Goose Chase (2 page)

"You mean that if my people could see how rich you are they might not mind you being so low and common?"

I agreed that he had understood my meaning very well.

"What difference does it make
what
your people think?" interrupted the King. "If they don't like it, your remedy is perfectly simple. Drag them out of their homes and chop off their heads in the village square. That's what
I
do."

"No, no," said the Prince. "The Goose Girl—er, the
lady
—has a point. Quite clever of her, actually. We will wait, my lady, until you have sewn your wedding clothes."

And since the tower and the land on which it stood both belonged to the Prince, they waited.

And waited.

Not being an utter fool, I first demanded the finest of gold workers to fashion the gold threads for my gown from the dust collected every morning. Then I found fault with them and sent them away. Once we had run through every goldsmith in both countries, and once it became necessary to admit that I had almost an embarrassingly large quantity of thread, I reluctantly sat down at the loom provided and began to make the cloth.

Naturally, at nightfall I unpicked the work I had done during the day. Well, my friend, what would
you
have done?

Unfortunately, one of the lady's maids acted the spy and caught me at it. After that a servant was required to be at my side both day and night. I didn't much care for that, I can tell you!

Even working as slowly as I dared, the cloth was by and by finally woven, then cut out and pieced together. I was sewing it now, with great sloppy stitches and uneven hems. I am in fact an expert seamstress, but I did not wish to advertise any wifely skills, and, naturally, my clumsy seams kept ripping out and requiring resewing.

Yet however hard I might try to delay it, my wedding day was drawing so near that I could all but smell the meats roasting for the bridal feast.

S
HE LOOKETH AS BUTTER
WOULD NOT MELT IN HER MOUTH.

—J
OHN
H
EYWOOD,
P
ROVERBS

My name, I must tell you, is Alexandria Aurora Fortunato, and the reason for all this royal rivalry for my hand—besides, of course, my inexhaustible wealth—is that I am as lovely as the dawn.

You need not laugh; 'tis perfectly true. Back when I was a simple Goose Girl and this calamity first befell me, I used to go down to the duck pond at sunrise to see if 'twas really so. 'Tis not terribly easy to see yourself in a duck pond—your hair hangs down and gets in the way, for one thing—but if anything, I would have to say that I am a great deal lovelier than the dawn. After all, there are dismal dawns and rain-drenched dawns and dawns as cold as charity, but I am always the same: perfectly, flawlessly lovely. Why, for sheer loveliness I'll warrant I could beat the dawn nine times out of ten. And that is without even trying.

I have not always been as lovely as the dawn. Six months ago I was no more lovely than—what shall I say?—a pickled onion. Well, not so
very
bad, perchance, but all knees and elbows and I didn't always keep my face and hair clean. Well, why should I? It never seemed important. The Geese didn't care how often I scrubbed myself, and that pond water is
cold.

I was only a poor orphan Goose Girl, you see, with no more use for a perfect profile than I had for a slops basin encrusted with emeralds. I
still
have no use for either; it seems to me that the combination of great beauty and great wealth is a monstrous cruel handicap for a girl who simply wants to tend to her own affairs and her own Geese. In the future I shall know precisely what to do if another old beggar woman comes pestering me for a bite to eat while I'm herding my Geese in the high meadow. Will I give her my last crust of bread, like the softhearted, simpleminded dunderpate that I am? No I will not; I'll send her away with a flea in her ear, that's what I'll do. 'Tis said that no good deed ever goes unpunished, and so I am learning to my sorrow.

Before that dreadful old hag saddled me with my three "gifts," which in my opinion were more like a trio of millstones hung around my neck, I was quite alone in the world. My father died before I was born and my mother ten years after. How my father died I cannot say, but 'twas a fever killed my mother. O, but that was a terrible time! She sickened and died, my poor mother, between a dawn and a
dusk. Rosy-cheeked and cheerful by morning's first light, she was cold and stark by nightfall.

As she lay dying, my dear mother made me promise to take good care of the Geese. I might sell or eat the ducks whenever I liked, she said, but never the Geese.

