The Lost Prince
Page 1
the lost prince
frances hodgson burnett
foreword
I first read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s amazing novel The Lost Prince when I was about eleven. I had chanced upon it at the library in Newark-on-Trent and started reading it not knowing anything about it. I’d probably read The Secret Garden by that point but I hadn’t made the connection that it was the same writer.
So I was coming to it like I came to most books back then, knowing very little about it except that the cover looked nice and the title had made me curious. And then as soon as I started reading, it had me hooked.
It transported me to a dreary, forlorn part of London (that somehow seemed an even worse place to live than dreary Newark-on-Trent), and into the life of Marco – the twelve-year-old boy who has arrived in London, whose father has been working to overthrow a cruel dictatorship in Samavia.
In London, Marco is an outsider. I liked outsiders. My other favourite book of that time was actually called The Outsiders. On the surface, The Outsiders – a novel about teenage gangs in 1960s Oklahoma – has little in common with The Lost Prince. Yet these equally absorbing novels are both about outsiders, and the idea of an outsider is appealing to everyone at every age, especially when you are young and fitting in is a matter of intense importance. So we instantly warm to an outsider.
And Marco Loristan is certainly that. He was, we are told, ‘the kind of boy people look at a second time when they have looked at him once’. Tall and dark and broad he certainly looks different. ‘He was as un-English a boy as you could imagine’, in fact. A boy who not only looks different but actually, in many ways, is different. Not only is he from an exotic land, not only is he too big and too quiet, but he has also never settled anywhere long enough to feel at home there. (‘In not one of the many countries he knew had he ever met a boy whose life was in the least like his own.’)
For me it was always Marco’s character that made the book. The book is Marco to me. I was so happy when he made a friend – the urchin, Rat, who is literally of the streets, and who has never been anywhere but London. Marco was gently heroic, and kind, sharing some of the good qualities of Hodgson Burnett’s better known creation, Little Lord Fauntleroy.
The plot itself – involving the restoration of a fictional Eastern European monarchy – was unimportant to me, except that it gave Marco and Rat an excuse to have an adventure together. An undercover mission – a quest to find a secret society of Samavian patriots and to tell them to bring the royal family out of hiding.
Actually, reading that paragraph back to myself I realise this book sounds like something I really shouldn’t enjoy, especially as an adult. I mean, I really have no interest in whether fictional monarchies are restored in fictional countries. It is a book which would be easy to dismiss as being out-dated and as a love-letter to monarchy. It is certainly near-impossible to imagine anyone writing this book today. And yet, it would be a real shame if such a story was never read again on those grounds.
I mean, for me, when I was younger, this story wasn’t about nationalism or kings and queens. It was about an outsider, who felt out of place and out of time, who finds a friend, and has an adventure. It was more about the ‘lost’ part of the title than the ‘prince’ part, if that makes sense. More about a boy who having been out of place in a city discovering he not only belongs to, but also rules a whole kingdom.
That at the time had the same power, I suppose, as that which millions of kids find in the story of an orphan who finds out he is an important wizard.
Underneath the slightly dubious politics and the stereotypes and the rather impossible events, there is a real and rare tender sweetness to The Lost Prince. Marco and Rat would do anything for each other – not because they are family (they are not), or even because they are of the same nation (they are not), but because they are friends.
It is also a tale about self-esteem and believing in yourself, even if you feel like you don’t quite fit in, and that was a theme that had great power for me when I was eleven (in fact, what am I saying, it has great power for me now at the age of thirty-eight). Reading it again now, as a ‘grown up’, I also realise it is a great story about a father and a son. And just as the relationship between Marco and Rat is written with great affection, there is a real human warmth to the affection he feels towards his father and that his father feels towards him. The son has respect for his father – which is something you might expect in a book written in 1915 – but what also comes across is that the respect is mutual.
The scenes in which Marco trains and teaches Rat and prepares him for the mission are a particular treat. After a bit of physical exercise on Hampstead Heath they go back to Marco’s run-down house and sit and chat. Neither of them minds that the house isn’t up to much, with its ‘poor bed’ for Marco and ‘hard sofa’ for Rat to sleep on, as ‘neither of them was conscious of the poorness or hardness, because to each one the long unknown sense of companionship was such a satisfying thing… they told each other things it had never before occurred to either to think of telling anyone.’
This chapter – called ‘Only Two Boys’ – illustrates the heart of this book.
Rat has terrible self-esteem issues. After all, it isn’t easy being a lowly street urchin who worships the aristocracy. But Marco helps him believe in himself, in this chapter as elsewhere. He tells Rat that he has a big brain and a strong will, and reminds Rat that he has a great memory.
Rat also admits to being jealous, but Marco rather wisely tells him that jealousy is always a ridiculous thing to feel. Rat wonders if Marco is jealous of other people claiming Marco’s dad’s attention. ‘No, I’m not…The only thing I care for is – is him. I just care for him.’ And then, a little later, he tells his friend something pretty wise.
