The Ickabog, Page 2

  The City-Within-The-City was separated from the rest of Chouxville by a high white wall, and the gates in the wall stood open during the day, so that the residents could visit friends and family in the rest of Chouxville, and go to the markets. By night, the sturdy gates were closed, and everyone in the City-Within-The-City slept, like the king, under the protection of the Royal Guard.

  Major Beamish, Bert’s father, was head of the Royal Guard. A handsome, cheerful man who rode a steel-gray horse, he accompanied King Fred, Lord Spittleworth, and Lord Flapoon on their hunting trips, which usually happened five times a week. The king liked Major Beamish, and he also liked Bert’s mother, because Bertha Beamish was the king’s own private pastry chef, a high honor in that city of world-class bakers. Due to Bertha’s habit of bringing home fancy cakes that hadn’t turned out absolutely perfectly, Bert was a plump little boy, and sometimes, I regret to say, the other children called him “Butterball” and made him cry.

  Bert’s best friend was Daisy Dovetail. The two children had been born days apart, and acted more like brother and sister than playmates. Daisy was Bert’s defender against bullies. She was skinny but fast, and more than ready to fight anyone who called Bert “Butterball.”

  Daisy’s father, Dan Dovetail, was the king’s carpenter, repairing and replacing the wheels and shafts on his carriages. As Mr. Dovetail was so clever at carving, he also made bits of furniture for the palace.

  Daisy’s mother, Dora Dovetail, was the Head Seamstress of the palace — another honored job, because King Fred liked clothes, and kept a whole team of tailors busy making him new costumes every month.

  It was the king’s great fondness for finery that led to a nasty incident which the history books of Cornucopia would later record as the beginning of all the troubles that were to engulf that happy little kingdom. At the time it happened, only a few people within the City-Within-The-City knew anything about it, though for some, it was an awful tragedy.

  What happened was this.

  The King of Pluritania came to pay a formal visit to Fred (still hoping, perhaps, to exchange one of his daughters for a lifetime’s supply of Hopes-of-Heaven) and Fred decided that he must have a brand-new set of clothes made for the occasion: dull purple, overlaid with silver lace, with amethyst buttons, and gray fur at the cuffs.

  Now, King Fred had heard something about the Head Seamstress not being quite well, but he hadn’t paid much attention. He didn’t trust anyone but Daisy’s mother to stitch on the silver lace properly, so gave the order that nobody else should be given the job. In consequence, Daisy’s mother sat up three nights in a row, racing to finish the purple suit in time for the King of Pluritania’s visit, and at dawn on the fourth day, her assistant found her lying on the floor, dead, with the very last amethyst button in her hand.

  The king’s Chief Advisor came to break the news, while Fred was still having his breakfast. The Chief Advisor was a wise old man called Herringbone, with a silver beard that hung almost to his knees. After explaining that the Head Seamstress had died, he said:

  “But I’m sure one of the other ladies will be able to fix on the last button for Your Majesty.”

  There was a look in Herringbone’s eye that King Fred didn’t like. It gave him a squirming feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  While his dressers were helping him into the new purple suit later that morning, Fred tried to make himself feel less guilty by talking the matter over with Lords Spittleworth and Flapoon.

  “I mean to say, if I’d known she was seriously ill,” panted Fred, as the servants heaved him into his skin-tight satin pantaloons, “naturally I’d have let someone else sew the suit.”

  “Your Majesty is so kind,” said Spittleworth, as he examined his sallow complexion in the mirror over the fireplace. “A more tenderhearted monarch was never born.”

  “The woman should have spoken up if she felt unwell,” grunted Flapoon from a cushioned seat by the window. “If she’s not fit to work, she should’ve said so. Properly looked at, that’s disloyalty to the king. Or to your suit, anyway.”

  “Flapoon’s right,” said Spittleworth, turning away from the mirror. “Nobody could treat his servants better than you do, sire.”

  “I do treat them well, don’t I?” said King Fred anxiously, sucking in his stomach as the dressers did up his amethyst buttons. “And after all, chaps, I’ve got to look my blasted best today, haven’t I? You know how dressy the King of Pluritania always is!”

