The Alyssa Chronicle

by Michael Strelow

  At first we took turns talking by holding a small stone. The one holding the stone got to talk by herself because we both had so much to tell and in a rush that we tried to tell it at the same time. Then we passed the stone, and the other one got to talk. This worked at first just to get over the beginning excitement, but soon Eugenie tossed the stone away and we jabbered back and forth like magpies.

  She had tales of my brother Jake, who was growing bigger, of course, and knew everything about our whole swap business but was being a great sport about the secret and not demanding anything special. He had not given up his tree swinging, and still she would find him contemplating the world from some leafy perch with his legs dangling over a branch like a serious, philosopher monkey. He would seem to grow still and quiet only when his distance from the ground grew.

  On the earth he was in constant motion, appearing here and then there like a pop-up jester who saw the world as his own private joke. In a tree, he was at peace. I thought about how even the idea of Jake in the castle world was, well, simply impossible. No one was allowed to climb trees. No one had the time, especially children, to sit up high and wonder about the world until they felt like climbing down.

  I started to tell Eugenie about the new business at court, but very quickly her attention seemed to wander to the flowers as if I had started in on a math lesson of some sort. I had a feeling she had changed her mind about the swap. So I went back to Arbuckle Beauregard the Third and chatted about his rise to the pinnacle of castle social life. I told Eugenie about how, with his forest green outfits, his impromptu lectures on water and the new science of geology, he was at once a newly risen prince among the courtiers and a known pain-in-the butt too.

  “He attaches himself to someone and regales them with his new wit and wisdom until their eyes begin to cast about for a polite escape,” I said. “But, in general, he remains one of the heroes of the bad-water days—along with me, since I get most of the left-over credit. The girl-credit anyway.”

  “Well, at least you get some,” Eugenie replied. “I get none.”

  I smiled in sympathy. “His portrait will soon hang with his ancestors, so he is both fulfilled and properly full of himself.”

  Eugenie warmed to the idea of switching back as we talked, and I carefully moved on to discussing the wedding. I shook my head. “I don’t see how I can pull this off with all those relatives coming at the same time.” I sighed, waiting for sympathy. But it was slow coming.

  “Alyssa,” Eugenie said, after a proper wait. “I think you probably could do it. You know, like the smile and wave thing. Just pretend everything’s fine and nod. Oh, and maybe say ‘um hum,’ and then if a grand old lady comes along, touch her arm. They all like that. I have never known it to fail. Touch the arm. Smile. The men like it if you look away and smile. Trust me on this.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was making fun or being serious. It was always hard with her. She’d use her pretending skills and keep a straight face, and then she’d burst out laughing once she knew she had me. But this time she kept the straight face.

  I said, “I…I…” It was hard finding the words for my discomfort. “Well, a steady stream of those oldsters, and everybody hearing the answer I give to everybody else, I think that would be the hard part. Now, I can just make up what I don’t know and am supposed to know. And then fit it to the person I’m talking to. But trapped! I’d be trapped day after day and the old people would have me there against the wall asking questions, and they’d bite little pieces out of my story and…” I truly was not looking forward to the wedding.

  But Eugenie just examined her broken gardening fingernails, lifted her hands for me to see how rough and “country” they had become, and then sighed. “How would these look? How would you look all pink and pretty in my garden? How long would Jake keep quiet? How, how and more how? And also”—she pointed to her face—“there is the matter of freckles.” Whichever one of us was outside the most, that was where the freckles flew and alighted on the sunniest face.

  Suddenly we weren’t both trying to talk at once. I was getting the feeling that my idea of switching back just for the wedding was very far from happening. I had planned to take time to tan a little while Eugenie kept out of the sun for a bit. I had planned to mess up my nails while she took better care of hers. I had planned… And so I laid out my plans to her, but Eugenie stayed polite and silent and occasionally shook her head sadly. And very quickly I could see myself in a great and noisy receiving line shaking hands and curtseying and then being besieged by huge flocks of aunts and grand uncles as they flapped their way out of carriages and maybe even out of the sky, too. Who knew? They would be grilling me like a slab of meat. I’d be hung up on the dungeon wall like a…like a…

  The steady and earth-loving Eugenie broke my nightmare. “You look like you’ve lost your final friend. Well, you haven’t.” She put her hand on my arm in a very princess-like manner. “Let’s think about this.”

  And so we did.

  We started the thinking about “this” by talking it through.

  I said, “The castle is a different place these days. The soldiers and guards everywhere in the past have been replaced by people talking in rooms about all kinds of things, like clean water, of course. After ‘The Great Plague’—that’s what they’re calling it now—well, after the sickness, Arbuckle was everywhere at once keeping us safe from ourselves. He’s a different person now. Oh, and there’s the subject of kindness now. I know, I know! Big topic. But somehow the whole business of kindness from the top, from the castle down, has become very important. I’m not exactly sure what they mean by it. The castle buzzes with ideas now: after kindness and water comes how to share wealth. Mostly that comes in the form of making better schools, and then the better education will help spread the wealth around.”