‘You choose your side,’ he said. ‘You either build up or tear down. You either keep in the light where you can see, or you stand in the dark and fight everything you see because you think it is an enemy. No, you wouldn’t have been jealous if you’d been I and I’d been you.’
They may only be ‘just two boys’ but if they train hard and work hard they can be ready for anything, when the time comes.
And of course, the time comes, and it is hardly a spoiler to say that they prove their worth. But as with life, it is the journey itself that is more important – at least for the reader – than the journey’s stated purpose to help save Samavia.
It is a journey not only filled with adventure, but also beauty, and just as Marco teaches Rat to have self-esteem and to be patient, the journey itself seems to be one on which they both change, and become more appreciative of life and the present moment. The world is not all like the shabby one they have known in London and elsewhere. There is beauty here too.
‘They saw the sun go down,’ Hodgson Burnett writes in one especially evocative scene. ‘and shade by shade, deepen and make radiant then draw away with it the last touches of colour – rose-gold, rose-purple, and rose-grey. One mountain top after another held its blush a few moments and lost it. It took long to gather them all but at length they were gone and the marvel of night fell.’
There is a timeless story here, beneath all the Edwardian values, and one with things to teach us still. A story of family, and travel and adventure, filled with bravery and wonder and love. Ultimately though it is the story of Marco and his friend, and how – no matter how lonely or different we may feel – there is always a cause and a companion somewhere out there that will make us feel at home.
It is a classic story from a classic writer and one full of hidden treasures.
– Matt Haig, 2014
the lost prince
frances
hodgson burnett
Contents
Title Page
foreword
chapter one
chapter two
chapter three
chapter four
chapter five
chapter six
chapter seven
chapter eight
chapter nine
chapter ten
chapter eleven
chapter twelve
chapter thirteen
chapter fourteen
chapter fifteen
chapter sixteen
chapter seventeen
chapter eighteen
chapter nineteen
chapter twenty
chapter twenty-one
chapter twenty-two
chapter twenty-three
chapter twenty-four
chapter twenty-five
chapter twenty-six
chapter twenty-seven
chapter twenty-eight
chapter twenty-nine
chapter thirty
chapter thirty-one
biographical note
Copyright
chapter one
the new lodgers at no.7 philibert place
There are many dreary and dingy rows of ugly houses in certain parts of London, but there certainly could not be any row more ugly or dingier than Philibert Place. There were stories that it had once been more attractive, but that had been so long ago that no one remembered the time. It stood back in its gloomy, narrow strips of uncared-for, smoky gardens, whose broken iron railings were supposed to protect it from the surging traffic of a road which was always roaring with the rattle of buses, cabs, drays, and vans, and the passing of people who were shabbily dressed and looked as if they were either going to hard work or coming from it, or hurrying to see if they could find some of it to do to keep themselves from going hungry. The brick fronts of the houses were blackened with smoke, their windows were nearly all dirty and hung with dingy curtains, or had no curtains at all; the strips of ground, which had once been intended to grow flowers in, had been trodden down into bare earth in which even weeds had forgotten to grow. One of them was used as a stone-cutter’s yard, and cheap monuments, crosses, and slates were set out for sale, bearing inscriptions beginning with ‘Sacred to the Memory of’. Another had piles of old lumber in it, another exhibited second-hand furniture, chairs with unsteady legs, sofas with horsehair stuffing bulging out of holes in their covering, mirrors with blotches or cracks in them. The insides of the houses were as gloomy as the outside. They were all exactly alike. In each a dark entrance passage led to narrow stairs going up to bedrooms, and to narrow steps going down to a basement kitchen. The back bedroom looked out on small, sooty, flagged yards, where thin cats quarrelled, or sat on the coping of the brick walls hoping that sometime they might feel the sun; the front rooms looked over the noisy road, and through their windows came the roar and rattle of it. It was shabby and cheerless on the brightest days, and on foggy or rainy ones it was the most forlorn place in London.
At least that was what one boy thought as he stood near the iron railings watching the passers-by on the morning on which this story begins, which was also the morning after he had been brought by his father to live as a lodger in the back sitting room of the house No. 7.
He was a boy about twelve years old, his name was Marco Loristan, and he was the kind of boy people look at a second time when they have looked at him once. In the first place, he was a very big boy – tall for his years, and with a particularly strong frame. His shoulders were broad and his arms and legs were long and powerful. He was quite used to hearing people say, as they glanced at him, ‘What a fine, big lad!’ And then they always looked again at his face. It was not an English face or an American one, and was very dark in colouring. His features were strong, his black hair grew on his head like a mat, his eyes were large and deep set, and looked out between thick, straight, black lashes. He was as un-English a boy as one could imagine, and an observing person would have been struck at once by a sort of silent look expressed by his whole face, a look which suggested that he was not a boy who talked much.
