Princess Mirror-Belle

  For Phoebe

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Dragon Pox

  Chapter Two

  Ellen’s Castle

  Chapter Three

  Snow White and the Eight Dwarfs

  About the Author and Illustrator

  Chapter One

  Dragon Pox

  “You’ve got some new ones on your face,” said Ellen’s mum. “Don’t scratch them or you’ll make them worse.”

  Ellen was off school with chicken pox. She didn’t feel all that ill but she did feel sorry for herself, because she was missing the school outing to the dolphin display.

  “Can you read me a story?” she asked Mum. But just then the front door bell rang.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t. That’s Mrs Foster-Smith come for her piano lesson. Look, here are your library books . . . and remember, no scratching.” She went out of the room.

  Ellen picked up one of the books. It was full of stories about princesses. She flicked through the pages, looking at the pictures. The princesses were all very beautiful, with swirly looking clothes and hair down to their waists. None of them had chicken pox. Ellen started to read The Sleeping Beauty, but it was difficult to concentrate. For one thing, her spots were so itchy. For another, Mrs Foster-Smith was thumping away at “The Fairies’ Dance” on the piano downstairs. The way she played it, it sounded more like “The Elephants’ Dance”.

  Ellen decided to have a look at her new spots. There was no mirror in her bedroom so she put on her right slipper (she had lost her left one) and padded into the bathroom.

  She studied her face in the mirror over the basin. One of the new spots was right in the middle of her nose. The more Ellen looked at it, the itchier it felt . . . Her hand crept towards it. Just a little tiny scratch wouldn’t matter, surely. Her finger was just about to touch the spot when a strange thing happened. Her reflection dodged to one side and said, “Don’t scratch or you’ll turn into a toad!”

  Ellen didn’t reply. She was too surprised. She just stared.

  “I’ve never seen such a bad case of dragon pox,” said the mirror girl.

  “It’s not dragon pox, it’s chicken pox,” Ellen found herself saying. “Anyway, yours is just as bad – you’re my reflection.”

  “Don’t be silly, I’m not you,” said the mirror girl, and to prove it she stuck one hand out of the mirror and then the other.

  “Come on, help me out,” she said, reaching for Ellen’s hand.

  Ellen gave a gentle pull and the mirror girl climbed out of the mirror, into the basin and down on to the bathroom floor.

  “What a funny little room!” she said.

  “It’s not that little!” said Ellen. This was true – there was room in the bathroom for three of the tall pot plants that Mum was so keen on.

  The mirror girl laughed. “The bathroom in the palace is about ten times this size,” she said.

  “The palace?” repeated Ellen.

  “Of course. Where would you expect a princess to live?”

  “Are you a princess, then?”

  “I most certainly am. I’m Princess Mirror-Belle. You really ought to curtsy, but as you’re my friend I’ll let you off.”

  “But . . . you don’t look like a princess,” said Ellen. “You look just like me. You’ve got the same pyjamas and just one slipper. You’ve even got a plaster on your finger like me.”

  “These are just my dressing-up clothes,” said Mirror-Belle. “In the palace I usually wear a dress of silver silk, like the moon.” She thought for a moment and then added, “Or one of golden satin, like the sun. And anyway, my slipper’s on my left foot and my plaster’s on my right finger. Yours are the other way round.”

  Ellen didn’t see that this made much difference, but she didn’t want to get into an argument, so instead she asked Mirror-Belle, “Why have you got the plaster? Did you cut yourself on the bread knife like me?”

  “No, of course not,” said Mirror-Belle. “I was pricked on my finger by a wicked fairy.”

  “Just like the Sleeping Beauty!” said Ellen. “Did you go to sleep for a hundred years too?”

  “No – two hundred,” said Mirror-Belle. “I only woke up this morning.” She gave a huge yawn as if to prove it.

  “Did you put the plaster on before you went to sleep or after you woke up?” asked Ellen, but Mirror-Belle didn’t seem to want to answer this question. Instead she put the plug into the bath and turned on the taps.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” asked Ellen.

  “Getting the cure ready, what do you think?”

  “What cure?”

  “The cure for dragon pox, of course.”

  “But I haven’t got dragon pox!”

  “Well, I have,” said Mirror-Belle, “and I’ll tell you how I got it. I was in the palace garden last week, playing with my golden ball, when—”

  “Weren’t you still asleep last week?” Ellen interrupted. “Didn’t you say you only woke up this morning?”

  “I wish you’d stop asking so many questions. As I was about to say, an enormous dragon flew down and captured me. Luckily a knight came and rescued me, but when I got back to the palace I came out in all these spots. My mother the Queen sent for the doctor and he said I’d caught dragon pox.”

  “Well, my doctor said mine were chicken pox,” said Ellen.

  “I suppose you were captured by a chicken, were you?” said Mirror-Belle. “Not quite so exciting, really. Still, I expect the cure’s just the same.” She picked up a bottle of bubble bath and poured nearly all of it into the water.

  “That’s far too much!” shrieked Ellen. But Mirror-Belle was too busy investigating the cupboard on the wall to answer.

  “This looks good too,” she said.

  “But that’s my dad’s shaving cream,” said Ellen.

