Anna’s Tale
If you have time, I’ll tell you about Anna. She was a Princess of some petty eastern European kingdom in around 1910, let us call it “Ruritania” for the sake of a name. Who am I? Well, I used to work for her as a clerk and general dogsbody: it wasn’t a bad life, being as she was a lovely, kindly girl at heart, despite her misfortunes. Listen well…
I sat at the desk in Anna’s drawing room, putting the finishing touches to a letter. At my back stood Anna, tall and elegant, dictating then listening and mostly accepting my suggestions. I have quite a talent for finding the right way to say things in writing; alas, in this case, I regret to say that it hadn’t helped Anna thus far. It should have been quite straightforward to find a suitable husband for her: she was only twenty-two, and quite pretty and shapely, if I may be forgiven for saying so. But how many letters have I written for her, requesting a visit from some unimportant and often pompous young prince from somewhere else? I’d quite lost count, I had to admit. Nobody seemed to be interested in her. She was the sixth child of eight, thus was unlikely to become queen here: nor was she the youngest, therefore she was very much a middle child, struggling to find a niche in life. Unpleasant words such as “nonentity” sprang easily to mind. The reason why no-one seemed to be interested in her was clear to me. I said to her,
‘I am finished, your Highness.’
I got up, faced her, and gestured that she sit, so as to sign the letter. She caught my gaze with her bespectacled eyes for a moment, then sat down in my place. She read it, and then nodded slowly and signed her name at the bottom. While I folded it and put it in an envelope, she walked to the window and looked out. She sighed, then said,
‘I wish it would stop raining.’
I replied,
‘Well, ma’am, the flowers and trees, that you love so much, will not grow without the rain.’
She nodded, and said,
‘You are so right. Perhaps it will stop raining soon, so we may go walking together.’
I took the letter downstairs to one of the servants and said to him,
‘here it is, another try. Perhaps this one will work.’
‘Yes, I hope so. I’ll get it sent immediately.’
‘We’re going outside once it stops raining.’
‘Thank you for telling us.’
I went back up to collect Princess Anna. She was waiting by the door, with such a sweet, placid expression on her face. Well, she did like me, that’s why I was in her employ. As she walked before me, she turned her head on occasion to glance at things, during which I could see the world through her lenses, distorted and minified. She saw clearly enough through them, but not quite as well as someone who didn’t need visual correction. They were around minus eighteen each eye, with lenses over half an inch thick at the edges, in a light metal frame. The way she looked at people was quite unique in my experience; her pale blue eyes were shrunken and pushed in each side, and those strangely attractive, to me anyway, rings of distorted light. Such things as myodiscs, contacts, lasik and thin lenses didn’t exist in these times. This was the cause of her problem: it was no good asking her to do without them, being as she couldn’t see. Her mother and sisters were at times cruel and spiteful about her; I could do nothing to help.
She paused in the outside doorway and smiled. The rain was abating and the sun coming out, and it looked as if it would be a pleasant afternoon for a walk in the gardens and beyond. I followed Anna as she strolled into the flower garden, then stopped to crouch at several points, smelling the flowers. Presently we happened to walk further away from the house, under the branches of some trees. She stopped under one and looked over to the house. I watched her eyes narrow and strain a little. She commented, with a hint of irritation in her voice
‘I can’t make out the glazing bars in the windows anymore: they’re too small for me. Can you see them?’
I assured her that I could. She sighed, and said
‘I’ll have to get new lenses, yet again.’
As she said this, a few drops of water fell onto her cheek and right lens from the trees above our heads. She wiped her cheek with her fingers, and then wiped her lens.
She turned to me and said, attempting to obscure her problems with a little gaiety,
‘come, let’s go and look at the ruin.’
It wasn’t really a ruin, just the remains of a building, a crumbling old brick wall about 3 feet high at its highest. We walked the short distance to the ruin: Anna immediately held out her hand so I could help her up onto it. She could be a bit of a risk-taker at times, sometimes doing things no princess really ought to do, thus she ended up walking along the wall to the end, then looked down at me. I pretended not to notice her ankles as she did so. Then she jumped down to level ground.
