Straw into Gold

by Hilary McKay

  “And she made her plans.

  “One snowy winter’s day a bright-eyed peddler came stepping along the dwarves’ little path. She carried clothes pegs and charms and bunches of herbs, such as peddlers used to sell in the olden days. When she came to the window beside the door, she knocked and called, ‘Missy!’

  “ ‘I mustn’t open the door,’ said Snow White, looking from the window. ‘And I have no money for clothes pegs and herbs.’

  “ ‘No comb for your hair either, I see!’ said the peddler with a laugh. ‘Look at it hanging, all tangles and tassels! Is that how you live out here in the woods?’

  “ ‘Oh!’ said Snow White. ‘But I brushed it this morning!’

  “ ‘Brushes are for floors!’ said the peddler. ‘You should comb your hair! Lean your head from the window and I’ll show you.’

  “So Snow White leaned her head from the window, and the peddler took a silver comb from among her clothes pegs and she ran it deep into Snow White’s hair, and Snow White swayed and clutched the windowsill and was sick and faint. No wonder! Each tooth of the comb was laden with venom like the fang of a snake, and the peddler pressed deeper and deeper.

  “And deeper and deeper.

  “Until Snow White fell in a heap on the floor.

  “There she lay, all the long day, while the freezing air poured in through the window, and the comb stabbed its poison into her head. No wonder the dwarves saw no smoke from the chimney when they came back at the end of the day.

  “That time they thought she was dead. Even when the comb was taken away, she lay limp and gray. Far into the night the dwarves worked to save her, with warm blankets and warm drinks and warm spells of their own. They parted her hair and bathed the place where the comb had been, and they rubbed her hands and heated stones for hot-water bottles and at last she opened her eyes and smiled at them. But she couldn’t tell them what had happened. Not a trace of memory remained. The dwarves took the comb and destroyed it, but they could not make Snow White well. She was sick and weak all winter, and the dwarves took turns to stay with her. But with the spring came happier times. The summer birds came back to the forest, the bees woke up in their hives, and Snow White was better again.

  “ ‘You have been ten years with us,’ the dwarves told her one summer’s day.

  “ ‘The ten best years ever,’ said Snow White, and she looked at them with love.

  “Now, dwarf lives and human lives are not the same. Dwarves live like trees, for hundreds of years. In the ten years that Snow White had spent with them, they hadn’t changed a bit. But Snow White had changed. She had grown up. If she wasn’t careful, she banged her head on the ceiling of the dwarves’ little house, and she had to stoop to look out of the windows.

  “She was looking out of the window the day the apple woman came.

  “ ‘Fine day,’ said the apple woman, apple sweet with her apple-round cheeks, nodding and smiling through the window.

  “ ‘Beautiful,’ agreed Snow White. ‘Are you selling apples?’

  “ ‘I am, but I see you have apple trees,’ said the apple woman, looking at the garden. ‘So I won’t try and sell to you. What do you grow?’

  “ ‘The two trees by the beehives are Beauty of the Valley,’ said Snow White, ‘and the one by the chickens has big green cooking apples.’ And then, to be friendly, and because it was nice to talk about apples on a summer morning, she asked, ‘What apples do you sell?’

  “ ‘Nothing but Rosabelles,’ said the apple woman, lifting her basket so that Snow White could see. ‘Red as roses! There’s no apple like them, for beauty or fragrance, and sweet right through to the heart. Taste!’ And she cut an apple from her basket in two, and offered one half to Snow White while she bit into the other half herself.

  “ ‘Thank you, how lovely,’ said Snow White, and she bit into her apple without a single thought of trouble.”

  “Oh no, oh no, oh no!” exclaimed Sophie, suddenly out from under her sheet, clutching her knees and gazing at her grandmother. “Oh no! Why didn’t Snow White guess? I guessed as soon as the Witch Queen came to the window!”

  “But she looked like a pretty, rosy old apple woman,” said Sophie’s grandmother.

  “It’s not what people look like!” said Sophie. “It’s what they are!”

