Christmas with Princess Mirror-Belle

  For Saoirse

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Swan Lake

  Chapter Two

  The Sleepwalking Beauty

  Ellen and Mirror-Belle’s

  Christmas Activities

  Chapter One

  Swan Lake

  It was a Saturday morning in December, and Ellen was drinking a glass of hot lemon and honey at the kitchen table. When she’d finished it she tried to sing:

  “On the first day of Christmas, my

  True Love gave to me

  A partridge in a pear tree.

  On the second day of Christmas . . .”

  It was no use: her voice was coming out all croaky. Ellen had had a bad cold and, although she felt much better, her throat wasn’t quite right yet. The lemon and honey drink hadn’t really helped. That meant she almost certainly wouldn’t be able to go out carol singing with her friends that night.

  She tried one more time:

  “On the seventh day of Christmas, my True Love gave to me

  Seven swans a-swimming . . .”

  “You sound more like a swan a-dying,” said Ellen’s big brother Luke, who was up early for once. (Usually he slept till lunchtime at weekends.) “Can’t you stop that awful din?”

  A dying swan! That reminded Ellen that she should be at her ballet class in ten minutes. They were rehearsing for their end-of-term show. It was going to be a children’s version of the famous ballet Swan Lake. At least there was no singing in that.

  In the ballet, Ellen was one of the maidens who had been turned into swans by a wicked sorcerer.

  Ignoring Luke, she ran upstairs and hastily packed her swan costume into a bag. The costume was quite simple: just white tights and T-shirt and a headband with an orange beak and two black eyes stitched on it.

  Even though Ellen took the shortcut through the park, by the time she reached the hall where the ballet class was held, the changing room was empty. “I’m late again,” she scolded herself. She hoped that Madame Jolie, the ballet teacher, wouldn’t be cross. She put on her costume as quickly as possible, then checked in the mirror that the swan’s beak was in the middle of the headband.

  “Oh no – don’t say the sorcerer turned you into a swan like me!” said her reflection. Except that of course it wasn’t her reflection – it was Princess Mirror-Belle. She looked just like Ellen, but was very different in character.

  “Mirror-Belle! What are you doing here? You know what happened last time.”

  Mirror-Belle had come to the ballet class once before, and Ellen didn’t want her there again. That time Mirror-Belle had told everyone that her shoes were magic and wouldn’t stop dancing. Madame Jolie was not at all impressed, and had ordered her to leave.

  “Fear not!” said Mirror-Belle, springing out of the mirror. “I’m not wearing my magic shoes this time. They wore out. But I’m shocked to see you with that beak. I thought the sorcerer’s magic only worked on princesses like me.”

  “It’s not a real beak – and the sorcerer is just in a ballet,” said Ellen. “Anyway, I can’t stay and chat – I’m already late.”

  Turning her back on Mirror-Belle, she opened the door to the ballet room, hoping that Mirror-Belle wouldn’t follow her.

  The other pupils in the ballet class were standing in a line with their toes turned out. Almost all of them were wearing swan outfits like Ellen.

  “I’m sorry I’m late, Madame,” said Ellen in her croaky voice. But instead of telling her off, Madame Jolie fixed her attention on Mirror-Belle who had followed Ellen and was fluttering her arms behind her back like wings. Ellen expected the teacher to be furious, but instead Madame Jolie clapped her hands in delight.

  “Yes! Yes! Zat is just ze movement I ’ave been trying to teach you all!” she said. “Everyone watch zees little newcomer and copy ’er. Arms back, fingers spread out, and flutter! Well done, my dear, you move just like a real swan.”

  “That’s because I am one!” replied Mirror-Belle. “A wicked sorcerer turned me into one, and I see he’s been at work here too. There’s a whole flock of you!”

  Madame Jolie laughed. She obviously didn’t recognize Mirror-Belle as the girl who had once been so cheeky in her class. “Ah, you know already ze story,” she said. “Zat is very good. Now, join ze line, please.”