  I said whatever was on my mind. Eugenie listened as if she were overhearing state secrets. And in a way she was. Somehow the great water plague, the deaths and sickness, had left the kingdom weak in the knees but stronger in the brain. That was all I could figure out.

  Then it was Eugenie’s turn to talk. “What you say has not appeared in the village yet. The school is making do with very little from the castle. Mostly we pay for our teachers by taking a tenth part of each farmers’ market and saving it for the school. Then we wait to see if some money will come from the King and Queen, my mother and father, told me. Well, ha ha, hasn’t come yet. But good to know the talk has started. And Jake. Well, he’s sort of like a song you can hear in the distance but can’t quite make out the words. And now, he’s getting muscles. Not little boy muscles, but like the horse has muscles. Like father has muscles. No more roughhouse with him. He’s too strong. We’ll see how that goes. But he has remained, and I hope this continues, a great secret-keeper. Not a peep. He never even lets on in private, no winks and nods. It’s like I’ve always been his sister. Always will be. He likes me, I think, in his own tree-dwelling way.”

  And then she really warmed to her subject. “There’s the garden and farm business, of course.” She kind of glowed as she started this matter. “I have found some books and could really use more. Maybe if there was a place that all the books were kept, and you could take some away and then take them back when you were done and then take out some more and…” All this was said in a rush as if she were having a vision of some new world. “The books on farming especially. If we could get more of these—I know there are not too many around. But a place to keep the best ideas for farming around this country. Or maybe borrow from other countries their ideas.”

  I could see immediately that her excitement was exactly what was needed in the castle and its sudden interest in new ideas. She should be—even for just a little while—where the money was to get those things done. And I should be? But there I felt a tightening in my stomach. We should be back where we started? Really? After we had both come to love our new places?

  I spread out the lunch I had brought from the castle: th
ree cheeses, two kinds of bread, the smallest cucumbers and the brightest red grapes. Eugenie had brought the cold water from the farm spring that now ran bright and clean and fresh. We ate, but neither brought up what was becoming clearer: we had to go back to our original lives, even if just for the wedding and then the planning of the new kingdom and its new water and its new joy.

  The afternoon wore down to a nub in that sweet garden.

  “One last thing,” Eugenie said. “I think we have enough time before the wedding to work out a few things besides the fingernails and freckles. If we have to go back, even for a short time, then we should get some good out of all the work.” She looked around the garden—big yellow roses here, small red roses there over an arbor—as if she were searching the flowers for a plan. I smiled to myself watching her. When looking for a plan, she always seemed to search a garden or even a patch of dirt for answers. What was she looking for there? I had always worked in our family’s garden (yes, our, since we both had two families now), and I liked to think I’d worked hard and well. But Eugenie, as if she had sprung up out of the dirt herself, she didn’t work in the garden so much as tend it like you would a puppy or new calf. She glided over the garden, while I used to sweat over it. She hummed and chirped while I had grunted at one end of a spade.

  And so she cast around the old couple’s glowing garden looking for a way to do what we had to do. I waited. She seemed to be checking out the flowers, how they grew, how the leaves waved about, the way the twigs branched. After what seemed to me like a very long time, she took in a deep breath and blew it out, something final, something good.

  “How about this? We both look for ways to make each place stronger and healthier.”

  I knew I’d have to wait for the thought to grow. I couldn’t quite see where she was going with this stronger-and-healthier stuff. It seemed at first so, well, so agricultural.

  She continued, still looking intently at the flowers as if she were getting some kind of direct message. “We make a chart, each of us, with what we want to see happen on the farms, and in the castle, and then we make a third list. That will be the most important one. That list will be all the things each place can do to help the other place. Sort of like trimming a rose bush. You open up the middle so the air circulates freely and no black spot gets started. You trim away the shoots that cross each other, then keep the first five stems…” And she continued with what I thought was a lesson on rose plants, but in her mind she was clearly somehow laying out our plan for switching back.

  I sat fascinated, I’ll admit. Her delight in healthy roses was catching, and I couldn’t stop myself from smiling—apparently like an idiot.

  “Are you even listening to me?” she asked, tapping me on the shoulder. I must have taken my “delighted-idiot” look too far.

  “Yes. Sure. Yes, I am. You said trim and air circulation and something about black spot. And I just know you’re going to let me know how this will help us plan our returns.”

  She paused for a moment and looked at me. I could see then how completely she had become a farm girl: take your time, consider your words, give your listener a chance to listen. On the other hand, I had become a fast-talker and damned be anyone who couldn’t keep up. My Queen mother called this, “not suffering fools gladly.” Apparently I had a lot to learn about “suffering fools,” whatever that meant. Whether gladly or not. And also, I had developed this habit just since I’d traded a farmhouse for a castle. I had carefully sought out those around me in the castle who were fast listeners for my fast-talking. That was like dessert to me—the fastness, the quickness of talking and thinking ahead and reacting to someone who was clever: delicious!

  Eugenie cocked her head to the side like the horse used to when it didn’t understand what I wanted it to do. I cocked my head back at her, and we laughed. I told her that I had got the idea of her plan—three lists, time to think it through, what I thought was needed and how I could help the farm too.

