Vasalissa Cremona

A novel by Gudrun Sabrina Hirt, started September 7, 2010

A self-reflection, in a fantasy-fiction sense, but so is most fiction.

To my friends Adam and Clement, for whom I started writing this in response to when they left Edinburgh, the meeting point for black cats and friends!  They are two of the characters in this book and they were involved with their interest and confidence-giving.

With special thanks to my friends Eva for her humoured supportive pressing on to the finish line; to Ina who encouraged me when I was about to give up, somewhere in the middle, with a Kinder Surprise and “that’s what you need to write about!”; to Colin who is the orphan’s mentor Puss in Boots in the story! Lots love!  Thanks to Morgane who was here from France the evening I finished editing and sent the book to Adam on his birthday!  Thanks to Jamie’s having recommended me a book about a boy who loses his mother and goes into a dark fantasy world, and I got the idea of reflecting on being orphaned myself and writing a novel again.  The start of this book is also in response to Lemony Snicket’s ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ but you will see my story is very different and always grows more and more toward light.

Chapter 1: A Girl in a Crimson Cape

It is a horrible thing to be an orphan on your own.  There may be orphans who get to live in orphanages or have a brother or sister and go on adventures together. 

Vasalissa Cremona was a girl of 14 years who wore a crimson cape and had long black hair always tied at the back.  She spent many journeys on the train being sent from one relative to the next, one family friend to a lost family friend, from one minister's family to the undertaker's family, from one family that needed their screaming children looked after to another family that was lonely because all their children had died …

Vasalissa Cremona didn't have parents.  And when they had died she had been only ten and living in a castle where all the cooks, chefs and banquet table servants and servers turned against her the same day.  Vasalissa had to fight them, using swords and shield from the knight in armour standing display next to a pillar in the middle of the banquet hall for a known six hundred years. 

Although the cooks, chefs and banquet table servants and servers threw squeezed orange halves at her – stinging her eyes as if to kill her eyes alive, and medium hot gravy came kabooing at her from all sides and directions and broccoli heads and floppy sausages hurtling through the air and rose hip tea and scalding hot black tea with sugar cubes and peppermints and milk lashing after, Vasalissa fought valiantly.  Until, the servants encroached their fighting army frontier up to where Vasalissa would no longer have a step to take back from them.  She was back up against the big tall glass windows drawn with yellow drapes on the side.  The sun was shining through like champagne sparkles through the inside of a crystal glass and there was plenty and plenty of sunshine and light shining through the castle windows because there were deep long black cliff drops, scraggly, all around.  The sun is attracted to black, so the sunshine was even more and brighter than it shines into a castle had the cliffs been green or brown and not black.  And there were no trees anywhere around, only sky.  If Vasalissa would fall through those windows, she definitely would not only lose her fight against her household servants turned against her, she would also plummet down into the unknown hundreds or thousands of lengths of any measurements created in the history of mankind; and she would after that also on top of that lose her life as she had known it as a girl with a crimson cape. And lose it without reversal.  Having just lost her parents, the thought of losing all this and everything caused her to no longer start losing her mind.  She was going to need her mind, particularly while defeat was drawing into her stomach as a sick feeling.  What was the one thing Vasalissa could do to stop her home household suddenly turned against her?   

  She dropped her swords, one from each hand.  Her armour did a circle wobble on the floor.  The servants halted their throwing a moment and before they would gain their aggression again, recovering from their surprise and perhaps their conscience, the big red thermometer in the banquet hall, on the opposite side of the room, burst.  It had reached 100 degrees Celsius, although the room had been calmly only at 22 degrees or 23 degrees Celsius. Vasalissa's face whitened with fearful relief.  It was just what her mother had once said to her would happen if Vasalissa was ever in danger inside their home and castle and nobody there to protect her:  The grand big thermometer would break, its deadly red-dyed mercury bursting out as waves of the sea.  All red.  It crashed throughout the hall onto the servants who hadn't seen it coming; they were swept away by the waves filling up the room while Vasalissa drew her arms and legs inside her cape, quickly, and her head inside, just as her mother had told her to do.  The mercury did not touch her, though the fume made her pass out.  Did you know mercury is one of the most poisonous substances and yet it is used on the inside of thermometers?  This is why mothers normally tell children not to break them and spill the mercury.

  Inside her cape Vasalissa began to float into a dream but it was what we call reality.  Her mother had told her also that this would happen, and she had said it would look like going through a birth canal again.  A tunnel with a reddish glow, moving at all sides like the beating of a heart all around; and on the other side Vasalissa would arrive at a safe place.

  “And you will have nothing to fear, my darling,” Vasalissa's mother said with her warm voice and all the generations of Russian colourful dances and witches in it, and fairytales and gypsies and forests and winter parties from palaces to palaces and big burning fire places flickering with its shadows across carpets.

  Vasalissa arrived finding herself in a very spring green, peaceful place, facing a tree that had such a friendly shape and personality.  Vasalissa always remembers that tree if it could have asked her “Which life would you like to choose?” personally, with a voice like a human’s.  It was the start of a new life, she could say, from then on.  If only she would have chosen to follow the path to the right that said, “Heidi's Grandfather”, she might have chosen wisely.  She was very sorry for not having chosen wisely.  There was a path that said: “Fairy Children's Valley”.  She didn't decide for that one, but thought she could come back to it later on after walking the path the furthest away on the right with the sign that read:  “Reality 1931:  Little Blossoms Orphanage Where Children Feel Lonely A Lot But Are Happy Because They Are Finally Together and Read A Lot of Stories.”  Vasalissa had always dreamed of an Orphanage because: although she had had parents in her castle, very loving ones and the most fascinating all the time, she hadn't had any playmates living close by that she saw often; and she had no siblings.  But an orphanage was full of children and they could all play together and most of all read stories together – when they didn't have to be in one part of the orphanage's strict routine or another.  That would have been all very nice if the sign to this path of life would have been only about the orphanage and being happy and reading a lot of stories; however, part of “Reality 1931” was very serious about being “reality”.  And particularly reality in 1931, or any year in the 1930's, meant “not getting what you want.”  Putting the two together, had Vasalissa been more informed and perhaps not romanticised the 1930's so much, she'd have quite a different sign altogether: “Reality 1931 Where You Don't Get What You Want Especially Not What You Wish For Most Which Is Little Blossoms Orphanage Where Children Feel Lonely A Lot But Are Happy Because They Are Finally Together and Read A Lot of Stories.” 

  On the way to the orphanage, supposedly in a city called London, in Covent Garden, Vasalissa took refuge from the wilderness at the second cottage she sighted, just at the foot of a mountain.  The sun was setting.  A middle-aged woman with hair cut in the time of the 1930's was busy in the raspberry bushes growing around the cottage.  Vasalissa had a safe night there and left in the morning, but something her host Mrs. Evans had mentioned worried her, a little – only for a little while as she walked.  It was something about orphanages only accepting you if you had no living relation to go to. 

  Vasalissa had never met or seen any of her relatives except in photos and one or two 8mm films her parents showed her at home.  The memory of this made the newly orphaned 10 year-old remember who she was as she had always known before everything was lost; before she had arrived at the tree of life and chosen a path that she believed would lead to a very nice life and yet nothing she had known from before was going to be the same again.

  Could she live without her mother for very long?  There couldn't possibly be a future existing at all without her mother there.  It wasn't possible.  Her mother's love and warm olive-skin face, sparkling like gold dust over Christmas with all the best the world has ever known in lives it nurtured and gave and places made up or in real life or somewhere in between.

  Her father … Could she have any place in the world without her father?  Could there ever exist a castle again, with its high domes to live in in safety and all luxury unquestioned? … Now she could be like the matchstick girl without so much as a suitcase or a hand bag, walking and paving a life of her own in the unknown.  There were moments when she woke up from a daydream as she walked and half-expected her father to appear from behind a fir tree, smiling and telling her it's time to go home.  And he was carrying a parcel later to be opened as a surprise for her pink-and-white- satin-embroidered, dome-ceilinged room. 

  Vasalissa first of all had to start the future with the present of relying on the mercy of strangers from now on and maybe relatives she hadn't heard any good descriptions about as adults – though of course they might have been kind-hearted sometimes as children.  The Cremona side were plenty more than the Romanovsky side but they were pretty boring and so many more Romanovskys made an impact on the orphan's life, coming-up, than the Cremona side. 

  Vasalissa's father had come from a family that split off into either living in a sect, starting one or being cold-blooded, corrupt and ravenous business men.  Vasalissa's mother had been a Romanovsky.  Those who hadn't been shot or killed some other way by the Bolshevik army in the Russian Revolution were living as hideaways in exile; many of them in mental health residencies and could not be guardians to an orphan – though their residencies were lavish and in prestigious places such as Lake Como and the Riviera.  And those who were suitable guardians had – let us say, suffered just as much as those in the mental health residencies. 

  The Bolshevik Revolution had not been easy on any of the bourgeois class, and the Romanovsky name being so close to the name “Romanov”, the name of the Tsar and his family who were executed after months of captivity in Siberia, it is no great wonder that the Romanovskys were treated nearly the same.  Losing their home country, their palaces and cosy fur-covered sleighs for the winter, witnessing their homes taken over and stripped by the communist looters who didn't seem to understand anything about art and finery which Romanovsky homes were supposedly filled with more than the Tsar's because of their lack of taste (and so they collected lots more), this would drive anyone more imbalanced in the head than before; even unstable on their feet at times; not to mention emotionally and materialistically insecure.  The Romanovskys that escaped of course became steeped in alcoholism, drugs more than they already were before: a new Mafia and secret money-making organizations to keep up their life style – including operating organs in and out of people without asking first.  No safe place for a child.

  If only Vasalissa could be with other children all just like herself, orphans, she would be safe and happy and might even have all she needed.

  Alas, at the Orphanage, called Little Blossoms, after Vasalissa waited nearly an hour to have her name called out and be next to see the director and nurse, her dreams were shattered and her future felt murdered.  It felt at the moment just as brutal and violent as if the future Vasalissa Cremona was stabbed and shot over a mud field; and the orphanage director and nurse disapproved even that the corpse could claim its place where it dropped.

  “There is no space for a new child at our orphanage.  Not one for someone who has plenty of relatives to go to,” said the director, a cynical and otherwise expressionless man in brown suit.  He held a print sheet with all the evidence.  Vasalissa wondered where he had gotten it from but dared not ask.  Anyway, it was being placed inside an envelope for her to take with her.

  “Here is a list of your ten nearest of kin.  It starts with your Aunt Vasilissa Romanovsky.  She lives in a town in France; I think it's close to the Swiss border.  Why don't you write to her and ask if you can visit her.  Alternatively, get on the soonest train you can make heading there.  I suggest the alternative: get on the soonest train you can make heading there.  Don’t write first because she might reject you.  Arrive at her doorstep and she is less likely to turn you away.”

  The orphanage secretary was present, with grey-silver hair and wearing the same grey suit, thin pink unsmiling lips.  She was very square.  The director was very rectangle.   The square secretary lady brightly said with a shrillness of impatience, “If you ever need to come back for more, you're in our archives.”

  So that is how Vasalissa Cremona began her journey of a new life which contained many journeys, always by train, then of course by automobiles just new on petrol or the wind-up ones, sitting usually in the back passenger’s seat – or horse-drawn carriages dating from black pre-Great War ones all the way back to a Cinderella fairy tale look-alike with pink plumes – The owner of this one was a bourgeois with a dark twist who in fact kidnapped children and sold them as luxury soap factory slaves.  Vasalissa didn't stay there very long, her uncle (by second degree) sold her to a luxury soap factory as well, but Vasalissa managed to escape that journey to go on another one instead, to Russia. 

  Vasalissa had already been to St. Petersburg before when she was ten and she went back when she was twelve to Great Aunt Miltitsa again.  At twelve Vasalissa had left because her great aunt sometimes locked her inside a big gold bird cage, in her lavish crazy Romanovsky style.   She could not see who Vasalissa was on the inside even when Vasalissa was outside the cage but like what so many grown-ups or grown-up-like children do, the painful cruelty is their not feeling for how you might be feeling and not seeing who you really are inside the golden cage they put you in.  The actual putting you inside one is not as painfully cruel.  They create and convince you of what you are to them and take measures such as a gold bird cage to regard you in.  And the scariest thing to Vasalissa Cremona was that her Great Aunt Miltitsa actually had rows of canary birds and colourful parrots with their beaks open and credulous eyes stuffed and mounted on the wall in the men's smoking and billiard room in her hidden former imperial residence.  She had married a Bolshevik commander in chief, by the way.

  Friends of Vasalissa’s parents also counted as relations.  There was Vasalissa's mother's friend from primary school when they had sat together at a desk, wearing white big ribbons on top of their heads and pinafores just as white.  But this friend died.  She had already been very ill a long time.  This was the last journey Vasalissa made away from any “relation” on her list.  It was one overcast but bright white-skied day, on the train from St. Petersburg on the track to Helsinki in Finland.

  Vasalissa was by then fourteen.  It had been her birthday a few days ago, just one day before her mother's friend Selma's all-black-dressed funeral.  Vasalissa still felt ashamed that it was her birthday while everyone around her was in tears and all the bouquets of flowers were strictly for the beloved deceased who had been such a sensitive-feeling person loving flowers though very likely not so much as to contain the amount the house now not contained.  In fact, Vasalissa was certain it was far more than Selma liked to have in her house while she was alive.  Every time someone came in with a bouquet, Vasalissa’s eyes rounded and her heart opened, this one maybe being a bouquet to celebrate her birthday, but it wasn’t.  She was only given disapproving looks. 

  But her mother's friend Selma had been such a sensitive soul indeed – even though she could give disapproving looks.  Besides Vasalissa's birthday and start of age fourteen being so glum and unwanted, the loss of Selma was something much more unwanted.  Vasalissa was alone again, without a parent and this time quite unsure of what to expect.  Where was she going to live under parental care?  She didn't know where she was going.  An orphanage would be no place for her after everything she had been through that made her more grown-up than any child could possibly be, so she was convinced.  Her mother's friend Selma had been the last name on the list on the last page that The Little Blossoms Orphanage in Covent Garden had held in their archives.  There were no more relatives or friends of her parents that Vasalissa could go to.  She had been to them all; and all of them had proved unendurable or their homes were unendurable or their children.  Or, as in the case of the Von Flintenstein family, their chimney sweep Vasalissa just could not stand after he had set Vasalissa once on fire for witnessing him killing the fourth family dog in two weeks by dashing a red powder kind of poison on to a bone that hadn't looked too healthy to feed a dog in the first place.  Then there was the butler of Uncle Frank who proved to be deathly jealous of Vasalissa and no wonder Vasalissa couldn’t endure it there at Elm Heights.  Vasalissa did not report Uncle Frank’s butler to the police but escaped out her bedroom window – she had no choice anyway, having discovered by peering through the keyhole that the butler was waiting outside for her to call her usual morning breakfast room service and this time he held a knife behind his back he had wrapped in a napkin which was usually to wrap a hot bottle of milk.  For five days Vasalissa had not been eating breakfast since she had seen the butler pour something suspicious into her porridge and in the custard – she had watched through the keyhole.  The strange maids in a couple of homes who tried to frame Vasalissa were not worth mentioning, in comparison, but it still caused Vasalissa to be on a Wanted list by the police in the country of Lichtenstein, Luxemburg and Moldova. 

  But to be homeless and not to have any home to be travelling to made every home Vasalissa had run away from not quite so bad. 

  Arriving at a door step in the helpless state of having lost both parents and her home, telling each relation or family friend that they were on a legal list printed out by a state orphanage had always been a destination Vasalissa relied on when she was on a journey, sitting on a train.  Now there was no destination she could rely on, no host or foster mother or father.  No one’s home she could rely on.

  She gazed out the window, seeing her reflection.  It was very white, her reflection, the outlines of her face faint.  Vasalissa was worried she might disappear one day, at this rate.  The Cremona orphan had had the skin mixed between olive skin and peaches and cream before and with the years having lost her mother and father and home and importance and worth to somebody, her face had become paler and paler, the outlines of her face fainter and fainter.  It is usually more painful to have and then lose than to never have had.

  Vasalissa had a soft, gentle nature that seemed like faint pencil strokes.  This gentleness, somewhat ethereal, she had inherited from her father, along some more of his disposition.  It might be considered something of unusual beauty and welcoming but the ethereal gentleness made people easily accuse her of trying to annoy them – on purpose.  Vasalissa had been locked up several times for the very reason.  Once it was by a barbarous lover of a minister's sister while Vasalissa was in Scotland.  He threw her into a wine cellar normally in use only for his children when he had enough of their fearful sobbing of him.  His name was Craig but the name did not suit him at all, maybe more a name like Ruffian or Ruff Joe.  And he wasn't really someone who tried to murder anybody, when the three Goblet sister in Somerset, England, wearing long lace dresses so unlike 1930's, trapped Vasalissa in a large pen with a very large, rage-provoked, bull-dog-and-monster mutt inside… whom the cruel Goblet sisters had trained to snap at Vasalissa and terrify her while she was living there.  The Goblet sisters' father had been a minister as well, before he retired, and he had set up two orphanages in Africa but he couldn't tell what was going on with his own orphan guest who sought shelter and a temporary home with him.  It was only one orphan, the quaint and quiet but well-mannered Vasalissa Cremona with the crimson cape.  When the minister’s daughters had set their vicious dog on Vasalissa, she had escaped by singing a song that her mother and father had sung to her which they said has the same effect on animals as when they are stroked.  The very wicked sisters watched in such maddening envy of Vasalissa's growing calmness, her pure, unusual voice.  There was a power she had just in her calm composure they believed competing with theirs, deliberately, which wasn’t very calm.  Their own power was by keeping nasty control over people and they had to stay very active in order to keep this going.  They had murdered several orphans before who had come to stay at their father's manse, and this was while he had been a minister overlooking two orphanages in Africa.

  Vasalissa reflected on these occasions, one to the next and she thought of some others which were not toward her health to think about.  She already had a runny nose and a cold from all the crying after the funeral.

  The train was passing through yellow fields, yellow so bright that Vasalissa remembered the low hills full of buttercups in spring and full of marigolds in fall where her mother took her on walks sometimes.

  Once they'd get to where there were only yellow hills and nothing else, there were occasions beginning with Vasalissa’s mother saying, “My mother was a gypsy.  Let me tell you what kind of funny things she used to do that the storytellers at our caravan would tell around the fire.” 

  Vasalissa would imagine a darker skinned woman with a long nose and some grey streaks in her long wavy – if not frizzy – black hair, eyes gleaming green or maybe a bluish lake green.  This was her grandmother.  There were white polka-dots, small ones, across her blouse and she wore a gypsy scarf with violet swirls and red tassels with green beads on it. Her voice was a little hoarse because of the many shouts over the horses pulling wagons of the caravan across to the boys who were driving them at the front.  And maybe a joke or two shouted across to the other women walking next to their wagon home. 

  Once, Vasalissa’s mother was in one of her gloomy moods, which was not very often; and she said to her little Cremona daughter in the crimson cape, “If only you had met your grandmother, my dear daughter.  Then you would experience a joy to life that even I cannot teach you.  I cannot teach you joy as she can.  This is because the other half of me is my father and he killed himself because he was such a sorrowful man.”  The musky mother had a whimsical smile to this.  “And I've always thought, 'Little wonder, in the crazy family that he grew up in'.  I'm surprised he lived to become a man and a father at all.”  The musky, whimsical mother sparkled.  “While he was alive and married to my mother, he had to live with her in his family’s house.  He could not break his ties with his family.  The Romanovskys are tiring people to be related to.  So rich and minds as narrow as the inside of a telescope.  I'm lucky to have grown up mostly apart from them, with gypsies, in the open countryside, until I was twelve and a half.”

  And she told Vasalissa often about the yellow fields in Russia and the Ukraine.  The rivulets flowing through them, how laughter travelled best over water and the gypsy children had played telephone across it quite a distance.  Funny rhymes – anything just to make each other laugh, such as, “Smelly Socks, it's time to eat!  Smelly Socks, come eat my feet!  Chee-eese grows after one week!  Mu-ushrooms in one more week!”

  Or, “Frogs can tell the future, without a crystal ball!  Through a froggy’s throat when it puffs like a ball!  No more work for fortune tellers.  Frogs can be good sellers.  You just have to learn what croaks means!  Same as learning what hoax means!”

  Sophisticated question-and-answer telephone messages for older children, such as, “How far does a gypsy caravan travel to?  Just as far as they can get in a day.  They change direction the very next day, that is the gypsy way.”

  Non-rhyming telephone messages often involved her mother’s people making fun of themselves. Vasalissa could never understand this sense of humour.  “What animals would a gypsy caravan breed if they were ever to stay put in one place long enough to post up fences?  Answer: horses, to pull their caravan carts, and they'd have to be imaginary horses because the gypsy caravans never stop to build fences!”

  “Why do gypsies not fight back when they are persecuted and killed?  Because there are so many everywhere, they can't possibly die out.”

  The rivulets Vasalissa's mother grew up with, together with her big gypsy family, were really easy for telephone messages to travel over.  Rivulets are a fun way to make a word out of rivers when rivers become a means of great fun such as for telephone messages and a growing keenness of mind just wondering about them.  What would it be like to listen to somebody's voice simply from the stream of water bending your way?  And you wouldn't see who was speaking but you could understand every word; and the tone of voice must sound just like water rushing over stones dipping and rippling and babbling.  On some syllables crystal clear and perhaps getting a bit murky in other places where the water slowed down and looked murky.

  “Baba Mama, take me to where you grew up and played with the gypsies,” Vasalissa said sometimes.  “All the stories and the sound of the violin and the jangles on the belly dancers' feet…  There where you were far away and safe from the Romanovskys and it didn't matter that your father was so sorrowful.”

  Baba Mama could always only be happy with those sparkles gold so warm out of the darkness; shining eyes still at the gypsy firelight, her scent still musky with the vanilla and extravagant perfumes from parties in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg when she was a young woman and a high aristocrat – on her father’s side, not her mother’s, of course.  From the age of twelve and a half she began attending fancy parties like the youths did and already looked like fifteen, tall with long black hair.  At eighteen it was the year 1900.  It had been times of no worries for the aristocrats before the Bolshevik revolution.  There had been no worry, no danger except maybe tripping on your very long skirt as you stepped up into the sleigh because the polite but drunk gentleman lending you a hand was a bit drunk.  There had been no worry except that your mother might find out later when you got home that at a party there had been a game of girls picking off goose feathers glued to boys’ bare chests or that the fashion at the time had been for ladies to wear a low neckline and Mother disapproved. 

  When Baba Mama felt a bit sad about something, the little girl Vasalissa could perceive there was something waiting to happen; and it was only a matter of time.  It was her death and that of Vasalissa’s father the same day, leaving their daughter an orphan.  Of course, Vasalissa’s mother had never exactly known the tragedy was going to happen, she had only felt something odd and never exactly understood it and she was too impressed by the sparkles of life to stay in that odd feeling for long.

  “I am sure the gypsies will one day call you.  It is your inheritance.  Gypsy blood draws itself.”  Then she said something Vasalissa only remembered much later on.  “Your life is your own, Vasalissa.  Your Mama has had her own and they cannot be the same.”

  Vasalissa Cremona later in her four years of being an orphan had wished for only two things which to her had seemed the easiest to come true but they simply didn't.  The first had been to meet and become friends and even best of friends with other orphans.  That is where she could belong.  And yet she had not met a single other orphan.  Not one.  Only on paintings and in books could she see pictures of an orphan.  She could read about orphans who had just died or who were from a time just before she had been born.  The likelihood in 1931, or 1932, 33, 34 to meet a fellow orphan was actually very high.  There were still diseases about like cholera that parents died of, scarlet fever; there were no immunisations.  Because of the Great Depression and men losing their business and all their money in the bank and even their house too, several fathers committed suicide during this time.  As a result for some, mothers could die in child birth for the obviously very last child after, leaving one to seven or twelve children to become orphans if their father was dead too or died of a heart-attack soon after out of grief, or he abandoned them or drank himself to death.  So there were lots of orphans at this time in Europe.  But Vasalissa simply had the opposite of good luck for meeting just one fellow orphan. 

  Second of the two things she wanted and wished for most was to meet just one gypsy who would recognize her as part of the gypsy race.  But this never happened.

  There were beggars, old men and women with many lines on their tanned faces on the streets; heads wrapped with frayed cloths.  But they looked back at Vasalissa seeing something about her that Vasalissa could not quite distinguish.  It was as if they knew all about how Vasalissa used to blow bubbles into wine in secret if her parents left the dinner table for a moment and the wine glasses had looked so inviting for bubbles.  The gypsy beggars looked back at Vasalissa with the kind of disapproval someone might have about toddlers playing with food and turning it into something disgusting.  The value of food sharing is what family is all about and selfish food playing is an offence.  Not valuing food the way it should be shared is the same as not valuing your family.  That’s how the beggars looked at Vasalissa. 

  These old men and women of the ancient gypsy race were no better or worse at making children feel horrible.  They were just the same as any of the grown-ups in the 1930’s toward children.  Vasalissa just longed to be recognized by family roots.  It was a painful thing to have eyes look right through the hole in her heart.  It felt like a screwdriver into that hole in her soul, no recognition and adopting a long lost child of their race happening.

  Vasalissa very often had a hole in her heart.  It made her eyes look a bit hollow, it made her look hungry and weak and unchildlike.  Some people saw only this and didn't see how Vasalissa really was when she was confident and happy and when she had been the apple of her parents’ eye.  This made it something indefinably painful which some people might call the feeling when you are so disappointed at a shoe store because the shoe that you wanted to spend all your savings on because it’s so great actually isn't a pair and there are no more pairs of it in your size in stock.  You'll have to keep wearing your very old, odd, ugly ones that make the cobblestone street the better thing to look at. 

Chapter 2:  Katrina Crystalska

When the train stopped at a station where there were only two or three other buildings, all grey, beside the station, somebody got on who would start the beginning of something brighter than anything so far Vasalissa encountered in her life in reality.  So far, reality was somewhere where it was so dark that hardly a wish came to fulfilment.  But now a little girl came into it with wonder-filled big eyes and long eye-lashes; with gold and tawny ringlets like a halo; someone fair and sweet and pure who remained this way even with the dark and grimness of this world.  Her brightness filled up Vasalissa with the return of all she was used to before her parents had died: Vasalissa’s home in the sun-lit castle high up. 

  The children Vasalissa had come across and lived with had been sometimes very kind or keeping the custom of being kind to the disadvantaged, yet had all been indifferent to who Vasalissa really was inside.  They only seemed to see the surface and that she was an orphan and all that.  Of course there were the cruel and treacherous that Vasalissa had learned little by little to watch out for.  But the indifference or blindness to who Vasalissa really was underneath being an orphan and a newcomer had cast a shadowy net over the young girl's heart.  Now at the end of her travels when she had no more families to go to, finally could she start meeting new kinds of people she could feel were her equal.  

  A little girl sweet and pure with gold and brown ringlets, though a few years younger than her, knew who Vasalissa was and knew they were the same...

  “Is this cabin free?”  It was a voice that assured her life was truly wonderful again. 

  “Yes,” Vasalissa replied.

  “Oh I'm glad.”  This little girl had much to say.  She sat down, her hat more of a bonnet and filled with real flowers.  Her eyes were crystal clear.  “I'm so glad I came to you.  I saw you through the window as the train came in and I saw your red cape.  I know I'll be safe with you.”  There was no fear in her countenance, rather she was moved so much and in awe to meet Vasalissa, but she then bent forward and imparted in a low voice, “I've just escaped the phoney gypsy man.”

  Vasalissa responded alertly.  “The phoney gypsy man?”

  “The phoney gypsy man.  He hung me up on a tree just because the strings of his violin came off while he was playing.  He's phoney.”

  Vasalissa's eyes were round as a Russian village girl's finding out that the bread she had baked for the village's holy ceremony had burnt a crisp in the oven.  Had she just not been languishing in reflection over why she hadn't been recognized and taken in by her Grandmother’s people, the gypsies – and where had they been?

  The broad-faced, pretty and curly and flowery country girl with the wonder-filled eyes continued, more with pertness than wonder.  “The phoney gypsy man's violin isn't a Stradivari.  His violin isn't a Stradivari like he says.  And yet he's a famous busker – I've seen him in different towns and cities I've been to.  And I was hung up on a tree that had no leaves … perhaps it was dead.  I only fell down because the ropes broke – the ropes that tied me began to burn.  The tree broke off at the top and I fell down.  The phoney gypsy man set it on fire by accident when he tried to kill the two ravens that tried to break off the ropes that bound me with their beaks.  He shot burning arrows at them.  He sure smoked a lot.  Cigarettes.  My clothes and my hair smelled so bad with it – and with the smell of fire from the burning tree of course.  He ran away and if it wasn't for some farmer people that found me and nursed me back, I probably wouldn't have walked again.  The tree had been quite tall.  It was a bad fall.”

  Vasalissa, having listened to depth of meaning, began nodding.  Nodding and nodding.  This episode was sounding so very familiar.  It was like when her false cousin had coaxed her into climbing a tree and then, since it was The Impossible Tree to Climb Down, went away and left Vasalissa crying and crying until the kitchen boy found her and quickly brought a ladder.

  The other girl sat back.  The train began to move.  Vasalissa was glad that the phoney gypsy man’s chance was up for making it on board.

  “Where did you come from before you met the phoney gypsy man?”

  The little girl's big, full blue eyes contained wealth of experience in impressions and emotion.  They went deep like they contained 100 years and centuries going down before that and into the present like you and me.  “I was a slave scrubbing floors and cleaning walls and windows and furniture… anything I'm asked to do, and – or – am supposed to know I should do.”

  Vasalissa Cremona was surprised at something like this, for this child glowed like a country summer lea full of rolling hills and flowers with the breeze of carefreeness across.  She couldn't possibly be a slave.  Or could she?

  “Why? . . . Are you a slave?”

  A white cloud passed over her awareness.

  “My name is Katrina Crystalska.  My father was Polish and my mother Irish and I've lived everywhere in the world since I was three.  I'm an orphan and I've been adopted by three sisters living on a hill, in Estonia . . . I'm allowed to travel all over the world but it is only because I am sent on errands.  The sisters wish to kill me.  They give me an errand to do which involves bargaining with . . . strange people like the phoney gypsy man, that I'm supposed to meet and then I have to send back by post something I'm not allowed to see or know about, wrapped in parcel paper and string back to the three sisters.  And the persons I had to bargain with all know the three sisters hate me . . . because I'm a child and an orphan and nobody will stand in between me and them because they're my guardians and are responsible for me.  Nobody will put anything in the newspaper about my death or hire detectives to investigate my death if I die.  They can let out on me all their hatred of the weak and homeless and unprotected because my guardians are very glad it’s not them that’s homeless and unprotected.  I wonder if this might be the only thing they like me for.”

  Vasalissa shook her head in disbelief at what an orphan has to endure in order to stay alive,  That staying alive should cost so much, that grownups and mean older children make it cost this much?

  “Why don't you escape those three sisters?”

  “They are called the Gronwen sisters.  In the language of those with the long teeth, Gronwen is a word that means 'all-the-things-that-must-be-and-should-be-and-have-to-be.'”

  “Why do you keep going back there?”

  This was something Katrina Crystalska could not answer, though for all she was pretty and blithe and carefree and confident; she was not so at all when she was at the house on a hill with the Gronwen sisters.  And yet, then she realized now, being asked why she kept going back, that she just had never been asked this before and had never asked herself this before.  There was a reason.  “They know where my grandfather is.”

  “You have a grandfather?”  Vasalissa was credulous.  What a wonderful, un-thought of thing, that there could be a grandfather somewhere and all the time you've been an orphan you just needed to get to your grandfather.

  “Yes,” Katrina said.  “I saw him a few times before my parents died.  He is quite old with a grey beard and ruby cheeks.  But the Gronwen sisters have been telling me he's lost his colour and is trapped somewhere in a country they won't say where.  He's tied between two big rocks and there's a dead tree, black and dead, where the vultures come and perch but he is not dead.  Not yet.”  Katrina's concern was still how other people are when they are in their carefree moments in the late spring.  “The Gronwen sisters have assigned somebody – I don't know who, to keep him there because he's old and lacks aggression.”

  “What's the matter with lacking aggression?”  Vasalissa interjected.

  “Nothing, but the Gronwen sisters hate this about anybody.  They hate this about little children too. Anybody who can't fight back or know how to keep away and defend themselves.  They despise you but they want to keep you.  I guess that comforts me a little.  It's nice to have someone want to keep you.  My parents wanted to keep me but then they died and let go of me.  I want to be kept.”

  Vasalissa thought a little and decided to let something speak out of her heart.  “But Katrina, it's terrible what those people want to keep you for!  They don't have the same intentions for what they want to keep you.  Your parents wanted to keep you because they wanted to nurture you and give you all they could for you to grow in ways you couldn't if they wouldn't be keeping you.”

  Katrina seemed to not understand this.  She sighed and continued her same route, unbroken.  “I always have to go back to them.  If not, they'll have my grandfather killed.  Just with one telegram – to where he's held hostage.”

  “Oh dear!”

  “Don't worry.  I've lived with knowing this since I was three.”

  With this finishing of Katrina's sentence there was a dip in the air and then a sudden crash.  The train jolted.  There was the sound like a horse's neigh outside…  Then another.  The third one was distinctive, a horse's neigh; then voices.  Many men, shouting, not happy or sad, rather angry and threateningly violent.

  The train rocked and shook with what must have been a stampede of buffaloes onto the train, from all sides… maybe a cavalry on horseback.  But when Vasalissa and the Little Bo Peep Katrina finally got to see something arrive in view it was through the open door of their cabin in the isle of the train right beside them!  It was a horse indeed and a man sitting on it, just what it had sounded like – only in the portion of one out of what sounded a hundred.  The horse seeming more threatening than the man sitting on it, since the horse was massive in its glossy velvety coat; powerful legs with thundering hooves, snorting   louder than any man could since a man can't have such big nostrils no matter how severely drawn the face with a look dismissing you of doing anything acceptable in your life.  A man couldn't crush your feet under his bare foot like a horse with its bare hoof.  A horse gives the impression of being more threatening than a man when it is groomed to look like a horse official authority, however Vasalissa was wise enough to remind herself it was the man to be afraid of, not the horse.  Of course man contained a woman inside and a child and maybe a horse as well, behaviour-wise. 

  Behind were two more horses and also Russian Soviet officers in black.  Vasalissa could see only their heads, yanking at their reigns.  It was a miracle the horses didn't stomp their hooves right through the train floor.  Vasalissa was a little worried with the hope that this would disrupt what she and her little friend Katrina Crystalska were in for, but it wasn't happening.

  The horses had to bend their heads and it looked terribly cramped for them; this is what the officers seemed to want, the way they pulled their reigns.  The horses’ eyes were turning red.

  “Where are your parents?  I want to speak to them.”

  Vasalissa looked at Katrina in firm alliance.  She asserted her speech faculties to answer with as much of the art of deception as possible.  She had learned quite a lot of it from foster parents and foster siblings.  “Our parents are waiting for us at Helsinki central station.”

  The Soviets laughed.  It was really more out of relief that there were no parents to worry about. 

  Katrina, in her belief that these men were actually really good deep inside, chuckled in relief along with their deceptive laughter.  She smiled at Vasalissa for having made a deception successfully.  Katrina was about to acknowledge it being a good joke that the Helsinki central station “out of this world” because it was outside of Russia and Russia was the biggest country in the world.  Parents were waiting “out of this world”.

  The uniformed men were definitely Soviets because this was the 1930's and the Soviets were in power.  And these men here wore their suits.  One of them dismounted; he was stern as death and Vasalissa and Katrina could barely breathe, he seemed to make you believe you needed metal braces to hold in your chest.

  “We're on a hunt for the twin villains that are on the run,” snarled this man with a pop of his eyes to evoke the severity even better.  Vasalissa and Katrina huddled closer together, scared again.  There was something about the snarl, derision that they did not like.  The man was cruel and cruel towards something that was the essence of the children's being.

  “The twin villains . . .”  Silence.  The man of the authorities had that glad gleam in his eye that Katrina had been talking about that gladness the Gronwen sisters have because they are not in the disadvantaged position but you are.  “If you will not speak out and say that you saw them, we will have to arrest you.  We will bring you to our torture and interrogation quarters.”  The Soviet officer – or General perhaps – had a jaw like a steel machine for pressing down lids on marmalade jars in a marmalade factory – or rather, a steel machine for pressing instant dried flowers for the grannies' dried pressed flower collections.

  Vasalissa and Katrina looked at each other in search of an answer for how to reply and answer.  From their many experiences that were right upfront similar to each other’s and to the present circumstance, their minds were quickly sharpened like French sword blades – the thin long bendy ones for musketeers.  Although, the mind is useless without your gut feeling. Vasalissa, assuming the role as eldest and wearing the crimson red cape, answered,   “Sir, there have been many twins that have been walking by us this rapidly passing afternoon.  Which ones are you speaking of?  And what makes one pair of twins villains, please?  And the other not?”

  The Soviet officer made a grunt sound the way you do when your cold is getting better and it's difficult to swallow the phlegm out of your nose.  The navy blue of his collar shone out, though it had first appeared his uniform was all black.  It appealed to Vasalissa in the face of the situation in which the future was so forcefully unpredictable.  Navy blue is like the night sky at times.  At least with the night sky, you know it is night and that there will be dusk and there will be daylight.  The navy blue of the uniform was mesmerizing.  The Soviet's jaw was set and his face was so tanned that he didn't look very Russian.  He believed everybody is supposed to behave according to Soviet Russia and there were evidently a pair of twins who weren't… but what about going out in the sun to get a tan like that?

  Next, the officer was going to start giving descriptions of those twins.  It must be warned though that people who can't make sense of the world any other way than being angry at little things and little people and making it their life vocation snapping at the innocent and impressionable, are not capable of (verbally) making a trustworthy description of anybody.

  “They need to be caught, tortured, punished.  Give them to me.  They are ripe for sauce.”

  Vasalissa merely got a visual description of apple sauce.

  “What do they look like?”

  The horses were standing quite still and probably mildly tranquillised in the train walkway.

  “They are rascals.”

  Vasalissa was impatient for a proper description.

  “What do they look like?” she tried again.

  “Like they need a big violent spanking.”

  Vasalissa sighed.  “What about their hair?  What colour of hair and what cut?”

  “Shave them.  They need to have it all shaved off, the rascal lions.”

  “Are they tall, short?  Thin, wide?”

  “They shall never be tall enough to be Russian soldiers.  They are thin because they move and run and wriggle.  They are fat because they eat up all the food in every farmhouse they have attacked and raided.  The mother country is very cross.”

  Vasalissa's question in her gut probed one more question.  “How old are they?  If they are twins, they are the same age.” 

  The Soviet seemed to be puzzled about this.

  The Cremona tried to make it easier for them.  “How old is one of them?” she asked.

  The tanned and navy blue modern sentry man's breathing gave away how flustered he became.

  “Tanning their hides will get the better of them.  I was nearly at the position of administering such a task.  But they ran away.  They got out of my hands.  They are always running and running.  Their mother must have fed them from her breast in her stupidity until they were four.  They have not learned that they should have grown up once they could finally start to walk and talk, like all children.  All children behave themselves like real adults once they can walk and talk.  Where are they. Give them to me now.”

  Vasalissa Cremona, much affronted but calm and tolerant, needed to skip ahead in imagination at how to handle what's next.  In just a few split seconds, she almost had it fixed together and the last ingredient was spontaneity which would unfold, which is the conducting ingredient of saying something that isn’t true; the crimson-caped, solemn girl was drawing her breath to start her speech when Katrina Crystalska had to interrupt.

  The little Bo-Peep spoke up; her voice was like a meadow.  “We haven't seen them.”  The innocent meadow was going to be the two orphans' doom.  Katrina had seemingly forgotten that this is exactly the thing the officers wanted to hear in order to arrest them into the torture headquarters, perhaps ripe for sauce just like the twins on the loose.

  Thunder.  No, more like rain – over your favourite chalk drawing.  “What did you say?”

  Katrina suddenly remembered… and buried her head in Vasalissa cape and sobbed, but it was no use.

  There were no officers in the time of the 1930's all around the world that could get as angry and hateful as the Soviet ones.  If you didn't nod and obey their will, you were luckiest if they shot you dead on the spot or stabbed with their bayonets which might be horrific but at least then you didn't have to suffer long term to death like their food deprivation temper tantrums.  They confiscated your last cow, last goat, last wheat kernel of your cold winter supply until you had nothing to put in your mouth but cooked crow.  And even then they jumped up and down and threw themselves on the floor because there were still rats, after the crows, and then you'd be dead.  “Unruly children!” they'd say, stomping their feet.

  Stomping feet, that is just what government officers are good at.

  “Torture headquarters!” yelled the boss of them.  The others had to press their lips together shut, for some reason as they stomped – only one of them, the boss, was stomping his feet, the rest were stomping hooves because the horses were getting restless.  The same lips exploded in contortions however which were more terrifying than the words that the contortions served:  “Torture headquarters!  Take them to torture headquarters!”

  Vasalissa and Katrina had lost the cause of survival by means or deceiving.  But they didn't give up.

  “Wait!” the girl in the crimson red demanded.  The confidence in her demeanour was noticed.  She stood up, black hair long, tied very straight down her back.  She was standing between the officers and Katrina.  Somehow, the officer became appalled at the strange blood red of Vasalissa's crimson cape, and he leaned back, eyes cross-eyed – for a moment.

  Vasalissa repeated.  “Wait, wait!  My sister here, she's only a child who doesn't know any better.  She speaks what she doesn't know of.  She has seen the villains you are looking for.  She just doesn't know what twin villains are.  She's only seen two handsome, fair, shining boys her age . . . she doesn't know that under this disguise are thieves, murderers, breakers of the law, runaways, and scum and dirt boys.  I have seen them.  And I burn with hate ever since.”

  The Soviet official’s eyes shone with a restored light as if they had been hearing very good, kind things about themselves.

  Vasalissa triumphed, brave and was nearly getting an oncoming fear of heights at how taller she was becoming than them. 

  In the tone of some antagonistic character with a hood shading his eyes – but wasn’t Robin Hood, Vasalissa said, “As long as I live, I swear to join your hunt and set the dogs on these cruel, vicious twins.” 

  Vasalissa was thinking and feeling fast, deep into the darkest densest fir thickets of the forgotten forest, deep under.  She remembered the stories and her mother.  There was one particular story about a handkerchief.  Taking action, pulling out from inside her cape came a handkerchief Vasalissa had been keeping since she was four.  It was white as cut up bone but there was some sticky yellow stuff on it but that didn't matter.  She thrust it onto to the Soviet in chief arm in persuasion.  “Take this.  The twin boys cleaned their dirty swinish noses in my handkerchief they stole while I was waving it to my crying grandma on the platform as the train pulled away.  The rascals.  Give this to your dogs and they will find where those boys are.”

  The Soviet chief looked credulous and interested, looking through the surface area of the yellow streaked handkerchief.  Then he became grown up again.  He swiped it in one motion into a pocket in his jacket.  Then he said just what Vasalissa had been praying for him to say, though he wasn't very nice about it.

  “You are coming with me, to follow where the dogs go.  You might be a freaking liar.”  Then he pointed at Katrina Crystalska who started weeping instead of sobbing, before he spoke.  She was so scared.  “That,” (he meant Katrina) “is going to be put in the trunk of the car.  Tied with ropes.  And she's coming to the torture headquarters whether or not the filthy twin villains are found.”

  Vasalissa embraced to protect the little girl and her curly summer meadow head.  There was worry, naturally, come to Vasalissa's mind and heart but she remembered her mother's warmth and promise of where that handkerchief was going to lead.  She had saved this last one in her pocket inside the crimson cape and her mother had said to use it (for besides wiping your nose on it) in the extreme urgent circumstance.  They had to be handed to a dog or dogs that had the sense of smell to follow where the white handkerchief would lead to, just like in the story of the Infanta Who Was Chased to Be Burned Because She Was a Doll Made of Wood . . .  Like the Infanta, the darkest deepest depth of the living forest was the only place where no one could pass through except those the handkerchief wished for to be drawn in to by the darkest deepest depth of the living forest.  All other handkerchiefs in the world simply would never be able to enter it.  And of course, nobody and nothing.   The boundaries of the darkest deepest depth of the living forest consisted of tall fir trees with straight straight spines; these tall fir trees were straight enough to open the way for those the handkerchief chose.  Those the opposite of chosen would walk on and on, lost and walking into places far far away and then back to civilisation where they belonged.

  It was bright day.  The fresh air and wide open fields were a relief for Vasalissa as she walked bearing in mind to keep in line with the government soldiers walking in front and behind her – and diagonally to the left and the right.  But there was a big gap right next to her left.  And beside her on her right huddled close, weeping young Katrina Crystalska.  Nobody next to that, so a big gap to enjoy the Russian countryside.  Some sparrows circled just where the yellow field began.  Vasalissa felt better at ease because of this, though her nerves were a jangle.  Her father had taught her the meaning of seeing two sparrows circling like this.  It was a sign of freedom, loyalty and love.  She wanted to exclaim and say this to Katrina but empathized with the girl’s attention being just a short distance heading toward a 1930's automobile where Katrina would be packed into its trunk.  Fathers were very good for telling you meanings of signs from nature, such as the circling sparrows promising freedom, loyalty and love.  But the use of a father being around for Katrina in a moment where she was about to be packed up by ropes into the trunk of a car would definitely be for feeling less scared.

  Vasalissa was wondering if it would be a safe thing to take over for the absence of a protective father and make a step to stand in between the Soviet officers and Katrina before they pack her in the car.  Just before her conclusion to stand for what was right, here was a sound up ahead of a car engine being started and dying abruptly, which meant great hope for a relief from the situation.  Starting; then dying abruptly.  Vasalissa overheard, in the gruff tones as if fighting with each other,

  “Put her in the army ambulance.”

  “But it doesn't have a trunk.”

  “Then, the artillery and arms lorry.”

  “That hasn't a trunk either.”

  “Darn it, where shall we put her?  By head quarters' policies, interrogable under-aged must be transported in the trunk of a car, otherwise they will escape.  To be travelling at that age in Russia, she can't possibly have any parents.  No parents would let their child travel alone like that.  No one will care if the ropes leave marks or if she gets strangled by accident.”

  “Bind her.  We'll put her on a horse by belly flop.  At least she won't wriggle as much as inside an ambulance or on a pile of artillery and machine guns.”

  “OK.”

  And that's what happened.

  At least this wasn't so scary as having Katrina shut up in the trunk of a car.  And the two children got to ride beside each other.  The dogs up ahead sometimes got so far ahead on their nose trail that the horses had to gallop wildly and Katrina Crystalska fainted and remained in a sleep for most of the way.  Vasalissa burst into tears.  Getting quite angry, she demanded the officer in charge to stop the expedition.  But the officer seldom turned his head to listen.  No wonder: the sniffing dogs were leading the army of around thirty men on black horseback so swiftly through the deep dips between hills, over stone and sandy ravines and end of rock fields on to a big ravine that he needed to look where he was going.  Riding on horseback is no joke, you can fall off.

  There were some rolling clouds to the right in the sky over the horizon that was going to be the last bit horizon Vasalissa would see of the yellow fields.  After this, the horizon was wilderness, stones.  The clouds over this last bit of yellow caught her attention, and this was because a bit grey at the bottom drifted apart and a face looked out of it at Vasalissa.  She gasped.  It wasn't her imagination.  It was an old witch's face: pointy nose, a very nosy kind.  All lines and creases observed what was happening.  If there can be wrinkles that watch and look at you, piercing you through, these were…  These weren't the eyes, of course; the actual eyes almost small slits, were that small and greyish green you had to strain your eyes to see them. 

  Vasalissa was impressed by the clouds' over the grey puffy hair was growing greyer and it was a storm kind of grey.  But then they drifted far apart to form a round frame, the sky thinly blue.  The witch was gone.  Someone else was looking at Vasalissa, someone soft and gentle; a guardian's face looking out for her, wearing a light blue head dress; blond hair out the sides, very pretty.

  The way it made Vasalissa feel was this:  “You are going the right way.”  This was very useful to compare with the possibility that she was heading the wrong way.  The look of the wilderness offered only for a child's heart to trust in fairy tales for the handkerchief to lead the way through – and Vasalissa, at fourteen, did not have pure childlike faith anymore.  The old woman witch had been all too harrowing-narrowing, to give Vasalissa the shudders or even the screams but somehow there was some valuable lesson to be learned up ahead.

  The clouds twined into green leaves and there was a picture of a house. 

  Vasalissa was amazed at this later on.  She had never been a visionary before.  She wondered if it was because of the handkerchief out of a story and all these storybook characters started appearing.  Maybe life became magical once you didn't have to be the only orphan in the world.  There was somebody else who had been an orphan too.

  In the picture the clouds were creating in the sky, Vasalissa could feel the refuge of a house, somebody’s home, in a clearing in a forest.  It was a Russian wood house, of course.    There was a young woman wearing an apron, in pale blues and greys and sort of bonnet-long-cloth headdress with a kind and youthful step and lilt.  She was sweeping the pathway to the side of the house where the hairiness of the leaves almost gave a nudge on Vasalissa's fingers when she looked at them.  Vasalissa looked at her fingers, alarmed – at least they weren't stinging nettles.  The thriving green of those bushes were nourishing for her heart that was beating like a small sparrow's heart.   It was good to be nourished by the calm of blue and indigo and their different hues blooming around the house; there were Monkshoods and some bell and star shapes growing.  If the house had a heartbeat, it was these. 

  Vasalissa found herself lost in these surroundings instead of her actual one with the Soviet officers and the unknown wilderness where she might be murdered in, in the very near future.  The warm, friendly house was in a clearing surrounded by dense almost all-fir trees, almost black because they were so dense.  It was nearly twilight.  The windows glowed with firelight inside and the house seemed to be going into flames inside because the firelight reflected all across the walls and cupboards.  But then there was a silhouette which took her by surprise. Vasalissa nearly began to recognize the shape of what or who this silhouette really was when the entire place she had been absorbed into snapped shut on itself like a slammed book in front of your nose.  Vasalissa’s quick breathing because of the shock of the slam seemed to cause the clouds close upfront to blow into eyes gleaming and wide thin-lipped mouth laughing, as if this was all telling Vasalissa a joke and half-mocking her for taking it seriously and watching intently. 

  The sky was as usual again, as if nothing had happened.  A wind blew at her face from exactly the same point and direction, the last bit of yellow fields lining a horizon, a comfort of agriculture and civilization before going into the deep dark forest.  Vasalissa was jerked head first by the black horse she was riding on and was forced to concentrate on riding or else she was going to fall off. 

  There was a big divide between the countryside and the forest; a shallow sun-pattering stream of water flowing across a wide stretch of pebbles scattered over the ground as if the stream long ago had been a wide wide river.

  The Russians say the forests are haunted and that there are witches living in them.  Even if you've never seen a witch before, you will in a Russian forest.  Apparently this is true, for Vasalissa, after four years of completely unsupernatural encounters, had seen one before even arriving at the forest.  And she had been living with what are normal people in the real world of the 1930's and never saw a witch before!

  The hunting dogs were very lively and barked and splashed into the water, overcoming the odds to get to where the scent of the handkerchief was leading them to.  In the wilderness, they seemed to be growing wild and Vasalissa shuddered because of her having started their wild chase and was glad she was out of their way.

  The current of the river looked very forceful, though the dogs just barely made it through the worst swirls of currents.  Vasalissa looked at the poor Katrina Crystalska hanging belly-flopped and unconscious over a brown horse and saddle.  What was going to happen to her once in the fierce river?  Maybe her captors did not care whether or not she would be pulled off the horse and be lost in the river.

  “We must awaken her!”  Vasalissa cried.  In full-action, she dismounted her horse and the government officials, still feeling fresh though some of them thirsty were quick to take orders before being told what to do but certainly not from their captive.  They officers were the ones in charge and Vasalissa had dared not to take over but now she realized she must wake up the little girl herself because nobody was going to follow what she said and now she had the chance. 

  “I just wanted to splash some water on my sister so she might catch cold and die of pneumonia,” Vasalissa explained as humbly as she could when the actual Commander in Chief advanced faster than she feared.  In a different tone than before, the Cremona girl proclaimed, “Serves her right for not knowing what twin villains look like.  There are so many eight-year-olds who would have known everything exactly as she is expected to.  I would not care if she drowns down the river.  I just want to wake her up so the drowning might be a horrific experience she needs to be awake for.”  Vasalissa even sharpened her tongue into an accent like the Commander in Chief's who looked back at her, smiling in a snarly, commanding way. 

   The Commander in Chief said something in a surprising, low voice more powerful than comfortable for Vasalissa. “We shall see very soon now if all you say is a lie.”  

  Vasalissa suddenly felt very small.  Just how an orphan captive is expected to feel.

  The sun was quite low now and glowed pink across the Commander in Chief's facial muscles; the steel-set jaw.  He added, “It's a hanging you get, for treason.  For your information, orphan girl.  And you won't escape it.  Where are your parents?  Where will they be?”

  He gave a mean snicker.

  However, next he did something surprising.  Vasalissa stood by in awe and almost happy relief as the chief officer let Katrina down from the horse – by order from another officer, of course.  The horse to sit down, each leg of the horse bending with the other. 

  Vasalissa was permitted to bring a cloth to wet at the river and return with it.  Water is the source of life.  With it, Katrina Crystalska came to consciousness.  Vasalissa stroked her face with the flushed cheeks and told her everything was alright – even though it wasn’t and Katrina could tell.

  The stubborn state-order-representative was very peasant-like, out in the wilderness, which he hadn't been back on the train.  Though peasant may be pleasant, this wasn't quite so with him.  To be sarcastic towards a circumstance for an orphan such as this was very unfair, since Katrina and Vasalissa were at a disadvantage from him far enough. 

  “If she's an orphan,” said the parched hatred inside the Commander in Chief's mouth, “And orphans have a rough time all their lives, then what's the big deal?”

  Vasalissa thought to herself, the life of an orphan is to face challenges and one of the challenges is what to do when taken advantage of for being so vulnerable, you’re right.  But she looked back at him with a conviction inside her that orphans are full of life and conquer death.  Had there not been so, so many times Vasalissa had beaten other people’s desires to kill her?  Orphans are conquerors of all threats and fears.

  Vasalissa wondered at his mercy in what he did next.  A lot more relaxed from the great amount of rushing and riding across field and hills, he had tired of giving orders a bit.  So he took an order he gave himself for once.  “Take down the child and make her look more at ease and fit for the interrogation headquarters,” he muttered under his breath as he cut the ropes off.

  Vasalissa did not like to give away any drama but she felt a little laugh of relief meant she could forgive the Commander in Chief for his harshness and cruelty – she could forgive only because he showed some mercy. 

  Katrina and Vasalissa were made to walk to tire themselves out for the rest of the expedition, since the dictator government officials feared their childlike tendencies to talk a lot and ask them questions about their job and “what's your favourite colour?” etc.

  Across the river, up the steep pine needle bedded ground, the orphans breathed with all their young lungs the haunting smell of pine and it was very comforting.  The girls spotted a deer, and one of the officials hoisted their gun to shoot it but the deer was quick, much to the hostage orphans' delight.

  Vasalissa wondered what it would look like when only she and the Crystalska orphan would pass through a place and everybody else wouldn't.  Would the children be able to look back at those who no longer could see them, once on the other side safe in the deepest deep woods as the story of the Infanta and the Handkerchief promised?

  The pine trees were becoming denser and their leaves a deeper and deeper green almost black; the sky a small clearing above between fir tops high, growing smaller and closer to dusk.  An owl hooted and dusk fell.  And then before Vasalissa knew it, the footsteps of the men around her grew fainter and the sighs of the horses no longer frequent but gone.  There were no dogs chasing up ahead anymore.

Chapter Three:  You Can See Only the Witch's Shadow

“What frightens an orphan child most is that sickening feeling he or she gets when all alone inside and everything and everybody on the outside is hostile and means them harm and can't feel what it is to be an orphan child.”  This is something a famous philosopher wrote who remembered his orphan childhood.  This is something that had been at Aunt Juanita’s library in Madrid, in Spanish.  Vasalissa, of course had learned Spanish as a small child in her castle. 

  Vasalissa Cremona could hide inside a crimson cape that everybody thought was blood.  And her face was so faint, everybody yielded back from speaking much to her except in the typical way they believed was how a child without parents ought to be spoken to.  Grown-ups who do act out of a big fear commonly believed and taught to believe among grown-ups.  This big fear was of the child’s powers to find within him/herself the guardianship they could give themselves and often this would be too good but not good for the sustainability of society as it is.  Adults had had their own trust in themselves robbed from them before – of course they would feel it unfair if a child would get away with keeping it themselves.  A child might actually remain in his or her paradise of unconditional inner satisfaction and innocence, own enjoyable ways of doing things and trust in a heavenly father.  Therefore it was in an orphan guardian’s best interest to destroy this.  Adults become so astranged from their own right to a babe’s paradise within him/herself that they see it a crime and an offence to them – or a big danger to a child him/herself.  The fear is easily transferred and grown-ups often take all measures and extents to make sure this fear is transferred thoroughly. 

 Adults, or older children trying to prove that they're just like adults – in a childish way, make sure that innocent children dare not rise up as anybody better than all the normal people who always do as they've been taught to do; all the normal and accomplished people who think as they've been taught the rules how to think, feel as they've been taught rules how to feel and have forgotten that they once had been taught all these rules.  They had to conform to the rules of how to behave as children in society, just like their parents had to. 

  A lot of people may come to feel superior over children whose parents have died because they themselves have not been so foolish and weak as to lose their parents themselves and they never lost their home.  To not be unfortunate might mean a fortune to some people, a pile of gold coins next to someone who has none; a beautiful face in the mirror next to a scarred and battered one.  And greed might give these people the thrill of piling more gold coins for themselves, to enjoy their advantage over someone who had theirs all taken away; more battering and scaring on the poor abused face next to their beautiful healthy face so the abused can suffer more defeat, humility, self-hatred and shame.

