by Hilary McKay
That
is
The fountain in the market square
and I am the Mayor of Hamelin.
Chicken Pox and Crystal
or
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
“Do I look all right?” asked Sophie. And then, because they both hesitated for one moment, less than a second, before replying, she said, “You don’t have to pretend! I know what you’re thinking!”
Sophie’s mother and grandmother both blinked, because this crossness was so unlike Sophie, and before their blinks were over, Sophie had flounced out of the door and stomped off along the corridor. The stomping went on for quite a while. That was one of the many problems of living in a large palace: it took so long between the flounce and the slamming of the bedroom door.
And of course the slam was a good way off from the flouncing point, and so might have been any old bang.
Sophie’s mother hurried after her daughter. She was an understanding person. She knew herself what it felt like to be the only princess at a birthday party when you didn’t know what everyone else would be wearing. She arrived at the slammed bedroom door, knocked on it, and called, “It’s me!”
“Go away. I don’t care. I know I look stupid, and I’m not going! Besides, I think I’m ill!” said Sophie.
Sophie’s mother picked the easiest of these remarks to reply to and asked, “What sort of ill?”
There was a thinking pause on the other side of the door, and then Sophie replied, “Chicken pox.”
“Oh.”
“Like the cook had.”
“That was last year.”
“I don’t care WHEN it was!” shouted Sophie through the door. “I’m just NOT going to the party. I only got asked because they know you, and anyway my dress is all ripped.”
“It wasn’t all ripped two minutes ago,” said her mother.
“That was before it got caught on the roses.”
“What roses?”
“The yellow ones outside my window.”
“Sophie!” exclaimed her mother. And she marched in, rescued the thrown-out-of-the-window dress, groaned, took an old one from the wardrobe, pulled it on over Sophie’s head, fastened the back, brushed her hair, and bundled her out of the room, along the corridor, down the stairs, across the hall, through the front door, over the terrace, and into the waiting coach.
“Daddy and I won’t be here when you get back, but you’re having supper with your grandmother,” Sophie’s mother said as she bundled her daughter inside. “She’s here to visit especially to keep you company. Have a lovely time! The birthday present is on the seat beside you. It’s a golden ball. I hope your friend likes it.”
“Nobody plays with golden balls anymore!” protested Sophie, but the carriage was already driving away.
Nothing had improved when Sophie returned from the party. She told her grandmother how she had accidentally taken a raw-fish sandwich and had to keep it in her pocket all afternoon because there was nowhere to throw it away. And how a girl had said, “I didn’t think a princess would look like you,” and one of the boys had added, “Or smell like you!” And then everyone had sniffed, and said, “Fishy!”
And the golden ball had been lost in the pond, and her shoes were soaked from trying to get it out, and she still thought she had chicken pox.
“Worse than ever!” said Sophie.
Later her parents came back, and then everyone considered Sophie, and they all agreed the same things:
1. Bed was the best place for her.
2. Of course she didn’t have chicken pox.
3. This really wasn’t like Sophie.
They didn’t know that Sophie had a secret.
Sophie’s secret was a fragment of glass, the size of an almond. It was very slightly cloudy, and silvered on the back. The broken edges were razor-sharp: it was a breathless job to pick it up, but still Sophie treasured it. She thought that it was beautiful and she had discovered that it was magic.
Sophie had found that if she held it long enough, in her fingers and in her thoughts, the fragment had a voice.
A thin gnat’s voice.
“You,” Sophie heard. “You. You. You.”
Me? wondered Sophie. Me!
Sophie began to think thoughts that she had never had before: Who am I? What am I? and most of all, Do you think I am pretty?
“Yes, of course,” said Sophie’s parents. But they had to say that because they were her father and mother.
“Yes,” said Sophie’s grandmother. (But of course she had to say it too.) “Do you?”
I want to be, thought this new Sophie. More than anything, I want to be pretty.
The glass fragment helped with that.
