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Your Saturday story: THE FAT OF THE LAND
Once upon a time there was a queen who’d provided the realm with six daughters, all of noble countenance and regal bearing. She considered six to be enough, and was therefore vexed to discover she was expecting yet another child. Simmering with resentment the queen took umbrage against the life growing inside her. By the time her seventh daughter was born the queen was a bubbling cauldron of ill wishes and spite, and wasn’t surprised when Garnet proved the most troublesome of all her children.
The seventh princess lacked her sisters pretty charm. She loathed dancing, frivolous talk and embroidery. She didn’t suffer fools gladly, or intelligent people for that matter. Garnet enjoyed her own opinions, her own company, and never felt the need to impress. Princess Garnet also liked to eat. She liked to eat a lot. Dainty triangles of white-bread sandwiches filled with honey and segments of clementine. Blackberry jam tarts. Chocolate covered ginger biscuits, sherbet lemons, toffee apples and iced buns. Thickly sliced toast and marmalade, sugared almonds and custard creams. Garnet enjoyed them all. The seams of her clothes strained. They gave away. New clothes were made, but Garnet outgrew them. The royal dressmakers gossiped as they frantically sewed, and talk spread across the realm about the princess whose plate was never empty.
The royal physicians were called. ‘Is it a medical condition?’ the queen asked. ‘A disease? An affliction?’ ‘Has a malevolent spirit cursed me?’ her father demanded. ‘Does it take impish delight in burdening me with a butterball of a daughter?’ The doctors shone lights into Garnet’s eyes and stuck pins in the soles of her feet. They made her swallow pills that tasted of seaweed and consulted dusty volumes of ailments. A to Z’s of the incurable and obscure. They scratched their balding heads and furrowed their wrinkled brows and professed themselves at a loss. ‘We can only conclude,’ one timidly ventured, ‘that she’s greedy.’ The king was displeased, and had the doctor pickled in a vast jar of vinegar. He called for a second opinion, then a third and fourth. After pickling eight royal physicians he grudgingly accepted they might be right, consulting the queen about diets.
Garnet was not best pleased when served pureed carrot and stewed turnip. She took to bribing the royal baker with pearls from her jewel box in return for doughnuts and profiteroles. This carried on until her father found out, the baker joining the physicians in their pickling jars. Garnet bribed the baker’s replacement, three footmen and eight maids, all of whom supplied her with delicious treats until they were discovered and met unfortunate ends.
Garnet switched to ordering takeaways, having triple swan burgers delivered to the royal residence. She devised a method of lowering a bucket on a rope from her bedroom window, hauling up snacks before folding paper airplanes out of banknotes and tossing them out of the window to make payment. That plan worked well until the day the queen woke from a nap to see a carton of egg fried rice flying upwards. Garnet’s bucket and rope were confiscated, her jewels given to her sisters, her money box nailed shut.
Garnet took another approach, sneaking out of the palace at dawn, breaking into cottages nearby. Villagers woke to find biscuit tins empty and pantry shelves stripped bare. The thefts went on for months before Garnet was discovered licking clean a treacle jar in the tax collector’s kitchen. ‘I knew she was up to something,’ the queen said. ‘Locking her in the tower will put an end to her wicked ways.’ ‘Feed her nothing but prunes and cardboard,’ the king commanded, ‘and death to anyone who defies my order.’
Garnet complained, shouted, kicked the locked door and threw prunes out of the window at visiting diplomats. ‘It’ll all be worth it,’ the queen reassured the six princesses who complained about the noise and mess Garnet made. ‘She’ll be thin as a rake by Christmas and no longer an embarrassment to the realm.’
But as Garnet’s confinement in the tower lengthened from days to weeks, from weeks to months, her weight never diminished. In fact, she gained. Garnet’s body, her parents realised with astonishment, was expanding. Her fingers becoming chubbier. Her chins multiplying. The prune and cardboard diet was replaced by potato peelings and banana skins, but still Garnet grew bigger. The royal dressmakers took down curtains in the king’s bedchamber and used them for Garnet’s new gown. The queen was rapidly losing patience, having little of it in the first place. ‘We’re still feeding her too much,’ she declared. ‘Thin air and nothing-much-of-anything. That’s all she’ll have from now on.’
Yet still Garnet didn’t diminish. She not only grew in size but something else was happening too. Garnet’s hair was lightening, the plain brown shot through with silk streaks of ivory and white. Her freckles were bleaching out, Garnet’s skin gradually becoming pale and luminous as a new moon. Days and nights passed. She seemed to be glowing like a firefly lit from within, her eyes sparking like Catherine wheels. Little flashes of silver fizzled from her fingertips. Garnet no longer shouted or kicked at the tower’s locked door. She no longer spoke. It was as if words were of no use to her. Garnet was beyond them.
Soon the royal household couldn’t gaze on her without shielding their eyes from her dazzling light. The edges around Garnet were blurring. She was dissolving into pure light, glittering, shimmering like thousands of tiny stars. Soon little left of her was recognisable. Then one day, as light blazed out from Garnet there was a pop, like a soap bubble being burst. All that was Garnet was gone. The tower room was empty of everything save its dull shadows and dusty corners. Years passed. Memories of the king and queen’s seventh daughter faded. No gravestone marked her brief life. Not even the sparrows or the finches mourned her loss.
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