Goose Chase Page 2

  As she lay dying, my dear mother made me promise to take good care of the Geese. I might sell or eat the ducks whenever I liked, she said, but never the Geese.

  "Drive them to pasture in the summer, Daughter, and gather them sweet grasses for winter. You may eat their eggs and make your bed from their feathers, but do not harm them. Treat them well and they will protect you and keep you from want."

  I only wept, unable to speak.

  "Promise me, Alexandria!"

  "As you say, Mother." I bowed my head and kissed her hand. "So shall it be."

  Then she died and I, a child of ten years, dug her grave and laid her to rest. The twelve white Geese came and stood around the grave as I shoveled dirt down on my mother's body and I was a little comforted, as though they grieved with me.

  Besides my fine flock of ducks and Geese, my mother left me a very small house nestled under the cliffs of Sorrow Mountain and a plot of ground on which stood beehives, fruit trees, and a garden. Every fortnight I would walk the ten miles to the miller's house and trade some eggs or a fat duck for flour to bake my bread. With cloth woven by the miller's wife I occasionally made a featherbed stuffed with duck and goose down, which she then sold in the village for our joint profit. She was an honest woman, the miller's wife, and never tried to cheat me. Unlike her husband, I might add, who was all too apt to lay a thumb heavy as a ham on the scales weighing my flour, if I did not keep an open eye and a chiding tongue in my head. Still, he was not so bad as some I've heard of. Millers were ever rogues and villains and 'tis pure foolishness to expect aught else. I presume they were made that way for some good purpose.

  So it came about that I spent three years alone. I lived by my brain and my birds, and let me tell you, 'twas not such a bad life. Before that old beggar woman appeared I had saved up a nice fat little pouchful of money and was happily weighing the advantages of purchasing a she-goat now or a cow in six months' time, when I could afford one.

  I was not afraid, living by myself. You see, Geese can be quite fierce with an intruder. If any stranger (which so far as the Geese were concerned meant anybody but me) came within a mile of the place, the Geese all rushed out in a body and screamed and bit and generally chased whoever it was off the premises. And if the intruder had a mind to eat goose pie for dinner that night, why, there was an old musket hanging over the fireplace. Because we lived in such a lonely place, my mother had taught me how to use it, and I was a good shot.

  So people generally left me alone. The village was only a mile or two beyond the mill, but I didn't go there often. I didn't think that the village children were either nice or polite. They used to call me a dirty Goose Girl, and sometimes they threw stones. So I simply kept myself to myself.

  By and large I was happy. I missed my mother, naturally, but at first I was too busy just surviving to mope much. And later, well, I'd gotten used to it. When I got a craving for company I used to dress the Geese up in skirts I made out of dried grasses and pretend they were neighbors coming to call. The Geese didn't much like it, but I have never been one to stand any nonsense from a goose. Geese, in case you do not know it, are very self-willed animals, stuffed to the brim with conceit and choler. One must be very, very firm with a goose.

  So it was that on the day the old beggar woman came I was up in the high meadow, playing at dress-up with the Geese. They were waddling around in circles, flapping their wings and wagging their bottoms, which made all the grass skirts swing like a carillon of giant bells. "Cronk, cronk cronk!" they cried in melancholy voices, and I had to laugh as I tried to herd them over to my make-believe tea party, laid out on a large, flat rock.

  As a special touch I had woven a crown of daisies for each bird, and also one for myself, mine being fashioned of wild roses. I was pretending that we were thirteen Princesses sitting down to dine in our ancestral hall.

  "My Royal Sisters, please!" I called, trying to sound stern. (In my imaginings, I was of course the eldest sister, she who would one day be Queen.) "Will you not be seated?"

  "Well ssso I would if there were anywhere to sssit!" whistled a high-pitched voice right next to my ear. I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  But no, 'twas not one of my Geese being saucy. A tiny, incredibly shrunken old woman with just two front teeth, each the size of a tombstone, and a chin and nose so long and so curved that they nearly met in the middle, had appeared literally out of nowhere and was regarding my tea party preparations critically.