It was a strange thing, but if Sophie looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, or in the little round glass in her bedroom, or even in the curly-edged gold full-length mirror in her mother’s room, then she saw ordinary Sophie. Straight brown hair, a round face, a few freckles, nice eyebrows like two painted brushstrokes. Starfish hands and sturdy knees, tallish more than shortish.
But the glimpses of herself that she caught in the knife-edged fragment of ancient glass showed an altogether more beautiful person. So Sophie would find a glimmering strand of hair, a moment of flower-petal skin, a shadow of a dimple, a curl of a gold-tipped eyelash. Tiny fragments of herself, like one piece of a very large jigsaw. And also, if she waited long enough, she would hear in confirmation, “You. You. You.”
Me? wondered Sophie. Am I pretty? Am I? Am I the prettiest? Am I the prettiest one of all?
“Sophie,” said Sophie’s grandmother, “what did you just ask?”
It was bedtime on the party day, and her grandmother had come to say goodnight.
“Am I the prettiest one of all?” repeated Sophie.
Sophie’s grandmother was the best grandmother anyone could wish for. She was gentle and funny and clever and kind. She was pretty too, in an ancient way, with deep sparkling eyes and wrinkled pink cheeks. She loved Sophie so much that she could only ever tell her the truth.
“You are our best girl in the world,” she told Sophie. “But no one is the prettiest! You can’t have the prettiest cloud, or the prettiest buttercup, can you? And in the same way, you can’t have the prettiest person. What are you holding in your hand?”
Sophie, who knew quite well that neither she nor anyone else should hold razor-sharp broken glass in their hand, pushed it under her pillow and said, “Nothing.”
“Sophie,” said Sophie’s grandmother, downstairs in the palace drawing room, “is not herself at all.”
And then morning came, and there was Sophie, dotted all over with little red spots.
“THAT’S what was wrong!” her family said. “And we paid no attention! Poor Sophie! She was right all along!”
“Chicken pox,” they told Sophie, loving and sorry.
And Sophie said, “I told you so.”
A palace, where your parents are king and queen, and there are people in and out all day, and everyone is busy and on best behavior all the time, is no place to have chicken pox. And so Sophie was taken back to her grandmother’s house, which was ten times smaller and a hundred times more comfortable. She took with her, wrapped in a handkerchief and held tight in her hand, the little piece of crystal. It cut through the handkerchief before she was halfway there, and she arrived with a bleeding palm, but even so, it was a great comfort to Sophie. She got it out as soon as she could, and it didn’t show a single chicken pox spot.
And although Sophie could see very clearly the spots on her arms and legs and stomach, she couldn’t see her face, and so she believed her glass fragment and didn’t imagine them. This was especially easy at her grandmother’s house, because there were hardly any mirrors there. Just a very small hand mirror in her grandmother’s room, so, she said, she could check that her face was clean. Usually it lay facedown on the dressing table.
“I don’t care for mirrors,” said Sophie’s grandmother.
The first chicken pox day was not nice. Sophie felt achy and hot and awful and thirsty and itchy and grumpy and miserable.
“My poor Sophie,” said her grandmother, and put her to bed with meadowsweet tea for the fever, and cool dabs of lotion, and tiny, delicious snacks of fruit and jelly, bread and butter in thin soft triangles, and iced lemon sponge fingers on a yellow plate. When evening came she opened the window so the breeze blew in and fluttered the curtains, and she said, “Try and sleep, Sophie. You’ll feel better in the morning.”
Sophie did sleep, in hot and itchy bits and pieces, with her grandmother in and out with drinks and more dabs of lotion. Toward morning she slept properly, and woke up at dawn to find her grandmother fast asleep in the big chair by the window. She took her chance then, and scooped under her pillow for the almond-shaped piece of glass, and she smiled at what it showed her. It was just the same as the day before. Fragments of a very pretty person, and the same thin voice whispering, “You, you, you!”
Words came then to Sophie, and she spoke them aloud:
“Crystal treasure in my hand
Who is the prettiest in the land?”
