Royalty

The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity.

~Henri Bergson

(It's been a lot longer coming than I had implied, not because it was unwritten, but because I'm the slowest blog poster ever, but here's the post I mentioned at the end of the last one. Hope you enjoy!)

Lydia had wispy yellow curls and a small sweet smile, and from the time she could coo, her proud parents told her she looked like a princess. "Liddie, darling," they said to their pretty infant, "you beat out the king's daughter in looks, you do."

So Lydia grew, always assured by her parents that she had the look of an aristocrat about her. Never did she learn that other little girls all across the world had mamas and papas who called them princess. No, Liddie thought she was a special sort, and took hold of some very definite ideas regarding the way princesses--or people who looked like princesses--were supposed to behave.

Lydia's family's closest neighbors were the wheelwright, the wheelwright's wife, and their son, who was named Tommy. Tommy had shiny dark hair and solemn gray eyes, and from the day he was born, his parents told him he looked like a little prince.

"Look at those big eyes shine, won't you?" said Tommy's mother.

"Reg'lar little prince, bless his wee heart," said Tommy's father, twiddling Tommy's toes.

And Tommy grew up just knowing he was the closest thing to a prince his village had ever seen. He might've heard other mothers in town affectionately calling their sons "prince" or "duke" or "little lord Sammy," but he knew princes didn't play with commoners. So he didn't play with Sammy--whose mother called him lord--or Billy--whose auntie called him duke--or any of the other children, and thus never caught wind of the royal pet-name trend.

Tommy and Lydia got along very well. With the aid of an old red storybook, an old blue etiquette book, and some rather sweeping assumptions about royal lives, the two children played prince and princess every single day. In fact, they seldom stopped playing all night, and had their suppers and baths and bedtime stories while holding their backs straight and keeping their voices royally haughty.

"Liddie, want some pudding?"

Lydia sniffed. "That is NOT my name," she said.

Her father chuckled indulgently. "Princess Lydia, it's two choices--pudding or bath?"

"A princess is always clean," said Lydia, rising from her chair and dropping her napkin on the floor. "Mother, go draw my bath."

Tommy, for his part, took a princely dislike to doing his chores and helping his father make and repair wheels. One afternoon, his father told him he was to become an apprentice and learn the fine old trade of wheel-making.

"I'd rather not," said Tommy, looking distastefully at the sawdust heaped soft and thick on the shop floor.

"Well, you're going to anyway," said his father.

"Why? Princes don't work."

His father laughed. "Princes might not, but wheelwright's sons, they do have a habit of making wheels. Really now, little prince, what else do you expect to do with your life?"

"Play chess."

Tommy did learn how to make a good wagon wheel that wouldn't break or warp or glump-bump the passengers too much when in use, but he did so with a very disappointing lack of enthusiasm, and more than once his father shook his head and wished that the little prince would be a little bit more of a little wheelwright and a little bit less worried about getting splinters in his hands and sawdust on his clothes.

When Tommy and Lydia were eleven, they heard the town carpenter, Jonas, complaining about the king to Tommy's father.

"Skipped right over me, he did. Choose a carpenter from Southwich. It's ten miles farther to Southwich, by George! Not fair at all, that isn't. Not a teensy bit."

Tommy's father nodded sympathetically, but said nothing. It was well-known that Jonas was a good man but a bad carpenter, and the things he built tended to fall down when it rained or snowed or blew too hard, or if the sun shone on them too brightly or someone looked at them wrong.

"...All I'm saying, Fred, is that next time that king wants to add onto that castle of his, you just see how much help he'll get from me. Not a particle, I'm tellin' you. Blasted royalty!"

Lydia looked at Tommy with wide eyes. "He just insulted the royal family!" she whispered.

Tommy nodded and ran his fingers through his handsome head of hair. "Princess Lydia, if he has insulted royalty, I say we should insult him!"

She looked a little confused, so he added, "Just refusing to grace him with our presence will be punishment enough, don't you think?"

"Oh, of course. Come on, Prince Tommy!"

So whenever they saw Jonas, the two children crossed the street, turned up their chins, and looked down their noses, refusing his offer of a wooden spinning-top or a piece of candy or even a friendly pat on the shoulder. And poor, friendly Jonas got to thinking--rightfully so--that the children had some sort of odd grievance against him. This was particularly unfortunate where Lydia was concerned, as Jonas was her mother's brother, and had always doted upon her.