  "How ... how do you do?" I asked, very much taken aback, and a little embarrassed to be caught playing at such a baby's game.

  "I'm hungry, thankee," she said, looking with burning eyes at the piece of bread I had laid out for my meal.

  "I see," I said, dismayed. I was quite hungry myself, and I had been preparing to sup on one scarsly little bit of wheaten loaf alone. However, I said, "Would you like some bread?"

  "I would," she said, and snatched the entire piece up and thrust it into her mouth. She gummed it with her mouth open, so that bits of bread fell out onto the ground, where the Geese snapped them up.

  "Dry bread always makes me thirsssty," she said. Because of her missing teeth she whistled shrilly as she spoke.

  "All I have is water, Grandmother," I said with a sigh, for I was also thirsty after a morning in the hot sun. "But I suppose you'd better have a little of that too." If I had any hope that she'd be ashamed of herself and leave some for me, I was disappointed. She even held the flask up over her mouth and shook out the last drops.

  "Why, you selfish old—" I began to sputter.

  "What do you sssay?" she interrupted, holding up a hand to her ear. "Ssspeak up, girl, I'm a little deaf."

  "Nothing," I muttered sullenly. My dear departed mother had brought me up to have the manners of a lady, even though we were poor. I knew that I must show respect to the aged, no matter how boorish and piggy and downright loathsome their behavior might be.

  "I'll be going, then," she said, thrusting my flask, the only flask I possessed, under her shawl.

  "As you wish," I replied between gritted teeth.

  She smiled then, her lips curling around her two tombstone teeth, and said, "You're a good girl, and patient with a bad old creature. Very well. When you comb your hair, gold dussst shall fall like rain. When you weep, your tears shall be preciousss diamonds. And you shall be as lovely as the dawn."

  "I beg your pard—"

  She gave a great cackle of laughter and vanished clean away, taking both my flask and my supper with her. The Geese made a great to-do, flapping and squawking, using this dramatic event as an excuse to wriggle out of their skirts and scatter to all points of the compass.

  Once I'd managed to gather the Geese together to herd them back home, I found that the grass skirts they had so thankfully shed had turned to small silken gowns, and the daisy circlets round their white brows were now made of gold and ivory. I am sorry to tell you that I was quite pleased with this discovery at first. If my Geese got golden crowns and silken gowns, what then should I, the kindly maid who had so generously and graciously given my all :o a beggar, receive?

  I was mad with greed.

  Imbecilic, prating fool!

  At home again, I at once had a hunt round for my mother's comb. I hadn't actually used it in the past four years, and I couldn't call its exact location to mind.

  You might expect that, once I'd found it, it would have taken hours to drag it through the knots and tangles far enough to accumulate even a thimbleful of gold dust, but no. My hair had suddenly grown several feet, developed all sorts of waves and curlicues, and changed color from dirt brown to polished gold. The comb slid through my glittering locks like a fish through water and the gold dust pattered around me like rain, just as the old witch-woman had foretold.

  O, but I was a dunce, a simpleton, a most pitiful merry-andrew! I actually sat there and wept tears of joy. And the tears, of course, fell—plink! plink! plink!—as three fat diamonds the size of acorns, into my silk-and-satin-covered
lap. For somehow, at some point, my ragged old dress had been turned into the gown of a princess, and my wild-rose crown into a golden tiara topped with great gaudy rubies, red as blood. Dainty little glass slippers sparkled on my feet as well, made of glass beads and solid crystal heels.

  Elated, I hoisted the nearest Goose up into my arms and danced her around the house, laughing and singing, the Goose (it was Eugenia, as I recall) struggling wildly as we staggered about, into and out of the fire pit. We knocked the bucket and the ladle off the shelf in the process and badly cracked my best blue bowl. I had to let her go quite soon, of course. Geese are big and heavy and very powerful. I collapsed onto a wooden chest and laughed until I cried diamonds again.