“Sophie!” exclaimed her grandmother, waking with a jump, and she hurried across to Sophie with her kind, merry face looking suddenly frightened.
What had she heard? Sophie didn’t know. What had she seen? Sophie couldn’t guess.
“Your hand is scratched,” said her grandmother. “How did you cut it, Sophie?”
“It doesn’t matter. It hardly hurts,” said Sophie.
Her grandmother looked at her, and Sophie looked away.
All the same, the scratch was washed, the chicken pox was bathed and dabbed, and Sophie’s bed remade with clean, cool sheets. And after breakfast her grandmother brought in the old-fashioned toys that belonged in that house. Sophie had always loved them. Storybooks, and beads to thread, and pick-up sticks, and a set of little wooden bears with comical faces and jointed legs. But their charm was gone with the chicken pox, and Sophie pushed them away one by one because they were too hard to bother with. Tears came to her eyes because she couldn’t love them.
“They will still be here when you feel better,” said her grandmother when Sophie tried to explain. “Would you like to go to sleep again?”
“No, no!” said Sophie.
“Then would you like the music box that plays a hundred tunes?”
“I’d hate it,” moaned Sophie.
“Shall I read to you?”
“I know all the stories in those books.”
“Then I will tell you a new one,” said her grandmother. “A new true story from a long time ago, and the minute you have had enough you can tell me, and I’ll save the rest for later.”
She began at once.
“Long ago, and far away, it was wintertime and snowing outside the palace windows. And by one of those windows, a young queen sat sewing, and she had the window open because she loved the tingle and sparkle of the falling snowflakes so much, and the sound they make . . . you know that sound, Sophie, like faraway bees.”
Sophie nodded.
“Now then, there was snow piled on the windowsill, and the window frame was of ebony, which is a shining black wood, and the queen was stitching and dreaming and smiling. She was going to have a baby soon, and when she happened to prick her finger and a drop of crimson blood fell on the shining snow, she looked at it and made a smiling, dreaming wish:
I wish I could have a baby girl, with crimson lips and skin as white as snow and hair as dark as ebony.
“And not long afterward, her wish came true. She did have a baby girl, and the baby did have hair as dark as ebony and crimson lips and fair, pale skin, and they named her Snow White.”
“That’s a funny name.”
“It wasn’t unusual in those days. There were all sorts of names that you don’t hear now. Rose Red! Briar Rose! I knew a girl called Beauty!”
“Was she beautiful? Was she the most beautiful?”
“She was lovely. So brave. She was a putter-upper!”
“What’s a putter-upper?”
“She put up with hard things. But back to Snow White, or have you had enough?”
“No, no.”
“Well then, Sophie, I’m sorry to tell you that the young queen died while her baby was still very small.”
“Oh no!”
“And the King married again.”
“What, straightaway, the same day?” asked Sophie, astonished.
“No, of course not the same day. Two years later. He married a very, very beautiful witch.”
“You said this story was true,” said Sophie accusingly.
“So it is.”
“There aren’t any witches.”
“There were in those days.”
“And witches wouldn’t be beautiful.”
“Most witches are (or were) beautiful. That’s how they got away with so much. It’s quite true, Sophie, that the King, Snow White’s father, married a most beautiful witch.”
“Did he do it on purpose? Did he know that she was?”
“I’m sure he didn’t, Sophie. Or else why would he have left his little daughter to be brought up by the new queen when he went away?”
“He went away?”
“Yes, on a long journey to a far country, and he never came back.”
“He died too?” asked Sophie.
“Yes. So Snow White was left to grow up with no one but the Witch Queen and the servants in the palace.”
“Were the servants kind to Snow White?” asked Sophie, thinking of the friendly maids and the cheerful footmen at her parents’ palace.
“They didn’t dare be kind because they were afraid of the Witch Queen. They were very frightened of her, and they knew she hated Snow White. So Snow White grew up very lonely.”