  “It would be a matter of national shame if you were any less well-dressed than the King of Pluritania,” said Spittleworth.

  “Put this unhappy occurrence out of your mind, sire,” said Flapoon. “A disloyal seamstress is no reason to spoil a sunny day.”

  And yet, in spite of the two lords’ advice, King Fred couldn’t be quite easy in his mind. Perhaps he was imagining it, but he thought Lady Eslanda looked particularly serious that day. The servants’ smiles seemed colder and the maids’ curtsies a little less deep. As his court feasted that evening with the King of Pluritania, Fred’s thoughts kept drifting back to the seamstress, dead on the floor, with the last amethyst button clutched in her hand.

  Before Fred went to bed that night, Herringbone knocked on his bedroom door. After bowing deeply, the Chief Advisor asked whether the king was intending to send flowers to Mrs. Dovetail’s funeral.

  “Oh — oh, yes!” said Fred, startled. “Yes, send a big wreath, you know, saying how sorry I am and so forth. You can arrange that, can’t you, Herringbone?”

  “Certainly, sire,” said the Chief Advisor. “And — if I may ask — are you planning to visit the seamstress’s family, at all? They live, you know, just a short walk from the palace gates.”

  “Visit them?” said the king pensively. “Oh, no, Herringbone, I don’t think I’d like — I mean to say, I’m sure they aren’t expecting that.”

  Herringbone and the king looked at each other for a few seconds, then the Chief Advisor bowed and left the room.

  Now, as King Fred was used to everyone telling him what a marvelous chap he was, he really didn’t like the frown with which the Chief Advisor had left. He now began to feel cross rather than ashamed.

  “It’s a bally pity,” he told his reflection, turning back to the mirror in which he’d been combing his moustache before bed, “but after all, I’m the king and she was a seamstress. If I died, I wouldn’t have expected her to —”

  But then it occurred to him that if he died, he’d expect the whole of Cornucopia to stop whatever they were doing, dress all in black, and weep for a week, just as they’d done for his father, Richard the Righteous.

  “Well, anyway,” he said impatiently to his reflection, “life goes on.”

  He put on his silk nightcap, climbed into his four-poster bed, blew out the candle, and fell asleep.

  Mrs. Dovetail was buried in the graveyard in the City-Within-The-City, where generations of royal servants lay. Daisy and her father stood hand in hand looking down at the grave for a long time. Bert kept looking back at Daisy as his tearful mother and grim-faced father led him slowly away. Bert wanted to say something to his best friend, but what had happened was too enormous and dreadful for words. Bert could hardly bear to imagine how he’d feel if his mother had disappeared forever into the cold, hard earth.

  When all their friends had gone, Mr. Dovetail moved the purple wreath sent by the king away from Mrs. Dovetail’s headstone, and put in its place the small bunch of snowdrops that Daisy had collected that morning. Then the two Dovetails walked slowly home to a house they knew would never be the same again.

  A week after the funeral, the king rode out of the palace with the Royal Guard to go hunting. As usual, everyone along his route came rushing out into their gardens to bow, curtsy, and cheer. As the king bowed and waved back, he noticed that the front garden of one cottage remained empty. It had black drapes at the windows and the front door.

  “Who lives there?” he asked Major Beamish.

&nbs
p; “That — that’s the Dovetail house, Your Majesty,” said Beamish.

  “Dovetail, Dovetail,” said the king, frowning. “I’ve heard that name, haven’t I?”

  “Er … yes, sire,” said Major Beamish. “Mr. Dovetail is Your Majesty’s carpenter and Mrs. Dovetail is — was — Your Majesty’s Head Seamstress.”

  “Ah, yes,” said King Fred hurriedly, “I — I remember.”

  And spurring his milk-white charger into a canter, he rode swiftly past the black-draped windows of the Dovetail cottage, trying to think of nothing but the day’s hunting that lay ahead.

  But every time the king rode out after that, he couldn’t help but fix his eyes on the empty garden and the black-draped door of the Dovetail residence, and every time he saw the cottage, the image of the dead seamstress clutching that amethyst button came back to him. Finally, he could bear it no longer, and summoned the Chief Advisor to him.

