The Birthday Ball (14 page)

"It is the moment for the choice," the princess said to the waiting gathering.

"Eh?" The queen could not hear her daughter. "What did she say?" she asked the king.

"The choice. She's making the choice." The king was preoccupied with his own plans. If he could get out to the meadow, and if that
Charaxes acraeoides
had lingered there ... Well, there was a chance...

"I know it is required," the princess went on, and for a moment her voice faltered. "It is the Law of the Domain. Isn't that right, Father?"

The king nodded. He looked at his watch and yearned for the evening to end. "Law of the Domain."

"And only you can change that?" The princess felt this was her only hope: convincing her father, even at this last moment, that he must change the Law of the Domain. "You being king, I mean?"

The king was startled. His daughter was correct. But the procedure for changing the Law of the Domain was complex and lengthy and very, very time-consuming. "Yes," he acknowledged. "Only I. Being king. Very time-consuming. Minimum, seven years."

The princess's heart sank.
Seven years?
She'd be
old
by then! She didn't want to wait seven years!

"Well," she said, frantically searching in her mind for another solution, "am I correct, also, that the princess—that's me, of course." Here she laughed nervously. "Ah, the princess has to choose a husband, and he must be nobility?"

"Nobility. Correct. Prince. Duke. Count. Whatever." The king groaned inwardly, suffering for his daughter. The hideous duke was slobbering in his seat and being comforted by a waif. The repulsive prince had fled, stopping only briefly to squat and look at himself in a highly polished doorknob, and a footman had whispered to the king that he was now being pursued around the castle grounds by bees. The counts, one of them with toilet paper stuck in wads all over his face, were singing madrigals in a far corner with the serving maids.

The princess took a deep breath. "All right, then, I'm ready. I will make the choice."

The room fell absolutely silent.

The princess remembered, in that instant, what the schoolmaster had said to her once:
You are tall and slender as a young willow tree, supple and lovely.
She drew herself up and stood very straight.

"I choose to marry Herr Gutmann," she said.

19. The Happy Ending

"What did she say? What did my daughter say? I demand to know what the princess said!" The queen turned to her husband.

"She said something that makes no sense," he explained to her, enunciating clearly. "She said she wants to marry someone named Herr Gutmann!"

"The footman? Impossible!" the queen gasped.

"No, not the footman!
Herr Gutmann
is what she said!"

Around the table, all of the villagers were murmuring the same word.
Impossible. Impossible. Impossible.

"It
isn't
impossible!" the princess, near tears, insisted. "My chambermaid told me about Herr Gutmann! He's nobility! He just likes to
pretend
to peasanthood! But he's truly noble, and qualifies!"

From her hiding place in the pulley passage, Tess listened, and her eyes grew wide. The princess had chosen the schoolmaster? That stern, bearded man who had taught her to read and sometimes rapped her knuckles with a ruler? He was old! But still, perhaps it was better than the horrible suitors!

A tall peasant woman, wringing and twisting her hands in nervousness on her skirt, stood. "Please, Your Majesties? Please, Princess? I can explain why it's impossible."

"Do so, then," the king commanded. He sighed. It was dark now outside. This was all taking much too long. The butterfly was out there somewhere.

"Herr Gutmann
is
nobility, it is true," the peasant woman explained. "That is, he
was.
Oh, I suppose he still
is.
Oh dear, I'm very nervous."

"Get to the point!" the king said.

"Well, the point being, Herr Gutmann went back to his own domain these many months ago, where he married his old friend Gertrude, her being a widow and all. He can't marry twice, not even if the princess chooses him!" The peasant woman sat down and bowed her head in embarrassment. She had never spoken in public before.

"No!" cried the princess. "He's not old! Not married! He's here! He's right here! Look! I brought him a book!" She held out the gift she had saved for the schoolmaster, the book of maps, and read the inscription aloud: "'For Herr Gutmann, with thanks from Patricia Priscilla, who was Pat for too short a time.' But he hasn't looked at me all evening, and I think my heart will break!" She pointed to the young schoolmaster.

He looked up at her and put it together in his mind, what she had thought, and how it was all hopeless. He stood.

He said slowly, "I too have brought a gift." He reached under his chair and held up exactly the same book of maps. He read his own inscription: "'For my dear pupil Pat.' But there has been such a misunderstanding. You are not my dear pupil Pat. She doesn't exist. And I am not Herr Gutmann. I am the new schoolmaster, only come recently from the teachers' academy.