We headed back to the house, this time by a more circuitous route: past the stables. Anna liked horses, she said, but I’d noticed she seemed to like the stable lad even more so, especially these last few months. He must have been around her age, I imagined. As we walked past the outer walls of the stables, Anna held her finger to her mouth so as to say “quiet please!” She then started creeping up toward the wall. There was a small round hole in the wall, some sort of air vent, I think. Anna put her left eye and lens against it, and blinked. I saw her smile. Obviously she’d seen the stable lad, and drew some sort of innocent, or perhaps not so innocent, pleasure out of it. Nothing wrong in that, but that got her no nearer getting some princely husband. But I could hardly tell her that, after all, she was the princess not I.
Gently I asked,
‘what do you see, Princess?’
‘Shhhh!’
She answered, then after a pause, she whispered,
’the stable lad! He’s so handsome. Such a fine figure.’
At that at, a plan that I’d been considering for some time came a lot closer to being put into action. I resolved to lay it before the Princess when she was indoors: not today, though. It would have to be the right day, probably when the latest rejection had arrived. Sad to say, I was all but certain it would be a rejection.
That day came some days later. As I had rightly foreseen, the latest attempt to find her a husband had failed. As usual her disappointment was veiled, but quite obvious to me, being as I’d known her several years: ever since I’d left the army I’d been her clerk. I approached her one afternoon, two days after the rejection had arrived, and asked for her attention. She was quite easygoing at most times, and this was one of them. Just the right moment to ask a question along the lines of the one I had in mind. Once I had her full attention, I asked
‘Princess, I have a suggestion.’
‘Concerning what?’
‘Concerning your lack of a husband.’
She nodded sadly, then indicated I go on: into uncharted territory. I continued
‘Princess, I have become increasingly aware that you desire to have intimate relations with a man, most preferably a husband.’
The look of shock on her face was a picture. She didn’t speak, just sat with her mouth half-open for a long moment. Then she shut it, and her slowly face regained much of the beautiful repose it usually possessed.
I then said to her,
‘as you are well aware, a suitable husband is hard to procure. Perhaps a different approach is in order?’
Warily she asked,
‘what sort of approach? What do you have in mind?’
‘Perhaps you may have to consider a “somebody” with rather less rank than a Prince.’
As I’d expected, Anna exploded. She cried out at me angrily,
‘what? Me? I will consider no such thing! Get out of here: it is only my good grace and because you have been a trusted and loyal friend that I do not send you away right now!’
I got out, quickly, glad to still be in her employ. But I had set the seed of my plan, it was down to chance whether it grew or withered. I firmly believed and hoped it would flower.
I was not surprised when she called upon me a few days later “in order to discuss a matter which you recently mentioned”. I was pleasantly surprised: it had taken less than a week for her make up her mind. Once I was before her, she said,
‘you recall the suggestion that you recently put to me?’
I nodded, and replied,
‘Yes, Ma’am.’
‘I would like to know the identity of this “somebody” you wish me to…’
Now this was tricky. Generally speaking, princesses could get away with quite a lot: but this might cause her, and by association me a lot of trouble. I inhaled, and spoke,
’the someone I had in mind is the stable lad, whom you have spent many hours watching with keen interest.’
I was skating on very thin ice here. Her eyes widened in disbelief: not so much because I’d noticed her interest, but much more because I’d mentioned that I’d noticed it. But then it was very hard not to notice.
She sat thinking for a long moment. I could hear the clock ticking in the awkward silence. Then something seemed to click inside her. She announced solemnly that wished me to put my suggestion into action as soon as possible. Calmly she commented ‘I know I can trust you to be discreet. If you were not, then I would never had employed you.’
And so it began. I summoned the stable lad to my office: apart from Princess Anna, my word went very much over everyone else’s here. He came quickly, and I bade him to sit. There he sat, nervous. He was a strapping lad of what, twenty? A little older? It didn’t matter. I asked him how he was getting on in the stables, and then started to explain my plan to him. He seemed even more startled and shocked than the Princess when he caught the gist of it. I asked him whether he’d ever had sex before: it turned out that he had, but he wasn’t prepared to say who with. That was fine from my point of view. He soon calmed down once he realised what I wanted him to do was pretty simple: make love to a princess and then say nothing about it, and get paid for it.
Later that same week I had him get scrubbed up, and sent up to the Princess. No-one else in her staff knew was going on, thankfully. I was downstairs for nearly two hours before the bell rang, and thus I went to see what had transpired. Princess Anna regarded me sternly for just a moment when I saw her, and then, oh joy, she smiled gently and thanked me: quite obviously the plan had worked.