Meanwhile, as mentioned before, Dimity was growing up into a beautiful princess in her own country. But a princess can no more sit around being beautiful all day than a prince.
As a small girl, Dimity was very curious, and she went on asking about things as she grew older. “Why does the food have to be carried all around the banquet hall before it’s brought to the table?” “Why does the guard who rides at the head of parades always have two blue feathers in his helmet?” “Why don’t we have walruses in the garden pool?”
The king and queen quickly ran out of answers, and took to sending the princess to the royal library and the royal archives, where she could hunt for answers among old books and documents. Dimity liked reading the old stories—the older the better—and when she couldn’t find answers in the library and archives, she would talk to the oldest people in the castle, or in the village not far from the castle gates. Sometimes she didn’t have any real question, and would just ask them what it was like to live in the old days, once upon a time. People were always glad to see Princess Dimity come to visit, as she was both very beautiful and interested in whatever they had to say, something they did not find in their own daughters and granddaughters. Besides, she usually brought some plum jelly or rhubarb conserve from the royal pantry.
One day, when Dimity was just seventeen, she went to visit Otruna Opscassel, who lived in a little cottage halfway between the castle gate and the village. Mistress Opscassel was exceedingly old, and remembered all sorts of stories of what life in the village was like when she was a little girl. Because this was so long ago, she of course sometimes got things mixed up.
“That was just after Bodell opened the candlestick shop next to Gludius the Baker,” she’d say. “Or was he still in Goose Street in those days? I can remember just how the shop looked inside, and the big silver candlestick he had hanging out front. But was he on Goose Street or Swan Way?”
“I always thought it was a terrible shame,” Dimity said, “That nobody made a good map of the village, with the names of all the shopkeepers and their shops.”
Mistress Opscassel sat back and slapped herself on the lap. “Ah, yes! That’s what you need!”
Dimity nodded, and spread more plum jelly on a muffin for her hostess. “Oh, yes. We do need that. A map.”
“That’s not what I meant,” the old lady replied, nodding thanks as she took the muffin. “You need my old quilt!”
Dimity didn’t feel the least bit cold. “Oh? Your quilt?”
With the muffinless hand, Mistress Opscassel raised her cane toward the ceiling. “When I was no older than Your Highness, the village made a quilt with one block for each shopkeeper, and they were all stitched together in the order they were in the streets. They had a drawing for the quilt and I won. It’s up in the loft, there, but it really ought to go into the royal archives. I was going to give it to my youngest granddaughter, but I expect she’ll just throw it away, since it got torn a bit at one corner the last time I washed it.”
“It’s in the loft?” Dimity looked to the narrow stairs along the wall.
“I put it there myself,” said Mistress Opscassel. “Should we call in Your Highness’s coachman to fetch it?”
But by now Dimity, afraid the old lady might change her mind, was halfway up the stairs. The attic was dark, except for a bit of light from a tiny grated opening. She tripped at the top stair. “Ouch!”
“The quilt’s right there on the left, in a bag!” called Mistress Opscassel. “I hope you didn’t step on my knitting needles. They’re up there somewhere, too,”
“I’m all right,” said the princess. “I just stubbed my toe. Maybe this bag…this must be it!”
She brought the quilt down, opened it out, and had Mistress Opscassel tell her all about each person who had helped make it. Then she carried it home to the royal archives, and told the archivist to make a proper label for it to show it had come from Mistress Opscassel, so that people would know what the village was like in the old lady’s girl days.
She was so excited about having secured such a valuable artifact that she could not sleep at all that night. In fact, long after midnight, she went down to the royal kitchen for a glass of milk and an apple dumpling.
While she was eating, the royal cook ran in waving a breadboard and shouting, “I told you to stay out of the…. Ah, Your Highness! I thought it would be one of the stableboys again.”
“That’s al right,” said Dimity. “You can’t have EVERYBODY stealing apple dumplings at this hour of the night.”
She took the dumpling and milk back to her bedroom, where she read through all the notes she’d written down about Mistress Opscassel and the quilt. Then she read a book. It was nt an interesting book, which was why she had chosen it, but it did not make her feel sleepy. She tried lying dow with her eyes closed, counting a hundred. All that happened was that she was wide awake with her eyes closed.