“Was she pretty?” asked Sophie. “Like her mother wanted?”
“All little girls are pretty,” said her grandmother. “I’ve never seen one that wasn’t. Yes, Snow White was pretty, but it didn’t help her. It made things worse, because the Witch Queen wanted to be the most beautiful one.”
“The most beautiful one in the palace?”
“The most beautiful one in the land.”
“What did the Witch Queen look like?”
“She was tall and very graceful. You know the way a cat moves, all smooth and balanced? She moved like that. And she had dark-gold shining hair, just like honey, and smoke-blue eyes. Her clothes were lovely too, bright jewel colors, jade and amethyst and ruby red. In wintertime she had thick, soft furs. Sleek, dark otter furs and soft silver-fox furs and dappled snow leopard.”
Sophie shuddered. Furs. The dead skins of animals. But perhaps in those far-off days, a queen had no choice. Perhaps the Witch Queen had to wear furs, just as her own mother had to wear a crown.
“No,” said her grandmother firmly, when she suggested this. “The Witch Queen liked to wear furs. She had huntsmen bring them to her.”
“Oh,” sighed Sophie, turning the crystal in her hand.
“But we were talking about her beauty. She was the most beautiful in the land, and she knew this for certain because she had a wonderful mirror. It had been made hundreds of years before, in the days of deep enchantments. This mirror was her most precious thing, and it was still magic, although it was beginning to grow a little dim.”
“What was its magic?” asked Sophie.
“It always told the truth.”
“That’s not magic! So do all mirrors!” objected Sophie.
“Do they? Anyway, this one had a voice. When the Witch Queen looked into it and asked:
“Mirror, mirror on the wall
Who is the fairest of them all?
“The mirror would reply:
“Queen, you are the fairest of them all.”
Then there was a very long silence between Sophie and her grandmother. It was caused by Sophie wondering: Did I say words like that? I did. Did she hear me? Where did the words come from?
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She glanced up, and found that her grandmother was looking at her.
“Well,” said Sophie’s grandmother, “that’s enough stories for now! Let’s try a game.” She jumped up, moved a little table over to Sophie’s bed, and opened the box of pick-up sticks. They were thin sticks of sweet-smelling cedar wood, as long as a pencil, but much thinner, carved with patterns of leaves and twirls of stars. Two long silver hooks came with them. The game was to take turns lifting the cedar sticks one by one, without moving the rest of the pile. Playing made Sophie feel much better. She won two games, and her grandmother won one, and then her grandmother exclaimed, “My goodness! The cherry cake!” and ran down to the kitchen. She made very good cherry cake, with almonds in it, and Sophie was glad when she came back saying, “Just in time!
“By tomorrow you will feel like eating it!” she promised Sophie. “Meanwhile I brought raspberry tarts and tea. It’s all nonsense, saying young children shouldn’t drink tea! I started drinking it at a very young age, and I enjoyed it very much!”
“How young?” asked Sophie.
“Seven. I had it with sugar lumps in it. Would you like sugar lumps in yours?”
The sugar lumps came in a little silver bowl. Sophie had two lumps, and felt very much revived.
“You do have pretty things,” she said to her grandmother, looking at the bowl, and the pick-up sticks box, which was carved like the sticks with patterns of leaves and stars.
“I do,” agreed her grandmother. “I like pretty things!” And before Sophie’s eyes, she folded a sheet of paper into a snow-white swan. “There’s another!” she said, and put it in Sophie’s hands.
“Was the Witch Queen’s mirror pretty?” asked Sophie, stroking the swan.
“I don’t know,” said her grandmother.
“You must! You’re telling the story!”
“I’m telling it,” said her grandmother. “Not making it up. Everything I tell you is true. I never saw the mirror, so I don’t know what it looked like. Nobody ever looked into it except the Witch Queen herself. The magic was fading, you see. Even magic doesn’t last forever. So she kept it for herself, and she didn’t use it often.”