The Princess Rules Read online

  ‘Florizella,’ he said, ‘I think I agree with you. I won’t choose a princess to marry, either. I shall tell my mother and father. And I should like to be best friends with you.’

  So Princess Florizella and Prince Bennett shook hands and rode back side by side in the starlight.

  When Florizella got home, the king and queen were waiting for her at the door of the palace.

  ‘How did you get on?’ asked the queen.

  ‘Who did he choose for his bride?’ asked the king.

  ‘How many princesses were there at the ball?’ asked the queen.

  ‘Did he choose the princess of Three Rivers?’ the king asked.

  Florizella laughed and jumped out of the carriage.

  ‘I had a lovely time,’ she said. ‘And he decided not to marry anybody just yet. There were one hundred and twenty princesses there as well as me, and I didn’t spot the princess of the Three Rivers, but the place was so awash with princesses that I didn’t even see the princess of the Two Mountains, who promised to meet me there.’

  ‘Not choosing a bride!’ said the king.

  ‘Not choosing a bride!’ said the queen.

  Then they both fell on Florizella at once, demanding to know what on earth could have made him decide not to choose a princess at a princess-choosing ball. They were secretly afraid that Florizella had somehow put him off marriage.

  So Florizella explained that Prince Bennett thought the nice princesses might have been just pretending to be nice and might be secretly rather awful to live with, and he hadn’t wanted to take the chance.

  ‘Did he ask no one at all, then?’ demanded the king. ‘Not one of them?’

  ‘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.

  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. ‘Tha
t’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.

  ‘How did you get to my bedroom window?’ she demanded as if she had not seen him scrambling, and grabbing for the drainpipe when a branch broke.

  ‘The ivy,’ Bennett said, surprised at the question.

  ‘And don’t you think,’ said Florizella sarcastically, ‘that if you can climb up, then I can perfectly well climb down?’

  Bennett said nothing. He hadn’t thought of that. He was so used to the old idea of princesses sitting still and waiting to be rescued that he had forgotten Florizella did not follow the Princess Rules.

  ‘Just go,’ said Florizella, giving him a little push towards the window. ‘It’s bad enough with everyone nagging me to marry you, without you carrying on like a prince in an old fairy story as well.’

  ‘But what about you?’ Bennett asked, rather worried.

  Florizella laughed. ‘My father will let me out soon enough,’ she said. ‘And, if I get too bored, I can always climb down the drainpipe and go for a ride. When I’m out, I’ll come over and see you. But I’ll stay here for now. My father shouldn’t have locked me in, and I want to talk to him about it. He’ll never learn to treat girls properly unless I tell him.’

  Bennett thought that perhaps Florizella was not a very comfortable daughter for anyone to have. And he thought that perhaps she would not be a very obedient wife. But she was a great friend. So he shook hands with her and climbed out of the window.

  ‘Gracious me, ma’am!’ squawked the queen’s maid. ‘It’s Prince Bennett coming back down the ivy. On his own! He’s left the princess behind!’

  The queen dashed to the window and watched Prince Bennett scramble down, whistle for his horse, mount up, signal to his trumpeters to go Tooroo! Tooroo! and gallop off without a care in the world and – more importantly – without a rescued princess across his saddlebow.

  ‘Oh no!’ she said. She had no doubt who was to blame. ‘Oh no! Oh, Florizella!’

  When the king heard what had happened, he went bananas.

  There was no chance that he was going to let Florizella out now. He had been so sure that Bennett was going to rescue her, he was even prepared to overlook the way the prince had bothered him so early in the morning. But for the prince to leave without taking Princess Florizella with him, breaking all the traditions of fairy stories and happy endings!

  ‘Amateur!’ he snapped and stumped off to the garden to prune the roses. ‘Half-hearted,’ he said with a snip. ‘Half-witted, more like,’ he said, taking off another flower.

  There wasn’t a single rose blooming by lunchtime, but the king was feeling a lot better.

  Until the messenger came, that is.

  It was one of Prince Bennett’s trumpeters. She came Tooroo, Toorooing into the courtyard in a terrible hurry, scaring the hens half to death and setting the guard dogs barking.

  ‘Prince Bennett has been captured!’ she shouted. ‘He was on his way home when he was captured by a dragon in the Purple Forest!’