  “Herringbone,” he said, not looking the old man in the eye, “there’s a house on the corner, on the way to the park. Rather a nice cottage. Large-ish garden.”

  “The Dovetail house, Your Majesty?”

  “Oh, that’s who lives there, is it?” said King Fred airily. “Well, it occurs to me that it’s rather a big place for a small family. I think I’ve heard there are only two of them, is that correct?”

  “Perfectly correct, Your Majesty. Just two, since the mother —”

  “It doesn’t really seem fair, Herringbone,” King Fred said loudly, “for that nice, spacious cottage to be given to only two people, when there are families of five or six, I believe, who’d be happy with a little more room.”

  “You’d like me to move the Dovetails, Your Majesty?”

  “Yes, I think so,” said King Fred, pretending to be very interested in the tip of his satin shoe.

  “Very well, Your Majesty,” said the Chief Advisor, with a deep bow. “I shall ask them to swap with Roach’s family, who I’m sure would be glad of more space, and I shall put the Dovetails in the Roaches’ house.”

  “And where is that, exactly?” asked the king nervously, for the last thing he wanted was to see those black drapes even nearer the palace gates.

  “Right on the edge of the City-Within-The-City,” said the Chief Advisor. “Very close to the graveyard, in f —”

  “That sounds suitable,” interrupted King Fred, leaping to his feet, “I have no need of details. Just make it happen, Herringbone, there’s a good chap.”

  And so Daisy and her father were instructed to swap houses with the family of Captain Roach, who, like Bert’s father, was a member of the king’s Royal Guard. The next time King Fred rode out, the black drapes had vanished from the door, and the Roach children — four strapping brothers, the ones who’d first christened Bert Beamish “Butterball” — came running into the front garden and jumped up and down, cheering and waving Cornucopian flags. King Fred beamed and waved back at the boys. Weeks passed, and King Fred forgot all about the Dovetails, and was happy again.

  For some months after Mrs. Dovetail’s shocking death, the king’s servants were divided into two groups. The first group whispered that King Fred had been to blame for the way she’d died. The second preferred to believe there’d been some kind of mistake, and that the king couldn’t have known how ill Mrs. Dovetail was, before giving the order that she must finish his suit.

  Mrs. Beamish, the pastry chef, belonged to the second group. The king had always been very nice to Mrs. Beamish, sometimes even inviting her into the dining room to congratulate her on particularly fine batches of Dukes’ Delights or Folderol Fancies, so she was sure he was a kind, generous, and considerate man.

  “You mark my words, somebody forgot to give the king a message,” she told her husband, Major Beamish. “He’d never make an ill servant work. I know he must feel simply awful about what happened.”

  “Yes,” said Major Beamish, “I’m sure he does.”

  Like his wife, Major Beamish wanted to think the best of the king, because he, his father, and his grandfather before him had all served loyally in the Royal Guard. So even though Major Beamish observed that King Fred seemed quite cheerful after Mrs. Dovetail’s death, hunting as regularly as ever, and though Major Beamish knew that the Dovetails had been moved out of their old house to live down by the graveyard, he tried to believe the king was sorry for what had happened to his seamstress, and that he’d had no hand in moving her husband and daughter.

  The Dovetails’ new cottage was a gloomy place. Sunlight was blocked out by the high yew trees that bordered the graveyard, although Daisy’s bedroom window gave her a clear view of her mother’s grave, through a gap between dark branches. As she no longer lived next door to Bert, Daisy saw less of him in her free time, although Bert went to visit Daisy as often as possible. There was much less room to play in her new garden, but they adjusted their games to fit.

  What Mr. Dovetail thought about his new house, or the king, nobody knew. He never discussed these matters with his fellow servants, but went quietly about his work, earning the money he needed to support his daughter and raising Daisy as best he could without her mother.

  Daisy, who liked helping her father in his carpenter’s workshop, had always been happiest in coveralls. She was the kind of person who didn’t mind getting dirty and she wasn’t very interested in clothes. Yet in the days following the funeral, she wore a different dress every day to take a fresh posy to her mother’s grave. While alive, Mrs. Dovetail had always tried to make her daughter look, as she put it, “like a little lady,” and had made her many beautiful little gowns, sometimes from the offcuts of material that King Fred graciously let her keep, after she’d made his superb costumes.