  “It’s not just a story,” said Mirror-Belle. “It’s only too real. Unless we can discover the spell to break the magic we’ll all be swans for the rest of our lives.”

  “Zat is enough talking,” said Madame Jolie. “Now, we will practise ze ’ead movements. Everyone, look to ze right, zen to ze left, and zen dip your ’eads as if you are looking down into ze lake. Imagine zat your necks are long, long, like real swans!”

  Ellen and the others copied her – all except for Mirror-Belle. “I agree about not wasting time talking,” she said. “There’s no time to lose – we need to find the sorcerer and discover the spell, before every maiden in the world is turned into a swan.”

  Madame Jolie sighed. Her delight in her new pupil was wearing off, but she explained patiently, “We already ’ave a sorcerer.” She pointed to a little boy with a black cloak and an innocent expression. “Oscar is doing a very good job,” she said. “’E does ze dance very well; ’e just needs to practise looking more – ’ow do you say? – more evil.”

  “Nonsense!” said Mirror-Belle. “That’s a mere child. The sorcerer is a fully grown man. We must go in search of him immediately.” She pranced towards the door, flapping her arms wildly as if she were flying. “Are you coming with me, Ellen?” she asked.

  Ellen shook her head and felt her face turn pink.

  “What a strange child,” said Madame Jolie once Mirror-Belle had gone. “She looks very like you, Ellen. Did you bring her?”

  “No, Madame,” said Ellen. She didn’t feel like explaining how Mirror-Belle had come out of the mirror; no one ever believed her anyway.

  “Well, never mind. We ’ave now wasted ’alf ze class. Let us practise ze scene when ze sorcerer comes back. Everyone, bend ze knees, raise ze arms and turn ze ’ead away from Oscar; remember, ’e is a wicked sorcerer and you are terrified of ’im. Oscar, please do not smile! You are evil, remember – evil!”

  As the practice continued Ellen tried not to think about Mirror-Belle. When the class had finished they all curtsied to Madame Jolie and trooped into the changing room. Ellen was relieved that no one else was there; perhaps Mirror-Belle had gone back through the mirror to search for the sorcerer in her own world.

  Ellen had another go at singing as she walked back through the park:

  “On the third day of Christmas,

  my True Love sent to me

  Three French hens . . .”

  “That sounds terrible, Ellen,” came a voice from behind a bush, and out popped Princess Mirror-Belle. She was still dressed in white and wearing the swan headband. “The sorcerer must have robbed you of your voice,” she went on. “Swans can’t sing, you know. Mind you, you don’t look like a swan any more, which is strange. I wonder why that is. Maybe the magic didn’t totally work on you because you’re not a princess like me.”

  “Mirror-Belle, you look freezing. Do you want to borrow my coat?”

  “Thank you, that would be very nice, even though it doesn’t have any gold and silver embroidery like my one back home.”

  Mirror-Belle put the coat on, and it was Ellen’s turn to feel cold, but she wound her scarf round a couple of extra times. “What are you doing here anyway?” she asked.

  “Looking for the sorcerer, of course. I imagine he must live quite near a lake and someone told me there was one in this park.”

  “Yes –
well, it’s more of a duck pond really. Shall I show you?”

  “Of course,” said Mirror-Belle. “Lead on!”

  They soon came to the pond, which had patches of ice on it. As well as the ducks, there were seven swans in the water – three white and four grey ones. Mirror-Belle gave a loud gasp. “It’s Swan Lake!” she said.

  “The grey ones are the cygnets – they’ll turn white when they’re fully grown,” said Ellen.

  “I very much hope not,” said Mirror-Belle. “If my plan works, they’ll all have turned back into maidens before then.”

  “No, these are real swans,” said Ellen. “I’ve seen them loads of times. Sometimes we come and feed them.”

  But Mirror-Belle wasn’t paying attention. Instead, she was fixing her gaze on a man with a broom who was walking towards them, sweeping the path. “There he is!” she whispered dramatically.

