In Which Princess Dulcie Has A Much Better Time Than Usual

From the diary of Dulcie, Crown Princess of Bentlefay:

Lynde and I are settling down well together and I think I may even be starting to enjoy myself a little. Looking back, I can see that I have been having a beast of a time lately for all I’ve been pretending to be amused. Say what you like about being romantically sought after, it’s hard to have fun with it when it comes at you from all angles. These days, Lynde keeps away the unlicensed ones -- sometimes just by looking at them, which I envy -- and the licensed ones are easy to ignore. At least they occur only at set times, and Lynde looks under the bed and inside the clothes press twice a day, so there will be no surprises from that quarter.

Yesterday, for instance, was the most interesting time I’ve had in months. It started when Lynde came back from the barracks. She practices for two hours with the men while Winnie and Ellen and I sew, and she always comes back looking like the spirit of fresh air, especially now that the weather is growing colder. We sit in lumps with our fingers cramping to the needles, and Lynde comes in loose and warm, with her cheeks red from her exercise and her hair damp from her wash.

She usually picks up some sort of sewing of her own – she is a careful needlewoman, but not particularly inspired, except in the matter of knitting, for which she has a positive passion – and politely ignores the reek of desperation that emanates from me during the second hour of sewing, before I have quite accepted my fate. Yesterday, though, I must have looked particularly disgusted with life because she asked if she could help me finish what I was doing (it’s the tapestry for the hall; I won’t finish it before I die if I live to be a hundred) so I could go and do something more interesting.

“There is no finishing,” I told her. “If I finished the tapestry, I would just have to find something else. This is just to pass the time; I have to get to luncheon without going crazy somehow.”

“Would you like to go down to the kitchen garden, even just for an hour?” she asked. “The vegetables are mostly in, but they are hoeing some of the winter squash and onions, and there are still apples in the orchard.”

Winnie has tried for years to get me outside before luncheon and I have always refused, because I hate mornings and would rather be marking time inside sewing than accomplishing anything anywhere, as long as I can sit mostly still and not have to wear a stomacher. But Lynde sounded like a nanny trying to amuse a fractious child, and I hate to have her think that I’m spoiled, so I said yes, as long as I wouldn’t need the stomacher, and only for an hour, and she told me the stomacher would get in my way anyhow so I went for my cloak. She shook her head over my train and said she would speak to Mother, but we tied it in a knot and rolled it up and pinned it, so that it was still a little heavy but at least left my feet free. And then we went.

Well, I can’t remember when I last spent a shorter three hours. I also can’t remember the last time I got so much dirt on one gown at one time, so it was probably away back in my childhood, if ever. The gardeners were surprised to see us and started to make it a great royal event, but Lynde said we were there to work so they settled down and left us mostly alone. We hoed, and it was marvelous, although I slew half a row of onions before Lynde caught me and showed me how to do it right. Then we helped them pull carrots, which was fun but harder on the back, and we stopped after only three rows on the plea that I wasn’t in training for it.

Finally we went to the orchard, which was a flurry of activity; they are bringing in the apples and I don’t think more than two or three people even noticed I was the princess when we first came up. One of them was Father, who was standing very majestic on the apple-cart as though it was a chariot of war. He bowed to Lynde and grinned at her, and then he noticed me and looked as though he had been hit in the back of the head by a shovel – just that two seconds between the blow and the fall. He literally didn’t know what to do, and stood there opening and closing his mouth like a fish, so we went over and Lynde said we were there to work and maybe if he saved us just one tree for ourselves and took the pickers on ahead, we wouldn’t be in the way. It took him a full minute to puzzle it out – I think he was trying to think of how he would be explaining it to Mother – but in the end he said yes, and bustled everyone to the other side of the orchard. I can see why he is such a good commander; by the time he got finished telling them what to do in his vast golden voice, I wanted to bustle over to the other side of the orchard myself.

The apple-picking was enormous fun. First we picked up the fruit on the ground, and put it in the barrel they’d left us to be made into cider, and I thought we were done. But Lynde said no, now we had to pick the eating apples, and that would take skill. She bent down a branch and showed me how to twist the apple so that it came off with just a little stem, and we worked it out so that I would pick the low ones and she would pick the high ones. But there were just six or eight perfect apples that were too high even for Lynde to reach, so I climbed up the tree and brought them down in the skirt of my gown. I had never climbed a tree before, even when I was a little girl, but it was as easy as winking and I have to admit I swanked a little, although it’s a good thing that Father didn’t see it since my mind already boggles at how he would be telling Mother that I had been there in the first place. Finally Lynde told me to stand back, and she put her hands on the bole of the tree and shook it so that the apples just rained down. We had a contest tossing them into the cider barrel which I lost ignominiously. Lynde said not to feel badly; she practices archery every day and aim is aim, whether it’s an arrow or an apple that you’re throwing.

We were an hour late for luncheon and Tess says she’ll feed me on bread and water for two weeks. I told her not to make promises unless she’s prepared to keep them.

I wonder if I can get Lynde to teach me how to shoot.

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