The Ogre of Oglefort

What Mirella was passionate about was animals. Not just cats and dogs and horses but creatures most people hardly know are there. She had made a sanctuary for wood lice and ground beetles and earwigs in a courtyard garden. She kept a plaster of Paris ant nest under her bed, and when the maids tried to remove it she threw a tantrum which echoed through the palace. Her dog was not a beautiful saluki like the dog that was photographed with Princess Sidony, or a perfectly groomed Afghan like the dog owned by Angeline—it was a stray she had made her bodyguards pick up on the way to the dentist: a rough-coated mongrel with a funny eye. She called it Squinter and her mother shuddered whenever she caught sight of it.

And she had a passion for birds. While she was still in her pram she had looked for hours at the starlings and sparrows and chaffinches that came close. By the time she was seven there was hardly a bird she did not recognize, and when her nursemaid took her down to the harbor, the little girl couldn’t take her eyes off the gulls and terns and gannets wheeling over the water.

“They’re so white,” she said to the nurse.

One of the things that royal families like very much is having weddings, and on the day she was eighteen, Sidony got engaged to Prince Tomas, who lived in a slightly smaller palace along the coast.

He was a very uninteresting young man who lived for his stamp collection, but both families were pleased, and a great wedding was planned to take place in Waterfield Cathedral.

“You’re going to be one of the bridesmaids, dear,” her mother told Mirella.

“Do I have to be?” asked Mirella, which upset her mother because surely all normal little girls want nothing more than to go down the aisle in a pretty dress.

The wedding was incredibly grand. The church was decorated with a thousand pink roses and Sidony wore a cream gown with a nine-foot train. Mirella’s dress was embroidered all over with tiny pink rosebuds.

“You’re going to look so sweet, my darling,” said her mother.

“No, I’m not,” said Mirella. “I’m going to look like an escaped measles rash.”

But everything went off pretty well except the usual things—an usher being sick on the best man’s shoe, a mouse in the trifle . . .

After that Mirella had two years of peace, during which she set up a freshwater aquarium with nesting sticklebacks and tamed a jackdaw which had fallen down the chimney—and then Angeline got engaged to the only other prince in Ostland: a weedy young man who sucked peppermints all day long because he worried about his breath, and Mirella had to be a bridesmaid once again.

This time the wedding was even grander. The bride carried a huge bouquet of hyacinths, which matched her eyes, and the bridesmaids wore silver dresses covered in glittering sequins.

“Like fish,” said Mirella.

But she was fond of fish and behaved well.

Once again there were a couple of years of peace—and then Mirella’s parents started to worry. Because the supply of princes in Ostland had now run out, so where were they to find a husband for their youngest daughter?

“Of course she’s only a child,” said her mother. “She can’t marry for years, but we’ve got to make sure there’s someone ready for her when the time comes.”

So Mirella’s parents went prince hunting in Europe. After many disappointments they found the Crown Prince of Amora, a small country between Italy and France, and the prince was invited to Waterfield to come and look Mirella over.

The visit was not a success. Prince Umberto arrived a day before he was expected, and instead of finding Mirella in her best dress with her hair curled, he found her in overalls cleaning out her stickleback tank. Her hair was screwed up in two rubber bands, and there was waterweed all down her front.

Prince Umberto did not take to Mirella at all and she most certainly did not take to him. He was a conceited show-off with a silly blond beard and a sneery voice.

“You’ll have time to get used to him,” said Mirella’s mother.

But Mirella said she wouldn’t get used to him in ten years or in twenty or a hundred. “You can hang and draw and quarter me before I’ll join my life to that nitwit,” she said.

So the prince went away but that was not the end of the matter. Mirella’s father was very rich—he owned oil wells and diamond mines—and Prince Umberto’s father was poor, and he told Umberto that he had to promise to marry Mirella as soon as she was old enough.

“I’ll do it,” said Umberto, “but she’s got to be cleaned up and turned into a proper princess. I’m not living with fish and mongrel dogs and jackdaws.”

Mirella’s parents saw his point, and they began to train Mirella. They confiscated the ant nest. They took away the aquarium. They shooed out the jackdaw. And they said that the little dog had to go before the prince’s next visit.

“We’ll get you a beautiful pedigree dog like your sisters’,” they told her.

“I don’t want a pedigree dog, I just want Squinter,” said Mirella. “Please let me keep him. Please.”