The Vanishing Princess by Jenny Diski

Author:Jenny Diski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-10-12T04:00:00+00:00

Shit and Gold

For the purposes of the story, I never had a name. I was always just the daughter of a miller, and then later the Queen—meaning Mrs. King. But we millers’ daughters have names, like everyone else, though the archetype-makers would have you think differently, even in a story such as this, where naming names is the name of the game.

Well, I bloody well had a name and have one still—excuse the language, not suited to a queen, I know, but once a miller’s daughter, always a fucking miller’s daughter, I say. My name, I can reveal, was, and still is, Claraminda Griselda. The first confabulation of a name being an indication of the florid hopes my father had for his own flesh and blood to raise him up above his natural station in life (a hope rather surprisingly granted now that he’s been elevated, as the father of a queen must be, to an earldom); the second name my father once heard in a tale told in the local inn by some accountant fellow called Chaser, or Chooser, or Chancer, or something, who fancied himself as more than just an ordinary customs and excise man. My father, the recently elevated earl, told me he had liked the sound of Griselda, and that the story the taxman told had held out great promise for the bearer of that name, who, though she had her troubles, came out well settled in the end.

However, not wishing to antagonise the rest of the village children (my father had already alienated us from our neighbours, on account of his comical fantasies and high-falutin ways), I called myself the rather simpler Clary, and even now, though the King has all the pretensions of a miller and insists on having my full name on documents of state, I think of myself as plain Queen Clary.

I spent my childhood in a miasma of flour dust. No matter how my mother wiped and washed while she lived, it was always possible to write my name with my finger in the film on every surface. Naturally, or rather, unnaturally, my father insisted I went to the village school to learn to read. So while most of my contemporaries were productive elements of their household—carrying water, carding wool, pumping bellows—I sat in school, alone, except for the children of better families than ours, who would not talk to a mere miller’s daughter, learning my letters, and what to do with them. I could not see what such an excess of learning would achieve, apart from being able to write my name on stools and tables and windowsills.

Of course, the price of his flour reflected the extraordinary expense my father had in the raising of a mere daughter, so we weren’t very popular on that account, either. There were plenty of people who passed through our village with tales of the cost of a sack of flour just a few miles away. I say a few miles, but each one

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