  The garden seemed to sigh with Eugenie as she accepted my short version of her flower-based plan. Trim, air, clean, feed and water, I guessed. We would save the kingdom.

  There was my problem. My new problem. My ever-since-the-switch problem. I had begun to see every side of everything, how complicated everything was, could be. I thought of this as “on the other hand.” Everything had an “on the other hand” that was not so clear-cut. And the result was that it was difficult, sometimes, to make a decision. On the farm I didn’t have this problem. You couldn’t dilly-dally or shillyshally either. Things had to get done and done right away. There was this and there was that and then the other thing too. Boing! Fence was broken. Mend it. Never mind whether the fence was doing what it should be doing and perhaps should be replaced by a better way to keep the cows in. Fix it!

  But at the castle, things usually got complicated very quickly. That was the story of the whole bad-water business: nobody could do anything about the sickness from the water because everybody was consulting someone else, and they in turn… Well, too much thinking and not enough doing. But the thinking part, I had to admit, became very interesting, even when it kept any solution to the problem flapping off there in the blue sky like any old butterfly that wouldn’t land.

  Eugenie and I waited in the garden until the very last minute. The sun was dropping; we’d be missed at home and castle. The old woman appeared and asked if we wouldn’t like something to eat, and said she had some cookies. But we had to hurry. We were two girls with a (sort of) plan. We would have to think, list, think some more. Plot the switch. The old man, as we were leaving, appeared at the edge of his garden and waved goodbye to us. I wondered if he could somehow see when he was in the garden but not when he was out of it.

  Chapter Two

  I returned to the castle full of a combination of excitement and, I’ll admit, fear. I had the castle routine down pretty well, the shuffle and slide of the whole thing, the way lots of new things have when all is exciting and first-time. I felt right away that I was part of an ancient dance and everyone else knew the steps: where I moved, who I talked to, when I lined up to receive important people. And the portraits on the walls of important people from the past, these were only a few, and not always the most important, of the dance makers.

  Some days I wanted to make clicking noises and move like a doll caught in a wind-up machine. I never did it, but I wanted to paint my eyes like a china doll, move my hands stiffly, squeak my shoes as I went through the movements. Somehow, it was good just to pretend to do it, just think about it. That helped me not actually do it, I think. I understood very soon why Eugenie had wanted out. But also, just as soon, I felt the opposite, the old on-the-other-hand. The importance of the dance and my part in it. The princess part.

  And, I have to admit that this part got away from me a little—the deadly princess-head; I felt that I had been meant to be a princess all my life. I wanted something more than the warm side of a cow at milking time, the dull slowness of a schoolroom with all ages being taught at once. The tutors, Eugenie’s tutors, had picked me up right where she left off. Not one of them suspected a thing because Eugenie, who hadn’t much cared for the whole tutor business, had told me clearly where she was in each subject. If any of them noticed that I was suddenly a much more eager student, they didn’t say a word.

  So, I had scrambled a little at the beginning of the math, but quickly got the idea. I soon found I wanted more, way more than the tutor was scheduled to give me. His teaching had what I called the princess-limit—just enough math to be useful to a young woman with royal duties. So when soon after returning to the castle after my talk with Eugenie, he tried to call off our sessions just when they got interesting, we had, well, let’s call it a discussion. I’m not proud of my imperiousness—that was the word I learned later, the word used for a princess too big for her britches.

  Mr. Andors had been wrapping up our number discussion. “And so these addings and subtractings and multiplyings and dividings, these you will grow
comfortable with as you see their usefulness. I think that concludes our…”

  “But wait,” I insisted. “What about how the numbers work? When do we get to the way they really work? What about, for example, if we pile up the numbers in groups then set up a way the groups can…what? I don’t know the right words. Can…can talk with each other. That’s not right, but certainly the number groups can be piled in a way that they change in value if you… Oh, I can think of what I want to say, but I don’t know the right words. Can we learn how to talk about what numbers can do…be?…when the groups are put together in a way so that…”

  Mr. Andors started to pack up his papers. He wasn’t listening. He thought his job was done. It was no excuse, of course, but his packing up, his ignoring what I thought was very interesting and exciting, that set me off. Okay, made me crazy.

  “Stop it,” I yelled. “Stop, stop, stop that fiddling and listen.” Oh, this was not going to turn out well, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. What had crossed my mind for just a second was the old lady yelling at the crows in her garden. Then the spoiled-brat imperiousness had ahold of me fiercely. “You put those papers down right now and tell me what I want to know!” I stomped my foot. “You want to just walk away from this lesson right when it gets interesting. Well, no! You will continue, right now. You will tell me what is known about groups and how they…”

  Mr. Andors stood perfectly still with his papers in hand, frozen by my barrage of princess insistence. His job, I was sure, flashed in front of his eyes. The displeasure of the princess was the displeasure of the King. And the King’s anger was slow to come but legendary in consequences. I could see his fear, but I couldn’t stop myself. The poor man, I thought. But then his eyes grew bigger and bigger. I could see what he was thinking. Would the princess leap at him like a lioness? Was his life at the castle about to be finished? My princess snit grew. Though he showed all the signs of giving in to my demands, I couldn’t slow myself down.