Ольга Грушина - The Charmed Wife

The dance was an annual gala held in the hotel ballroom, and she sneaked in without an invitation, using her knowledge of service corridors. Unlike the other ball, this one had many princes, and she chose the one she liked best. She chose him before he chose her, and not because he was rich or desired by all but because she liked the boyish shyness of his golden-brown gaze, the soft cadence of his accent, the warmth of his hand when it found its way into the small of her back. But of course, the man she picked would change with each retelling, too, just like the dress. Sometimes he would be blue-eyed, suave, and dazzling, and other times mysterious, silent, and dark. In all the versions, though, she fell in love without a doubt, and her love was like the home she had always dreamed of having, warm and thrilling and filled with shared understanding—and reflected, just as deep and certain, in her beloved’s brown, or green, or cornflower-blue eyes.

The girl in these stories, needless to say, did not go about losing her footwear like some silly strumpet, nor did she need to be recovered like some misplaced piece of luggage. They had a proper courtship that spanned days, weeks, months—not mere hours. They dined on spicy fare in the imaginary city’s ethnic restaurants. They went to the opera, where their souls soared in unison with the music. They took long drives through the countryside, and she laughed when falling leaves brushed her face. She knew the prince’s name. She met the prince’s family. She approved of the prince’s hobbies and forgave him his foibles, whatever they might have been. She was asked whether she wanted to be married, and she chose to say yes.

These stories, in short, were nothing like the familiar story, and this girl was nothing like the familiar girl: this girl was special. The only thing, perhaps, that the two had in common was the presence of the two mouse friends, Brie and Nibbles—although in this new world the girl had purchased them, with her own money, at a neighborhood pet store.

(There was, as it happened, great unrest among the mice during this time. Brie the Third and her companion, Nibbles the Fourth—formerly Captain Brunhilda—had adopted twin mouselings, a boy and a girl, who had been orphaned in the kitchen when the fattest of the cooks had slipped on a lemon rind and landed with her voluminous backside on top of their hapless mother. To the adopted children, in due course, passed the mantle of the Royal Companions and the titles of Brie the Fourth and Nibbles the Fifth. Young Nibbles settled into his new life of chocolate delights and musical pastimes with perfect ease, but young Brie soon began to chafe against the silky restraints of her role; having been raised by Brunhilda with a strong sense of civic duty, she bridled at having to dance polkas to the princess’s listless clapping and thought her passionately serious nature better suited to combatting poverty among the recently migrated field mice.

She was not alone in considering herself unfit for her position. Among the direct descendants of the original Brie and Nibbles, there arose a mouse with an uncommonly long tail, by the name of Maximilian, who believed that the exalted life of mouse royalty belonged to him and his by sacred birthright. His great-great-great-grandparents, he told anyone who would listen, had been Chosen by the Higher Power and the distinction should never have been allowed to pass out of the family, first to a foreign upstart with unnatural proclivities and later to some kitchen riffraff whose genealogy could not even be traced beyond one threadbare generation. Having gathered a number of like-minded followers about him, he led an efficient nighttime raid, which became known in the Murine Historical Annals as the Five-Minute Mantelpiece Coup. Upon waking one morning and finding herself and her twin brother trussed up and surrounded by an agitated mob led by Maximilian, who wielded a thumbtack, Brie was frankly relieved, and promptly abdicated in order to devote the rest of her life to the pursuit of social justice among the underprivileged inhabitants of the palace sewers.

Nibbles, however, had grown enamored of his goosedown pillows and breakfast sweets, and, too, at this sudden encounter with violence, the more militant lessons of his adoptive mother Brunhilda stirred in his breast. He determined to offer resistance. “Blood is a mere accident of birth,” he preached from inside the pumpkin in which he had been imprisoned. “It is merit alone that should be rewarded—and no one dances the mouse polka better than I!”

Two of the mice set to guard him were swayed by his eloquence, helped him escape, and became his Right-Paw and Left-Paw Captains in the eventual civil war of the Mouse House against the usurpers Nibbles the Sixth, formerly Maximilian, and Brie the Fifth, formerly Lady Bruschetta, Maximilian’s sister and concubine. In the end, the Blood Faction prevailed, albeit after many violent battles and regrettable casualties. Unluckily, Maximilian himself perished of his wounds in the final skirmish, and it was his son who assumed the title of Nibbles the Seventh to rule with his mother (and aunt) by his side. Maddened by their loss, the victors showed no mercy to the defeated and had the headless body of their enemy, the unfortunate Nibbles the Fifth, flung into the sewers. A hushed crowd of sorrowful rats brought it before their beloved Sister Charity, formerly Brie the Fourth. Heads bowed, they stood around her in the underground dimness, as she cradled what was left of her twin brother and lamented the senselessness and cruelty of the world.

“Oh, my dear heart,” she cried, her fur matted with blood and tears, “do you see where your foolishness has gotten you? And all for what—the love of chocolates and a few absentminded pats from a frivolous, moody princess who can’t tell any of us apart and treats us like wind-up toys, just because we are little? I do not blame Maximilian—like my poor brother, he, too, was a misguided fool, and he paid for his own mistakes dearly. No, I blame her, I blame her!”

She moved her eyes along the wall of silent mourners, her piercing gaze burning into them with unmouselike fire. When she spoke again, her tears had dried and her voice was a low, fierce chant: “My brother’s blood is on her hands. All of our blood is on her hands. And I curse her, I curse her, I curse her. As long as she walks the places turned red with the spilling of our lives, she will never know a day of peace but will be gnawed by discontent, fear, and sadness, just as we gnaw our daily bread. I bind her to her misery by the truth in our blood.”)

The princess hoped that her unborn child would be a girl who might benefit from being thus imbued, while still in the womb, with brave examples of free and unconstrained living. Yet when the child was born, it was a boy. They named him Roland, after his father the prince. Since the old king, too, was Roland, as the king’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been before him, it made her son Roland the Sixth. She felt secretly disappointed, even a little betrayed, as if all her marvelous inventions had been wasted—more, as if she had made some vast, courageous effort to do something different and it had been in vain.

And seemingly out of nowhere, despair descended upon her.

“‘An insipid blue cupcake,’” the fairy godmother quotes, her voice frosty. She has seated herself in an ample leather armchair she has summoned out of thin air and is brushing invisible specks off her cloak. “I never took you for an ungrateful kind.”

“As much as I hate to admit it, I agree with the busybody here,” the witch says as she stirs the potion. “Also, I must tell you, it’s not very reasonable, expecting the prince to remain eternally enticed by you no matter what. Because, let’s face it, you did not exactly overwhelm him with personal accomplishments or depths. Preserves and polkas, did you say?”