  It is kind of the same thing siblings or children in the same class at school might do, comparing what they have with what the others have.  The plushest newest heaviest plush toy – be it a rabbit or a teddy bear … and there may be some children who have only a shredded one from the time they were teething or one that was found by their parents in a mud puddle by the road.  Or there may be some children who have no plush toy at all.

  What an orphan child might be afraid of most is not being gifted with any plush soft slippers by their guardian or whoever they need the care of for a while.  She might crave to be given those lovely strands of floating pink lace and gauzy ribbons by an aunty or an older sister figure looking after her and needily crave this so much she doesn't care to notice that the puddles on the way to and from school fill up her shoes because of the big hole in each sole at the toes that nobody is caring about.  The hot chocolate drinks and sugar comfort treats are all the orphan girl waits for although they bite her teeth and give her tooth ache.  But she sits on edge and without them feels like the day before yesterday's sloppy cold all-wrong sandwiches; wilted lettuce leaves stuck in between that nobody wants.  A hot chocolate everybody craves and enjoys is what she would rather be affiliated with.  To be desired by someone is something a little girl can easily crave, especially after being taught she is not desirable.

  In your desperation, you are convinced that your next breath depends on what comes your way or what your false guardians are holding back – a hot chocolate, a softer expression on the face, some kindness saying “you’re okay, don’t worry.”  These people become a child’s gods and these guardians enjoy it and think it is right.

  In a young girl's world, life might evolve around the attainment of compliments instead of hot chocolate and to keep them coming.  However Vasalissa Cremona was not like this.  She knew she did not need compliments which many orphan girls believe they are ugly and unwhole without.  Skin sheds every day and hair can fall out.  Flowers wilt even on a bush – on the longest living blossom or flower tree, such as the acacia.  Young women turn into grey, wrinkle-sagging hags. 

  Vasalissa had observed from her many aunts and woman guardians and older foster sisters how a woman's source for assurance that she deserves to be alive comes from men's eyes and hands.    How will an old haggard woman draw anyone's attention?  Were they not young and desirable once?  Maybe there is a time for everyone to be desirable and then not to be desirable but desires pass.  For children who lose their parents, there was a time when they were desirable to their parents and then their parents became sick and did not recognize them anymore and all the desire was gone – and then they died and went to a better place.  Some parents did not desire their child from the very beginning and gave their child away or kept and raised them anyway. 

  The children that used to be desired and lost the parent or both parents that accepted and desired them are easily picked on as orphans for having lost what they used to have and are feeling sore about.  There are plenty of people who will reinforce that orphan’s loss and there will be plenty of people who will “adopt” them for a while for selfish purposes such as feeling good about having someone to parent, forgive, sympathize and give to.  When the orphan no longer wants or needs this, the foster parent or foster big brother or sister gets angry… and hostile, just as are the many things the world toward an orphan child.

  The world looks like the world is all there is because it is full of colourful lanterns hanging everywhere and shiny coloured candy and other round shiny things that look like candy and sugary hot drinks and 'Can you be beautiful?' dress shops and women who have everything one can want for.  This is part of what the term “a hostile world” means.  Anything deceptive, in other words not all true, just putting on a good front on the outside to appeal and sell itself, is hostile.  Even if it seems convincingly appealing and seems to fill in all your needs.  The trouble is that most things, and not to mention most human interaction, runs along deception and along selling and buying and stealing, if there is no visible selling or buying.  Seldom is there giving without price or expecting in return later.  You can look like you're a good girl even though you pick your nose and hit your brother at home when he's naughty.  If you don't let people see or know that you pick your nose and hit your brother, you're being deceitful, but at least your teacher lets you go out early for lunch because you're a good girl on the outside.

  To live in this world is to be deceived and to learn to deceive in order to get what we need.  A baby might even learn that to cry a bit louder will get their mother to come quick and apologize for not having taken the quiet crying more seriously.  But most of the time, grown-ups work and try and master their needs much harder than that.  The orphan child often gives up on their needs.  To not have any needs, what a wonderful life that will be.  Not to have to eat, not to be to be stroked and held, not to need to have a shelter from the wind and storm.  But in the meantime, there are fairy tales to read about and think about and write about where everything someone needs comes out of visions, usually following a sequence of needs being met or not being met.  Little does everyone know that their own lives are just like fairy tales.  Vasalissa's life was no different . . . perhaps with greater evident extremes and contrasts than some of us.

  Vasalissa had had a vision of a witch's house just after she had been taken hostage.  Being taken hostage had been a dire and very unwanted sudden experience, and it could have been seen as being all with Vasalissa's little well-meaning friend's fault, the little girl orphan girl Katrina Crystalska.  Without this mistake Katrina had made, Vasalissa’s fairy tale would not have changed route to a brighter direction, though it might not have seemed so at first with the capture by the Soviet officers.  Without this happening, Vasalissa would not head to the witch's house that she needed to through which Vasalissa would care for guardians no more.

  Only Vasalissa passed through the invisible forest walls to where the magical handkerchief led to.  She found the handkerchief again nowhere but as part of the wall, enlarged, on the left side of the house under the thatched roof.  The rest of the walls were only pure wood, the greying kind because it hasn’t been painted at all.

  It was just the time of dusk.  It was the feeling of being bereft that Vasalissa was walking with.  Not because she had lost the position of being held hostage and being threatened time and again of going to some torture and interrogation headquarters, but she had lost the position of walking alongside somebody like Katrina Crystalska and not having to be alone on a journey which she always noticed made her quite unusual from other people travelling.  Vasalissa felt she must be the least loved person on the planet.  It is a wonderful thing to meet somebody on a very similar journey as yours who has felt the same way, being an orphan, having dreaded unsuitable guardians, and even being on a journey as hostages together with army dogs chasing the origins of quite-used handkerchief up ahead, by scent. 

  The girls were going to meet again as old ladies.  Truth is nothing befell her after Vasalissa passed into the deepest darkest heart of the living forest.  Soldiers broke out fighting and shooting each other at the disappearance of Vasalissa into thin air mainly because it was proof to them that the forests of Russia were haunted.  In the meantime, seeing a vacant horse, Katrina Crystalska escaped her hostile captors without anyone noticing and galloped away where she rode for a night and a day and then another day and ended up in Finland.

  Walking into the big clearing with the wood house in it, Vasalissa's breath drew in without effort though she was a bit unsure of herself.  What Vasalissa noticed first when she saw the woman sweeping outside of the house was the pristine clarity of her skin, that clarity of a blue dusk sky after a sunny day and the stars are coming out.  Of the same dusk sky was the cloth hanging over the lady’s shoulders from her head.  A few stars were appearing just over the fir tree tips at the back of the house because it really was dusk.

  The woman seemed to notice the girls' sense of her beauty and became a bit stern because of it, only like the sharpness of the star in the dusk sky. 

  “Whatever you may be making a note of as praiseworthy, be aware how you cast your own mirror you carry with you upon someone else.  What you see in someone else is what you would like to see in yourself.” 

  Vasalissa's lips bit together.  The lady softened.  This was the kind parental guardian lady who evolved out of the witch when the clouds changed.  Vasalissa blinked. 

  More brushing of the broom, the solemn sternness softened into well-humoured kindness.  The energetic housekeeper evoked keen interest in the earthen floor.  Then, for a surprise, she quipped as if thoughts turned out loud but also in a way somebody tells a guest to kindly remove their shoes, “It is vanity to be casting on someone else what you would like to see in yourself.  It is fanciful, as is whatever you want to see in everything you see here: the sky, the early white stars.  Best to turn within to what is in you and find all you have ben wishing for.”  She stopped brushing and looked back at Vasalissa with promptness.  “You may do this here.  That comes with my hospitality to you, free of charge.”

  Vasalissa Cremona smiled to herself and to the pristine fair lady, relieved to be offered hospitality.  The moral lesson with the conclusion sounded very opposite to what anybody had ever granted her before when she first arrived at someone’s doorstep.

  At a glance through the window where a fire cast a soft pink glow over the walls, the crimson-caped girl asked without fear, “Is there a witch living here?”  She could see no shadow as she had before in the clouds.

  The woman stood solemn again, the top of the broomstick to her chest.

  “If you wish,” she piped with a sudden grim sense of humour and louder voice, “If you wish to see a witch, the one who lives here, may you be advised that she will eat you alive if you see her.”

  Vasalissa’s shoulders tightened.  She wondered if it was an unacceptable thing to wish to see a witch.  This was the house where a witch lived inside and Vasalissa had always known the Russian ones were flesh-eating.   All the children that came here were orphans or at least lost and had been pushed to come here because there was no other way. 

  The air was cold and a wind played on the small wood chimes hanging from the low veranda ceiling.  The veranda of course built with wood of the forest began to the right and led to the back of the house.  If perhaps the witch sat there sometimes, rocking in a chair, would she welcome a viewer?  Would she look back at you, wobbling her warts on her chin?

  Vasalissa knew she wanted to see the witch.  The witch was a cynic and Vasalissa felt enthusiastically drawn toward the witch perhaps for this trait.  The witch had so cynically blown out the coloured vision of this clearing in the deepest darkest woods and this house that Vasalissa had had at the start of the journey with the Soviets and Katrina.  She wanted to meet once again the shrewd glance of a witch with the pointed long nose, the many creases and hardiness of a face that had braved harsh winds and the scorching of cauldron fires because of her being so intensely at work over them.  Her life’s work was a mystery that teased Vasalissa’s curiosity.  Did the witch really need to eat people?  Was it only children?  There were not enough people that came here for her to kill and eat, surely.

  Information of course came from the fair lady pristine as the sky of dusk.  “The witch lives in this house but so long as I am here, she lives in the deepest depths within this house which is where she does her work.  You can only see her shadow at times.  She can do you no harm so long as you are under my protection.”  

  Vasalissa could hear in her tone and poise that protection was at a condition.  The pristine housekeep continued, “You must learn all that is set out here for you to learn and what tasks are done.  You may stay here as long as you like.”  The pristine lady housekeeper changed her tone.  “If you are not going to face what can be learned here, then you are facing in the wrong direction.”  The pristine lady made a glance past Vasalissa's shoulder, challenging her to face the exit of this clearing and leave this house.

  Vasalissa still felt this house in the big clearing inside the deepest darkest of Russian woods the safest place to hide from the world.  So she agreed, with a small voice, to accept what could be learned here.

  The gracious keeper of this house had empathy for how someone felt that had made the journey here.  She had empathy for a newcomer and her empathy was beautiful as the pristine sky at dusk with a white star like a tear shaking next to the moon – Just in time Vasalissa remembered to turn back the mirror of admiration on herself.  Something happened – Vasalissa actually found inside her she could have this kind of empathy the same.  Perhaps the pristine fair lady would not cast Vasalissa out of this clearing in the woods if Vasalissa failed to keep the mirror to herself sometimes.  It was fairly easy to remember: glance inward. 

  The keeper of the witch's house viewed the young girl in crimson cape with a respect that comes, of course, of Vasalissa's mother having once thought ahead of Vasalissa's need to be respected in the future and therefore dressing her in the colour of blood.  The housekeeper also took a respect for Vasalissa being just about the bravest child she had ever seen.  None of the children she met had been so insistent to see a child-eating witch.

  “And so, godmother,” as the crimson-clad lone orphan called the keeper of the house, “How is it that the witch does not come out of the dark depth within, where she works, and eats you?”

  The young gracious godmother, as most beautiful women, did not believe in using sense of humour for everything to get by in life.  So her reaction was as expected: she smoothed her temples, which were dressed in the dusk-faint fabric; she smoothed her apron on the sides and challenged Vasalissa back with the possibility that she might not answer.

  Then she did answer. “Because this is a woman who prefers to keep to her work in the dark depths, she does not waste time doing housework,” the lady said much to Vasalissa's thrill.  “And you know, since she has been an old lady, she cannot welcome any lost children, even though this house is meant for seeking refuge, that is its purpose in the place that it is.  So I am in the witch's place.  The only times a child has been eaten was when they refused to listen to me and forced their way to see the witch who cannot bear to be seen.  And now.”  The housekeeper was sharp at defending her sharpness to be keeping to what she needed to be keeping.  “There are only a few shades of pretty blue left before blackness and by then this house must be sound asleep.  Will you help me set supper on the table?  And we'll make your bed.  We can talk again about the witch tomorrow.”

  The Cremona daughter agreed to that and let herself be led into the house.  It felt quite pleasant and almost daylight inside while it was dusk outside, as if the sun shone through the window, at least for a little while longer.  Until, the gracious godmother left Vasalissa to go to sleep, going to bed early, and Vasalissa looked around her at quite a different kind of home and atmosphere than while the gracious godmother had been awake.  As the gentle guardian was falling asleep, Vasalissa, alone in one half of the house, watched the phenomenon of the gentle light inside being taken over by the orange burning of the fire at the hearth.  Any kind of shadow began to be a lurking shadow with a crooked back and a pointy nose.  The house seemed to be breathing.  Something had become awake.

  It became night inside very quickly.  Fire burned and burned without being poked or rekindled.  The house seemed to have a life of its own and the fire’s cackling became sounds the house made with its mouth.  It was like being inside the belly of an animal…  Inside the belly of a witch!  Vasalissa shuddered and gasped.  The supernatural was going to be even scarier than this.  Awaiting the cruel actions of guardians and foster siblings had not been one that made your spin tingle.  Vasalissa expected to be caught by surprise at something beginning to move somewhere, out of nowhere. 

  Then it happened: two moving things appeared out of nowhere in particular, running across the floor from a cabinet.  Like spiders, but no!  They were two human hands!  Running!  They jumped at the firewood, much to Vasalissa's relief, and poked the fire with the iron stick they had jumped to clutch high on. 

  Vasalissa hoped the hands were used to serve visitors and that they would stick to being busy just doing that.  With great relief, the hands gave the impression that they were being driven by something like habit and “must”, just as Vasalissa's own hands sometimes cleared a strand of hair fallen over your eyes and her hands knew how to re-tie her hair back.

  The safest way to sleep is with your head under the covers, and this Vasalissa resorted to, leaving a hole just for air since it was getting hard to breathe under there.  She discreetly had reached for her crimson cape from the chair where she had laid it.  It was the best idea to sleep wearing your mother's legacy to you.

  This is not to mean a mother's protective legacy would keep you from seeing what was there to look at when your head wouldn't stay under the covers during the night. 

  In the middle of the night Vasalissa opened her eyes, her head was out from under the blanket.  The house inside had turned into something else.  The Cremona daughter was filled in by horror from all sides.  Screaming and screaming, she wanted to run, leave her bed and find the door out of this house into the night but the floor was covered in bones.  She could not step on them. They glared at her and seemed teeth-like. 

  Then… finally, the shadow of the witch had moved across the wall in front of her, as if it could have been Vasalissa's own silhouette. 

  Blood was dripping from inside the walls, dark crimson blood, darker than Vasalissa's cape, almost a venom as if it had come from the witch's bile and throat, gushing through her fang-like teeth.  Nothing had been of this kind of horror before in Vasalissa's life.  To see a shadow in this place was the anger of the terrible witch who did not want to be seen. Vasalissa curled into a ball, the smallest smallest that she could so as to humble herself to the witch in her house; begging and praying that the witch was not going to creep up or sound her horrible voice or let her ghastly breathing be heard.  This was just as bad as being eaten up.  To be eaten up was something Vasalissa firmly believed was not going to happen, since the gentle keep of his house had promised her safety so long as Vasalissa help out in chores and learn what was to be learned at this house.  Vasalissa had been eager to help out with dinner and she washed the dishes and made her own bed almost all by herself.  What had she done or failed to think of doing so as to deserve the witch paying back this horror?

  The blood on the walls that her crazy Uncle Sasha had smeared and poured down to remind him of the massacre of his family in 1918 when the Bolsheviks took over his countryside Romanovsky home, wasn't anything like this.

  Inside Vasalissa's crimson cape where she curled into the tiniest ball there was no escape, only a slide into a journey.  It was a half-sleep like a chute down a winding chimney and it started with the same bones that were covering the floor around Vasalissa's bed.  All the bare whiteness of sliced open bones just having been cleaved out of flesh – that the witch might have torn.  The bone was immaculate, smooth. 

  Then in her half-sleep there was a bounce Vasalissa felt, as if the bones were a mattress that tossed her up into darkness until she was out in the night inside the dark dark forest.  It was the depth of the deepest night.  The girl shrieked in the shock of pain at the piercing of needles in her skin all around her body.  Vasalissa was pushed along them and when she recognized this is what they were she grabbed hold of one in one hand, still shrieking but it was the last of them.  She was falling – or rather, flying in a straight line; it wasn't downward but the force was the same as falling. 

  She could stop herself falling quite easily but only for a short time.  Each time she fell again she tried to gain a hold.  Eventually she learned to keep steady and move at will.  Once she could do this, she asked her all to be lifted upward into the dark night sky with its stars, escaping the denseness and darkness.  It was not dark in the night sky and she asked in her heart for help to one of the stars, the one that grew larger and larger and had a strange familiar welcoming to it...

  Then Vasalissa’s familiar self in a familiar place resurged again and it was not a memory, it was a new reality of the moment.  So familiarly safe and at home and so close and loved could only be because of the nearness of one person.  That person's love had overtaken her flight.  Her mother and she were snuggled together.  It was morning. 

  “Mama?”

  Her mother's warmth was the low hum of voice that restores life.

  Her mother was alive! 

  The skin of her cheek was real to touch.  She smiled.  The fabric she wore was real to touch, the same white morning robe she used to wear as if nothing had happened to her.  Soft white and yellow morning rimmed her face and shoulders.  The same mother-brown eyes rich with all the courage that a mother gives its youngster to survive, now had ethereal courage and assurance in them Vasalissa hadn’t seen before as much as secure and arrived as this.  The mother held her daughter's hand and squeezed.  She knew how scared the young Vasalissa had been, that she had felt only five years old quite often inside but now Vasalissa was already 14 and becoming a young lady.  

  “It is scary being on a journey on your own,” was what Vasalissa had wanted to say to Baba Mama all these years and it was choking in her throat so much together with the dark times losing her mother.  Vasalissa did not need to open her mouth and use her voice to say this, but she said it.  And her mother understood and had already known and deeply felt for her child the whole time she had been away.  Vasalissa in this time and place with her mother no longer felt there had been a separation. 

  And then Vasalissa began to fade back into her awareness of her body in her sleep inside the crimson cape.  She felt the bed under her with the sheets and the goose-down cover … It was its own morning light though not the same as the light with her and her mother.    There was nothing Vasalissa could be afraid of now.

  The keeper of the house wore a bright sky blue dress and white apron to match the morning.  She was attending to her tasks such as rolling dough and churning butter, folding freshly starched and pressed tea towels and didn't ask Vasalissa to do anything.  But she gave Vasalissa a smile once, in empathy and value of Vasalissa's youth and girlhood full of mysteries a girl does not exactly know but feels she has them just the same, and the keeper of the house had some of her own.

  “Have you the courage now to begin your work?”

  Vasalissa somehow felt like there was something outside the house waiting for her.  She wanted to go out.  However, after a stretch or two, Vasalissa got up and instead of following her sense of direction and heading outside, she reached for the butter churner.  “No”, the pristine housekeeper asserted primly. “You can do your work that needs to be done.  Outside awaits you barrels of split lentils,” she said.  “They're in water and it's the rainwater fallen off the roof.”  She softened her approach, seeing Vasalissa's transparent innocence; stepped to the young girl's side and explained, “You have to guard them safe, those split lentils.  They're only lentils but they are very important.  You have a duty for what to use those lentils for.  Don't give them to the birds that come.  That isn't what the lentils are for.  You might find them appealing and having soft feathers.  They look so fair and seem well-meaning.  But you'll be deceived.  Those birds will feed on your innocence.  They resent your innocence because they once lost theirs and regard the innocence they lost as having been a weakness.  These deceivingly beautiful birds aren't well-meaning because they have lost the pure heart of a child who wishes to feed birds freely without claiming anything back.  They are starved inside and will claim everything you’ve got and demand more.

  “Those lentils belong to the witch of this house of these woods.  What water does to her stock of food is soak them so they are useful and edible, not for the birds but for her.  The witch needs them for her work within these walls you cannot see.”  The godmother's countenance revealed how she had a feeling for Vasalissa's horror the previous night; did she know what had happened? 

  The godmother had more to finish her instruction.  “If you let the birds peck at the witch's lentils, those yellow round things, soon other creatures will appear instead of those soft fluffy birds.  They will arrive from all directions.  You will not be able to handle them and you will be killed.  You might allow and indulge in feeding these creatures because of your own need to feel good about yourself by being nurturing charitable and giving what they want.  I ask you to feel good about yourself and heal this need and the birds will fly away.  You will learn much about yourself.”

  Vasalissa sat down outside with a big big dish.  The two barrels 2/3rds full of orange-yellow coloured split lentils; 1/3 filled with murky white water.  A 'tedious joy' might be said of something that is a task that isn't supposed to be joyful but tedious, and so the tediousness wipes out the joy you might be hoping for.  It was a tedious joy at first draining the lentils with a funny sieve supposedly welded in the mysterious terrible witch's deepest dark within.  Vasalissa, like some young girls always the ones asked to do chores, knew she was back at it again, so to speak.  She felt the bitterness of being a homeless orphan girl sting out at her...

  Every place she had lived at since her parents died, there had been tasks assigned to her, from sorting out the stained underwear and the less stained ones of Uncle Smirnov to all the cookies soggily bitten in by 18 month old Jana needing to be separated from cookies bitten by her cousin, 18 month old Mary – their mothers had wanted to know who had eaten how much.  The cookies had to used up evenly, since their mothers had paid for them evenly.

  Vasalissa squinted at the sky.  It was an overcast day but a bright overcast day.  The lentils were so bendy they wouldn't break when you tried to pull one apart.  Vasalissa began to wonder if the godmother had made a mistake about there being any birds.  There weren't any at all, not even the tiny sparrows.

  Vasalissa rolled out a mat that was square and red and a kind of pink striped with some design.  There were some orange-yellow squares in the corners.  Once it was rolled out, Vasalissa noticed a black bird fly in from the dense forest, flapping noisy wings, landing on the gables of the roof of the house, watching Vasalissa.

  “Well,” she thought to herself, a bit unhappy because of the task.  “That won't be so hard to keep away.  It's not a soft, white and beautiful bird.”  She tasted bitter sourness in her mouth sometimes.  Vasalissa enjoyed putting black earth in her mouth sometimes to think of bitter-sour things to say.

  Then, when Vasalissa upturned the big dish of drained lentils across the mat, there came a white bird.  It landed close next to the raven, and Vasalissa marked its sticking out feathers everywhere.  She narrowed her eyes.  They weren't smooth and soft at all.

  She sighed after having spread out the lentils to dry and stood up, hands on her hips.

  “Well.  If those birds come and fly here to peck on the lentils, they'll have my broomstick over their backs.”  And the broomstick waited next to Vasalissa's tiny low stool next to the dish.  When she sat down, she eyed those birds, glaring.  They dared not fly down but probed for their chances, flinching the way birds do all the time, tilting their heads side to side, forward and back.  It looked like they were about to fly off the house gable any time, but the “Beware” from Vasalissa pushed them to keep their distance.

  Vasalissa a little later spread the second batch of lentils thinly across the mat.  She began to hum to herself, sweetening up the bitter-sour earth in her mouth.  The Cremona orphan was a bit vain with her voice.  She liked very much how it rang.  She wanted to hear it echo.  She stood up and listened out and tried to sing out far to any of the valleys in the forest or other clearings where it might ring round.  If it could read a waterfall or some villages, towns and some might hear how beautiful Vasalissa was.

  That is when the beautiful birds came…  The softest Vasalissa had ever seen.  They were white; some were peachy, sandstone, pink.  They seemed to make fainter her face as she lost all pace and firm will for her work she felt ashamed about since it was really something very crude and of a Cinderella’s job, working with lentils.  The soft birds flocked from high in the sky where the clouds were pinkish although sunset was yet in hours to come.  Surely these could not be the birds Vasalissa had been warned about?  Vasalissa was caught by their arrival as if they had nets to steal her eyes and mind.  Great shame overcame Vasalissa for not being so beautiful and graceful.  These winged graces proclaimed that being beautiful and graceful and soft was better than being determined, courageous, hard-working, focussed with one's own purpose.  Moreover, the superior creatures were a flock.  Each one of them was in a flock.  In comparison to them Vasalissa was alone.  She had always been alone and she hadn’t minded at all unless she compared herself with those who had families or even just one travel companion.  Not to be cherished and appreciated by someone along your side must mean you have nothing to be appreciated and cherished anyway.  Not to be loved by anyone must mean not to be loveable in the first place.  You are only loved when you were combined with another person, or in a flock.  On your own you were the poorest thing on earth, small, helpless, but these birds were here and sympathetic of this.  They tilted their heads at her, observing her, and Vasalissa felt the only courage she could have to live was from their sympathy, and from nothing else.  She seemed to feed them with her helplessness and this is how she could receive warmth and importance at last.

  The birds flew about to her and they tried to land on her shoulders but the blood of the cape repelled them as something distasteful.  Vasalissa removed her cape.  It dropped on the floor.  Many bird feet landed on Vasalissa’s arms so she couldn’t move anymore.  The birds flapped their wings a little too close in front of her eyes and their feet digging in her arms and wrists felt like talons… but the birds cooed and made such wonderful company for someone so cursed to be alone and forever moving from place to place, a poor girl so tall but so little inside and not even at home at this house in the clearing in the woods but just a guest having to keep up with conditions to be protected from being eaten by its witch. 

  Since these fair, soft-feather-winged creatures offered such comfort and sympathy for her weakness, Vasalissa took pity on a few of them for wanting to eat the softened lentils.   

  Sometimes when something so great is taken away from you like your parents and loyalty of your cooks and servers of your meals and servants at your castle and your sunlit castle home is taken away too, people will come along who want to take away even more because you seem to them like someone whose loss isn’t big enough.  Some people’s kindness comes with the condition to trespass your boundaries and take what is yours or what is your responsibility – and make you believe it wasn’t yours really.  Surely the witch who needed these lentils was not the one really in power.  It was these birds. 

  She put the broom away under a bench behind a shed, quick to please.  Perhaps the broom had been what the birds had feared to be hit by.  Having been eyeing both the lentils and Vasalissa, in they dived, beaks first, pecking hungrily, if hunger is what excused their viciousness.  Some were demure and still graceful, just giving soft pecks.

  As Vasalissa worked on the next dish, the birds got in the way, their wings flapping against her face since they crowded around wanting those lentils in the dish too.

  “Go away; you've got what you have there on the mat.”

  She used her arms, jerking so the birds would lose their balance and fall off and leave her, which they did but they came back, even landing on her head.  It was most annoying.  In her helplessness, she forgot all about the broom.

  The first batch of food for the witch was eaten away!  Only crumbs remained and the birds were interested in the next sieved batch; even the gentler content-seeming ones turned greedy.

  The Cremona child no longer cared that these lentils were for the witch's work.  She only was so taken up by her own inferiority in the face of all the admiration the winged know-it-all’s were due.  They were big in number.  They wanted the easy-to-eat harvest of her light work.  As for the witch, Vasalissa thought she could always dry more of these lentils for her, there was sooo much of it.  The barrels were full.

  The birds impatiently ate the next batch too, a smaller batch since a lot had been eaten while it had been sieved, strainer full after strainer full.

  Since Vasalissa's story is that about an orphan and orphans always have things go wrong and things just don't succeed the way the orphans hope, the witch's housekeeper, whom Vasalissa had called “gracious godmother” could have offered more graciousness.    The witch's housekeeper could have afforded a bit of forgiveness for a child who failed to follow instruction and had his/her own issues of self-image.  But the godmother did not even come out of the house when Vasalissa started calling and crying for help.

  Monster mutant animals appeared beside the trees of the forest all around, approaching at the perimeter of the clearing in the forest.  The white fluffy birds, frightened, flew away.  They had eaten enough.

  No broom was going to smack these animals that came this time.  They would only kill her faster.  Vasalissa was defenceless, with only the dish in both hands.  Her crimson cape was far away, in a heap and hurting.  What was there to do? 

  There was only one faith that came to the hope inside her heart that began searching for direction.  There had to be something.  She believed, and she believed more and more and the animals growled and breathed hard and made beast noises unimaginable unless you heard them.  Vasalissa Cremona began to get the feeling that the basin-like deep dish was a funnel communication to the witch, wherever she might be inside the house.  Asking for help and mercy: that was something Vasalissa could do. 

  It sure was dark in there, inside the basin-like deep dish used for sorting lentils . . .

  With it on her head, stuff started happening outside.

  It was a something that was wearing an old bloodstain colour of red, just a big cloth, not fancy like Vasalissa's cape on the ground.  Vasalissa didn't see it but this is what happened, who appeared.  The witch came out of her house, flying on a broom, a horror to look at but it was daytime.  The fiends from the dark forest were encroaching their prey.  Of course, Vasalissa was their prey, not the lentils as the birds had been interested in.  The hungry fiends were terrified and lost focus on their prey.  The horrible miscreants began to groan and some to shriek.  It was the stench of a kind of smoke coming out of the bristles of the broom.  Whether or not it was a poison, the hungry fiends entreated to where they came from.  Their teeth-grinding and slobber-licking and wheezing disappeared.  Vasalissa kept listening out as the groans and shrieks became distant.  Who knows where they returned to, it was none of Vasalissa's concern.  They were gone and Vasalissa was safe.

  The Cremona daughter walked on wobbly legs to sit down on the little bench-stool that had been her work-stool before the wide-winged, long-necked superiors had flown in.  She trembled a little.  She vowed to herself never to care anymore about being admirable.  She didn't want to be it.  It was not the ultimate thing, anymore, to be admirable.  There had been something the birds had wanted from her which they were hungry for.  Because Vasalissa  was a keeper of something which apparently was their food, because she felt herself of little value compared to the winged and long-necked creatures with their beauty, the giving what they were hungry for was how she felt of any significance to anybody and to herself. 

  The witch had broken her own rules by saving Vasalissa from the forest fiends, letting herself be seen though it wasn’t night.  The witch terrified her and yet brought Vasalissa such relief and surprised her with mercy.

  Vasalissa had failed the task the keeper of the witch's house had given her. 

  A run of a tear felt to be engraving on her cheekbones, then the soft fleshy part of her cheek that is where people give kisses.  Mercy when you fail in something, especially when your failure means the consequence of somebody losing something precious can melt your heart of all the fear that had made it hard.

  Vasalissa's safety at this house had become unconditional, by this house’s witch's mercy.  It was quite alright the way it was that the witch had gone back into her house to wherever it was within the walls she went to work.  Vasalissa hoped she wouldn’t have to see the witch again.  It was quite alright that the witch lived there… Vasalissa just did not desire to be living here anymore… not in a negative way, but she was glad to pick up and move somewhere else that was calling her.

  This is when there came something out of the woods into the clearing, running.  Two pairs of legs.  The pairs were separate but were the same legs, same blue trousers.  The blondness of their heads fell soft all around and they could be as deceivingly beguiling for sure to all the farmers and farmers' eldest daughters and wives across the country who had taken them in to feed and shelter them.  Their faces beamed with a kind of bounce to innocence:  Mischief.  It was the twins!  Those same “twin villains” the Soviet men had been after.

  “We've been here before,” said one to Vasalissa, in a piping ruby-cheeked voice.  He was only about seven years old.

  “We come here all the time when we've had enough of chases out there,” the other explained, only about seven years old as well.  The two of them walked up to Vasalissa and smiled at the stunned yet relieved look on her face.  She only stared and found nothing meaningful or purposeful to say.

  “Sure is fun, but it's nice to come where we know nobody can come after us.  Once in a while!”  This one twin had a particular twinkle in his eye.  Vasalissa marked this as how to tell the boys apart; there was nothing else.

  The boys looked down at the big barrels and pecked-at coloured mat on the ground; the reminders of Vasalissa's failed task.  They kid boys read the signs.  They looked back at Vasalissa, nodding knowingly.  Had they perhaps been asked to do the same task as well or seen other young girls of fourteen do the same?  Vasalissa read by their eyes that there had been other girls like her before her.

  Good-naturedly. “So, you didn't call the Flying Sun-Man?”

  Vasalissa blinked.  “A what?”

  “The Flying Sun-Man.  He lets us call him Dirk.  He is of Swedish and Dutch origin.  Call him that too.  Can you blow a whistle with your two fingers?”

  Vasalissa became a bit annoyed.  The boys could perhaps just be challenging her and were up to mischief, as usual.

  “No.  I can't whistle like that.”

  The boys shrugged.  One of them kicked a little rock on the ground.  The other one kicked like a colt.  “There's nothing to be afraid about.”

  “That's right, I've had lots of practice whistling.  I've herded sheep and herded cattle before, my brother and me.”

  “It's alright; we've had lots of practice.”

  “That's ok if you haven't learned how to whistle.”

  “It's good you've got us now.  What would you have done if you had known about the Flying Sun-Man and that he dries up your barrels of lentils just in four seconds – when you wouldn't even have been able to have called him anyway?  He only answers to this whistle.”

  Playfully, the other twin chimed in laughing, bumping arms with his brother and blew a whistle.  The two boys, handsome, ruby in their cheeks, eyes daintily slanted like kittens on the sides, laughed and looked up, waiting.  Vasalissa did too, quite expectant.  If a witch existed then so did a Flying Sun-Man.

  “You have to wait a minute,” said one of the twins, the one with the twinkle.  “Dirk doesn't work like magic, he says.”

  In the meantime, Vasalissa put her crimson cape back over her shoulders and fastened the buckles.  Things went wrong without her cape – or went especially wrong, so to speak, with all the things going wrong all the time even with the cape on, so much going wrong during the lifetime of four years being an orphan.

  There had been no sun that day except early in the morning when Vasalissa had woken up.  But then there was a sun drawing near and nearer.  The flying sun-man was a flying man.  This became apparent with his arms and legs, bent up like an eccentric inventor with long limbs; someone who spent his time up in the air since he worked on inventions all the time.  You couldn't see his torso; it was a ball of sunlight.  He wore goggles and looked a pilot at you.  His stockings were striped brown, beige and green.

  “Howdy!  Hey lovely young miss!  I like the red, it looks good on you.  Another colour wouldn't strike as well.  Forget the pink and lady fluff.  Hey, boys, how've the muffins been baking?  Miss Witch's Housekeeper will be yelling her throat into these forests if ye don't watch them.  Was fun last time though, how you burned them and had to call the Rain Man instead of me because they wouldn't stop burning.  The fire wouldn't go out!  Not even with the blankets thrown over and the water jugs.”

  The twins were laughing at the memory.

  “Those muffins were perfect after they dried a little for a dough-ball fight!” cried a twin.

  Both of them demonstrated the motion.

  Vasalissa felt a growing contentment.  This was the most light-hearted, humoured company in her lifetime – since of course, the days in the castle when the cooks and cooking servants, banquet servers had been in good moods, before they had turned against her the same day her parents died.

  The Flying Sun-Man hovered and circled in the air a bit.  He did not even need to be asked to do the job he had been called to.  The lentils were drained of water while still in their barrels.  Any drier and they'd snap and break as if they'd never been softened and hydrated.

  “Ok, that's enough” Vasalissa said in a hushed tone to the boy children.  “The lentils are going to get too dry.  The witch needs them just right for her secret work.”

  The boys were co-operative.  Whoever said they needed to be locked up or sentenced to death?

  “Dirk, you can go back into the clouds again.”

  “Thanks for coming.  Go back to your farm and wife and kids.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alright.  Well it's always lovely to see people besides my wife and kids and the sunflowers, you won't believe how many of my rays aren't appreciated at home some times.”

  “Oh, I hope you can work on your airplane inventions.”

  “That's right. That I will. That way, you can fly up and visit me.  Ordinary airplanes can't fly my way.”

  Then he said something that Vasalissa memorized instantly.

  “Am I making too much sense?  Yes, I ought to build you an airplane to fly around the world and get a new perspective on the grown-up world out there.  But then...  If you did go flying in my airplane, you couldn't need to come to this place here where you are now.  And it would be very sad for me never to see you again.  Thankfully, I'll never know the way to what's called 'the real world'.”

  Then the Sun-man left.

  The feeling of safety and home can come about by many different people and kinds of people and things and places and sounds and smells.  It brought a lot of warmth to Vasalissa's heart to see how the godmother welcomed the two boys, her friends since they came and went from here.  They ran to her and hugged her and joyed her over laughing for their wild-kitten ways. 

  Vasalissa felt she had learned enough here.  No more tasks to please a witch, for one thing, at least not for a while.  Vasalissa always had an uneasiness staying in one place for too long.  She had much to learn and it came about at many different places.  Though the longest she had spent at anyone's home had been two months, a second day here would be unbearable.  And so the next morning, while the fairy godmother was still asleep before getting up to do her chores and the twin brothers breathed in a deep sleep inside goose-down feather duvets in periwinkle covers, Vasalissa left.

  Sometimes you need a break from getting to the bones and blood and deciding that something is hard work and not worth the condition for safety. 

Chapter Four:  Becoming a Metal Factory Worker

The magic about being a child is that you are magical.  You seem to be killed by someone and then out of the ashes, like a phoenix bird, you rise again and you’re alive and flapping your wings.  You need only a few moments to recover, flapping your wings; beak drawn open to get fresh inspiration.  You don't need any strength. People can be cruel to you, expect you to crash and die, but you live again. 

  A child can be much more than a phoenix bird. 

  Vasalissa's crimson cape had powers it lent her if only she'd decide what to do.  When she decided to fly, then she could fly.  And this she tried and did for quite a long time, flying over Russia and all of Europe and spying on her relatives and former guardians through windows.  Well, it was maybe just over a month – for a young person, this is a long time.  When finally it was time to live back in the real world and once she reaching her toes and then the bridge of her feet and finally her heels back on the ground in the 1930's again, she came out of the land of fairy tales only for a little while.

  One of the biggest fears an orphan child has, especially once they have grown up and no longer are accommodated by guardians who give them the basics of food, a home, clothes, and that sort of stuff, is reality.  This is reality that is a so-called adult's perception of the word and the awareness that is prescribed thus.  This awareness prescribed by many adults is something very imaginative in its own right.  However, it is used to dominate and curse the awareness the magical child with the child’s access to natural perfect bliss and love unconditional of outer conditions and persons.

  If you are a child that compromises, you will live on with a combination of the two:  the magical child still inside you but also the imagination of the adult's dictation of what reality is and how to live by it and this starting to dictate your mind and thus feelings, perspectives, choices in life.  These kinds of people often are the ones who must create worlds of their own, a combination of the two, through music and stories and art.  For this, those adults with very rigid ideas actually are unaware collaborators.  They may act as villains in stories or something creepy and oppressive or retaining or treacherous.  They serve a purpose of haunts and fears in children's dreams.

  If it weren't for antagonists, there wouldn't be a good story.

  Besides there being an antagonist, there is a lot of what we call magic.  As an orphan child, your imagination grows tall like Jack in the Bean Stalk's and wide like the lake where the forgotten world fell in once, consisting of all the stories and books and make-believe characters there've ever been and can be created right now and another time.  One child might prefer a farm with blossoming cherry trees in lanes and ten brothers and sisters.  The same child or another child might make up stories out of a shipwreck and nothing to eat and a walk into the jungle to make friends with orangatangs who feed the shipwrecked children and show them an old abandoned village where humans used to live.  For another child there would be pirates on that island instead.  For another child, there would be no shipwreck and starving children but palaces and golden cities and tower bells.  For another child there would be crocodiles and hidden treasure vaults and cobra-guarded treasure caves.  For another child, ghosts and a mysterious letter.  For someone else, Venetian gondolas with a dark-hooded guide through a controversial square with intricate artful facades glistening with rubies in a night ripe for murder . . . Not to mention, places where the forests once were, the time before the 90% of Ireland before the trees were felled and all the unicorns and fairies, elves, helpless princess maidens that had to pay the cost with their lives because of the loss of forest.  The tree houses of lost boys got lost too (but don't worry, some of them managed to escape in time to places like Neverland).  There is an unlimited imagination that an orphan child possesses.  It is kind of like having an unlimited bank account, in adult terms for those who might not be able to appreciate the meaning of this. 

  Bank accounts are always limited and conditional to how much money comes in.  But an orphan child can have an unlimited imagination.  And would you ever say and suppose that as the child grows past adolescence that any amount of “You're becoming a banker” talks or “What will become of you if you never get your parents' inheritance?” kind of challenges can dry up that bottomless lavish water-well in the middle of centuries of deserts and desert land?  A child past the age of adolescence and even in his or her 60’s and 70’s can find it again if they’ve ever lost it.

  To Vasalissa, Uncle Fritz had been one of the most important of her parents' relatives and friends because he had a sense of humour, which the others hadn't.  He also had visited her family in the castle a few times; her father had been fond of him, being a younger brother – step-brother actually.  He was someone who liked to play and joke around.  So it was most bewildering when at times he would come out with something like this:  “Who do you think you are?”  - (Without giving a chance to think about the question) – “Can't you see that life is about work, hard realistic work!?”  His Yorkshire terrier named Poodles used to run yapping and snapping at Vasalissa whenever she would enter his workshop while he was at work.  Uncle Fritz said, “You go waltzing and daydreaming and thinking you're somebody when you're nothing without a job.  Let's not even think about your music.  You can't make any money out of singing a song.  You might have considered yourself a novelist and your parents used to brag to others how talented and successful you are, by the age of ten having written two miserly treasure trunks filled with novels.   Your parents were fools.  Remember when I visited your home castle once?  You were once something special so long as your parents were alive, only they believed you were special and anybody visiting became drawn into their world.  But can't you realize that isn't reality?  Your castle is gone now.  Your parents abandoned you due to their own failures.  Nothing now from the past and your home when you were a girl-child is anything real. 

  “So you have talent?  None of those sentimental pictures you made that your parents filled walls up are anything respectable, surely you know that.  But if you could paint a series of Bavarian country houses and all the cracks and crevices in all the trees that have ever existed on the planet in accurate realistic detail, then I'll publish this series for a business calendar.  For my company. 

  “I keep going with only 4 hours sleep and rest, working for my living.  You have accommodation and are getting food to eat because I had such an irresponsible step-brother, your father, who left you witless and helpless and so that’s why you're here.  So why don't you try and take advantage of the great opportunity I am giving you and the great faith and belief I have in your talent and originality?”

  Vasalissa naively replied, “Yes, Uncle Fritz, that's great.  You have given me the courage I have needed.  I just needed someone to believe in me and offer me a chance to prove myself.  My parents had not known anything about art, though they thought I was a child prodigy.  All my framed drawings I put on the walls reaching the ceiling, the theme mainly of the innocence of childhood, really aren't of any value, even if it was to my parents because my parents are gone now.  They had me and left me.  They didn’t know anything about art, but you do because you know about the world.  My parents lived in a castle, with me.  We’re stupid.”   

  When someone such as Uncle Fritz in Bavaria teaches you that your parents were fools and he is much wiser than them, you will hurry up to create a new identity and burry the old which you’re ashamed of.  You don't want to be a fool like your parents who loved you and all the astonishingly beautiful and loving things you made and did, felt and thought of.

  And this is the time when a barred gate falls closed on an orphan child's imagination.  Who approves of a child's imagination?  To many adults imagination is gingerbread, a luxury that must not be eaten anymore when you become of age because an adult's life has to be devoid of all luxury that isn't paid for with hard-work, hard studying, sacrifice, aching bones, and a bitter taste on your tongue because of your sacrifice or stealing of your innocence. 

  If there is a male queen in the fairy tale of Snow White who asked the magic mirror "Who is the fairest of them all?"  Uncle Fritz in Bavaria was this way in terms of independent intelligence. 

  The gypsy and Russian noble-blooded Cremona mother, who lived in the sun-filled, high, high-rounded ceilinged castle with gold-braided columns, could see how her daughter shone out something that many people would like to murder.  And so she carefully dressed her daughter with a crimson cape so that these kinds of people would see blood whenever they looked on her and their attack on her would be only half as bad perhaps as they would have been without the crimson cape.

 

After Vasalissa's world-tour flying when she had taken the power to fly, having had enough of the Baba Yaga's cottage in the woods, Vasalissa let go her flying power as she hovered over the sparkling white buildings of Covent Garden, London, mingled with a few sooty grey and brown buildings that were not kept up such as that of the Orphanage Little Blossoms.  Viewing herself as a parentless, familyless, homeless, futureless child, Vasalissa still longed to live a life with others who were the same.  

  Now, if this orphan heroine had had chosen at the very beginning a different path other than reality in the 1930's where one doesn't get what one wants, she might have had the courage to live just like Pippi Longstocking who at only age 11 adopted an empty Villa Kula house and knew how an independent life is highly desirable over a subdued life consequent to being pulled into an orphanage where you had to go to bed at seven or be smacked and then go to bed at ten past seven.  You couldn't take your pet horse and monkey with you to the orphanage.

  Vasalissa was still having her illusions about orphanages.  However one thing she had learned about living in families: there was no guardian who could be either like her real mother and father she had lost.  Her real mother and father were irreplaceable, and every home she had sometimes really liked at first sooner or later proved to be intolerable and unsuitable.  There had perhaps been one house with Georgian columns where her guardians Uncle Jo and Aunt Persephone had remained respectable and left Vasalissa to do as she pleased, since they were always away on holiday or tending her horticultural garden of the finest class outside.  However, then the giant spiders appeared … after two weeks of a perfectly blissful life for Vasalissa... and she realized the reason her guardians here never stayed in the house much was because of these giant spiders with thickly spiky hairy legs – two of the best and least threatening feature about these spiders compared to their heads or their mouths or their antennae.

  There had been an ex-patriot gypsy, a fourth cousin of the Romanovsky-Cremona mother, who set up a camp with roof using an old circus tent striped red and let's-call-it vintage white to stop the rain pouring in.  The rain dribbled through instead.  This former gypsy was a kind, swarthy chubby man who drank Kurdish tea in little cups Vasalissa was allowed to drink too – even though it might have been considered guardian-privilege elsewhere.  Then one day, the lost ex-patriot gypsy children, three of them, scrambled under the table and Vasalissa only understood why when fire broke down the make-do roof striped red and vintage white … and Vasalissa's mother's fourth cousin was arrested by the 1930's police, charging with horses and charging with the charges at the Romanovsky for being an escapist.  All people living in the country, even in hiding, had to pay taxes for their roofs, paying the government what is their due.  Vasalissa's mother's cousin tried to persuade the police that he did not need to pay taxes because he did not have a roof, it was only fabric from a torn down circus tent from the time Bolsheviks lost interest in going to the circus and started burning them down …

  “And you burn what they did not burn down!”  The man was in tears and his face most pudgy than Vasalissa ever witnessed.  “I lose everything.  Everything.  Even when I try again, I lose it.”

  Thankfully, to prevent being arrested too, Vasalissa used her fibbing skill to tell the police officials she had never been living here, she was from the charitable organization “A Heart for the Outlaws” and was going to make her way back to town quick for the next meeting that afternoon.  The former gypsy children were to be taken to the orphanage and Vasalissa was glad for them, at least other children had better luck than she had.  She couldn’t go with them because she had already made the lie about having to rush to the “Heart for the Outlaws” charity meeting. 

  And that is how she made the journey back to London where of course she was turned away again because there were too many other guardians still left responsible for her.

  This time though, that she went, after her world-tour of flying and taking a better perspective of the world and parental guardians in general, she decided, “No more families, for me.”

  The director of Little Blossoms Orphanage in white-sparkling Covent Garden was a challenge as usual but the Cremona orphan had not expected something like this.

  This is what the director said, his hair noticeably all grey or silver or white now.

  “After these four years of your being 10, 11, 12, 13, 14!!  - while children prepare their real adult lives with an education, what have you done?”   

  Although he wasn't really asking, it was more of a challenge that wasn't meant to be answered, Vasalissa answered anyway and then was corrected in return for “answering back”.  She tried another answer and said the truth. “I was continuing my journey and carrying my burdens.” 

  “I am not interested in your stories.  Children should be seen and not heard.  You are lucky I still have got my eyesight – yesterday I was diagnosed by my physician that I've got a cataract in both eyes and will be blind in a few years.  And then I won't be able to see you.  Children should not tell stories; children have nothing but lies and schemes to get what they want.  They know nothing of reality.  Nothing.  There is no reality in their stories or anything they can see or hear or experience.  Now the death of their parents, this is the first and only thing I can accept as being of reality.  And that is what we are here to accommodate for.”

  Vasalissa was about to boast about her flying tour and say this was a great achievement for a fourteen year old, even if she had not been studying for it and had been unachieving during her age of 10, 11, 12, 13.  She wanted to tell the orphanage director about the real views on very many things, which she had been able to catch from up there, including the inequality between those people with powerful advantages over others and those people with less.  Vasalissa watched how it's a matter of previous events that led these people to such positions.  Every adult was once a child that had to listen to their parents, elders and teachers and was humiliated at some point because they didn't do something quite right.  Every parent and every teacher and authority had started from being messy crying babies in swindling cloth, like everyone else and Vasalissa had watched them grow up through windows even into old age when the same people would need the same kinds of swindling cloth again … but Vasalissa didn't begin sharing this enlightenment with the orphanage conductor.  Her case for the right to get into this orphanage was what she was here for.  She tried the use of victimhood.

  “Sir.  I've been learning how to escape guardians or sons and daughters of guardians who've tried to kill me.”  Hopefully there were some children's rights in place already in the 1930's and murder of a child was considered a crime, whether orphaned or not.  “A month ago, I nearly ended up in a Soviet Russian torture-interrogation chamber – headquarters, as they're called.  With another girl who can't find a place in an orphanage.”  (This wasn't entirely true; Katrina Crystalska was a slave who hadn't thought of finding a place in a state-run orphanage).  “I haven't been able to go to school and get an education to prepare for my future as an adult because I've been having to learn to run away and hide from nearly every guardian I've had to live with.  I've been in situations where, instead of practising The Table of Elements by memory, like other children my age, I've had to practice my Table of How To Plea For Directions From People Everywhere I Go when I haven't any money to buy a map.  I was running away quite often and lost in a big city or a small city.  Instead of learning, like other children, how to use a sewing machine in Home Economics Class, I've had to learned to use my own instrument in my gut that sometimes tells me this is a time to ask for help and from who and which sometimes tells me I'm left to my own devices and skill because anyone who might offer help might want my inner organs to sell on the Black Market… or anyone might trick me into some form of slavery such as prostitution or a laundry for the rich that's hidden because they pay half of the minimum wage and employ children to wash clothes as little as the age of three.”

  The orphanage director was someone who listened but was not interested.  Perhaps he was believing as usual that children only tell lies to get their own way.  But he was quite wrong about this.  As an orphan in the 1930's, you did not get what you wanted.  You could tell all the lies and stories you wanted.  Nobody would listen.

  The booking time the Little Blossom's Orphanage had granted Vasalissa that afternoon came to an end.  The secretary, a woman, square and thin-lipped and looking more like a man, came in late, apologizing for being absent, and because she was in a cheerful mood, she was so kind to spare Vasalissa from asking that difficult question she had to ask every time when it became apparent there was no way she was going to be given a place in the orphanage: Where will I go? 

  “Where will you go?” asked the secretary.

  There was no answer from anybody and the question became, apparently so on the faces of both the director and the secretary, a matter of sarcasm like sardines inside a tin that Vasalissa had not wanted to smell.  The can-openers were well in use at the office in this orphanage, after all.

  The secretary for this institution, having just been on a sky-blue holiday in Spain, suggested something cheerier than Vasalissa could have expected and so turned this try-out for the orphanage for the first time into one with the most unexpected outcome than ever before.

  “Why don't you work at a Metal Factory?”  The woman-man almost sparkled daisies with the holiday joy she had come with.  “There's the Light-Metal Factory, opposite the Heavy Metal Factory in one of the towns just one day's carriage drive from here.  It's a very industrial town with so much smoke and soot they have chimney-sweeps can go up the factory chimneys at least twice a day.  The fore-runner town for progress for our country.  I'll show you on the map. 

  “The Light-Metal Factory is for the women who can’t do the heavy work.  Choose that one, not the Heavy one or you'll collapse in an hour.  The Light-Metal Factory, that's what I would do.  Get a job there.”  The secretary breathed quite satisfied with the solution so well-presented.  “Well, that's the perfect opportunity to take for a young emerging lady such as yourself…  too young to want to obey guardians' rules, never fit to stay with any of them, and yet too young to get married an start a family and become a parental guardian your very self to see what it's like.  You toss away your parental guardians far too easily.  Maybe in two years, that might have to become the option for you, to get married.  We don't take in orphans anymore past their sixteenth birthday.  The best way to solve the plight of having no family and repetitively running away from the ones you don’t like is to start a family of your own.”

  Another unexpected outcome of Vasalissa's try-out for this orphanage: the prospect of being too old, in two years' time, to ever make it.

  And that was how Vasalissa Cremona became a metal factory worker.

 

Chapter Five:  The Secret Woods Behind the Factory and Who Lived There

The 1930's of course had its glories and cabaret and tippling champagne glasses but not in a light-metal factory.  And Vasalissa soon started ten hour shifts working there, which was unusually short a shift compared to what some of the other workers did.  But Vasalissa did not need to pay for her board and lodging, so she asked only for seven hours a day, only five days a week instead of six.  This is because she became friends with four girls who had a spare room in their little house in the secret woods behind the factory.  They welcomed the new factory-working girl wearing the cape that looked like blood and they knew of too much kindness to be afraid.  Nobody else wanted to speak to this girl, but these girls, with colour in their cheeks making them very different from the drained other women working here, not only wanted to be the new girl's real friends but they welcomed her to their warm fire hearth and said she could stay and live there with them and take their spare room for as long as she liked.

  The girls were all older, the youngest sixteen, wearing long dresses more from the Victorian era except for one of them who wore the latest fashion of short dresses of the 1930’s and had chin-length hair.  “We can't afford any dresses other than these handed down to us,” was what the three who wore Victorian dresses said.

  Now when it came to the subject and aspect of a person's affording this and not affording that, Vasalissa knew she had to keep a secret that made her very different from everybody working at the light metal factory.

  Vasalissa's father had left her a fortune greater than all the value of metal goods the Light-Metal Factory produced in a year though the manager deputies bragged about it so much.  And probably her father's fortune was greater than the value of the yearly produce of the Light-Metal and the Heavy Metal Factory put together, when Vasalissa thought of it.  Her father's business had been in building hover-crafts and ships that travel to faraway worlds.  But of course this wasn't applicable to London in the 1930's, perhaps it wasn't included anywhere in the registry of businesses.  Not many people believed in there being faraway worlds.  But the business still had an account with a bank.  Vasalissa was its heiress.  The money was there, it was just at the bank.  Since this was Reality in the 1930's-with-an-orphanage-you-can't-live-at-and-nothing-elese-you-want-comes-true-or-happens, the crimson caped heiress's pleas for her claim were turned down every time though sometimes she thought she was getting close. 

  But here where she lived now, she didn't need more money than she earned anyway.  She was about to learn something new: that money can't buy a house full magic inside it.

  And soon Vasalissa learned that she wasn't the only one keeping the secret of actually being rich and undeserving of working in a grimy factory in a sooty industrial town – even though this factory was on the outskirts by the woods.

  These four girls secretly wore pure purple amethyst stones sewn into their bodices underneath their clothes. 

  “Don't tell anyone here at the factory,” whispered the second eldest to her.  “We'll get in trouble.  They'll accuse us of witchcraft and we aren't witches.  The amethysts grew out of dew drops in the tulips we picked once in spring, growing along the walls of the house all around.  They weren't even all purple tulips.  If our youngest hadn't sniffed them in the morning before going to work – and she smells flowers all the time, we wouldn't have found them.  That was the only time we ever found amethysts, they never came again … oh, except spring of this year.  And so we've sewed some more amethysts into the garments we wear underneath which no one can see.”

  And instead of living in tightly-cramped dorms with little heating, in town, which were for the single women or in the slums for the married women, these four girls, sisters lived in a cosy, spacious old wood cottage in the wood behind the factory nobody knew about.  They showed Vasalissa the little chamber for the treasures in their house.  The little room was full of gold and silver all laid out tastefully; there were tea sets made of pure elaborate silver; all kinds of silver service and candelabras and gold goblets and treasure chest fill with jewels.  The light from the sun through the window beamed off all the diamond cuts and emeralds and the gold and silver.  Vasalissa’s eyes had not been used to such brightness inside a house as when the chamber doors were first opened. 

  The house on the outside was overgrown with leaves and moss and lichen and trees. Nobody came by here because everybody was too worn out after work and everybody was working and worn out in this town.  Nobody would guess there was a cottage with a room filled with treasures and that the owners of it wore jewels studded in their under garments.

  Then there was the porcelain in the dark wood cupboard that was worth at least all the girls' wages put together in a year.

  The names of the Amethyst wearers were:  Martha – if there could ever be a Martha who is pretty, this one was; Gladys – if that is a fashionable name in the 1930's, this girl represented the fashionable look of the 1930's; Amber – who truly had amber eyes if there really can be eyes that colour.  She was nicknamed “Tiger” at the factory because her eyes flared up like a tiger's when she was emotionally charged; and the youngest was Samantha – she was never called Sam if there ever can be a Samantha never called Sam, and she walked around singing, caring for the many plants the house was filled with.

  The way to the green-overgrown cottage was across a river behind the factory, into the woods of tall trees of different kinds, stepping over a moss-grown log at a particular hidden spot, and then there was an inconspicuous path never cleared of the damp autumn leaves fallen across it,

  The sisters wearing amethysts did not make friends with anyone.  But because of Vasalissa's crimson cape, they made an exception.  They could perceive she was one of them.  Vasalissa at last had become a friend of people who were women but weren't sneaky or plotting someone’s humiliation and fatality like the stepsisters in fairy tales.  Vasalissa could finally begin to unfold into a woman.  Amidst these girls she was a jewel.  They didn't compare her to themselves and so there was no competing or jealousy.  

  Vasalissa wondered if she could ever share her secret with them that she was secretly an heiress of a fortune larger than that of the owners of the factory they worked at. 