  “You are absolutely right, Sophie,” said her grandmother. “I couldn’t agree with you more! Now then, what about breakfast?”

  “Breakfast? Breakfast!” shouted Sophie. “What about Snow White?”

  “Snow White bit into the apple and sank into darkness,” said her grandmother.

  “Until the dwarves came home?”

  “This time the dwarves couldn’t help her, Sophie. Snow White was quite still when they found her, but there was no bead necklace to cut away, nor comb to take from her hair. They could find nothing wrong at all. Yet heat couldn’t warm her, nor air revive her. All their love and tears could not stir her. And so the world became dark for the dwarves as well. For days they could not believe they had lost her. They had loved her for so long, ever since she was seven years old and had arrived at their home so frightened and alone and offered to cook their suppers.”

  “This is too sad,” said Sophie.

  “It is too sad,” said her grandmother. “We will hurry to the end of the story. The dwarves couldn’t bear to bury Snow White, so they made her a coffin of crystal and silver and they carried it into the forest . . .”

  “WHY?” demanded Sophie.

  “Where else could they have put it?” asked her grandmother, surprised.

  “In the garden,” said Sophie.

  “It would have upset Smoke,” said her grandmother. “And the bees and the chickens and the goats. The forest was best, and they used to go and visit her there and she never changed; she just lay as if she were sleeping.”

  “Perhaps she was.”

  “No she wasn’t. Remember the apple! Well, one day a handsome prince came riding by (don’t groan, Sophie!) and saw her, and he fell in love with her there and then.”

  “Is this story still true?” asked Sophie, looking very doubtfully at her grandmother.

  “Every word, I promise.”

  “Go on, then!”

  “So the next time the dwarves visited Snow White, there was the Prince. And when very special people meet each other, Sophie, they often make friends at once. So it was with the dwarves and the Prince. And the Prince told the dwarves how he loved Snow White, and how he couldn’t bear to go away and never see her again. He begged them to let him take her back to his castle on the hilltop, and in the end the dwarves said he could.

  “And Sophie, I can see that you are bursting with remarks, but be patient one minute longer! The dwarves said they would carry Snow White to the castle themselves, and they lifted the coffin, and it joggled and . . . Snow White coughed! She coughed up the piece of poisoned apple that was stuck in her throat, and there she was, alive again!”

  “Good GRACIOUS!” said Sophie.

  “And she married the Prince and lived happily ever after! Breakfast time at last!”

  “What, she didn’t go back and live with the dwarves?” asked Sophie, astonished.

  “No, but she visited them every year, and they stayed friends forever.”

  “And what happened to the Witch Queen?”

  “When the mirror told her that Snow White was alive after all her magic, she flew into a terrible rage and picked it up and hurled it across the room. It exploded into a thousand pieces and the largest piece pierced her heart and she died.”

  “All because she wanted to be the most beautiful,” said Sophie, sorrowfully. “That wicked mirror! It killed her in the end. Poor Queen! Poor Witch Queen!”

  “What a strange thing to say, Sophie!”

  “I used to want to be the prettiest,” said Sophie. “A long time ago. So I remember how it feels.”

  Then she was silent, thinking.

  “What happened to the other pi
eces of mirror?” she asked at last.

  “I don’t know . . . Sophie!”

  How had the crystal got into her hand? Sophie didn’t know. But somehow it had, and there was no hiding it from her grandmother this time; there was much too much blood for that.

  “Your hand!” exclaimed her grandmother, horrified, and rushed her to the bathroom, where she bathed and bound and bandaged and tutted like a chicken.

  “It’s a horrible bit of glass I found,” said Sophie furiously. “I thought it was on my side, but it isn’t a bit! I’m never going to listen to it again.”

  “Listen to it, Sophie? What does it say?”

  “It says You!” said Sophie. “It says ‘You! You! You!’ ”

  “I knew you had a secret!” her grandmother said. “That’s what it was!”

  “Yes,” said Sophie, and then she and her grandmother both spoke together.

  “It’s a piece of the Witch Queen’s mirror!”

  “What shall we do with it?” asked Sophie, much later, after breakfast in the garden by the apple trees.

