north, their eyes were as blue as the larkspurs in the palace gardens, and they had complexions like wild rose petals and cream.
Their royal Mama the Queen was very proud of them, and they had all had extremely grand christenings when they were babies. She had called them all after precious stones and was often heard to refer to them playfully as “my jewels.” Their names were Diamond, Opal, Emerald, Sapphire, Crystal and Pearl.
Every princess wore a golden crown set with the jewels of her first name, so you can imagine the excitement in the city of Phanff (which is the capital of Phantasmorania) when the news leaked out that Messrs. Heibendiks & Piphorn, Goldsmiths and Silversmiths, By Appointment to His Majesty King Hulderbrand, had been commissioned to make another crown and this time to set it with amethysts.
“So there is going to be a seventh princess at the palace,” exclaimed the housewives of Phanff.
“That is as it should be; a seventh daughter is always lucky,” cackled the oldest inhabitant.
“A seventh princess!” sighed the romantic maidens. “And of course she will be the most beautiful of all. Youngest princesses always are.”<
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“How lucky she will be!” And “Oh, how lovely to be a princess,” thought the schoolchildren, looking enviously across the roofs of the town to where the tall towers and pointed turrets of the Royal Palace of Phanff rose high above the treetops.
“How do you know that it won’t be a prince this time?” asked the travelers stopping at the inns and taverns of the city. But the townspeople and the innkeepers and the hosts of the taverns only laughed and said, “It is plain that you are strangers to the country. Our royal family always has princesses.”
“But you have a king,” objected the travelers.
“Ah yes; but by tradition the heir to the throne is always the youngest son of the eldest princess. It’s very simple.”
And so, upon a lovely spring morning, when the primroses were gold in the Forest of Faraway and the woods were white with wild cherry blossom, the great bronze cannon on the palace walls, which is only fired at the birth of a royal baby, boomed out on the still air. And as the first puff of smoke broke from the walls and the first “Boom!” rang out over the city, the townspeople stopped their work and housewives, shopkeepers and schoolchildren all ran out together into the streets.
Every eye was turned to the palace. “Boom!” rang out the cannon. “Boom!” “Boom!” “Fifteen—sixteen—seventeen—eighteen—nine- teen,” counted the townsfolk. “Twenty! A princess!” they cried. And they threw their hats in the air and cheered while the bells of all the churches in the city rang a merry peal and a general holiday was declared in honor of the occasion.
In a rich and splendid room, high up in a turret of the palace, the cause of all the excitement and rejoicing lay in a golden cradle and blinked at the carved ceiling.
The seventh princess really was the loveliest baby imaginable. She was no bigger than one of her sisters’ dolls, but she was as pink and white and gold as the apple blossoms and the spring sunshine, and her eyes were as blue as the sky above the Forest of Faraway. Her nurses and ladies-in-waiting never tired of admiring and exclaiming over her many perfections, and from the first she was a very good-tempered baby. She never cried or screamed but would lie on her back and smile at the sunbeams dancing on the ceiling, or sleep for hours on end.
She had a very grand nursery for such a very small person, for the ceiling was all carved and painted with legends of the Forest of Faraway, and the walls were hung with amethyst-colored tapestry. The floor was spread with silken carpets, and the seventh princess had no less than twelve attendants all her own. First there was her nurse, Marta, then three under-nurses, two ladies-in-waiting, four nurserymaids, and two pages. Sometimes the pages would play on flutes and viols while the ladies-in-waiting sang lullabies to hush the seventh princess to sleep.
When she was six weeks old, preparations were begun for an especially grand and splendid christening. Hundreds of clerks sat at ivory desks all day, writing out invitations with gold ink on parchment. Hundreds of pages heated gold sealing wax to seal the envelopes, and hundreds of the King’s messengers put spurs to their horses and rode away east and west and north and south to deliver them to the invited guests.
The list of invitations was so long that it took the Lord High Chamberlain from before breakfast until after suppertime to read it, while the roll it made was so large that it took six men-at-arms to carry it. There had been a long debate in Council on “The Advisability of Inviting Fairies to the Christening.” The King had been against it from the first, but he had ended by being overruled by the Queen, who had been backed up by the Prime Minister and the Lord High Chamberlain and a large majority of the councillors.
“Oh, all right—have it your own way,” said the King at last. “But mind you, I think it’s rash. And I shall go on saying that it’s rash. We didn’t have any of these fairy nuisances at the christenings of my other daughters, and what happened?”
“Nothing,” said the Queen.
“Precisely,” said the King. “Perfect peace and quiet. Everything went off beautifully; no fuss or bother and everyone had an extremely good time.”
“But Your Majesty—” began the Prime Minister.
