The Ickabog(4)

Now, King Fred had heard something about the Head Seamstress not being quite well, but he hadn’t paid much attention. He didn’t trust anyone but Daisy’s mother to stitch on the silver lace properly, so gave the order that nobody else should be given the job. In consequence, Daisy’s mother sat up three nights in a row, racing to finish the purple suit in time for the King of Pluritania’s visit, and at dawn on the fourth day, her assistant found her lying on the floor, dead, with the very last amethyst button in her hand.

The king’s Chief Advisor came to break the news, while Fred was still having his breakfast. The Chief Advisor was a wise old man called Herringbone, with a silver beard that hung almost to his knees. After explaining that the Head Seamstress had died, he said:

“But I’m sure one of the other ladies will be able to fix on the last button for Your Majesty.”

There was a look in Herringbone’s eye that King Fred didn’t like. It gave him a squirming feeling in the pit of his stomach.

While his dressers were helping him into the new purple suit later that morning, Fred tried to make himself feel less guilty by talking the matter over with Lords Spittleworth and Flapoon.

“I mean to say, if I’d known she was seriously ill,” panted Fred, as the servants heaved him into his skin-tight satin pantaloons, “naturally I’d have let someone else sew the suit.”

“Your Majesty is so kind,” said Spittleworth, as he examined his sallow complexion in the mirror over the fireplace. “A more tenderhearted monarch was never born.”

“The woman should have spoken up if she felt unwell,” grunted Flapoon from a cushioned seat by the window. “If she’s not fit to work, she should’ve said so. Properly looked at, that’s disloyalty to the king. Or to your suit, anyway.”

“Flapoon’s right,” said Spittleworth, turning away from the mirror. “Nobody could treat his servants better than you do, sire.”

“I do treat them well, don’t I?” said King Fred anxiously, sucking in his stomach as the dressers did up his amethyst buttons. “And after all, chaps, I’ve got to look my blasted best today, haven’t I? You know how dressy the King of Pluritania always is!”

“It would be a matter of national shame if you were any less well-dressed than the King of Pluritania,” said Spittleworth.

“Put this unhappy occurrence out of your mind, sire,” said Flapoon. “A disloyal seamstress is no reason to spoil a sunny day.”

And yet, in spite of the two lords’ advice, King Fred couldn’t be quite easy in his mind. Perhaps he was imagining it, but he thought Lady Eslanda looked particularly serious that day. The servants’ smiles seemed colder and the maids’ curtsies a little less deep. As his court feasted that evening with the King of Pluritania, Fred’s thoughts kept drifting back to the seamstress, dead on the floor, with the last amethyst button clutched in her hand.

Before Fred went to bed that night, Herringbone knocked on his bedroom door. After bowing deeply, the Chief Advisor asked whether the king was intending to send flowers to Mrs. Dovetail’s funeral.

“Oh — oh, yes!” said Fred, startled. “Yes, send a big wreath, you know, saying how sorry I am and so forth. You can arrange that, can’t you, Herringbone?”

“Certainly, sire,” said the Chief Advisor. “And — if I may ask — are you planning to visit the seamstress’s family, at all? They live, you know, just a short walk from the palace gates.”

“Visit them?” said the king pensively. “Oh, no, Herringbone, I don’t think I’d like — I mean to say, I’m sure they aren’t expecting that.”

Herringbone and the king looked at each other for a few seconds, then the Chief Advisor bowed and left the room.

Now, as King Fred was used to everyone telling him what a marvelous chap he was, he really didn’t like the frown with which the Chief Advisor had left. He now began to feel cross rather than ashamed.

“It’s a bally pity,” he told his reflection, turning back to the mirror in which he’d been combing his moustache before bed, “but after all, I’m the king and she was a seamstress. If I died, I wouldn’t have expected her to —”

But then it occurred to him that if he died, he’d expect the whole of Cornucopia to stop whatever they were doing, dress all in black, and weep for a week, just as they’d done for his father, Richard the Righteous.

“Well, anyway,” he said impatiently to his reflection, “life goes on.”

He put on his silk nightcap, climbed into his four-poster bed, blew out the candle, and fell asleep.





Mrs. Dovetail was buried in the graveyard in the City-Within-The-City, where generations of royal servants lay. Daisy and her father stood hand in hand looking down at the grave for a long time. Bert kept looking back at Daisy as his tearful mother and grim-faced father led him slowly away. Bert wanted to say something to his best friend, but what had happened was too enormous and dreadful for words. Bert could hardly bear to imagine how he’d feel if his mother had disappeared forever into the cold, hard earth.

When all their friends had gone, Mr. Dovetail moved the purple wreath sent by the king away from Mrs. Dovetail’s headstone, and put in its place the small bunch of snowdrops that Daisy had collected that morning. Then the two Dovetails walked slowly home to a house they knew would never be the same again.