  It was not easy for the Amethyst sisters to have to keep so many secrets and the secrets were far many more and colourful than Vasalissa's secret of being an heiress with lots of plain gold coins and one-or-two-colour printed paper bills waiting for her in a bank.

  “Have you seen my Persian carpet?” Martha.

  Just a day before Vasalissa came to live with the mysterious girls, the eldest sister Martha had been looking for her Persian carpet with the colours on it all in the rainbow and all the shades and shadows of the forest.

  Gladys in her room was looking through the many engagement rings and simple stones of different colours collected in rows inside a middle-sized treasure chest.  “Oh, do you mean, I've forgotten it from when Prince Aliadad and I took it two nights ago?  Of course not, sister.  Have a look outside.  I might have left it by the aspen tree when I pounded it to get out the sand.  The desert sand just sifts in, but comes out with lots of pounding, believe you me.  A sore tired arm I've got after it.  And the veins in my hand don't settle down from their bulging for another day or two”

  Martha sighed at old wood the door, brown eyes rolled and black hair hung around her rose and cream face.  She had been organizing and housekeeping.  “Must you always be so careless with what is lent to you?”

  Gladys, clear-olive green eyed.  “Oh sister.  Don't start the poison-ivy growing over our kitchen table chairs.  It's only once in a while I forget what I do with something you lend me.”

  Martha sighed again, arms crossed.  “Like the stained-glassed rainbow you forgot was still hung around your neck when you went to work.  That was only a week ago.  Honestly, Gladys.  Mrs. Crane won't be unsuspecting of you and maybe the four or five of us ever again.”  She was beautiful and kind, Martha was.  But her forgiveness is mighty precious, so Gladys thought. 

  “We have to be careful, Gladys.”

  “That's what people say who have money.  'We have to be careful,' they tell their children.  All we get is treasure and Spanish coins called the 'real' in English because they're real even though they possibly can't be since they're from the 1500's.”

  Martha admitted her own humour.  “Reales, in plural form.  Then it’s not real anymore.”    

  “We haven't got any money that's useful,” retorted Gladys.  “It might have been real hundreds of years ago.  Not now.”

  Martha smiled, mock-quizzically back at her sister.  Then she quoted her own quote, “The coins that are in currency today are just as unreal as the Spanish real are unreal.  All money is play-money, created by adults who were once children.  All money is pretend just the same.  Everything in life is pretend.  The children still know things as they are.” 

  Gladys was verily proud of her sister’s prophetic streak.  Gladys had to keep up her reputation however for being defiant toward the eldest always in charge. “I'm so glad I don't have a real philosopher for a sister or a brother.  It would be so tedious having to listen to their philosophical quotes all day,” the second sister taunted.

  “How glad are you to have an older sister who teaches you to be humble about the magical things coming into her life, out of nowhere?  . . . Without the use of money or a father or husband looking after you who has money?”

  Gladys mused, smiling ironically. “I'm as glad as one can be when green branches shoot through cracks in the wall by the windows so the draft is finally fixed.  And I'm glad as one can be to have the royal privilege of resting my elbows on arm rests at the table that are grown-over by vines out of nowhere – although it's very apparent that these magical green fibres grow wherever they can through cracks and holes because this house is so old, Martha.  This house definitely is something to keen hidden away.”

  Martha smiled dryly.  “Old and rich.”

  “Dark, leafy rich.  Martha, by the way, I wonder why new treasures aren't appearing anymore.”

  “It's because we've had our fill.  The magic knows contentment is the greatest treasure.”  Martha could look like a beige plush rabbit with her nose and cuteness sometimes.  “Maybe it's because you're showing them off too much.”

  Gladys’s 1930's head scarf, side to side broad and green, glinted its gold threads in the sunlight shining through the less-washed window.  “When will be the day I can forget about the greed and envy of the world so I can run out and give out the magical crying candy that tastes like candy floss, left and right?  And the rainbow glass for bringing out everyone's innocent joyful inner child which in deed would make the world a better place right after everyone's cried their tears from the candy.” 

  Martha couldn’t help but giggle and the stifle her giggle.  Her younger sister could be cute and funny without meaning to.

  Gladys lit up like a child and kidding herself, continued, “And then there won’t be any greed and envy.  The magic would keep bringing new things every day.  We sisters wouldn't have to worry about it at all; we'd share it all and make use of everything it’s brought.  Martha, but I do resent a carpet that can't be used.  Can I at least use it one more time just to say adieu to Vanessa's children?  The Galapagos Islands could do with a little cheering up – nobody there has a sense of humour like mine . . . “

  Martha, the eldest, could joke equally to how she could be exacting at times. 

  The word exacting is another word for being strict and wanting things to be exact even if you haven’t got any measuring cups and measuring spoons at home and no measuring tape at the seamstress shop you are an owner and manager of. 

  “And so what if there aren't any laughing Galapagogans on that salamander island?  I wouldn't notice because I'm not at all there.  I am here, in Hertfordshire, in a cottage in a wood that really is off the sphere of this earth.  I don't know where it is, but it's not Galapagos Island.”  Martha chuckled, being inconsistent in her exactingness.  Next she became cross.  “Gladys, you're not going to ride my Persian carpet again, unless I can see that the travel bug in you has been killed off by immune system that knows what's good for you.  And knows what's good for all of us.  You can keep all those engagement rings you've collected from Gibraltar and Paris, and they’ll be set with pretty jewels but just as much with your heartsickness over not being married like the rest of the women our age – “

  “I didn’t want to be married.  I would never leave our home and my sisters and my way of life.  But I’m twenty and I want to see boys and get to know some – “

  “Get to know them,” scoffed Martha the eldest.  “You’re sounding like a boy.  All that they want is to get to know a girl and by that they mean getting to know you with your skirt flipped up – “

  “Martha, you are so insulting.  The romantic boys aren’t anything like that.”

  “Hmm, it’s only boys in novels you’ve been meeting.”

  “I only want to meet a boy who’s someone like in novels.”

  “Back to your engagement rings, you can count on them to be your souvenirs for life, a time to remember when your head's spinning because there's so much work to be done in the house before the freezing winter . . . Gladys, haven't you forgotten, you're poor.  Your life is supposed to be about humbleness and modesty virtues and working hard, not flying off gathering engagement rings and wands of silk and lace.  People are going to be suspecting that we're keeping secrets.  Of course it's true, we are.  But can't you see the consequences of what will happen?  We'll be sent to a madhouse and then to prison if we're lucky, for stealing all these things we can't prove from where.”

  “Why can't we prove it?  Why can't the town judge himself and the mayor jump on the magic carpet themselves, together, and ride to where I was given all these things?  People are so hospitable in the Middle East and in Asia . . . The judge and mayor of our town can jump on the magic carpet themselves and be guests there themselves.”

  Martha grunted a laugh.  She rolled her eyes.  “I'll bet the carpet won't hold these beer-barrel-weighted men.  It'll be pounded to the ground with a thud and torn to shreds, my poor carpet.”

  “Martha, I can just tell everybody I have a rich paramour,” flounced the second eldest with mock-pretentiousness – though she could be quite pretentious for real a lot of the time.  “What can be more flattering than that? A rich paramour, an owner of a textile printing company, won't that be romantic, if it comes true?”

  “Yeah, wouldn’t you like that?  He’ll print you all your dream prints . . . for free.”

  “A home with chandeliers and servants . . .”

  “She who doesn't work, shall know no free-time.”

  “But none of us are going to be getting married, are we?” poked Gladys, snuffing her nose up and mouth together, pretending she was one of what she called the “unrefined working-class” girls at the factory who presumed Martha at least was never going to get married, having all the bitter streaks of an old maid.  “You 22, me 20, Amber wasting her bloom staying at home and working at the factory might as well call ourselves spinsters now.  Then at least we can stop worrying about how Prince Charming is ever going to arrive at the doorstep.  However will he find his way?”  Coming to a realization how this mock-distress was a genuine distress and sadness for her, the second Amethyst sister sat down in despair on her bed, the short bob of her stylish dark hair bobbing like other chins next to her own chin.  Moodily she sulked into the “getting by” air of hers and lifted her face again with dignity and brimming humour.  Next to her were some very attractive leg garments, a pair laid out side by side.  “Here, try on these new red – what-you-call-button-up-leg-fashion.”  Gladys tossed some onto her bed.  “Not from Paris.  I found them in New York.”

  Martha, the first Amethyst sister, could not care anything for fashion.  She had her own set-attire of cream and white aprons and petticoats; long skirts like before the hems ever started to rise higher at the turn of the 20^th century of rosewood and beiges and alt rose and sometimes a band sewn along the hem of pink to match the fox gloves teeming in the summer – a kind of wildflower.  Her reply to Gladys’s offer of glamour was a dry smile and shake of her dark-haired head, leaning on the old wood door frame.   She had never been to New York, neither to Paris.  Her opinion was that these were the capitals of ambition and greed, two traits she believed her little cottage in the secret wood was a haven away from.  If only her younger sister could be more discerning.

  “Martha, why not?”

  “No thanks, I don't need any more than the ones that I've got.”

  “Those are completely old,” returned Gladys, petulance being a good description for a haughty petunia.  “Darned over and over again and crumpled . . .”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

  “I don’t have to be adored and I don’t have to adore myself in the same way you do.”

  “What?” exclaimed Gladys, hurt by the moral superiority Martha claimed for herself.  “I’m just making the best of the magic carpet rides to faraway places where people give me things like this – “

  “Because you’re so specially loved and admired and adorable like a child …”

  “Martha, don’t be jealous.”

  “I’m not jealous.”

  “Yes you are.  You’ve always had to be the eldest and had to swallow the emptiness you felt when all the special attention went to the younger sisters.  You always had to look after us and were expected to have outgrown the need to be cute.”

  Martha had nothing to say.  She stared back, sourness emerging.  Gladys was right but Martha was only on the verge of recognizing this and merely gaped instead of gnash out.  To be kind and brighten up, Gladys apologized and admitted she was jealous of things about Martha sometimes too.  “And I might be jealous of your modesty because . . . because, as you say, I need to prove things to myself and therefore care so much about worldly things and can’t be as modest as you are.”

  “It’s because I never got so much attention as you, when we were little.”

  “True, but that’s because you’re not as sociable as I am.”

  “Whatever you want to explain it by,” Martha said to cover up the little hurt of wanting to be more sociable and averting people for whatever reasons she hadn’t thought much about. 

  “I’m grateful that magic has come into this house with its green leaves and vines and branches shooting all across it.  I do see how unusual it is and if anybody finds out about it, our lives will be changed … for the worse.  It would be better if the house would just return to as it was before this all started to happen and then the house might become as you’ve always wished it … humble and not so alive and poverty-stricken …”  She laughed to tease as Martha threatened her with a fist for what she was accused of. 

  With mock contriteness, Gladys resolutely swore, nodding, “And that is all the more reason I need to keep this all a secret.  I do show off all too easily, don’t I?  I forget my sisters with all the attention I give to myself looking in the mirror.  I go shopping in foreign faraway lands, thinking how I can combine my beauty with beautiful things and feel I’ve got lots of friends.”

  She was more serious now and looked sincerely in her sister’s solemn eyes.  “I want you to trust me, Martha.  I’m going to keep all the clothes and jewellery and fancy stuff to myself, here in this house, and not wearing any of it to the factory – well, except some lingerie.  But nothing that anyone can see.  The treasures and magical things that need to be kept a secret, like the Persian carpet and Rainbow Glass and I’m not going to use them anymore until . . . the week before Christmas so I can all get us presents.”

  Martha laughed out loud, though she thought she could keep a solemn older sister’s face.

  Olive green her dress with a variety of colours that roses can be, a short 1930's dress, in all her vainglorious attire and rouge in her cheeks, Gladys stepped over and asked for a hug.

  The eldest of the Amethyst sisters with the natural rose in her cheeks and ebony hair let her heart rush in a wild fierce sister hug.  That was how things worked for the good, in sistership.

  The four Amethyst sisters were foster sisters, having been fostered by a very kind old woman who used to live in this house in the secret wood since before a factory had ever been built.  She had taught the girls always to recognize how fragile each one of them really was.  And any anger and resentment toward each other would mean that one or the other sister would feel they might have to face the world alone, and this was something no one should ever have to feel, it would be cruel.  Deep love within your heart was always kind and looking out for the other.

  Gladys promised herself and Martha that she was going to try to think more humbly of herself and therefore wear some of the house dresses with the long skirts instead that she had pushed to the far side of her closet.  And she was going to stop wishing for glamour and just take on humbleness as a virtue and a sanity of mind and health to her spirits.

  “Luckily I finished the strawberry tarts earlier than I expected,” Martha returned, speaking over her shoulder, long skirt sweeping behind her, with mock sternness after Gladys urged her to go back to her work she was devoted to.

   

  Besides devotion to the growing up of her younger sisters, Martha was very disciplined about work and keeping the house running.  This was also part of the virtues of character Gran Fran had taught, the kind woman who had adopted them all as babies.  Gladys was the least disciplined of the four; she was kind and warm at heart and perhaps overly generous at times because of exuberant outbursts of joy.  She was often in need of proving independence, especially independence from Martha, and so she could often be sullen and sarcastic like a bobcat when someone's been trying to make it tame.  Amber was too independent already to care about proving herself so, a tower of strength filled with light.  You did not need to speak much with her, her power already communicated that there wasn't anything to say – at least not by words.  Words usually snap the twig of honesty from the start.  Samantha, when she was ruminating something, shared her thoughts and feelings with Amber without expecting an answer.  Samantha was the youngest of the four young lady sisters and she was perhaps the one whom Vasalissa spent the most time with, introducing Vasalissa the housework and garden and forest-gathering ways of life.

  Living in a cottage in the 1930's without electricity and without running water, in a secret wood, of course needed a lot of chores to do every day to keep it up.  Work in and around the house became a necessity to Vasalissa to get through so the fruits could be enjoyed: warmth from the stove to warm your hands by in the morning before sunrise; fresh clean water in a pitcher filled from the well and a white dish to wash your face in; long autumn leaf and autumn-berry -dyed skirts to wear that trailed the wood floors – and the wood floors were mopped twice a day for luxury, and swept continuously; there were fresh flowers in the vase and berries in baskets because someone had picked them.  There were fragrant cinnamon pies and scones because someone had baked them and had picked them from the forest or planted and harvested the ingredients . . . of course flour and cheese and butter were bought from the shops using the coins the girls earned from work at the factory.  There was a bag of salt Gladys had put together from a trip to the sea, once.  She joked it was all the salt that had come off her skin from swimming and drying up in the sun – and Samantha believed that some of that was true.  Green-eyed Gladys wouldn't give away what her technique had been to separate the salt from the sand grains.

  Because the new member to the house, Vasalissa Cremona in the crimson cloak was only 14, she was joined up for a team with Samantha.  Because Samantha liked to daydream and work very slowly and thoughtfully as any task and chore for her was leisure her nature was directed by a heart that just was filled with joy of home, Vasalissa's start and learning the Amethyst Sisters' home ways could not have been easier.  Keeping a home became something entirely new, and yet familiar – for hadn’t Vasalissa played housekeeping this way a bit when she was a little child?  Now she could be relieved from her with fears from past guardians and foster siblings and servants of her guardians who made housework and garden work a dread because Vasalissa could never do anything good enough and could never know enough.  

  Tall with long hair almost the colour of the house, an old darkened brown wood, Samantha was very humble for 16, the common age for wanting to define one’s self as individual and powerful.  She wasn’t thirsty for power or ways to appease a quest for and admiration.  She did not mind hearing Gladys making a comment about Samantha’s plain clothes or Martha trying to speed the work up.  The youngest of sisters living away in the woods liked the way she was and nobody could persuade her to be more like anybody else.  She liked her young girl-self enough to make herself younger than Vasalissa at times just so Vasalissa wouldn’t feel small or worried about being the very youngest.  Samantha still kept her hand-sewn dolls, speaking to greet them when she entered her room in a breeze between things to do and think about.  Her sense of humour was a hearty one since she had such a big heart for everything and everyone.  She wore just very plain cuts of dresses and aprons and liked greys, especially blue-greys.  She took hand-me-downs but not without sewing them over Samantha-like.  Like little girls in Edwardian and Victorian and Georgian times, she still wore pinafores, most often a big blue-grey one – plain and no frills.  She was the only one who looked after the plants in the house and had her thumb particularly working miracles with spring-green leaves.  The little lives were wonders to her.

  She delighted in wonder and all attention on little things that were happening, becoming of something, growing, making its voice heard.  She was the fondest of the kittens; laughed holding up one by one when they mewed after their birth.  She wasn’t ashamed of child-like glees and didn’t use it for basking in attention but for everyone to bask in the richness for celebrating their own sense of being and each other’s the way babies do.

  “Martha, Gladys Vasalissa, Amber.  Can you hear each one of them say, 'Hello, I'm here now.  I've made it?'”

  Vasalissa laughed as Gladys made a broad-voiced quip, “I was wondering for a moment if you're going to give them our names, Samantha.”

  Samantha's blue eyes rang out.  “Why would I?”

  Sitting down next to Samantha, the cat mid-wife, “You said my name particularly as for that orange one.”

  Samantha’s voice began a ballad – in the old sense of the word meaning a long song telling  a story.  She sang, “Of course I did.  It would do your vanity good to think yourself orange for once instead of ivory and rose petals and ebony.”  She beamed in affectionate pride at her older sister with playful scorn.

  “My hair's dark chocolate.”  Gladys picked up a kitten with her speciality of playful care.

  “We'll learn each of the kittens' meows.” sang Samantha.

  “And be just like their mother,” said Gladys.  “Just as well.  It doesn't seem to be that I'll become a human mother before I've lost my bloom,” she retorted.  “I feel too young to be a mother and too old to be one anyway.  And too young and too old to meet the right man.  At twenty, I belong to the last quarter of girls who are yet unmarried.”

  “Oh… it’s not exactly the last quarter,” hummed Samantha, the youngest.  “Maybe only half.”

  Gladys shook her head petulantly.  “It’s the last quarter.  A fourth.  I’m the faulty one, the chipped teacup standing on the dusty shelf.”

  Martha’s response to this: “Is that all you want to be, somebody’s cup of tea?”

  “Well, of course, to warm up their soul.  Warm up their heart and warm up their toes.”

  “Smelly toes,” chided Samantha, mischievously.  “Will you still snuggle and warm up his feet if he has smelly toes?  What’s the use of hot water bottle anyway?  Won’t they be to be found in your household?”

  “Gladys, you are yet too young to make a wise match, with your aged twenty,” Martha told her sister, ‘for-your-information’-wise.  “And there are many things that are much better and desirable when they are aged.  Such as wine and cheese.   And marzipan stolen.  Men, as well – sometimes, not always.  Maybe more on the inside than on the outside.  Wait till you’re older and you’ll be matured wine or matured cheese… sweeter and full.”

  “And bitter.”

  Martha protested indignantly, “Well, if you wanted to frolic and marry when you were the age of 16, you could have.”

  “I wouldn't frolic and marry!” protested Gladys.  “Especially not because you always accused me to be that type of girl!”

  “So why do you complain about having missed out?” 

  Gladys’s big beautiful eyes boggled comically a bit and then she just sighed with her hands folded over crossed knees.  “It’s because I’m twenty now.  I feel I’m already aged cheese.  Do you mean really old, when we’ve greyed and hobble leaning on a walk stick?  And that's when we'll start going to the balls and country dances and smile back when a gentleman acknowledges us?”

  Amber, laughing, spoke up, “Gladys, you're the provocative one of us.  You sometimes smile back, I've seen you.”

  “Oh but that's because I'm a tomboy.  I never mean it in a seductive way.  I just can't do that.”

  “Why not?” challenged Martha.  “Then you could leave us forever and live the life you always wanted to.”

  Gladys crossed her arms and implored, “Why is it me you’re expecting to strike a match with someone?  Striking matches, the stick ones, those can be easier.  I've struck one or two with some of the men on my travels with our Persian rug.  Little matches of romance, being touched by wonder together, the things we’re both mystified about – music and art and textiles – and of course no kiss or even stroke on the hand, Amber.”  Gladys stuck out her tongue.

  Amber smiled in her depth for quiet understanding.  Then she said, soothingly, “You were frightened about having to leave us, weren’t you?”

  The second Amethyst sister nodded with her fashionable green head band shaking its beads.  “It's as far as I'll go.  There were only one or maybe two men with the imagination and soul to strike those little matches with me.  And I miss them terribly.”

  She sighed again.  Petulantly playful, she nodded towards Martha, telling Vasalissa, with a wink, “Martha’s the one who’s been the most misfortunate in love.   You’ve got a history, Martha, and Vasalissa doesn’t know about it.  For Martha, Vasalissa,” said Gladys, candidly, “there has only ever been one.  Bertram.”  To say something candidly, by the way, is to pretend someone isn’t going to get sad.  Gladys sincerely believed her Martha would benefit from sarcasm. 

  “Bertram, Bertram … The romantic friend and sweetheart who romanced my sister.  And now he's married.  They can’t have children so they always act so in love as if they’ve just met each other.  But we don’t know what they’re really like behind closed doors on their own.”  Gladys announced, defiantly on behalf of her pride for all three sisters and herself, “I don’t believe Bertram can like and love her as much as he loved my sister.  He just couldn’t wait for Martha and Martha always disappeared.  He didn’t know she was travelling by magic carpet and came from England while he lives by a lake in Switzerland, studying.  He didn’t know my sister has obligations and a home to attend to and has to look after her younger sisters.  Well, because he was so careless to find out more about our eldest sister and couldn’t wait, he’s gotten himself fixed in a marriage that’s boring and a pain.  And he refuses to send Martha word through her friends in Switzerland that he cares for her.  He refuses to admit he remembers her but I’ve seen when I was on the carpet once, outside his window, he was crying over one of Martha’s letters and kissing them.  Love letters, of course.” 

  Martha mournful shook her head; Vasalissa had never seen this darkness in her as this now.  “No, I’ve said horrible things to him in those letters.”  Martha's misery about this man she still loved only showed later when she cried tear rolling after tear at the dinner table.

  Vasalissa gathered the information for herself about the Amethyst sisters.  So, Martha is heartbroken, Gladys longed to flirt but was inhibited inside a tomboyish flamboyance whenever she met and talked to men and gallavanted with and made friends with in faraway places she travelled to by magic carpet.  Amber the third sister had not been in love – or who knows for sure because she won’t speak about herself . . . and Samantha?  She seemed too content in her young femininity and disinterested in anything outside it.

  If there was any fairy tale character Samantha might take after, it was Sleeping Beauty.  It was such a pity that so many times when picking blackberries outside, Vasalissa had to hear how Samantha pricked her finger again on the thorns.  She could not watch her fingers very well.  Her sisters nicknamed her Sleeping Beauty.  The joker second sister who sometimes crueller than Martha the bitter chocolate eldest, told Samantha, “A shame no prince will come around here in a hundred years.  Keep your hundred-year sleep, Samantha; sleep in another hundred years.  You'll be Sleeping Beauty forever at our cottage in the woods nobody will ever have passed by until then.”

  The youngest of the to-be spinsters, still sweet sixteen, smiled; happy about staying at the cottage for 200 years since she never wanted to leave anyway.

  The youngest Amethyst sister had the voice that the nightingale had when it turned human those few times through the centuries.

  Nobody had known where she had come from as a baby.  Each of the sisters in the wood here had been orphaned or in any case given to be raised by an old woman named Gran Fran a few forests away on the outskirts of a town that was particularly old-fashioned where every second person was an antiquarian or medieval artisan – an artisan, meaning a purse or shoe or hair comb maker or magician or descendant of French troubadours, still wearing hats from the time.  Troubadours were the musicians at royal courts going back as far as 1100 AD.  Trouveres were the inventors of music.

  Samantha though, perhaps did not come from any parents in that town.  Just on the outskirts where the trees were in full green as if they were so all year-round, one warm July day, a baby in a basket was flowing down the river.  And that was Samantha.

  “Her crying was singing, when I first heard it,” the child said who had heard her and could swim and so swam out to fetch her.  The townspeople wondered why the ten-year-old child, in bright-filled awe stared at the baby and insisted she had heard the baby singing and not crying, when it was on the river.  The townspeople gathered around at Evelyn Millsworth’s house to see the baby were in unusual awe about it in a superstitious way many of them.  The baby was not the first one found floating down a river.

  The baby never sang again until she grew to a normal age to start singing again.  But an old lady, Gran Fran had heard the baby singing on the river too and was the quickest person to ask to mother the baby and raise her as her own.

  Samantha told Vasalissa sometimes when they were mushroom picking in the woods how the little elves might get picked up holding on to the mushroom stems if you plucked too fast.  You had to make your movements slowly, with graceful hand, giving the elves a chance to escape.  Vasalissa never saw any elves.

  Mushrooms popped up overnight sometimes, particularly around damp tree stumps and along the mossy roots.  Some appeared to be round brown rocks but were mushrooms indeed and the tastiest.  Some you could poke or pinch and then dust puffed out at you in big clouds.

  To one side of the house was a stack of chopped wood ready for the fires burning inside to keep the girls warm and for their cooking and baking.  There were wild spruce trees and one fir tree with long bendy needles very close to the side of the house.  Samantha and Vasalissa had to work there every so often and pull away the spider webs that covered up the logs.  The spiders were so quick at re-making their play and home ground there.

  The bramble bushes were thick and there was some unwanted furniture such as a chair with three legs, a chair with one leg; and young women’s fanciful articles such as a broken parasol. 

  The broken parasol, Vasalissa learned, was of some history to the Amethyst girls.  Nobody had cared for it the most except Martha because it had been a present to her from Bertram, her one love.  During the time it had been given to her, she could find no better use for the parasol than to hand it down to her sister the second Amethyst sister who adored such things.  Martha herself was too practical and defiant of showy luxury.  Gladys might have had another parasol already, but this parasol, so crème-coloured and special coming from her older sister’s romance with the handsome and admirable Bertram, was perhaps as delightful to her as for some girls their older sister’s first baby.

  Samantha told Vasalissa, picking her mushrooms in her usual dreamy way, “Gladys by herself had walked down the Champs Elysee with this parasol.  Do you know where the Champs Elysee is?”

  Vasalissa vaguely remembered her view of it from out of a carriage window when she had been living with a guardian in Paris for a while.  She never had actually promenaded it.

  “It's in Paris, isn't it?”

  Samantha, smiling impishly like glimpses of a cheerful sun through dreamy rain.  “Glady had been in Paris.  She visited Paris by means of the Persian carpet ride in springtime just this year.”  Samantha recounted a story.  “Our fashionable sister wasn't strolling down the Champs Elysee, she was flying down it, sitting with her parasol, when a Scottish wind started to blow, coming from L'Arc de Triumph.  That had been for our sister Gladys the sign to pick up her Persian carpet and go. 

  “But Glady kept the parasol open and you know what can happen to an umbrella when there's a Scottish wind,” said Samantha with a hint Vasalissa did not need to be reminded of, since Vasalissa had been to Scotland indeed during the windy months.

  “The umbrella turns inside out,” replied Vasalissa.  “There aren't any parasols in Scotland,” she said glumly.

  “Neither are they the fashion in Paris,” said Samantha.  She continued, her eyes very blue though they had just been a hazel or almost green.  “My sister was sitting up straight and proper on her Persian run, smiling demurely on her promenade d'elegance' up the Champs Elysee . . . People stopping to stare and many screamed and someone called for the French police, when suddenly… the carpet picked up speed!”  Samantha laughed without mercy.  “That's when the lovely parasol turned inside out and nothing after that could mend it.  The French police ran after Gladys but her rug was too fast.”

  Vasalissa envisioned the French police acting particularly quickly to an incident like this, a young woman sailing in mid-air on a magic carpet.  That was something entirely out of the usual order of promenading in French style.  All down the lanes sitting on benches by the trees, Parisians were sultry like the afternoon sunny countryside and eating chocolate-filled pastries called pain au chocolat, painstakingly. 

  “Gaols are not nice places in any country,” the youngest sister in the secret woods whispered, laughing still.  “Gladys says she flew by the Bastille, the most famous prison in Paris, from the time when people wore white wigs.  This parasol got caught in one of the flags though and so it got even more wrecked.  This is why it's of no use except to hang around here.  At least it doesn't get dirty, under the shelter of our roof.”

  Vasalissa felt the fabric of the sun umbrella with her fingers.  It was fit for a gown.  “I'm surprised nobody sews it into a dress?” she suggested.

  Samantha chuckled.  “It's still too precious a souvenir for that, to Gladys.  Gladys used to love Paris.  But now she'll be recognized by the police anywhere – there's too big of a risk.” She shrugged. 

  The spider webs covering the tall stack of wood caught Vasalissa’s attention – they always did whenever she walked by here.  The spider webs were horribly sticky things when you tried to pull them off something.  She wasn't scared of the spiders. 

  “I can see why this parasol is something worth keeping,” Vasalissa brought up, tunefully.   

  Samantha, still smiling, “My bold and daring sister likes to flaunt what she's got.  She gets in trouble for it sometimes.  Gladys loved that parasol like it was Paris' best treasure, more of a treasure than the marble sculptures at Le Louvre, which to me I would consider more precious if anyone insisted.  Or the red roses at Le Jardin des Plants … well, Paris is full of those kinds of treasures.”  Samantha dreamed a while with her hands to her sides.  “There’s the house full of Rodin's figures emerging out of marble rock.”  A rueful smile was what she let Vasalissa see.  “I've never been to Paris and I shall never go.”

  Vasalissa looked back at her.  “Why not?”

  Samantha smiled, to Vasalissa, to the pine-filled air with the smoke from the chimney of the house.  “I like home better than anywhere, and I have and make my own treasures here,” the youngest sister said.  “So do my sisters.  This parasol is one of them, and to me it is because of it has been to Gladys and was a gift before that to Martha from someone who loved her.; and the funny pretty thing has the story I’ve told you.

  “ I’ve always been in love with this house.  My home is my true love.”

  As a once dweller in the sunshine-filled castle with its high high rounded ceilings, where her parents had made it her home and framed her drawings in columns reaching tall, the Cremona orphan remembered what it meant, that home was a better place than anywhere in the world.  But her home was castle in another world, anyway.  There was no getting back. 

  Smiling just as rueful, with a deprivation inside which edged on jealousy looking at someone who had their home and wasn't leaving it, Vasalissa acknowledged Samantha's home.  And then Samantha said, “You're home, here, friend … sister.  Stay here as long as you like.  And come back here whenever you need to come back.  We're here always.”

  Vasalissa listened and nodded and smiled.

  The two girls started working again, and Vasalissa chuckled out loud at the memory of her experience of Paris but did not wish to recount it to anyone who was not into gory novels.  Samantha was such a blithe and sheltered girl, eyes filled with the blue bells and violets humming in their haven.

  Since Vasalissa was chuckling to herself, Samantha asked, “What are you laughing about?  Glady's parasol story?”

  Vasalissa lied and nodded.  Lying includes any deception in behaviour.  Vasalissa's “yes” kind of smile with her eyes came before her nod.

  If Samantha could only know the secrets Vasalissa kept, she would agree that Vasalissa’s visiting in Paris had been comparatively pleasant compared to many other places Vasalissa had to make her home in.  Although Vasalissa had escaped the lists of guardians forever and she was now in the perfect haven safe for a girl to grow into a young woman, memories of the old life returned to her every so often. 

  When the Cremona girl in a crimson cape, aged 13, first arrived in this city famous for its beauty, she did not know that until leaving it again all she would see of the city would be from a window inside a black horse-drawn coach.  Who was her guardian this time, in Paris?  It was her father's English cousin, Uncle James Lorton.  A scientist, wearing gold-rimmed round glasses, he looked much like a werewolf who travelled to his laboratories in dark secret quarters of the French capital city every day.

  In the black horse-drawn coach travelling across Paris, Vasalissa sat with her uncle who ignored her and with passengers who had been mummed and put to sleep by a chloroform-sprayed cloth held over their nose and mouth before the journey.  They were Uncle James Lorton's humans for what Vasalissa was sure were animal lab-tests.  There were always three of them for every week, hostages, obviously. 

  Chloroform, by the way, is the old-fashioned anaesthesia in those romantic times. 

  Uncle James Lorton always wore a tall black hat from Charles Dickens' time even though that wasn't the fashion anymore in the 1930's.  He asked Vasalissa to travel with him in the mornings so she would see some of Paris out the window but she never got to see inside his laboratories.

  Part of Vasalissa condition for her board and lodging by Uncle James Lorton was to work feeding the laboratory hostages meals while the hostages were still under effect of the drugs and whatever experiments they had to undergo while away from home: combing their hair, powdering and applying lipstick for the women, shaving the men's growing beards, reading children's books in French to them.  The hostages never spoke a word to her and her uncle was hardly at home and even scarcely looked at her.  He was a bit mean though, giving orders to his servants to only feed and attend Vasalissa with the same food as that of the servants.  The hostages lived better than the servants.  Vasalissa fed them the same food with the same silver and china finery as she saw Uncle James Lorton ate at the table at which she never sat to eat.  She ate at a small desk at the other side of the dining room. 

  The hostages never did any work for their food and board as Vasalissa had to and that was unfair.  A servant said to Vasalissa, in French well-pronounced though Vasalissa understood French perfectly well even in slang and at top speed, “If serving as a guinea pig for the master's old lab-testing isn't classified as work, even though it's involuntary work, then I don't know why porridge is not something I look forward to in the morning as much as a pain au chocolat.”

  Besides the human hostages, for which Vasalissa all gave names since nobody told her what their names really were, Uncle James Lorton kept real live guinea pigs as well.  These stayed much livelier than the human guinea pigs.  They ran active and free inside their pens on the floor in one of the rooms of the grand high-ceilinged rich home of Uncle James Lorton (called Uncle James Lorton and never Uncle James because he had had an Uncle James he detested when he was a child so he strictly demanded his Cremona niece never to call him Uncle James).  But the guinea pigs died rather quickly after two days or three and were replaced, whereas the humans merely disappeared and were replaced, after a whole week.  Vasalissa was told they had to go freshen up with a walk along the Seine – the main river in Paris where it wasn't recommended to swim in – and Vasalissa watched the hostages she had looked after like bean-bag dolls pushed out of the house on their wheelchairs, with her intuition telling her something was dreadfully wrong.  They never came back, but then some new hostages appeared the same afternoon and she had to care for them, and in loyalty to them she liked to imagine the ones before had woken up from their anaesthesia and jumped into the Seine for a swim, to wake up properly. 

  So much for Vasalissa's memories of Paris. 

  Not yet at the maturity of understanding the gift of hardship in life, Vasalissa could not quite appreciate her unfortunate of having lost her home back when her parents had died.  All the other homes she had gone to live in had felt horrible.  She felt alone in her homelessness in her having lived the life of a fugitive, always hopeful of the next home just to have to run away again. 

  Here in the green and life-thriving dell next to the house where everything grew thick and dense together, the youngest sister Samantha started turning up little hand-spade-fulls of dark rich soil to make room for new life to grow.  She hummed to herself and the plants, caring for their startle for her intrusion on their living space, so she tried to soothe them.       Samantha was always so good and so caring; Vasalissa at times felt a sting of jealousy because her younger sister friend had had it so much easier in life and had such a loving home since as long as she could remember and she never had had to lose it, nor the people who loved her. 

  Of course Vasalissa did not know Samantha still grieved Gran Fran’s death, the kind woman who had fostered her since Samantha had been a baby found floating down a river in a basket.  And Samantha also had endured witnessing her best friend Toby, a most gentle little boy, when she was seven, die of a blood disease that had made him turn blue and purple on his pillow.  After this, Samantha stayed home and never made friends. 

  Out of all the four secretive sisters, only Samantha had built herself a small other little cottage to herself and her sisters respected it and never went there.  They knew they might spoil their young sister's make-belief by intruding upon it.  The little sanctuary for Samanthaness without outer influence was painted periwinkle and white – though, since it had been painted two years ago it was beginning to look more plain brown wood with periwinkle strokes over it. 

  Samantha’s own little cottage apart from home was a forest ramble up the slope from the peaceful-sounding stream.  The sound of the water streamed into any fidgets and worries the young girl might have had and reminded her of who she was: of the same nature as the stream… flowing tranquillity.  Contentment comes with being of young, humble heart and not having ambitions to impress other people and fight for one's recognition in the world, Samantha needed to be reminded of who she really was, every so often.  When she remembered, her own contentment was listened to by anybody who passed by her in the factory where she worked and by her sisters and she was a river of peace to them. 

  Since, at work in the factory and in domestic life at home with the little squabbles and temptation to compare herself with Gladys who enjoyed flaunting her gump and worldly attainments, fear easily creeps into even the meekest heart.  And fear is the start of all evils.  Of course, Samantha was too shy and self-contained to act out any evils, she truly was as unselfish as it gets.

  If there was any flower to describe a dreamy maiden, it might be any of the shy violet and blue delicate flowers that grow on thin stems.  They are shy but they seemed to fill up the whole ground surrounding Samantha’s cottage because they seemed to be present even where they weren't. 

  Vasalissa perchanced upon the secret cottage once but something so sacred and sweet asked not to be entreated closely. 

  The Cremona daughter would remember the fragrance of the spruce growing only near that secret little sanctuary.

 

“I like home better than anywhere else,” Samantha said once again to Vasalissa one evening, eyes so vivid in hue and with a happy song.  The patch-quilt blanket the youngest sister sat on was crawled on by kittens until they found a cosy spot snuggled in together.  It was covered in once-cut-out shapes of violets and other such flowers of the same nature.  It was the evening when all the girls were assembled by the fire to start reading stories each of them had written during the week. 

  Amber said to Vasalissa, “How wonderful you’ve made yours,” turning pages back from a cover for the story painted as neat little water-colour depiction of a night sky, blue and purple and the shades and pinks in between. 

  It had been the week of writing stories and doing an illustration if you could.  Of course, the girls were going to read from their many books of fairy tales as they usually did on Friday evenings – but once in a while they gave themselves the chance to write stories of their own.  The young women laughed a lot even before beginning to read them because they were quite aware they were doing children's stuff instead of tidying the house and cooking and cleaning and embroidery and sewing as they had become very serious about.  Their childhood when Gran Fran was alive and there had been heaps of delicious time to write and draw seemed like a lifetime away. 

  These evenings each girl present came alive as if they had not been before with such intense joy as that only by the sharing the child-self’s humour and ingenuity.   Mistakes and innocence become the most ingenious novelty there can be about a person and the source of everyone’s laughter and one’s one.  With a whimsical smile to herself, Vasalissa realized she had been far too serious during her unfortunate journeys. 

  Shiny gold-headed Amber breathed again, recovering after laughing and fallen to the floor because her torso muscles cramped up when she laughed about her own silly comment at a part in Martha's more serious knight and horses story.  The rest of the evening, Amber was laughing most of the time – of course, with some respite at times when the intense pinkness in her usually clear, composed face drained down.

  Vasalissa was relieved to get to know that womanhood where you didn't have to lose anything, just gain the fun and child's creativity you had missed as an orphaned lone traveller . . . She felt she was going to stay forever here, safe in the kindest sisterhood and home imaginable … Yet, in the journeys of this very fortunate soul, there were going to be very many more opportunities  for stretching and deepening . . . And what better form these opportunities than in the form of challenges and losing your home and loved ones once again? . . . (Do not worry, the Amethyst sisters lived very well into old age and the wood cottage in the secret woods still stands now).

 Chapter 6: The Discovery the Third Sister Made in the Secret Wood

At the four sisters' cottage in the woods, autumn started.  When a day's factory working ours were over and on weekends, the Amethyst sisters delved into their own work for themselves and nobody else's at their cottage.  Autumn was a celebration of all they could gather and make out of.  The sisters' enthusiasm went with the changing colour of the leaves of the trees and bushes: first yellow, then orange, then fiery red and crimson.  Enthusiasm for life needs to turn bright and deeper in preparation to later meet the cold and grey of the long winter and its baring teeth.

  The chimney smoke was very pleasant to watch and catch wafts to smell when Vasalissa nipped out to snip some parsley for a soup or when Martha the eldest asked please for a pail of water to help her out as she was scrubbing the kitchen floor and her arms already were so tired.  And when the leaves turned red and crimson, the girls made a little bonfire outside, Gladys, the second, dropped something as a surprise on her crimson-caped new sister, and it was a crimson gown like in medieval paintings.  The fabric was rich.

  After a hug and kiss, Vasalissa exclaimed, “Where was it you found the material for this?”

  The Persian-carpet rider answered, “Down-to-earth Ma'am let me ride the carpet to Bordeaux.  She piped, glancing to the side, “Oh!  Listen… I had to promise to bring some purple grapes off some vines for grapes and cheese.”

  Martha's satirical threat droned, “The grapes were supposed to be a surprise too, Gladys.”  Purple grapes hitherto had only been learned to exist in paintings by the big masters, since they didn't grow here – of course only very fortunate people could catch glimpses of them inside books as special prints that weren't black and white.

  “Don't be so uptight, Martha,” returned Gladys.  “We'll eat them all as if they hadn't been the condition for letting me ride out again.”

  A song voice sounded. “Oh, have we purple grapes?” asked Samantha unassumingly, containing child-like eagerness very well for a sixteen-year old for the sake of nurturing harmony.

  Amber told her two older sisters, “If we’re eating purple grapes, then we need cheese and oatcakes.  It’s a frivolous thing to eat grapes without something substantial – spoil the luxury.  Gran Fran wouldn’t approve.  I’ve chopped firewood early this morning.  Whose turn will it be to bake oatcakes?  Martha.”

  Amber the tiger-eyed meant a bit of satire.  Grapes and cheese, as all the girls knew, went with oatcakes, and if someone was reluctant to bake oatcakes, then they weren't too excited about the grapes.

  Jokingly, Gladys stalked and pushed the wheelbarrow stacked with firewood and dropped its handles at Martha's feet.  “There, you can make yourself useful, Martha.

  Martha for once was admiring her fingernails and nursing a cut on an index finger.  “What?”

  Gladys smirked and leaned on Samantha's back, sighing out her exhaustion after a Saturday's work at home and it was a golden warm afternoon.

  Martha knew how to mock-fight just as well and half mean it.  “If it's you making the oatcakes, Gladys, then I can have your portion of grapes plus push this wheel barrow out of my way.”   

  “The Old Spider Ladies are waiting for,” Gladys teased, referring to the back of the house where spider webs grew overnight covering the supply of firewood stacked against the wall.  “Old Spider Ladies want a bigger home.”

  “Ah, so much of the cooking and boiling and baking our firewood is chopped for doesn't even get eaten,” complained Martha with some grim blame.

  “Such as when you burned dinner last night.”

  “I forgot about it.”

  “And you burned it.”

  Vasalissa chimed in, “But the burned supper was used to our advantage, I thought.  It gave us an excuse to start our fires early: some of the casserole and the potatoes in each of our fireplaces in our rooms.”

  The girls all laughed, full of heart.

  Gladys and Samantha swaying to some song, Samantha spoke up from her humming, “Oh I love our fireplaces.  Gleefully, “Vasalissa, did you know that I was so happy when you came and finally Martha gave permission for us to light the fireplace in the room again because it was going to be yours.”  In a more reflective tone, “It had not been lit since Gran Fran died.”

  The girls lost heart a little.  Then Gladys blurted out, “Yes, but that's because it was a cow's stall for a few years.”

  Vasalissa did not like to be reminded of that because at times when it was damp, she could smell it in the walls.

  “Thank heavens we sold that cow, in town – thanks to me again.  I'm the only one who ever goes in to town.”  Gladys put in a nutshell.  “When there isn’t anything important to get in town, of course.  When there is, it’s Amber. When there’s extra food to give away, it’s Samantha.  When there’s something important to buy, like new fabric for a dress or for a project, it’s Martha.”

  Amber mused.  “You sold that cow to the hunter you met who was merely keen to learn where you lived.  Bold and fresh of him. 

  “I go into town and I quite enjoy errands and seeking things we need at home and finding out what people are about these days.  I refrain from speaking anybody when it isn’t necessary.”

  “Yes, but how will you meet real-life characters except in books if you don't speak with anybody beyond the ‘Pardon me, may I get past?’ and ‘It’s ten ounces please.’” scoffed Gladys, her lips pink with excitement.  “Yes, I spoke to that hunter though none of you would have and that’s how I sold that cow.  He wasn’t handsome at all.  Only a hunter up for a visit from London and he said he was living and he was visiting all the wrong places because all he wanted to do was kill some wildlife again like in his youth.  He wasn’t really a hunter.”

  Ironically all the girls laughed.  Samantha explained to Vasalissa the soonest.  “He called himself a hunter but he had only hunted in his youth but he been working 20 years in a bank.  But he called himself a hunter.”

  Gladys nodded, being the only one who had seen this man out of her house-cat sisters.  “He dressed like one too and he carried a rifle on his back.”

  The girls hollered.

  Gladys shrugged in the boyish way which was unladylike for the day.  “Good thing our cow was as good wild-life to him,” was her charitable assessment, “or he wouldn't have paid for her how much he did.  Double of what a farmer would pay or anyone in their right state of mind.”

  Samantha wailed, and then said emphatically, “Gladys, you said he was taking Charlotte to his mother in a red-roofed cottage two miles from town.”

  The girls became quiet.

  “You were too young to know such news, angel,” Martha soothingly said with a stroke and cuddle.  “We’re sorry we sold Charlotte…” 

  Vasalissa, suddenly not knowing whether to laugh or cry, soberly assured the youngest Amethyst, “I'm so sorry for your cow who lived in my room – the room you have given me.”

  “Ohhh, don't be sorry.”  Samantha soothed with heart.  “We somehow knew someone dear like you was coming our way.”  And she and Martha drew Vasalissa in for one big solidarity hug and of course the others joined in very soon after everyone burst out laughing.

 

  When there was some poison ivy growing over the ground outside of the cottage, you had to make sure you didn't walk outside in your bare feet – not even to pull back the washing on the line between two trees because a clan of big moths had just landed on them.  The girls wore lots of wool.  Everyone knows the reason moths have such fuzzy wings is because they are fond of eating wool.

  There was fresh country home baking in muffin trays every day, as Vasalissa experienced.  Vasalissa often had to bake them herself, those months September, October, November.  She had her fingers stained purple and red all the time because she baked muffins with forest berries.  She worked at Light Metal Factory with berry-stained fingers.  Blackberries thrived across the house, reaching inside through the windows, framing the window thickly.  Strawberries ran snail race tracks outside.  Blueberries were what grew on many of the shrubs around the house.   And you could walk far and cross a river and cross more woodland and this was all for the harvest-minded.  Baskets of blueberries were brought back to the secret house in the wood nobody cared to know about – except those who lived there.  Samantha composed a poem about elves and a castle made of blueberries and Vasalissa could see how she got her inspiration.

  During the second week of October, pumpkins were ripe.  Apples too.  Forgotten earth behind a factory on the outskirts of town is often a haven for all the fruits of the earth to grow, as wildly as the heart desires.  Nobody had planted anything, the brambleberries and rosehips grew of their own accord; the nuts dropped from treetops.  Every year there were surprises.  The Amethyst sisters were very loving and at times coming back from work, sitting next to the rounding squash and pumpkins of different greens and oranges, yellows – speckled, smooth.  The sisters pulled out dirt from between layers of the cabbage; made room for the plucky kale leaves if they were covered by a few mahogany leaves from the maple tree whose leaves turned mahogany while the other maples turned the usual fall colours.  This year, there was a surprise of Jerusalem artichokes.  They had come back from two years ago and the girls marvelled at this, Samantha of course with her dreamy expression of praying hands to one cheek.  It was said she loved the feel of her smooth knuckles and hands.  She made a starflower balm for everybody’s hands here at home. 

  One day, coming home from work at the factory, trudging in boots they had been wearing since their feet stopped growing (at age 14 or younger), Samantha murmured and then Amber spoke out who had seen it first,  “Look!  The potato leaves are that verdant hue ...”

  “That verdant hue that means the potatoes are ready to be picked,” Samantha mused.

  Gladys declared, “Let's pick them.  Tomorrow they'll have turned yellow with autumn frost.”

  “Not quite, Gladys.”  Martha, of course.

  “I'm going to make potato stew,” Gladys announced.”

  “With carrots, please,” Samantha chimed with a mouse’s greed.

  “Why not with pumpkin?” Vasalissa suggested, admiring the orangeness with satisfaction.

  “Good idea.  That'll be tasty,” Samantha promoted.  Then she remembered something and her head lowered.  Vasalissa could tell that look was about the fact that the Amethyst sisters kept all of their harvest and food and treats to themselves.

  Gladys, not well-humoured that afternoon after slaving away at the factory, muttered and tossed away a pea perfectly sweet for eating.  “Of course, Samantha.  If only the world wasn't full of vicious people, then it would be the perfectly normal thing to share our richness and success at work tomorrow and with the poor in the slums in town.  You saw last time, you were robbed and nearly killed.” 

  Samantha looked around her hopefully, her long hair limp over her shoulders.  “There still are hungry children.  Or, we could invite some of our co-workers.  I would feel a little better and freer just giving away some of our richness even to them.  If it weren’t for you, my sisters and my own home and my own self I do love, I wouldn’t care catching cholera or diphtheria or any of those diseases and dying.”

  Since there came no response from her sisters, she began humming to herself and to the potato leaves she grazed with her fingers.

  Gladys startled the tender-hearted youngest, saying, “It’s a good thing you don’t want to be going to church, at least.  We have our own readings at home and you do the most of it.”

  Amber reached a caring hand to the shuddered shoulder of the youngest.

  Samantha courageously defended her feelings.  “I just long to reach out.  It doesn’t come from any religious reading.  It comes from my heart.  But you won’t let me go.” 

  “Don't worry, Samantha,” retorted Gladys.  “Only while you're 16 you've still got your big heart that longs to reach out.”  Gladys plunged a shovel in the ground for the potatoes.  “Wait till you're 20.  You’ll comprehend it a nuisance to others who have to hear how good you are.”  And she up-heaved a potato plant and it slanted back by the shovel.  Gladys, of course, was 20 and quite aware of what she herself called “souring the cream”: that is what women do as they become old maids.

  Amber took Samantha in consoling sisterly arms.  They were long, thin arms Amber had.  Martha stood with hands on her hips, not impressed with Gladys' attitude of being oppressive toward the youngest and frail-hearted sister.  Martha never scolded Samantha.  There were never any corrections to be made.

  “Gladys, sometimes I wonder if you've had a father.”  This was a talk Vasalissa had heard before.  Martha equated a father with being hurtful and harsh and terrible; Vasalissa would have liked to tell her that not all fathers were like that.  “Is that your only way you can feel equal to Samantha – by putting her down?  Using the word ‘a nuisance’.  And you’ve never acted nuisance to anybody before?  You know better than to put your youngest sister down just because you can.  Even if you're about to start your period, it's no excuse for being this cruel.”

  “Oh what about you?” Gladys said darkly, preparing for another thrust of the shovel, her funny maroon head scarf turned askew.  Vehemence was breathed out as well as with the exercise that comes with uprooting potatoes.  “Why are you allowed to be cruel?  And banning me from wearing any jewellery at the factory and I'm not allowed to ride out anymore on the carpet and meet my boy friends – “

  “That was your choice, you agreed.  So no complaining,” conceded Martha, in confidence while the second eldest confronted her with sour emotion.  The earth smelled its smell.  “I pervaded you to make those decisions, and it's for our protection.  By the way, your head scarf alla-holding-back-your-sweat style is falling off.”

  Samantha couldn't help a kitten-like giggle escape from her sense of humour.  Martha started pulling the potatoes off the uprooted plants – so far they were only two plants but enough potatoes for a hearty meal for all girls

  Martha and Gladys exchanged a few more reel turns and returns of fault-finding; though matching in inexorableness, they became a nuisance to listen to, both of them.  Vasalissa helped toss potatoes onto a table cloth on which the harvest was aimed at, exchanging wry smiles with Amber and Samantha. 

  Amber then did not return Vasalissa’s wry solidarity but began taking growing interest in something and it was not in potatoes exactly nor her older sister's rights and wrongs and feelings.

  Amber's eyes had turned translucent like a tiger watching for motion happening somewhere in the early morning hazy savannah.  Her gaze was scanning for something just above the potato plants, her senses heightening.

  Finally she spoke out, with uncanny depth in her voice.  “Sisters.  Wait a minute.”

  It was a big potato patch, growing wildly.  Gladys with the shovel had only uprooted ten of the generous but tenaciously-rooted things.   Gladys ignored Amber stepping through the patch. But Vasalissa and Samantha carefully watched Amber pick some kind of evidence off one of the potato plant leaves.

  Walking up to Martha and Gladys still in a feud, Amber informed them, “Somebody's been in our garden.”

  The elder sisters glanced at the strand of thin-shorn wool.  Gladys dismissed it but Martha took alarm at the mention alone of “somebody” and “in our garden.”  Her cheeks were flushed from exercise; she was milk and coffee with growing rose petals in it.  She took the strand of wool.

  “What's this?”  Even though she knew it was a sheep's wool. 

  Gladys remarked, “Somebody or something?  Unless we're still giving our best Sunday dresses to pet lambs as when we were three.”  Leaning on the shovel handle.  “Keep that,” she eyed.  “It'll be good for the winter wind, to stick in our ears as ear plugs.”

  Samantha made a childlike quip, “Gladys, you're silly.  There's not enough for two ears you know.”  Sometimes Samantha liked to play at being bossy and spoiled just because she was such the opposite.

  “Let's find out where the lamb's lurking about.”  Gladys laughed at herself for pretending to be a boorish lamb chops devourer.  Everybody laughed at her face, even Martha.  “It's been a week since I got my hands last on some tasty lamb ribs … of course, as we all know, lamb chops is only something we can afford three times a year.”

  There were no more shorn strands of wool to be found.  However, Amber swore she needed to have a look into their well and taste if the water tasted any different and tasted funny.  “The first thing an intruder can do is poison your drinking water,” she said.

  The girls hollered and then chuckled and then somehow a worry crept in, because Amber was undoubtedly serious.  They all knew to take Amber serious when she was making a discovery and demanded a serious kind of attention.

  They all walked to the well.

  Samantha plaintively started to hum her uneasiness away, her hands in her blue-grey pinafore pockets still from working in the factory.  Vasalissa's blood-red coat was the courage at the back spine of the huddle; the girls glanced back at her; warm appreciation in Gladys' persistently humoured eyes; a young girl's humility and smile in Samantha's; responsible softer-hearted leadership in Martha's eyes though it was Amber who led the way.

  Gladys stepped up to keep pace with Amber, saying, “Amber, there couldn't really have been anybody here . . . this is a sheep.”

  Martha spoke up, “From experience, Amber has plenty of wit about her not to be witless about some sheep's wool, Gladys, but you could be right, too.  Let's follow Amber and taste if there's poison in our well.  Or we might have to see what happens, if we can’t taste anything.”

  Gladys burst laughing.  Samantha couldn't help it too.

  Martha reproved them. “Our third sister is allowed to make a mistake.  But this is a good practice for paying attention to little things that could mean a lot.”

  Samantha turned to Vasalissa to explain, “You see, Amber can see and sense things sometimes that none of us can.  If one of us forgot something cooking in the kitchen … before any of us can smell it starting to burn, Amber gets a hunch it will.”

  “The next time we come home from work to dig up potatoes, our sis will find that the tree we all skipped past really had hanging from one of its twigs a love letter from the baker’s son in town, who’s actually really a prince in disguise and wants to marry all four of us.  Or five, Vasalissa, if you really want to be included.  A love letter for us hanging in a tree!  Fancy that!”

  With Gladys' headstrong remark the girls choked back laughter at this, one by one.  Even Martha couldn't keep serious and Amber herself smiled, bemused and rather relieved from her track of investigation.

  Amber in fact found a note left at the foot of the well.  A piece of white paper, unfolded.

  Everyone gasped.  Samantha even gave out a shriek which was very unusual of her.  Crowding all around Amber, Martha steadied her voice before reading out loud. “Do not be alarmed.  Your well water has not been poisoned.  Prepare yourselves for an apparition.  Your fairy godmother for the orphans, Woolla the Pastora of Sheep.”

  The sisters all looked to Vasalissa.  They themselves had never considered themselves orphans, having been adopted as babies … but Vasalissa knew she was the orphan here, though the girls shuddered.  There was something eerie about all this.  They all held arms in arms, Vasalissa huddled between Martha and Samantha.  Gladys quipped that this was a hoax a dream-boy shepherd lad was playing and nothing was going to happen, when there came a sudden gust of cold air and spookiness seemed to be crawling in from all directions of the forest.  The forest suddenly seemed an unknown place.  A bright silver light struck them so the girls had to shield their faces.  The sisters and Vasalissa herded and screamed instead of running away.

  Within the wonderful calming bluish silver and light, a woman came from far far away.  The light became less bright as she encroached and her form was fully visible.  She smiled so warmly and genuinely and because of this smile, none of the Amethyst girls or Vasalissa screamed or ran way.  Her hair was silver and very long.  She stood very tall and in mid-air.  The sheep’s wool that Amber had found was what her dress consisted of almost entirely, in fresh-shorn form.  They were beaming out as much bluish silver light as the light source itself that this fairy godmother grew out of.

  “I am a messenger between the worlds,” the very kind godmother said to the girls.  “The Amethyst sisters have received as one of their own and sheltered from her after long dark and difficult journeys . . . this is one who wears the crimson cape.  She is one persevering on her journeys because she is The Story Girl.  She might be keeping her stories to herself, but there is a forgotten country waiting for her . . . over the meadows and hills beyond this secret wood, to the west of the ruins of once a castle.  Enter there to that country, Story Girl, and you shall be welcomed by all the people in fairy tales with happy endings.  You are their queen there.”  The fairest lady smiled so gentle and near though she had come from so far away and lived in a far far away place so pure there was only light.  “Not only are happy endings welcoming you but you are queen to all living their happy endings… gentle, benevolent queen who has endured much so she can whole-heartedly welcome happy endings and rejoice in the happy endings of other people... ”

  As the lady started to take distance and disappear into the light as a reversal of how she had appeared, her voice still rang out gentle and clear. “Go, my child, to the country of happy endings.”