Three years after they began snubbing Jonas (who never stopped trying to regain their good graces, and never managed to succeed), the king's housekeeper stopped by the village to pick up some fresh potatoes after bugs got into the castle supply. While she was inspecting each to make sure that the eyes and bumps didn't look too much like little potato faces (for, although she appeared to be a woman of supremely pragmatic sensibilities, the housekeeper had never been able to make herself cook the parts of things that had heads), Lydia's mama, fondling the tomatoes at the next stand, dropped her handkerchief. It fluttered over to the housekeeper and landed on her potato pile.

Lydia's mama hurried over just as the housekeeper picked it up and began examining it as if it were another potato.

"Excuse me, ma'am--I dropped my--"

"This?" the lady asked, squinting at the lace edging. "This is very fine needlework here. Your work?"

"My daughter Lydia's. It's a good hand that girl has, if I do say so myself."

"How is she in other homey endeavors?"

"She doesn't cook much, ma'am. But she's decent tidy and brilliant at her needlework, and such a pretty little thing!"

"That was my next question," said the housekeeper. "Hair?"

"Golden curls."

"Eyes?"

"Blue and sparkling."

"Skin?"

"Prettier than wild roses."

"Age?"

"Fourteen."

"Singing voice?"

"Soft but clear."

And on and on it went, for a solid hour, until the king's housekeeper knew more about Lydia than anybody in the village except Lydia's parents. Finally, Lydia and Tommy came marching into the market to see what was holding up Lydia's supper.

The housekeeper smiled at the pretty maid and put a hand on her shoulder, which Lydia graciously allowed for exactly one minute. "My dear," she said, "how would you like to live in the castle?"

"It's where I belong," said Lydia.

"Well, I'm glad to hear that, because I was wondering if you would be interested in a job at the castle as lady-in-waiting to Queen Edith. We need someone right now, you see."

It turned out that the old lady-in-waiting had accidentally sampled one of the court magician's more in-progress potions, and inflated to be so enormously fat that she had to be rolled through the palace, looking rather like a pale truffle covered in pink ruffles. As she kept stopping up the doors, she was not much good as a lady-in-waiting, and thus the queen was looking for a new one while the old one was slowly put to rights.

Lydia's mother was very nearly whistling with delight like a teakettle at the thought of this splendidly royal opportunity for her daughter.

Lydia, however, shrugged off the housekeeper's hand and politely said no thank you, not interested, not happening.

"My true calling is to be princess," she said, tossing her curls. "Anything less is a blemish on my record. Find someone else to amuse your queen."

The housekeeper huffed her way back to the royal wagon with her faceless potatoes, and Lydia was grounded for two weeks, about which she was rather disturbingly unconcerned.

Not two more years had passed before a sweaty, huge, bearded man came from the castle to Tommy's father's shop to rave about how smooth Fred the Wheelwright's wheels were, and how they were currently the only wheels in use by the king and his court.

"Please, master wheelwright," begged the man, who seemed to have a flair for theatrics, "Come with me! Live in the castle as our in-house wheelwright and protect us forever from cracks and bumps and poor spoke designs!"

"Sorry, sir," said the wheelwright. "My wife likes it here, see, and she'd have nary a thing to do with moving away from her friends, and as I can't do without her, I guess I'm what you might call a frozen asset."

The big man flourished wildly. "Have you an apprentice you can send? A nephew? Firstborn son? Anyone you have trained in the art of fine wheelmaking? Please, sir, you could stop our beloved king's behind from ever being bruised because of ill-made wheels!"

"I do have a firstborn son..." began the wheelwright.

"Excellent! Can he make wheels?"

"Well...yes, actually."

"Hallelujah! You trained him? Good wheels?"

"Structurally sound."

"We'll take him!"

The wheelwright called Tommy down as the big man dramatically beseeched the wheelwright to sign the wheels on his wagon (which was a task complicated by the fact that the wheelwright's literacy skills were somewhat lacking), and beamed at him.

"Son, you'll never believe it! This man here is sent by the king, and he is offering you a job at the castle to be a wheelwright all on your own! What do you think?"

Tommy laughed at the offer. His father, aghast, threatened to whip him if he were not more polite, but as Tommy later explained to Lydia, living in a castle but not owning it was as bad as being the lowest stable boy, which was as bad as being a clump of dirty sheep's wool lying on the ground. He was determined to not be anything less than a prince.

The big man deflated and climbed into his unsigned carriage for the wheelmaker-less ride back to the castle. (And for the record, the wheelwright himself simply went and wept a little weep for his impossibly obstinate son, and then forgot entirely about whipping the boy.)