This look was specially noticeable this morning as he stood before the iron railings. The things he was thinking of were of a kind likely to bring to the face of a twelve-year-old boy an unboyish expression.
He was thinking of the long, hurried journey he and his father and their old soldier servant, Lazarus, had made during the last few days – the journey from Russia. Cramped in a close third-class railway carriage, they had dashed across the Continent as if something important or terrible were driving them, and here they were, settled in London as if they were going to live forever at No. 7 Philibert Place. He knew, however, that though they might stay a year, it was just as probable that, in the middle of some night, his father or Lazarus might waken him from his sleep and say, ‘Get up – dress yourself quickly. We must go at once.’ A few days later, he might be in St Petersburg, Berlin, Vienna, or Budapest, huddled away in some poor little house as shabby and comfortless as No. 7 Philibert Place.
He passed his hand over his forehead as he thought of it and watched the buses. His strange life and his close association with his father had made him much older than his years, but he was only a boy, after all, and the mystery of things sometimes weighed heavily upon him, and set him to deep wondering.
In not one of the many countries he knew had he ever met a boy whose life was in the least like his own. Other boys had homes in which they spent year after year; they went to school regularly, and played with other boys, and talked openly of the things which happened to them, and the journeys they made. When he remained in a place long enough to make a few boy friends, he knew he must never forget that his whole existence was a sort of secret whose safety depended upon his own silence and discretion.
This was because of the promises he had made to his father, and they had been the first thing he remembered. Not that he had ever regretted anything connected with his father. He threw his black head up as he thought of that. None of the other boys had such a father, not one of them. His father was his idol and his chief. He had scarcely ever seen him when his clothes had not been poor and shabby, but he had also never seen him when, despite his worn coat and frayed linen, he had not stood out among all others as more distinguished than the most noticeable of them. When he walked down a street, people turned to look at him even oftener than they turned to look at Marco, and the boy felt as if it was not merely because he was a big man with a handsome, dark face, but because he looked, somehow, as if he had been born to command armies, and as if no one would think of disobeying him. Yet Marco had never seen him command anyone, and they had always been poor, and shabbily dressed, and often enough ill-fed. But whether they were in one country or another, and whatsoever dark place they seemed to be hiding in, the few people they saw treated him with a sort of deference, and nearly always stood when they were in his presence, unless he bade them sit down.
‘It is because they know he is a patriot, and patriots are respected,’ the boy had told himself.
He himself wished to be a patriot, though he had never seen his own country of Samavia. He knew it well, however. His father had talked to him about it ever since that day when he had made the promises. He had taught him to know it by helping him to study curious detailed maps of it – maps of its cities, maps of its mountains, maps of its roads. He had told him stories of the wrongs done its people, of their sufferings and struggles for liberty, and, above all, of their unconquerable courage. When they talked together of its history, Marco’s boy-blood burned and leaped in his veins, and he always knew, by the look in his father’s eyes, that his blood burned also. His countrymen had been killed, they had been robbed, they had died by thousands of cruelties and starvation, but their souls had never been conquered, and, through all the years during which more powerful nations crushed and enslaved them, they never ceased to struggle to free themselves and stand unfettered as Samavians had stood centuries before.
‘Why do we not live there,’ Marco had cried on the day the promises were made. ‘Why do we not go back and fight? When I am a man, I will be a soldier and die for Samavia.’
‘We are of those who must live for Samavia – working day and night,’ his father had answered; ‘denying ourselves, training our bodies and souls, using our brains, learning the things which are best to be done for our people and our country. Even exiles may be Samavian soldiers – I am one, you must be one.’
‘Are we exiles?’ asked Marco.
‘Yes,’ was the answer. ‘But even if we never set foot on Samavian soil, we must give our lives to it. I have given mine since I was sixteen. I shall give it until I die.’
‘Have you never lived there?’ said Marco.
A strange look shot across his father’s face.
‘No,’ he answered, and said no more. Marco watching him, knew he must not ask the question again.
The next words his father said were about the promises. Marco was quite a little fellow at the time, but he understood the solemnity of them, and felt that he was being honoured as if he were a man.
‘When you are a man, you shall know all you wish to know,’ Loristan said. ‘Now you are a child, and your mind must not be burdened. But you must do your part. A child sometimes forgets that words may be dangerous. You must promise never to forget this. Wheresoever you are; if you have playmates, you must remember to be silent about many things. You must not speak of what I do, or of the people who come to see me. You must not mention the things in your life which make it different from the lives of other boys. You must keep in your mind that a secret exists which a chance foolish word might betray. You are a Samavian, and there have been Samavians who have died a thousand deaths rather than betray a secret. You must learn to obey without question, as if you were a soldier. Now you must take your oath of allegiance.’