  Later that night, sitting on the bed that had once been Gran Fran’s and now had been Vasalissa’s, the solemn faint-faced Cremona girl traced the stitched-in layered pictures of Icelandic sagas on the bed quilt next to her, with lots of burgundy and sea blue.  To the Amethyst sisters nearby, Vasalissa looked so faint and fragile inside her crimson cape, that Martha comfortingly brought a cup of hot coca for her, inside a cup from Costa del Sol in Spain, with a velvet dainty handle.  Gladys reached out with a squeeze of hands.  Amber sat across, watching with her contribution of being a light house by the sea with whatever weather it might be.  And she perceived Vasalissa’s stormy mournful sea.  Samantha hummed softly under her breath, standing by the window where the aspen’s leaves were autumn gold, dangling and then streaming with the wind.

  “Oh come, Basilissa, it can’t be that bad,” coaxed Gladys.  She seldom ever had called Vasalissa after basil before – it had only been once or twice before during which she had watched how much fresh basil Vasalissa used in a soup when she made one.  “Your life might start going toward a happy ending, since you’ll be around folk who all have found their happy ending and gone to their country of happily ever after!”

  Everyone laughed out or rather convulsed to themselves in spite of the situation.

  Gladys continued, “You’ll be leaving us, sure.  You’ll miss us, dear Forget-me-not.”  Vasalissa was encumbered by a strong big hug from southern Italy Gladys had been influenced by.  “But we’ll be staying the very same back here – you’ll be seeing the same thing as this in twenty years to come, Vasalissa Amethyst – Minus the youth and beauty and colour, of course.”

  “We’re only homebodies,” said Samantha, after a peal of laughter.  “In our secret home in the secret wood nobody can find out about … You know the way to us.”

  Vasalissa looked at Amber in her golden solemn promise of courage.  Vasalissa nodded.

  “We’ve just been visited by somebody today, little homebody yourself,” drawled the second Amethyst under her dark fringe across her forehead.  “Who knows how many fairy godmother type ladies in those faraway places are watching and listening to us right now.  We’d better not give away any more secrets.”

  “Now we have proof that there’s someone looking out for us,” concluded Martha, folding her hands and smoothing the rumples in her rose apron.  “Maybe we wouldn’t be as we have been and as we are, working and living together and looking after each other if it weren’t for them who were watching out for us – and intervening with their beams of tranquillity and harmony ever so often to make it work.”

  Gladys of course smiled, quite pleased and content.  Then she quipped with a half truthful fear, “I hope though when I’m outside late at night washing laundry because of course I can never finish it during the day, the moon will suffice.  And the fairy god ladies and gentlemen won’t need to brighten me up the way this lady’s sheep’s wool just did and surprise me.”

Chapter Seven: The Country of Happy Endings

As usual there was the menial every day house work and tasks that would pile up if they didn’t get done right away.  During the week, work at the factory.  Even as Vasalissa became more and more aware that she was going to be a queen pretty soon – or that she had the choice to follow the call and request to become one for the country of Happy Endings, the work and tasks kept her from day-dreaming all too much.  The results from her making and doing and finishing were always rewarding.  Starching and ironing seemed to smooth out her worries and it was good to see her success.  Darning stockings closed up her fear of losing her love of home and comfortable yet constructive life.  Finishing her project with Samantha of finger puppets, crocheted, and lining them up across the mantel piece in her room told her of the faces she had gathered while living here.  Some faces were laughing, some were cross, some were awkward, some in pain, some in relief; there was one in dignity and one in humiliation; one was courageous, seeing through to the end with a bent big nose.  Some very innocent and in a dream.  All might be retrospective of her herself, in resonance with the sisters she had found here who had the same traits emerging here, creating a cast much like that of these little finger puppets.

  The fairy godmother messenger between the worlds had mentioned the castle Vasalissa had once seen on a walk with Samantha and Amber where the first tree had been sighted bearing yellowed leaves, later that summer.   It was only in ruins, this castle, and this made it so beautifully part of the little hill with the wild golden grasses as if it grew there and was woven in.  The summer winds wove through the tumbled archways that hadn’t tumbled down and the winds whisked around the stubble pillars.  So just west of this lay the country of the happy endings all the fairy tale characters went to – those with fortunate endings, living there presumably immortally.

  On a bitter note, Vasalissa wondered what her Cremona Uncle, Bruce the Brute – so she later nicknamed him to herself, for fun – would regard her becoming queen.  Would he not mock her?  Remind her she was assuming herself more than she really was; deriding the faith in deserving the unfolding of feminine beauty and majesty and inner peace flooding outward.  If an orphan niece was to be seen aided and served, was she not ridiculous?  Uncle Bruce the Brute had made it his duty as guardian to teach Vasalissa you could earn your basic needs under his roof through guilt and fearful gratefulness.  He didn’t even have a proper roof, it was a torn off wall from the previous house where he lived with his previous wife, with red window sills; the roof was held up with one plank of wood.  Uncle Bruce believed everybody should enjoy the outdoors as much as he did and since he had to work all day gardening, everybody needed to endure the same as he endured: wind, cold, rain, sleet, over-bearing sun.

  Vasalissa had to live under his roof and get used to the fear that knotted her stomach as the roof moved and creaked, standing only on one column, a wooden plank, spinning at times and titter-tottering . . . The wind could make it move even faster.  Vasalissa believed that if she would watch and guard the perimeter of the roof while it spun, it would not fall off.  And she worried Uncle Bruce would yell at her because the laundry hanging from the edges of the roof, dangling in the air, sometimes fell off.  She did not mind so much that the spinning helped dry the clothes.  Uncle Bruce hardly tolerated anything female under his roof, not even dresses which he considered an annoying vanity and Vasalissa hoped everytime her laundry would dry quickly.

  For this shelter her uncle granted her as an orphan in his parental guardianship, the Cremona daughter had to plant Redemption Seeds in a gardening plot between two groves of trees.  Redemption is a word for making all the things you were wrong about right and making all the things that made you wrong right.  Vasalissa planted these redemption seeds with obedience and great hope because she was Great Uncle Bruce Cremona’s niece.  And after all, they shared some things in common such as having a free mind, so Vasalissa thought.  One day, everything about her would be right instead of wrong or almost right.  Bruce Cremona though, had lied.  When he pointed to the white bean-like seeds he placed in Vasalissa’s hand and he had promised, “These are penalty seeds for your being so weak-willed and feeble-minded and not being able to survive on your own without anybody’s help and for destroying my unusual peace around this place.  You claim a piece of my home that I’ve toiled and sacrificed my youth and well-being for.  You expect to have it without any work and input.  Plant these redemption seeds.  Everyone has to redeem themselves with hard work and sacrifice.  See what grows out of this.  If you can plant these, you’ll be a very good gardener.”

  When Vasalissa planted these white bean-like seeds, it took two long days of suspense to get results.  The results were entirely unexpected and undreamed of.  At first, it was a crisis of some kind of epidemic that caused plants wilting across the whole plot of land.  The leaves on the trees withered also.  The sun flowers brown and sunny even though they were wilting eventually fell down face flat.

  “Uncle Bruce Cremona, why does the water taste funny?  I didn’t tell you yesterday, but I’ve been feeling so ill I feel I’m going to die.”

  Great Uncle Bruce Cremona had gone away strangely that day after the redemption seeds were planted.  He came back several days to ask how things were doing on the farm and to apologize to Vasalissa for her having to take over everything by herself.  After all, hadn’t she agreed that learning independence was what could make her a real person?

  Vasalissa later found out when a herb woman living in the woods nearby found her close to death and struck to the ground without strength to move her tongue let alone speak, that those redemption seeds had been all the curses Uncle Bruce Cremona had been saving up for a long time, against himself.  When Vasalissa took them, he relieved himself of their growing harassment.  Those seeds wanted to be planted.  They were curses.  When finally they were planted, the whole area of several hectares was poisoned.

  It was his land and all he had slaved away on.  But what could he do to avoid it all being poisoned eventually?  And anyway, the land property had all been transferred to the name of his niece, so she had to be responsible for it to the Environmental Agricultural and Inspection Commission.

  Thankfully, Vasalissa escaped the court trials and very possible sentences worse than death because the herb woman who found her nearly dead took her in and hid her away until the Cremona orphan recovered well enough to travel back to London.  There the directors of Little Blossoms Orphanage directed the orphan child to the next guardian.  By this time, Great Uncle Bruce Cremona had been at the bottom of the list for guardian candidates for the Cremona case, page five, the latest page printed out – but there were more to be printed.  Would her guardians ever have given her a more honourable place to stay and better privileges had they admitted to themselves the lone red-caped girl was a Story girl and queen of a country for happy endings?

  There are many queens we are told stories about, who were once Cinderella’s.  There has been Cinderella herself who was as good as an orphan even though it didn’t seem exactly so, staying in her house she grew up.  The house became taken over cruelly by the stepmother and stepsisters.  A crown might not have done Cinderella any good while she was still living with them.  Vasalissa’s story began to change to something new when she met the Amethyst sisters.  She was offered by them to live with her and they had no obligations to her, unlike parental guardians.  They were naturally kind and accommodating to her instead of trying to be kind and they knew and cherished what it was to be fostered lovingly and being given equality, having been fostered by Gran Fran who was so compassionate to adopt baby orphan girls so they would be sheltered from other kinds of families and upbringing and a world that is brutal to the feelings of little girls.

  Vasalissa’s home was here with the sisters, welcomed into womanhood.  If she was to “pick up her crown”, as the fairy godmother had advised, then she was to go far from here.  She wondered if the country that awaited her, the happy-ever-after princes and princesses and peasants and maids and queens and kings and other fairy tale characters who had had to endure much before their happy-ever ending, were really worth leaving her home for.  Sure, there were going to be delightful banquets to celebrate the Story Girl.  The people awaiting her believed she was home with them.  There’d be bright-lit high ceilings, balconies with views over hills and lakes and mountains, everybody dressed beautifully without any troubles and challenges and perhaps only light work to do; everybody with lovely manners and joyful contentment.  Their horses very likely decorated for a festival every day in celebration for a happy-ever-after.  Flower meadows were sunny all the time – perhaps it never rained – or if it would, the sun would still shine.  Flower petal confetti would be greeting the Queen maybe every Saturday evening riding home.

  Vasalissa hoped that as a queen you could never go wrong and make mistakes.

  “We’ll be baking muffins today with cinnamon, can we?”  Martha announced, reaching over the kitchen table with the oil, vinegar, salt and pepper after having wiped the old grey and chestnut table clear.

  “No more nutmeg?” Vasalissa asked.  “Oh that’s right.  There was only a small chip left I hadn’t grated and I just dropped it into the evening soup yesterday.”

  The eldest Amethyst sister nodded, very soft, “Of course, it was a very good soup.  Delicious.  We haven’t had that before, Vasalissa . . . Nutmeg can be used a little more.”

  Martha when soft and assuring and content she glowed the prettiest of all the sisters.  There was lustre in her warm brown eyes that told of every mistake already forgiven and to make mistakes is your right to experiment with.  When Martha was not reprimanding Gladys and when she was not acting supervisor, her cheeks were the as rose petals and her olive skin as if rubbed with a healthy oil.  When at home for a while after working at the factory, her tiredness didn’t seem to get to her at all.  She was like a tanned Snow White living healthily and at ease, managing a cottage in a wood.

  That afternoon, when tall Amber walked in after raking leaves outside, there was something unusual in her other-worldly alertness.  Her pretty woodland living brightness seemed a bit like an elf-lady fugitive today, escaping out of the usual graceful strength and composure about her.

  Martha spoke to her.  “Is it Samantha’s factory head cloth that needs replacing?  Amber, I’m sorry I couldn’t give you fabric off of my Cordalis felxuosa spare fabric.  You know how I want to use that for our sitting room cushions when I get the time around to do it . . . I’m sorry, Dusty.”  That was a nickname from when they were children Martha rarely used.  Cordalis felxuosa is a Mediterranean brilliant blue flower

  Amber sighed, shook her head.  “Martha, no.  It’s not that, there’s something I have to tell you and all of us.  It’s about something I saw . . . pass by when I was outside and happened to look past one side of the house . . . there was . . . a unicorn.”  She looked at Martha’s face with resignation of expecting to be believed.  Amber was never a guilt-ridden person, her course in everything was strong and sure.  “Pure white,” she said.  “Humble.  And a willing servant for the meek . . . it looked at me …”

  Martha shook her head.  Vasalissa held her breath.  She rarely saw Martha’s cheeks lose their pinkness except when she felt weak such as when work had been too tiring and she had dropped a pail of water just after crossing the threshold of the house, coming from the well outside or when she was guilt-struck for having failed some responsibility.

  In a voice that sounded like a pale younger girl, Martha said to her sister with the amber eyes, “I wouldn’t have known there really are such unicorns.  Why didn’t one come to us before?  Is it telling us something?  Asking something?  I feel it has.”  Martha’s eyes were shadowed.  She was about to lose something; she felt weak under its weight and pull.  It hurt.  Vasalissa knew by the grasp over Vasalissa’s own hand Martha made that the unicorn meant something for Vasalissa and all the sisters hiding in the secret wood.  But Martha’s belief in unicorns was more surprising.

  Through brimming tears, Martha whispered because her voice first came out choked.  “I’m about to lose a sister.  We are going to lose you.”

  Vasalissa’s immediate response was like that of breathing on a calm summer morning: it was a shake of her head; there was no thought or feeling to it. 

  “Yes,” Martha contradicted her, wiping a tear off with the palm of hand.  “You are going to go with the unicorn when it comes again the second time, maybe the third time.  There is no holding you back.”

  “Why would I go with a unicorn?” Vasalissa felt rebellious at the suggestion.  “Where would the unicorn go?”

  Martha looked to the third sister with the amber eyes and clear sight. 

  Amber did not know the answer.  She was prompted to answer, though, so she made a suggestion which later Vasalissa recognized was what happened.

  “Vasalissa’s godmother first discovered us here.  Now the unicorn has come.  They speak from the same source of bright light.”  There was such a wondrous feeling and happiness stirring in Amber; and the light she recalled brightened her with it.  “The unicorn is our little sister’s guide . . . to her next destination.  It will be good for her, the land of happily ever after – for a visit.”

  There was a gentle quietness and solitude and quiet breathing.  The young women felt humbled and relieved of their emotions.  Parting is not easily done from a cosy home keeping itself happy and eager with productivity and autonomy and leisure relief to look forward to in cycles; the Monday to Sunday with each day its special own; five o’clock in the morning until bedtime.  Beginning and ending to begin again.

  Then Martha made a quip, since Gladys wasn’t there to make one.  “I wish I’d know the way to the castle ruins you need to get to, Vasalissa, so I could be sure my own life was going to be a ‘happily ever after’.”

  Amber chuckled, beaming with beautiful emotion.  She was still as graceful as ever while a spontaneous eruption of tears followed.  It became a rivulet of tears rushing from her amber eyes.  She held on to Vasalissa’s hand that felt thin and vanishing, to Vasalissa herself.

  “Are you going to choose and let the white unicorn guide you to the land of Happy Ever After?” Amber beamed golden like a human angel, at times, and Vasalissa wondered sometimes if that wasn’t what she really was.  Having found her home and happiness and friendships so well here with her sisters, Vasalissa could not answer.

  When it was the next day and the unicorn appeared again, just outside the secret cottage in the hidden wood.  Amber whispered over to Vasalissa who was kneading bread, “Vasalissa!  The unicorn is here!  Leave us the kneading, kind young woman, and let’s have you follow the unicorn instead!”  She tried to keep in bright humour and warmth.  Amber opened the door, its round shape reminding Vasalissa of an illustration in a Snow White and the Seven Dwarves book and the first time she had looked at this front door to this loved and so loveable house.

  Vasalissa’s hands were quite covered with flour.  She saw the unicorn outside and its whiteness was so pure to her heart, she walked through the door and passed out of this house forever.

  With Amber, stroking the mythical creature, such happiness filled up all her doubts and worries and reluctance to leave.

  “Gladys gets travel fever, you know,” whispered Amber.  She tried not to cry. 

  Vasalissa smiled; it was a different smile than she was already smiling.  “I wish and hope Martha will encourage our sister to travel out on the Persian carpet again.”

  Amber, with her usual graceful way, admitted she agreed.  “I believe Gladys will be happy at home a little while longer, but when her eyes widen for scenic views and the thrill of flying and discovering new treasures and sounds, Martha surely will trust her enough to let her go . . . using the carpet with less intention for extravagance than before.”

  Vasalissa beamed, looking forward to this although she would not be here anymore.  She opposed the feeling of mourning weighing down her chest.  “I’m sure I won’t be so very long in the country I am going to.  Samantha must be assured this when she’s back from her Bluebell House.  She is the most beautiful friend I could ever have wished.” 

  Embracing, Vasalissa and Amber each acknowledging the precious and delicate worth of their sister who had been absent for two days, gone up to her Bluebell House, perhaps not wishing to say good bye.

  “Don’t worry, Vasalissa,” the third Amethyst assured as well.  “Our Samantha knows separation is only temporary and she believes all will be together in Heaven where we’ll all be home forever more.  And I quite believe this, though it’s hard to at times.  It doesn’t mean Samantha doesn’t mourn.”  She stroked Vasalissa’s cheek.  “Travel safely and happy and free, my sister.  Come back whenever your sisters can console you and all quests fail . . .”

  “I should rather be back next week,” Vasalissa tarried.  “I’m going to try . . .”

  “I don’t think you can plan, once you are in a faraway country . . .”

  “But by Christmas!”

  Amber did not believe so but smiled ruefully.  Squeezing hands again for courage and faith, she then helped Vasalissa up to sit on the unicorn’s back.  The unicorn made it welcoming and less daunting by kneeling down in its friendly way.

  “I’ve been terrified of sitting on a horse before,” spoke Vasalissa.  “Not all horses are the same, but some of them were horribly frightening, I would not trust one again.

  “Are you alright up there?”

  “Thank you, Amber.  Yes.”  Vasalissa was amazed.  “It is not scary like on a horse.”

  “Not even without a saddle?”

  “The unicorn . . . is a friend.”  She stroked the unicorn’s mane and spoke to it.  “You don’t lurch forward though you know I’m afraid you could.  You could throw me off, I would fall and get hurt.  But you don’t throw me off.  You don’t startle me, you mean me no harm.  Thank you, unicorn.”

  That is how our orphan Vasalissa Cremona left the four sisters living in the secret green-growing wood.

  While she was true Queen of that faraway place, she was no longer the girl who wore the crimson cape her mother had dressed her in for protection.  Vasalissa took on all kinds of star and moon and sunlight capes and cloaks and scarves and gowns, of fabrics sewn out of the light from stars that cannot be seen from the Earth.

  In the country of Happy Ever After, she spent three years.  As everything stayed the same there, Vasalissa stayed her age fourteen. 

  On the day she left, she had nodded to a messenger who arrived to speak to her in the morning as she was making plaits out of the tassels of a tapestry to go up on a wall of the castle for a banquet.  Two girls her age with roses in their crowns just like Vasalissa were her company and a robin orange-breasted bird.

  “My lady,” said the messenger, bowing.  To him, Vasalissa nodded.  He came forward.

  As usual and gentle as a dove, Vasalissa urged him, “Speak.”

  “Giesela, your fairy godmother of the Blue Star asks you to visit her.”

  Vasalissa was faint.  She could not answer and gave only a nod.

  The Queen of the country Happily Ever After quickly and with ease took to leave her friends, asking them to finish the tapestry’s final preparations without her. 

  While she was preparing her hair and gown to look ready to appear before the Blue Star godmother who shone blue in all peacefulness and harmony, Vasalissa thought about what she had heard about her.

  Giesela looked out for all the children little and big, living in the less fortunate realm to live in which is the Earth.  Everywhere else it was much easier for children, little and big.  The children on the realm of Earth needed special attention and watching over and intervention at times.  She saw from far up and far far away past the stars seen from Earth.  Recently, Vasalissa had heard about her concern about the children in an industrial town in the 1930’s who were being chased by The Scrambly Scraggly Man.

  Vasalissa dressed in her crimson cape under a thin star-fabric cape that shimmered like Giesela’s neighbour stars.  She had reached for her crimson cape in case she would be asked to go on a mission.

  The Scrambly Scraggly Man is a name given by those who can see a very terrifying, cold-hearted man of darkness for what he really is.  Just a Scrambly Scraggly Man.  Giesela, the watchful fairy godmother, watched the Scrambly Scraggly Man from a safe perspective where the selfish, cold entity could not delude her.  But to the children he was the fear that attacks them from the back of their heads, at their necks and whispers ideas of the worst that can happen.  His whispers become snares, pulling; pulling reigns on your horse, holding it back.  Your horse had to obey.  The horse would come to a full stop and you would ride nowhere because the reigns were always pulled.

  The children living in the industrial, troubled town called Endswitt, were terrified of the Scrambly Scraggly Man.  He was terrifying because they could never catch a glimpse of what he looked like.  He chased them in their dreams at the backs of their heads.

  The youngsters kept dreaming and sleeping yet with their pleasant dreams being pulled out of the back of their heads as the Scrambly Scraggly Man chased them and chased them far.  Anything pleasant and easy and anything in sunshine was being drained by this evil.  And so these children had to dream what we call nightmares.

  Now the only place the Scrambly Scraggly Man ever would find his rest and peace and leave the troubled industrious towns at night for ever and for good would be the black waves of the night sea.  The outlines of black waves sometimes reflect purple.  And the troubling thing is that this night sea was just a little ways from every child’s head as the children slept.  The Scrambly Scraggly Man, whom we’ll just call the Scraggly Man for short, could not see the night sea always there, over the tops of the dreaming children’s heads.  His scrambling would not reach the night sea because he was blind to it and blind to the one thing that would relieve him from his chasing.

  Giesela, godmother of the Blue Star who watched this wicked scraggly man was moved with sympathy and good will.  She wished for this evil chaser of children in their sleep finally to find the black sea with the purple outlines of waves.  The children in Endswitt suffered so much that during the day they saw only the grey of the factory town and sat in school staring out in front of them.  They lived without any colour for joyful imagination.  There was only black or white to wear, or grey.  Children normally can see all the colours there are, even if adults can see only black or white or grey or nothing.  Children here had become just like adults.  They had been drained from out of the backs of their heads by the Scraggly Man.  Without their child-spirit, they had become adults the way adults are when their child-spirit is drained or shut quiet or tied up and gagged.  The child-spirit sparkles, is joyful and living imagination … thriving and growing like wildflowers and weeds and bringing life across the ground in the least likely places, not to mention where they thrive and grow expectedly.

  The children in this industrial town were too tired out and horrified from each night of nightmares to be able to fall asleep at school during the day.  And because it was the Great Depression of the 1930’s, school had classes all about Economics . . . with some Current Affairs and History of Economics.  By the way, during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, Economics was a subject nobody enjoyed listening to, not even Economics for seven-year-olds.  When the children came home, their parents were poverty-struck and drunk and fighting and angry and depressed.  There was no playing, no joking, no acting like kids – not even the kids.  So maybe it was no wonder the Scraggly Man had arrived in towns like these.

  Vasalissa Cremona was asked to dress in her crimson cape one morning and was requested a visit to Giesela.  Vasalissa knew this would mean something important … She dressed her precious old crimson cape over her shoulders and looked at herself in the mirror, remembering she had travelled through thick and thin with this.  It had grown longer into a cloak, knee-length, while she lived with the sisters in the secret wood.

  Giesela the Fairy godmother lived in a castle made of stars’ rays, different colours besides the clear whitest rays of light.  Vasalissa wondered if perhaps Giesela wished Vasalissa to appear in her truest form?  That would be, of course, with her crimson cape she had worn since a tiny little girl when she had started to walk.

  There was a mirror in the throne room and Vasalissa arrived standing there, in front of it, waiting for the fairy godmother shining blue.

  In the mirror, Vasalissa began to see the children in that very grey, industrial town where the Scraggly Man stole their happy dreams.  He chased them right behind their heads, at the back.  The children had no happiness during their awake lives.  It was deplorable.  Vasalissa had not known such a thing could happen to anybody, to children of all, whose imaginations nobody and nothing can usually take away.  At least not until they give it up later when they’re older and choose to “grow up”.  Adults often become like the Scraggly Man themselves without knowing it and persecute children and other adults.

  Giesela the blue fairy godmother was graceful and her gracefulness and graciousness filled the entire room Vasalissa entered, which was of all mirrors in a labyrinth.  This godmother’s custom was to be solemn and keep at a distance and to communicate with a visitor only through a mirror between them.  Her voice overcame all worries.  “Vasalissa Cremona, young queen.  These are the children I would like you to lead into another country.  I would like you to lead them out of the industrial country they live in.”  Giesela then sat on her throne.  Vasalissa watched the star fairy godmother’s reflection.

  “What will it be like for these children when they are in another country?” Vasalissa asked.  “Can the Scraggly Man ever find them there?”

  Giesela lovingly answered, “No.  The children will have their imaginations and happiness back forever in the country that awaits them.  It is their true home.  They are only going back to it.  It will all come back to them when it meets them.  There are no economic classes and no black and white or grey frocks to wear.  There is no hunger to worry about.  There is no cold.  There is no government and no banks and nobody holds authority over what reality means or is supposed to mean.  There is no fight for survival and so nobody has to grow up and work.  Forever you can play and draw and run and cuddle and laugh and swim and in the true home country you even can fly.”

  “Can I go there?”  Vasalissa asked, eagerly and with abandon.  “I would like to live there too.  At least for a while.”

  Giesela smiled and nodded.  Her yes was very graceful and also a gracious conductor to the beginning of a journey.

  Vasalissa began to dread remembering what London was like in the 1930’s and the orphanage called Little Blossoms she never was allowed to enter past the reception and office.  She was willing to brave this for the children who had lost their imaginations and colours and happiness, if going back to Earth meant having to go back the way she had gone before ... but maybe this time it was not going to be this way.

  When Vasalissa was escorted through two big red doors, there were two blue doors at the end of a corridor where there were no walls.  It was a walk through the universe.  Instead of being mostly black, the bright rays from the stars made it a welcoming place; the blackness was not horribly enormous but swallowed your smallness.

  The silver-bearded escorts guided the way for Vasalissa to cross over to get to the blue doors.  Vasalissa looked at the doors next to each other apprehensively.  One silver-bearded escort asked her, hand on the handle of one door, “Do you like Christmas trees?”

  And the other escort asked, “Or do you like the sunrise?”  Vasalissa answered, “Christmas trees,” although she liked both.  And the door that was “Christmas trees” was opened.  The escort or doorman was of a jolly, assuring disposition; his smile became mysteriously playful.  Vasalissa caught up with that mysteriousness a moment later when she stepped through the doorway and expected the doorman to continue the way with her, when suddenly she found herself amidst snow-sprinkled, snow-covered Christmas trees.  A fog ahead of her created by her own breath told her right away she was somewhere very cold.  It was night.  The Christmas trees were a forest and she could see nothing besides.  Behind her there was no sign of a door or doorman, or anywhere above, around.  Vasalissa reached to touch some pine poking out.  This is what Christmas trees felt like, after all, inside a cosy room lit and warmed by fire and candle light and rosy faces on Christmas Eve.  Vasalissa remembered the gingerbread men and the presents . . . her parents and their guiding arms and voices toward the Christmas tree . . . Vasalissa shuddered.  Everything was not as expected.

  The moon in the sky made the place a remarkable blue with some purple.  Snow sparkled.  Vasalissa felt the first pang of loneliness and remembered she was an orphan while other children lived safely at home with parents who loved them and made sure they never got into a situation such as this.

  The cold became painfully cold.  Vasalissa walked and tried running for a while and still would not warm up.  The running exhausted her after a while.  She felt a little warmer but the cold was overcoming her and her tears were freezing over her face and she gave into the temptation to give up.

Chapter 8: The Prince in Moonlight

 

Sound is the last sense to go, out of the senses of touch, sight, smell, taste . . . when someone is dying.  Vasalissa lay in the snow, freezing.  Her crimson cape wasn’t thick enough.  She slowly could not feel the cold anymore and slowly her vision darkened to a black out.  Vasalissa Cremona found every breath painful in her lungs and began to drift to that last falling sleep before awaking wherever the soul passes into, usually on no return . . . At last, a jingle sound came through the last of her senses to go which was slipping as well.  But that jingle sound was just enough to call back a story girl dying in her crimson cape in the freezing snow.

  The sound of jingles is what ought to be heard in all times of distress – may it be all day when you move your arms.  Little jingle bracelets, or jingle anklets.  Just a faint, little sound to remind you there is a magic that sound brings. 

  Flaxen hair over an open furry hood of rimmed with arctic rabbit hair, eyes soft and intent ahead of him, the Prince in Moonlight drove his sleigh that cut through the snow very quietly, leaving perfect slim tracks behind.

  The sleigh passed through the night, a smooth passing between Christmas trees covered in snow.  There is always that snowed-in and snowing-in silence on a night like this in the north when those fluffy crystals drift down from the sky, falling sometimes at changing paces.  When they are fat and heavy, the silence is rounder and fuller and content.

  The jingle sleigh was being pulled by quiet husky dogs of the playful meek sort.  The Prince in Moonlight was the meek quiet kind and playful at times.  With him shone the moonlight from the nearly full mother of pure white.  His cape was of moonlight fabric.  For the winter it was thick as fur but silken on the outside, reflecting the moon’s pale blue shimmer.

  The Prince in Moonlight was well-dressed, he was not poor.  His long fair hair shoulder-length.  He listened and all around him was sound . . . peaceful sound.  Everything  was of interest to him that sounded little and silent.  He could hear little sounds, little jingles in everything.

  His left foot in elfish-prince suede shoe stepped on the snow off his sleigh; and jingles on his rabbit-fur covered ankles were softened by the thick fluffs of snowflakes.  Some huskies next to each other began biting each other like puppies and with young growls and the Prince made a “hushhhh” sound to them.  They were the cutest creatures there possibly could be with heart-like shape of their faces only husky dogs have.  They had such a joy in them which comes from running and trotting for hours across snowy wastelands, in that pact of dog and man to survive the arctic together.  Huskies drive woman and man to destinations unknown before and known before such as the Christmas Tree Forest.  Vasalissa had fallen here through the door from Giesela’s star.  The Prince in Moonlight travelled to this forest always on his way home.  The ride felt to him like comet rides, only steadier since the sleigh was weighted, drawn by the law of gravity.  A comet had been how the prince had once arrived. 

  This night, the swift pulling across the Nordic landscapes into the Christmas Tree Forest had left the Prince to make a most unusual find . . . a person lying on a death-white frozen ground.

  The Prince never met any human beings in this world he lived in.  He did not realize at first that humans were of flesh and blood, like him and like his huskies.  A small gasp escaped from near his heart.  Something had entered through a wall of stifled silence within him and his heart met the arrival of this crimson life he saw before him.   

  Some colour came to the Prince’s cheeks that was not there before.  He lingered a step back from the form on the snow from the crimson cloak because at first the crimson struck the return of many memories to the boy, the Prince.  It was the colour of stories he had yearned to hear and never hear and knew they were there.  Crimson was running through the veins of the stories that could be and it was living blood, alive, on its own that keeps us all alive.  The crimson cloak had a life of its own and its wearer was somebody who likely possessed a profound ability to bring life to where there wasn’t life or bring life back. 

  The figure began to shake and it startled the Prince.

  Instead of acting straight away by impulse or instinct, the boy listened.  It being deep in the night and deep in this forest called Clasp of Burgundwich, little animals living in the trees or in hollows were awake, taking part in the midnight charm.  There was a strange cross between squirrels, ferrets and chipmunks that scurried and bashed snow on snow with the disruption of the fir trees’ stillness.  The creatures’ sounds were so minute only the boy with the fair glory of hair and one with the moon beams, listening, would notice.  The little animals were summoned by instinct.  Two of them spoke close to the Prince’s ear and the Prince could understand.  This form of crimson on the ground, the roan-furred creatures said, was not dead.  “It is a girl.  She needs your help,” they said, with strong red squirrel-ferret-chipmunk character.

  The boy looked back at the crimson shape and realized that calling to his heart included a call for help.                               

  The Prince was just as tall as Vasalissa.  He was 13 and just at the start of a growth spurt.  He was the kind of boy who was not particularly helpful, living with servants who treated a little lord.  He was not a boy of action, but now he made two steps and bent over to lift the crimson form off the ground without looking at the face hidden under it until he carried her on the caribou fur-covered seat of his sleigh.

  Caribou, by the way, have each of their fur hairs filled with air inside.  Air is the warmest insulator.  This reminder came to the Prince’s mind like warm summer air about to make flowers grow.  Some doves arrived, their wings flapping snow off pine branches as they perched and cooed.  The Prince’s chin was lifted over his shoulder by their sound and then he shyly drew away the crimson cloak that was covering Vasalissa’s face.

  Many people with hypothermia don’t look their best. The boy at first gasped in surprise.  He saw a face with lips were purple and shivering, the face, like made of ice, turned blue.  He could see the gentle shape of her face was as delicate as the curves of tulip petals and soft.  He had not seen such a pretty face before, besides the blue and purple.  Her eyes were closed, he wondered if soon the cold and death would take over and she would be lost.

  Suddenly the sound of sharp little beating wings cut through the air and the Prince was visited by golden fireflies that had come to the rescue.  Fireflies are normally what children and the child-hearted watch on warm summer nights.  It is the sort of thing sweethearts laugh about when they had been watching out for shooting stars.  But here for the very romantically inexperienced Prince in Moonlight, at thirteen, the fireflies told him it was ok to warm up a girl who was so near to death.  If he would not, she would die.  He had never seen a girl up close like this before.  He had never met and spoken to any girl before.

  The Prince had only read about disdainful kinds of girls, the ones who were ‘roses with thorns’.  Or he had read about the ones who expected to be carried to a prince’s castle and be married straight away. 

  A honey bee came flying from out of a bee hive in a tree, breaking out before its normal time which is spring, of course.  From a tiny golden chaucer the bee carried, big as a thimble, the bee poured the Prince a drop into his pale blue silken collar.  The Prince tasted it, and then, not afraid of being stung, took the thimble-sized chaucer from the bee and gave Vasalissa this through her lips that were quivering as she shivered.

  Then he quickly took two husky dogs off their collars, the friendliest, most loyal, and they rushed to snuggle with Vasalissa under a pile of blankets and furs and the huskies licked up her face without being asked to.

  Vasalissa began to wake up.  The Prince in Moonlight sat with her and the faithful dogs and kept feeding her honey carried back and forth from the hive that had been burst before its time to, which of course would be the end of winter.

  When the warmth and colour returned to Vasalissa’s face and the promise she was going to live, the Prince smiled and shyly kissed her hand at the knuckles. 

  Breathing and looking at each other, to be alive became the greatest wonder; life seemed to flourish new around.  Where there had been only sound, there became also a story.  Where there had been only story, there came sound. 

  Then, very suddenly, Vasalissa was overcome by sleep and the Prince let her go, knowing she was going to wake up again.

  The Prince in Moonlight had a home in a castle and it was three hours away by sleigh.  The castle was on a high hill where it was always sunrise, orange when he arrived.  Scarcely was he home in the castle, for he liked to travel.  He travelled mainly in the North and always throughout the night for then he was in his element which was moonlight, of course. 

  With the jungles of the running huskies as the sleigh ran across the snow, Vasalissa began to dream of beating drums, tiny ones just as gentle as jingles.  The drums were around a fire with little faces over them and little people were swarthy with short arms and legs and tubby bellies.  They were fairies but not the kind that fly; they were close to the earth. 

  In this time there was another meaning for the word weird.  It meant eerie or occult and this was just what these fairies around the fire, drumming, were like.  Weird fairies.

  In fact, these earth fairies were the Prince’s neighbours.  They lived at the base of the castle’s lowest hill, in the hill underground and around it.  They had heard about the girl the Prince Moonlight had found and was bringing to the castle.  They had heard about her from the hoots of the owl, the crows of the raven and the dove’s cooing across the winds.

  The sun was pink at the end of the winter sky when the Prince drove the sleigh to the end of the Christmas forest.  The sleigh came to a stop just for the boy to view the beginning of the thin-layered snowy plains and ridges toward the river and beyond it the Land of Spring where everything melted.

  A joy leapt to the Prince’s heart and he tugged at the reigns to signal the huskies to trot again.  He looked forward to hosting the girl and to when they could start talking to each other.

  Having been so close to leaving her story behind, having nearly crossed over to the land after life as she knew it, Vasalissa dreamt in another dimension very close to the land she had nearly gone to.  In this other dimension, she was walking in a green lush place and it was the month of May where the bluebells of sweetest purply blue kept appearing in the ground as she stepped.  Wherever she stepped, they appeared though they had not been there before.  They made a sound that sang and tickled inside her ear when they appeared, like the peal of a bell and the peal of a lark trying to wake her up from her dream.  But she kept dreaming.

  Then in the dream, she came to a thicket of apple blossom trees.  The grass was so soft that she accepted its invitation and entered it.  Then an aunt appeared who Vasalissa had liked very much, one of the very few kind people on her journeys as an orphan from guardian to guardian.  It was Aunt Imogene who was only 21.  Her older brother and bully, Uncle Sanders Cremona, had become Vasalissa’s parental guardian.  To him, Vasalissa was a distant cousin’s daughter, the forlorn Cremona orphan he had never bothered to find out about until she arrived at his doorstep.  He and his much younger sister, Imogene, lived in a mansion by a river in a lush green valley where blue bells grew, in a part of Cumbria.  Between branches of apple blossoms, here where Vasalissa met her in a dream, Aunt Imogene looked as usual with her long brown soft and golden.  She wore a long white dress, and high-collared, being an old-fashioned girl.  Vasalissa remembered her being an odd girlish woman wearing her mother’s clothes from before the time of the First World War.

  “Aunt Imogene,” Vasalissa called.

  “I’ve wanted to ask you to come with me,” Aunt Imogene said, gaily.  “There’s a church picnic I’m going to.”

  Vasalissa remembered picnics as something her brother never let Imogene go to, in fear of losing her to other people.  Poor Aunt Imogene had always been so alone.

  “Are you going to a picnic?  Oh Aunt Imogene, I’m so glad for you.”

  “Aren’t you coming, too?”

  Vasalissa seemed ready to step forward and go with her aunt hand in hand.  But then she remembered she was already on a journey.   She was only vaguely aware of being packed in a sleigh filled with blankets and fur skins and two dogs were breathing next to her, snuggled, and looking after her was a boy she did not forget even in her sleep.  They were driving somewhere Vasalissa wanted to discover and be a guest at – and it might lead to the destination Giesela the Blue Star godmother had sent her to.

  “No, I’m not coming with you,” Vasalissa answered her youthful girlish aunt.

  Light-heartedly and younger and happier than ever Vasalissa had seen her, Aunt Imogene replied, “That’s fine with me.  I’ll see you there maybe another time.”

  Vasalissa nodded.  “Oh yes, next time.”

  Then Vasalissa’s dream changed.  Aunt Imogene was gone and now Vasalissa faced a tree with hanging golden apples.  Vasalissa could smell their redolent appleness and it became more than she could crave just to look at.  She picked one and pressed it to her cheek and smelled and then bit a bite of it to eat.

  That was when she woke up from her sleep.

  Her eyes opened to a wall and walls and domes of books.  Something told her they were all books she was not interested in and she was so disappointed the apple she had just taken a bite into wasn’t with her now.  She was quite thirsty for the juice of an apple.

  She found herself inside a kind of wheeled bed.  She lifted her upper body with some effort off the pillows, having just woken up, and peered over the side to examine the big wheel and the other side had a big wheel too.  The blanket over her was green, very dark Everest green and quite blue.  Under this were several kinds of sheets that were exactly the same print as from her nursery days.  They were here now and Vasalissa was astounded by it.  The top flannel sheet was of a print that was the illustration of a fiddler, a dog, a dish and a spoon and a moon and a cow.  She used to yearn to join them in their fun, looking at them on prints as a little girl.  Vasalissa felt quite content that she had found herself here.

  There to her left where she would not have noticed had she not turned her head, sitting up, the same boy with blond long hair, curling in at his shoulders stood flipping through pages of a book, making a sound the such that tasteful to listen to and Vasalissa’s thirst for the taste of apple transferred to the sound of this.  It was quite a big book and the pages heavy because they were so many but the pages were thin.  The library was like a cathedral, shelves so many Vasalissa didn’t start to count.   

  Vasalissa observed the boy wearing the pale blue of some fairy tale unreal fabric and white fanciful collar, cuffs and stockings and high-heeled shoes with buckles as of the 17^th-18^th century.  He was definitely some kind of prince or aristocrat, but somebody very independent – he lived on another planet, with such charm about him that nobody could possess living in any world Vasalissa had been to.  Even in the land of Happily Ever After there had been nobody this way.

  There was a bird with drooping shoulders, a very large-sized bird so it could have been a seven year old child in height, the strangest kind of bird, quite a vulture though more of a turkey.  He made a gobble-gobble so suddenly that it took a while for Vasalissa not to get startled every time.  Vasalissa watched in awe at how this bird was picked or pecked out books from book shelves and dropped them in a basket.  He sat perched on a baton kind of thing that moved up or down as the ropes pulled it which-ever direction.  The basket full of books which went up or down too was made of a material that to someone in the later half of the 20^th century would identify as plastic but not at this time.  A plastic-woven basket, perhaps, rubber, not plastic.  However this really was a weaving made of cobwebs by all the cobweb ropes giant spiders spun in and out across the hall of this library, up across sides of the dome high above.  There were spiders here normally.  The spiders weren’t out anymore by the time Vasalissa first opened her eyes to this library.  They had been asked by the Prince in Moonlight to pack their cobwebs and move into the East Wing library of the castle and stay there a while.  The Prince had apologized and said he hoped the spiders would understand that the girl he was hosting most likely was only used to small spiders no bigger than the span of her hand and some of these spiders however had legs spanning the size of a grand piano.

  The boy was after a specific target and that is why he was here with the turkey.  In his head he was studying his map of what he knew about girls so he could accommodate his guest with what would suit and delight her.  “Hmmm… a girl,” he thought out loud, pensively; then to his turkey working with him as a team: “How about a book on how to teach dolls cooking lessons?” suggested the Prince in Moonlight.  The turkey who gobbled a yes and evidently made books the prince’s suggestion an order.  Wings stretching out as he craned his neck to a shelf above, he pecked – or picked – out an obviously vintage book – these books all were very deserving to be in this lovely library, being so old.  The turkey dropped this in the basket.  The basket was lowered down not by the prince pulling the ropes down but by a mouse – a live mouse – just quite a big one like it was a toy dressed in an orange suit with white frills and collar, turning a pulley which turned a big grated wheel.  That’s what caused the basket to pull up from shelf to shelf.  It bumped along, quite heavily.

  “I suppose Greta is still young enough to play with dolls, don’t you, Mr. Samson?

  Vasalissa wondered who Greta was.

  The turkey – ahem, gentleman in the shape of a turkey, gobbled and apparently meant more than just a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’.

  “Oh well, I don’t know what time Greta has come from.  From the way she’s dressed with her red cape and all, I’d guess late 19^th century?  Dolls were quite sophisticated then, Mr. Samson.  Some of the best doll houses I’ve seen were in Germany.  And there has been much of the performing arts and cinema city Berlin created into miniature, for the dolls.  That is, before the city was going to be bombed and lost for the most part, in the 1840’s – pardon me, I meant 1940’s.  I haven’t actually lived to that time.  I’m in the 1730’s.  There’s a book, somewhere, I think in the next aisle to the right, on “The History of Doll Cinema”.  Dolls became actresses and – and there were some actors and they created their own cinema.  Before the first normal people’s cinema came out in Europe, the dolls’ cinema was already in its Golden Age.  That’s by the late 19^th century.”

  The turkey gobbled.

  “Yes, Mr. Sampson.   Then that will be the last book from the dolls’ section,” the Prince decided.  “A book on knitting jar-lid covers?  However boring that will be.  Unless, of course, they will be for peanut butter cookies and chocolate chip cookies.  I might take that book into consideration… let’s just drop it in the basket.”

  A moment later, the Prince in Moonlight clapped a hand over his knee in a jest, laughing.  “But if the girl wants a book on something really useful, there’s one on washing porcelain dishes.  It’s called ‘Scratch-free Porcelain Dishes’.  Girls like washing dishes for some reason.  They like having tea parties with their friends and teddy bears. 

  “Here’s the sequal, ‘How to Wash Porcelain Dishes without Breaking Them.’  How particular girls can get about not breaking dishes!  I wouldn’t care if a plate broke or if a tea cup lost its handle.  It’ll be fun to toss them in the bin.  I never do any kitchen stuff… I haven’t been inside the kitchen I think since Christmas when I sampled the Christmas puddings… 

  “Hey, of course, I haven’t forgotten that girls like to make things that have nothing to do with kitchen and home things.”  The Prince tossed some fair curls over his shoulder.  “’Nordic Witches Responsible For the Auroroa Borealis’  - here’s a suspenseful detective true story set in 2000BC of the very beginnings of the phenomenal colourful lights in the North, created by some witches who were soon after blamed and persecuted by their city to escape their imprisonment.  They flew across on their brooms to the wilderness.  A detective found them after a long investigation and the detective was able to record their story and even learn in their witches’ brewery laboratory in a cave how the Northern Lights could be started if they needed to be started again.  This is how he learned to make some himself.  This is how Greta might want to create an Aurora Borealis herself.  I could travel with her to the north by sleigh and my huskies and set up camp there.”

  The turkey gobbled quite a long kind of gobbling to which the Prince laughed happily.  “Yes, well, you’re right, on a witch’s broom it would be faster and easier,” the Prince said.  “I’d miss me huskies though,” he admitted tenderly.

  A slam and then a rumbling sound pulled Vasalissa’s attention and caused her reaction to duck under the covers inside her wheelchair-bed.  She peered over and watched a cat swiftly glide across the smooth parquet floor on a rolling pin, across the streams of lamp light across the shadowy parts and across the sunshine pooled middle of the library beneath the dome ceiling with windows beneath around it.  It is the oddest thing to watch a cat doing something that isn’t possibly real.  Vasalissa blinked to make sure that is what she really saw.  It was a rolling pin the cat was gliding on – of course, as the rolling pin rolled, the cat tip-toed over it, standing upright.  The cat must have had ballet lessons in order to do this, because its paws pointed and as ballet dancers do across the stage with pointed feet at such a speed as if they don’t touch the floor.  The rolling pin had two red handles as is common.  How the cat was good at this was only due to years of practice, Vasalissa presumed.

  This domestic ballet-dancer cat was dressed with white and red furbelows and the fashion of the same century as the fanciful boy browsing through books.  There was one feature of the cat’s attire that wasn’t a detail and that Vasalissa had stared at first – after the rolling pin, of course, and that was the cat’s prominent kitchen apron with many pockets, strings and some frills and some little ribbons.

  When the cat arrived in front of the Prince, at the distance one makes a formal presentation at, the cat meowed and meowed and meowed.  Unlike the norm of servants bowing or curtseying, this cat held equal status, apparently.  Vasalissa of course did not know exactly that the boy was a prince.  These fascinating animals were the boy’s friends – or family, to her perception.  The Cremona orphan girl felt her cheeks flush with regaining enthusiasm after her near death.  Life was becoming a thrilling delight she had never known.  Hadn’t she lost the sphere of child-like paradise when she had lost her castle and her home?  She was back at a child’s castle, she could tell.  Perhaps there were no parents here, but friends instead – something different.

  The boy’s glory of fair locks to his shoulders and big eyes and face perfectly matched the refined manners he demonstrated and cordial appreciation of his friends.  He nodded, well-listening to the aproned cat’s speech, as there can be something heard within the finest particles of a breeze.  In his way, like having a little bell tinkling softly by his shoulder, he answered, “Right, yes of course.”  Then some childlike impetus sprung in and the boy’s eyes sparked.  “But only after I finish finding these books I want for my poor guest Greta.  She might wake up any moment.  And hopefully she won’t be afraid of us, so I have lots of books to give her.”

  Vasalissa gasped a bit without it being audible to anyone. 

  “Yes, I know.  Just after I finish with this, please, Mum.”

  The cat, evidently a cook or perhaps a baker or both, meowed a bit in protest.

  “Mum, the books are for the girl, not for me.  I’m sure she won’t be hungry right after waking up.  I’m not hungry.  No Mum, she sleeps and sleeps, it’s been two days.  Rangoon was barking at her, sitting on her lap last night and she still slept.  I’ll see you for lunch when I’m ready.  Thank you.”

  The cat then turned around with dropping whiskers to express some contained emotion and ballet-tip-toed back in the direction it had come, across the rolling rolling-pin.  Vasalissa squinted her eyes as the plush white tail whisked away through a tall door that closed behind with a thud.   

  Vasalissa scanned her eyes across the floor which was immaculate, a warm light wood.  She noticed the Prince wore buckled shoes with high heels from Johann Sebastian Bach’s time.  He walked in them to a trolley with wheels, other kinds of wheels from the different ones Vasalissa had been noticing, and he pushed the trolley to meet the basket of books that had landed on the ground with a thud.

  The Prince’s shoes had such a mysterious sheen to them, of opal kind of greys and blues, bouncing off certain kinds of light.  Perhaps moonlight, Vasalissa wondered.

  The Prince continued pulling books out of the shelf, climbing the ladder and skimming some table of contents out loud.  Besides reading, the Prince of Sound enjoyed listening to stories.  Fairytales and children’s adventures.  His collection spanned into the future up to the 1960’s.  The 1930’s to 1960’s were in the West Wing, where the giant spider libraries were at the moment.

  “If only I could show the girl Astrid Lingren’s collection,” the Prince said under his breath.  “There are quite a lot of great books in the West Wing . . .”

  The turkey gobbled.  Pardon me, but his suit proved that he was a male turkey.  Vasalissa observed him as he made the bird-perch elevator he used to collect books off the shelf.  Vasalissa looked again and noticed that it wasn’t the turkey but the mouse down below that was making the turkey wobble so he would fall off.  The mouse had gotten himself in a tantrum over the work he was having to do.

  To Vasalissa’s amazement before relief, the turkey’s wings spanned out, far on each side, dark like a bat’s wings on the inside.  The turkey could fly!

  The Prince in Moonlight, though supposed to have the most sensitive hearing, was growing more engrossed in his book and had not heard Vasalissa gasp.

  The Turkey, called Mr. Samson, glided upward.  His head casually stooped like a vulture’s.  If he were a hummingbird, his wings would be flapping eighteen times per second.  But here, the turkey-vulture-but-bat’s struggle to keep up against gravity was not with as much effort as the hummingbird’s.  High up at perhaps the seventieth shelf, he pecked at a book.  The book was apparently tightly jammed in between books and because it was so hard to pull out, Mr. Samson had to pull and the massive spanning wings flapped completely open and closed taking as long a time as four seconds. 

  The huge bird seemed to be regurgitating when he dropped the book into the basket and then perched back on the baton and began preening his feathers over his right shoulder and wing.  His wings on the outside were like a baby’s owl’s, very fluffy, soft charcoal and white, quite in contrast with the inside which was that of a bat’s.

  “I’ve found the eighth book in the collection for the History of Doll Cinema.”

  Vasalissa closed her eyes on her pillow, remembering the warm wood house where the longs skirts of her surrogate sisters Martha, Gladys, amber and Samantha swept across the floor, round at corners by the table.  She remembered her own long skirt and apron she wore.  She was not a little girl anymore who wanted to play with dolls.  The History of Doll Cinema was something else, of course.

  The Prince with sublime pride started to work, transferring books from inside the basket and onto the trolley.  Then, sparkling and enthusiastic anew, he asked, “Mr. Samson, how long can an old friend wait for his lunch?”

  The answer from Mr. Samson sounded a bit sad.  This meant in other words an old friend could not wait very long for his lunch.

  “Oh, but what about the Finnish Folk Song section?” the Prince gasped, suddenly alarmed.

  The Story Girl was quite eager to see these books put in the basket.  Her voice came up before she could think twice about encouraging the Prince for this.  “Oh, music!  Finnish folk music, I would like that!”

  The Prince turned and fell silent; the children were caught in a happy kind of shining gaze.  Vasalissa uttered a half-nervous half-gladsome giggle, but the Prince was serious and crossed the immaculate wood library floor; never had Vasalissa met a boy with maternal concern.  Every step the rushed with clarity of emotion as of clear moonlight when you least expect it on a night sitting lonely by the window, knowing everyone is asleep and you are awake.

  The Prince could be as far away and quiet as a prince can be who once descended from the stars and whose cape and clothes always shone in moonlight, yet Vasalissa never had met someone so near to who she was.  They both knew this and smiled.

  The boy’s handshake was hearty and continuous until Vasalissa pulled her hand away.

  “I am sure you have seen me before when you woke up a short time before falling asleep again.  My husky dogs led me to you; you were lying on the snow, about to die.”  The boy spoke frankly as frankincense and in a way that made innocent humour about the thing that happened and the rescue.  “The huskies smelled you out and pulled our sleigh to where you had dropped on the snowy ground.”

  “Yes . . . I vaguely remember though not very well … I fell in from a star I was visiting . . .”

  “That happened to me before too,” the Prince said, charmed and liking Vasalissa more each moment.  “It was a little different, I suppose.  When I landed, there was a mammoth gorilla knowing I was arriving, in a summer forest where it was nice and warm.  And the mammoth gorilla took me on a ride to this hill where I live in a castle.  This castle had been waiting for me.  It had been abandoned by a family and all its household of servants had been waiting for a new lord to wait upon.”

  “Oh,” was what Vasalissa rather involuntarily said.  An opinion was forming in her head that this boy was a little presumptuous of himself. 

  The Prince noticed the change in her face and quickly added, “Of course I’m a Prince and the servants at this castle like me very much because I don’t order anybody about like kings do or queens.  I’m only a young prince, madam.  I couldn’t get along at all without my servants.  They are my dearest friends.”

  Vasalissa felt she had to curtsy, also to show she made an effort to correct her opinions.

  The Prince subjected hastily.  “Oh no, please don’t curtsy for me.  I’m only a Prince who has no subjects at all, not to mention the need for any loyal subjects.  I’m a Prince only by birth.  And because I wear a moonlit cape.  I couldn’t help wearing such fine clothes.  The moon chose me for it.  The moon is my mother though not exactly.  It is something I don’t quite understand, myself.  I believe sometimes she’s your mother, too.” 

  Vasalissa nodded, knowing what he meant.  It wasn’t your real real mother, the moon, but kind of.  What about his real parents? 

  The Prince was filled with mystery on one dimension of his and in another, upfront, she was a beautiful child.  Vasalissa knew she was going to feel at ease very much.  This was a thrilling start and she and the Prince were soul-friends of a wonderful kind.  She got up out of the wheelchair bed, in sturdy health just like on another day before she had caught hypothermia.

  “May I be your escort to lunch?”  asked the Prince.

  “Lunch?”  Vasalissa stammered, forgetting she was the guest of a prince in a castle and of course every meal was a banquet.

  “Oh yes,  my mum’s cooked lunch … well, of course, she and her army of 49 kitchen porters and cooks – my mum is the chef and goes around making sure the food isn’t spoiled because there are so many cooks stirring the pots.”

  Vasalissa remembered far back to her own household of servants dressed in black and white, preparing meals for her and her parents.  She remembered her mother had kept them down to between 35 and 38 though.

  “That’s a lot of people to cook the same meal,” Vasalissa murmured.

  The boy was dazzled pleasantly, and Vasalissa only could perceive that he enjoyed her responses very much and she could be relieved every time of her worry to have said something awkward or offensive.

  He whispered something to her which Mr. Samson wasn’t supposed to hear and not the mouse that turned the wheel for the library books elevator either. “You’ll soon discover, all here apart from me and you are animals.”

  Vasalissa nodded, not surprised.  “I saw your mum.  And of course Mr. Sampson and the mouse.”

  “Oh yes! “ The boy looked up.  “Mr. Sampson behaves himself wisely, for if he comes any closer to you he’s sure he’ll frighten you.”

  Vasalissa eyed the old man – ahem, vulture-turkey librarian who remained perched along a column of books, merely an animal and probably far more frightened of Vasalissa than she could be of him.

  “Thank you for taking the consideration,” she said to the Prince, nonetheless.  Then she blurted out a thought that returned to her at the speed of lightening.  “How did you get to have a cat for a mother when you’re human?  How can you have two mothers at the same time?  The moon and the cat?”

  The Prince’s eyes widened with a subtle hurt and then he laughed delightedly in sheer boyish joy.  “Everyone’s got to have more than one mother.  You couldn’t possibly have one mother for everything you need a mother for in life.  This mother, yes, who’s a cat, tells me when to come for lunch and for dinner and looks at my fingernails sometimes to inspect that they’re clean.  She asked if I’ve washed my hands and if not she’ll lick them clean.”

  Vasalissa stared and then laughed delightedly.  “A cat that acts like your mother?!. . . Cleans your hands with its tongue as if you’re her kitten with paws and fur.”

  The boy waited in silence, understanding something that emerging to Vasalissa’s own awareness.  “And have you a mother?”

  Vasalissa shrugged, admitting her hidden sadness about mothers.  “My mother doesn’t look after me anymore because she died when I was ten.”

  “Have you seen her since then?”  Somehow the Prince, unlike people in the 1930’s, was assured that Vasalissa had.

  Vasalissa nodded, and was lit up again by that morning sunlight as when she awoke with her mother in that place she was and Vasalissa had found her again.  Her mother was as ever, unchanged and even freer and happier.  Vasalissa forgot this easily, since her demands and expectations for her mother being there for her were still greater than is realistic and this is why she was still sad and a little angry.

  “Well, for now, you can have my mum too, for being looked after, if you need to.”  The Prince looked earnestly at the young Cremona.  She liked his generosity very much.

  “Thanks.  Well, we can pretend.  Though I’ve learned to look after myself well enough; I don’t need a mum anymore.”

