“Well, um, I, er, don’t dance very much.” Soapsuds waved a hand back toward the ballroom without looking. “One of those other ladies would probably make a much better partner.”
“I’ve danced with most of them already. I have to dance with all the ladies, you see.”
Soapsuds thought this was interesting, so she raised her eyes from her collection of cobwebs. The speaker was a tall man with a broad smile, young, but with lines at the sides of his eyes, which showed he smiled a lot. Recognizing him, she took a deep breath and shook the rolled-up cobwebs from her hand.
The prince reached out to take her other hand. “Just one dance,” he promised, “So I can tell my mother I did my duty and danced with everyone.”
They stepped out onto the dance floor. Soapsuds, like most other girls, had been required to take dancing lessons. The prince danced so well—he’d had lots of practice, of course, if he had to dance with all the lady guests—that she regretted a little all those times she skipped class to sweep out the pantry.
Trying to think of something to talk about besides how badly she was dancing, Soapsuds asked, “You don’t think this collar is cut too low, do you?”
The prince, who had spent his evening looking at collars that low and lower, had wondered why some of the court ladies couldn’t wear their collars right up under their chins to hide some of their shortcomings. (Lady Zarma was so thoroughly freckled that she looked as if she needed to shave, and the Duchess of Denkiehle had that mole.) Pity the first person he’d seen who looked good in this style was worried about it.
Being a bright young man, for a prince, he knew enough to change the subject. “That color suits you very well. So many of the guests are wearing those antiquey cream-colored gowns.”
“I wouldn’t like that,” she said, shaking her head. “They look dusty.”
The prince smiled. “That would be a problem for you, wouldn’t it?”
She frowned at him. “Well,” he said, “It isn’t every guest who comes to the palace and hunts cobwebs.”
“I hope you didn’t mind.” Soapsuds blushed. “It’s just a habit.”
“You find cobwebs wherever you go?”
“Usually,” she admitted. “So many people hire servants right out of the country, you see, and though they know quite a lot about feeding cattle and taking care of chickens, you can’t expect them to know where to look for cobwebs way up on top of the china cupboard, or inside the piano.”
The prince nodded. “Most farmhouses don’t have pianos.”
“That’s right! So people complain and complain about how lazy the servants are, when, really, they don’t know as much about cleaning as their servants, even. I know one lady who just didn’t know anything about dishes, or washing them. She thought her basement was all full of dishes and the servants just threw away the dirty ones and brought new ones upstairs.”
“I think I know who you mean, but we won’t say her name since she’s right there by the buffet,” said the prince, with a wink.
“I know,” Soapsuds whispered. “I went over one morning and showed her new maid how to polish the breakfast tray.”
‘Was she grateful?”
“The maid? Oh, ever so much. I wouldn’t want to work for Lady…but we weren’t going to say the name.”
“Have you helped other maids?”
Soapsuds had advised maids, cooks, scullions, and even, on occasion, butlers. This had all been done secretly, so her mother and sisters, and the people of the town, wouldn’t find out. The prince learned quite a lot about his subjects, and a few things about washing up as well.
“Her downstairs maid grew up in a house that didn’t even have windows, so naturally the poor girl wouldn’t know about using vinegar on window glass,” she told him about Lady Azimi. “Can you imagine?”
“Not a bit.” The prince had never heard of washing windows with vinegar either. It was all new to him, and interested him. Most of the ladies he danced with wanted to talk about the health of his whole family, or, slightly less boring, of THEIR whole families. (He reminded himself to tell the queen Lady Diane said her mother had that terrible cough again.)
Soapsuds, for her part, had never met anyone who was this much fun to talk to. She could sort of tell he didn’t know much about cleaning, but she supposed princes wouldn’t. He was honestly interested, though, and he smiled so prettily. She did wish he wasn’t quite so tall, or that this dress wasn’t cut quite so low.
One dance became two, and then four. Some ladies at the ball required no rouge to grow red in the face. “What CAN they be saying to each other?” Lady Glennorah asked the Countess of Eyre.
