Wonder Tales Page 8

  After the perfidious prince had locked Loquatia up, he went from room to room of the castle and, finding all of them open but one, concluded for certain that it was into that one that Finessa had retired. And as he had composed a string of compliments for her, he stood in front of her door and attempted to talk to her through it, deploying all the charm that had so ingratiated him with her sisters. But in this case the door turned out to be a wall. This princess, who was no dupe, no gull, contented herself with listening to him a good long while without saying a word herself.

  At last, realising that, despite her silence, Richcraft knew she was inside, she told him: If it’s true, young prince, that you have as strong and sincere a passion for me as you would have me believe, then you surely won’t mind going down into the garden and closing the door behind you. If you do so, I shall be happy to talk to you just as much as you please out of the window of my apartment.

  Richcraft would have none of this. And as the princess obstinately persisted in not opening her door to him (how comforting is a locked door from the inside, how very infuriating from the outside), the prince found himself a hammer and caved it in with a single blow. When he entered at last, however, he found Finessa armed in her turn, with a huge axe which had accidentally been left in a wardrobe near her chamber.

  Emotion had fired up Finessa’s complexion; but, although it was at him that her eyes sparkled with rage, it was only the sparkle, not the rage, that Richcraft could see, and she appeared all the more enchanting a beauty to him. Indeed, he would have thrown himself at her feet, except that she said to him boldly, as she confronted him: Prince, if you take one step nearer me, I shall raise this axe and slice your head into two neat hemispheres.

  What, beautiful princess, said Richcraft, ever the hypocrite, is the love I have for you to be repaid only with hatred of me?

  He began to speak to her, if from the far end of the room, of the violent ardour that the reputation of her beauty and wit had inspired in him. He added that his sole motive in adopting so repulsive a disguise was to offer her his hand and heart, and so forth (for I know you’ve heard this speech before); and he told her that she ought to pardon his boldness in breaking down her door by ascribing it to the passion for her that had prompted so rash and unsociable an act. Finally, he tried to persuade her, as he had so easily persuaded her sisters, that it was in her own interest to marry him as soon as possible.

  The cunning princess, pretending to be entirely mollified by his speech, answered that she must first find her sisters, and after that they would decide together what had to be done. To this Richcraft replied that he couldn’t allow such a move until she had consented to marry him, arguing that Lackadaisy and Loquatia would certainly not agree to the match on account of their being her elders.

  Finessa already had good reason to distrust the young prince and her suspicions of him were only fuelled by his argumentation. She trembled to think what might have happened to her sisters at the hands of such a villain and was resolved at one stroke to avenge them and herself avoid the same misfortune she suspected had befallen them. So she told the prince that she would consent to marry him, but that, as she had heard that marriages made at night were invariably unhappy ones, she wanted him to postpone the ceremony itself until the morning. She assured him, too, that she wouldn’t mention a syllable to Lackadaisy and Loquatia of anything that had passed between them and requested him to give her just a little time to herself to say her prayers. Afterwards, she would take him to a chamber in which there was a very soft and comfortable bed, and then return to her own till the following day.

  Now, if the truth be told, Richcraft was not the bravest of young princes; and, seeing Finessa still with her axe, with which her fingers toyed as though it were as light and airy as a fan, Richcraft, I say, agreed to obey the princess’s wishes in this matter, and went away to give her time to meditate. But he was no sooner out of the room than Finessa ran off to prepare a bed for him in one of the other chambers of the castle.

  This chamber was as splendidly appointed as any; except that in the middle of the floor there was a gaping hole leading to the sewer in which were thrown all the kitchen ordures, and worse, of the whole castle. Across this hole Finessa laid a pair of slender wooden poles, then made a very handsome bed on top of them and hurriedly returned to her apartment. A moment later Richcraft came back in, to be conducted by the princess to the room in which she had made up his bed. There he retired for the night.