  “Who?”

  “The sorcerer!”

  “Don’t be silly – that’s Mr Hollings. He looks after the park and does the gardening.”

  “Ellen, I despair of you sometimes. Can you never see through anyone’s disguise? And have you not noticed his broomstick?”

  It was true that the park-keeper’s broom was the kind that looked like a witch’s one, with a bundle of twigs tied on to the handle. “But lots of gardeners have brooms like that,” said Ellen. “I think they’re the best kind for sweeping up leaves.”

  “He’s talking to himself,” said Mirror-Belle.

  “He always does that,” said Ellen. “I think he’s going over all the jobs he has to do.”

  “No, he’s chanting a spell – I’m sure of it!” said Mirror-Belle.

  Mr Hollings was quite near them by then. “Clean the tools, tidy the shed,” they heard him mutter. Then he noticed them and raised his hand in a cheery greeting. “Hello, young ladies,” he said. “The pond’s freezing over. I hope we’re not in for a cold spell.”

  Ellen expected Mirror-Belle to start accusing him of turning maidens into swans, but in fact she just glared at him and said nothing. Mr Hollings carried on past them, still sweeping.

  “Did you hear that?” said Mirror-Belle when he was out of earshot. “He said something about a spell but he said he hoped it wouldn’t happen. He must be talking about the spell to turn the swans back into maidens.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Ellen. “He just meant that the weather was getting colder. And it is – I’m freezing. I need to get home.”

  “You can go where you like, Ellen, but I’m staying here. I’m going to find out what the spell is, and then I’m going to say it and set the maidens free.”

  “But what about my coat?” asked Ellen.

  “I’ll bring it back to you once I’ve found out the spell,” said Mirror-Belle.

  “Where’s your coat?” asked Mum when Ellen arrived home.

  “I lent it to Mirror-Belle,” said Ellen.

  “I do wish you wouldn’t use that old excuse,” said Mum, who thought that Princess Mirror-Belle was just an imaginary friend. “You must have left it at the ballet class.”

  She was about to tell Ellen to go back and fetch the coat, but just then the doorbell rang.

  “That’s probably her now,” said Ellen.

  But it wasn’t; it was Robert Rumbold, one of Mum’s piano pupils, who had come for his lesson. Mum showed him into the sitting room and soon Ellen could hear him thumping away at “O Little Town of Bethlehem”.

  The bell went three more times during the afternoon, but each time it was another piano pupil. As it began to grow dark, Ellen wondered what Mirror-Belle was up to. Was she still spying on Mr Hollings?

  “I forgot to tell you, Ellen,” said Mum when the last pupil had left, “Dad and I are going to a drinks do this evening. It’s only for a couple of hours, but I’m afraid children aren’t invited. Luke’s out at his band practice, so I’ve asked Sara to come and babysit.”

  “Good,” said Ellen. She liked Sara, who used to live next door. She had gone away to university but was back home for the Christmas holidays. Now Ellen wouldn’t mind so much about being too croaky to go out carol-singing with her friends.

  When Sara arrived she was keen to see Ellen practise her dancing, so Ellen got into her swan outfit and did a demonstration.

  “The hardest part is when we all have to stand on one leg with the other toe touching our knee. It’s meant to be how swans go to sleep, but I always wobble. I’m afraid I might fall over during the actual show.”

  “I’m sure you won’t,” said Sara. “I can show you a special way of keeping your balance—”

  But she was interrupted by the doorbell.

  This time it was Mirror-Belle. She was still wearing Ellen’s coat and the swan’s-beak headband.

  “I have some very important and highly confidential information for Ellen,” she announced.

  Sara laughed. “I didn’t know Ellen had a friend coming round,” she said. “You must be another of the swans.”

  “That’s right,” said Mirror-Belle. And I see that Ellen has been turned back into one too. But not for long!” She had a triumphant expression on her face and a piece of paper in her hand.