  Everyone came running at once. Florizella opened her window to listen. The messenger told them that the great two-headed dragon of the Purple Forest had jumped out at the prince and his courtiers, and everyone had ridden away as fast as they could except for Prince Bennett, whose horse reared and dropped him right at the dragon’s feet. Bennett had bent his sword in the fall and couldn’t draw it from the scabbard! As he lay there, stunned and helpless (‘Amateur!’ the king exclaimed. ‘As I said. Nincompoop!’), the dragon had picked him up and tied him to a tree, using all sorts of particularly difficult knots, and was sitting beside him, waiting for forty-eight hours (according to Dragon Association Rules) for the rescue party to arrive, before eating the prince up – every little bit of him except, possibly, the bent sword.

  ‘Ooo!’ said Florizella, privately rather pleased at hearing this, and she leaned out of the window and whistled a loud, clear whistle that Jellybean could hear wherever he happened to be. He was in his stable and had to back up against the far wall and take a little run at the door and rear up to jump over it, and then he came galloping round and crashed to a stop under Florizella’s window. Florizella grabbed her sword and her dagger, and a spare sword for Prince Bennett (which she kept in the wardrobe in the space for the long dresses) and shinned down the drainpipe as quickly as she could.

  She dropped on to Jellybean’s back and galloped as fast as she could to the Purple Forest, steering Jellybean with the halter rope and clinging on tightly to the two swords.

  She saw the dragon before he saw her.

  He had dozed off while he was waiting, with an alarm clock in one of his great green ears to wake him when the forty-eight hours were up. His snores bent the tallest trees of the Purple Forest and made a noise like a thousand thunderstorms. His reeking, smoky breath scorched all the grass and flowers and bushes for three miles around, so that Jellybean snorted and shivered at the dreadful smell of burning.

  Bennett was tied to a tree with fiendishly complicated dragon knots, looking rather white and scared. But as soon as he saw Florizella, he whispered as softly as he could, ‘Florizella! Untie me, quick!’

  Florizella had a look at the knots as she jumped out of the saddle and thought it would take her all of the forty-eight hours to get even one of them undone and, drawing her sharp sword, she cut through the rope. She and Bennett were just about to get up on Jellybean and gallop away, when …

  … the dragon woke up!

  As soon as the dragon saw Florizella and Bennett, he let out a dreadful great roar. His yellow eyes flashed and smoke spouted from all his nostrils in both his noses.

  Florizella and Bennett stood back to back without saying a word, and both drew their swords. The dragon lurched towards them, his two great scaly heads getting closer and closer. Florizella’s sword went up, and Bennett’s too, and before the dragon had a chance to blow flaming breath all over them, the two heroes brought their swords down with a mighty swoosh and a horrid thwack that resounded through the forest.

  The dragon lay dead at their feet, disappearing from its toes up, as dragons do when their heads are cut off, and That was the End of Him.

  ‘Wow!’ said Bennett. They both leaned down and wiped the blades of their weapons on the grass and the ferns of the forest. Their swords were smeared with the dragon’s bright-green blood. It made them both feel a bit sick just to see it. When their swords were clean, they gave each other a hug and slumped down together on the ground an
d waited to get their breath back.

  ‘You know, you shouldn’t have risked your life to save me, Florizella,’ said Bennett as they sat under the pine trees.

  Florizella thought he was being polite.

  ‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘You’d do the same for me.’

  But Bennett wasn’t being polite at all.

  He was being horrid, though he didn’t mean to be, and though he didn’t know it yet.

  ‘I’d risk my life to save you,’ he said carefully, ‘but you shouldn’t have done the same for me, because I am a brave prince and you are a princess, and it’s not how a princess should behave. It’s right against the Princess Rules.’

  Florizella stopped staring at the sky and listening to her heart, which was beating too fast because she had been so scared by the dragon. She took the stem of grass she was chewing out of her mouth and she looked at Bennett. She did not look at him affectionately. She did not have a pretty-pleasing expression. She squinted at Bennett as if she thought he was about to say something stupid.

  She was dead right.

  ‘It’s the prince’s job to do the rescuing,’ Bennett prince-splained. ‘Everybody knows that the princess has to be caught by the dragon so the prince can come along and rescue her. Then he asks her to marry him and they get married to universal rejoicing. Everyone knows that. That’s how we should have done it.’

  ‘There wouldn’t be universal rejoicing if we got married,’ Florizella said sharply. ‘Because one person, at least, wouldn’t be rejoicing, and that would be me. You know very well that I don’t want to get married yet. You know very well that we agreed to be friends. And if you want to be friends with me then you have to see that I am not the sort of princess who is going to get caught by a dragon and wait to be rescued!’