  “Get rid of it,” said her grandmother.

  “How?”

  “I think,” said her grandmother, “the dwarves would know how to make it safe. Like they did with the beads and the comb.”

  “But the dwarves were in the story!” protested Sophie.

  “It was a true story,” her grandmother reminded her.

  “But you said it was long, long ago.”

  “Long, long ago to us, but not them. The dwarves are still there in the forest, Sophie. Wouldn’t you like to meet them?”

  “Me?” said Sophie, round-eyed and breathless. “Me?”

  “As soon as you are better we will go and ask their help!” said her grandmother. “That’s the thing to do!”

  “But how could we ever find them? Even if they are true!”

  “Of course they are true,” said her grandmother. “I’ve known them since I was seven years old! And as for how to find them, why, I visit every year!”

  Sophie gazed at her grandmother. Gazed and gazed and wondered.

  “When you were a little girl . . . ,” she asked huskily, at last. “When you were a little girl, long, long ago, what did they call you?”

  “Long, long ago, when I was a little girl,” said her grandmother, “they called me Snow White.”

  The Prince and the Problem

  or

  The Princess and the Pea

  Once there was a prince, and he lived in a stable . . . but before that, there was a prince who lived in a palace.

  The palace was in the middle of a forest. It was not a very big palace, but it had a front door and a back door and turrets and a terrace with a peacock who stalked up and down. So it was a proper palace. Perhaps it only seemed small because the forest was so large. It was a forest of oak trees and beech trees and pines and birches and blackberries and foxgloves and bluebells and thin forest grasses that turned golden in autumn.

  In the forest lived squirrels and songbirds and beetles and butterflies and great owls and hawks and foxes and wolves. The weather was very snowy in winter and very damp in spring, wonderful in summer, and wild in autumn. Then the wolf packs gathered for their winter hunting, and darkness came early, and the forest paths were hidden under drifts of fallen leaves. It was easy to get lost in the forest at that time of year.

  The Prince in the palace had a Problem. He had had it for years, and at first it had not distressed him at all. However, it had grown, as such things often do.

  First a little, then a lot, and then quite suddenly it had become so large it shadowed his days and stalked his nights. Also it made him so sulky and rude and bad-tempered that people who met him said, “That young man certainly has a problem!”

  The Prince had been given his Problem on the day of his christening, when he was six months old. It had been an ordinary royal christening, with fireworks and trumpet fanfares and a large white cake with a blue cradle on the top made of sugar icing. They had named him Charming; a traditional name for a prince.

  Fairy godmothers had arrived with gifts: the Crimson Fairy had put a bright red teddy bear and a large ruby-handled sword into the Prince’s fat pink hands. The Snow-White Fairy gave him silver-bladed ice skates, and the promise of always snow at Christmas. The Queen had thanked them both, removed the sword and the skates to keep safe for later (no royal blood was shed: she got there in time), admired the teddy bear (it had real ruby teeth), and said how much they would all enjoy the snow. The Prince had behaved perfectly; everyone said so.

  Then the third fairy godmother had appeared. She was the Dust-Gray Fairy, and she arrived in a cloud of dust with her gray wolves yammering around her.

  The Crimson Fairy and the Snow-White Fairy rushed to meet her, scattering a snowstorm of rubies and frost. The trumpets blared a fanfare of welcome. The crowd dipped and swayed into bows and curtsies, the Queen curtsying with the rest. But when the six-month-old Prince was carried across to meet the new arrival, he had stared, and then he had reached out his hand and grabbed . . .

  “OW!” shrieked the Dust-Gray Fairy. “LET GO!”

  “My dear!” exclaimed the Queen, hurriedly handing the Prince to his nurse. “Are you very hurt? Let me order you some ice!”

  “Ice makes me sneeze!” snapped the Dust-Gray Fairy. “Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! What a dreadful child!”

  “I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt you! He doesn’t understand how to behave!”

  “He understands exactly!” said the Dust-Gray Fairy angrily. “He smiled and waved at the Crimson Fairy only a moment ago! He fluttered his eyelashes at the Snow-White Fairy and kissed her hand! She told me herself!”

