Stacy Gregg - The Princess and the Foal

She looks at her watch. “Now what time do you usually begin your lessons?”

“Lessons?”

“Yes,” Frances says. “You know, your studies?”

Haya doesn’t understand. She is only five. Surely that is too young for anything except playing?

At that moment one of the kitchen staff turns up carrying a silver tray with a pot, cup and saucer and a jug of milk. “Tea, Miss Ramsmead,” he says.

Frances lifts the jug with great suspicion, feeling it in her hands. “This milk is warm?”

He nods vigorously. “Yes! Hot milk.”

Frances wrinkles her nose. “Tea requires cold milk,” she says. The kitchen boy stares blankly at the tray that he has set down on the table.

“Well?” Frances says. “Take it away and bring me cold milk.”

He rushes forward, grasps the milk jug and backs away nervously. Then he turns and dashes back down the stairs. Frances shakes her head as she watches him go and then looks back at Haya.

“I can see I will have my work cut out for me,” she says.

t doesn’t take Haya long to figure out that Frances is two different people. There is Frances the Governess – all sour, thin-lipped and taut as piano wire. And then there is the other Frances, the one the King gets to see. Haya and Ali call her ‘Happy Frances’.

Happy Frances will cheerfully play games and sing songs. She will sew the pink hat back on Doll just like Haya has been begging her to do for days. Happy Frances reads proper bedtime stories instead of ones that last just one page.

If the King is in the room then Happy Frances fusses over Haya and smothers her with cuddles. But her arms are so bony and her hugs are stiff and awkward. All they do is make Haya miss Grace more than ever.

Haya never talks to Baba about how much she misses Grace, just as she never speaks about how much she aches every single day for her Mama.

One day, Haya hears noises in the upstairs bedrooms, and walks in to find Frances overseeing her staff as they work their way through room by room with three large cardboard boxes.

Haya watches in horror as Frances picks up one of Mama’s silk scarves and flings it into a box.

“What are you doing?”

Frances does not turn to look at her. “Decluttering.”

“Those are Mama’s things!” Haya can feel her cheeks turning hot. “You leave them alone!”

Frances shakes her head. “This is a palace, not a shrine. If you were more considerate, you would see that your father needs to put the past aside and move on.”

If Baba were here then Haya would run to him right now – but he is away in Aqaba and Frances has chosen her moment all too well. Haya has no choice but to stand by helplessly as she watches Frances sweep her mother’s memory away as if it were so much house dust.

No more Mama. That is the rule now that Frances is here.

There is a hole. Haya can feel it inside her, an emptiness that overwhelms her. Into this void she pushes down all thoughts of Mama. Only she does this a little too well, pushes too far.

Now, if she tries to picture her Mama’s face or the sound of her voice, she finds it harder and harder. She is losing her Mama all over again. This time it is like Haya is trying to grab at smoke with her fingers. She wants so badly to hold on to her memories and yet her eyes well with tears whenever anyone mentions her Mama. And so people stop talking about the Queen in front of the little Princess. Everyone stops talking about Mama. Everyone, that is, except for the one person who should.

Frances barely met Queen Alia, but she speaks of her with an air of absolute authority.

“ Your mother would never …” Frances always begins her lectures with these words and very soon Haya can hear them coming before Frances even opens her mouth. Your mother would never … dress like a boy, laugh too loud, get dirty fingernails, stain her clothes, forget to brush her hair, play childish games, or – worst of all – waste time with smelly, filthy horses.

Frances is an expert on the King too. She says His Majesty would be so much happier if Haya would try to be more feminine. “Your mother had such noble manners, she was such a lady.”

A lady? Is that what Baba wants Haya to be? He has never mentioned it, but Frances says it over and over again, so Haya doesn’t know any more. And she doesn’t know how to tell her father about the dark empty place inside her that is getting bigger every day. When her Baba says, “You are very quiet, Haya, tell me what is wrong?” she finds that there are no words for her sadness and so she says, “It’s nothing. I am fine.”

Haya cannot voice her emotions, not even to Baba. But she has found a place to put them. They are kept inside her treasure box. The treasure box is made of gold. Well, not really: it is made of cardboard, a shoebox painted gold with magazine pictures stuck all over it. Kept safe inside, where no one else can see, Haya stores her most precious things: her memories of Mama and life before Frances came to the palace.

The box is her museum and Haya treats each item inside it with the utmost care. There is a pair of her Mama’s sunglasses with tortoiseshell rims, huge and square like a TV set. Two tape cassettes – Abba and Gloria Gaynor – which she found with the glasses in the glove box of Mama’s car after she died. A pink pebble from the beach at Aqaba and the pointy white ice-cream seashell, pressed flowers, wild blooms from the meadows near the Summer House, once soft and delicate, now brittle like parchment, tucked between the pages of a notebook. There are photographs too and empty bullet cartridges, made of cold metal, just like the ones that bounced off her father’s medal.

Haya spends hours arranging everything from the treasure box on her bed and then packing it away again. The last item she puts in the box is an almost empty bottle of her mother’s favourite perfume. Before she puts the bottle back she very carefully removes the stopper and dabs the tiniest amount on her wrist, just like her mother did. Then she closes her eyes and inhales deep breaths, until the scent overpowers all her other senses and the world disappears.

*

Several weeks after Frances arrives, with great reluctance, the governess gives in to Haya’s pleading and they make a visit to the Royal Stables.

As usual, Santi is there to greet them when the car pulls up at Al Hummar.

“Welcome back, Titch!” He smiles at Haya. “The horses have missed you!”

Santi invites them into his office, where the music is playing and the pot of cardamom coffee is bubbling.

He offers Frances a cup. She takes a sip and then screws up her thin lips in disgust, placing the cup promptly on the table. “I should like a tour of the grounds, Señor Lopez.”

Santi is very proud of his stables. He has given many tours here; Sultans and Kings have come to visit. None of them were ever as critical as Frances. The governess inspects the horses in the same way that she ran her eyes over Haya the day they met. “They’re a little underweight, aren’t they?”

“They are Arabians,” Santi replies. “The breed is much lighter in the frame than the horses you are accustomed to back home in England.”

“I know my breeds, Señor Lopez,” Frances says. “All the same, I should like to see them a little more filled out than this.”

“I did not realise that you were such a horsewoman, Miss Ramsmead,” Santi says, casting a glance at Haya.

“Oh, yes,” Frances says. “In England I rode with The Quorn. Have you heard of it?”