  *

  Without even troubling to undress, the prince simply hurled himself on the bed. And as his weight immediately caused the two slender poles to split down the middle, he found himself to his astonishment plummeting to the bottom of the sewer, bruising himself all over on the way down and landing with a loud splash. His room was not too far from Finessa’s own, and his descent into the sewer was a noisy one, so she knew at once that her little stratagem had worked. Paragon as she was, she was still only human after all, and it would be impossible to describe the glee she felt at the thought of his discomfort: he fully deserved his punishment, did he not, and the princess was right to rejoice at it. Yet her joy was not so unbounded as to make her forgetful of her sisters. Her first concern, she knew, was to seek them out.

  Finding Loquatia posed no problem, since Richcraft, after double-locking her in her chamber, had left the key in the door. Finessa quickly unlocked it and went in to awaken her sister and relate to her just by what means she had contrived to elude the wicked prince, who had come to the castle to insult them all. At this news Loquatia was thunderstruck, as she had swallowed whole every single word that Richcraft had spoken to her and was still convinced of his virtuous intentions. Oh yes, dear Reader, there are such people in the world, even now, and half of them are women.

  Attempting to conceal her secret sorrow at this unexpected turn of events, she left her room with Finessa to look for Lackadaisy. But although they looked into all the rooms of the castle, they couldn’t find her in any of them. At last it occurred to Finessa that she might be in the apartment in the castle garden, where, indeed, they found her half-dead from both faintness and fright, for she hadn’t had a thing to eat all day. Her sisters gave her what food they had, after which they told one another of their adventures, Finessa’s in particular having a pronounced, and by no means positive, effect on the others. Then all three went to rest after having had such a tiring time of it.

  Richcraft, in the meantime, spent the most uncomfortable night of his life, and when the next day finally dawned he was not much the better for it. He had to grope his way through all kinds of dismal dungeons, the worst horrors of which he couldn’t see (and it may have been just as well), because they weren’t illuminated by so much as a flicker of light. At last, though, after a long and painful struggle, he managed to reach the end of the sewer, which he discovered ran into a river at some distance from the castle. He made himself heard by some fishermen, good, ungrudging countryfolk by whom he was drawn out in such a pickle as to inspire true compassion in them.

  Richcraft had himself carried immediately to his father’s court to be hosed down and tended to, but his disgrace made him hate Finessa so fiercely that he thought less of looking after himself than of taking revenge on her.

  Finessa’s thoughts, too, were much troubled. Honour was a thousand times dearer to her than life itself, and her sisters’ shameful conduct had cast her into such despair that it took all her will-power to govern it. At the same time, the ill state of health in which those princesses found themselves, as a direct consequence of their unworthy marriages, put her constancy even further to the test.

  Since his misadventure, Richcraft, that unrepentant deceiver, had once again been mustering all his wits to make himself the complete villain; neither the sewer nor the bruises caused him as much vexation as the mere fact of being himself deceived. He thought long and hard about the effects of his two marriages so-called; and, to further tempt the princesses, had great tubs full of trees, all la
den with ripe, glistening fruit, transported to the castle and placed in a row beneath its windows. Lackadaisy and Loquatia, who would often sit gazing out of those windows, could not but see the fruit and they nagged and nagged at Finessa to go down in the basket and fetch some up. Her good humour was so great, as was her willingness to oblige her poor sisters, whose appetites had taken a curious turn of late, that she did as they asked and bore up the very juiciest of the fruit, which they both immediately devoured.

  And the next day there appeared to sprout more fruit and of another kind. This was a new temptation for the princesses, and a new test of their sister’s good humour. But, this time, Richcraft’s officers, who had been lying in ambush, and had failed in their task the day before, were not found wanting. They seized upon Finessa and carried her off in full view of her sisters, who could do nothing to stop them.