  “Perhaps I’d just better phone your home to check they know you’re here,” said Sara. “What’s your number?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Mirror-Belle. “Princesses have names, not numbers. I suppose if I did have one, it would be number one.”

  “No, I mean your telephone number.”

  “I don’t think her family has a phone,” said Ellen.

  “If you want to send a message to my parents, the King and Queen, you could try strapping one on to the back of a turtle dove,” said Mirror-Belle. “Though if your writing is backwards, like most people around here, I doubt if they’d be able to read it.”

  Sara looked a bit bewildered. “Well, maybe it’s all right if you’re not staying for long,” she said. “Have you just come to practise the dance with Ellen?”

  “Yes,” said Ellen quickly, and then, to Mirror-Belle, “Let’s go up to my room.”

  Upstairs, Mirror-Belle held out the piece of paper she was carrying. “I’m hoping you can read this, Ellen. I went to a lot of trouble to obtain it. I followed the sorcerer round for absolutely hours.”

  “And what happened?” Even though Ellen didn’t really believe that Mr Hollings was a sorcerer, she couldn’t help being interested.

  “He spent a long time fiddling about with his broomstick. I was afraid he might fly off on it, but in the end he put it into his den of evil.”

  “I suppose you mean his tool shed,” said Ellen.

  “You can call it what you like, Ellen, but the next thing he did was very sinister. He took out a sharp object and started to cut branches off the bushes.”

  “That’s called pruning,” said Ellen. “It keeps the bushes nice and healthy, and stops them getting too woody.”

  “I think it’s far more likely that the branches had overheard his secrets and he wanted to make sure they didn’t tell them to the wind.”

  Ellen decided not to argue. “What happened next?” she asked.

  “Well, all the time he was muttering the words of the spell, but I couldn’t get close enough to hear exactly what he was saying. But then he went back into his den and wrote it down! I could hardly believe my luck. Here it is!”

  She waved the piece of paper at Ellen, who could see now that it had been torn out of a notebook.

  “How did you get hold of it?” she asked.

  “I was just coming to that,” said Mirror-Belle. “After he’d finished writing, the sorcerer locked the door of the den and went away. But I noticed that there was a window, and that one of the panes was broken. So I stuck my arm in and managed to reach his spell book. I tore out the last page and threw the book back on to his table. As I suspected, his writing is just as terrible as yours – all back to front. So I’m hoping you will be able to read it for me.” She handed the paper to Ellen
.

  Mr Hollings’s handwriting was a bit of a scrawl, but Ellen managed to read what was on the page:

  “‘Mend the broken windowpane

  Clear the drain

  Fix the fence

  Prune the rose

  Clean the tools

  Repair the hose

  Oil the swing.’

  “It’s just a list of jobs,” she said.

  “It sounds like that, I agree,” said Mirror-Belle. “But that just shows how cunning he is. He’s made up a spell that doesn’t sound like a spell, so no one will suspect.”

  “But even if it was a spell, it would be one to turn people into swans, not to turn swans into people, wouldn’t it?” said Ellen.

  “Of course – but all we need to do is to say the spell the other way round, and that will undo the magic.”

  “What, read it backwards, do you mean?”

  “Not exactly. Just read the last line first, and so on till we get to the top.”

  “Well, it can’t do any harm, I suppose,” said Ellen.

  “Harm? Of course not! We’ll be doing tremendous good! Can you write it out like that for us to chant?”

  So Ellen wrote out the list in the opposite order, in her neatest handwriting. Then she found a little pocket mirror and gave it to Mirror-Belle to hold up against the paper. “Just read the writing in the mirror,” she said, “and I’ll read what’s on the paper. That way it’ll be easy for both of us.”

  “Thank you, Ellen,” said Mirror-Belle, “though one of these days you really will have to learn to write properly. Now, are you ready? One, two, three, chant!”

  Then together, the two girls read aloud:

  “‘Oil the swing

  Repair the hose

  Clean the tools

  Prune the rose

  Fix the fence

  Clear the drain

  Mend the broken windowpane.’”