  The Prince wasn’t offended since he wasn’t a proud prince.  “I’m too young to not have a mother.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “That’s not too young to not have a mother,” declared Vasalissa.  “I was ten when I lost mine.  I had to look after myself.  I wouldn’t be taken into the orphanage, so I had to go from one relative or friend of my parents’ to another.  It was terrible.” 

  The Prince conceded, stirred more in his purity of heart than Vasalissa had seen in anyone before.  Her face slowly lost its hardness as she felt strings loosen their tight pulling; and since the Prince was so clear in compassion, in his moonlight, Vasalissa no longer had her fears and pain to hide. 

  She lowered her face, a bit sheepish, and admitted, “I forget that my mother is just in another place.  Most of the time I forget.  She’s still there.  I don’t need anyone to fill her place.  Nobody can be the same… nobody could fill my father’s place either. 

  “So, I am sure she wouldn’t mind if I pretend I have a mother who’s a cat.  Just for fun; not because I need a parent.”  Vasalissa smiled.  “Before I was ever born, in the beautiful bright place, I have a parent before my mother and my father.”

  The Prince in Moonlight nodded.  They both had that same parent.  Gathering playful, comic energy after a mutual appreciation, he urged, “Then climb back into your wheelchair bed and let me push you onward to the banquet hall.”

  Vasalissa expressed some indignation.

  “It’s so much funner, you’ll go really fast.”  The Prince looked at her quizzically.  “Don’t tell me you’ve grown up.  Haven’t you yet come to the conclusion from all your suffering and searching that growing up is just taking the world with its laws and expectations and systems and lies as your parent?  And you forget who your real parent is.  Our real parent from before you were born lets us to be free and have fun and be really happy.”

  More seriously, the boy confessed, “I’m an orphan too.  I’ve never met my parents.  I haven’t always been happy, too.  But that’s when I think about myself and compare myself to other people who have parents that can be seen.”

  “My parents never let me ride in a wheelchair bed before,” commented Vasalissa.  “We didn’t even have one.”

  The Prince smiled again.  “Well now’s your chance.  Get in and I’ll push you through the halls, you’ll love the views.  You can see the rest of the castle later.  To lunch!”

  Sitting up, Vasalissa was jolted by the rush of speed on wheels quite soon especially once the boy no longer ran to push the wheelchair-bed but rode on it with one leg.  The floor was so smooth and the perfect surface for gliding.  The library books were left behind once big tall oak doors opened and so much sunlight shone to greet them that Vasalissa believed they were outside until she looked up to the very high ceiling, the dust floating around, as you see when sun shines into a house.  The peaked dome ceilings with arches were painted morning yellow and then a warm rose.  There were windows on each side filling up the walls so that it was like being outside and Vasalissa was awed by the lush green and orchard trees.  It felt like it had been a long time she had not been in the country of Happily Ever That was when she had last seen a green tree.

  This castle with its high high rounded ceilings and with so much sunshine was just like the castle of her childhood . . . her home.  The only difference was that there were animal servants opening doors and dusting and polishing and greeting and bowing.  They were dressed in very respectable clothes of different colours, as if they were lords and ladies in Charles’ Dickens’ times.

                                                                            

  When Vasalissa and the Prince in Moonlight arrived at what evidently was the banquet hall, a tall toad butler, solemn and quietly ribett-ing, bowed to the Prince and excessively bowed to Vasalissa.

  “Mr. Tomlin,” the Prince introduced after exclaiming, “This a Greta!  But she does have a name of her own, really.  I didn’t know what to call her while she was asleep.”

  “My name’s Vasalissa,” asserted the un-Greta.  “Vasalissa Cremona.”

  “I’m sorry to have called you Greta.  If you wish to get back at me, you can call me – Prince Vladimir!”

  The children both laughed.  Vladimir was not a name that would suit this boy at all. 

  Obligingly, the Prince bowed as boys of his day always do in the late eighteenth century, asking for Vasalissa’s hand.  Vasalissa was charmed and gave her hand, thinking he was going to pull her up out of the wheelchair bed but then he bent over her hand and kissed it.  The children both laughed again. 

  “The journeying Vasalissa,” the young boy said, richly older for his age with all his patience and respect for a girl, “Shall continue her journey on foot.”  Then he candidly pulled Vasalissa out of the wheelchair bed.

  Still wearing her nightgown, a very old-fashioned one that the servants must have dressed her in, Vasalissa was led by the Prince, hand in hand as was taught the boy to escort.  Vasalissa marvelled at there being only chairs seen anywhere along the table.  These were two and were along the very middle of a long table fully banqueted.  You could not see what food was there because there were silver lids covering up every dish.  But there was a cake with pink icing, very tall with all its layers stacked high, and some baskets of fruit.  It was a little odd to be sitting to the side of the table, in the middle, when lords and ladies sit at the head of the table.

  “I never sit at the head of the table,” said the Prince.  “No one gets to sit there because nobody here likes sitting at the head of the table.  Occasionally a mouse will take that seat because she or he needs to boost of self-esteem – just to try it out, being the boss.”

  The Prince’s butler, Mr. Tomlin the toad, pulled out the chair for the Prince once Vasalissa was seated.  There was a very caring kind of hedgehog with a soft paw that rested on Vasalissa, dressed in pink silk and checked pink and white and lace who introduced herself, in her hedgehog language.  The Prince explained to Vasalissa what the hedgehog had said. “Mrs. Rhubarb is delighted to have a princess in the castle to be the prince’s best friend, and she says you are very pretty.  Mrs. Rhubarb would like to stand by in case you have any requests or need help.”

  Vasalissa smiled courteously and felt herself a little girl again in a nice way when a little girl is doted on.

  Since there were no other chairs at the table, Vasalissa assumed she and the Prince were the only ones dining.  She also assumed the food would be served by the servants, one dish after another, presented, as she had been used to growing up in a castle.  But something unusual was about to happen. 

  Enthusiastic as ever, the Prince nodded to the two lady cats in pink frilly aprons that stood next to Mum Cat standing proud.  From a picnic basket hanging from their arms the cats opened, golden-winged creatures flew out.  They darted in the air at Vasalissa and the Prince and Vasalissa shrieked with an involuntary-seeming attempt at hiding behind the prince.

  Her moonshine-blue and frill-dressed protector shook with laughter and Vasalissa peered past his shoulder to see the flying golden-winged things hovering in the air in front of her and the Prince.  They were spoons!  Spoons with wings so they could transport themselves.  Vasalissa with flushed cheeks and colour in her usually pale face looked a little further, getting a view of a whole row of these kinds of spoons and more rows of them circling and buzzing out of the picnic baskets.  The pink frilly apron-dressed cats steadily.  The cats seemed to be smiling, perhaps only because the mouths of cats are naturally shaped that way at the corners, but their tails were swaying to and fro with satisfied cat-contentment.  The spoons all made a dip, at the same time, into the dishes and came back up neatly slid into their places as before, hovering in rows in a queue.

  “What service!” Vasalissa complimented when she had calmed down and sat back in her chair again.  The many different animal servants from badgers to beavers to minks stepped in to lift lids off the many different dishes. 

  The Prince’s eyes twinkled and with a sheepish chuckle he explained, “At this castle, everyone tastes a little bit of everything  So then by the end of tasting a little bit of everything, you won’t have missed anything from the table and have any regrets.  There are forty-seven dishes in all.  Pardon me, I hope you can accept that as a Prince and you my guest, we eat first and later all the servants finish the rest.  There are forty-seven dishes in all.  There is plenty for everyone and more is being cooked in the kitchen.”  He said to Mum, his cat mum, “Mum, thank you very much.  Please, you can return to your supervision in the kitchen.”

  Vasalissa was relieved to watch the Prince picking the first spoon in a dainty lift and feeding the food it carried into his mouth.

  “Mm,” he said, most childlikely festive.  “Mashed potatoes with gravy.  How do you like this?  I think you’ve got the same on your spoon.”

  With a little hesitation, the lady guest in her nightgown mimicked the prince and tasted the food which was perhaps the tastiest mashed potatoes she had eaten.  Maybe it tasted so because she was very hungry after not eating for two days.

  She could not say a word to fit her mouthful and so only nodded as politely as she could to reply as a guest would when asked if the food is acceptable.  Meanwhile, she already grabbed the next spoon which was something like mashed carrot with oregano and perhaps parsnips and a hint of red pepper with another kind of gravy on top.

  “Delicious!” she could say, this time.

  It took quite a row of other spoons after that one until Vasalissa began to feel her stomach was filling up and the sound of the wings of those golden spoons became mesmerizing.

  There were fluff-things looking just like dandelion seeds floating in rows which offered themselves as serviettes to clean very cleanly eating children’s lips; they were very pretty, so Vasalissa shook her head next time the serviettes came around and the serviettes responded with a kind of miniature curtsey and flew back in line, waiting.

  When the puddings and fruit slices and cakes spoons started to arrive, an opera singer started singing with a little instrumental ensemble high up on a balcony.  They were wind instruments and there was a trumpet too, a viola and two violins.

  The Prince and Vasalissa smiled at each other, through their mouthfuls.

  The only other human being there besides them was a lady with long blond hair and a long dress made of what looked different-coloured rose petals blown close together off some dainty rose bushes also painted on the wall just as she was.

Chapter Nine: The Snowy Owl’s Perch

“Prince in Moonlight,” Vasalissa said to ask a question.  “Are we children?”

  The Prince had heard and kept smiling, the very serene young boy feeling at home in his castle and content with it.  The golden spoons he and Vasalissa had eaten with were being polished still in rows in mid-air by the cutest miniature cats with feather wings who also had bushy tails just the right kinds for cleaning.

  Vasalissa asked again.  “Are we children?”  She wasn’t quite sure the Prince really was, since he was thirteen and tall, as tall as her and she was just average for a woman’s height but she was fully grown and wouldn’t grow anymore, she was sure.  That made her an adult, in a way.

  The Prince prompted Vasalissa to think for herself and she realized her question was not a question to ask.  It was a matter of course.  They were children here at this castle.  Yet respected like grown-ups.

  There were two lions who stepped up close.  Vasalissa recognized their elaborate white lace collars from Tudor paintings she had walked into in London.   She became a bit nervous when they opened their jaws, dropping their jaws far down and she gasped and cried when the Prince nodded his head into the mouth of one lion and had his face licked by a big lion tongue that jiggled like jelly tipped on a plate.  Vasalissa did not want to have her face licked this way.  She endured the condensation of the lion’s breath and it was enough on her face that she had quite a lot to wipe dry with a towel the lion handed her.

  The Prince was not embarrassed at all and ignored Vasalissa’s stare as he sat back and cheered and clapped at the arrival of a kitchen stove on wheels.  It was copper and black, pushed by servants.  The wheels were oiled so well they didn’t screech.  Steam was piping all around the stove and the lids on the copper pots wobbled and set Vasalissa on edge for the event that one or two of the lids would fly off.  The cook was not Mum the Cat and was possibly a human with copper hair, his back turned to the Prince which Vasalissa wondered a bit strange, since every other servant always faced in warm greeting and courtesy to the Prince and his guest.

  “Is that a human?” Vasalissa asked the Prince in Moonlight, afraid to smell the saliva of a lion off the Prince face he had just towel-dried.

  “That’s Mr. Portminton,” The Prince answered.  “He’s my instructor in playing badminton, playing on the hurdy-gurdy – an instrument from France that sounds a bit fiddley, a little harpsicordy.  He’s a great cook, as well.  This stove used to be a doll’s stove.  There used to be life-size dolls living at this castle, you see, like humans.”  The Prince looked a bit sad, as if he would have appreciated the company of humans or even dolls who looked like humans.  “But they were taken with the family that used to live here.  Supposedly they came alive at midnight and took to cooking and baking and had a party and sometimes the family joined them if they permitted themselves to stay awake till midnight.  Now Mr. Portminton cooks on their stove.  He … uh … took off some hair from a doll’s wig left behind.  That’s why he has a doll’s hair … he isn’t human, he’s turtle.  But he hides the fact, he’ll get very upset if you call him a turtle.  He’s even taken his back shell off.”

  Vasalissa scrunched her forehead.  “Who is Mr. Portminton cooking for?  The table is still full of food and the servants haven’t started eating yet.  When are they going to start?”

  The Prince admiring of some virtue and servitude said, “The copper spoons served us and they need to eat.  The smallest are served first.”  His eyes were large and rich and shone in the corners.  “The spoons turn from gold to copper when they turn hungry – the spoons, they get hungry too.”

  What an unthinkable thing!

  “The smallest in the castle is the Lord.  I am the smallest because I don’t serve anyone.  I need all the serving.  I make myself the greatest and therefor I am the smallest.  The castle lord’s guest is the next smallest because a guest is served just like the lord and actually served the most, but let’s just keep the lord the smallest.  Next up are the spoons.  Then the animals; the servants are the greatest.”

  The spoons preened their wings that had turned into feather wings, snowy white with black crests like a snowy owl’s.  Before they had been sharp gold butterfly kind of wings . . . maybe this is what happened when spoons turned gold to copper because they were hungry.

  Then Prince clapped his hands, very child-like and indeed his delight was much like a three year old even and Vasalissa began to consider it ok for herself to eight years old.  It felt more comfortable that way than staying at fourteen.  Nothing was the way it was supposed to here, and nothing stayed the way it was supposed to.

  The Prince in Moonlight had a feminine quality that made him the perfect brother or friend when one was a little girl growing up with only rough-and-tumble boys and no girls. 

  The Prince in Moonlight opened a jewellery box that Vasalissa watched in awe because of the laboradite that poured out, a greyish stone with many gleams of rainbow and places in distant galaxies shining with radiant colours.  There were amethysts too, tear-shaped. 

  “Which one is your favourite?” the Prince whispered.

  “I like all of them,” Vasalissa said, tracing the shapes of the stones.  They weren’t set in any metal.  “These are wonderful.  I’m so glad they aren’t set in any metal, that means I can wear them.  I’m allergic to any kind of metal unless gold or finest silver.”

  The Prince chortled a laugh at this unexpected condition.  “You can wear one,” he said.  “Or however many you like.”

  Vasalissa did not say that more than one would be unbecoming and greedy since the Prince was only trying to be generous.  She remembered Gladys with her treasures in excess and did not wish to be like her.

  Vasalissa picked a string of opal clusters.  They contained the radiant rainbow colours of distant galaxies within greys, much like the laboradite.

  Mrs. Dobrechensky was there to help and close the clasp of the opal necklace at the back of Vasalissa’s neck.  Mrs. Dobrechensky was a friendly badger in pale blue and periwinkle dress.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Dobrechensky,” Vasalissa said.  “I’ll wear this only to go with my night-gown since these stones are too precious to wear otherwise.”  She said a word or two in Russian that she knew, and then told Mrs. Dobrechensky she was half Russian, having relatives who had been at imperial Russian court before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.  Mrs. Dobrechensky nodded in empathy and replied.  The Prince in Moonlight had to translate badger language to Vasalissa, since no animals of course could speak either Russian or English. 

  “She says she isn’t Russian, she’s Polish,” the Prince said, not having understood anything Vasalissa had said in Russian.

  “Oh!”  Vasalissa blushed a little at her own mistake.  The Polish badger was patient like a 70 year-old-woman, so it did not matter.

  “Do you notice your dress, Vasalissa?” the Prince said.

  Vasalissa looked down and could not believe that her nightgown had turned into opal.  And she felt her feet inside slippers.  She pointed her feet, looking under the table.

  Mr. Thomson, the Prince’s butler, the toad, showed Vasalissa her red cape.  It had been pressed and dry-cleaned by an elephant’s trunk and then a mouse’s whiskers, the Prince informed in detail.

  Vasalissa snuggled her shoulders to the inside of her mother’s legacy, the crimson cape.  She tied the ribbon across the collar and kept the cape hanging just so she could still admire the opal light of her dress; the shimmering differences of colours.

  “So, what do spoons eat?” Vasalissa tried to get a glimpse of what the copper spoons were dipping into, flying one by one up to the opened pots boiling on the life-size dolls’ kitchen stove.  The vapour could be smelled at a distance; it was some kind of almond fragrance, sweet.  “What?  The spoons eat the fragrance that’s being boiled and then turn into little packages tied up with string . . . and fall into a pile.  Their wings have turned to fluff, floating all around.”

  The Prince nodded a bit shy, as if it had been his idea.  He noticed Vasalissa felt a little sad for the death of the spoons that had had butterflies and more recently snowy owl wings.

  “All death is a transformation, leaving remnants behind and what transformation is made has some use.  These packages are food parcels for children who are poor suffering under post-colonial devastation.”

  Vasalissa’s heart bust with gladness.  She smiled and smiled.

  The Prince evaded this from getting to his ego.  “It’s the Snowy Owl, called Snow, who delivers the parcels.  Today she’s dropping them in some place in India – I don’t know exactly where.”  Then he began with a kind of young romantic impulse, very dreamy, introducing Vasalissa to a spell-binding hidden dimension of wonder. “I’ll take you to where the Snowy Owl lives.  She flies very quickly on her errand to deliver the food parcels.  And then she naps on her perch on a cloud.  She’s just like any ordinary snowy owl otherwise.  But when we visit her, we become miniature.”

  Vasalissa was amazed. 

  “I’ve never visited the world but I have the nicest perch to look down at the world from, a snowy owl’s on a glistening cloud,” the Prince in Moonlight murmured, subduing any boyish boastfulness as best he could.

  “Oh yes,” Vasalissa found her voice agreeing before she could think.  “Let’s go.”

  The Prince then said very quietly after musing a little in his usual way, “It’s very cold up there.  Snow spreads her wings out on the cloud though, that’s her perch, and her wings are soft and snuggly, she’ll keep you warmer than any coat can.”

  Vasalissa giggled.  “How can we become small as fairies and snuggle under her wings?  As tall as my thumb?  As tall as Thumbelina?”

  Serious, caring eyes persuaded her it was true. 

  “Oh I believe you, I just wonder how,” Vasalissa explained.

  The fair, long-haired boy so close to such fanciful happenings tilted his head thoughtfully.  “I’m not sure which happens, actually.  Either the owl is a giant owl or anyone who goes to the clouds becomes fairy-size … bigger fairies, not as Thumbelina but as tall as owl chicks.”

  Vasalissa nodded, satisfied. 

  “Do you like to look through telescopes?

  “Oh yes!”

  “Well, Snow lets us look through telescopes while she’s napping.  You can look down to the Earth, anywhere you like.”  The Prince shrugged.  “You need not look at the places where Snow delivers the food packets to.  They will make you sad. 

  “Do you like weddings?” he asked.

  “The ones with lots of white and pink flowers and flower petals up and down the aisle the flower girls throw, pointing their toes?  Of course.  Brides are so beautiful and you don’t get to see their faces except through the white veil which is so pretty.”

  The Prince laughed for some reason.  “What’s pretty, the veil or is it pretty that you don’t get to see the bride’s face very clearly?”

  “Oh both together.”

  “You better not let any bride hear you say that.”

  “Can you look at weddings through the telescope?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “What else?”

  “Merry-go-rounds and fairs.  And skating on ice on canals in the Netherlands or in Quebec.”

  “Where’s Quebec?”

  “In Canada.”

  “I remember… but… “

  “What?”

  “Nevermind.”  Vasalissa did not want to say because to her it was a taboo to mention to anyone there being different time zones.  Sometimes the crimon-caped orphan from the 1930’s was puzzled by the Prince’s time zone.  He was in the late 1700’s was he not?  By his dress and also the castle … Canada did not become a country until 1867.  Perhaps he travelled through different times – or had once?

  “To the Snowy Owl’s perch?”  The Prince offered his hand, and Vasalissa gave her hand with a joy taking flight in her heart.   It was a joy to be alive and her feet were light like a little bird’s wings to take her soaring. 

  It was all new this very friendly, caring elegance of the Prince and the way he could be was so fine-feeling and girlishly meditative.  His hand as he held hers easily lapsed into boyish artlessness.  As he led Vasalissa up a winding staircase at the far side of the ballroom, next to the banquet hall, Vasalissa wondered if this was an escape route in case of a fire.  

  At the top of the stairs, Vasalissa saw what the castle walls were without the creamy finishing, paint or wallpaper over top.  Then the Prince opened a little door like in an enchanted castle and sunlight shone in … but Vasalissa when she stepped in it, it wasn’t sunlight.  It was a mist, a very dense one.

  “I can’t see anything,” Vasalissa said, on the verge of annoyance after she nearly tripped over a step.  There was step after step after that.

  “This is the first layer of clouds,” the Prince said.

  “You mean there are more layers of clouds like this?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid there is a lot of climbing to get to the Snowy Owls’ Perch.  There’s nothing else that’s in the way of getting there.  It’s not like the way from here to the Sipi Falls.”

  “Where are the Sipi Falls?”

  “In Uganda.”

  “Uganda in Africa?  Have you ever been there?”

  “Of course.  You’re unlimited to where you can go when you’ve got an imagination and some books and pictures.  You don’t have to rely on anything, that way, or anyone.  And there’s no risk involved – dangers of your boat capsizing in a storm or catching Yellow Fever or being captured and beaten and eaten by cannibals – not that there are any in Uganda, but if you sail the South Pacific for sure … in your imagination, at least, that can happen to you but you can twist the story at the last minute, like that you eye the cannibal chief when you’re captured and turn into a green cheeky parrot.  And green cheeky parrots are a taboo to eat for cannibals because they fly away and copy everything you say, in whatever language.  ‘Takaka woonka’ might mean ‘I will eat you because you’re human and can’t fly away,’ – a line the cannibal chief might say to each one of his captives.  That’s just what you can say once you’ve turned into a parrot.  And being quite nervous from having escaped being killed and eaten, you can drop your bird droppings right on your captives’ faces as they watch you flap your wings up high.”

  Vasalissa laughed and laughed.  She hadn’t been reminded of a child-like humour for years.

  There sure were a lot of steps to climb up.  The Prince chattered and stretched out his talent for entertaining someone and relieving them with kid sense of humour of about age seven.  Besides this, the cloud became a beautiful colour.  It was a thick mist to Vasalissa’s eyes and she still couldn’t see her feet or the Prince as he chattered but the mist became light blue and then pink.  And once this first layer of cloud was through, it was a dusk sky pink.  The second layer of cloud was only about twelve steps, surprisingly. Then when Vasalissa and the Prince emerged out of the cloud, finally, the air was clear.  Vasalissa and the Prince were standing on a stretch of cloud from horizon to horizon all around.  Instead of the cloud being a mist, just vapour kind of substance, it had become something like candy-floss, only tightly packed and just a little bouncy to walk on.  Vasalissa laughed gleefully.

   Overtop the perfect flat landscape of cloud the clear sky was pink like the sun had just set.  Overhead, the sky was lilac purple.  After a little rest, the children climbed on.

  “Can you see the next layer of cloud above us yet?”

  “What?  Can there be such a thing?”

  “Why yes, of course.”

  Vasalissa laughed.  It was believable, since the Prince was not the lying sort but maybe he was joking.

  Vasalissa kept looking up as the stone steps continued.  Then, yes, the lilac sky revealed a layer of cloud.  Cotton candy.

  “What do we do?”

  “Eat it up, of course.  That’s the only way to get through it – just joking.  Just watch.”

  And the boy with his glorious locks popped his head into the gauzy stuff and pulled himself through effortlessly until his shoes went up too.  Vasalissa waited a little in suspense.  The boy came back down again. 

  “I’ve made you a little tunnel.”  He smiled artlessly. 

  It was easier than climbing up a rocky slope, for sure, since the gauzy stuff lent itself as grips anywhere as she clambered through.  This layer of cloud became dimmer purple until it became a gauzy grey as if dyed in blackberry juice, the kind that floats in the sky in the summer on a full moon when you are glad the sky never gets black but just a blue like in paintings.  Vasalissa admired this once her head was through the other side.  It was only the height of a two story house she had come up.

  It was cold in this beautiful place – night-time.  The children fell silent, exchanging glances every so often.  There was a kind of quietness as the children approached the Snowy Owl’s Perch, the top cloud, just an island of glistening cotton stuff.  It was cold to step on; Vasalissa’s feet were only in thin-soled slippers.  But the glistening was making a kind of quietness.  Quietness makes a sound.

  The Prince made a cooing sound with rounded mouth and eerie face.  It was an owl.  He was calling the owl or saying “hello, I’m here, Snow.”

  And there she was, the snowy owl and she was just the motherly size to make the Prince and Vasalissa her adopted downy chicks.  In other words, the Prince in Moonlight and Vasalissa Cremona were just the height in proportion to be her chicks.

  There was a sign in a language Vasalissa could not recognize but she guessed by the Prince glancing and then pulling his shoes off his feet, that the sign was saying “No shoes allowed”.

  “Oh, your slippers are alright, Vasalissa.  This is just so my heels don’t damage the cloud,” the Prince assured.

  The children stepped carefully. 

  The snowy owl was breathing noisily perhaps because of her long flight to and back from the countries in the world where she delivered the food packets to the children.  Snow was tired.

  A magnificent bird she was.  Like a hen she clucked a bit and pecked a bit through their hair and their coats.  The thought crossed Vasalissa that the beak was sharp at the end of its curve and tore mice and rabbits and Vasalissa was grateful when the owl finished her beakish concern and nudged her and the Prince under a wing each.

  When they began to peer through the telescopes, one each, a gold rod just as you’d expect, Snow fell asleep though Vasalissa did not notice for all the things the telescope could show her on Earth down below.

  First there was a stunning white-sand beach and turquoise waters, waves lapping serenely.  At such a sight to the eyes, the pupils dilate even though it is so bright and they are supposed to pull into tiny dots to shield the brightness.  Vasalissa wasn’t aware that it took only a fraction of a millimetre’s movement – just by her breathing – and the telescope moved and it moved her to another place, from the white-sand beach and turquoise waters to a circus, peering through the hole at the top of the largest tent striped red and yellow.  There below, Vasalissa watched seals flapping their finned arms and clapping and the circus master threw some fish at the seals and they ate them.  Then another breath and Vasalissa saw some gruffy ruddy-skinned men on board a ship and they looked they were pirates and brilliant water sparkled behind them.  One of them who had a particular grimace seemed to glare at Vasalissa and so she was glad when the telescope moved again to another place by the movement of her next breath.  The next vision was at a ballet on the stage and Vasalissa tried to hold her breath as long as possible.  She liked ballet very much with its very graceful and pristine art the form of the body took on. 

  “What about the children in the industrial towns who have lost their dreams?”  Vasalissa suddenly thought.  She remembered her mission since she walked through the doors out of Giesela the fairy godmother’s star castle and she fell into a Christmas tree forest.  Her heart made big beats and she wondered if now her mission would be soon coming to an opening of its unknown tunnel.  Up to this moment, she had forgotten about this mission to save the children from the persecutor in their sleep and all childhood fancy and joyfulness.

  The telescope somehow never showed her any industrial towns nor that persecutor of children in their sleep – presumably something like a black shadow with a white face and long white fingernails… Vasalissa was quite relieved. 

  In contrast, it was very relaxing and amusing watching children run out of school somewhere in Italy because some of them had decided together to run away and they would not listen to the teacher shouting behind them and waving a belt.  The children stuck their tongue out and had plans of leaving their town and living in a forest where the outlaws lived.  The telescope began to sink into the cotton, glistening cold cloud because Vasalissa had fallen asleep and because she was only a child and adopted as an owl’s chick, after all.

 

“These are some of the scenes I saw,” the Prince recollected later on.  “I remember these jolly really nice children I would like to be friends with . . . they were watching a spinning top in a nursery.  And then there were really pretty girls dressed in long white nightgowns in a procession which was a Santa Lucia’s procession on the 13^th of December.  The girl in the front was wearing a green wreath on her head on top which glowed candles.  The wax was dripping down.”

  While the graceful boy mentioned some other scenes, Vasalissa was not listening, not only because she felt a little arrogant, not telling the Prince she had actually flown across and around the earth before, having learned the courage to fly from Sun-man Dirke. 

Also, Vasalissa had dropped into a sullen mood, remembering all too well the Santa Lucia procession she had seen in Stockholm when she was eleven.  There, her Uncle Gustav Cremona had been one of the kinder guardians.  The crimson-caped Cremona orphan was his third cousin’s daughter, on special treats like musical concerts and galleries.  But then his wife, or Aunty Thelma Louise, tried to poison her. 

  Aunt Thelma Louise had been Vasalissa’s aunt who had claimed Vasalissa to be a treacherous niece because she had stolen her magenta lace and silk slip knickers which of course Vasalissa had never even ever seen.  Of course Vasalissa’s stomach was quite a hardy one – or rather it had been the lucky thirst for drinking lemonade soon after eating the poisoned chocolate mousse cake that had allowed her to survive; the acid of the lemonade broke down the poison molecules; one of lemon’s healing properties.  Vasalissa only suffered mild indigestion that evening.  When in the morning, she hadn’t died, like her aunt expected, that’s when she heard about the magenta lace and silk slip knickers and that her aunt accused her of stealing then.  In the end, Aunt Thelma Louise even admitted trying to poison Vasalissa to death because she began claiming Vasalissa a kind of witch who didn’t die like normal people are supposed to with poison and that is when Uncle Gustav, in the orchard garden where Vasalissa was playing with her carefree little cousins at sunset, asked Vasalissa to just leave and go to another family before the servants who had overheard his wife admitting she had tried to poison her orphan niece were going to spread the news and the home situation might become very unpleasant and unsuitable for any boarders and guests and newly adopted orphan children.

  Such was the life of an orphan, always having to escape a home, a family.

  The faint-faced, delicate, crimson-cloaked Vasalissa wondered if The Prince in Moonlight knew what it was like to be an orphan.  Wasn’t he one?  He did not seem like an orphan, he seemed like a care free boy and a prince of his own castle.   Perhaps he never even considered himself an orphan.  He had a cat-mother who cooked for him – called him to lunch and dinner and insisted when he was busy.  There were more animals cooking for him than anyone could leave want for the feeling of being provided abundant delicious food.  A snowy-owl was his mother who was a courier looking after hungry, deprived children across the world in post-colonial areas, and worked hard for the Prince’s care for these children so that he would have no need to feel guilty about not sharing his richness every time he ate a meal.

  Maybe the Prince never called himself an orphan because he did not feel he was one.  There were no other children around to compare himself with and realize he was the only one without parents.  

Chapter 8: School at the Prince’s Castle

As soon as Vasalissa was feeling better, she had to go to school.  It was no ordinary school, of course.  There were no other children going to it, and it was inside the castle. 

  The Cremona girl walked in early in the morning, with the Prince, dressed in a prim school dress 1890’s style all in black, with a frilly peach and burgundy apron to wear over top because of the chalk that would come off the slates she would write on.  Black can become very dirty-looking when one is handling white chalk.

  The Prince in Moonlight was tutored normally all on his own and his school was in one room divided in many sections as there are subjects to learn.  It was a fanciful room.  Since some say travelling is the best education and the Prince was a fanciful traveller, there were maps of different worlds and countries and lands all around the school room, even in the Biology side of the room, of course to show where all the different plant life and animals and insects and sea life could be found.  Vasalissa found on one map how to walk from a village in Guiana to a part of the Amazon River basin where you could wade in and manatees would swim around you.  Manatees, as Vasalissa observed in the picture, were seal-like creatures quite like whales or slow-moving pudgy-faced dolphins.  There was a friendly black bear living in the Smoky Mountains the Prince in Moonlight had drawn a map himself for how to get to the black bear’s cave.  And in the Rocky Mountains there was a bog you could ride to by horse – preferably after the 1890’s to avoid trouble and questioning by the natives living nearby, and there was a speaking moose the Prince had called Babby. 

  “The moose of course can’t speak exactly like us, but he tries.  He interacts with you when you say long vowels to him like ‘ngaaahhh’ and ‘moooooh’.”

  Vasalissa laughed.

  “You know, we can go there.  With my husky sleigh.”

  Vasalissa could not even ask “Really?” for sceptical surprise. 

  “Yes, really.”  The boy laughed in spite of himself.  “I know it sounds out of this world.  Well, it is out of this world.” 

  Looking at each other both in wonder of those far away worlds and the wonder of how to travel there, the Prince slipped his hand in Vasalissa’s right hand.  “Let me show you something.”

  They went to a display of models, different kinds of sleighs and boats and one particular clay model of islands on the sea.  “These are a part of the Philippines.”

  In the Home Economics division of the school room, the Prince held quite a collection of different ethnic food, all dried up and preserved though real-looking, from many different cultures. 

  Vasalissa wondered something.  “How does your tutor allow you to travel so much?”

  “Oh, I didn’t collect all these things here myself.  Some of them, yes, like the conch shell off the coast of Samoa… I went diving with some kids there – just happened to land there one particular afternoon, finding some bright purply pink tiny flowers growing along the ridge of the sea not very far from here.  Before I moved into this castle, there was a family of quite a few children who went to school here.  These things all were here before.”

  “Who is your tutor?” Vasalissa smiled, somewhat knowing the answer.

  “It’s Mr. Badger of course,” answered the Prince, smiling too and tossing up a clump of some kind of dough perhaps from thirty years ago and from some clay hut by the source of the Nile.  “He’s not a badger, he’s called that because he sometimes gains a bit of weight and then looks like one – particularly in winter.  He’s actually a weasel.  You’ll have seen him yesterday at dinner.  He wears round gold-rimmed glasses.”

  Vasalissa laughed out loud.  “Oh, I remember, I do.”

  After a pause, Vasalissa wondered, “How can you learn any languages if there’s nobody to teach you?  I – I mean, you can speak the language of every animal here.  You’re the most talented person I’ve ever met.  Can you learn any human languages besides English which we’re speaking now?”

  “At the moment it’s Swahili I’m learning for my next travel trip to Earth,” replied the Prince, with humility.  “I’m not the best at learning human languages so I do one at a time and I learn them from books and when I’m actually in a place.  You can speak all sorts of languages, can’t you?”

  “Yes, well, I’ve been in many parts of Europe.  Every month or two, almost in a different country – and sometimes back again to the same.  Since I was a kid I learned pretty fast.”

  “You’ll be a faster learner than me by far,” the boy complimented.  He sat placidly on a desk, his legs dangling. 

  “Which subject would you find most important?” Vasalissa inquired moment later, dangling her feet as she sat on a desk also.    

  The boy tilted his head.  “Astronomy class tends to be the most consistent class I have since I have to learn where to catch the comets and how to look out for the twists and turns between the worlds.  It’s not the usual Astronomy class you might be used to.  There’s a telescope for that, outside on the roof.”

  “Oh.  I haven’t learned much about Astronomy,” said Vasalissa.  “Let me have a look in that part of this school…”

  There was different patterned wallpaper on the wall for every subject, most of them floral.  At Astronomy it was something more unusual, something alluding to outer space as well as could be acceptable to 18^th century interior design.

  Vasalissa crossed her ankles neatly as she sat on the plush burgundy sofa, Jugendstil from Berlin.  She hoped her neatness would make up for not having gone to school or had any tutoring lessons since she was ten years old when her parents died. 

  “Have you ever gone to school with other children?” asked Vasalissa.  If they were nice children, this could be a reason for going to school in the first place.  If they were not nice children, then it might be better not to go at all.

  The Prince did not seem to ever have known you could go to school where there were other children although presumably he did know because he read so much and travelled to earth from time to time.  He was holding a fallen leaf to his ear when Vasalissa asked him this.

  “Here, in the woods … can you hear?”  There was a red maple leaf for Vasalissa to listen to and she tried to do the same as the Prince, wondering if he expected her to hear the answer to his question. 

  Surprisingly enough, you could hear a sound through that leaf at your ear that sounded just like in a forest.  It was very peaceful and very awake. 

  Vasalissa was apprehensive about doing something in class without a teacher or tutor giving you permission or guiding your learning.

  Listening to a dead leaf put up against your ear could have been a passage way to hear a forest of dead leaves rustling.  But the sound of the forest you could hear on the other side was alive.  It was so alive Vasalissa felt she had never really been listening to leaves in the treetops before.

  “Where is this place?”

  She did not feel she needed an answer.  The Prince listened for the answer in that place through the sheet of leaf.  He did not learn of any answer, it was just something in the sound of the place, where any questions were engulfed by the answer.

  She walked to the harp a few paces to the centre of the room.  The harp was made of maple leaves chiselled out of maple wood.  Along the top it was gold-plated.  Vasalissa began to pluck the strings as if the heart strings were being plucked and a human soul enveloped it left and right – and it was played at the heart of humanity with all its individuals to the hurts and longings and surviving beauty inside.

  The Prince in Moonlight sat down on a red velvet cushion stool and started playing with two light-weight sticks on strings strung across a board.  The wood of the instrument was also a light wood, shaped like the roof of a long house.  Once this wood had been part of a living tree.  The Prince of Moonlight collaborated his sense of soul and feeling and understanding together with the co-operation of the instrument.  The resonance and message that came from them together went in all directions as the wind of all seasons: north, west, south and east.  Crystal ice and snow; summer caresses and speechlessness. 

  Most of the world had been covered from coast to coast in forests, long before man began deforesting and burning and clearing thousands and thousands of years ago. 

  At the foot of mountains, on hills, along the flowing hair tresses of streams … trees resonate together in their silence... and they provide resonance for instruments for our souls. 

  Of course there was no Conservation class here… 

  Perhaps if the Prince’s tutor would have come along and taught the children a lesson about music and about instruments, he would come to a close reminding the children that most instruments are made of wood and all wood is made of chopped down tree.  Of course, the 99% forest that used to be did not go to become musical instruments.  Most of it went to battle ships and things of far less noble use than musical instruments and children’s wooden toys like a duck on a string with paddling feet.

  The Prince in Moonlight’s listening continued and Vasalissa’s listening into spirit of the living trees was like finding ancestry with the wise sages of the ancient world.

  All seemed nothing like the average school.  However, there was morning break time and the prince rang the bell himself, a little hand bell he said had come from an Amish school in Ontario, Canada.

  When it was break-time, the children were called by another sound, after the bell, making an announcement, distant yet familiar.  Not a school bell or a teacher saying anything like “Come back in 15 minutes”, but the sound here at the Prince’s castle was that of a window opening at the far side of the room.  The children picked up their feet and attention toward it . . . it wasn’t a window at all but the opening of an elevator.  Vasalissa had lived amongst some wealthy relatives before who had elevators and whose friends and associates had elevators.  And yet the elevator was a different kind even from the gilded fancy Victorian ones she had seen, creaking along.  This was a pavilion, mainly soft pink in colour, with silk rounded sides and sprays of decorative reeds . . . for it was a frog pavilion.

  “The frogs go on breaks from being inside their aquarium too,” the Prince in Moonlight said with a kind of defiance on their behalf, in natural brotherhood with frogs.  Vasalissa stared in wonder and laughed.  The Prince with his soft pale mane of curls nodded toward the frogs.  “Once they are out of their aquariums, they come to full life size, being just like us – or wider in some cases because of their bellies… the wideness of their bellies is necessary for skimming across the water like they do, it has little to do with their enormous capacity for croaking.”

  All the animals she had seen at this castle were out of proportion to the natural animals she had ever seen in the wild or domestically or seen in illustrations.  Vasalissa was only surprised a brief time about them being somewhat taller than her. 

  The Prince began croaking in a conversation with one of the frogs, then all of them there among the pink feather fluff.  The boy was well-pleased with his lung capacity and greatness of sound which his young lady visitor turned away from with a bit of disgust after some astonishment. 

  Then the frog gentlemen began fanning those feather plumes at their own faces but so much air came from it that Vasalissa had to turn her face away so as not to be out of breath.

  “Is that elevator taking us somewhere?” she asked.

  The Prince, well-mannered as usual though he was escaping school and inviting his young lady guest to do so as well, together, made a courteous bow gesture and then showed Vasalissa a menu from off one side of the pavilion where it slipped off from a frog who had become tired of fanning himself – or herself with it, most diva-way.  Off a little silver try the Prince in Moonlight plucked off a few chocolate pralines.  He and his Cremona-girl guest ate them.

  “A pre-lunch theatre dinner now.  Just where an orchestra is ready to play.”  The Prince in Moonlight was blank in innocence, completely charming and with warm generosity.  “Do you like the Impressionists?  Some might call them the Symbolists.”

  The young long dark-haired damsel’s heart made a leap and that is how it feels when you remember something that has been a youngish longing because someone speaks of it and nobody else had before.  “Of course!  You mean like Debussy?” 

  The Prince nodded.

  Vasalissa recalled, “My father played the piano.  He played all of the Impressionists and Symbolists.  He had recordings of some of their orchestral works.  He had a room just for his music and the recordings and volumes of sheet music and scores.  Nobody has ever taken me to hear a real live concert of this kind of music.”  There sounded a round hope at the end as Vasalissa began to wonder if perhaps the Prince had an orchestra somewhere and it might be where they were going to.

  The Prince in moonlight gestured to show the silken flower patterned steps for the elevator pavilion.  The frogs were fanning big pink and white plumes.  They wore suits just like that of usherers at symphony halls; one of them boasted the wardrobes of solo singers – perhaps he had access to a wardrobe behind stage at the theatre? 

  There was another sound, far, far away.

  “Are we by the sea?” asked Vasalissa.

  The Prince tilted his curly blond head to the side and smiled.  “There’s an orchestral suite called ‘’La Mer’ . . .”

  Vasalissa stepped close up, chiming in, “By Claude Debussy”.

  The Cremona heiress was glad she had learned French from her father’s recordings and music and illustrated books, and ‘La Mer’ was just a dreamier way of saying ‘The Sea’.

  “And there’s one about sirens . . .”

  Vasalissa realized as she saw in the Prince’s eyes when he spoke the word ‘sirens’ that a half-fish, beautiful luring singer with long hair living in the sea was as mesmerizing to him as to Vasalissa.  She had never met anyone who shared the perception of this mythical profoundness.

  The teens both with aspirations for wonder and mystery respected the uniqueness to have met each other.

  “For today, because all the animals know a girl is here, the symphony hall you’ll see has two pearl clams,” the Prince said.  “As if they are for mermaids to sit in and sing the songs of the sea… in that language that sounds like no language at all.  Just singing… music reaching the beginning of the earth at the time everything was only sea and darkness, and then light.”

  The Prince smiled and in a very natural way said, filling in Vasalissa’s lack of warmth where her parents had broken off like a rose snapped off a bush.  “There is only life out there, in any unknown Vasalissa… a voice out of the dark mother depths of the unknown sings this. 

  “Making up anything – like stories, making up music or making up pictures… tells this.

  “It may seem there is death or there can be death, but only as change, a transit to a new life.  You don’t need to fear anything.”

  “Death and loss has been so big and dreadful a thing to me,” Vasalissa confessed. 

  “Loss, as well, is the transit to a changed state of being.”

  “How do you know all these things?”

  “I don’t really.” 

  Vasalissa laughed, relieved and lightened though the beauty of these thoughts spoken had taken Vasalissa into a reverie.

  “Where are we going now?”  Vasalissa landed a soft seat on the fan-plume pink pavilion, holding the Prince’s hand still as she asked. 

  Round like a muffin, the Prince in Moonlight cupped something in his other hand from out of his frilly wrist.  It was a miniature castle.  He nodded to it.  That was where they were going.

  Expecting something out of the ordinary to happen from out of the ordinary, Vasalissa did not doubt the Prince in Moonlight’s line of direction.  His usual serene moonlit secrets were admitted to Vasalissa with a nod and a light went on in one of the castle towers.  Vasalissa started with alarm, not having been quite ready for the unexpected.  It had not occurred to her, somehow, that there can be lights inside a miniature castle in the palm of someone’s hand.  Then the lights turned on in another tower of the castle, and another and then all from one side of the castle to the next and suddenly the castle had a park with purple skies and trees and a green lawn.  And there was a little live person, a girl in a red cloak, running across the green lawn.  That little person was Vasalissa!  And the Prince in Moonlight was with her with his moonlight cloak floating behind him.  It was evening.  The moon and beautiful shadows and silver light wanted a sound; Vasalissa as she watched, then heard music faintly starting and it was being played inside the castle.

  “Look at this,” whispered the Prince and turned his hand so Vasalissa could distinguish in a more recently-built extension of the castle within the tall frames of windows much movement of silhouettes.  “Musicians are playing, violinists and cellists . . .”

  Vasalissa had been to hear an orchestra play only once before, having grown up in her castle and only travelling with her parents occasionally.  One travel had been to the opera house in Prague. 

  It was a curious firelight inside where the orchestra was playing and Vasalissa felt she might just step around the corner and meet it.

  The pavilion was an escalator and though the miniature versions of Vasalissa and the Prince in Moonlight were peeking through the windows, standing by them, the usual-sized Vasalissa and the Prince in Moonlight who were watching the miniature ones and the miniature castle were lifted by the pink-plume feather pavilion, more like a chandelier going up through a hole in the ceiling.

  The children went through a narrow tunnel at first and then a labyrinth hall jagged in different directions and lit only by burning torches and a few Venetian lanterns.  There was a long painting of coloured paper lanterns on a long gondola on a canal… red and pink and orange and one yellow with painted red marks on it.  Vasalissa lingered by the painting with fascinated eyes a moment at how the lanterns shone out.  And when she turned to walk again, a frog in fancy reception attire, including a kind of scroll-like bib was holding a tray with a bubbling champagne glass on it.  The Prince cautioned Vasalissa, “These were only for adults.”  Vasalissa remembered she was only 14 yet and withdrew her hand from reaching those sparkling drinks. 

  And then the children arrived at an opera theatre.  The stage was shaped round by gilded silver and gold and of course moonlight blue – so Vasalissa figured when she was informed that this was the Prince’s opera inside his castle. 

  “Why look,” the Prince in Moonlight said obligingly, very sincere.  “The round cushion seats we have here are the same crimson as your cape.”

  Vasalissa smiled.  The seats were many and like pin cushions in their roundness.  Those on the sides though were blue.

  The maestro of the orchestra wore a black suit, tail-ended.  And it was a good thing because he was a lion and his tail swung to and fro.  His hair from the back looked just like Beethoven as a man.  Of course, the Prince had no humans around but his animal company was probably all better just as they were, decent with refined manners and not talking.  The Prince was the noisiest of any of them when he communicated in language they understood, trying to sound like them.  He had a lot of fun doing it; it seemed to be something he enjoyed just as some boys enjoy playing the flute or the whistle.  It often was a kind of music.  Often he truly did not know what he and them were saying to each other.

  The music had already been playing before Vasalissa and the Prince arrived.  The trombone sounded powerful and only played by a giant cricket with long arms.  The French horn was blown black bears the Prince said were twins and only the equivalent of teenagers but very talented.  The concert master, which means the first violinist, was a puppy.  Vasalissa applauded with especial appreciation for this child prodigy.

  When the orchestra began to play a familiar piece Vasalissa soon recognized as “Theme on Thomas Tallis” by composer Vaughan Williams which she had listened to on her father’s gramophone in his music study, Vasalissa’s friend the Prince in Moonlight presented a book to her.  It was leather-bound and very heavy.  Opening it, he showed how half of it had been written iand the rest was blank.

  “When you start writing a story in this,” the Prince whispered, “While you are writing, the orchestra will play your music – the music of what you are feeling.  The orchestra will play.”

  Story was Vasalissa’s element, as sound was the Prince in Moonlight’s.  The girl in the crimson cape wrote a story in the book with a quil and ink.  The quil made a scratch noise particularly as she looped her l’s and e’s.  The book with its gold-sided pages weighed on her lap. 

  Vasalissa became more present as though she had not been truly alive before she started writing.  Places and characters emerged out of this aliveness inside.

  Her friend in moonlight watched her write and he was much interested in what might be mingling within the emergence of gold sparkles all around her as the story girl smithed with metal and fire.  First there was darkness and from there, secrets unfolded. 

  At the origin of every sphere of imagination lies the beginning; in the beginning is always darkness.  Love wants colour out of this, some light, some character, some setting, some voices, some relationship, some movement, some feeling, some story.

 The orchestra called to those spheres of imagination as they were depicted by Vasalissa’s ability with words, something not very easy.  The quill squeaked and scratched across the thick paper, the thick book, thick on both halves of the book open halfway.

  When the quill scratched at the finishing of the second story, where the words ended with “taken away from them never again” and Vasalissa felt she might like to make up a song instead because just plain writing couldn’t give all her spheres of emotion any justice, a knight named Galleiyad stepped by the side.

  Vasalissa did not notice the sweep of his red cape in the dim light by the seats at the opera.  The red cape was not heavy but it swept like ocean water when you swim in it with long out-stretched arms.  It was raw silk, his cape, a patron’s gift for gallantry.  Over his sleeves of a noble blue were tiny iron loops sewn together as mail of armour.  With him lingered the air of familiar-drawn fires and respite at the hearth; the smell of burning log fires.  Mingled with this, wind still rushed through forests on horseback through to his further missions.  The sweet youth of flowers in a sunny meadow mingled with the clash of swords and with the clash of swords was the rusty odour of bloodshed.  Blood was shed by his best of family and his late wife, murdered in battle, and the man had submitted to defeat because of the loss and yet he got up again, stained by the loss of fear.  By losing he had lost the fear of losing and this was at the core of all these is what Vasalissa began to smell without recognizing what it was.  It bewildered her and yet its potence to remind her of death as a change that can be braved blossomed as a red flower because there was something sweet the Knight Galleiyad had gained; that certain sweetness had taken over the bitterness.

  Vasalissa Cremona felt a tap on her shoulder and she was just about to turn the page after her finishing her second story with “was taken away from them never again” when the Knight’s twinkling blue eyes caught her in a new sudden tide.

  Within the dim light the sea-remembering eyes laughed out and together with shape of cheek bones and coarse tawny face, Vasalissa remembered who he was.  She jumped to her feet as her eyes welled with recognition and appreciation.

  “Sir Galleiyad!”

  “Lady Cremona.”  He bowed, generously good-natured, someone who was like a gateway to heart-warming courage.

  “Vasalissa,” began the Prince in moonlight, standing at Vasalissa’s side.  “So you know each other?  This is my friend, too.”

  Vasalissa looked to the Prince her friend, for she somehow could not remember anything about this knight apart from his name and her familiarity with him.

  The Prince in Moonlight said, “Sir Galleiyad of Lower Iss Terria, those regions after the Viking raidings.  He is humble servant with loyalty pledged to the deprived and oppressed.  Knighted by King Acremad, the one king believing in equality for all.  He’s grown all-white haired, they say.”

  The Knight chuckled.  “Worry,” said he.  “Worry has never done any of us good.”

  The Prince in Moonlight smiled, gaining back the joyful times with an old friend.  Then he turned with something dutiful to say to Vasalissa.  “Sir Galleiyad’s come to your protection, Vasalissa, and guidance.”  Almost teasingly after a moment of awe, with a child’s humour, he concluded, “ You must have called you, with your writing… at some point in your story?”

  Bewilderment still remained with Vasalissa’s eyes but she finally asserted to say, “I don’t know, Prince in Moonlight.  Sir Galleiyad was my grandfather’s knight . . . I cannot remember . . . I had another life, I was somebody else, long long time ago.”

  Vasalissa was not speaking of the time when she was a small child in the castle on the black high rocks with her father who listened to music on a gramophone and played the grand piano in his study and who gave Vasalissa lots of presents and surprises for her room.  There had been another life before that.  She had been somebody else . . . in another place, with other people.  Now she had met face to face with one of those people again and she hardly felt herself different.

  Full of grace, the knight spoke to her so not to bewilder her or frighten her.  “King Acremad, Vasalissa.  Can you remember him?  It has been his request that I find you.”  His mouth seemed to dry with hesitation, remembering words from his king.  “You have not been with us for a long time, Lady Cremona, daughter of Thormund who died in battle, leaving you granddaughter of King Acremad.  It is of the free country called Lower Iss Terria you come from, land of the rich black soil, home for the refuge-seekers from afar.  Home for those so crave only freedom from inequity.  We defend invaders with steel, iron, fire, water, wind to protect our ground.”  His gaze deepened as he watched to see if Vasalissa would remember anything.  He added, “You haven’t changed much, though your cloak is deeper red…”

  “It is crimson,” Vasalissa asserted. 

  “Crimson,” nodded the humble servant.  “And your hair is black, tied back and your face is white and clear.  You once grew up daughter of a king, in the company of horses and knights and pages and her nurse Annie.”

  An inescapable laugh erupted at Vasalissa’s right side, it was he Prince in Moonlight.  She chided him for Sir Galleiyad’s sake.

  “A nurse called Annie?” the boy asked.  “Sounds like you needed someone running after you as you tottered alongside the knights on horses, learning your first steps.  A nurse called Annie to pull you back from getting stamped on?” 

  Vasalissa usually always found her joy with her best friend’s sense of humour and child’s freedom and carefree fun.  It triumphed over everything. 

  The Prince in Moonlight respectfully straightened out his humour and became as solemn as possible. 

  Vasalissa spoke out, “My grandfather was immortal and had lived since the first people washed up on shore; mer-people, people of the sea with fish tails instead of legs… those who had grown legs instead had been the first land-people,”

  Sir Galleiyad bowed again.  “Your home country is pleading your return.” His smile weared.  He paused in some grief.  “Dark times have begun once again, Lady Cremona.  Defence is failing.  The Scraggly Warriors are gaining territory.  Attacking, burning villages, stealing babies and maidens for ransom the King no longer can pay.  He is already in debt to other countries for paying these ransoms.  Soon it will be winter and our country will be famished.  One of the Scraggly Warriors has escaped our realm, I have heard, and he has been disrupting the sleep and stealing the childhood in Europe in the 1930’s.”

  Vasalissa blinked; and nodded.  She had already linked Scraggly Warriors with the Scraggly Man.  They were the same.  The dreaded never-seen shadow man stealing the dreams of children in the Great Depression in the industrious towns for which she had probably come to this very castle for of the Prince in Moonlight’s, on a mission to end the persecution of those children.  She smiled now.  Vasalissa might be on direct route to the frontline of that mission, whatever shape and form it might be.

  Sir Galleiyad said, “The lands and lush green forests of long ago and the isles and mountains far away will be forgotten forever if these children grow up to be like their parents.  These children will be even worse because they have never even lived in any places of imagination for the reason that all their dreams have been stolen by the Scraggly Man, whereas their parents lost theirs in a fire.”

  “The children live the day without any joy or any childlike play,” Vasalissa augmented.

  The Prince in Moonlight listened with his own perceptiveness, which of course was with great pores ready for fun.  He stifled some laughter.  He was ignored anyway.  

  Vasalissa continued.  “All the countries like Iss Terria will be invaded by terrible wars and devastated.  Be no more.”

  “It’s happening now,” the Knight of her grandfather said.

  Lady Cremona looked sharply through her flooding return of memories before her eyes.  A pain and sorrow emerged but she felt the Prince in Moonlight’s intuitive response of nearing her for support.  In purity of moonlight he lent her, Vasalissa spoke in contradiction to Sir Galleiyad.  “You know when I went to battle, my grandfather’s armies were unarmed.”

  Beside her, the Prince in Moonlight smiled like at the thought of a warm drink at a colourful market at Christmas time. 

  The Cremona princess steadily lowered her chin.  She glanced at the Prince in Moonlight and turned back to further contradict Sir Galleiyad.  “I’m not going to fight any cause in your way of fighting.  I won’t go to war.  At least not in the sense of war with weapons that cut and kill.  We once were all born children of light.  When we forget who we are, inside, then the outer world with its kings and deceit and slavery caves into our souls.  No longer autonomous, we’ll listen to anything, even a general’s command to eye the enemy and charge to the frontline. 

  “I expect the Age of Innocence to return.  The birds of the forest and the little animals and the unicorns upon my call … this is the infantry that will accompany me to face the enemy… an infantry in the correct sense of being infants in approach.  Servant of my grandfather, Sir Galleiyad, this is the cause I would take if I were to return to Iss Terria.  This is what you persist in, that I fight the cause.  I can fight the cause not in your way.”

  The Knight with the sea blue eyes shook his head, his hair hanging.  “Then it is a cause I will have to forsake.”

  Lady Vasalissa blinked a protest.

  “You cannot expect a return of the age of innocence, my Lady.”  The Knight was calm but forthright and not to be persuaded by any other logic that wasn’t his, learned from men.

  “It exists,” Vasalissa said, “in other realms.”

  “But you cannot persuade it in the realm of our world.  We must fight with iron upon iron, steel on steel, flint arrow.”

  Outspoken and grand-daughter of a king Vasalissa spoke for herself in return.  “I don’t belong to it anymore.  It is not my realm.  Do as you like.  I shan’t return.”

  “Then our country is doomed.”

  “I shan’t return.”

  “Fight with us.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I will not leave until I can find in Acremad’s granddaughter the honour of allegiance that once gave us all hope and light like the burning petals of a red flower.”

  “You must leave without it.”

  “I shall not.”

  The Prince in Moonlight introduced his playful grace to strive for peace, since it both his guests at his castle refused to come to an agreement.  “How about some time to think things through, Sir Galleiyad, friend?  Vasalissa, you still haven’t seen the inside of this castle.”  He showed both the knight and the young lady the miniature castle figurine.  This brought the knight to suddenly change face and laugh out loud.  The youthful prince persuaded generously.  “Vasalissa… Before you would be on your way with my friend who is calling you back home, on behalf of your grandfather, would you like to go to a ball at this castle with me?”

  Relief brought a glow back to the Cremona traveller’s face.  Her face began to host a torch light spreading corner to corner.  “Oh really?”  With catlike curiosity she perked her nose close to the mysterious castle.  The lights were still on and where music was playing; silhouettes were moving in the windows; arms and elbows and stringed bows.

  “It’s happening this very minute,” breather the fair-haired boy.  “All we have to do is attend.”

  Vasalissa nodded an eager, secretive ‘let’s go’.

  The children looked at Sir Galleiyad from the medieval ages of Iss Terria and he complied.

  They walked to the end of the row of velvety seats together. 

  The orchestra behind them was packing up; there was rustling sheet music paper and opening clasps of instrument cases.