“I don’t even know who she is,” the Countess replied.
As a matter of fact, Soapsuds was just explaining how she had taught the Countess’s laundress to use a separate tub for rinsing. He laughed out loud at the funny part of the story, which showed again that he really was listening, and not just pretending.
She did like him very much. She did hope, though, that her fairy godmother was not planning for her to marry him. The thought of having to dress this way all the time, and goto big parties, and horse shows, and highway openings, when what she wanted to do was mop the kitchen floor, was terrifying.
Soapsuds was so busy liking the prince, and worrying about it, that she entirely forgot to keep checking the clock. “What was that?” she demanded suddenly, in the middle of his story about washing horse blankets.
“Just the big clock,” he told her, “Striking eleven.”
“Oh!” She whirled to look up at the clock. “Oh! Eleven! Oh my! It isn’t very loud, is it? I expect the chimes are dusty. I’ll run get some polish.”
“But….” The prince said.
Soapsuds was already headed for the door. As she ran past the ladies at the buffet, someone stuck out foot. She tripped and dropped her reticule, but kept running. She didn’t even look back, and thus did not see her fairy godmother (whose foot it had been) smile. A wave of the wand, and the reticule became a sponge again.
The prince stooped to pick it up. “What’s the matter, son?” asked the king, who had come over to the buffet to see what the fuss was, and also to see if any of those little eclairs were left.
“The woman I was dancing with dropped it,” the prince told him.
“It’s probably a shoulder pad,” sniffed Baroness Mdena.
“That is a sponge,” said the queen, joining them. “No doubt one of the cleaning women left it behind.” She reached to take it from the prince’s hand.
“No.” he pressed the sponge to his chest. “It is hers. I will search the country to find her. Only one woman could have brought a sponge to a royal ball. I shall ride out to search for her through every village and town.”
“Sounds unnecessarily flamboyant.” The king reached for a little pinwheel of salami and cheese. “Why not just put an ad in the paper?”
The prince didn’t do that, but neither did he ride out through every village and town. His dancing partner had told him so much about her house and her neighbors and all the things she’d cleaned that he really felt he’d recognize the street she lived on.
By the middle of the first afternoon, he was realizing what a lot of streets there were in Slingtown. In these streets were plenty of nice, clean houses, and in each of those houses there seemed to be simply hordes of pleasant young women who had somehow learned the prince was looking for someone. They came crowding out of the houses, trying their very hardest to look like someone he was looking for. It all made for a very long day.
At one house where there were no daughters, he drew his horse up tp the trough for a drink of water. He took very good care of his horses, to the point of washing the horse blankets personally. He quite frequently talked to his horses as well.
“I just don’t know, Yarrow,” he said. “I thought I’d have an easier time of it. The princes in stories always seem to find what they’re looking for. Of course, some princes have fairy godmothers, who can give practical advice at times like this.”
“Excuse me, young man.”
The prince turned to find a small, roundish woman with a quantity of dark rings around each eye. She looked a little dangerous. “Yes, Ma’am?”
“I think your horse is thirsty.”
The prince had been trained to be polite, and simply nodded, ignoring the fact that his horse was drinking loudly all the while. “Yes, Ma’am?”
“There are all kinds of horse troughs along this street,” she informed him. “Don’t you think your horse would like a drink from each?”
He nodded again, determined to be polite as long as this took. He noticed, though, that this strange woman was winking at him. Furthermore, she had a wand tucked up inside one sleeve.
“Horse troughs,” he said.
“Give it a try,” she told him.
Nodding a third time, he led Yarrow away from this yard, and headed for the next. “Horse troughs,” he muttered.
His trip to the end of the block took no end of time. Naturally, everyone in a house where he stopped had to come out and help water his horse, and discuss the weather or the well-being of his relatives. (No one seemed to notice that the horse s not drinking, and looked rather bored.) Along about the fifth trough, the prince began to wonder whether the woman had been an evil fairy bent on making mischief rather than a fairy godmother. Shaking his head, he let one hand fall to the edge of the trough.