  It must have been no more than five days later when I was sitting over my supper of duck eggs fried in grease and deep in rosy dreams of the future, when I heard the blare of trumpets outside my door. You in your wisdom have no doubt guessed that this uproar heralded that very King and that very Prince who now hold me in durance vile.

  Each stood in my dooryard with a battalion of soldiers at his back, come to ask me which one I would have in marriage. As I was a subject of the Prince, this naturally made the Prince feel that he had first claim, but being simpleminded, he had let the King talk him into giving me a choice.

  Some rotten little beast of a swineherd had spotted me in the high meadow in my princess clothes and crown (I had nothing else to put on save my new gown, though I admit I wore the crown out of sheer vanity and pride), brushing the gold dust out of my hair, and of course after that, 'twas only a matter of hours before everyone in the village heard about it, and a matter of days before the whole countryside for miles around got the news.

  Naturally, when I heard their proposals I replied, "Neither one of you, if 'tis all the same to you and of course thank you very much." But what was the good of that? I had might as well have been talking to the wind. The Prince looked perplexed and the King looked like cold death, and all the soldiers took a step forward in an extremely menacing manner.

  So here am I in the tower, where they can keep a close eye on me while I make up both my wedding garments and my mind. I must leave here soon, and yet I don't know where to go even if I do escape. I long to go home, but how can I, looking the way I do and shedding clouds of gold dust and diamonds at every step? Even disguised, the villagers would guess who I was the minute I tried to pay for the common necessities of life with even a pinch of gold dust or the tiniest of diamonds.

  I am most dreadfully afraid that my cottage has been looted by those ghastly villagers and that my ducks and Geese are all gobbled up by foxes or wolves by now. I feel so guilty for failing to protect the Geese as my mother commanded. And do you know, I miss them dreadfully. Geese may have their faults, and speaking as someone who has lived intimately with fowl all her life, I'd be the first to admit that they are far from perfect models of gentility. Yet what a comfort it would be to see their peevish, bad-tempered little faces again!

  They flew away when the soldiers came, and who can blame them? Not I. I would have gladly flown away myself. Two battalions of heavily armed soldiers, a Prince, and a King was too much to expect them to tackle. I wept when I saw them go and swore 1 could not be parted from my birds, but to no avail. The sight of the diamonds that poured onto the floor when I cried quite made up the minds of my royal visitors for them.

  I gathered up the little gowns and crowns into a sack and brought them along with me. The Geese had always refused to wear them, in any case, and 'twas something to remember them by.

  'Twas kind of the Prince, I suppose, to give me Chipper as a sort of compensation for losing my birds. If I were minded to marry and the Prince were less of a dunce—but no, I must be mad to even consider such a notion. He is a dunce, and I am not minded to marry.

  Ah well. If the Geese had been allowed to accompany me here, the King would probably have served them as he did my little Chipper, and with better cause. Any one of my fat and bonny birds would have made a supper fit for a king, which of course is what he is, so perhaps they are better off as they are. Tis possible some may have survived.

  Yes, I must leave this place. Chipper's death has convinced me. The King is growing bored and my golden gown is nearly finished. I might be able to put the Prince off by going on unpicking my handiwork until the crack of doom, but the King will not wait much longer for my decision. The time to act is now.

  Yet how shall I escape? And if I do, where in the wide world shall I go? I do not know.

  I am a no-nonsense, practical sort of person and I don't expect that I shall care for adventures—certainly I don't think much of the one I'm in at the moment—but I suppose that from now on adventures will be coming my way whether I like it or not.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Escape from the Tower

  WHEN THE SUN SHINETH, MAKE HAY.

  —JOHN HEYWOOD, PROVERBS

  They have left the door to my room unbarred. In all the months in which I have been imprisoned here, that has never happened before. In addition, they have left me entirely alone!