  When Vasalissa and the Prince in Moonlight exchanged glances, there was the reflection of the lights in that great ballroom hall where the dance and music was happening – although they weren’t there yet.  She clasped her hand in the prince’s.  The Prince warmly received her way of telling him she wasn’t wanting to part from him.  Their adventures together were just starting.  There was so much to discover in the newness of the here and now.  They both knew planets and stars were resonating beyond and within, those “other realms” Vasalissa had mentioned, in which the age of innocence existed – in some.  That was what they both decided was their home; until they would go there, they could be present in the stream of the sound, story and light of these and feel at home.

  If Vasalissa Cremona was to return to Iss Terria where she would be once again guarded by knights and horsemen on journeys and by nurse Annie and a lady-in-waiting now that she was 14, always watched and guarded; there would be no one to be her friend and share in this stream of sound, story from those other realms where the age of innocence was still a light.  When Vasalissa realized this and gained a heavy sense of her landing in this realization for where she wanted to be, she began to become aware that around her no longer was the theatre with the pin-cushion like seats.    There was a new sound, very familiar, that of evening outside… 

  She was walking on grass and there were bushes around and lilac blossoms.  Beside her, the Prince had just landed in this new place but not as easily as Vasalissa.  He had lost his balance and was now brushing his knees from a moderate fall.  The boy made a silent complaint to himself at the sight of one knee having a grass stain on the white stocking (it is awful to say tights), below the cream and white hand-embroidered and patterned ruffles.  His breeches were balloony pale blue, moonlight silk with stripes in the silk texture.  Moonlight was shining from them directly from a pale nearly full moon.  The trees were rustling.  The lights to the castle were flaming torches and smoky hats rose out of the flames. 

  Suddenly Vasalissa and the Prince remembered something.

  “We’ve forgotten Sir Galleiyad!” they cried out at the same time.

  Vasalissa couldn’t help feeling relieved and taking triumphant independent steps.

  The Prince in Moonlight asked, as if he didn’t know what it was like to be a prince being looked after by his household of animal servants, “Didn’t you like being King Acremad’s granddaughter?”

  “There was a beautiful golden tree growing in my little garden.  There I could spend afternoons and just be myself without anybody watching me.  As a princess, I’ve always been watched.  Everybody looked at how my hair was made that day, how the folds of my tunic fell; they watched to see if I was grumpy or whatever mood I was in.  I was being watched as to how I was growing from a girl to a woman and just as I was at the start of changing in to a woman, my grandfather began accepting suitors who visited the castle to see me and there was lots more watching I didn’t like.  I refused them all. 

  “Some people, the ladies at court and some guards and even a gardener said the reason Lady Cremona refuses all her suitors is because she and Sir Galleiyad, the King’s favoured knight, share a liking for each other of that kind – that’s what they were saying.”

  “And is that true?”

  “He’s widowed and he’s only my friend and protector.  And he’s nearly ten years older than me!”

  “But he’s handsome.  Of true, noble character.  A fighter.”

  Vasalissa hung her head and sighed.  “I’m not Lady Cremona anymore.  Iss Terria isn’t my home.  I don’t care about fighting and defending and wars.  I’m Vasalissa Cremona, my mother spent her childhood with gypsies and escaped the Bolshevik revolution and my father designed hovercrafts and listened to music on his gramophone and played piano.  I go on journeys and I’m on a mission.”

  The Prince in Moonlight drew a breath and hung his head low in some kind of relief and said, “So you care about the children who have lost their dreams and childhood? … More than you care for your former home and your being the granddaughter of an immortal king and more than you care for a future romance when you’re grown up, with a handsome true valour-hearted knight?”

  Vasalissa’s feet stood in a pause and turned to face her friend by her side.  “My fairy godmother Giesela sent me on a mission.  Childhood is the greatest cause, to me.  A joyful childhood as it should be is something I only knew brief days and moments, when I was a princess in Iss Terria.  It is something I lived all the time in my sun-filled castle over the black rocks which I had to leave because my parents died.  A happy childhood is something all children must have, not to be ended and broken like it did for me when I was ten.”

  “I’ve never had a family,” the Prince in Moonlight said.  “I always wanted to know what it is like  On my star because I came here to what became my castle with my servants and my hills and my sleigh with huskies so I can travel, there was nobody except comets and comet children.  Nurturing asteroid and comet older sisters.  Some meteor brothers I didn’t like.  But it wasn’t like family at all.  And my playmates weren’t like me at all.”

  Vasalissa laughed.  “They were comets.”

  The children – or growing up children, held hands and decided promptly that the ballroom party was in direct path to the rescue of those children who had had their childhood stolen.

Chapter 9: A Misfit Star

If Vasalissa could have been given a bird’s perspective of what was going to happen at the ballroom party with music and hoop skirts swaying and platters of bite-size elegantly arrayed castle food, she would have taken notice of a grey lady cat peering through a masquerade eye mask at her every so often.  Since Vasalissa didn’t have a bird’s eye view of the future and what was happening in the picture of her journey, she could not prepare herself when this grey mysterious lady cat would reveal herself a menacing enemy.  However this menacing enemy was going to push Vasalissa to the quickest gateway, should Vasalissa choose it, to her next destination toward freeing the children who had lost their childhood due to persecution by the Scraggly Man.

  Just before the children made for the red-painted doorway which was attended by guards half asleep, a grey-haired lady, surprisingly young, drew up the reigns of a sled-looking mass Vasalissa quickly observed had no wheels but hovered above the ground like a cloud and it looked like a cloud too, tissued, glistening silvery-grey you could touch but wouldn’t because it looked something extremely cold and Vasalissa felt the extremely cold draft it emitted.  Perhaps your hand would glue to the tissue and your arm become an ice statue if you touched it.

  “You are expected at your origins, Prince O Ray,” spoke the glistening grey lady brilliant though hearty, her forehead a perfect round, delicate and white.  Her necklace shone at some edges of the slim-cut jewel stones strung together.  They were laboradite.  This is the name for a very mysterious stone where you have to look out for its ethereal colours to see any colours at all.  And those colours shine in the other world onto rocks there, creating the ethereal colours shining out of the grey. 

  The glistening grey lady brilliant though with a smiling heart, added dryly.  “In other words, at home.  You are expected at home, O Ray.”

  Vasalissa blinked and looked once more from the grey-haired but young lady’s laughing twinkle in her eyes to the Prince in Moonlight.  Prince O Ray?  Was this his name?  And his castle wasn’t his home?”

  The lady acknowledged Vasalissa with her hearty dry smile and tucking nod.  “Good evening.”  Her smile became warmer and less dry, recognizing Vasalissa as not naughty, only the Prince as so.  “The stars have been singing in the tones they hum far far from here, in their galaxies.  They are happy you have chosen to walk your path of destiny as they have been shining for you, or tried their best to shine.”  She nodded another tucking nod.  “An adventure lies ahead of you, Vasalissa Cremona.  Trust what you fear as the gateway to your next destination.”  Suddenly the glistening grey lady remembered something and rolled her eyes away to mutter to the night darkness ahead of her, “Tell humans and warn them all you want, fear is an uncontrollable emotion to most.  We stars and comets and asteroids have little fear because we have little emotion.”  She looked back to Vasalissa and then to Prince O Ray.  “That one there is an exception.  O’Ray, when are you coming up again?”

  The Prince seemed annoyed at this in a familiar way Vasalissa had seen when his Mum the Cat kept asking him come to lunch and that meant he had to leave what he was doing and preparing for in the library.  “I’m travelling, as you can see.  I’m visiting the Montrose castle in the mid 1850’s.  If I’m not travelling, then I’m at my castle, as usual and always extremely busy I can’t even remember there are stars except in books and paintings and poetry and songs.”

  The glistening grey lady chuckled, a bit sharply at first.  “I won’t tell your mothering sisters that.”

  “I don’t care if they hear it,” the Prince muttered.  “I don’t need any looking after by them.”

  The glistening grey lady shrugged nonchalantly and pulled her reigns, ready to take off.  “You are our independent changeling.  You always were; it was you who couldn’t leave our side, before.”

  “Because I didn’t know I could leave.  I’ve found animals to serve me instead.”

  “Oh, a prince will be a prince.”

  “Good bye, Tchara.”

  “I might visit you again soon, Prince O’Ray.”

  The Prince rolled his eyes, unsmiling and short of his usual grace.

  The cloud-like glistening mass the lady rode on disappeared just after the lady on it smiled her good bye.  Her sled moved so fast and the reins from one moment were fastened on to thin air instead of horses or huskies.  Then in a moment a blazing comet was what the reigns must have been fastened to, for that is what Vasalissa and the Prince watched shooting past and high over the hills on the horizon.

  “I didn’t know you were called Prince O Ray,” Vasalissa whispered to the fair locks in the way of his face when later she and the Prince were walking in quick-paced unison through a torch-lit passageway inside the castle to get to the fancy ball.

  The Prince’s grace had returned and he looked grateful to Vasalissa for their mutual understanding.  “A little bit like you’ve been called Lady Cremona.”

  Vasalissa always relished the Prince’s looking far-away in his thoughts to places Vasalissa had dreamt of dreaming about which were so beautiful.

  “The Prince in Moonlight is who I am now.”

  “Vasalissa Cremona is who I’ve come to be and I don’t want to go back.”

  “Tchara the comet is right about what she said.  My origins are from the stars.  Before my own world, this here you see, I came from where the stars are and I’m called Prince O’Ray.  I am a star . . . I know it doesn’t look like it, but stars can shift form.”

  Vasalissa stopped walking and in awe stared at her friend with deep appreciation.  Then she comically plodded side to side.  “That’s an amazing thing to happen, you know.  That a star can shift form and become a human.”  She chuckled with her arms and steps out a bit, star-shaped.  “And why are you expected to be back with the other stars?”

  The Prince in Moonlight, called O’Ray above, gave out humoured twinkle, leaning forward a bit over his toes.  “They expect me because they know I don’t want to be there.  That’s exactly why.”

  “Really?  Are they that strict?”

  “Oh yes, stars are all about organization.  They are clear cut and don’t tolerate someone like me who is a misfit.”

  “You’re a misfit?  What does that mean?”

  “My rays are a shape that don’t fit in with everyone.  I was called ‘O’Ray to tease me.”

  “Whoever would have thought stars to be cruel?”

  “Oh they can be.  That’s the reason I’ve left.  They can be cruel and dominating.  They used to make me believe they look after me and I need looking after.  I am a Prince, and so when I came to Earth and found the castle that had been abandoned, all these animals came to look after me.  And so I am served and in a much nicer way than up there by my sisters.”

  Vasalissa thought and then giggled.  “Nicer, the animals because they don’t speak?”

  The Prince smiled and nodded.  “Yes, a lot of hurtful things can be avoided by not speaking.  Nobody at my castle believes they own me.”

  “Do your sisters treat you as if they own you?”

  The Prince was sad. 

  “There isn’t really any such thing as anybody owning anybody,” Vasalissa said from her childlike self.  “It just is what people believe and make-believe.  Not even your mother or your father own you and you can’t own your mother or father.  They didn’t own you even when you were three or when you were a new born.  If the parents looking after the baby die, somebody else will look after the baby.  There’s always going to be someone.  There’ll always be something ... And if you die as a baby because there’s no one to look after you, not even an animal wolf or an owl, your life will keep going. 

  “Just as when you’re an orphan child and easily believe you have to stay with a family even though it’s not very safe or happy for you, you also just as easily can turn around and take off; leave and go to the next family.  It took some practice to leave sooner than later before things got worse.  But until I was fourteen, I didn’t realize it would be alright if I don’t need to be looked after anymore.  I’ll meet people who’ll like me and like to be my friends without having to be looked after; friends who are independent.  That’s what I’d like to be.  And you’re independent, Prince in Moonlight.”

  The boy smiled.  He had been listening intently.  Then he said, “It’s alright sometimes to be looked after a little.  But you’re not a pet animal who needs looking after and to be made their possession and kept under control.  And the things people might do which are the looking-after, such as pouring you tea and baking you scones with cream and jam, for example, is something they need always know you can be doing yourself and they can admit it.”  The boy was a little sarcastic, though with a chuckle and good nature.

  “Someone who looks after you needs to be aware that you always have the choice whether or not to be looked after.  And if you are expected anything in return, such as to be their pet to love and care for but stay only as they like you to be and they won’t allow you to change and grow, then you are not being looked after with fair intentions.  If you feel you aren’t free, then you are forgetting you really are free.  That’s why I made a move away.  I exercised my free will and my sisters feel I am a pet that ran away.  They are learning though that you cannot make a brother your pet to keep the same and loyal forever.  Everything changes and has to change.  Doesn’t it?  And I have my free choice all the time even when I don’t know it.  That’s the important thing I’ve learned about myself.  Sometimes I feel bad about having a freedom of choice of what to do.”

  Vasalissa thought for a while and thought of her own fear of choice.  “Me too,” she confessed.  I think I started to feel bad and fearful of having choice when I made the big mistake of choosing the path that went to Little Blossoms Orphanage … back when I came out of my castle where my servants came after me throwing food to kill me, there was a tree of life.  It was very green.  There were many paths.  Some led to a very rocky foothills of mountains and I thought it would be too hard to walk.  The path with the sign “Heidi’s Grandfather” led to that.  I should have taken that.”

  The Prince in Moonlight swayed and cared for the self-reproach in Vasalissa’s voice.  Gently he questioned, “Should?  Who’s saying should?  Is that the reproachful voice that is saying you can’t do anything right?  The voice saying you can’t do anything right, not even make the right choices?  You ‘should’ regret your independence and not trust yourself.  Always should.  Why not ‘might’ or ‘could’?  It’s a voice that doesn’t admit that there are options and other possibilities, just what a lot of grown-ups sound like. 

  “It isn’t so great a thing to know everything or to know better, like they think they do.  It isn’t.”

  Vasalissa blinked.  A diamond that shone brilliantly caught her eye in a dim-lit room.

  The Prince in Moonlight with his friendly seeking filled in that gap Vasalissa had known herself to be completely alone in.  He knew that self-depreciation.  “With some things you never seem to be able to try hard enough, no matter how often you try and how much it becomes the most important revered and necessary thing.”  He mused a space. 

  Vasalissa augmented, “It’s like there’s a walnut shell that won’t open; you believe the walnut inside is the juiciest thing in the world you believe you can eat; nothing else is.” 

  “Maybe, Vasalissa, you’ve been trying to fit into the wrong puzzle, into a picture that isn’t meant for you.  There are other people in the world besides those people you’ve tried to fit in with and find that family-feel.”  He shrugged.  “I’ve been a misfit star with different shapes of rays.  It’s makes a great excuse to go and discover all kinds of adventures you wouldn’t have, staying under the care of those  who want to look after you all the time.” 

  The Prince and Vasalissa exchanged smiles containing both firelight from the torches and shadow because they were in dark passageway where the walls were not more than clay.   

Chapter 10: A Grown-Up’s Party Becomes A Children’s Party

There was a party inside this castle that Vasalissa had once been looking at in the palm of her friend’s hand.  The torch-lit clay passage way led to a place very warm, well-lit and full of people.

  “They’re all humans!” marvelled Vasalissa, kiddingly to compare her friend the Prince’s all animal castle household.  Vasalissa and the Prince in Moonlight perceived all the motion and the body odours and were reminded face to face the reality of here being other human beings besides themselves.  Vasalissa wondered how there could possibly be so many, when each human being contains his and her own world, and more than twenty different people with their own worlds was beyond capacity of her own imagination, thoroughly for each.  The Prince in Moonlight was only a little apprehensive of anybody nearing him or Vasalissa to ask where they had come from and who they were.

  These humans here were the usual type Vasalissa had made the acquaintance with on her journeys through Europe in the 1930’s.  She turned her face away from some of the distasteful ones, such as a lady heavy-set with puckering lips and fascinating to watch because of her bawdy loudness, interacting with other people, but if she would take notice of Vasalissa, there was sure to be some kind of manifestation of power of big and loud over small and quiet Vasalissa would be made to suffer.  Likewise there was a sneering man wearing a white wig who had just noticed Vasalissa because of her unusual crimson cape but before he could walk by close to scrutinize and dismiss as inferior to his own image, the Cremona journeyer exerted a kind of prayer-protection to keep him away.

  It wasn’t the 1930’s, Vasalissa inferred, but about the 1850’s at the time of the big hoola-hoop braced skirts. Vasalissa stared wide-eyed at some of the elaborate hairstyles.  Hair could so such things!  It must have taken a lifetime to grow hair into such length to put into such shapes.  The fabrics of the dresses were beautiful and just as ornamental.  The expressions on faces were generally candid, like cotton-candy, so full of sugar and without interest for anything besides cotton candy – m aybe only some other kinds of sweets such as big swirling lolly-pops.  Though there were silver tray with savoury pastry puff bites going around and Vasalissa tried one.  It was late summer; the baskets of Indian paintbrush and wild feather grasses showed it was summer.  But then, wreathes of holly took up a big part of the decoration although it wasn’t Christmas and gingerbread men were served to eat.

  There was a collaboration of human orchestra players and conductors with animal orchestra players and conductor.   The same animals dressed prestigiously as in the Prince in Moonlight’s theatre hall with the plush seats.  Here they wore wines and greens seats.

  The Prince met with Vasalissa’s amazement that the same animal orchestra was here. 

  “I didn’t expect them to be here!” Vasalissa exclaimed.  “I thought this is supposed to be a fancy ball?”

  The Prince bowed gallantly with ruffled wrists.  “So it is; a very fancy ball.  That’s why it’s Mr. Bogland who’s first violinist instead of James Finchley the puppy and child prodigy.”

 Mr. Bogland was a frog.  He had extra long arms because he was a frog and long fingers but he kept making mistakes and played out of tune and played wrong notes when the bear behind him bumped him by accident ever so often because the bear was without any fingers.  Bear only had claws to press down strings on his violin.

  A red squirrel’s cheeks rounded when she breathed in before blowing the French horn and a chestnut flew out.  Yet the sound and performance of the orchestra was impeccable.

  Besides all these marvellous perceptions Vasalissa had turned to absorb to keep from feeling so out of place at the grown-up party, there an occasional pull at Vasalissa’s face, so it seemed.  Vasalissa found herself turning to a lady who was watching her.  It was as if Vasalissa was prompted every time to follow that lady’s command to take notice of her.  It is eerie when these things happen.  After a few looks, Vasalissa suddenly grasped with her conscious mind what was going on and she took a studied better look at this person. 

  It was a grey-puffy-haired lady with a mask held up to her eyes.  The mask was to resemble a cat.  The lady wore sky purple, just the kind at sunset in the sky between the blue outward and the pinks in to the horizon.  The lady was socializing with some young ladies and two men.  One was a barrel-round man of average height, with bushy sideburns; the other a tall man, dark-haired with sideburns whose wine glass in one hand sometimes tipped and spilled on the grey-puffy-haired cat masked lady – and it was evident the lady pretended not to notice.  Vasalissa wondered at such a strange but one of the usual notions grown-ups partake in, pretending some things are not happening for whatever mysterious reasons.

  Vasalissa and the Prince in Moonlight, or Prince O Ray he might be called, were the only children who were there.  As the only children at a party, not knowing anybody there and not knowing how to carry themselves – as children or as adults, being 13 and 14 – they felt rather more akin to the animals of the orchestra.

  “Animals make mistakes so obviously and find it natural to be making mistakes,” Vasalissa observed with a twist in her smile as some chestnuts dropped by accident onto a flute key and annoyed the kitten flute player in the orchestra because of the wrong notes this caused.  Somehow the music still always sounded right, anyway. 

  The chestnuts falling out from the squirrel French horn player weren’t the only disruptions causing the kitten’s musicianship perfection.  A monkey’s tail often tapped the poor kitten’s flute key.  There was a brown monkey playing the violin in front of the kitten flute player.  The monkey wore corduroy in greens and beiges.  And the bear violinist’s paw with the claws pressing down the strings funnily kept slipping off.  It was a good thing the bear had steady neck muscles to keep a hold of the violin in the first place or he might not have passed his entrance auditions for this orchestra.

  To Vasalissa the Prince whispered, “Adults always try so hard to cover up their mistakes so that it appears on the outside that they make none.”  He spread his shoulders as if he had wings.  He breathed contentedly by his disclaim of perhaps beginning any adulthood himself.

  “There’s a word called ‘pretentious’,” Vasalissa chimed, sarcastically.  “These adults all have to hide that they’re actually just like animals sometimes.  And they’re sometimes children.  ‘Pretentious’ kind of means pretending.”

  Watching a pair dancing where the gentleman kept being stepped on – you could tell by his minute yelps and once an “ouch – it’s ok!” the Prince commented, “Pretending they don’t have any animal-likeness or childlikeness at all.”  The gentlemen later snarled to himself because of being trodden on.  Perhaps he did not want to admit to himself abused and humiliated and trapped as well.  A woman is always right, he thought.  They woman danced with her head held high in between very carefree jerks where again she had stepped outside the expected direction.

  “I like impulsiveness,” Vasalissa said in response to this, musing down the line.  She crossed her arms.  “Growing up seems such a dreary thing.  Does everybody have to become like these grown-ups?”

  Before her friend, the only other child there, with her, could wonder and then answer, the song ended and rabbit oboist hopped up to Vasalissa and the Prince in Moonrlight.  First of all she asked them if she could have a bite out of one of the gingerbread men the children were eating.  The children acquisced selflessly.

  Then the rabbit chatted, oboe in hand, “I’ll go ask the Easter Bunny to bring in the young children.  You know, they are here tonight.”

  Vasalissa and the Prince looked at each other in surprise.  “Children?  Are there other children here tonight?”

  “It’s a secret everybody’s supposed to forget about for the duration of the adult party, from beginning to end.  I’m not allowed to tell you, but we rabbits rarely stick to the rules – at least I don’t.  I hope where I please and don’t only just eat vegetables and hay and grass and I don’t always use my potty.  But yes, the children really are here.”

  “Where?”

  The rabbit oboist wriggled her nose, which was something she was doing all the time anyway.  “They are much younger than you.  Now, by the look of you two, I’d say you are quite close to growing into grown-up children.”

  The Prince in Moonlight thought and then chuckled.  “Grown-up children?  Well, I suppose that’s what all adults are, aren’t they?”

  “Children that have grown up in size but they’re still children, yes, yes.  Obviously.  You’d have to still be a child to be so pretentious pretending all the time, like adults do.”  Vasalissa sounded quite scornful.  “Pretending they are never in error is one of the things they pretend.”

  The rabbit patted Vasalissa’s hand most assuringly sympathetic, with plush fluff.  “At least you can be among your own kind.  I think you two are still quite the little ones, even though you’ve grown so tall.”

  Vasalissa and the Prince took it as a compliment.

  The rabbit oboist scrunched her nose in sympathy for the human race.  Her paws were the most adorable fluffy white things, only Vasalissa remembered this was a grown-up distinguished rabbit playing in an orchestra, not a pet and so she did not reach out to touch them.

  Next, the sympathetic rabbit oboist turned away and hopped away.  Vasalissa and the Prince in moonlight watched, and Vasalissa wondered why children had to be hidden at a party.  Were locked away?  Adults always had to lock away their own inner-child, so it wouldn’t be surprising that all children had to be locked away at a party like this.

  “Vasalissa, what do you feel about being neither an adult nor a child, really?”  the Prince asked.

  The Cremona girl thought to herself.  Her answer wasn’t as straightforward as she wanted it to be.  “Well.  When I was 3, I could feel I was 60 and my father’s grandmother,” she said thoughtfully.  “But then when I was eleven and my relatives, those who were my parental guardians for a time, when they would make themselves something tasty to eat and serve themselves abundant portions, would give me only a very small portion and remarked I should be grateful.  That’s when I felt I should only be three and not eleven.  When they lectured me about my life and what a dreamer and floater I was and that I had no future unless I would do everything their way or what they believed would suit me or served me right, then I felt four.”

  The Prince chuckled.  “Even though you were only eleven?”

  “Even up to fourteen.  Just after my fourteenth family I finished my list of relatives and friends of my family to be cared for.”

  “Not all three and four year-olds are made to feel small,” said the Prince, in a murmur.  Then he noticed the white rabbit who had spoken with them.  “Look.”

  The maternal white rabbit oboist stopped at some orange-painted doors with gold and silver gilt framing.  She spoke with some of the guards.

  Suddenly the Prince realized something.  “Wait a minute,” he said to Vasalissa.  “No animals I’ve ever met can talk.  They can’t talk in our language.  I’ve had to learn theirs.”

  Vasalissa gasped.

  It seemed there would be time to wonder about this more, when the guard nodding to the rabbit pressed a paw down on the gold door handle and a golden orange sun like the yolk of a farm egg broke into the castle ballroom.

  Vasalissa and the Prince in Moonlight were struck to the ground by the yolky rays of that gigantic runny egg yolk.  Out of its golden orange light hopped a jubilant plush beige rabbit, perhaps a cousin of the white rabbit oboist.  The two rabbits were nearly identical only this one was much bigger.  At the same time doves flew and rushed through the door, suddenly closer than estimated.  While they had first been the normal size of doves, they became gigantic as Vasalissa caught sight of one  little child sitting a on the back of one dove each  They landed on the ballroom floor infront of Vasalissa and the Prince who scrambled low to avoid getting hit by the dipping giant dove wings. 

  “Don’t worry, the doves are just here to escort us.  They are flying back once we’ve landed.  See?  My name’s Peter,” explained and introduced one boy with tawny brown hair, a dove-rider.  He disclosed his exuberance he was trying to contain.  “Peter, the successor of Peter Pan.”  The boy had blue bell eyes, on the verge of shyness with their lovely corners.  “Thank you for letting us out.  Did you make the choice to do it?”

  “Yes,” said Vasalissa, who always felt responsible, having looked after children on her journeys through her list of relatives and friends of family.  Then fact urged her to correct herself.  “I mean, the white rabbit wanted to let you out because of us.  She wanted us to have other children to keep us company at this fancy ball.”

  “The Man on the Moon had been reading a story about a little girl who sounded just like you,” said the successor of Peter Pan.  “Red cape and long black hair.  ‘The choice was hers,’ the nutcracker Father Christmas said in the story and he gave the girl the choice to open the box of children or keep it shut.”

  Vasalissa couldn’t help laughing.  The Prince laughed out before her.  “A box of children?  You mean, something like a box of chocolates?”

  Peter, the successor of Peter Pan, sitting comfortably on the dove cooing comfortable, replied, “The box was under the Christmas tree.  Who can resist opening a box of chocolates under the tree?  But it’s a big choice to make, whether or not to open a box of children.”

  Chuckling quietly, Vasalissa straightened up, standing on her feet.  “It was the rabbit who chose to open the door and let you out from where you were trapped in the other room.”  She observed with amazed distraction the arrival of many more children all on the different animals, after the doves.  The colours were credulous, a child’s wonder, under the yolk light.  The green twinkle, of many shades and depths of green, the rosy tint in the children’s upturned cheeks.  Vasalissa did not notice, but the Prince was aware how all the adults in the ballroom had clustered together, quiet and fearful.  He wondered about that cat-masked woman; there was something suspicious about her.

  Before he could think much about it, a very colourful bright pony appeared with bunches of flowers.  It beckoned to Vasalissa with a toss of its purple nut-brown hair.  Turning out to be a very unusual pony, it even had a natural smile on its face.  It might be true that all ponies smile because of the shape of their mouth especially with the bridle pulling up the corners of their mouths.  For this pony, the bridle was soon put to use for a merry-go-round.

  “I’ll take you for a ride up over the rainbow!” spoke the pony with a very hoarse voice.  Both Vasalissa and the Prince in Moonlight stared.  Another animal that could talk!  It sounded a bit like a neigh, very much a horse’s voice, but it was audibly clear, every word.  The Prince in Moonlight made a natural pony’s neigh – he was perfectly good at sounding just like a pony, same as sounding like a cat or like a turkey – any of the animal servants at his castle.  But this pony merely chuckled as if the Prince was trying to melt the ice at a first meeting.  The self-assured boasted.  “I trot across the rainbow, you know.  How the colours shine in their stripes so close under where my hooves trot.  Such light!  If I ever slip, then I fall straight into one of the colours of the rainbow.   If it’s the green then I’ll be falling into the greenest green.  Lush green bushes.  Pink and red-pink berries growing on them.  Broad leaves . . . all the heart desires.”  The pony clicked its hind heels together.

  Vasalissa smiled and reached her hand to touch the pony’s neck.  It was a dream fulfilled to touch a pony that could talk.  She used to wish such a thing when sometimes she was living with a foster family where a pony or horse in the field was with whom she felt the most at ease with.  Many times though she had wished the pony or horse could comfort her with words or give her advice or tell her she was alright just the way she was and situations were going to get better if she kept faith and made some changes of perspective.

   Bright rainbow colours were still a craving for an orphan teen who was recovering from the grown-up world.  “Green is my favourite colour – well, one of them” she said.  “One of my favourite places in the world is an artist’s shop.  I used to have most wonderful assortments of coloured pencils and water colours and paints … a long time ago when my parents were still alive.”

  The pony’s ide tilted with listening sympathy.

  “But then they died and I’ve had to live with relatives and friends of my family and I lost everything I used to have from my home in my castle.  And nobody gave me anything to draw or paint with again.

  `When little colourful elves came, pudgy round cheeked and wearing colours of the rainbow, Vasalissa was sure these were the Rainbow Elves.

  “Wait,” Vasalissa said to the pony.  “I can’t decide yet if I’ll go with you.”  She looked toward her friend the Prince in Moonlight.  “Can my friend come too?  He’s the Prince in moonlight.  Is there another rainbow pony like you?  Or can’t we both fit on your back?”

  The pony neighed.  “Nay,” it said.  “Nay, nay.  Of course not.  I am the only pony here and I can only carry one of you because you’re a lot taller and heavier than the children who usually ride on my back.”  With a gleam in its eye, it said, “I am the Rainbow Trotter.  I pass through the different worlds of colours.  The origins of colours; everything begins and starts at the rainbow.  This world is grey without the rainbow.  Ahem, any world is grey without a rainbow.  Have you been to many worlds, young miss?  Without the colours of the rainbow, wouldn’t every world become more of a grey and black and white filled place?”

  Vasalissa thought and envisioned.  “Yes, it would,” she admitted.  She filled in the pony’s demand for integrity as being entirely unique and important.

  “Ahhh,” the rainbow pony neighed.  “So you have travelled and seen different worlds?”

  A recollection surged at Vasalissa’s visionary mind of some places she had been too.  The colours living at secret cottage in the woods where the Amethyst sisters lived was where colours had been richest and brightest and warmest.  Before a sentimental sigh could start, a familiar “Ho ho oho” sounded and the crimson, black and white journeyer turned to look and met Santa Claus’s big round belly with its belt tied across.  The belly bounced with each laugh.  The children who had been riding their animals – one a turtle, one a panda, and a giant purple-shelled snail, all stepped off and rushed, calling, “Santa Claus!” and “Merry Christmas!” The children crowded around him with his huge potato sack out of which he began presenting presents, wrapped up.

  A Giver like Santa Claus was always something captivating to Vasalissa Cremona.  Perhaps because she knew she was not a Giver so much herself.  How could someone be so giving, like Santa Clause, was just mesmerising.

  The Pony trotted off and away, prompted by Vasalissa’s immersing her perception faculties in someone else’s presence.  The Rainbow pony that brought colour to this world and maybe other worlds did not wait around for a master. 

  The Prince in Moonlight caught up with Vasalissa’s fast tapping feet across the floor.  “You’re never too old or too big to make a run for presents!” hailed the Prince with a laugh.  Vasalissa laughed too, losing her breath to run.  The Prince said, “Presents are what I’d choose over a whale ride over the ocean, any day.  It doesn’t matter that the colourful pony did not have any space on its back for me.”

  “It did for me, though.”  Vasalissa decided to feel a grudge toward a friend who is supposed to wish for the best for you, selflessly.  There couldn’t be anything better than having your dream come true.

  “I wanted to ride the whale,” said the Prince.  He nodded towards something and Vasalissa turned to recognize the gigantic creature, purplish black, with a tiny sleepy eye watching the commotion of children around it.

  Vasalissa stopped in her tracks.  “I hadn’t noticed.  I can’t believe something like that has come through that door along with everyone … and everything else … Won’t it die?  Whales need water.”

  “I wouldn’t worry,” the Prince said.  He shrugged, surprisingly nonchalant.   This was a side to him Vasalissa had not seen before.

  “Would you say Santa Claus is in charge or the Easter Bunny?” Vasalissa asked.  Then she giggled, realizing how funny that sounded and how bizarre everything was here.  “Can you trust either of them to keep consideration of everything and everyone here?  Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are both so busy making all the children happy.  What if the Whale is forgotten and dies there on the ballroom floor?”

  The Prince in Moonlight teased horribly because he was not concerned as Vasalissa had expected.  This disappointed Vasalissa as to her faith in the Prince’s moral virtues she had admired so far.

  “A whale can sing a message across the depths of the ocean from the coast of Costa Rica to any whale by the coast of New Zealand.  I don’t suppose the whale will be going anywhere from here soon.”  The Prince sounded quite unlike Vasalissa had ever heard before, and yet she had been suspicious how uncaring he might be about some things that really matter.  It was baffling to her how the Prince could be so indifferent.  Maybe all the animals at his castle who were his servants were treated just the same.  They belonged somewhere else, not inside a castle.  Maybe they stayed at the castle because they adored the Prince and they were his friends but maybe they could not return to the wild because they had already left it and become domestic.   Being looked after seemed to be the Prince’s only priority.  Vasalissa began to suspect something of the Prince in Moonlight and she mistrusted and resented him and became a little grumpy.

  The full-round bellied man dressed in red looked just like in illustrations for American books and decorations.  He tossed more presents across for Vasalissa and the Prince than was fair to the other children.  That was a big surprise to Vasalissa and the Prince.  There were little tykes of four to ten years old close up to the old man with his jolly red coat and shiny black belt, but the two slender tall youngsters standing out from everyone else because they weren’t little anymore amused Santa most.  He was generous to them.  He thought to himself, It wasn’t these youngsters’ fault to have started growing up!  “I’ll encourage them to choose the joyfulness of children over the primness and worries that comes with growing up.  I’ll encourage them to choose the joyfulness of children because it’s a better choice than the primness and worries that comes with growing up.’

  “This is what I got,” said Vasalissa to the Prince.  “Look here. The Easter Bunny’s Egg.”  She read the tag for a big colourful egg she held in her hands.  “It looks just like a Faberge egg!  Faberge eggs were a novelty only for the nobility, in Russia at the time of the tsars.

  “My relatives,” she began, “the Romanovskies, rescued some of these from the clutches of the raging Bolsheviks who don’t believe in Christmas or Easter.”  She shrugged, matter-of-factly.  “My Aunt Tatiana by Lake Como rescued two inside her one suitcase she had packed before her home was invaded.”  Vasalissa shook the egg, close to her ear, since it was very noisy with all the children still crying for presents and opening them and laughing.

  “Open it,” suggested the Prince, so courteous as to divert his attention from a spinning top with stained-glass windows and a light shining inside.  He was spinning it on the floor.  One or two children drew near but the Prince asserted himself as the toy’s proprietor.  Vasalissa was well-amused by this and then focussed on her giant Easter egg; with slender gentle fingers grazing the shapes of jewels studded in gold.  She felt the swirls the paint made for the pattern.  The colours of the paint were purples and mauves.  Something inside her told her this wasn’t the time to open this Faberge Easter egg but she couldn’t think why.  She placed it carefully in her lap and then opened another parcel. 

  “Drawing pencils!” cried Vasalissa.  “A case of 48!  All colourful.

  “No one’s given me drawing pencils since my parents passed away.” 

  She opened some more presents just so she could find out what they all were, as much as she would have liked to hold and look at those colours of the pencils assorted in rainbow order next to each other.  There was a notebook with a pencil on a clasp.  There was a cuddly toy rainbow elf – quite a good version of the real ones in the ballroom of the castle where his grand present-opening splendour was happening.  Vasalissa sat up the toy rainbow elf on the floor beside her so he would observe the real rainbow elves.  Together, she and the toy watched the room and what was happening in it.  She pointed to him the real rainbow elves grooming the Rainbow Pony and watching the children unpack and marvel and play with their gifts.  Santa Claus was sitting on a chair that one of the gentleman and lady animal orchestra members had pulled up for him to sit on.  Santa Claus was quite exhausted and getting to be bleary eyed, yet he still seemed jolly as always, exchanging remarks, questions and answers and Christmas jokes with the orchestra members as well as two or three older children who were probably hoping to be Santa’s pets.  Probably they would not be exactly like his real pets, a white cat named Davie and fluffy dog with floppy ears but maybe like his silver cat Deanna perched purring to herself on the top edge of Santa’s sleigh seat.

  The Victorian adults in the ballroom began to relax again.  They were still there, after all and had been quite uptight earlier, at first when the children had arrived, accompanied by the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus and all these rainbow elves and other strange colourful creatures.

  A child-size train emerged from the side of a sudden Christmas tree that had arrived in the room, close to the door with the yellow-orange egg yolk glowing through.  Little children could fit inside these trains.

  Vasalissa stared.  A moment ago she had seen just a tiny toy train strung together by a little boy.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

  The orbit of wonder together Vasalissa and the Prince in Moonlight shared in together with all the children in the room about what happened was popped when lots of laughter and screams arose and then lots of children hurrying over to board the train.

  One little girl, one of the prettiest little girls Vasalissa had ever seen, tossed some seeds out of a seed pocket – that is definitely what it was she was tossing out.  And out of the seeds rapidly sprouted and burst colourful flowers taller than the tallest children.  Some children clapped their hands.

  Then the Prince nudged the Cremona daughter and said, “I wonder what’s going to come out of your Russian nobility egg when you open it?”

  Vasalissa had forgotten all about it.  It even had rolled off her lap and she hadn’t noticed it.  Good thing it had not cracked.  “Do you really think I should open it?”

  The Prince had no idea what he was urging.  Little would he know he was asking for his own grief, for what would come out of the Easter egg, Vasalissa’s very special-looking present would cause him the saddest thing he was to experience so far in his life as a star.

  Vasalissa looked at it reluctantly.  She shook it, sighed and then pryed the egg open from the middle.  It made a sound   Some little things fell out in a clutter on the ballroom parquet floor.

  Someone behind her exclaimed, “Oh, it’s little furniture pieces!”  This was a girl, also an inbetween-female-youngster-and lady, like Vasalissa.  She must have newly arrived, for Vasalissa had not noticed her before.  She could be maybe sixteen.  The little woman had a sweep of chestnut ringlets swept to the sides of her face, most early Victorian-like, and she looked so beautifully roses and cream with a soft rose-petal silken dress.

  Vasalissa was glad to have such company to the rescue to the distress bottling inside her about opening this Easter egg.

  “What’s going to happen with this?” Vasalissa asked, feeling suddenly worried and overwhelmed about all the magic happening around with the creatures she had never seen before, not even in the country of Happy Endings, and all the extra-ordinary surrealism to surprise the children.

  The roses and cream older girl caringly replied, “Oh, my older sister once got something like this for Christmas before.  Watch and you’ll see what happens.”

  Beside Vasalissa, the Prince in Moonlight examined one of the miniature furniture articles.  He turned between his delicate fingers a delicate miniature chair.  It was daintily polished with carving work fit for a throne.  With some humour, he remarked, “I have a few books about dollhouses and the history of doll houses all across Europe.  There’s a stack in the library at home for you, Vasalissa.  The Germans were quite the forerunners, with the production company called – “

  “Wow, look!” exclaimed Vasalissa.  She had extended a table from a small square to an imposing rectangle.  “This would do for 30 little guests to sit and dine at.”

  She glanced up and over to the commotion of children running up and down a mound of black-Ukranian soil suddenly appeared on the ballroom floor.  On top was a mother sow with squealing piglets.  Someone, still on the floor was holding something in their hand Vasalissa in the distance made out to be a cow.  It was a Jersey cow, with black spots on white.  The child holding and gazing at it gave out a sudden shriek and the little cow it had been holding became a real cow, life-sized.  The cow was guided by some laughing confident children up the Ukranian black soil mound to the top where there was fresh grazing pasture, next to the big sow on the soil over which somebody was pouring a pitcher of water over to create mud.

  The Prince, amused, chuckled, “Good thing the ceiling’s pretty high, here.  Somebody might open the box of a miniature castle and it’ll grow into a life-size castle…”

  Vasalissa smiled, half absent, her gaze drawn by a small baking tray with play muffins.  It became a big adult-size baking tray with real berry muffins in its muffin moulds, drawing much attention from the grown-ups at the party.  The fancy ball had turned to a children’s party with Easter and Christmas presents, presents which took over, astonishing everyone, one surprise after another.  But the muffins perhaps were the greatest delight for the adults because this was something they could eat.  Maybe, if the children would share.  Some of them had been secretly longing to be included as a recipient as well in the all the Gift-Receiving Big Bang happening here. 

  Watching the berry muffins freshly out of the oven, several hoop skirts among the adult audience bobbed and rustled in eagerness and Vasalissa noticed one man’s breathing become long heavy breaths in appreciative patience.  He was preparing for the patience needed to watch other people eat away each muffin in the tray because, of course, of ‘children first’!  But once it was recognized by everyone in the audience that it was magical muffin tray in deed that instantly replaced each muffin that was taken out, the man sighed in relief.

  Vasalissa felt a pang of homesickness in her breast.  Baking berry muffins used to be what filled her mornings at the cosy wood cottage where she had lived with her sisters Martha, Gladys, Amber and Samantha.  The blackberry juice had stained her fingers and the tart raspberry tang played a tune to her, circling her ears.  It was like a friend she now missed.  Vasalissa could feel the heat from the oven and missed it. 

  The Cremona orphan needed someone to speak to about this.  There was so much commotion going on everywhere at the ball-turned-to-a-children’s party, that she desperately picked up the mirror that was part of the Faberge egg toy furniture collection.  She checked to see if her reflection could be her loyal friend who was aware of her thoughts and feelings.  The young girl with straight back hair tied back set the mirror on the floor standing up on its legs to return to it some dignity.  She bent her head low to the floor so she could be reminded of her reflection in the mirror.

  Then she just barely felt the touch of someone’s hand across on her shoulder . . . The rose and cream in the pretty little woman’s face smiling.  Vasalissa turned to face her.  She had not imagined that smiling herself would make everything new and better again. 

  The loud shriek that broke the round glow of Vasalissa’s smile did not seem to be the shriek of a cat at first, but it was... well, a woman-cat’s shriek.  The creepy cat-masked woman who had been watching Vasalissa from the beginning had turned into a cat.  It was her shriek.  The gown was still fitted over her body but ripped in a few places.  The cat back arched high and the gown ripped, its purple silky fabric and grey laces ruined.  This was perhaps what made some of the women scream in horror – such a waste of status, the ripped gown.  And a respectable woman turned to a cat.  It was a feral cat.  It was terrifying for some and many children screamed and ran away.  What was most unusual about this cat was its size – the size of a human on four legs, and most profoundly the gleaming purple eyes with which it glared, mostly straight and sinisterly at Vasalissa Cremona.

  The mirror, endearingly small out of the Faberge Easter egg Vasalissa propped up on the floor, turned into a life-size mirror the height of a human adult as well.  Vasalissa jumped to her feet, staggering back yet intrigued at the same time, all her attention drawn by the inside of the mirror.  The mirror had become a kind of gateway inside, no more reflecting anything but swirling marble mists as if there were no more glass.  The draft chilled her.  Vasalissa took another step back and then scream a blood-chilled scream as the purple-eyed cat charged for her.  Its teeth and jaws were just as dark inside as what Vasalissa had seen in the mirror and Vasalissa perceived two choices: either to be bitten and torn up by the cat and die or to make a dash for the safer option of the mirror which compelled her to enter.

  Before she could make a choice, the Prince, her friend stepped in between her and the cat.  The cat stopped and growled and hissed and the Prince turned his face with the shower of cat spit that befell him.  Vasalissa felt with some novelty that she was a heroine in a legend or a book and her friend the Prince was her hero.

  The cat had a voice of a human woman when trying to sound mock-scary to some friends, playing with her voice with a glass jar over her mouth.

  After trying her new cat voice, a gigantic sound and multiple-pitched, very much like a dramatic opera singer’s vocalise, the cat spoke out directly to Vasalissa with which the cat’s fur raised on its spine.  “Make your choice, Story Girl,” is what the woman-cat said.

  Vasalissa dared not take a step anywhere, lest the cat take it as a move to an escape and then the cat for sure would jump on her.  And yet, Vasalissa was only one movement away to an escape, right behind her, to another world.  Through the mirror yet another world again, very compelling and Vasalissa was sure it was going to lead to another world.  But then Vasalissa would be gone perhaps forever, from this place and from the Prince in Moonlight’s friendly partnership that had brought her here, inside the miniature castle which was a real place.  His home, the other castle filled with sunlight just like the castle of Vasalissa’s childhood, had been a place she might not return to again.  So, instead of escaping into the other world through the mirror, could she escape the cat another way, running to some part of the room?  But the cat would be faster for sure.  Vasalissa could lean into the trust for someone to help her, somebody maybe out of the grown-ups at the ballroom party; somebody would have a rescue idea.  Vasalissa surveyed her chances by reading the scene: people were watching but nobody was stirring to help her.  People were aghast, some were stunned, some were whispering to each other, some looked like they were hesitating to help but they probably knew cats behaving unpredictably and if they tried to help, the cat would react by finishing off Vasalissa sooner than if nothing was done to help.

  In the meantime of a few seconds, a little girl in the crowd with blond curly hair in bobs started spinning her miniature merry-go-round toy.  It turned into a real carnival life-size one.  The little curly head looked back at it amazed and overwhelmed; she popped her green lime lollipop back into her mouth.  Santa Claus had given too many presents this party …

  The merry-go-round became the centre of attraction.  It was a very tall one, reaching almost as tall the ceiling which was very very high.

  “Oops, somebody’s turned another toy to real life,” said a boy who was a less enthusiastic kind.  Vasalissa heard this and yearned to know what would happen when she would start drawing a picture with the coloured pencils with the vibrant colours … this yearning was only for a split second or two, and a sharply present predicament she found herself in stole her yearning quickly, for the human-sized cat with sharp teeth waited for the Prince to be out of her way so she could charge on the helpless Cremona orphan girl.

  Looking around her, Vasalissa was disappointed that only a few adults and children stayed, showing concern on their faces and watching what was going to happen to her.  The merry-go-round did catch her sense of appeal – its bronze-gilded poles with gold on the edges, and the high-calibre horses.  The cat herself had her attention grabbed by the merry-go-round.  Her collar was very puffed out fur on the sides as she turned her neck and her face was quite flat for a cat, Vasalissa observed.

  Perhaps Vasalissa made the mistake now of taking her chance to speak out a courageous response to this otherwise attention-demanding cat. “What choice?” asked the Cremona, ready to travel between the worlds again and her decision set square.  “What choice are you talking about?”

  The cat turned back again and eyed Vasalissa with gathering readiness in her hind legs to take use of her power and make a pounce, a deadly one, in giant-cat indignation.

  The Prince refused to leave Vasalissa defenceless.  Yet Vasalissa, out of fright that he would get hurt, threw herself back in the mirror.  Then she was grabbed and pulled back by her arm and torso, just before her feet could make it to the other side.  It was the Prince.  He did not want to let her go.  His eyes were filled with dedication to the Story Girl’s cause that meant he would sacrifice his own life for her.  Vehemence rose in Vasalissa’s chest at why he would not let her go. 

  “We’re going back to my castle.”  He pleaded for his wonderful world with so much still left to discover together; all his peacefulness and listening and inquisitiveness. 

  Vasalissa had always journeyed by herself before this and travelling with somebody else would restrict her freedom of choice and direction and making the choices to serve just herself.  Her friend had brought so much to her and compensated so much she had been missing and what she could do was going to take this with her.

  “Let me go,” Vasalissa said, and she and the Prince nodded at each other because they both understood.  They both knew something lay ahead for Vasalissa which was according to her mission.  Vasalissa remembered the children persecuted by the Scraggly Man.

  The Prince whispered, “Hopefully we’ll meet again soon.”

  Vasalissa’s chin bobbed, in the stream of their mutual recognition and also by the stream of the that compelling other place the mirror was drawing her to.

  Mutely but with good-bye in her eyes, Vasalissa proved her independence by slipping through the mirror again, for good.  Once her feet were through, she saw nothing more, though she vaguely heard the cat scream in the world left behind.

Chapter 11: The Ginger Cat in Overgrown Boots

 

Vasalissa growing up would begin to notice how every time she let go of an attachment to a boy, Puss in Boots would appear, the independent, easy-striding tomcat.

  Cat again?  Of course, there was the glaring purple-eyed cat once a lady of society Vasalissa had run away from, so she might have become quite wary of cats and she would have a good excuse.  But meeting Puss in Boots was a luminous light-opening to what cats are supposed to be like.  This ginger cat was open-hearted to a wanderer like Vasalissa, himself having been lost before and self-taught to steer himself out of that captivity called “being lost”.  Often it is a matter of fearing your own independence; autonomy.  Snug in his human boots his hind legs fell into, Puss in Boots always seemed to have all he needed, and his confident happy-go-lucky grin could make other tomcats jealous – since he did not worry about a thing and accepted himself the way he was.  He was a rogue who chose to refrain from making himself big in the world’s view – though wearing reasonably large boots for his cat-height.  There was a kind of magic about him, that caused his height to become equal to anybody’s he met and talked to.  And if he had to be in combat, he changed to whatever height served him best.  Besides being invincible, he had gone through dark times where he sheltered his defeat.  Every winter he went into hibernation because anybody hurt him when he felt weak.  He had clung to lady cats before, and his own mother cat, and he had learned to cleave apart.  “Life is full of magic and surprises.  Selling your soul can be so easily done.  Don’t do it, Lady Orphan.” 

  He said “Orphan” in the esteem for someone who in wisdom chooses to be open to the challenging journeys and yet bright outcome at the end of the tunnel.

  If Santa Clause had given the Cremona orphan and the other children gifts that turned real and to life-size, the Amethyst sisters in the backwoods had given the Cremona orphan a home to feel safe in and to feel the security of sisterhood for the first time; the savouriness of making a home of your own; if the Prince in Moonlight had given Vasalissa back her life when she was dying in the cold on the snow ground and had given her hospitality and the most magical friendship to start a journey of discovery together, the legendary cat called Puss In Boots set Vasalissa’s steps.  They both walked the same path at times with the same spiritual quest, that of exploring their independence.  “To love your life as it is, without someone to cling to for the sake of loving someone else’s life, is the beginning of accepting a gift,” became Vasalissa’s philosophy.  “It’s the greatest gift we already have as babies and somehow forsake at some time, growing up and forget about it.” 

  Vasalissa had walked through a closet once before for a treasure hunt for a celebration back in The Land of Happily Ever After, but she had not walked through a mirror, and so she was much surprised to find herself walking in continuous fog for what seemed half a mile, on cobble stone like that of a street.  Then she met the very familiar seeming, open and friendly gingerly ginger cat with the over-sized hat for his head and over-sized boots.  His very open heart seemed too big for his chest to contain at times.  Vasalissa met him when the fog just began to clear. 

  Parting from a children’s Christmas and Easter party and stepping into the other side of the mirror was stepping into a silent place such as she had never been in her life – of course, besides the closet in The Land of Happily Ever After Vasalissa had walked through to find a treasure for a treasure hunt, there had been Uncle Jenkins’ sound-proof closet she had walked through when she was ten, with the secret passage-way at its far back side.  Once she had stepped through that, she walked through an underground tunnel without any light but she kept walking and feeling her way along the wall when she needed to; she crawled when the uneven ground kept tripping her up until eventually she came to a door which she opened.  There she was happily greeted by light and a cottage in the countryside, all bright, and Vasalissa discovered her uncle had kidnapped several ladies only to relieve these ladies of their husbands they had not wanted to marry and they were alive and well, contrary to the rumour.

  Then she began to smell something familiar  . .  burning of wood.  A mingle of other smells.  It was something like a small city or at least a village, with lots of horses.  In the country of Happily Ever After, all the villages smelled like that because they were in the time when most fairy tales were set, before the burning of coal. 

  A ginger cat grinned at her, striding like an cat on a prowl in its own good company and deciding to be generous to someone he had been waiting for, as cats seem to be waiting for you with their sometimes uncanny instinct for knowing when you’re about to arrive.

  “Here I am.”  His voice was a comfortable husky voice with a purr.  “Didn’t you truly want to meet me when you were a child?”

  Vasalissa had recognized him instantly but it seemed so natural to meet him that she spoke his name out before realizing how unusual it was to meet a legendary fairy tale figure – especially while she was out of the country of Happily Ever After.  Or was she?   The fog was clearing and a country side in bleak weather became recognizable.  It was very green and there were crags the colour and texture of red clay. 

  “Puss in Boots?”

  “Aye, that’s me.”

  Remembering some manners, the crimson-caped youth introduced herself.  “My name is Vasalissa Cremona.  I’m an orphan.”  She was feeling a little down about herself, that’s why she felt she needed to explain she deserved nothing better than an orphan because she was one.  “What is this place?”  She knew the answer.  She was beginning to recognize it from sketches and etchings printed in books.

  “It’s an enchanted city.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes, mi lady.”  The cat had a Scottish way of speaking.  Vasalissa had been to Scotland before, on one of her journeys to find and be fostered by another distant relative of her father’s.

  “Am I in Scotland?” 

  “Yes, you are.  Vasalissa Cremona, that’s a good name.  Have you just arrived in Scotland?”

  Weariness is something you instantly are hit by when you remember your unhappy times with guardians and constant arriving in yet another place that turns glum and hostile very quickly.

  “What’s the name of this city?  It smells like a city.  Or are we in a town?”

  “Edinburgh, mi lady.  You haven’t gone through its walls yet.  The city’s fortified against attacks from the English.”

  “Oh.”  This was an early time in deed!  “I’ve been here before, by train, just to change to another . . . “ 

  Vasalissa wondered if the cat knew what trains were.  He didn’t.

  “Lady’s trains?” the cat guessed.  “That’s quite an unusual figure of speech, I like it.  “I suppose you can come here an’ then change t’another.  Fancy shops there are here.  Ah, so you’re no stranger.”

  Out of sudden anxiety over having perhaps told a lie because she hadn’t been to Edinburgh during this time but she had been to it perhaps two centuries later, Vasalissa quickly employed her request-for-empathy tactics.  “I’ve had a very hard time in my life, you know.  I’m an orphan and always travelling to and fro.”

  Strangely, though the cat’s eyes filled with a response that was the kindness and empathy Vasalissa expected, he replied with a human-pronounced, “Me-ow.”

  It felt something a bit rude for a cat to say to you, in a human way but using cat animal language.  The crimson-caped Cremona girl employed her gears of tolerance so it would not look like she did not appreciate the cat’s answer.  She then quickly perceived his nonchalance meaning to humour her and bring back good humour in the face of tragedy and fears.  Smiling, his chin was turned up as any cat’s chin and he introduced to Vasalissa a confidence; the world as one not to be all too worried about.

  “So where is it you’re goin’, lady, Orphan?”

  Taken by surprise, Vasalissa surveyed the cat’s intention for calling her this.  Then a smile turned a light on in her spirits.  She quite liked being called Lady Orphan. 

  Being asked this question reminded her also that she had just parted ways with her Prince in Moonlight and had become so used to him being by her side and how magical and kind he was and what fun and beautiful his world was.  She missed him.  Her feelings began to catch up with her, clutching like a claw in her gut and pulling the strings of her heart.  She wondered her choice to part from him and if it didn’t hurt him too long.  She wondered if he wished she was with him for his next lovely meal in his castle with the flying golden spoons, each serving a little bit from each dish, in a line.  She also wondered when she would get something to eat when she would be getting hungry and if she would obtain any simple comfort and pleasure like a cup of tea with milk.

  The ginger tomcat spoke with whimsical generosity to offer her some interesting discoveries and his company.  “I once used to live in lofty domains common to the rich nobility when my master the Marquis of Carabas was alive, but I’m not rich now.  I gave away all my inheritance to the poor.  They have been living a little better since and so to enter their domains wasn’t entering into the worst of poverty.  I became a street cat.”

  “You did?” said Vasalissa in surprise.  “So that’s what happened in your happily-ever-after…”

  “Yes,” said Puss in Boots without regret, just with a collection of rough experience all to gain more empathy with humanity.  He twinkled.  “I do usually have a secret den to hibernate in in the winter. 

  “I’ve gotten to know the best shops in town and where to get quality food. Quality.  Are you up for a stroll?  I’ll bring you to the shops where things are for free.”

  Eyes sparkling with sudden interest when Vasalissa remembered she had no money.  She never carried money with her on any travels unless someone had given her some for a train fare.  She always found food to eat and shelter but she had learned at the start of her journeys four years ago to be quick to grab the first opportunity.

  “Oh yes, I’ll go.  Thank you.  I’ll be hungry in a little while.  What is it you know of?”

  “Anything you can see, it’s yours for free.”

  Vasalissa became sceptic.  “Is there such a thing?  How can it be true?”

  The ginger cat spoke, “You’ll discover it’s true the same way you’ve had to discover that other shops expect you to pay for things.  All your heart’s desire isn’t something that comes with a price to pay,” said the Puss in Boots.  He gave a challenging example.  “There’s a grandfather who lives at the top of the Mound and all the children run to him over the cobble stones up the hill after school.  He has fresh-baked scones and shortbread made for them every day and the children wish for nothing else in the world but those scones and shortbread when they see them and smell them through the grandfather’s sitting room window.  The scones are best with butter, of course.  You can watch those children’s books from school drop to the street ground as they stand waiting at the window.  Those delicious scones and shortbread won’t be eaten by anybody so eager and appreciative as these children.  It would seem a waste for this baking to be going to anybody else.”

  The cat grinned in his orange gingerness.  Joyful to be himself and to exude charm, he said as an added comment, “That is the same with all you see in the shops,”

  A peal of relief came out of Vasalissa’s heart in the form of pure laughter.  “I never saw it that way!”