She could not sleep the next night, either, or the night after that. This might have gone on for numerous nights had the royal cook not mentioned to the queen that princess Dimity kept coming down to snitch dumplings after midnight. At about the same time, the royal librarian told the king that Dimity had read her way through almost the entire library. “And she always seems to need a new book at two in the morning,” he said. “I’m not getting enough sleep!”
His Majesty had started to say, “She’ll probably give that up when it’s apple picking season again” but when the librarian mentioned losing sleep, he turned pale and concluded the discussion. He thought for a moment, chewing the knuckle of his left thumb, and then went to talk to the Queen. She told him about the royal cook’s complaint. When she heard about the royal librarian, she also became very pale.
Not long afterward, she stepped up to Princess Dimity’s room, and asked, “Dimity, my dear, have you hurt either of your feet recently? The left one, say, or maybe the right one?”
The princess put out one dainty foot. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Oh, well, yes, now I think of it. I did stub a toe last week, but it was nothing. I didn’t even get a bruise.”
“Nothing,” whispered the queen. “And…and on what did you stub your toe, dearest?”
Dimity frowned, trying to recall. “It was dark there. There was a great big wooden box: as big as a horse trough, if they ever made horse troughs out of wood. “Why? Mother, do you need to sit down?”
The queen looked quite bloodless now. She put one hand on Dimity’s dressing table and swallowed twice. “And where…where would you find a wooden horse trough?”
“Oh, that’s only what it LOOKED like.” Dimity could tell from her mother’s face that there was some sort of problem, and she didn’t like to think Mistress Opscassel might get into trouble. “That was days ago anyway. Does it make a difference?”
Now the queen really did need to sit down. Setting her back against the back of the chair, she looked into her daughter’s eyes, blinked once, and told the whole story of the royal christening, the irritable fairy, and the curse of a wooden horse trough and unsleeping death.
The princess was simply amazed. “Did all that happen? Really? It’s like a fairy tale! You never told me!”
“We believed all the wooden horse troughs had been burnt,” the Queen said, shaking her head.
“And here I thought I had a plain old royal christening!” Dimity exclaimed. “Well, what do you know? A curse from a….” Before she finished the sentence, it dawned on her that there was more to this than just an exciting story.
“Well!” She leaned forward to take her mother’s right hand. “What do we do now?”
This seemed to enhearten the Queen, who took a deep breath. “Well, I suppose we must find you a prince.”
“Oh.” Dimity patted her mother’s hand. “I don’t have to marry him, do I? There were some other things I wanted to get done before I married anybody.”
“I don’t know,” her mother said. “I don’t recall the exact words of the curse. We’ll have to look it up.”
So the two of them went down to the royal archives and had the archivist fetch out all the documents dealing with Dimity’s first year, which Dimity herself had never read because they were far too new to be interesting. These, however, contained just the words spoken, and not necessarily all the conditions and provisions implied by them. They took the papers to the King, who called in all the wise men of his Council to discuss this urgent matter.
They argued and conferred, discussing comma placement and grammar, and finally, when the King started tapping a foot, announced that, in their opinion, Princes Dimity did not necessarily have to marry the prince involved, she WOULD, according to the curse, have to find him herself.
Dimity immediately searched the royal library for every book dealing with dashing princes or daring princes: where they were to be found, how to tell a real one from an impostor, how to attract them, and how they could be captured without damage. She checked not only the books but documents as well, and talked to everyone in the place who might know something about princes. She put a great deal of work into this, as she never had to stop to sleep, to the great inconvenience of the royal librarian and archivist.
“You’re entirely too busy,” the royal librarian told her, when she inquired why he had hidden inside a cupboard when she entered. “I do need my sleep, even if you don’t.”
Dimity did not know that, behind her back, people had started to refer to her as Unsleeping Beauty. But when the people you talked to kept yawning in your face, you couldn’t help but notice THAT. So Dimity decided to take all she knew out into the world, so her friends could sleep.
She filled a backpack with supplies. “I don’t need a sleeping bag: that’s for certain. Bread and cheese, and a little money to buy more when that’s gone. A nap or two, and a notebook, and a couple of these charms to keep off trolls and evil genies. I think I’m ready.”
Once packed for the journey, she kissed her parents goodbye. “I hope you can find a prince who will break the spell,” her father told her, holding her hand for quite a while.
Dimity smiled. “Or at least one who can keep up with me,” she said. And with that, she set off from the castle into the rising sun.
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