  “It’s nice and frothy,” said Mirror-Belle, squirting some into the bath. “And this looks just the job,” she said, taking the cap off a tube of Minty-Zing toothpaste, which had red and green stripes.

  “Nice colours,” said Mirror-Belle, squeezing most of the toothpaste out into the bath.

  Ellen was a bit shocked at first but then she giggled.

  “Shall we put some of Luke’s hair gel in too?” she asked. Ellen’s big brother had started getting interested in his appearance recently and was always smoothing bright blue sticky stuff into his hair.

  “Good idea,” said Mirror-Belle. Ellen scooped the gel out of the tube and into the bath. That would serve Luke right for all the times he’d hogged the hairdryer.

  Mirror-Belle poured in a bottle of orange-cloured shampoo and eyed the bath water thoughtfully. “We still need one more ingredient,” she said. “I know!” She picked up Mum’s bottle of Blue Moon perfume and began spraying merrily.

  Ellen, who had begun to enjoy herself, felt rather alarmed again. Mum only ever put a tiny bit of Blue Moon behind her ears. By now the bathroom smelt like a flower shop.

  “Let’s get in now,” said Mirror-Belle. In another moment the two of them were up to their chests in bubbles, cream, gel and toothpaste.

  “I can feel the cure working already, can’t you?” said Mirror-Belle, and flipped some froth at Ellen. Ellen flipped some back, and a blob of toothpaste landed on the spot on Mirror-Belle’s nose.

  Ellen noticed that Mirror-Belle, like herself, had a pale mark round one of her wrists.

  “We’ve both got watch-strap marks,” she said. “Did you lose your watch like I did?”

  Mirror-Belle looked at her grandly and said, “This mark isn’t from a watch. Oh no. It’s from my magic wishing bangle.”

  “A wishing bangle! Can you wish for anything you want?”

  “Naturally,” said Mirror-
Belle. “And for things that other people don’t want.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, once I wished for a worm in the palace garden to grow to the size of a snake and give the gardener a fright.”

  “And did it?”

  “Yes. The only trouble was, it didn’t stop growing. It grew and grew till it took up the whole of the garden. Then we had to banish it to an island, but it still kept growing.”

  “But couldn’t you just wish it small again?”

  Mirror-Belle looked annoyed for a second but then her face cleared and she said, “No, because I dropped the bangle in the sea and it got swallowed by a fish. Luckily, though, I caught the fish last week.”

  Ellen thought of reminding her once again that she had said she was asleep last week, but she decided not to. It would only make Mirror-Belle cross. It was more fun just to listen to her stories, even if some of them sounded a bit like fibs.

  “I don’t feel quite so bad about missing the dolphin display any more,” she said.

  “Is that all you’re missing?” asked Mirror-Belle. “I’m missing the sea monster display.”

  The two of them played at being dolphins and sea monsters for a while, splashing a lot of water and froth out of the bath.

  “Your dragon pox hasn’t gone away yet,” said Ellen.

  “Don’t be so impatient,” said Mirror-Belle. “We haven’t done Stage Two yet.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Get out and I’ll show you,” said Mirror-Belle. They both got out of the bath and Mirror-Belle picked up a roll of toilet paper. She began winding it round and round Ellen, starting with her legs and working upwards.

  “I feel like an Egyptian mummy,” said Ellen, laughing.

  Mirror-Belle reached Ellen’s face. She wound the paper round and round until Ellen couldn’t see out.

  “Now you have to count to a hundred,” she said.

  “What about you?” asked Ellen.

  “We’ll do me later,” said Mirror-Belle.

  Ellen started to count. She could hear Mirror-Belle moving about the room and from downstairs came the sound of Mrs Foster-Smith playing “The Babbling Brook”. The way she played it, it sounded more like “The Crashing Ocean”.

  When Ellen got to about eighty she heard Mirror-Belle say something which sounded like, “Ow! Stupid old taps!”

  When she got to a hundred she tried to unwind the toilet paper but it got into a tangle.

  “Help me, Mirror-Belle,” she said. But there was silence.

  Ellen managed to tear the toilet paper away from her eyes, but Mirror-Belle was nowhere to be seen.

  “Mirror-Belle! Where are you?” called Ellen. Mirror-Belle’s pyjamas had disappeared as well. Could she have put them on and gone out of the room?

  Ellen opened the door. Maybe Mirror-Belle had gone downstairs. Ellen was still half-wrapped in toilet paper but she didn’t bother about that. She set off downstairs in search of Mirror-Belle.

  When she was six stairs from the bottom, two things happened. Ellen tripped up and fell down the stairs, and Mrs Foster-Smith came out of the sitting room. Ellen went crashing into her, and Mrs Foster-Smith let out a shriek.

  “Ellen! What are you up to?” asked Mum, following Mrs Foster-Smith out of the room.

  “It’s Stage Two. It’s all to do with dragon pox,” Ellen began explaining. “Mirror-Belle said that the cure for chicken pox was just the same. You need bubble bath and toothpaste and hair gel and . . .”

  “The child’s raving – she’s delirious,” said Mrs Foster-Smith. “I think we ought to call the doctor.”