"And," he went on, "I am truly a poor peasant, not nobility at all, so my heart is breaking, too.

"My name is Rafe," he said.

"Rafe!" Tess, on hearing the name, tumbled in a twirl of petticoats out of the pulley passage, onto the marble floor. "Ow!" she said. "Bruised me bum, I did!" Then she picked herself up and ran forward into the banquet hall. She found the schoolmaster, threw her arms around him, and grinned at the princess. "It's me brother, miss! The one I thought was gone forever!"

"Tess? My little lost sister? Pa sent you to work at the castle?" Rafe replied in delight as he hugged the freckled chambermaid.

"I'm happy for you both," the princess told them. And she was. But she was terribly sad for herself.

***

"Explain to me what is happening," the queen said to the king. "That's quite a good-looking man there, but he's wrapped his arms around the seventeenth chambermaid, and I don't like that one bit!"

"Sister. Long lost."

"And our daughter? Did she make the choice or not? I couldn't hear a thing. It seemed as if she was choosing a footman. We can't have that. All this hugging of servants! Quite unthinkable! And she looks sad."

The king leaned close to his wife. "Schoolmaster, dear. The good-looking one. She chose him. Can't happen. Not nobility. Very sad."

"Not nobility?"

"No. Not."

"What's his name?"

"Rafe, he says."

"
Treif?
That's a terrible name!"

"It's
Rafe!
" the king said loudly.

"Rafe!" the queen called. "Rafe, pay attention here! Disentangle yourself from the chambermaid! I'm summoning you! Come forward!" She made a summoning gesture with her hand toward the schoolmaster.

"You must obey when she summons," Tess whispered to her brother. She pushed him forward.

The queen had lifted her skirts and was looking around the floor by her feet. "Where's my stupid scepter?" she asked. "You always put things where I can't find them!"

The king crouched by his chair, searched the carpet, and found the jeweled scepter where it had rolled near the feet of a peasant. "Here," he said, and gave it to the queen.

"Kneel, Rafe!" the queen commanded. Then she called to her daughter. "You come up here and watch, dear! I hate seeing you so sad!"

The princess gathered her skirts and came to stand beside her parents. The schoolmaster, brow furrowed, was kneeling there obediently.

"I'm going to make you nobility," the queen explained, "but you need more of a name. Rafe is very peasant-y. You need to be Rafe the...

"Any ideas?" the queen asked the entire gathering. "It has to start with an
R
!"

The little orphan, who was just learning to read, made the sound to herself, thinking hard. "
Rrrrr.
Rafe the Ridiculous? No, I don't fink so." She giggled.

"Repellent?" suggested Duke Desmond. "No, that's
me
." But he grinned down at Liz.

"Redoubtable?" proposed the king. "No. Not good."

The chambermaid came forward. "Please, miss?" she said to the princess, with a curtsy.

"Do you want to be nobility, too, Tess?" the princess asked sympathetically. "Mother, could you possibly—"

"Oh, no, miss! Not at all!" The freckled face had turned pink. "'Cuz the pulley boy, he ain't nobility, and—"

"What, then?" The princess worried that it was a long time for the schoolmaster to be balanced on his knee, and he might be uncomfortable.

"I wanted to say:
Remarkable.
That's what he is, my brother. Always was."

The princess smiled, and said it loudly to her mother. "REMARKABLE."

So the queen touched the scepter to the schoolmaster's shoulders, one after the other, and named him as a knight. "Sir Rafe the Remarkable! Rise!"

He rose, newly knighted. "There, Sir Rafe," the queen said. "Now you're nobility. That was easy. Let's forget dinner. Let the dancing begin!" At her command, the royal orchestra, which had been waiting for the signal, began to play in the ballroom, and the doors were opened to reveal the polished floor that waited.

Sir Rafe took the hand of the princess and smiled at her. "This has been a very confusing evening, Princess..."

"Please call me Pat," she told him. "I loved being Pat."

"Very well, Pat. But I am still a bit mystified. You seem to have chosen me. Chosen me for what?"

The princess laughed. "First of all, to help me become a teacher, of course!" She took his hand and led him onto the ballroom floor. "After that? Well, we'll see." She waited, listening to the music, for him to place her arm around her waist.

He stood there, embarrassed. "I don't know how to dance," he confessed, blushing.

"Ah!" she replied in delight, and reached out her arms to show him how to arrange his. "My first teaching assignment!"

The Happy End.