  “It is their glittering and glimmering that attracts him,” said the Queen soothingly. “Remember he is still very young.”

  “Not too young to PULL MY NOSE!” said the Dust-Gray Fairy, and she closed one eye and squinted down her nose, to see if it was bent.

  It was bent.

  “NO PRESENT FOR HIM!” said the Dust-Gray Fairy. “I brought one, in a basket, but he doesn’t deserve it now! I shall give him a Problem instead!”

  “Pray, don’t trouble yourself!” begged the Queen, very alarmed.

  “I WILL trouble myself!” said the Dust-Gray Fairy. “I shall give him a Problem that will grow and grow until he learns who’s who and what’s what! That’s what he needs!”

  “I will make sure he understands those things,” said the Queen faintly. “When he is older.”

  “I will make sure he understands all those things when he is older!” replied the Dust-Gray Fairy, and she glared at the young Prince so ferociously that the Queen was truly shaken.

  “You surely won’t turn him into a frog?” asked the Queen. (For this had been known to happen in royal families before.)

  “Certainly not!” said the Dust-Gray Fairy. “I’m sure he would enjoy it, lurking around the lily leaves waiting to be kissed, but he would learn no manners at all!”

  “Nor send him to sleep for a hundred years?”

  “That’s for girls only,” said the Dust-Gray Fairy. “Boys are lazy enough as it is.”

  “True, true,” admitted the Queen.

  “So, quite the opposite. I shall give him a problem that will keep him awake! Now listen, when he marries . . .”

  “Marries?” asked the Queen, looking down at the Prince, now back in his cradle and busily gnawing his own left foot.

  “MARRIES!” repeated the Dust-Gray Fairy. “Please don’t interrupt! He must either marry a true princess—”

  “Well, of course he must!” the Queen could not help saying.

  “OR . . . ,” said the Dust-Gray Fairy, “put up with the consequences!”

  “Is that all?” asked the Queen, after a quite long pause, for fear of interrupting again. “That’s perfectly reasonable. You are quite right! Naturally, since he is a prince, he must marry a princess. It shouldn’t be a problem. There are princesses by the dozen in the castles aroun
d here.”

  “But are they true princesses?” demanded the Dust-Gray Fairy.

  “Is there a difference?” asked the Queen.

  “There are princesses and there are true princesses,” said the Dust-Gray Fairy. “I will explain to you how to tell the difference. It is important that you understand, because the consequences of not marrying a true princess will be the fall of this palace!”

  “Literally or metaphorically?” asked the Queen shakily.

  “Literally!” said the Dust-Gray Fairy. “The walls will tumble and the turrets will topple and the roof will slide to the ground!”

  Then the Queen forgot the need to be polite and exclaimed, “I am sorry about your nose (of course) but that is a Bit Much and I think you are overreacting!”

  “Overreacting!” shrieked the Dust-Gray Fairy, and at once went off in a great huff of gray dust without waiting to tell the Queen how to distinguish a true princess from the other sort. However, a week or so later, when she had calmed down a little, she sent the Queen a wolf with a message explaining the secret. She also sent a very small gray bag containing the necessary equipment.

  Or part of the necessary equipment.

  The other part was too large for the wolf to manage. “And anyway,” wrote the Dust Fairy, still clearly very annoyed, “I’m sure you have at the palace ten spare mattresses and ten feather beds! My NOSE,” the letter continued, in gray angry letters, “is still very much SWOLLEN. Please do not forget my words, and teach that Prince some manners before it is too late!”

  Of all the fairies, the Dust-Gray Fairy was the most powerful. She reached into every corner and she could not be forgotten. No matter how often the palace was swept and rubbed and polished and scrubbed, her dust came back to remind them of her words.

  Meanwhile the Queen grew old and the Prince grew up. Princesses came and went. None of them were true princesses. The Queen was very disappointed. The Prince said he didn’t care about any of them, true or otherwise. However, they both agreed that the problem given by the Dust-Gray Fairy was very bad luck indeed.