“I know, I know. Don’t interrupt me,” said the King testily. “You are going to tell me that it is the custom of our kingdom to invite all fairies to the christening of a seventh daughter. You have already said it at least seven times, and I still say that it’s rash!”
“There is no need to get heated about it, dear,” said the Queen. “You know perfectly well that it has always been done before and that it would look very odd if it were not done now.”
“I’m not getting heated,” said the King. “I only said that it was rash.”
“For goodness’ sake, Hulderbrand,” snapped the Queen, almost losing her royal temper, “do stop using that annoying word.” She took a deep breath and recovered her queenly calm: “Besides, dear, think how useful it will be. Fairies always give such delightful presents. Like Good Temper and—and Unfailing Charm and Unfading Beauty. You wouldn’t want to deprive your daughter of such a chance?”
“I can only repeat,” said the King stubbornly, “that to invite fairies to a christening is asking for trouble. And getting it,” he added gloomily. “Speaking for myself,” said the King, “I’d far rather ask several man-eating tigers. You may have forgotten what happened to my great-great-great-grandmother, but I have not. Had to sleep for a hundred years, poor girl, and the entire court with her, and all because of some silly fairy-business at the christening.”
“But Your Majesty forgets,” put in the Prime Minister, “that the unfortunate episode you refer to was due to gross neglect and carelessness. History tells us that an influential fairy was not invited. But on this occasion I, personally, will take the greatest possible care that no such calamity occurs again.” And the Prime Minister tried to look very uncareless indeed.
The Lord High Chamberlain hastened to add that no single member of King Oberon’s court would be omitted from the list of guests: “And we must not forget,” he pointed out, “that as Her Majesty has said, these—er—persons have it in their power to bestow the most valuable of gifts. For your daughter’s sake—” urged the Lord High Chamberlain.
“Oh, all right, all right,” said the King peevishly. “Don’t let’s go over all that again. But you mark my words,” he said, “I’d much rather have a nice silver-plated christening mug from a nice solid baron than some chancy thing like Unfading Beauty from a tricky creature with wings and a wand! Besides,” said the King, “who’s to tell that some tiresome fairy won’t get out on the wrong side of her bed that day and give my daughter Perpetual Bad Temper instead? Answer me that!”
“Really, Hulderbrand,” sighed the Queen in an exasperated sort of voice, “I find you quite impossible at times. It seems to me that you are determined to be unreasonable about the whole affair.”
“But Your Majesty—” began the Prime Minister.
“But Your Majesty—” began the Lord High Chamberlain.
“But Your Majesty—” chorused the councillors.
“Oh, all right,” said the King. “Have it your own way. Ask the lot. Don’t mind me!” He gathered up his train and glared at his councillors, the Prime Minister, the Lord High Chamberlain, and the Queen. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he said. “No fairies have ever attended a christening without some funny business happening somewhere. You just mark my words,” said the King. “It’s rash.”
And with that he bounced out of the Council chamber and slammed the door behind him.
So the fairies were invited after all, and the most tremendous care was taken that no fairy should be overlooked: in fact a special committee was appointed to see to it that no one was forgotten. As the day of the christening approached, the whole palace buzzed with bustle and excitement like a hive of bees.
In the royal kitchens two hundred and twenty cooks, four hundred scullions, as many servingmen, and five hundred kitchen maids worked like mad, baking cakes and pies and pastries. They stuff
ed swans and peacocks and boars’ heads and made wonderful sweets—marzipan trees hung with crystalized cherries, and castles and dragons and great ships of sugar candy. Five cooks from Italy worked on the christening cake, which was decorated with hundreds of sugar bells and crystalized roses, and was so tall that they had to stand on silver steplad ders to ice it.
Ladies-in-waiting filled golden flower vases and crystal bowls with hundreds of blooms, so that the whole palace looked like a flower garden and smelled most deliciously of roses and lilies and lilac. Housemaids polished the chandeliers, and footmen and pages ran to and fro with trays full of china and glass. In the city the rich merchants and important citizens who had been invited to the ceremony were having new suits and dresses made for the occasion, and the townsfolk were preparing bonfires and decorating their streets and houses with banners and wreaths.
The day of the christening dawned bright and sunny, with not a single cloud in the blue sky. Guns boomed and church bells rang in every steeple as the townsfolk crowded round the palace to cheer the arrival of the guests. But the seventh princess was quite unbothered by all this noise and fuss. She lay in her magnificent cradle in the great throne room and stared at the dangling fringe of little golden bells on the canopy above her head and paid no attention to the guests at all.
She had seven godfathers and seventeen godmoth ers, and when the christening ceremony was over, heralds in scarlet and gold blew a fanfare on silver trumpets and announced her seven names to the populace:
“Her Serene and Royal Highness the Princess Amethyst Alexandra Augusta Araminta Adelaide Aurelia Anne!” cried the heralds.