  On Richcraft’s orders, his guards took Finessa to a large country house where the young prince was recuperating from his recent mishap. Working himself up into a lather, Richcraft cursed her to her face in a hundred brutish ways – a cursing to which she answered with a firmness of character and a greatness of soul that makes me congratulate myself once more on having her as my heroine. At last, after holding her prisoner for some little time, he had her taken to the summit of the highest mountain in the kingdom, and it was there he told her that he was going to put her to death in such a fashion as would finally avenge him for all the injuries he had received at her pale hands. He showed her a barrel all around the inside of which were stuck razors, penknives and nails, and told her that, as her punishment, a punishment she well deserved, he was going to have her put inside it and rolled down from the top of the mountain into the valley far below.

  Though Finessa was no Roman, she was to outward appearance just as unafraid of this punishment as was Regulus8 at the prospect of a similar ordeal: she retained all of that poise and presence for which, I trust, she has become a byword. Yet Richcraft, who might have come round to admiring such a heroic stance, hated her all the more for it and became all the more resolved to torture her. To that end, he bent down to peer into the barrel to see whether a few more cutting edges might be added to those with which it was already adorned.

  Watching Richcraft lean over the barrel, Finessa seemed to see opportunity staring her in the face, and lost not a moment in exploiting it. Without giving her tormentor any time to know where he was, she deftly kicked him inside and started to roll the barrel down the mountain. Whereupon she herself ran away, and the prince’s officers, who weren’t on the whole evil men, merely soldiers, and who had watched their master torment the pretty young princess with heavy hearts, made not the least attempt to catch her up. Besides, what had happened to Richcraft so alarmed them that their only thought was to try and stop the barrel. It was all, however, in vain: unimpeded, it rolled the whole way down the mountainside, and when the prince was at last extricated from it, his body was bleeding from a thousand cuts.

  Whilst Richcraft’s accident threw the king his father and his brother Prince Belavoir into the utmost despair, the ordinary people of the kingdom were not at all concerned, Richcraft being loathed by everyone and it long having been a source of amazement that young Belavoir, who was known to have a generous soul, could love so unworthy an elder brother. But so noble was the character of this younger prince that he was deeply attached to all those of his family; and Richcraft had always taken such good care to extend the tenderest signs and expressions of sibling affection to him that Belavoir wouldn’t have forgiven himself had he not returned them with interest.

  Belavoir, then, was immeasurably grieved at his brother’s wounds and tried all he could to have them cured and Richcraft good as new. Yet, for all the attention that was lavished upon him, it seemed that nothing now could save Richcraft. On the contrary, his wounds were aggravated by the day and he lingered on in complete misery.

  After so neatly disengaging herself from her plight, Finessa was delighted to return to the castle where she had left her sisters but where before too long she was confronted with that most unpleasant form of truth – bad news. Lackadaisy and Loquatia were each, and almost at the same time, delivered of a son – at which turn of events Finessa was extremely perplexed. Even now, however, her courage would not desert her. Her desire to conceal her sisters’ shame made her resolve once more to expose herself to danger, although she knew very well the risk she would have to run. To carry out this new plan, she took every measure that prudence might suggest. She disguised herself in man’s clothes, placed the babies of her sisters into two wooden boxes (in which she bored two respective holes where she knew their little mouths would be, so that they could breathe through them), mounted her horse, had these two boxes along with some others carefully strapped to her saddle and, with this queer equipage, rode off into King Lamb’s kingdom.

  The first thing Finessa heard when she entered its capital was how generously Belavoir had paid for the medicines given his brother, who had summoned to court all the charlatans and mountebanks of Europe. For, at that time, you must understand, there were in our continent a great many adventurers without portfolio, so to speak, without any precise business or talent, who would announce to any prepared to listen that they had received from heaven the gift of curing every imaginable type of illness and injury. These individuals, whose only diploma was in quackery, always found willing subjects among the ordinary folk, over whom they cast a spell with their gaudy clothing and the colourful names they gave themselves. They never stayed in their own birthplace, where people knew them for what they were; and the prestige of having come from a long way off does very frequently, with simple souls, make up for an utter want of merit.