"Drive them to pasture in the summer, Daughter, and gather them sweet grasses for winter. You may eat their eggs and make your bed from their feathers, but do not harm them. Treat them well and they will protect you and keep you from want."

I only wept, unable to speak.

"Promise me, Alexandria!"

"As you say, Mother." I bowed my head and kissed her hand. "So shall it be."

Then she died and I, a child of ten years, dug her grave and laid her to rest. The twelve white Geese came and stood around the grave as I shoveled dirt down on my mother's body and I was a little comforted, as though they grieved with me.

Besides my fine flock of ducks and Geese, my mother left me a very small house nestled under the cliffs of Sorrow Mountain and a plot of ground on which stood beehives, fruit trees, and a garden. Every fortnight I would walk the ten miles to the miller's house and trade some eggs or a fat duck for flour to bake my bread. With cloth woven by the miller's wife I occasionally made a featherbed stuffed with duck and goose down, which she then sold in the village for
our joint profit. She was an honest woman, the miller's wife, and never tried to cheat me. Unlike her husband, I might add, who was all too apt to lay a thumb heavy as a ham on the scales weighing my flour, if I did not keep an open eye and a chiding tongue in my head. Still, he was not so bad as some I've heard of. Millers were ever rogues and villains and 'tis pure foolishness to expect aught else. I presume they were made that way for some good purpose.

So it came about that I spent three years alone. I lived by my brain and my birds, and let me tell you, 'twas not such a bad life. Before that old beggar woman appeared I had saved up a nice fat little pouchful of money and was happily weighing the advantages of purchasing a she-goat now or a cow in six months' time, when I could afford one.

I was not afraid, living by myself. You see, Geese can be quite fierce with an intruder. If any stranger (which so far as the Geese were concerned meant anybody but me) came within a mile of the place, the Geese all rushed out in a body and screamed and bit and generally chased whoever it was off the premises. And if the intruder had a mind to eat goose pie for dinner that night, why, there was an old musket hanging over the fireplace. Because we lived in such a lonely place, my mother had taught me how to use it, and I was a good shot.

So people generally left me alone. The village was only a mile or two beyond the mill, but I didn't go there often. I didn't think that the village children were either nice or polite. They used to call me a dirty Goose Girl, and sometimes they threw stones. So I simply kept myself to myself.

By and large I was happy. I missed my mother, naturally, but at first I was too busy just surviving to mope much. And later, well, I'd gotten used to it. When I got a craving for company I used to dress the Geese up in skirts I made out of dried grasses and pretend they were neighbors coming to call. The Geese didn't much like it, but I have never been one to stand any nonsense from a goose. Geese, in case you do not know it, are very self-willed animals, stuffed to the brim with conceit and choler. One must be very, very firm with a goose.

So it was that on the day the old beggar woman came I was up in the high meadow, playing at dress-up with the Geese. They were waddling around in circles, flapping their wings and wagging their bottoms, which made all the grass skirts swing like a carillon of giant bells. "Cronk, cronk cronk!" they cried in melancholy voices, and I had to laugh as I tried to herd them over to my make-believe tea party, laid out on a large, flat rock.

As a special touch I had woven a crown of daisies for each bird, and also one for myself, mine being fashioned of wild roses. I was pretending that we were thirteen Princesses sitting down to dine in our ancestral hall.

"My Royal Sisters, please!" I called, trying to sound stern. (In my imaginings, I was of course the eldest sister, she who would one day be Queen.) "Will you not be seated?"

"Well ssso I would if there were anywhere to sssit!" whistled a high-pitched voice right next to my ear. I nearly jumped out of my skin.

But no, 'twas not one of my Geese being saucy. A tiny, incredibly shrunken old woman with just two front teeth, each the size of a tombstone, and a chin and nose so long and so curved that they nearly met in the middle, had appeared literally out of nowhere and was regarding my tea party preparations critically.

"How ... how do you do?" I asked, very much taken aback, and a little embarrassed to be caught playing at such a baby's game.

"I'm hungry, thankee," she said, looking with burning eyes at the piece of bread I had laid out for my meal.