  The servants, who are also my jailers, have gathered outside to hang laundry in the sunshine and gossip. They are laying wagers on which of my suitors I will accept. The Prince is the popular favorite, since like me they are all his subjects, but at least one of them shares my forebodings about the probable result of my marriage to the Prince.

  "What I say is, let that nasty old King have her," the Cook said, her red, beefy bosom heaving with emotion, "else our dear Prince will find reason soon enough to regret it. If, that is, he lives long enough to grieve. That King is just as twisty as a little piggie's tail, he is." She nodded her head wisely several times, which made the white wings on her ridiculous headdress flap up and down. "And good riddance anyway," she added with a sniff. "What do we want with a Goose Girl for our Queen?"

  Several people disagreed, pointing out the practical value of a Queen, Goose Girl or no, with my particular talents.

  "Besides," sighed the boy who polished the shoes and sharpened the knives and tended the fires, "she is the loveliest creature in all the world."

  "Handsome is as handsome does," snapped the Cook. "I say she's as common as cabbage."

  By my oath! I'd never even spoken to the woman. For sheer bounce and bobaunce, I trow I have never heard the like! I happen to have exquisite manners. Indeed, 'twas my refined and aristocratic behavior to that gap-toothed old hag that got me into this predicament in the first place. Mayhap I ought to marry the Cook's beloved Prince just for the pleasure of tweaking the flaps on her silly hat and then sending her packing. But nay, 'twould not be worth it.

  I withdrew my head and decided to try a little exploration while they were occupied in discussing my deportment and marital destiny. There was no object in trying to escape through that mob; they were grouped around the only door and would catch me ere I set one foot outside. But if I could not go down, I could go up.

  My room was but one story above the ground. However, no one need fear that I would escape through the window. The iron grille affixed to the window frame allowed me to stick my head outside, but no more. By craning my neck back uncomfortably far I could see that the tower was very much taller than the level of my chamber. It should give a good view out over both my own country of Dorloo and the King's country of Gilboa, since it stood almost directly on the border of these two lands. I would climb it and see what I could see. I tucked my golden gown into the bag in which I kept the gowns and crowns belonging to my Geese and bore it along with me. If caught, I could always claim I had been in search of a better light for my sewing.

  Three hundred and twenty-six.

  Three hundred and twenty-seven.

  Three hundred and twenty-eight.

  Would there never be an ending to these everlasting steps? My heart felt ready to burst out of my breast; spots swam before my eyes. My legs trembled beneath me like willow wands in the wind.

  There were three hundred and thir
ty-three stone steps up to the top of the tower and much good my long climb did me, as it ended in a dark landing with a flat roof four feet off the floor. I collapsed in a heap, wishing I knew more curse words.

  When I had caught my breath I got to my feet again, crouching and holding one hand over my head to shield myself against the stone ceiling. To my surprise, my fingertips discovered that 'twas not stone at all, but wood. Well, of course, there was no particular reason why the tower shouldn't have a wooden roof, but yet it gave me food for thought.

  Why build this monstrous tall tower anyway? There were various storage rooms above mine, but it did not need to be anywhere near as tall as 'twas if it afforded no view of the surrounding countryside. There must be a way onto the roof. My fingers groped around in the darkness and eventually found an iron ring. Rejoicing, I put my shoulder to the ceiling and gave a doughty heave.

  Ah! The light dazzled my eyes for but a moment. Gathering my skirts together, I climbed up with what haste I was able. To thrust both self and garments through such a small trapdoor was no small feat, and required some kicking and squirming. My Princess gown was a trifle torn, which grieved me some, 1 will confess. 'Twas the finest dress that ever I had owned and 'twas a crying shame to see it spoilt with rough usage. Still, I managed to struggle out at last onto the roof and that was worth a good deal. I stood up and looked all round.