  Our ingenious princess, who knew all about such men and their swindles, took for herself a name that nobody in the kingdom had ever heard before, Sanatio. Then she let it be known about town that the Chevalier Sanatio was ready to share all his occult secrets, all his alchemy, with the townsfolk, ready to cure every species of wound, even the most chronic or dangerous.

  Belavoir immediately sent for this wonderful Doctor-of-Everything, and Finessa arrived, playing the part to the hilt and some way beyond, confidently tossing out the most obscure medical terms and signing the visitor’s book in a wholly indecipherable hand: nothing in short was missing. She was a trifle nonplussed, however, by Belavoir’s pleasant, open and honest features; and, after talking to him for a while about the state of Richcraft’s health, she told him that she would go and fetch a bottle of her most treasured brew and would in the meantime leave the two boxes she had brought – boxes which, she said, contained some excellent ointments, of a kind particularly suitable for relieving the wounded prince.

  So saying, she left… and stayed away so long that everybody began to grow quite impatient. Until at last, wondering just what to do next, they heard what sounded like babies crying in Prince Richcraft’s chamber. Now this was really rather surprising, as there certainly seemed to be no infants around, but they listened more attentively and eventually discovered that the crying came from inside Sanatio’s boxes.

  It was of course Finessa’s two little nephews. She had fed them before setting out for the palace; but, as they’d been lying there for quite a long while, they wanted to be fed again, as babies do, and were making their wishes known, as babies also do. The courtiers opened the boxes and were discombobulated to find inside them two of the prettiest infants they had ever set eyes on. Their unexplained presence in the palace, however, was enough for Richcraft to suspect a new trick of Finessa’s; and, if such a thing were possible, his detestation of her was even greater than before, a detestation that so added to his bodily pains it was feared he was about to die on the spot.

  Belavoir, for his part, grieved all the more at Richcraft’s precipitous decline; but the latter, perfidious to his dying breath, was reflecting on how he might still abuse his brother’s tenderness.

  You have always loved me, Prince, he suddenly cried, and I k
now that you will lament your loss of me. But a man can have no greater proof of another’s love than to see him accede to a deathbed request. If, then, I have ever been dear to you, grant me this one request that I am about to ask of you. It’s certain I shall never ask another.

  Considering the condition in which his brother now found himself, Belavoir naturally could not refuse him, whatever his request might be, and he swore that he would grant him anything he wished.

  When Richcraft heard him make this promise, he embraced his brother and said: I die contented, brother, for I die avenged. That which I ask is that you seek the hand of Finessa in marriage, immediately upon my decease. You will, I am sure, obtain it; and the moment she is in your power, I want you to plunge a dagger in her heart.

  At these words Belavoir trembled with horror and repented the imprudence of his promise. But it was too late; the thing could not be unsaid. Nor did he want his regret to be noticed by his brother, who expired soon after.

  Richcraft’s father, a good man if too indulgent, was of course deeply sorrowed by his son’s death. But his people, far from regretting it, were on the contrary glad that it secured the succession to the throne of Belavoir, who was as widely loved as his late brother had been loathed.

  Finessa, meanwhile, who had once more happily rejoined her sisters, heard soon after of Richcraft’s death; and, some time after that, news came to the three princesses that the king their father was at long last on his way home.

  On his arrival, he immediately hurried to the tower, where his first concern was to inspect the three glass bobbins. Lackadaisy, who was first to be asked, went off and brought back that which belonged to Finessa; then, making a very deep and modest curtsey, returned it where she had found it. Loquatia did just as Lackadaisy had done; and Finessa, too, naturally brought her own bobbin to show to the king. But some slight insincerity in their manner had aroused his suspicions and he told them he had a mind to see all three together. This time only Finessa dared to show him hers, and the king fell into such a rage against his two eldest daughters that he instantly sent them off to the fairy who had given him the bobbins, commanding her to keep them with her as long as they both lived and punish them as she saw fit.