  The roguishly humanitarian cat nodded.  He continued, “It would be pretty mean for that same grandfather to demand payment from children he had made those after-school snacks for in the first place.  Demanding payment is not a trait I wish to support, lady orphan.  I make it my grace and charm to slip in and out of shops taking with me what I want, without paying . . . thanking and wishing the best for the shop attendants especially the owners instead of paying.  No one feels too good about themselves when they are demanding or expecting something back in return.  A happy heart is one that opens enough to give freely.”

  Vasalissa had not heard anything saner than the turn-up of the face-flat-down comprehension supposed to be reasonable about how to get your many physical and worldly needs in real life.

  The pussycat proposed, “Come along, I’ll show you what’s for free in these places where they let me in for free and where they let me take to eat and drink, free of charge.”

  Vasalissa imagined herself stealing off the shelf and shook her head, though reluctant she was to master curiosity and thirst adventure and even her values which were in favour of things being free.     “I’m afraid I’ll get caught.”

  Puss in Boots, amused though present with empathy as always, demonstrated to Vasalissa with a pretend load in his arms the mood and spirit of when he went shopping. “When I walk out of the shop that sells the best jams and honey – they have really high prices – I give the shop keepers a wave . . . even though my arms are so full with a heap of jars.  I haven’t dropped one jar yet . . . except a couple, without breaking, and these go straight to some homeless folk sitting by the street who know they can get their jams and delicacies this way even when there aren’t coins in their basket.”

  The Lady Orphan laughed though scarcely able to believe how naughty this legendary cat was and yet he was benevolent as any charitable old lady who gave to the homeless what little she could spare.  “That’s amazing,” said Vasalissa.  “How can the shop-keepers let you walk out with all the stolen goods they can see – ?”  She gasped, imagining the situation.

  “Taken goods,” Puss in Boots said, not sternly, just kindly in good nature for all mankind.  “Taken off the shelf, lady orphan.  I get a friendly wave back, or a smile from those more reserved.”

  Vasalissa yet more drolly humoured.  “What?”

  A little restlessly, the big-hearted genteel rogues explained, “Shall we walk, lady orphan?  I’ll explain more on the way.  My stomach’s grumbling.”

  Vasalissa stepped to a promenade.

  The cat said, meowingly lackadaisical, “I was on the way to where I normally go for my afternoon cup of milk and shortbread biscuits.  It’s in the grandest Hotel in these parts of the country; I’ve scouted far in these whereabouts . . . well, in vicinity of this part of Midlothian, mainly.  I tend to be a house cat half of the year; and cats are happy roaming just up to where they can still get back home at the end of the day, preferably. 

  “You’ll like the very admirable ceiling and the friendly waiting staff.  Possibly the friendliest hospitality and the milk and shortbread’s free . . .”

  “Oh, of course milk for your tea is always free, surely?”

  The tomcat grinned, taking joy in his steps.  “I get a jug-full poured into a silver serving bowl.”

  Vasalissa child-likely giggled.  “Oh yeah, you’re a cat!”

  The tomcat chuckled, admitting his humble form.  “There’s a fine grand piano.  Can you play the piano?  You look like someone who can.  A Lady.”

  Vasalissa smiled, accepting the high esteem.  She did not know if she had any aristocratic blood though she presumed her mother had for sure.  “Thank you.  I carry myself this way naturally, whether I am a lady or not, I should like to be lady-like.  I can play piano, though my father was much better than me.  He had a black shiny grand piano in his music study, so I grew up with one.  Oh, I learned to play ‘The Little Shepherd’, part of the Children’s Corner collection by Claude Debussy.  When you play it, there’s a clear blue night sky, I imagine, and the little shepherd is out along the hills and sees the stars begin to appear, one by one.”  Vasalissa pointed throughout her  painting of her impression.  She then surveyed her new-found friend with a thought and decided to tell him about one of her foster homes she had journeyed to and lived at for a while. 

  “I was 13, that was the last time I practiced piano, and it was at my Aunt and Uncle’s where I had the house all to myself and I got to play the piano in the conservatory loads and loads . . . until the giant spiders started to appear from under the sofa in the living room and from under the bed and when I played the piano, the spiders seemed to get jealous of what my hands were doing because a little girl’s white hands at the piano look just like sophisticated versions of themselves.  And they wanted to be the only hands crawling over the piano, why they perhaps did in the night.  Maybe they felt they couldn’t make music and did not think it fair that my hands could.”

  Puss in Boots had been laughing and giving the Cremona child a good turn at being outstanding in unusualness.

  Vasalissa’s eyes twinkled, which they only did when someone laughed when she hadn’t been meaning to be funny and she realized she actually was very enjoyably funny.

  “Isn’t it expensive to go?”  Vasalissa was often a dubious, conscientious one.

  “Why, of course,” answered the tomcat in the boots much too big for him.  He started totter like a toddler about something and then Vasalissa heard the cling sound of a coin.  With a ginger paw the Puss in Boots patted a worn carpet purse dangling off one of his shoulders which bumped onto his belt as he did his over-grown cat-toddler totter.  “Spanish gold”, he said, mocking that fact that gold could mean anything to anyone.  That’s what was inside the purse, something that he didn’t need but was useful perhaps anyway.

  “I thought you said you’re going to places where you can get things for free!”

  The cat under the over-sized hat nodded confidently.  “So I did, and you said you’re afraid of getting caught.  I’ll get any of your necessities for you when you need them, when you wish.  Is there anything you wish?”

  “Only food and some tea with milk,” Vasalissa answered.

  “Then the Carlton Hotel is where you can get free shortbread with that.  And the milk is all free.”

  “If you don’t believe in paying money anywhere, why are you carrying a purse of coins with you?”

  “It’s Spanish gold.”

  Vasalissa Cremona’s eyes narrowed and she gathered her breath, stopping in her tracks to face the cat, as tall as she.  “I knew it,” she exclaimed.  “Spanish gold from the Caribbean!  You look just like a pirate!  Aren’t you from the Caribbean?”

  “I’ve been there … once.”  He laughed.

  “I could have known from the start that you’re a pirate!  Many pirates originated from Scotland, up at the docks in Leith, north of Edinburgh.  You’ve stolen from people’s boats!  That’s how you can get things for free.  It’s just been a transfer of your way of life from water to land.”

  The humble cat shook his head in his usual very tactful way, knowing after just a little thinking what was fact, well-appreciating Vasalissa’s perspectives with a smile Vasalissa liked to see.  “No, Lady Orphan.  Cats are shy of water.  I prefer land.  Back when I had mi master and I was a domestic cat under ownership, I was taken on board a ship to the Caribbean.  I came back again.  I told you, I’m a house cat.”

  “You’re a street rogue.”

  The ginger tomcat in the over-sized boots explained, “I only have an allowance of Spanish gold enough for the little luxuries a cat can have who doesn’t want to catch mice but would rather live like a human being.”

  “I haven’t got any money,” Vasalissa said, making it a nobler thing not to have any money.  Of course, she had been in the most luxurious of places like a Prince’s home and then inside a castle where all the children’s toys turned into full-size real luxuries: a real merry-go-round to ride on with lots of other children, a muffin try that never ran out of hot freshly-baked berry muffins, a tiny mirror out of an Easter egg and this mirror popped into a real life-size one that you could step through and walk into another world… Priceless things Vasalissa had witnessed, that money had not bought nor produced. 

  “It’s highly likely you’re happier off without any money or gold or silver, Lady Orphan,” agreed Puss in Boots.  “And the Carlton Hotel isn’t too expensive for a cup of warm milk.  I’m asked to pay something.  I give them Spanish gold.  You can choose a cat’s drink, the same portion as I’ll be getting, and with that a fine aromatic cup of tea for a young lady.”

    Vasalissa pictured this and chuckled.  “I do like tea with milk and a lump of sugar . . . but warm milk isn’t only for cats.  I used to drink milk in a big dish when I was little and it made my mother laugh.  I pretended to be a cat.  I’ll come with you, if you can spare to pay for a cup of tea for me.”

  The tomcat nodded accordingly.  “It shall be done, Lady Orphan.  Be my guest.”

  As they started walking again, Vasalissa inquired, “What is the currency of Spanish pirate gold to the Scottish sterling?”

  The cat grinned.  “One Spanish gold coin puts the Sterling-filled till or drawer behind the counter to shame.”

  Vasalissa gasped.  “Is that why the shortbread is free for you?”

  The cat was amused.  “It’s because I’m their most frequent guest.”

  “Ohh . . . then maybe people don’t try to make up for over-payment as much as I thought.  You get shortbread not because you over-pay but because you’re a frequent guest.”

  The cat laughed at the serious disappointment in the girl’s voice and countenance, appreciative of the innocent hope in the good of mankind. 

  A little girl’s innocence was the most precious and brightest hope for humanity; the ginger cat believed in it.  It needed to be guarded.  The legendary Puss in Boots was actually an underground knight for the innocent and the poor.  He knew an innocent girl was easy prey in a city life like Edinburgh.

  Surveying her benefactor and courage giver for her footsteps where she had just landed, through the mirror where it was nothing but fog and cobble stone ground, Vasalissa appreciated from the start the cat’s broad-structured face which made him someone with earnest genuineness you could trust.  She was so glad she was so fortunate to make a friend so soon, just arriving out of the fog on the other side of the mirror she had stepped through to escape a woman-cat that had wanted to devour her.  Now that the distress was over, a hearty meal would be just the right thing.

  “Lady Orphan, you must be looking forward to a hearty meal,” spoke Puss in Boots.  “Vagabonds like you and I know how fast the last meal has burned up.  I’ve been prowling the streets and living at an abandoned house for years.  A secret den, Vasalissa.”

  As they walked, Vasalissa remembered the breakfast at the castle with the Prince in Moonlight before going to school – school that had been a big classroom with lots of different subjects but no other children or no teachers or tutors.  Later, she and the Prince had left the classroom because it was break time; and they were lifted up through the ceiling on a pink feather frog pavilion to a symphony concert in an opera theatre.  They never got to eat anything as they had planned though a frog had presented a marvellous menu on the pink feather pavilion.  Maybe that’s why Vasalissa was so hungry. 

  But later at the ballroom inside the miniature castle Vasalissa and the Prince had arrived at, there were plenty of snacks to eat, carried around on silver platters by black and white dressed waiters.  Vasalissa must have eaten at least ten of these delicious savoury moon-shaped appetizers with familiar things like sundried tomato pesto and olive slices and cream cheese on them.  She could have sworn she had eaten one thing that had gnats on it, on top of chutney sauce.  Hopefully that hadn’t been what they were; it was pretty spooky that people would serve that anywhere.  Gnats, by the way, are the white scavenger worms that start to poke through the faces of people in coffins whose children peer at, now orphans.  Gnats can be someone’s greatest dread.

  Vasalissa began to feel and remember she did not really have a care in the world even though she had lost so much in her life: her parents, her first home and wonderful life and then moving from on temporary home to another and when someone has stored all this up, it can amount to so much grief and loneliness and alienation that there is no room for any other feelings, not even happy ones.  But Vasalissa was still young and when you’re young, you can still be quite good at turning things around. . . She hoped she was going to return and see Martha, Gladys, Amber and blue-bell Samantha again.  She was not quite sure if she would find the Prince in Moonlight again in his world, but for sure, if they were friends, there would be a way to find each other again, even if it might be speaking and looking at each other through the mirrors.  Vasalissa was sure she would be with her mother again, from experience back in the witch’s woods where she had been flying and Vasalissa had escaped and awoke nestled with her mother in her usual morning gown in a beautiful sunshiny place.  It had been the loveliest place Vasalissa had ever arrived at and she had felt so free and returned to herself and at home there; her real home.  Perhaps her father was near.  For now, she did not need them.  And being hungry at the same time, she felt altogether thoroughly empty, and when one feels healthily empty, one takes in energy quite readily.

  The ginger cat had a natural upward slant to the corners of his mouth as all cats have.  Puss in Boots when he travelled on foot had a very casual roll to his shoulders, too good-natured to be on a hunt of any kind except maybe a fun in a kitten’s way.  At the same time, he was reflective, highly ethical, compassion always at his breast; complicated clockworks turning and teasing at his mind under his topsy-turvy over-sized hat, for as all humanists, he was also prone to constant self-inflictions, sometimes better, sometimes worse.

  Vasalissa smiled about her new-found friend she had always wanted to meet since she was a little child.  He was the closest if not exact fulfilment for the meaning of the word ‘whimsical’.  Vasalissa had wondered about Puss in Boots sometimes as a child, looking at the painted colour pictures in books and ink sketches of him.  Whimsical had always been one of her favourite words and she wondered what a person would be like who was whimsical.

  Vasalissa could see nothing through the fog.  From her encourager for her walk she stepped a deviation aside along the wall of a building perhaps right on the side of the road.  She wanted to find out the boundaries of this street.  A street could only be so wide…

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you – “cautioned Puss in Boots, but it was too late.  Vasalissa bumped into a very old lady who suddenly appeared a second too late before Vasalissa stepped right on her outside foot and walked where there was only the old lady and not any solid ground.  The woman toppled and Vasalissa screamed with fright and dread for the old woman’s safety.  But a paw pulled her up, gingerly.

  Nobody was hurt; Sir Boots had come to aid just in time.

  “Thanks,” Vasalissa said.  The old woman said nothing … and something strange was happening to her.  Vasalissa gasped.  The woman’s face changed shape and became the face of a woman with clear blue eyes.  The eyes had a pretty slant and the cheeks and cheekbones became so gentle and like a cream and pink petal with dew.  There was no fault-searching-or-finding in the refined woman’s expression, only kindness.  Then she laughed outright and Vasalissa smiled.

  “I’m so sorry,” Vasalissa said.

  “Oh, it is no matter.”  The lady made a polite nod and curtsy.  Her dress Vasalissa recognized as one of Georgian times, the second George and in the 1740’s specifically when the hoops of women’s dresses became enormous.  “I was lost in the fog.  I was an old lady and lost in this fog we get in Edinburgh.  Beware, young miss.  My back became so bent and quite painful.  I’d been walking for ages and ages in the fog.  It started… one early evening when I was just on my way home … and now I haven’t been able to be home for ages and ages.”

  Vasalissa could empathize from a depth and recognized her own pain and confusion because of not being home for ages.

  The woman looked around her, smiling with her arms out and Vasalissa noticed too with amazement how the fog was clearing rapidly.  There was a pinkish light over everything.  It must be sunrise, there was dew all over the street and now Vasalissa could see a kind of red rock formation across from the mouth of a valley down below.  The pink light making the rock very red was something that reminded her of Ayer’s Rock she had seen in paintings.  Ayer’s Rock was of course in a country far away where none of her journeys had taken her to, so far.  She enjoyed that red crag slant very much.

  “So where are you from, young miss?” asked the lady.

  Vasalissa couldn’t answer the truth – she didn’t exactly know the truth; she quickly answered,   “London.”  London Vasalissa had last been to while she had still been on the Earth.  Of course, it was in a decade which made the London far different from the London as this lady would understand it, even if this lady had aged for 80 years and then come back again, there was still quite a wide gap between the 1740’s and the 1930’s.

  The lady smiled pink.  “You must have had a long journey behind you to come up here.”

  Vasalissa nearly laughed.  She did not want to say how the journey had not been long – in fact, only a step through a mirror and about half an hour walking through fog.

  Vasalissa, thinking to herself, wondered perhaps if this lady might be a bit more unusual than herself, having transformed from an old lady back again to her young self when Vasalissa had trampled on her by accident.

  The lady curved her arm to point over to across the valley on the other side.

  “I live there in a cottage in what’s called the Pentland Hills.  It’s actually countryside.  That’s the lovely thing about Edinburgh, countryside all around.  I haven’t been home in years and years . . . I hope it’s still the same as when I left it.”

  “You mean you were lost in the fog for years?”

  The lady looked back at Vasalissa as if it was a normal thing that could happen.  “Yes, why at least for thirty, or forty years … well, how old would you say I looked when you bumped into me by accident?”

  Vasalissa tried not to sound rude.  “Eighty?  Eighty years old, or maybe more.  Really really old.”

  Beside her, Puss in Boots chuckled, well-pleased with Vasalissa’s outright frankness.

  The lady clapped her hands with excitement, as if it didn’t matter that she had just been that old.

  “Well, all the faster I’ll be able to run now, since I’m back to … twenty-five I was.  A pleasure to meet you.  I would invite you to my cottage for some tea and milk but I’d better not because my cottage might be an outright mess.  And who knows who’s lived in it in the meantime.”

  Vasalissa was reminded of the fairy tale Rip Van Winkle.

  “All the best!”  And the lady heartily gestured.

    Vasalissa and Puss in Boots watched the mysterious and yet very bubbly and kind and beautiful lady clamber away down the hill which did not have a path.  Her blue-bell shaped enormous-hoop dress bobbed and with her graceful arms for balance she disappeared over the other side of a hill. 

Vasalissa turned again to the ginger cat who smiled back at her, with the fun of the mystery like lovely cream floating on top of a sour drink.  Then he said, “Lady Orphan, nicely done.  You’ve cleared the fog.”

  “Me?”

  The cat nodded with his chin acknowledging an imposing grey building to the right up ahead.

  “That there’s the Scottish Parliament.”  He chuckled to himself and tapped his shoulder, expecting a chip there like the chip off the shoulder of someone who’s made it through.  “I’ve been in trouble with them before.  I escaped the jury.  They’ve kind of forgotten about me now.”

  “You were in trouble with – the parliament?” Vasalissa stammered.  “What did you do?”

  If the cat had been someone who had rescued an old lady from hurting herself, without a second’s hesitation, could he possibly have committed a crime?

  The tomcat replied with some amusement in his usual whimsical manner.  “They didn’t like that I’m a cat in a nobleman’s clothes . . . well, middle class nobleman, respectively.  I’m a cat with no master to account for my playful behaviour.  No one can bribe me with a dish of milk, contrary to the hopes of many about cats.   I’m very cautious with who I’ll accept a dish of milk from.  And they can’t imprison me because I’ll just slip through the bars.”

  Vasalissa laughed with delight.  This is what made Puss in Boots so whimsical.  With appreciative respect, she asked, “Are you your own master?”

  With a low purr in his voice only a good rogue’s calmness could allow, “Yes.  I am my own master.  I try to be allied with the good cause.  And fail constantly, at times… ‘specially when I’m not in good form.  I might start believing I need a master.”

  Vasalissa contemplated something.  Then she began to tell about her family’s pet parrot back home in the castle she grew up in.  “I knew how Caesar had felt,” she said, referring to the parrot.  “I wished I could fly out of the castle and see what was far out there that I couldn’t see from the windows.  I wondered what other children like myself I would meet out there.”  She looked painfully pensive.

  “Aw,” said Puss in Boots with a maternal sympathy lilting whimsical fun at the end.

  Vasalissa continued.  “Caesar was free to do as he liked in the castle, flew everywhere and landed on my shoulder to talk to me and he liked to chew on my hair!  I liked to pretend we were pirates.  My pirate shipmate had no cares for how Rosanne, our chamber maid, demanded him to use the bird-toilet all the way at his cage.  Parrot droppings had to be cleaned every day as a result.  Some of it, such as on the highest shelves in the libraries, was never cleaned.  Back in the jungle where he came from, Caesar’s droppings were of generous use to help trees and plants grow.”

  The cat laughed.

  Vasalissa continued with mischief, “I used to giggle, watching Rosanne cleaning.  She complained and got all in a huff and sharp-toned when the other servants to clean with her wouldn’t arrive on time.  Caesar, my green speckled friend, laughed to himself too.  Of course, not human laughs.

  “I never laughed so hard in my young life before Caesar started to humiliate the servants with the scrubbing work he gave them.  They scrubbed and scrubbed, wearing hygiene masks, occasionally muttering how other animals such as cats use their toilet properly.

  “You’re kind of like that too, just like Caesar.”

  The cat’s eyes widened.  He stopped short.  “Pardon me?”  A rolling expression began to escape from under his drawn breath that was often the beginning of a laugh.

  Vasalissa gave weight to her voice so she would be heard.  “I –I mean, you don’t do what people expect of you!  That’s how you’re like Caesar.”

  When the compassionate rebel steadied his laughter, he nodded with glee, eyes squinted a slant most cat-like.

  “Caesar didn’t do everything that pleased anybody.  He wouldn’t meet their expectations – he’d only peck your cheek – a bird kiss, when you least expected it.  He’d fly on your shoulder when you weren’t waiting for it.  He wasn’t the kind of parrot who did any of his tricks on demand.  I’ve thought of him sometimes while I was an orphan moving from guardian to guardian.

  “When you know you’re a parrot and can only behave and be like one, you can’t behave and be like something else, even if you’re told you should.  That’s what makes being an animal so much easier than being a human.  Human beings expect so much from each other because they think we ought to all be able to do everything the same as each other and behave just the same.  A little child must pick up the rules for how to behave and control him or herself just like a grown-up can.  But those expectations are often unrealistic because a little child just isn’t a grown-up, as much as a dog isn’t a cat or a parrot isn’t a cat that knows how to go to its potty.  A kind of fourteen-year-old girl like me might get all the rules wrong on how to be a lady or to be someone useful and in the approval of society, because I’m as different from some other fourteen-year-old girls as a fox is from a goose.”  Vasalissa declared vehemently, “Sometimes I’d just like to be a rebel and join those women who tell the world that they’re not women as they’re expected.  Women are just never understood for what they really want.  They’re being ignored for what they want and what they need.” 

  Vasalissa suddenly gaped because she realized she might have been giving away her time travel secret; that she had had a glimpse of women in the early 2000’s once when she had been flying around the world.

  Puss in Boots became a little absent minded, Vasalissa noticed.  Then he replied to this.  “You are a lady, Vasalissa Cremona.  If you try to join any kind of cause and have to disown your being a lady, then you’re being somebody you’re not.  A lady is something unusual, a real one.  She has a cause of her own, just as she is.”

  Vasalissa felt slightly annoyed. It wasn’t till later she appreciated what Puss in Boots had affirmed for her which she had not been affirming for herself. 

  The small city of Edinburgh was awakening.  Vasalissa and Puss in Boots entered it.

  A very busy and unnerving place, so sudden, for Vasalissa who had been in magic-filled realms.  Life was hard, here.  The stones were drab and bleak.  There were gruff working men and other rough-looking people, a shocking thing to somebody who had just come from a fairy tale Prince’s castle and The Land of Happily Ever After before that...  The only colour acknowledging the beat of a heart was the green in some treetops, hovering to the side of the commotion.  Vasalissa stopped and marvelled at the green, soaking it in. 

  There was something so familiar here in the world where there were troubles and sorrows and harsh voices and expectations and rules and clashes of wills and emotions.  Something spoke to her heart, the diamond in the rough still present… humanity in its humility. 

  “Have you met Peter Pan yet?” asked the rogue humanitarian guiding her.

  Vasalissa blinked back at Puss in Boots, taken by surprise both by the question and by the rough movement by some adult men loading a horse-drawn lorry.  The crates made nerves pop up in the arm muscles of those men, Vasalissa observed with amusement.

  “Y – yes . . . I mean no,” answered Vasalissa.  Abruptly, one of the strapping lads walking past her gave a loud burp.  He was oblivious to her, or she was sure he would have pardoned himself in front of a lady.

  The ginger cat under his large broad hat chuckled.  “Well, you’ll be sure to meet that fanciful character here.  You’ll find Peter Pan in the least expectable places.”

  Vasalissa Cremona had always liked to make friends with Peter Pan, if he only existed.

  “Does he exist?” she asked.

  “Of course he does.”

  A thin Irish Whistle player Vasalissa’s eye caught sight of in the corner of her eye might have been Peter Pan, but he was too old.  He wore raggedy lost boy-like clothes from a forest if the fabric could have been leaves and vines.  The expression in his eyes was like a comical and deeply feeling child’s, dreaming of faraway places once flown through.  If he wasn’t a little boy anymore, why did he come across like one?

  “Is that a man or a boy?” she whispered to Puss in Boots.

  Puss in Boots smiled.  “I told you, Peter Pan exists where you least expect it...  Like Father Christmas, Peter Pan you can find in many people here.”

  The whistle player suddenly spoke up, recognizing both Boots and Vasalissa like old friends.  “The horses are awaitin’ up at the usual place, Boots.”  He gave a gallant 18^th century bow to Vasalissa.

  “It’s a secret place,” Boots replied at a close step.  “You can be a little quieter about it.”

  “Oh!” said the whistle player.

  “Dunna worry.  It’s bound to be found out sooner or late.  For now, we have a horse for this fine Lady to ride on to a morning tea and breakfast.  Welcome to Edinburgh, Lady Orphan.”

  “Lady Vasalissa.  Welcome to Edinburgh.  It’s very lovely to meet ye.  You look like you’ve stepped right out of a fairy tale, mi lady.  Which is your fairy tale?  May I ask?”

  Vasalissa curtseyed like she had learned to do in the country of Happily Ever After, which had customs considered old-fashioned even for those in the 18^th century.  She still wasn’t so sure if being a lady was so great, when heroes like Puss in Boots or Peter Pan were greater, in her esteem.  She replied, sheepishly, “Oh, it’s just a fairy tale of my own.  Nobody’s really heard about it or read it.”

  “Oh, but they will!”

  The Cremona daughter shrugged; then became assertive, looking back gravely.  “I believe not.  Nobody gets to travel with me where I go and what within I am.”  She was discreet not to mention leaving worlds, times and realms.  “I don’t write anything down and I almost never tell anybody where I’ve been.  So, nobody will find out about the fairy tale I’m in.  Maybe it’s not a fairy tale I live in.  Maybe it’s a dream.”

  Puss in Boots nodded, as if the young girl was summarizing his own life description.  Then he hummed, absently, “The dream we call life.”

  “And some people might disapprove that I move from one place to another all the time and I come and go.  I belong nowhere for long and I don’t belong to any people for long.  Everyone I meet is just right for my journey, but the course of my journey changes very quickly.”

  “So, soon you will have to leave us again?” the Whistler said, enjoying the romanticizing patterns.

  “Yes.”  Vasalissa was devout to her own life.  “That’s why my fairy tale is very long and too much to describe if I were to write anything down or tell anyone.  I could never describe all the characters in it to give them justice.  And there have been so many I’ve met, nobody could read all about them; it would take a life-long time to read them!”  She grinned, dryly and found a good response from her listeners.

  When Vasalissa and her street cat guide climbed over a stone wall into a garden sloping up a tall hill, Vasalissa discovered the two horses that the young-like street piper had mentioned.  These horses were grazing on grass and clover.  There were blossoms on trees and birds in this refuge from the city.  It seemed like its own little countryside in there.

  “There are many places like this in Edinburgh,” said Puss in Boots.  He nodded to assure Vasalissa she would ken the little sanctuaries at the true heart of this city. 

  “How are we going to get over the wall from here?” asked Vasalissa when she was sitting boy-like, not dame-like, on the horse, having practiced riding like this lots in the Land of Happy Endings.  She still had been called Lady, and Lady Story-Girl.

  “Shall we ride to lunch in style?”  The cat winked.  “Follow me.”

  On the far side of the garden, where some linen hung on a laundry line, a long wood plank was leaned against the wall.  It looked too steep for a horse to trot up.

  “After you, Vasalissa.  Just trust Queen Margaret,” said Boots.  “Lean forward.”

  Vasalissa giggled in spite of her seriousness.  The name of the horse she was sitting on was Queen Margaret.  It was a black mare; she tossed her head, sensing Vasalissa’s fear it was too much to ask a city horse to climb up a plank at such a steep slant.  The sun had just come out from behind clouds and made its golden reflects on the black smooth velvet and Vasalissa’s long black pony-tail tossed as well.

  “This is an obstacle Queen Margaret is used to charging over every day,” Puss in Boots assured.

 “What’s on the other side?” asked Vasalissa.

  “A soft green bank quite high up the wall, not the cobble stone street straight away, Lady Vasalissa.”

  Vasalissa sighed with relief and nodded; then after the cat on the saddle before her, kicked her heels in the horse’s planks.  The horse shot up the plank with loud thunder and Vasalissa held on tight, her face flat on the horse’s neck so she wouldn’t fall backwards.  She prayed she wouldn’t fall off, for the saddle slid back a great deal.  Over the wall the horse lurched; hooves thudded before the horse’s weight landed and with its weight came another thud, and Vasalissa realized those were the back hooves.  The saddle slid back in place.

  The streets further down getting busy; Vasalissa and the ginger cat rode through them at a gallop.   Vasalissa’s crimson cloak got lots of looks which Vasalissa mainly ignored.  It was exhilarating to feel advantaged this way, on horseback.  She felt exclusively advantaged; and the horses sped her and Boots across quicker than anybody could try to track her down and who she was.  There were tiny alleys where people still threw their waste-water and sewage waste out from the windows and that’s especially when Vasalissa felt at an advantage to be driving at high speed.

  Puss in Boots chuckled in the delight and relaxed humour that comes from making a life fashioned and tailored to your fancies instead of adhering to rules.  “General Law is you aren’t really allowed to speed except in mere emergencies, “he meowed alongside Vasalissa.  “We’ll get faster to breakfast than if we were on foot.”

  In an alleyway there was a lady with a frilly bonnet who dropped a basket out of which eggs crashed and split open.  She screamed, as a result, “You shudna be tarryin’!”

  “Sorry,” replied Puss in Boots and dropped a Spanish coin after himself.  Over his shoulder he promised, “Good madam, this gold will buy you dozens of eggs till next spring.  With compliments from the Spanish king from an era ago…” … “Or two eras, the coin will say so.”

  Vasalissa smiled with gleeful admiration.  Puss in Boots could rhyme.  Perhaps this is what left his legacy, his fine words. It was just a good thing the horses hadn’t run over the lady by accident; they had been so close.

Chapter 12: Finery

Vasalissa spent a lovely afternoon with the street rogue who had a heart for finery.  He did not shun finery, even though he was considered an outcast and had given away all his riches and his home he inherited from his lord, the bogus Marquis who had received his fortune from a king. 

  The Puss in Boots opened to Vasalissa his ken of the most luxuriously, boasting hosting place in Edinburgh open to the extremely wealthy public.  While waiting for the meals to cook, Vasalissa and Puss in Boots ate scones with clotted cream.  Vasalissa imagined herself squatting like a cat and licking up a dish of cream to prove to her chum companion and idol that she used to act cat-like sometimes as a child and wasn’t too petty about table manners, but she refrained.  She might offend her friend again for acting outside of the idea of being a lady.  Also, she didn’t want to seem like she wanted to compete with cats, the dainties creatures at the table even when they lick up a bowl or a plate.

  At this most luxuriously, boasting hosting place in Edinburgh open only to the extremely wealthy public, there was a grand piano, strangely enough.  Vasalissa wondered why, since Edinburgh was in the Georgian times here and the piano-forte as she had known it, growing up in a castle and her parents having met and married just after the Bolshevik revolution, her mother in exile, 1918,   Maybe she was in a magical place? 

  “We don’t know where this instrument has come from,” said a waiter, quite nervously.

  “It hasn’t been here before you came,” asserted the Puss in Boots.  He was used to magic, Vasalissa knew instantly.  And yet, she did not wish to give away that it might have been her crimson cape.  Her mother loved her to be playing piano.  At home, there had been a grand piano in her father’s music study.

  “This instrument is meant for you,” said Vasalissa’s friend, to encourage her to play.  Vasalissa went without hesitation after that.

  For playing the piano, the Cremona damsel was rewarded by the hospitality hosts with more plates of Scottish short-bread.  These are soft butter cookies with sugar.  Vasalissa could really only eat two or three.  She enjoyed playing without payment after that and even forgot she was hungry for her meal and waiting for it to arrive. 

  The Georgian ladies and gentlemen listened and perhaps had never heard the sounds of scales introduced to the Western world by the French Impressionist and Symbolist composers around the turn of the 20^th century.

  Vasalissa ate a full meal served with finest finery, with crystal vase of white lilies on the table.  To keep with tidy etiquette, she placed a napkin on her lap while Puss in Boots, as in fairy tale etchings and sketches of animals eating at the table, tucked his napkin under his collar.

  Vasalissa with a very fine fish fork poked out the white flesh of steamed fish on her plate painstakingly while Puss in Boots ate up the whole thing rather quickly.

  The cat ate little of the vegetables and Vasalissa ate up all of hers.

  The pudding was Scottish trifle, a little different from the English trifle, of course, to defy English conquest.  The Scottish trifle had some whisky in it. 

  The crimson-clad Cremona orphan sat deep in her comfy chair that supported her shoulders.  The seat was wide as if it was fit for a suma-wrestler, and she nearly disappeared in its softness.   The ginger cat candidly toasted a cup of warm milk at her.  His hat, for Georgian etiquette, had been taken off by the waiters along with his creaky leather coat.

  The rogueish fairytale hero sipped his foamy cup of milk with the layer of froth spreading across his cat chin and frosting his whiskers thick!  He was treated like a king and nobody suspected him a street cat.

  “I always behave myself when I choose to,” with a solemn face but twinkle he quipped.  “They know me here.  I am a regular.  They give me free access to the Swedish sauna and Turkish bath.  I go to the Swedish sauna and only to the Turkish bath when highly necessary because I get involved in a street fight somehow and am knocked down to the mud.  It’s easily overlooked by some that I’m a cat and we cats clean ourselves without any water, preferably speaking.” 

  Vasalissa laughed, imagining a cat trying to lick itself clean after rolling in the mud.  Poor cat, cats hate being wet.  They shiver with cold and look dismal.

  Vasalissa asked something she wondered about suddenly.  “Boots . . . do you have a home?  Something comfortable, like this?  With a fire-place, like cats do? – or prefer to live by, if they have the fortune – if they don’t give it away.  You did.”

  The cat grinned in amused surprise, and then laughed outright. 

  In a low purr, the broad-faced tomcat replied, “Not in common respects have I a home, Lady Orphan.  I can’t afford one unless I’m offered one.  I have a home only temporarily.  I only accept the kindness of offer from proprietors of mansions and only if they’ve been abandoned completely.”

  Vasalissa stared and was amazed.  She laughed.  “It has to be a mansion?”

  “Why, of course.”

  “How can you live at a mansion without a servant?”

  The cat shook his head at the thought.  “I wouldn’t like a servant fussing over anything and I detest housekeeping when it’s somebody else cleaning anything for me.  I also wouldn’t want to be reminded of the fact that there are some that are rich and some that are poor.  I wouldn’t want it in my own den, a servant and a master.  I can’t be fussed about housekeeping too much myself.  It’s a lot of unnecessary work.  I eat off the ground, no plates, and only a silver dish for my milk treat.  I am a cat and generally clean.”

  Vasalissa mused about some hidden new philosophy that spoke to her conscientious heart.  She was reminded of the Prince in Moonlight with his delightful array and company of working and serving animals.  There was even an orchestra to serve him music; a green and speckled frog the conductor.

  Vasalissa was then also reminded of her nurse she had grown up with until the age of eight.  Wilma, a dark-skinned woman with jet-black hair.  Wilma used to not care for any differences between Vasalissa’s frilly dresses of thin floating veil materials and Wilma’s younger sisters’ dresses that were plain grey coarse material because they were fishermen’s daughters and that is what they wore.  Wilma wasn’t overly impressed by any toys and luxuries but more by what a child saw in them and what they became in a child’s imagination.  The patient, insightful nurse guided Vasalissa to open her heart for humility.  Wilma herself had a heart for the humble and she esteemed fisher folk’s way of life as something worth discovering, though it was far far away, her home.  Wilma drew pictures of her home life and taught Vasalissa how to draw the cottages and the fishing nets and boats and sea-scape.  Vasalissa was told all about the children in it and what daily life was like there. 

  Wilma had felt appreciation for Vasalissa’ innocence like someone might appreciate the deep meaning for a tender violet flower with bottomless insight because of its innocence.  And Wilma appreciated the little girl as an equal, also on a journey even when it did not seem a journey, living in a sunshine-filled castle and it seemed the little was not going anywhere.  The time would come when she would.

  Vasalissa told Puss in Boots, her eyes dazzling like lights because she had lost and missed so many people and things in her young life, “You know what, you remind me of my nurse, Wilma.”  It was really nice that the Cremona orphan could be comforted with familiarity here on the other side of the mirror she had walked through.

  As she was feeling so comfortable, the soft velvet of her seat and the caving in around her shoulders, the whisky in the Scottish trifle was drawing her into a blissful sleep.  She felt perfectly at peace.  There was the fire ahead of her, burning at the back of the ginger cat in his chair.  Since in Scotland it is always cool or cold and even in summer it is cool, so it is the perfect place for children and cats who love cosy firesides all the year. . .

  “For some more finery, there’s the Pretty Spinsters’ Castle,” said Puss in Boots, with prominence in his voice.

  Vasalissa’ chin bobbed and she was awake again.  She blinked back at Boots.

  “Ladies dressed in beautiful gowns trailing the ground and lace veils hanging over their hair from tall medieval hats . . . finest goblets they hold in their possession and everything is shining with ancient luxury inside their castle.  They are full of grace, without fail.  Hospitable and generous as to the children they never had – so are guests to them.  They might even ask you to join them and become like them as you get older, Vasalissa.”

  “Oh really?”  Vasalissa all too easily believed in a womanhood of being fine and beautiful.

  “But I wouldn’t recommend it,” said Boots with a chuckle.  He began stroking his chin which curved up like cats’ chins did.  Cats’ chins give rise to mischief and independent-minded will.  The ginger cat was sitting very comfortable himself but he was one who continuously challenged himself, as a principal.  What more was it a principal not to have your guest growing bored but be continuously challenged and on a journey of discovery him/herself.

  Vasalissa’s eyes narrowed shrewdly.  Intelligently, she looked at her roguish friend.

  “Spinsters in a castle?”

  “Very elegant ones.  Tall, long-haired, refined like princesses.  You would like them.”

  “How can they all be pretty?”

  “They are.  They are so fine in spirit and fill each of their days with finery of needlecraft and arranging flowers and singing songs and playing the harp and all that refines the soul inside and out.  They can’t help but be pretty, even if they were born with a large nose maybe or a wide mouth.”  Boots amused himself at being a bit dry, but nothing he said was a lie.

  “Are there any spinning wheels?  Weaving looms?”

  Puss in boots thought and then nodded.  “Both.  They spin just as spinsters do, Lady Vasalissa.”

  Vasalissa wondered if Puss in Boots thought just as many people did that women can’t be happy unless they marry and have children.  She herself took a rather defensive toward the women that didn’t marry because she had lived with the four sisters in the secret wood behind the factory, young women loyal to their sisterhood.   The amethyst stones are to symbolize loyalty and these were sewn into their undergarments.  They lived craft-full lives in secret, hiding their cottage full of treasures from travels one of them had made on her magic Persian carpet.  And vines grew through the inside of the house and leafy branches.  The young women read and wrote stories together and fairy tales and dreamt of romantic stories, some of them funny, but the young women preferred the safety of their sanctuary and they could only trust each other.

  “Why are they called ‘Pretty Spinsters’?” Vasalissa asked.  Is that how everybody calls them?”  She rolled her eyes.  “Just because they’re spinsters, it isn’t unusual that they could be pretty, especially if they’re still young.”

  The roguish gentleman cat laughed in luke-warm generosity as a way of caring for the specialness of a girl-child who can say no wrong.  But he obviously held a dry-humoured opinion about these ladies who are called ‘spinsters’.  When female feelings were expressed, with him they were rewarded.  “I think ladies who take to spinning into old age a very decent way to live, probably one of the wisest.”  He chuckled.

  “Have you yourself ever been married?”

  “Yes,” replied the legendary cat.  “For a few years.  It was intense.  I was losin’ myself, two lives entangled.  It had to end.”

  There wasn’t anything so romantically put in a nutshell that Vasalissa had heard about this phenomenon of life before.  It was like a modern art painting Vasalissa had seen at an exhibition in the 1930’s of paintbrush-lines in different colours weaving across from opposite sides and becoming entangled in the middle so much that you couldn’t see the lines anymore and the colours had blended with one another.  Maybe that is what Puss in Boots was talking about and that is what he didn’t like.  But Vasalissa wondered if it might not seem fascinating.

  A waiter came around with the bill on a silver platter.  The cat did not read it but laid a coin on the table which was worth the grand piano and the waiters all came around and then the owner of the hotel and they bowed several times, saying thank you.  The rogue cat could not nod and grin enough on time to each bow and thank you to him.

  Vasalissa could play Debussy’s ‘Gollywog’s Cakewalk’ and after, one of the waiters paid her especial compliments for her playing, giving her a red rose to put in her hair.  Puss in Boots slipped off his comfy sunken chair and came back with Vasalissa’s blood-red coat only for another waiter to try to take it away because it was part of the hospitality but Puss in Boots dropped it over the Cremona orphan’s shoulders just on time.

  There was a handsome waiter here who had listened to Vasalissa playing the piano.  He was about 16, just two years more than Vasalissa’s fourteen, and he came across the room in a bit of apprehension over Vasalissa leaving so soon.

  Vasalissa had had a little chat with him earlier on.  Now he returned with more eagerness than before.  Because of the boy’s sincere respect for her piano playing, which she had not received from anyone before, Vasalissa’s heart beat at her chest like wings beating to escape, with its joy.  “Hopefully I’ll see your paintings one day,” she said in return.  “I can imagine they’re unusually beautiful.”   Her step back could have been interpreted as out of lady-likeness or unease.  She did not say out loud, “Maybe you’ll be a famous painter whose work I’ll see in the museums when I’m back in the 1930’s”, but she said it to herself with a chuckle.

  “Not as great as your piano music,” said the boy.  “What a wonderful instrument.  Nobody knows where it’s come from.  Just appeared soon as you arrived.”

  “I’m pleased you liked to hear my favourite piano pieces.”

  The boy coyly encouraged, “You’re really good at it.  You should keep playing.”

  Vasalissa replied innocently, “Should is something that won’t ever happen if there is no could.   I haven’t lived anywhere near a piano in years.”

  The obliging youth apologized though Vasalissa didn’t think it necessary.

  “Oh, it’s just something I’ve observed.  Should is such an awful word.  It only can make you feel bad for not doing what you’re supposed to.  I might not perchance across a piano again for a long time . . . I’m a traveller.”

  “A vagrant?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s why you shou – I mean could practice more tonight.  I insist.”

  “I’m not because I’ve been looking forward very much to going with Puss in Boots to visit some pretty spinsters – so they’re called, living in a castle.  It’s quite a walk away; we shall get there by lunchtime and walk around the castle grounds.  It’s nearly that now – well, on horseback, it’s only half an hour, he says.  I wonder what’s to see until it gets dark.  The ladies aren’t to be disturbed in their work during the day, so we’ll have to wait till evening to call on them indoors.  Puss in Boots says they’re always merry in the evenings and they still do a bit of spinning in the evenings.  I can’t wait to see spinning!  They sing songs while they spin.  Isn’t that wonderful?”

  The handsome charming boy returned, “The Pretty Spinsters of Dove Window Castle!” as if there had been no time lapse since Vasalissa’s first mention of the Pretty Spinsters.  They were the only ones called that.

  “Dove Window Castle?” repeated Vasalissa, her ears picking up a marvellous treat for imagery.

  “Y-yes.  These ladies are exceptionally pretty – they’re beautiful.  They’re young and some further past the marrying age than others but because of the things they do, they are filled with beauty and it shows in their deportment and poise and everything about them.  And sometimes, at festivities, some of them go to archery tournaments and claim their right to take part just like any of the lads.  They’ve won prizes, they’re pretty good.  And even though they are festivities and several men – especially foreigners – come to them a-wooing, only to be joked off you haven’t seen the like of!  They know what they want, these women.  They want to keep to their spinning in their castle with the doves along the windows and know of nothing else.”

  Vasalissa chuckled along.  Then added assertively, “I’m sure they do other things than spinning, too.”

  The brave waiter with the shiny black hair nodded, charmingly appeasing.  “Oh yes.  Why why –“he stammered, “I hope you’ll meet her, she hangs around the stretch of forest grove that one of the castle gardens leads into.  She practices archery I think just as much as she spins.  She’s called Lily Anne.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “Oh, very fair, perhaps the fairest of them all.  The longest moon-yellow plait down her back to her ankles.  I’ve played a tournament in archery with her last summer and toward the end I nearly won but then she beat me and won the prize of twenty turtle doves.  She meekly told me she already looks after enough turtle doves living in her forest in the garden. She let me keep all the turtle doves she won.  I’m afraid two of them escaped as she passed them to me.  I’ve kept only one, and the rest I sold to buy my mother some fine things for herself at home.”

  Vasalissa returned, “That’s very kind of you.”

  “Thank you . . . then I hope you’ll meet Liliana, she’ll be on the lake most likely when you arrive during the day.  She has a voice filled with stories in the making.  That’s what I call them anyway, what she sings.  You’ll like her too.”

  Vasalissa felt purest delight over this imagery.  “A lady on a lake?  Is the lake sometimes grey and sometimes blue?”

  The boy thought back.  “Yes.  Depending on the weather.”

  “Is the lady tall with black hair?”

  The boy nodded coyly.  “Lon g and down below her knees; black as ebony and over her shoulders you can’t tell if it’s her hair rippling or the water of the lake.”  He added chum-likely, “If you’ll see her, you can tell the whiteness she keeps for her face, throat and arms is only the way a fairy can keep in spite of the afternoon sun.  It can get very sunny in Scotland.  I know it’s said that it’s grey and grim here all the time.  It isn’t though.”  He shrugged, conscious that he was promoting his home country as if to suggest a lovely little lady to stay.  “How would everything grow so well here without any sun?  We get many thoroughly sunny days particularly in September and October, normally.”

  Vasalissa was going to ask what month it was, since she had only just arrived from the other side of the mirror.  But she refrained and faltered because that would raise suspicion.  Everywhere in the world it was the same month, if the world was the Earth.  “So – this lady on the lake never gets scorched or burned by the sun even if she’s out all day?”

  “Never.  She sings there on the lake.  Her voice fills out across the water on all shores.  She’s really there only in the morning.  Sometimes in the afternoon.  She’s a good weaver too and many a sort of crafter.”

  “Does she spin?”

  “Of course.”

  “How many spinning wheels have you seen inside the castle?” asked Vasalissa, whose favourite thing was a spinning wheel.

  “There is one for every spinster, Lady Vasalissa.  Were you hoping for one yourself?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “There are ten.  I’m sure they have spare ones.  There were eleven but one went away.”

  “How come?”

  “She was married.  Some persistent man from her childhood in the Pentlands.”

  “Oh, how romantic!” Vasalissa murmured.

  “Well . . . sadly to say, her husband lost an arm in an accident and has no way of earning for a living, at the moment.  She spins but one person spinning doesn’t create much wool.”

  “Easier to be a spinster then,” said Vasalissa curtly. 

  The boy laughed out loud.  “How do you say that?  Easier to fall in love.”

  “Maybe so.  I know women easily are disappointed, widowed, or easily die giving birth or after,” said Vasalissa as someone finishing a book and then closing it.  “Tell me more about the kind of music the lady on the lake sings.”

  After a pause and recovering from surprise, the dark-haired lad continued.  “I can’t really say . . . you’ll just have to hear it yourself.”

  Vasalissa frowned.  “What if I can’t because I don’t make it there before she goes back and spins again?”

  The boy tried to ignore Vasalissa’s impatience.  He began to describe, with his painter’s admiration air.  “To me, she’s an elfin princess,” he said, having a particular indulgence for descriptions of ladies.  “She knows a lot about the stars.  In her face it looks like she has a link with one or two of them.  A mermaid looks to a waiter when she becomes human for a while and she isn’t in the water.  Her face gives away that she is from an entirely different place all the other maidens are from.” 

  Vasalissa was affronted and desperately tried not to give away her dread of what might come next if this waiter person really had found out somehow that Vasalissa had come from a different time and different world.  Almost under her breath, a gasp, she countered as confidently as she could, “Is that a joke?  Or have you really met a mermaid before?”

  Maybe she was only imagining this boy might know everything about her because that is what boys try to seem like when they are courting.

  The boy laughed admitted defeat.  “I’m making it up.”  In haste, he continued describing and Vasalissa realized for sure it had only been a deception the young man had put on so it would seem that he knew all about her and that she had come from somewhere so unusual she might get captured and imprisoned for it.  “They do make beautiful things, these pretty spinsters,” the boy exclaimed.  “Tapestries – the loveliest colours.  Such imagination!  Such incredible artistry.  With just threaded wool they can depict legends known and legends they have made up which are just as good as legends that are known.  They’re very clever ladies.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “They create bundles and bundles of spun wool from their toil at their spinning wheels, day after day – you know, fingers doing this and foot doing that at the pedal . . . These bundles supply the queen in England, even.  If you watch the spinsters spin and stitch, you’ll wonder how there can be such nimble fingers.”

  Vasalissa was amused at this boy’s theatrical streak.

  The boy humbly confessed, “I don’t have such slender fingers as they have so I could never be a nimble spinner –“

  “You mean spinster,” Vasalissa jested.

  They both laughed.

  There was a noise to the side and Vasalissa turned to notice Puss in Boots stretching out lazily as a house cat, over the carpet, spacing out his claws.  “Sometimes I truly could be a house cat,” mused the former domestic cat in a marquis’ stately home.  “Specially when there’s a fire goin’.  Pardon me, I wasn’t listening to your conversation, I was quite enjoying myself roasting next to the fire.”

  “Oh,” Vasalissa said.  “Well, this boy’s been telling me all about the Pretty Spinsters of Dove Window Castle.”  To the boy, she added, “By the way, what is your name?”

  The boy tilted his head to the side and thought like a parrot – just as Caesar did, Vasalissa thought.  “I didn’t think it polite to introduce myself.  I have such an ordinary name compared to yours.”

  “Oh, my name’s just one in Russian fairy tales.”

  Puss in Boots meowed over.  “I think I need an afternoon stroll for digestion.  If you aren’t ready to go, I’ll just be out by myself, Lady Vasalissa.  But there’s no guarantee you’ll find me, since a digestive stroll has gotten me into all kinds of ramblings before.”

  “It’s Andrew.”

  Vasalissa bobbed her head between the two sources of voices.  “Oh.  Andrew, pleased to meet you.”

  She found it hard to admit to herself she was disappointed with the name.  All in two brief moments she had a flashback of an Andrew that had spoiled the name for her.  It had been her Uncle Andrew Pollymer.  He had tried to drown her in the pond because he had thought Vasalissa had stolen his silver candelabras and candlesticks.  He found them the next day under his bed and remembered that was where he had hid them in fear of his Cremona cousin’s orphaned daughter stealing them in the first place.  He had forgotten they had been hidden under his bed.  He wanted to apologize to Vasalissa for having tried to drown her and perhaps comment something like, “I’m glad you fought back so well and escaped.”  But Vasalissa was gone from that place forever and only overheard from gossiping people on the country road she travelled what had happened after she left.

  “You know what?  Andrew is always a name I thought perfect for a cute terrier kind of dog.”

  “Well . . .” The boy just ended up laughing for his helpless situation.  “You can’t mean that?”

  “Yes I do.”  Vasalissa was serious.  “But I can see it’s quite alright for a boy too.  But why are you named Andrew when you’re not even Scottish and it’s the patron saint of Scotland?”

  “Oh yes . . . I know, I’m not Scottish.  My family comes from the Red Coats.  Yes, it’s fact, I’m not joking.  Equivalent to the Conquestadores in South America and almost as bad as the English and Scottish and Irish together conquering North America at the moment . . . these are the Red Coats.”

  Vasalissa felt a little sorry.  “Can you row a boat?” she asked suddenly.

  “Yes . . . That’s not the way my ancestors came, by the way . . .”

  “Would you like to come with me and Puss in Boots to the Dove Window Castle?  And you can row me in a boat across the lake.”

  Eyes sparkling so Vasalissa admired their brown.  “Why yes of course;” adding with appropriate decency, “The loch, Lady Vasalissa.  In Scotland that’s how we pronounce lake.  I’m just kidding; I always say lake myself, forgetting.”  Andrew turned his head over his shoulder at a stream of people arriving at the hotel, waiting to be served.  “It looks like I might not be allowed to leave work.”

  When he looked pleadingly at Vasalissa, Vasalissa looked back at him with lady-like reserve.

  Good-natured about the response he got, Andrew said in a low tone which quite charmed the Cremona maiden.  “I’ll for sure be able to follow you and Sir Boots . . . later.  I might not arrive there by evening though.  But we’re near midsummer.  Evening is still bright.”

  Vasalissa nodded as if she knew just what month it was although she didn’t.

  “Do you like starry nights outdoors?” asked the boy unexpectedly.

  Vasalissa couldn’t answer.  There was a look about the boy in his eyes that reminded her that Martha would slap any bold boys like that but then Gladys’ eyes would perhaps sparkle.

  She answered, “I’ve been a consumptive for many years.”

  “Oh.  Weak lungs?”

  This was a lie, of course.  “Doctor says I can’t go outside in the night air.  I could get sick and die.”

  “Oh yes,” Andrew said apologetically.  “I’ve heard of many girls like that.”

  Vasalissa somehow now hoped Andrew did not think less of her now – even though it wasn’t true; she wasn’t a consumptive and had run away from her guardian families plenty times at night.

  “Well . . . have a nice walk to the castle with Sir Boots.”

  Vasalissa found this boy handsome indeed. 

  “Thank you.”  Then she asked something without thinking first.  “Andrew, do you believe being a spinster is a good way to be?” Vasalissa wanted to know if it might be a good path for her.

  The young man looked surprised.  Then he laughed, in good grace and good will.  “Why yes.  And I’m called back to duty.  See you later, for sure.”

 

Vasalissa later asked her friend Puss in Boots.  “What do you find.  Is it a good thing to be a spinster?  Do you think it’s something perhaps I could be?”

  The ginger cat gleamed; then chuckled good-naturedly.  “Vasalissa.  You’re fourteen years old.  Are you someone who’s planning old age as well as growing out of childhood?  – growing out of childhood to some extent is good, not to a far extent.”

  Vasalissa lowered her chin.  “I’m just wondering if it would be a good idea to think I might get married at all or if it’s better to just decide I won’t.”

  Her legendary hero friend seemed intimidated by Vasalissa’s faith in him to know the answers.  In a little while he replied with a bemused and captivating introduction, “There’s a little house up this way I’d like to pay a visit to.  It’s a place of old stone, solidly built, and grown over with ivy and all kinds of blue and purply flowers.  There’s a little lady who lives there.  She used to have husband and she’s living alright having lost him, so maybe giving marrying a try once in your life can’t be too bad.  It’s the flowers there I’d like to pick to bring for our Pretty Spinster ladies at the castle.  I wouldn’t like to arrive empty-handed.”

  Vasalissa smiled.  She decided to make a little tease.  “Are you allowed to prowl into her garden?  If you are her loyal stray cat, she might capture you and make you her house cat!”

  The street cat, well-amused, returned an answer.  “She’s already got a house cat.  A black one named Tobsy.”  More serious, he added, “Cats can’t be stolen, Lady Orphan.  They always find their way out of a place and back to territory of their pick.  A cat does so when it’s in good form, anyway.  I’ve been needin’ to be getting back into better form than I am now.”  He shook out his shoulders.  “A hunt of mice will provide a good run . . . I haven’t been running after anything lately and I must say I haven’t been chased either.  Been keepin’ out of trouble.  Things are goin’ too well and easy, I suppose.  Why would I eat mouse when there are shops giving out anything you can take with a free arm?”

  “Could you really actually kill a mouse?”

  “Well . . . that’s it, I’d rather not.  Because last time I pushed myself to kill a mouse, I couldn’t eat it.  And soon after, I fished a herring out of the sea with my tail.  I killed it with a slap.  But then couldn’t eat it.”

  “And what about humans?” the sometimes boldly journeying Cremona child asked.  “You kill in sword fights, if there is one and your opponent tries to kill you?”

  The jaunty jawline of the ginger-striped cat set in.  He swallowed a lump in his throat, shaking his head.  “That’s why the fellows I could have killed in dual can’t stand me and have banned me from certain drinking pubs.  Taking the life of your enemy is much more wrong than taking the life of something that can make your food, Lady Vasalissa.”

  The tomcat stretched his claws out twice, then thrice.  These clefts cats can create by moving each claw Vasalissa always thought unnatural.  The paw just appears to split open at the cat’s will.

  Vasalissa sighed and sympathized for her friend she was learning more about: the cat underneath the legendary fame down through centuries.  She was honoured.

Chapter 13: Sign of the Orange-Pink Flower and the King of Fife

In fact it would be years until Vasalissa would see the handsome boy Andrew again.  The boy who made beautiful descriptions and thought Vasalissa was wonderful never was going to make it to the Dove Window Castle as he said because just outside the Hotel in the smoky alleyway, when he’d finish work, he was to be kidnapped.  A black-wool poncho-shrouded bandit with a hunchback, together with two lean wiry other bandits with dark circles around their eyes were going to bind him by a net and gag him so he couldn’t shout for help.  The poor, kind friendly, youthful, wonderful kind Andrew… Vasalissa was always remembered him the handsomest and kindest boy she had met.

  There are many roads to a spinsters’ castle as there are roads to Rome.  Just as Rome was once a mighty empire which many people thought worthwhile travelling to, so was a spinsters’ castle.  For some young boy the road might follow in line of throwing down a walnut picked from a walnut tree.  If you throw it in line with a star on a summer night, then you can see the road to the castle, which might appear like a spider’s starlit web in the sky.  For the man living on the moon, to find a road leading to a spinsters’ castle might start by polishing his eye-glass to take a look across the chimneys on rooftops of London, all-sooty and in all directions.  For a young woman whistling on her way to teacher’s college – although it was bad manners and so unlady-like to whistle in 1910, the route to the spinsters’ castle might be to keep on whistling and take up a pert walk with those black-stockinged legs and keep up a waywardness with ankles and shins showing.

  When Vasalissa stood under the moon at the start of her walk to the spinsters’ castle, she did not want to go anymore. 