When Tommy and Lydia turned eighteen, they decided to get married. They loved each other as much as they loved anybody else (although perhaps not as much as each of them loved himself), and besides, they looked so good together! It seemed logical. Their mothers invited the whole village, although the wording Lydia put on the invitation (which involved the word "subjects" more than once) meant that only six non-relatives RSVPed. Both Tommy and Lydia were determined to have their wedding be as proper and non-villagey as possible. Unfortunately, their village was about the villageyest village in the area. Lydia dragged her mother all over the countryside looking for twenty yards of white silk to make into a truly impressive wedding gown.

"Liddie," her mother finally said wearily, "if you want twenty yards of white silk, you either have to be rich or move to France, neither of which we're about to do. And my chickens at home, they miss me! As do my mending and your father."

She went home, but Lydia did wind up with ten yards of white silk and five of some sort of white linen, nearly putting her father into debt and spending three consecutive weeks doing nothing but cutting, measuring, stitching, and ignoring her parents and her fiancee. The gown, however, looked most impressive. There were ruffles. There was lace. There were gathers and pintucks and draping and embroidery.

Tommy, in the meantime, deserted his father's shop for a week and a half to ride to the king's castle and demand an audience.

The king looked bemusedly at the boy who came striding through his gold-inlaid double doors with his chest puffed out and his chin tipped up.

"What can I do for you, young man?"

"I have a matter of business to discuss with you, your highness."

"Don't you think you'd be better off chatting with my councilors or butler? I oversee the kingdom, son. I make the rules. But I don't do everything."

Tommy raised his princely brows. "My business is with you, not some underling. I wish to know if you will rent me a fine suit of yours."

The king, who was fairly young and very kind, found himself in the awkward position of not being able to stifle a guffaw at one of his subjects. "And I'm sure it would look lovely on you," he gasped out, "but I don't usually let my clothes."

Tommy tapped his foot. "I wish to look like a prince when I marry my bride. Will you aid me, or not?"

This kid has no sense of humor, the king thought. How disappointing. "Fine, you may borrow a suit. Payment is not necessary as long as it stays in good condition."

Tommy inclined his head slightly in thanks and let the butler lead him to the king's closet. As for the king, he sighed, and then gathered up his robe and went to go play a rousing round of horsie with his little daughter.

Lydia and Tommy were married in splendor, a carefully arranged tableau of blonde curls over white shoulders, silken trains, golden waistcoat buttons, polished boots, aristocratically raised noses, a notably silent congregation, and a minister so still and anxious more than one person in attendance wondered if he had been threatened into nervous perfection before the ceremony.

Eventually Tommy and Lydia ended their countryside honeymoon and moved into Tommy's grandmother's cottage ("So convenient, really, that she died when she did," Tommy mused) in the middle of town. Lydia put the white silk away and refused to let any of the young girls getting married borrow it. She spent most of her time sewing new things for herself; Tommy spent most of his critiquing the wheels that his father's new apprentice made. And every Saturday evening, they dressed in their finest and went for a stroll through the prettiest paths and parks around to complain about the lack of benches and order small children playing nearby to run and pick posies for them.

A pink-cheeked little girl with messy braids and a dirty hem picked their flowers for them one hot July evening. "There you go!" she said cheerfully, grinning hugely. Her left front tooth was missing.

Lydia examined her bouquet. "There should be more blue in this selection. Go fetch me some of those pretty blue flowers, hmm?"

"All right," the little girl said. "But only if you play a round of hide-and-seek with me!"

"No indeed! That is quite out of the question." Tommy gripped Lydia's arm and stepped back.

"Why not?"

"Because only the common folk play silly games," Tommy explained. "People like us--like royalty--stay out of such things."

"Oh," said the little girl. "Well, too bad. I should probably get home, anyway." She began to trudge towards the hill in front of them.

"Silly child," Lydia murmured to Tommy. "You're not facing the village," she called to the girl.

The little girl looked back at them, surprised. "I don't live in the village. My papa is waiting for me in the castle."

"Oh, you're a servant's child, then. That explains the vulgar behavior."

The child laughed and shook her head. "No. I'm the king's daughter."

Tommy and Lydia's jaws nearly hit their collarbones. "Nice meeting you!" the girl said. And with that, she scampered up the hill and out of sight.

When she was gone, Tommy looked at Lydia. Lydia looked at Tommy. They both looked at the castle in the distance.

"Ridiculous," Tommy finally said.

"Absurd," Lydia agreed.

So they went home. And they lived together as king and queen of their leaky cottage, for many long, self-absorbed years.

The End

(Thank you for reading my story! I know that all of you who read this blog are friends, but just in case someone new stumbles across it, please keep in mind that this silly wisp of a fairytale belongs to me and is not to be claimed or used by anyone else without permission.)

PS--I have NO idea why the italicized sections have double-spaced themselves. Blogger really makes no sense sometimes.