“Oh yes, Aunt Donvia is much better, thanks.” It was none of their business how Aunt Donvia was feeling, but everyone in these houses seemed fascinated by the royal family. He slid his hand along the trough, answering their questions with his best royal smile. Then he frowned. Most troughs so far had been weathered, with the wood somewhat spongy, or splintered, or both.
This one had been polished.
He looked around at the people who were pretending to admire his horse and show interest in the maladies of his relatives. “And, er, your family,” he was able to break in at last, “Is this, er, um, all of it?”
The lady of the house nodded. “Everyone, Your Highness, except for my stepdaughter Sloogner, who said something about the attic shelves needing to be dusted.”
His eyes went to the house. “The attic is, um, upstairs?”
“That’s where most people keep them,” she said. The prince heard only the first word; by the end of the sentence, he was inside the house.
The first room was spotless, and the first door he opened showed signs of having been scrubbed. He found stairs and ran up, two at a time. “Aha!” he cried, at the sight of a dusty individual behind a half-closed door.
Soapsuds turned, her dustcloth clutched to her chest. “What…what do you want?”
The prince reached into his pocket. “I came to give you your sponge back.”
She reached out. “Not to ask me to marry you?”
“I was thinking about that, too.”
“Don’t.” She pulled her hand back, and the sponge dropped to the floor. “I’ve got so much to do right here. Nobody will ever clean these shelves if I don’t.”
“I understand.” He took a step toward her. “If I were to marry somebody, I wouldn’t be able to do some of my work, either. I couldn’t go to the Prince’s Ball at the palace any more.”
“Why not?” asked Soapsuds.
“When I marry, I have to move out of the palace and start living in the Prince’s Castle, to the north.”
She frowned. “Just because you got married?”
“It’s the official residence of the prince and his wife,” he replied. “There hasn’t been a prince and wife to live there since my father became king, thirty years ago.”
Soapsuds looked down at her sponge. “Nobody has lived there for thirty years? It must be….”
“A terrible mess. Absolutely filthy.” He leaned down to catch up the sponge. “I visited about ten years ago. A lot of the windows are broken, the wallpaper is covered with dust, and not one of the chimneys draws properly, so there’s soot on everything. I expect there are rats.” He ran one finger along the top of the sponge. “And the place is positively huge. Even if I brought in a hundred servants, it will be years before it’s clean enough to hold a tea party, even. You wouldn’t care for it.”
Soapsuds put one of her own hands on the sponge. “I…I’d have to see it before I could decide whether I liked it.”
He folded her hands around the sponge. “I can show you around the place. But you’d better meet my parents first.”
Soapsuds changed into better clothes to go to the palace, but she still felt a bit dusty when she found herself standing before the king and queen in the throneroom. “So you are the woman my son believes he wants to marry,” said Her Majesty. “What is your name, my dear?”
“E-everyone calls me Soapsuds.”
The queen sat back in her throne, her eyes as wide as the rubies in her crown. “We can’t possibly have a daughter-in-law named Soapsuds!” she exclaimed to her husband.
“I’m sorry, Your Majesty,” Soapsuds added quickly. “I should have said that my real name is Slawfneer.”
“Slofner?” the king demanded. “Why, that was my grandmother’s name!”
So it was all right. The king and queen called her Princess Slofner, and everyone else called her Soapsuds. After she and the prince were married, they rode away to the north, to a vast dusty castle that took ages to clean, even though they had the assistance of dozens of servants trained personally by princess Soapsuds herself. Soapsuds and the prince worked together on the great dining hall and the ballroom. Soapsuds found there was also a simply huge garden, which her parents never had. This opened up whole new kinds of housework that were totally new to her.
With so wonderfully dirty a castle, and so attentively helpful a husband, Soapsuds was deliriously happy. She did wonder why he liked her to wear those low-collared ballgowns when they scrubbed floors together, but that is a minor matter, unworthy of mention in a story of pristine cleanliness.
Blogsy Babbles 