"I see," I said, dismayed. I was quite hungry myself, and I had been preparing to sup on one scarsly little bit of wheaten loaf alone. However, I said, "Would you like some bread?"

"I would," she said, and snatched the entire piece up and thrust it into her mouth. She gummed it with her mouth open, so that bits of bread fell out onto the ground, where the Geese snapped them up.

"Dry bread always makes me thirsssty," she said. Because of her missing teeth she whistled shrilly as she spoke.

"All I have is water, Grandmother," I said with a sigh, for I was also thirsty after a morning in the hot sun. "But I suppose you'd better have a
little
of that too." If I had any hope that she'd be ashamed of herself and leave some for me, I
was disappointed. She even held the flask up over her mouth and shook out the last drops.

"Why, you selfish old—" I began to sputter.

"What do you sssay?" she interrupted, holding up a hand to her ear. "Ssspeak up, girl, I'm a little deaf."

"Nothing," I muttered sullenly. My dear departed mother had brought me up to have the manners of a lady, even though we were poor. I knew that I must show respect to the aged, no matter how boorish and piggy and downright
loathsome
their behavior might be.

"I'll be going, then," she said, thrusting my flask, the only flask I possessed, under her shawl.

"As you wish," I replied between gritted teeth.

She smiled then, her lips curling around her two tombstone teeth, and said, "You're a good girl, and patient with a bad old creature. Very well. When you comb your hair, gold dussst shall fall like rain. When you weep, your tears shall be preciousss diamonds. And you shall be as lovely as the dawn."

"I beg your pard—"

She gave a great cackle of laughter and vanished clean away, taking both my flask and my supper with her. The Geese made a great to-do, flapping and squawking, using this dramatic event as an excuse to wriggle out of their skirts and scatter to all points of the compass.

Once I'd managed to gather the Geese together to herd them back home, I found that the grass skirts they had so thankfully shed had turned to small silken gowns, and the
daisy circlets round their white brows were now made of gold and ivory. I am sorry to tell you that I was quite pleased with this discovery at first. If my Geese got golden crowns and silken gowns, what then should I, the kindly maid who had so generously and graciously given my all :o a beggar, receive?

I was mad with greed.

Imbecilic, prating fool!

At home again, I at once had a hunt round for my mother's comb. I hadn't actually used it in the past four years, and I couldn't call its exact location to mind.

You might expect that, once I'd found it, it would have taken hours to drag it through the knots and tangles far enough to accumulate even a thimbleful of gold dust, but no. My hair had suddenly grown several feet, developed all sorts of waves and curlicues, and changed color from dirt brown to polished gold. The comb slid through my glittering locks like a fish through water and the gold dust pattered around me like rain, just as the old witch-woman had foretold.

O, but I was a dunce, a simpleton, a most pitiful merry-andrew! I actually sat there and wept tears of joy. And the tears, of course, fell—plink! plink! plink!—as three fat diamonds the size of acorns, into my silk-and-satin-covered lap. For somehow, at some point, my ragged old dress had been turned into the gown of a princess, and my wild-rose crown into a golden tiara topped with great gaudy rubies,
red as blood. Dainty little glass slippers sparkled on my feet as well, made of glass beads and solid crystal heels.

Elated, I hoisted the nearest Goose up into my arms and danced her around the house, laughing and singing, the Goose (it was Eugenia, as I recall) struggling wildly as we staggered about, into and out of the fire pit. We knocked the bucket and the ladle off the shelf in the process and badly cracked my best blue bowl. I had to let her go quite soon, of course. Geese are big and heavy and very powerful. I collapsed onto a wooden chest and laughed until I cried diamonds again.

It must have been no more than five days later when I was sitting over my supper of duck eggs fried in grease and deep in rosy dreams of the future, when I heard the blare of trumpets outside my door. You in your wisdom have no doubt guessed that this uproar heralded that very King and that very Prince who now hold me in durance vile.

Each stood in my dooryard with a battalion of soldiers at his back, come to ask me which one I would have in marriage. As I was a subject of the Prince, this naturally made the Prince feel that he had first claim, but being simpleminded, he had let the King talk him into giving me a choice.