The Princess Rules

‘Oh yes,’ said Florizella. ‘He asked me. But I told him I didn’t want to marry yet.’

The king and queen stared at each other for a stunned moment, then they both rushed at Florizella again and made her sit down and tell them all about the ball and the breakfast and the horseride and the picnic for two and Prince Bennett asking her to marry him under the stars. They took a lot of interest in the stars. And if there was a nightingale singing. Then the king jumped to his feet and went to the window and said, ‘Undoubtedly! Undootedly!’ a great many times, very softly.

And the queen had a little smile on her face as she looked at Florizella.

‘What a match!’ said the king. ‘Prince Bennett’s kingdom! The Land of Deep Lakes! It’s beyond my wildest dreams!’

‘What a triumph!’ said the queen. ‘And everyone always said she was such an odd sort of princess!’

Florizella looked from one to the other.

‘I said I didn’t want to marry him, and we agreed to be just friends,’ she said. But she could tell they weren’t listening.

The next day, her father the king laughed and teased her all day, calling her the Queen of the Land of Deep Lakes, which was rather irritating.

The second day, the queen spoke of inviting Prince Bennett over to stay.

The next couple of days there were lots of letters between Prince Bennett’s parents and Florizella’s mother and father. Then on the fifth day the king told Florizella that she was going to marry Bennett whether she wanted to or not.

Florizella looked at him as if he were crazy. ‘You can’t make me marry someone if I don’t want to,’ she said. ‘It’s just wrong.’

‘Oh, can’t I?’ said the king.

He snatched Florizella up and bundled her upstairs, and locked her in her bedroom.

‘You’ll stay there until you agree to marry Prince Bennett!’ he bawled through the keyhole.

‘Nonsense,’ said Florizella. She knew perfectly well that her father had no right to lock her up, or to order her to marry anyone. No one can tell a girl who she has to marry. She also knew that if she wanted to leave, nothing was easier than to open her bedroom window and climb down the drainpipe. After all, she went out like that most mornings to go horseriding. It was so much easier than opening the great double doors, raising the portcullis and lowering the drawbridge on her own. But, instead of running off, she thought she would wait until her father came to let her out and talk the whole thing over with him. So she got one of her favourite storybooks and settled down for a quiet morning’s reading.

Florizella’s lunch was served on a tray in her room by ten footmen.

At teatime they arrived again with a cup of tea and a slice of cake.

By dinnertime Florizella had finished her book and was pretty bored.

At bedtime her father came to the door and said in his most kingly voice, ‘My daughter, Princess Florizella, this is your father.’

‘I did know that already,’ she said.

‘Do you agree to marry Prince Bennett?’

Florizella, who was rather sulky, for she had wasted a whole day indoors while the sun was shining outside, said, ‘Certainly not! And you know you shouldn’t treat a daughter like this. Not even in a fairy story.’

At that, the king stamped off to bed in a terrible temper. He was cross because Florizella would not do as he wanted, and he was cross because he knew perfectly well he was in the wrong.

‘She’s acting like she thinks she’s a prince!’ he complained to the queen as they went to bed that night.

‘A princess is just a prince with more s’s,’ she replied.

The king thought for a moment. ‘What do the s’s stand for?’

‘Sass,’ she said. ‘Sass and science, sensibility and scepticism. Sincerity, spirit and certainty.’

‘That’s a c,’ said the king. ‘Undoubtedly.’

‘And tomorrow,’ the queen continued, ‘Florizella is to be let out, whatever she says about Prince Bennett.’

The king said, ‘Humph,’ as if he meant No. But he really meant Yes. There is nothing more boring than being a tyrant.

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But next morning, before anyone was up, there was a great Tooroo! Tooroo! at the palace gates, and in galloped Prince Bennett with half a dozen of his courtiers, a dozen soldiers and a couple of trumpeters. Just a small informal visit.

He had come to see the king, for someone had told him that Princess Florizella was locked in her room and that the king would not let her out until she promised to marry the prince.

Prince Bennett popped up to the king’s bedroom and argued with him while the king sat up in bed and longed for his morning tea. He had never liked Bennett less than he did at that moment.

Just think of him married to Florizella and living in the palace! the king warned himself. I’d never have a peaceful morning.

But, out loud, all he said was that Prince Bennett should go home and wait for a message, and that he was certain Florizella would agree to a wedding soon. And then the footmen finally poured the morning cup of tea, and the king looked so hard at the door and at Prince Bennett and back again, that even the prince could see he was very much in the way. So he made a bow and got himself out of the room as quickly as he could go backwards. (You’re not supposed to turn your back on the royals. It’s a nuisance when you’re in a hurry.)

Prince Bennett didn’t go home, of course. He at least knew how a prince should behave in a crisis. He popped round to the back of the castle and hooted like an owl until Princess Florizella put her head out of the window and said, ‘Don’t be silly, Bennett. Everyone knows owls come out at night. Besides, that wasn’t anything like an owl.’

Then they argued about whether or not owls made calls like too-wit-too-whoo, or whether it was more like hoo-hee, hoo-hoo, and whether they came out at dawn or dusk. They made owl calls at each other until all the windows of the castle opened and lots of people put their heads out to see what was going on.

‘What on earth is that racket?’ the queen asked her maid, pausing in the middle of trying on one of her twenty crowns.

‘Princess Florizella’s young prince, Your Majesty, making secret signals to her,’ said the maid, leaning out of the window to have a good look.

‘He’s come to rescue her, then,’ said the queen, extremely pleased. ‘That’s very prompt. I like a young man who gets on with a rescue. When I was a princess, my future husband, the dear king, was very late. I was tied to a rock for three days, and if the sea monster had not had an upset stomach, my dear husband might have been too late altogether. It’s not all fun being a princess, you know.’

The maid nodded and looked out of the window again.

‘He’s climbing up to her bedroom, ma’am,’ she said.

‘That’s unusual,’ said the queen, with interest. ‘I’d have thought Florizella would have had the sheets knotted together by now. How is he climbing? Not by her hair – it’s not nearly long enough. She will keep having it cut. I told her she’d need it one of these days.’

‘Up the ivy, ma’am,’ said the maid. ‘Looks a bit unsteady to me.’

The queen smiled because it had been her idea to plant the ivy outside Princess Florizella’s bedroom on the very morning that she was born, to be ready for just such an occasion. And now here was Prince Bennett climbing up it to free Florizella! It was very gratifying. Next, Bennett would rescue Florizella and ride away with her. Then the queen and the king could forgive them and they could all have a wonderful party and live happily ever after.

But she should have remembered that Florizella was not like other princesses.

Prince Bennett should have remembered that Florizella was not like other princesses.

She was not a bit grateful to him for climbing up the ivy.

‘But I’ve come to rescue you!’ Bennett protested, scrambling through the window and diving head-first on to the floor.