  “I don’t think it’s that bad,” said Mum. “Go and put your pyjamas back on, Ellen, and I’ll be with you in a minute. I’ll see you at the same time next week then, Mrs Foster-Smith. And as I said, maybe you could try playing the pieces just a little more quietly.”

  Back in the bathroom, Ellen finished untangling herself. She had just got into her pyjamas when Mum came into the room. She looked round in horror at the empty jars and bottles and the froth everywhere.

  “What a horrible mess!” she said.

  “It wasn’t me – not much of it, anyway. It was Mirror-Belle. She came out of the mirror.”

  “Oh yes, and I suppose she’s gone back into it now.”

  Ellen looked at the mirror. It was covered in toothpasty bubbles.

  “I think you’re right,” she said.

  Mum wiped the bubbles off the mirror. Ellen looked into it. The girl she saw there did look like Mirror-Belle, but she moved whenever Ellen moved: it was just her own reflection.

  Ellen frowned, suddenly unsure about everything. She couldn’t just have imagined Mirror-Belle, could she? Her reflection frowned back.

  Mum scurried round the room, tut-tutting and clearing up the mess. The worst part was when she discovered how little of her Blue Moon perfume was left.

  “I know I leave you on your own a lot when I do my piano-teaching, but I did think you were old enough not to do things like this,” she said. “You should be in bed with those chicken pox – though I must say, they do look quite a bit better. That big one on your nose seems to have disappeared!”

  Then she caught sight of something in the basin and, looking surprised, picked it up.

  “Look – here’s your left slipper!” she said. “I’m glad it’s turned up at last.”

  Ellen didn’t say anything (that would only annoy Mum again) but she smiled to herself as she put the slipper on, because she knew whose slipper it really was.

  Chapter Two

  Ellen’s Castle

  Ellen and her mother were in one of the changing rooms of a big department store. They were supposed to be buying a dress for Ellen to wear to her grown-up cousin’s wedding, but nothing seemed to fit or look right.

  “That greeny-blue colour suits you,” said Ellen’s mum, “but it’s too tight. I’ll go and see if they’ve got a bigger size.”

  Ellen didn’t really care what dress she wore to the wedding. No one would be looking at her, since she hadn’t been asked to be a bridesmaid – something she felt a bit cross about. She practised making her most hideous face at herself in the mirror – the one where her eyeballs rolled up and almost out of sight and her bottom lip jutted over the top one. If she did that at the wedding, people would look at her. But of course she’d be too shy to do it when the time came.

  This time, though, the face didn’t seem to be working properly. The eyeballs in the mirror rolled back to normal, the mouth went back to its ordinary shape, then opened and said, “You look just like that wicked fairy – the one who pricked my finger.”

  “Mirror-Belle!” exclaimed Ellen. “What are you doing here?”

  Mirror-Belle stepped out of the mirror. She was wearing a too-tight, greeny-blue dress just like the one Ellen had on.

  “I see you’ve moved house,” she said, looking around her.

  “This isn’t a house, it’s a shop,” said Ellen, but Mirror-Belle wasn’t listening. She had picked up Ellen’s coat from the floor where it was lying inside out, and was putting it on that way, so that the tartan lining was on the outside.

  “Not bad,” she said, looking at her reflection. Then, “Come on, let’s see what your cook has made for lunch.” And she walked out of the changing room.

  “No! Stop!” cried Ellen. “Give me back my coat!” She ran after Mirror-Belle, who was merrily weaving her way around the rails and stands of clothes.

  “You have got a lot of clothes,” she said when Ellen caught up with her. “Almost as many as me, though not such beautiful ones, of course. I don’t suppose you’ve got a ballgown made of rose petals stitched together with spider’s thread, have you?”

  “No, I haven’t,” said Ellen. “But I don’t think I’d want one. Wouldn’t the rose petals shrivel up and die?”

  Mirror-Belle thought for a moment and then said, “No, they’ve been dipped in a magic fountain which keeps them fresh forever.”

  By this st
age they had reached the escalator. Mirror-Belle hopped on to it.

  “This is fun,” she said. “Does it go down to the dungeons?”

  “No,” said Ellen, riding down beside her. “It goes down to the food department.”

  “The banqueting hall, do you mean?” asked Mirror-Belle. “Oh good, I’m starving.”

  She skipped off the escalator. They were in the fruit and vegetable section of the food department. Mirror-Belle picked up a potato and put it down again in disgust.

  “It’s raw!” she said. “How does your cook expect us to eat that?” She inspected the cabbages and cauliflowers. “What sort of banquet is this supposed to be?” she asked. “None of the food is cooked at all.”

  “It’s not supposed to be cooked – people take it home to cook,” Ellen tried to explain. “Look, Mirror-Belle, do give me back my raincoat – I must get back to Mum.”

  “These apples look all right,” said Mirror-Belle, picking one up and taking a large bite out of it. She picked up another one and did the same. “With green and red apples like these I only ever bite the green side,” she explained. “You can’t be too careful – there could be a wicked queen going round putting poison into the red sides. Look what happened to my friend Snow White.” She took a bite out of another apple.