  And so a week passed, then a month, and then a year, until the dresses her mother had sewn her were all too small for Daisy, but she still kept them carefully in her wardrobe. Other people seemed to have forgotten what had happened to Daisy, or had gotten used to the idea of her mother being gone. Daisy pretended that she was used to it too. On the surface, her life returned to something like normal. She helped her father in the workshop, did her schoolwork, and played with her best friend, Bert, but they never spoke about her mother, and they never talked about the king. Every night, Daisy lay with her eyes fixed on the distant white headstone shining in the moonlight, until she fell asleep.

  She wore a different dress every day to take a fresh posy to her mother’s grave.

  By Lucy, Age 12

  There was a courtyard behind the palace where peacocks walked, fountains played, and statues of former kings and queens kept watch. As long as they didn’t pull the peacocks’ tails, jump in the fountains, or climb the statues, the children of the palace servants were allowed to play in the courtyard after school. Sometimes Lady Eslanda, who liked children, would come and make daisy chains with them, but the most exciting thing of all was when King Fred came out onto the balcony and waved, which made all the children cheer, bow, and curtsy as their parents had taught them.

  The only time the children fell silent, ceased their games of hopscotch, and stopped pretending to fight the Ickabog was when the lords Spittleworth and Flapoon passed through the courtyard. These two lords weren’t fond of children at all. They thought the little brats made far too much noise in the late afternoon, which was precisely the time when Spittleworth and Flapoon liked to take a nap between hunting and dinner.

  One day, shortly after Bert’s and Daisy’s seventh birthdays, when everyone was playing as usual between the fountains and the peacocks, the daughter of the new Head Seamstress, who was wearing a beautiful dress of rose pink brocade, said:

  “Oh, I do hope the king waves at us today!”

  “Well, I don’t,” said Daisy, who couldn’t help herself, and didn’t realize how loudly she’d spoken.

  The children all gasped and turned to look at her. Daisy felt hot and cold at once, seeing them all glaring.

  “You shouldn’t have said that,” whispered Bert. As he was standing right n
ext to Daisy, the other children were staring at him too.

  “I don’t care,” said Daisy, color rising in her face. She’d started now, so she might as well finish. “If he hadn’t worked my mother so hard, she’d still be alive.”

  Daisy felt as though she’d been wanting to say that out loud for a very long time.

  There was another gasp from all the surrounding children and a maid’s daughter actually squealed in terror.

  “He’s the best king of Cornucopia we’ve ever had,” said Bert, who’d heard his mother say so many times.

  “No, he isn’t,” said Daisy loudly. “He’s selfish, vain, and cruel!”

  “Daisy!” whispered Bert, horrified. “Don’t be — don’t be silly!”

  It was the word “silly” that did it. “Silly,” when the new Head Seamstress’s daughter smirked and whispered behind her hand to her friends, while pointing at Daisy’s coveralls? “Silly,” when her father wiped away his tears in the evenings, thinking Daisy wasn’t looking? “Silly,” when to talk to her mother she had to visit a cold white headstone?

  Daisy drew back her hand, and smacked Bert right across the face.

  Then the oldest Roach brother, whose name was Roderick and who now lived in Daisy’s old bedroom, shouted, “Don’t let her get away with it, Butterball!” and led all the boys in shouts of “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

  Terrified, Bert gave Daisy’s shoulder a half-hearted shove, and it seemed to Daisy that the only thing to do was launch herself at Bert, and everything became dust and elbows until suddenly the two children were pulled apart by Bert’s father, Major Beamish, who’d come running out of the palace on hearing the commotion, to find out what was going on.

  “Dreadful behavior,” muttered Lord Spittleworth, walking past the major and the two sobbing, struggling children.

  But as he turned away, a broad smirk spread over Lord Spittleworth’s face. He was a man who knew how to turn a situation to good use, and he thought he might have found a way to banish children — or some of them, anyway — from the palace courtyard.