  The afternoon had been such a lovely one visiting a widow.  Vasalissa and Puss in Boots had stayed visiting till dusk the little widow’s little stone house overgrown with ivy in a hidden garden walled with blue, periwinkle and violet and purply flowers abounding and abounding even shyly under leaves of other rioting plants.  The old little lady living inside wore a lace doily on her silver-haired head.  She had just baked cinnamon-plum tart and asked Vasalissa to churn fresh cream for her while she baked some scones to follow and then they could sit down to a late lunch of asparagus and potatoes and bacon.  She had to be a little mean because she wasn’t very well off, but her guests didn’t mind because the luxuriously indulgent meal at the grandest hotel in Scotland previously had robbed them all appetite for the rest of the day.  Yet guests wanted to stay and eat just because the old lady’s hospitality fulfilled the ethos of “eat whatever you can for free” which Vasalissa wholeheartedly had adopted herself. 

  The little old lady was so pleased to have the cat and the young lady with the crimson cloak with her, she extravagantly showed them she possessed a lively humour and talked away about the most controversial topics like what is life after death, radically.  Often she described her late husband.  She described her late aunt and her great-aunt and her mother who had raised her all by herself.  

  Somehow Vasalissa began to want to put off going to experience Dove Window Castle, where the spinsters lived, for another day.  The next day, if it had to be so soon.  She rather really liked the old lady with the forget-me-nots in vases dotting her kitchen.  Meeting and soaking in the example of a widow followed by spinsters was going to be all too much for one day.  These possibilities a woman could have for her course in life, according to the marital statuses available, were each a world of their own.  Vasalissa Cremona would rather create her own world, follow her own whim of direction.  There ought to be something different that would not fit into any category of a woman’s marital and social status?

  The landscape under the moon was vast here, past the last of Edinburgh’s outskirts.  Vasalissa and Puss in Boots stopped at a field where nothing grew.  Puss in Boots said it had been cleared and burned and had not been planted yet.  Just over the hills in the distance, he said was the Firth, which was a water channel from the sea and on the other side was the land of Fife.  “There are numerous clams living in those waters,” the cat said.  He was spoiled with human-prepared food in the city but he went out to catch a few things to keep “in good form”, as he called it. 

  “A walk at night can capture anybody who has some cat-nature at heart toward some magical destination, Vasalissa Cremona,” said the Puss in Boots.  His whiskers could sense a change in the air current the young girl journeyer was locating to step along to.  “It is often best to just go where you just feel a little pull to.”

  Vasalissa smiled, having been hesitant to think just what the cat had said. 

  This is the scene that the chummy companions set: A cat and a young lady walking with the blue of the night impressed and obscuring their colours.  Her skirt hung thick and her red cloak – now more of a purple or brown, her fists inside its pockets had been swinging beside her until she stopped at that barren field that had just been burned.  Beyond this were hills.  The moon’s white light was thick and pasty like in a pastel painting.  The painting was past full.  The good-humoured ruminative cat with the rugged hat too big for him strolled and had stopped to join the stillness. 

  The clouds strewn across that great nightness above was the texture and colour of cooked plum, were lined with silver in a whimsical way which quickened Vasalissa’s heart when she saw it because this was the summer night sky typical only to Scotland. 

  Like people do, Vasalissa had hoped Boots to speak what was on her mind and heart that she could not decipher by her own inner listening skills and care about.  She looked to him.  He was a little hesitant to do so, since he firmly believed everyone must gain self-awareness on their own for making decisions but sometimes self-awareness when you are young needs some parenting.  Puss in Boots believed in equality, of course, so many outcasts and homeless and vagrants gravitated toward him for a little parenting they had lacked, whatever their age.   A little parenting, of compassion and deep empathy can touch the soul so that all the resistance to change and understanding can rumble off, much like gentle rough dry stones dislodging out of an orange clay slope so a waterfall can burst its way forward.

  “Vasalissa.  I believe . . . you’re too young to be looking to the lives of spinsters to become like them.  Sexism isn’t something I approve of, personally.  I wouldn’t recommend it.  I’ll be glad hear of it if you’ll be finding brothership and sistership in one the same garden.  It’s all alike.  In me you’ve seen a sister.  In me I’ve been your brother.  I see a person as my brother and my sister.  Both.  I don’t follow restrictions, personally.”  He paused.  “I am myself a little too much inside the restriction of this cat form.”  He chuckled with the creaks in his leather jacket at the shoulders.  He paused and felt inside his generously empathetic chest and looked at Vasalissa sharing that they were one and the same kind.  “There is that garden you’re looking for, Vasalissa.  Like as little children and it is purrrrfectly acceptable for girls to join in what are considered boys’ games, and likewise boys are included in what are considered girls’ games… without hesitations.  There aren’t any roles to play that you have to stick to for the rest of your life.  We’re all children inside.  While we still knew it is wise to play without making differences, whether skin, gender, background, clothes, strength, talent, health, there is a place where everybody stays in that frame of mind because they’ve returned to that wisdom… where it’s allowed.” 

  From the inside of his jacket, the ginger cat drew out a glowing orange wild rose.  Vasalissa scarcely believed anymore that she had come to an unmagical world.  A wild rose, in its centre, has yellow antennae like an insect’s.  This is what sparkled and glowed throughout the petals.

  “It’s for you.  From that garden you can call home.”  Puss in Boots pressed the soft petals into Vasalissa’s hand.  Careful of the thorns further down the stem, Vasalissa’s took secure hold of the flower.

  “How can that be for me?”  She was credulous.  “This is the flower that used to grow, on its bushes, in the little garden that was mine, just a step into from my room in my castle of my childhood.  It’s the flower of my home.” 

  Then, the longer Vasalissa watched its pure radiance, a very meek, gentle personality made itself present to her. 

  Puss in Boots looked very pleased at this mutual recognition between the wild rose and Vasalissa Cremona.   “Lady Vasalissa, why don’t you follow this rose and not your awe for cobwebbed castles and long trailing gowns?  Don’t be going with the spinsters.  You’re a lady.”

  As before when the legendary hero emphasized that she is a lady, Vasalissa resisted.  She was about to make a protest when in her understanding a convincing meaning suddenly unfolded itself, of what it means to be a lady.  To be a lady meant something of courage.  As a lady she needed no awe or admiration from others to prove anything about herself because courage spurned her to acknowledge everything she needed to know and trust about herself.  She would not be craving the acknowledgement by other people.  She gave acknowledgement to herself. 

  The glowing rose of orange-pink resonated with nobleness of character.  It was submissive to the cause of kindness.  Because of this, the wild rose was honest when it looked at someone.  It acknowledged a person’s inner worth, which is something not all beings and creatures are honest about.  Dishonesty is just what the enemy can use the best; that is why the devil is called a liar.

  “There is a place where all the pressures of growing up don’t exist at all…If that’s really a place, I want to go there,” Vasalissa said to Puss in Boots.  She dropped one side of her smile askew.  “I have a lot of catching up to do for a childhood I missed for four years while I was an orphan.”

  Vasalissa reached and expressed to the legendary humanitarian a big hug.  Hugs were one of the things she had not been able to do during her years as an orphan.

  The long lost legendary hero and friend, twinkling understanding and a toddler’s joy for her, chuckled to reciprocate the hug. 

  “To the rose,” the cat said, later for caution, “Guard it well.  This is a survivor, this flower, much like the weeds that keep growing no matter how you might try to cut them back.  It won’t stop glowing and speaking to you.  But it can easily be snatched away.”

  “By who?” asked Vasalissa, putting the wild rose to a hiding spot just in case, inside her crimson cloak.

  Puss in Boots replied, “If you can get to the garden that it’s come from quickly, you won’t have to worry.”

  “Where is this garden?” Vasalissa found Puss in Boot’s enigmatic secrets a tease, she realized, though whimsical – just the trait she had been wishing to meet personified since a little girl.

  While the ginger cat tapped into his inner compass to give his answer for whereabouts of this garden, he and Vasalissa already knew the essence of where this garden was.  As the Puss in Boots tried to formulate some answer to the question he wanted to answer, a remarkable whistle sound pierced the air and broke his train of thought.

  The whistle sound was the least likely thing to expect outside at night in the country when you were sure you were alone.  The night sky and the tree nearest turned into heightened awaken of life because of it.  Vasalissa looked around frantically.  The sound came again, shrill; then followed by some lower tones.  It became familiar to Vasalissa with her black hair covering her ears.  A flute!  Somewhere in the dark there was someone playing some kind of flute!

  “Is someone there?” Puss in Boots called, more as a chuckle.  “Your playing has an audience.  It’s us.  Puss in Boots and a Lady.”

  “Oh?  Alright!  I’ll be pleased to meet you,” came a boy’s polite voice rounded with humour.  It could have been a girl’s, Vasalissa wasn’t sure.  A trill was played and a laugh followed which revealed he was most likely a boy.

  The silhouette of a maybe 10 year-old with skinny legs and wiry arms and short faun-like hair moved through the shadows under the only tree that was on the burnt field, against a short grassy ridge.  It was a very broad branched tree, probably an oak.  The ground there was rounded with little knolls.  Little specks where the light of the moon beamed showed a white shirt with plaid vest.  He wasn’t wearing a kilt – the tartan skirt fashion for men and boys in Scotland – but a pair of brown breeches.  As the boy stepped closer, beams from the night’s illuminator revealed his feet bare.  Perhaps he was of the fairy folk!

  He seemed a bit shy and before stepping out of the shadows to make a greeting, some hesitation marked him a very thoughtful person, aware of his manners and consideration for other people; careful not to be perceived “the wrong way”. 

  Vasalissa’s heart beat with anticipation of an awestruck kind telling her this was someone you could strike a friendship with as the strike of a match aflame in the dark.  He was a friend to light up the dark.  She breathed a gasp as a swarm of fireflies flew across and lit up the boy’s face.  It was a very friendly, mythical face with high cheek bones.  Because of the wilderness and playful fun this boy compelled her with, Vasalissa began to wonder if he might be a fawn – since his legs were normal and not a goat’s, then he was a fairy . . . She waited to find out if his ears were tall and pointy.  Yet there was an understanding for being a human which only another human could have.  And the boy’s playfulness was not to pull pranks to annoy or pester but to emote confidence in harmony.

  Vasalissa asked, “Who are you?”

  The child replied.  “Well . . . it doesn’t make a good impression to brag about your name and title.  So I’ll have you guess.”  He stepped up closer, now at ease; giving away that he was the most amiable and full of faith in that good Vasalissa needed a reminder of.

  Vasalissa and Puss in Boots exchanged chuckling surprises. 

  “Are you someone important?” asked the Cremona daughter.  “I might not know who you are because I come from a faraway place.  What’s a boy so young doing outside at night, unafraid of monsters and ghosts?  Did you escape your home?  Did you get in trouble at home?  I’ve done that before… go for walks at night because I needed to escape my foster families,” Vasalissa confessed.  “If you don’t have a home because… it seems . . . you’re really a fairy?”

  Fairies were full of mischief in many kinds of folk tales in Scotland and the boy did not like the connotation of being suggested one of those.

  Puss in Boots to the rescue laughed in the way to support an uncomfortable situation with tender-hearted enjoyment.  Tender-hearted enjoyment of any situation is something peaceful that wins the day.  “This is the King of Fife you’re talking to,” said the humanitarian.  “King of Fife.  Fife is the land up North.  There’s a fair chance this might be King of the Fairies, Lady Vasalissa… A fair chance.”

  Vasalissa stared with awe; she loved to be in her young child self, so sure of there being fairies.

  The King of Fife or King of the Fairies accepted the statement and smiled again.  “If flying is the sign that I am King of the Fairies instead of King of Fife, then I’m King of the Fairies.”  His eyes and high cheekbones lit up like torches in enthusiasm.  But then, Vasalissa watched how the grin then dampened a little with something that was either the spirit of being delicately humble or the spirit of discontentment with oneself. 

  What the King of Fife did next was run up a tree.  He hurled through the branches and then bending over as if all he wanted to do was gaze into the puddle below in which the moon was reflected.  Vasalissa screamed in an instant when the boy suddenly fell from the branches!  The fall turned into a flight just late enough to persuade Vasalissa’s stomach to flop.  He could fly!  Vasalissa observed the first person she ever saw who could fly… asides the Flying Sun-Man that had dried up all the scary witch’s lentils Vasalissa had failed to dry in the sun, back in the heart of the deepest darkest forest, in Russia.

  When somebody knows how to fly and you have the honour of meeting such a reality in your life, you find that it is entirely effortless – once the person who can fly is up in the air, defying the law of gravity.  Vasalissa observed and relished every moment of this boy’s flight and conquering one of humanity’s most disappointing inabilities.  The boy swam, caught within some kind of seaweed hairs not in water but in thin air; maneuver was by some pressure of his palms; the pale moon was behind him larger than his head, so his expression was shadowed.  He communicated on the level the young instinctively feel without words and he was very sad.

  Vasalissa said a little sorrowfully, “I can’t tell if you’re King of Fife or King of the Fairies, but you’re a boy who isn’t too content with himself for being able to fly.” 

  The Fife King or Fairy King played a few low forlorn notes on the whistle out of a pocket.  “How did you know?  I guess it’s easy to tell.  Why would I be happy about being able to fly when it makes me so different?  I can fly, yes, I know it’s unusual.  I used to always want to be different, and that’s when I started to learn how to fly.  But now I just want to be like any ordinary lad who cannot defy the law of gravity even if he tries to teach himself.  People just don’t like anybody to defy laws.  Laws are there to keep everyone… miserable.  It doesn’t seem fair that one person can get away defying them and getting past them.”

  “Does that make you a law breaker?” asked Vasalissa.

  |Puss in Boots put up a paw when the Fife or Fairy King did not reply.  “I’m one… escaped the noose and the axe several times because of some stroke of fortune giving me further chances at becoming more obedient.  Law breaker, that’s me.”

  Vasalissa inspired with humbled but joyful appreciation.  “So am I.  When I used to fly, just for a trip around the world, I was spying and eavesdropping on kinds of people in their homes when they are alone and speaking to their gold-fish or picking their noses without a handkerchief or – guess what… I’d catch presidents and ministers sitting on the chamber pot; and nobody is allowed to know that presidents and ministers use chamber pots – it was against the law for me to know that they do this – it was something terrible!”

  The boy king burst out laughing.  He did not quite believe Vasalissa could fly, but the part about spying and eavesdropping on presidents and ministers was something hilarious and that this could be breaking the laws they had made.

  Vasalissa walked a little closer to the tree, clutching her magical flower lantern to her chest under her crimson cloak as she breathed.  “What does it matter what anybody else likes but yourself?” she said.  “Isn’t flying something amazing and wonderful?”

  “I care about what the leprechauns think,” came the boy’s defeated reply.  He hovered in the air.

  Vasalissa felt some relief and was about to laugh but the boy had mentioned leprechauns so seriously.  “The leprechauns?  Is it only the leprechauns that you care about?”

  The Fife or the Fairy King with the wispy faun’s hair said as a matter of fact, “The leprechauns are plotting against me in the hollows at night.”

  “What?”

  “Their headquarters at the roots of the ancient yew trees… The leprechauns in the Kingdom of Fife are plotting against their king because I’m so young and timid.”

  “And because you can fly and they can’t?”

  “Well… yes.  Maybe.”

  “Why don’t you fly away?”

  “I do.  I’ve flown away tonight, that’s why I’m here.”

  “Oh right.  It’s only the Kingdom of Fife once you cross the… the Firth, the wide bay with currents of fresh water together with sea water just purrrrfect for a cat to catch clams with his tail,” chided Vasalissa aside to the Puss in Boots.  “I wonder why don’t leprechauns fly?”

  “They can’t,” replied the King of Fife.  “They can only jump.  Like fleas.”

  “Isn’t flying something people can learn in their dreams?  Everyone can dream.  They can find out they can do it, in their dreams, and they can defy the rule that it is impossible.”

  “Yep, the law.”

  “But you’re not dreaming right now.  You really can fly.  You can do what others dream they can do, only to wake up realizing it was only a dream.  But you never wake up.”

  “Yes, I haven’t woken up for a long time but I have to now.”

  Crestfallen, holding her magical wild rose, the Cremona orphan returned, “That’s a pitiful thing to say.  But you’re awake, your majesty, King of Fife.  You’re awake.”

  The boy realized this was something quite impressive to himself.  “Yes, I am, and I still can fly.”

  Vasalissa clapped her hands like a thrilled little girl.  “I’m so glad you can.  I’m glad.  I’m glad there’s someone who defeats the law of gravity.  And I did once.”  She and the young king laughed together and Vasalissa told him a little more about the time she knew how to fly – it just happened.  And she flew around the world to learn new perspectives.  By this she had learned that equality between human beings is so easily covered up by the creation of inequality.  There really is no one superior or inferior, though there may be roles of persecutors and persecuted, dictators and the dictated, oppressors and oppressed; stern tyrannical parents or guardian and children squeezed into tiny boxes to wait until their parents come back.

  The Puss in Boots next to the Cremona lady nodded a Well done, well done for this declaration.

  With this, the King of Fife wanted to meet his little crowd to speak with on equal height.  Before he landed, he looked about to say something and couldn’t say it. “You can call me Pipper,” he finally said.  It was as if he still listened intently to the things Vasalissa had said to him.  A kind of pixie light began to arrive with a prink.

  The King of Fife flew down and walked to her and made a more formal introduction.

  “I’m called Pipper.  There’s no one to be King of Fife and so I’m the one.  What’s your name?”

  Vasalissa curtseyed, since she was in the 18^th century.  “Vasalissa Cremona.”  She smiled about herself to him.  Then she smiled about him.  “If you’re a king who wishes he couldn’t fly, I’m a journeying orphan who wishes she didn’t go on so many journeys, though journeys are supposed to be really fun and there are millions of children wishing they could go on exciting ones.  I’m growing out of feeling I’m the only orphan, because I’ve been meeting so many others orphans.  Once I met the first other orphan, my journeys began to change very much.”

  The ginger cat in tough Georgian jacket tapped has chest with a paw and a gesture, clearing his purring throat.  “Other orphans?  I’m one of them.” 

  Vasalissa turned.  “But you’re such a big nurturer. You could be a rounder for all the lost orphans, gone astray, wandering the streets of Edinburgh... Why, that’s what you do, don’t you?”

  The cat admitted, lowering his head, “Aye, the lost boys.”  With paws in his pockets he thought deeply and sighed.  “I provide and share my den sometimes with many.  It’s a safe refuge from the streets.  I have to keep changing headquarters so actual criminals don’t find out, or sometimes those I’ve sheltered and shared my food with and warmth by the fire actually turn into law breakers of a different sort that doesn’t agree with me.  Or they have already been criminals at some degree of murder, for example, and I didn’t know it… Many lost boys – and girls – boys, mostly, have been turned away by their charitable grandmothers and have ended up at my hideaway because they had heard about it.  The warmth and smoke of a wood burning stove of an abandoned mansion can be very inviting but more so can be the community and sort of family we create – family with no parents or authority… though sometimes I’ve had to be a bit of this myself.  Sometimes there’s a been a clash of wills I could’na handle and I’ve had to ask someone to leave. 

  “It was very difficult to have to do so; sometimes it was I who escaped and left instead.  Inside each person, I saw, underneath whatever escalating age and affectations to be manly or to be the boss, even if they’ve got parents still alive but aren’t being looked after, they’re all orphans.  The meanest person can be an orphan because he isn’t understood by his parents.  Makes him an orphan, just like anyone who’s lost their parents because of death.”

  The Fife King or Fairy King listened and a great peace filled his re-found assertiveness to speak and share a hope.  “There is a safe refuge I would like to take you to, if you can fly with me there.  That flower is from there.”  The young boy nodded to the orange-pink glowing flower Vasalissa was holding.  She had been eager to show Pipper this.  “Do you know what that one means?”

  Vasalissa shook her head. 

  Puss in Boots declared to explain, “It’s for Vasalissa, but it came to me, before, or I’ve picked it out of sheer chance, a few days ago.  Kept it under my jacket for protection.  It makes me bullet proof – somebody tried shooting me a few days ago.”

  “Whatever for?” exclaimed Vasalissa.

  “Nothin’ worth shooting a person for whatsoever, Lady Vasalissa – let alone a cat.”

  “The rose will do that,” said Pipper the Fife or the Fairy King. 

  “It’s a wild rose,” corrected Vasalissa.

  “A wild rose,” agreed Pipper.  He raised his eyebrows and creases above them formed so quaintly.  “Do you know … that this special glowing flower is a sign that the Scraggly Man, a persecutor of children’s childhood, has been defeated?  The rose – wild rose – could finally grow.  It lives in a garden and children go to live there as a safe hiding place.  It’s a wild sort of garden, everything teems in it.  Anything that grows can’t be defeated.”

  Vasalissa breathed with all grace of resolution falling in place for all her purpose she had been so baffled about since Giesela the star godmother had sent her.  Vasalissa’s light-brown eyes were the softest Puss in Boots had ever seen her.

  “The Scraggly Man,” said the girl, barely a murmur.  “The Scraggly man?  You know about the Scraggly Man?”

  The young boy Pipper smiled, resolutely.  “Yes, I have known about the Scraggly Man.  You’re not the only one who has been sent to help the children in the dark, grim places in the industrial world where he is abound.”

  Vasalissa stared, her heart escalating to a higher-pitched voice.  “Have you been asked by Giesela too?”

  “That sounds a lovely name, but no, I haven’t been asked by her.  There are flower fairy children who ask me things like this.  Any of the flower kinds that are stem flowers with many bells on them, these are where the children prophets live, and they tell me sometimes what’s happening in the world and how I could change things – and that I must change them because I can and because I want to.”

  The Cremona daughter blinked.  “Did you – have to meet – the Scraggly Man?”

  Young Pipper stared back, then shook his head.  “No.  I couldn’t.  No one is a match for him.  If you ever meet him, that’ll be the end of your freedom.  You’ll have to become just like the poor children who lose all their fun and imagination.  You’ll forget who you are.  You’ll forget everyone who loved you.  Everything.”

  Vasalissa sighed.  “I wonder what happened then, how did this amazingly kind and magical flower started to grow as a sign that the Scraggly Man’s been defeated?”

  The boy tilted his head in tentative thought.  He then landed on the ground so he could ponder some more.  He then said to persuade Vasalissa with one very simple explanation, “It’s just happened.”  He was very convinced of this.

  Vasalissa absorbed this conviction with the certainty she needed.  That’s all she needed for now.

  Pipper continued, with genuine earnestness and love for the truth.  “It just happened… because we’re so wonderful.”

  The very kind and honest flower kept shining its glow by minutest pulse like a flame of a candle that keeps steady with just a few minutest pulses once in a while.

  Vasalissa breathed.  “Wonderful?”  Vasalissa was so gratefully bewildered.  Finally, the mission she had been sent on by Giesela on her star far out of the country of Happily Ever After was accomplished and Vasalissa did not even know how.  It had just happened – and because she was wonderful and Pipper was wonderful... might have something to do with it.  “I didn’t know that I’m wonderful.”

  Pipper nodded, fully convinced this was the reason.  He was aware of the puckish humour over what could be considered narcism and how point-blank self-acknowledgement is something strongly disreputable, condemned by many.

  Vasalissa feared her Uncle Bruce disapproved.  Aunt Miltitsa disapproved.  Then she realized, they weren’t here.  Whether or not she was far removed from the memory and awareness of them existing was entirely up to her in her head.  It was up to her. 

  Vasalissa still did not understand why she had been deposited in the Christmas Tree forest by Giesela’s castle door porters to perish in the cold.  If it had not been for the wanderer in the husky sled, fair curls over his arctic rabbit hair hood, moonlight fabric reflecting the North’s moon and night snow, Vasalissa would have frozen to death.  The pain of the cold made Vasalissa sick in her stomach.  Someone who remembers a frosty night when they came home to find the window was left open might shiver or shudder.  She had nearly died on this mission, and yet nothing had need to be done or fulfilled!  The fulfilment just happened because Vasalissa was so wonderful.  It was true, and she was glad she could was not the only one who was so wonderful or she would rather not be wonderful at all, just angry and sour over it.  The Scraggly Man had been defeated.

  “I’m wonderful too, so don’t worry about it.”  Pipper piped, loving the fact that some people might think him outrageous.  “Aren’t you glad the Scraggly Man is defeated?” asked Pipper.

  “Hm?  Oh, yes, that too.”

  “What were you thinking of?”

  “I was just remembering the start of one of my journeys… the start of my journey after Giesela dropped me off her star.”

  The boy with empathy then brightened up to humour.  “That Giesela of yours is a funny character.  Are you sure she’s not a witch?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.  She’s definitely not a witch,” said Vasalissa who had met areal witch before.  She shuddered.  “But I landed in a forest where it was freezing cold.  A Christmas tree forest.”

  “Well.  At least you got all your Christmas trees you ever wished for!”

  Vasalissa smiled.  “I guess so.  I nearly died there, because of the cold.”

  “Oh no… that isn’t good at all,” said the boy Pipper.

  “No… it was pretty painful, the cold.  Then somebody found me and rescued me.  A Prince in Moonlight.”

  “Ohh,” said Pipper.  He imagined a Prince in Moonlight in his child’s impressionable mind.

  “I don’t think he knew about the Scraggly Man… he’s in a very far away land.  He would love to look at this flower though,” said Vasalissa.  “Magical things and wonders is what his day is all about.  And travelling.  And reading.”

  “May I hold the glowing rose for a while?” The little King of Fife assertively coveted carrying the wild rose glistening in the night, much as one would covet the carrying of a fluffy bunny rabbit.

  Vasalissa nodded and passed it to him.

  A kind of wisdom sparkled across the point of the boy’s nose to his puckish high cheek bones.  “The Scraggly Man has dispersed into fragments and been blown away.  That’s quite a talent for a shadow.  All the usual shadows can do is disappear.  I know that’s not a very appropriate to say.  What are all those children celebrating for?  How dare they?”  His mischief rang with eyes laughing for Vasalissa to laugh with. 

  Sir Boots the rogue of Edinburgh city commented, when the laughing convulsions calmed, “You ought to give a shadow some credit for disappearing, ‘cos at least by disappearing he’s done something not many of us can do.  This evil spirit at least can leave us alone now, and that’s some talent he could have shown a wee bit earlier, to my own idealistic ethics.  He’s a lucky one for being spared a public execution – which I’d detest and hate to see the crowds flock to.  So we can thank him for sparing us one. ”

  “Executions are dreadful!” Vasalissa said, shaking her head more seriously.  “I can’t believe people hold public executions or any executions at all.”

  “Most definitely,” agreed the humane cat.  “I’ve escaped having to be the actual spectacle of one several times, myself.”

  Vasalissa gasped, hand to her humble mouth.  “But you’re a hero!” she said between her fingers.

  Puss in Boots had no pride in being a hero even though he knew he did well, so he nodded, accepting what was meant.  “The liberation of the oppressed and lonely and unsheltered on the streets must be continued, Lady Vasalissa.  I wouldn’t like to have to escape an execution ever again… but there’s no avoiding such things when you’re unwilling to conform to the laws of behavin’.”

  Vasalissa couldn’t help but laugh.  And Pipper too.

  “But nothing you do that gets you into trouble is something that’s really wrong.  You’re helping people!”

  “Well, I’m not helping the lawmakers and the oppressors of the poor and the unprotected.”  He chuckled.  “And it’s a general rule wherever you go in this world that to conform and do what is taught as  right is to do wrong all the time.”

  Vasalissa’s shoulders drooped.  “I wish it wasn’t that way.”

  Puss in Boots mused and nodded and sighed.  He began to purr.  “Well, that’s why you children ought to fly to that garden I told you about, Lady Vasalissa.  I’ve stopped calling you Lady Orphan and I’m glad you’ve grown out of making yourself one because you’re not an orphan anymore when you don’t feel and make yourself one.  There isn’t really any such thing as an orphan, you know, though it may seem so at times … even for the time of a lifetime for some.”

  Vasalissa’s eyes shone and she nodded since she had just started knowing this herself.  Her heart was clasped by something.  It was a kind of bliss and liberation from something that used to choke her throat at times and made saunter her journeys through, feeling she was the greatest loser on earth.  She took the cat’s paw and gestured a thank you. 

  “Thank the father of all orphans, Lady Vasalissa,” said Sir Boots, pointing to his heart.  “It’s not me, but he’s in me.”

  Vasalissa smiled in peace.  Whatever the Puss in Boots said was along a common strand of sense she shared with him.  Then in childlike spontaneous liking of the roguishly generous hearted she said, “Can you come with Pipper and me to the place where all are brothers and sisters and don’t become adults?”

  “Am I not in that place already?” said the cat, turning his paws up. 

  “No, I mean that other place that’s a garden away from the world.  Can’t you come too?”

  The humanist shook his broad striped head.  “I can’t fly.”

  The Cremona orphan exclaimed, “Neither can I!”

  “Yes you can,” the cat purred low. 

  “Let’s meet the children who’ve escaped the shattered Scraggly Man!” declared the King of Fife, who, whose delightful audacity warmed his friends.  Good will radiates like golden leaves on a grim November afternoon.  Audacity is fresh and cooling like water at a spring to your face.

  “Woww…” The crimson-caped orphan envisioned how beautiful and happy they all were, playing in the garden where it was sunny and not too hot, not too cold, a perfect refuge for all different kinds of children to heal from the world’s persecutions.

  “It’s night-time now, but they’ll be having a party to celebrate the Scraggly Man’s death.”

  Vasalissa laughed along.

  “Shall we go then?” Pipper said, with a hand suggesting they fly.

  “Where do we go?”

  “I’ve been there plenty times before, it’s my second home,” Pipper confided.  “It’s lovelier than the little fairy gardens in Fife.  And you have to fly to get there …”

  “What do I do to fly?”

  “Just sneeze.”

  “What?”

  “Joking!”

  Vasalissa stood square so to remember what it was like last time she could fly.

  “Here, some orange-pink Flying Dust!” The impish Fairy King shook some off the lantern-like rose.

  Vasalissa’s wrists glowed with that dust; and her toes; the moonlight-coated suede shoes the Prince in Moonlight had given her after she recovered at his castle from hypothermia.

  So the children lifted up in the air, over the tree with the so-many branches because it had lived for about 1000 years.  The legendary cat grinning with his oversized Georgian hat and oversized boots.  He gave himself some credit for having been agent for this coming to be and he felt the good will all around.   He was not reluctant at all to have to stay behind and return to where he had work yet to do for the homeless and the oppressed – those in Edinburgh.  In the distance, into where the stars twinkled brim-full, Vasalissa and the boy Fairy King seemed the shape of a dove of peace.

  There, among the stars on the way to the wildly teeming garden, Vasalissa and Pipper were met by some star sisters of Vasalissa’s sometimes missed friend, the Prince in Moonlight.

Chapter 14: Cottage of Night-blooming Flowers

Many people can’t recognize a cottage built of stone surrounded by dusk and night-blooming flowers at the edge of the galaxy… indigo and purple and lavender-pink.  Travelling from one galaxy to the next can often be made in hast.  Travellers are focussed on the destination up ahead – even if they can’t see it.  Sometimes an obstacle hindering them on the way is what will let them notice and decide it for the quiet refuge.  Stopping on the way at a hidden gateway usually only happens to reflective people who might decide to land on their feet and stop flying for a while.  They might need to reassemble their line of head to shoulders to knees to soles of feet to the white light above them to the purple star-universe below them because travelling can make one weary and worried about many things because the destination just doesn’t seem to be arrived at, ever.  Some travellers take it easy and just sit on something they can fly on and don’t even notice they are travelling and believe they are at home surrounded by the same orange and yellow wall-paper surrounded by other homes in the same town.  Many don’t understand that they are traveling this whole time and are away from home. 

  Vasalissa Cremona and Pipper the King of Fife and King of the Fairies understood well that they were travelling; they flew with the night sky under their feet turning a mystic’s purple once the world was far far under them and gone.

  Vasalissa and Pipper swam as it is like when you’re flying in the air, arms stretched up and legs kicking frog-like.  They laughed for joy and freedom that there were no leprechauns to fear anymore, for Pipper, and for Vasalissa there was no consciousness to be censured as being different from everyone, being from a different time and country and with a rare past nobody would believe.   Travel companions were rare and the time of companionship wasn’t ever long, for her.  In a place Vasalissa jumped and soared through now, the start of the open universe, there was a possibility that nobody was going to see or think of her ever again – except, of course Pipper.  He was a young boy with wise and compassionate insights and he was just as glad as she was.  His flying was a gift he could exert all his inner joy and energy through.  He didn’t care about the fact there were some people or creatures who didn’t like that he could fly, now that there were dark purple layers of thick spheres between him and the Earth where those certain people and creatures lived.  They couldn’t follow him here.  He could feel his head was close to nearing the white expanse of light on the other side of the dark universe and the stars… he was align with it better now than when he was on Earth.  He did not truly belong in Fife nor anywhere else on Earth.  Maybe it seemed like it sometimes.  But there would always be some kind of trouble that started when you belonged to anywhere on Earth.

  A light of pale blue was something the two children flew by … and just as they turned their head back forward, smiling at the incredible effulgence, a hand gripped Vasalissa by the wrist and Pipper by the ankle.  Both children screamed and kicked and Vasalissa was about to bite when the voice of someone familiar came to her ear.  The voice of an obstacle.

  “You remember, Tchara, the sister of your friend, Prince O’Ray!” said the voice of a kind of harpy.

  Vasalissa recognized not the face of a half eagle-half-frantic-harrowing woman who snatched people’s beloveds and children and carries them to her next, but Vasalissa recognized the fair face of the Prince in Moonlight’s sister.  She had the lovely shaped, inquiring eyes reflecting beams of light that appreciated whatever precious and beautiful they saw.  The silver hair in all the radiance that reminded Vasalissa that this the Prince in Moonlight’s sister was an asteroid.  Yet, there was something different about her from when Vasalissa had met her first.

  Engulfed by the pale blue light like a woman’s huge parka to luxuriate in and dwell in for her body in the universe, the asteroid yielded to her radiant pale blue so she was only a human from head, hair, to collar; with arms.

  “It isn’t Tchara, Vainlissa.  I’m Esterelle.”

  Vasalissa squinted.  That’s where the difference was – they could be twins, this lady and the silver Tchara.  Tchara had had something much gentler in her eyes.  The Cremona girl asserted a correction.  “I’m Vasalissa.”

  “Vainlissa,” Esterelle insisted, all too playful for Vasalissa’s need for common respect.  “You’re so vain about yourself and you do everything in vain – the other meaning of the word, my dear.  I’ve heard all about you.”

  Vasalissa was stunned. 

  “It is my brother who would like to speak to you; you’ve left him behind, so heartlessly.  Prince O’Ray … or you might know him as Prince in Moonlight.”

  There was a red ball of light coming from the other side.  It was another asteroid sister.  Indeed, a face with a red feather hat – coquettish – emerged.  The lady spoke as if there was silver on her tongue and cherries dangling from her lips.  “Why did you abandon him?”

  Vasalissa stared back, a little frightened but still too confident from all that flying and freedom to be intimidated to please anyone with any insincere answers and excuses.  “I had to go through that mirror and leave him otherwise the giant purple striped cat was going to attack and possibly kill me.”

  “No, it wouldn’t have,” said the red brilliant asteroid.  This red brilliance with a sharp-shaped nose gave a laugh.  Vasalissa did not take a liking to her any better than Esterelle.  “You know who that was?  I suppose you wouldn’t.  That was Mirabelis, the Countess who changes shape to a cat sometimes – she’s woman and cat.  She would have attacked you, yes, but she wouldn’t have killed you.  She would have wounded you, but then the Prince in Moonlight would have had to worry and fret about you and he would have rushed you outside and he would have had to bring you to us or else you would die.”

  Vasalissa stared with shock and a bit of betrayal.  She had thought her friend the Prince had nice sisters.  She looked back at them in disgust and wasn’t afraid to let out the sting at the back of her throat.  Yet she was still a conscientious kind of girl, Vasalissa Cremona, and all she could say was this: “That isn’t very nice – it isn’t very nice of you to think and say so.  It’s selfish and cruel for you to plot in such a way just so you can get your brother back to the universe because you miss him and you want to control him.”

    “We want to take care of him,” quickly said a voice, another sister.  It was a little pink asteroid that came, with a younger sister in it – or, the physical emergence of one, since the asteroid and the sister were the same thing.  She was about Vasalissa’s age, maybe younger.

  “As our little sister Isteena is saying,” announced Esterelle with a patient motherly explaining voice.  Vasalissa listened with discernment for ambiguous intention. “We take care of each other here, and more so does a boy need taken care of and he being a Prince and not knowing any better.”

  Vasalissa’s head shook a disagreement.  “But he knows how to look after himself.”  Now she began to understand why her friend the Prince escaped.  “I’ve visited him in his castle.”

  “Oh, it’s all those animals serving him,” countered Esterelle.  “Not the same as sisters.”

  “They’re fascinating creatures,” promoted Vasalissa.  “I like them a lot.”

  “Well, that’s because you’re just as obstinate-minded as our brother, that’s the only reason he likes you,” said the young one Isteena, with something seething through her teeth even though she had seemed innocently good in her little sister pink.  She was red-haired.  “We stars can catch glimpses of you sometimes.  You are so not a real girl.  All those things you enjoy that are just our brother’s.  So that makes you like a boy trying to be just like our brother.”

  Vasalissa could not say anything in return, she was too bluffed and too bewildered with all this stabbing at her inner self-image.  She had the instinct to cross her arms, though, and protect her heart if possible.  Pipper thought he’d try to appease her braised pride and tell her saying anything back here wouldn’t be worth the trouble.  He wasn’t one who would fly away easily himself, but he did not indulge in angry feelings confronting with someone else’s angry feelings.  And these were three pretty upfront angry girls.

  The red asteroid sister with the red feathers said with hands on her hips which emerged in her red effulgence, “Vainlissa, you’re an explorer, that’s what you’re doing, but that’s a man’s role in the world, you know.”

  Vasalissa blinked and then chortled a protest.  “With the Prince in Moonlight – your brother, it doesn’t matter what role anyone plays in the world because we weren’t in the world at all, you know.”

  The pale blue asteroid Esterelle had a very pretty face but a cold expression followed a little laugh.  The other sisters tittered.  “You even talk just like O’Ray.”  They meant the Prince in Moonlight. 

  Esterelle’s eyes gleamed.  “He’s found his perfect playmate.  And then you abandon him.  He’ll find someone else, you know.  And then you’ll be all sad.” 

  Vasalissa felt all her dreamful happiness with her friend the Prince was teased and thwarted and never to be again.  Pipper drew attention to himself to assure Vasalissa his support though quiet he may be.  Vasalissa realized these sisters were rather stupid.  They were the kind of girls with interest sharpened just at the thought of combing their hair to look good all the time, comparing their combs with the combs of other girls, very likely.  And all they liked to talk about stirred up the emotions in unpleasant ways – or pleasantly unpleasant ways, to them.  It felt as if a stone would throw her heart down when Vasalissa would have to witness these conversations which were traps like the jaws of a Venus fly trap.  These kinds of flowers are sticky and difficult for someone to get out of without being eaten and while you are trapped in them you can feel your energy and natural freedom being sucked out until you eventually die. Vasalissa had experienced this lots on her many foster family journeys.

  The Cremona daughter decided she needed no approval from these asteroid sisters and there was no longer any hesitation about it as with girls she had been bullied by in one way or another, before. Just because they had something in common with her: being female in body, did not mean Vasalissa could rely on them welcoming her as their own.  Perhaps the reason they did not welcome her as their own and did not accommodate her was because they could see only what made Vasalissa different from them and they were not appreciative of differences – at least not of some.  Perhaps one of these things they noticed in Vasalissa was how black her hair drawn back from a face so faint at times it was as if Vasalissa was a reflection in a glass.  They saw how she appeared so untouched by vanity with just her crimson cloak and cared not for any embellishments like a ring or earrings or a clip in her hair and that she had adapted no affectations of behaviour or poise like many girls her age do.  Perhaps they could sense that she did not feel the need to hold on to a sense of beauty to give her purpose and courage as a female.  She seemed so soft and defenceless that she seemed just the delicious thing to be punctured.  The Cremona lady had little need to hold on to any conformity just to be acceptable and desirable amongst any groups of people or animals – or in this case, finding herself among the asteroids, the Cremona lady had little need to hold on to any conformity just to be acceptable to astral bodies inhabiting the dark vastness of the universe.  This made her a free person and a carefree one and this is what some girls hated because it seemed unfair to them.

  “Let’s go now,” whispered Pipper close to Vasalissa’s ear.

  The asteroid sisters overheard.  “Where is it you are going to?” demanded Esterelle.  Her face showed itself so haughty that if Vasalissa had not gained such confidence as she had since meeting Puss in Boots, she would have made herself small and mute and feeble-minded just like was demanded of her.

  Vasalissa Cremona had not much to say.  “I was on my way with Pipper to where this flower grows.  There’s a garden where everything grows and teems wild where all the children have gone.”  She pulled the glowing orange-pink rose from inside her cloak at her chest.  “The place is full of children.”

  The Moonlight Prince’s sisters’ eyes widened in a kind of horror which caused their faces and human form in the effulgence of light to disappear.  But their voices could still be heard, though rang like a silver triangle does when it is struck.  “No, no!  Oh, the sight, oh the sight!  The garden where there only chi-i-i-i-ldre-e-e-n!  Young chi-i-i-ldre-e-en all of about six years young!  I-i-nnocent!  Chi-i-ildre-en!”

  Vasalissa and Pipper exchanged bewildered a bit anxious looks, then amused, relieved smiles as the asteroids moved away and spiralled further and further away until they were gone. 

  “Yes, there are only children.  What is the matter with that?” said Vasalissa to her piper friend.  “We’re children, though I might not look like it anymore.  And you’re quite tall for your age.”

  Pipper shrugged.  “I guess they don’t like the thought of being a child themselves.”  He commented, “Being a child is something not everybody enjoys to revert to because it’s a loss of power.  People don’t like to let go of their adult wisdoms and desires.  And they like to control other people and like to control children or what are weaker than themselves, and if they become innocent little children again, they can’t be in control anymore.”

  Vasalissa smiled, a little sad and nodded.  Her little friend could perceive the simple things so much easier and quicker than she could – just when she was around the bend to perceiving.  She pointed her toes and stretched her feet.  “So, shall we go?”

  “Let’s.”

  Little did the children know they had been stopped by the asteroid sisters just as they had neared the edge of a galaxy  Here there was a cottage just like on Earth with a garden all around with night flowers blooming and trees and one could get food and rest.

  “Look,” pointed Vasalissa.  “What a quaint place!  In the middle of the open universe!  What is this here?  I can smell flowers.  They’re amazing.”

  Pipper tapped his foot on the path before he landed both feet.  It was solid.  “I haven’t been here before but I’ve heard of it.”

  “Does someone live here?” Vasalissa said this out of nervousness though she could tell somebody did live here because the light was on inside the cottage. 

  Pipper smiled at Vasalissa’s  nervousness.  “It’s only a children’s nurse.”

  Vasalissa breathed an involuntary relief but then remembered the cottage she had once came upon in The Deep Darkest Forest and stammered, “I-is that all?  Nobody else?  Nothing living within the walls?  Nothing like a spirit or a witch?” 

  The boy King of Fife smiled in amusement, shaking his head.  “No, there’s a lovely lady who’s a children’s nurse.  She’s someone offering rest, food and shelter for people travelling, like us.”

  “There is such an incredibly wonderful smell!”  exclaimed Vasalissa, distracted by her worry; the scent of the night-blooming flowers here went to her head in the most lovely way.  These flowers were what can be called transcendental, transcending all worries and cares.  Lifting her arms her feet lifted from the ground again to fly and Vasalissa landed back down again with the impulse at her heart to touch those petals of one flower which was white with petals like a flower lily and very much like an ethereal crown.

  “Smell these ones,” said Pipper along a hedge of night-blooming trellises up ahead.  “Don’t they smell purple?  Kind of like grapes?”

  Vasalissa smelled.  “I’ve always believed purple has a smell.  It is a little like grapes – certainly a special kind of sweetness.”

  “And look at these,” said Pipper a little later up the path closer to the cottage.  “These are flowers but you can’t actually see any flowers, they’re hidden.”

  “It’s amazing,” murmured Vasalissa in response.  She added, “I wonder if you could just lose all your senses and just have the sense of smell and that would suffice for the lack of any other senses.  Then nobody would ever want to do anything in life but grow flowers and smell them.”

  The purity of unassuming childlikeness and joy livened Pipper’s smile.  Then he thought with some powerful reflection and said, kindly, “To some extent, life on Earth would be a lot simpler, that way.  People would have only flowers on their minds… but perhaps people would become selfishly ambitious just the same, with those flowers, and there would be different types of flowers and some people would not be happy with this and want the other person’s flowers but not want to trade fairly with them… things like that.”  Pipper laughed.  “It might end up just in the same way as with food and with gold and with gold and silver.”

  Vasalissa nodded and drolly interjected, “But at least these flowers creatures have petals and smell so nice – and they’re all different shades and colours while gold and silver are just the same and very boring.”

  “They are.”

  “And growing food is so much more work than letting your garden grow… or visiting the woodlands with the wild flowers.”

  “Pipper, do you think the children’s nurse living here will have something like a midnight snack for us?”

  The Fairy King’s curls shook as he laughed at this.  “A midnight snack?”  Teasingly he said, “Why, do you think that’s all anybody eats around here because – “

  “It’s always midnight around here,” chimed in Vasalissa.  “At least something like that, with the stars out.”

  “Thankfully those asteroids just left us alone.”

  “I heard there are stars perhaps quite like them too.  The Prince in Moonlight is a star.”

  “The Prince in Moonlight?  I’ve heard of him.  He’s the only really nice one.  That’s because his mother’s been the moon.  Something like that.”

  “Ahh.  I didn’t know that.”

  Vasalissa spun a little lavender-seeming flower between finger and thumb, thoughtfully.

  “Lots of people have their mother the moon, in a way,” said the King of Fife.  “It really just means you’re sensitive to emotions.  You can feel the moonbeams.  The Prince in Moonlight, also Prince O’Ray he’s called, feels these quite literally.  He’s very in tune.  It makes him hear and listen sometimes too much.  I met him once before… His mother is very lovely, I’ve only heard of her.”

  Vasalissa imagined.  Then she said, “The Prince in Moonlight is a very sensitive soul.  I’ve always found his listening wonderful.”

  The Fairy King asserted, “It is.  It’s the most wonderful thing … but the Prince is so into it, he’s created his own world by it.  Or his world he lives in has been created for him.”  The fairy boy shook his head in mere concern.  “He doesn’t really leave it.”

  “Oh really?” responded Vasalissa and protested, “He does.  He travels with his huskies across snowy lands and through different seasons.” 

  “Yes,” conceded Pipper.  “Yes, those are great distances.  But they’re not places anybody else can get to.”

  “No?”  Vasalissa felt this a little eerie.  “But I was there!”

  “Yes… but you’re a bit like him.  That’s why you came there.”  The Fairy King innocently persisted, the flower fairy children tell me the story about the crimson-caped girl with the black hair tied back who becomes best friends with the Prince in Moonlight and she came back to life again because she came to his realm.  And then she left again.”

  “What weird stories do your fairy friends have to tell?” Vasalissa exclaimed after staring in disbelief.  She contradicted, “But I didn’t die.”

  “You nearly did.”

  “I don’t remember, I fell asleep in the snow, kind of.”

  “That’s the same thing.  You gave up.”

  “There wasn’t anything else to do.”

  “There’s always something to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “You didn’t believe in yourself.  There’s the honey the bee can bring you in a golden thimble, in that forest.”

  Vasalissa did not remember the Prince her rescuer feeding her this, so she gave the young Pipper a stare of disapproval.

  Pipper remained in good humour even with the Cremona girl being sceptical.  “Also, there’s eventually a bright tunnel through the snow if you keep walking and you’ll arrive back at a sunny warm place.  That’s ok, you didn’t see it.  Most people don’t.”

  Pipper’s laugh was Vasalissa’s sign of grief and relief at once.

  “What sunny warm place?”

  The boy Pipper knew he was speaking of something vital and had felt all the time it wasn’t in his place to do so.  “That sunny place of your happiest memories of just being, when you were something like the age of three… and younger.” 

  Wandering the path grown over on both sides by green that looked purple and blue and some gold and pinks because of the light of the open universe, Vasalissa realized she had never walked such a fragrant garden before.  There was no moon but a similar silver light from stars not far away.  Vasalissa wondered if these could see her and if they also could watch the Prince in Moonlight and if they knew where he was.  Vasalissa wondered what he was doing and she wished he was here.

  The quaint little cottage had pink-painted open window doors – the old-fashioned things you can close on the outside of windows when you don’t want any light in or you don’t want anyone to see you inside.  This lady living here was not shy of strangers and did not close them.  Vasalissa saw through a window, framed with fuchsia drops clambering about, a lady sitting in a rocking chair, writing.

  Vasalissa and Pipper exchanged awed glances, Vasalissa awed more than Pipper.

  “Does this lady write?”

  “Yes,” said Pipper.  “She has all these stories to hand in on time as the currents of the universe change.”

  “Currents of the universe.”

  “Yes.  There are currents out here, just as there are in an ocean and on earth with the winds.”

  “Who does she write stories for?”

  “For children.”

  “Oh really!”  Vasalissa clapped her hands with returned delight of innocent youth.  “Can we hear some?”

  “They’re top secret.  Until they’re baked into muffin trays and burned up, into the air up the chimney, they musn’t be disturbed.  I know that sounds odd.”  The boy shrugged.  He suddenly laughed, admitting everything must sound outrageous he was saying, but it was true.

  Vasalissa’s curiosity crowded around her brows.  “How can that possibly be?  You mean every story she writes is destroyed?  Is that the only way the stories can get to earth to those children?”  It was a wild guess.

  Pipper smiled good-naturedly though he knew so many mystifying secrets.  “That’s why we have to go back to Earth at some point, if you want to find out what she’s writing tonight.  The stories are just transformed, Vasalissa.  Don’t worry.”

  Of course it was first Vasalissa’s eager focus to get to the magical garden where everyone could stay innocent children, brothers and sisters, where those had just arrived having been freed from persecution by the Scraggly Man, stealer of dreams and carefree joy.  Vasalissa hoped not to stay at this stop at the gateway too long.

  Right next to the door bloomed some red roses, like guards.

  “Pipper,” started Vasalissa like a child asking someone older a question.  “How can roses grow and bloom where there’s no sunlight?”

  Pipper was very humble and never showed off despite his way of grasping answers out of undercurrents like fish out of various currents of a river.  His universe-botany was partly because he flew through the universe at times when he did not feel bad about being able to fly and partly because he had heard so much about them from sources such as the prophets living in flowers in his Kingdom of Fife.  “These roses grow by light of the stars,” he said to answer Vasalissa’s ruminative question, without making any claim to fame.  Pipper turned his head, a bit sheepishly; this was also because he was about to knock on the door to the cottage and felt that shyness of meeting a stranger when it is someone heard of before and spoken of so highly.

  Vasalissa, in her anticipation before the door opened, slowly inhaled the air hanging heavily with those red clusters by the door frame.  They mingled with the cedar-like freshness of the wood and smell of a house with its comings and goings of laundry and soap and fire on wood and smoke and meals cooked and lemon peel with pine oil to polish wood the wood floor and furniture.  Some wool straight off a sheep Vasalissa could smell too.  And she loved how all this met with the garden.  The soil was moist and star-light-glossed leaves reflected the burning gases in the fair distance which is what stars are made of.  The most wondrous company anyone could have, living at a place like this, so Vasalissa felt with blissful appreciation, were those shy-petalled keepers of dimensions to breathe in.  Of course, all of these dimensions already are inside a person.  Fragrant blossoms grow along the path to them.

  The sheepish boy Pipper tapped the plain wood door with his knuckles.

  “Come in!” a voice sounded from inside and through a glass window that was open ajar.  The humble children’s nurse had a voice with rosy youth at its peel.  Very round and soft at the edges, like a freshly ripe clementine off its tree.

  Pipper, a little unsure of himself but not so much as to hesitate, gave the door a push leaning on it with one shoulder.  Once the door was open ajar, he let go and straightened his torso and chest for a polite entrance.  Vasalissa stepped in after him. 

  Inside there were a couple of lamps and a fire and they flooded their golden warm light most welcomingly; the floor-boards showed fine polish.  Everything was quaint and cosy with a lot of effort for detail though sparing.  The curtains were berry-stain colour.  The glinting of gold candelabras on a desk to the right livened to all the vibrant friendliness of a lady very kind with buoyant-disposition.  Brown ringlets dropped off her wrist she lifted with a pen between fingers most gracefully; her breathing moved what were ruffles of her white old-fashioned nightgown. 

  “Oh, hello!”  She did not stand up.   She was quite young still for a woman lady, maybe about 22 years of age, her skin very supple and she was very pretty with flush in her cheeks.  Her eyes were pretty big.  She seemed used to having visitors as if they came and went frequently.

  Vasalissa smiled with relief; she had not wanted the serenity of this night-blossoming place to end with all the humdrum conventions of a first meeting.  Next to her, Pipper bowed, having come from the 18^th century.  Vasalissa had hoped that out in the universe there were no customs and no present century but everything universal in time.  In case it wasn’t and she was still in the Georgian times, she bent a curtsy, next to Pipper.

  “I’m just writing near the end of a chapter of my book,” said the lady.  Eagerly, she glanced down at her manuscript on the desk, about to continue writing but smiling generously because she also was delightedly welcoming the persons her intuitively-absorbing eyes were appreciating.  Her heart in her chest raised itself high, her chest filled with a natural joy.

  The Cremona daughter smiled for all this and was glad she finally met someone who did not care so much about the formality of manners.

  Pipper was quick to speak his sensitive considerateness.  “Do … do keep writing.”

  The lady beamed and lifted her chin, well-pleased with herself.  “I shall. Thank you for reminding me.”  She gestured with a supple hand, “Why don’t you sit down on the sofa… I’ll be with you in a moment.  There’s a jug of milk and biscuits … there is some paper and some wax colours.  Do you wish to draw?”

 Vasalissa and Pipper had not guessed this was a luxury they were going to be welcomed and accommodated with.  Children in the times they had just come from and even in the Land of Happily Ever After where Vasalissa had been living, there had been no drawing materials available and abundant as in the 1990’s in Canada, for example.  Vasalissa the little King of Fife nodded eagerly, casting glances at the coffee table filled with paper and wax colours.

  “There are some blank writing books just for you to keep,” added the lovely lady.  “And pencils and pens … You look just the creative thoughtful type just like me… do you like to make up characters with interesting ways and feelings?”

  Vasalissa nodded, promptly and remembered her fanciful childhood in her castle where she had sat at a desk with a study lamp much like this lady here at the desk with her candelabra.  Blank papers in a stack and another stack all filled with her handwriting.  Vasalissa felt the excitement of starting her own creative project.  She hadn’t been writing, all these years as an orphan, except again at the Prince in Moonlight’s symphony hall where the music set her ideas.  Vasalissa said to the writer lady who lived at this cottage with the night-flowers blooming all around, “Yes, I like making up characters and interesting feelings and very happy wonderful times and places and I would like to meet them for real, some time.”

  The lady smiled and joyously focussed back on her writing as if there was a boat race she was attending to – some boys down a river, or perhaps some friends first introducing themselves to each other at a winter youth’s party after snowy-hill sledging and hot drinks to warm up.

  The cups were delightfully pretty that Vasalissa and Pipper poured milk into.

  Maybe an hour later while Vasalissa and Pipper were at a fresh start again with their creative planning, the lady tapped them at the shoulder and she had a wood tray with large round oat-crumbles on them she said were with ginger in them.  It was a cosy delightful creativity-at-work hominess the children revelled to find themselves in and that they were part of it. 

  “Thank you,” they said, and took one oat-crumble each.

  “Some tea?  With milk and a little bit of light brown sugar?”

  “Oh yes.  Thank you very much.”

  The steam was very warming just to watch as the lovely writer lady poured Vasalissa and Pipper some tea.  It smelled of some rose and lavender. 

  “And now I will get back to my writing.  The next chapter is just starting.  I’ll tell you about it if you like, maybe after we get to sleep in an hour or two.  Hm?  It is so lovely you’re here.  My husband is away to some far away garden and won’t be back for another sleep or so.  There are some children that have just arrived there and he wanted to meet them and join in there games a while.”  The lady laughed heartily, jolly as usual, with the rounded softness of a buoyant, gladsome heart.  “Children go to that garden to recover from the place you have just come from – and there are far worse places, I have heard.  And children come here to this cottage for a respite before they continue their journey on to the next galaxy where you’ll find that garden.  It is a sunny place and everyone, no matter what age, returns to being a small child again where so many things don’t matter and everyone is your brother or your sister and it doesn’t matter whether you are a brother or a sister – it’s all the same. 

  “When it is time for you to sleep, I’ll take you to the guest room.  There are some teddy bears you will adore and I make things fresh and nice all the time.

  “We don’t have day and night here as on earth.  I am not always here, you know; sometimes I am to earth – to sunflower fields in Italy.  I have a little home there as well.  But when I am here, that is when there is lots of writing to do.  There are little guests who come here once in a while to stop and recover themselves from the strange world that is down there on earth once in a while – where children growing older fear they may not draw anymore because there are more important things to do and they compare themselves with each other – and they can’t write stories anymore because they believe you have to be extremely talented to do so that your books just come hot and piping out of a printing machine ready to be famous without having first been written… and all sorts of reasons… Nobody knows I write books.  Nobody except my friends and that’s all.”  The lady with the bouncing ringlets over her nightgown shoulder scarf.  She leaned over to the children sitting on the sofa and tenderly stroked the blond wisps of hair to the side of Pipper’s forehead.  Pipper smiled, a little rueful but happy to be himself, being wonderful and glad he was with a friend who was wonderful just as he was.  The writer lady who lived in this cottage with the night-blooming flowers all around smiled and gave Vasalissa’s hand a squeeze.   “There now, isn’t it nice to be away from the world and recovering from the loss of who you really are?”

  Vasalissa thought to herself and then replied, “I shan’t believe anyone who tries to tell me I’m not the most wonderful person in the universe.”  She blurted out laughing and Pipper more so and the writer lady laughed also, since this was true.

 

The End

By Gudrun Sabrina Hirt

Completed October 30, 2011

Copyright 2011