Chapters She was christened Little Applestia, but nopony called her that.
Her mother called her Sunny, because she had named her after the royal Sun Princess, “Princess Celestia,” one of the few charitable characters found in Canterlot.
Her father, Little Apple Cider, was anything but little. He was a large orange stallion that almost always had a red face and a loud beery voice. Apple Cider called her Lestia, after the mare in one of his favorite songs: “Lestia, Lestia, the presents I buys er, she throws em right back in me face.”
The other foals that played with her in the lower class streets of Canterlot that ran in and out like scruffy strays under the legs of the black railway arches called her Apple.
The Little Apple family lived in a worn down gray farm on the outskirts of Canterlot. The railway for the trains were built right by the farmland, so that the trains ran right outside the trees and showered the apples with sticky black soot. When the wind was not blowing the smoke that way, she could look into the lighted carriage windows and see the high-class mares, mysterious in their traveling veils, and the gentlecolts with their side well-groomed manes growing down into their high collars, too deep in their conversations to notice Applestia’s yellow face behind the dirty glass and the rotting apples. But she would imagine herself in there with them, rattling away to the castle, and think, “One day, ah’ll go somewhere too.”
The year was 1900. A bad year for jobs, Apple Cider said, although every year seemed to have been that, as long as Applestia could remember. He was a lazy, boastful stallion, whose tongue was the only part of him that got enough exercise. Born as a slacking farmworker, he never enjoyed working on the farm, thus decided it would be best for him to find work elsewhere. Always in and out of work, and mostly out, if there was any money to spare, he would take it off to Buck Daniels and get rid of it in beer or bets on Pegasus races.
Applestia’s mother took to tending the farm to keep them alive. She often worked late into the night; toiling using a dim lantern, until Celestia began to raise her sun and the early mailponies began soaring through the sky on their routes. Out of the leftover bits she managed to earn, she would save them up for pretty dresses for her Sunny to wear at school, “So she can look like the little princess she is.” She was very proud of her daughter who was shrewd and intelligent. Applestia learned to read and write at the shabby farm, though not much else, as there was not much bits to spend on education.
“She’ll grow up to be something better than us one day, you’ll see,” Applestia’s mother told her husband, but Apple Cider only said, “I don’t see there’s anything wrong with me .”
It was in the bitterly cold winter when Applestia was fourteen that her mother grew ill and could not leave her bed. Her father was off somewhere chasing one of the “golden opportunities” that he always knew were waiting for him round the next corner. Applestia was afraid to get the doctor because there was no money to pay him. She spent the last bits she had to buy ingredients to make stew which her mother could not swallow, and crept up to the train docks to steal enough coal to keep the fire going, because her mother was so cold all the time, except when she was burning hot.
One evening she did not get warm, and she did not move or speak, and Eliza knew that she was dead. When her father came home, Applestia told him, “You killed her!” and he went into a noisy show of grief. But it was Applestia who went out and sold their table, so that her mother could have a proper funeral.
Now she nopony’s princess. Her father took her away from school and put her to work in a textile factory, where she stood in a basement room for ten hours a day, sewing dozens and dozens of saddlebags, dresses, and such. There were other fillies to talk and joke with, and songs to sing in the sweet Southern accents of the country parts of Equestria that found their way to the city.
The other fillies hated the factory as much as Applestia did, but they stayed on there, because jobs were hard to find in the city, especially if you were poor and had no connections. But Applestia had more spirit. Knocked down so often by life, she was like one of those weighted dolls that roll back upright every time. She had never lost that feeling that there must be something better than this for her. The feeling that had made her believe, when she the fancy mares and proper gentlecolts go rattling by in the trains, “One day, ah’ll go somewhere too.” She never forgot her mother saying, with her sweet tired smile, “Something better for her one day.”
After a year, she ran away from the factory one spring morning when she could see the sun shining through the narrow windows. The manager ran after her, chasing her ruffled mane through the crowds on the street, crying, “Stop, thief!” Her father had hired her to the factory for five years, so she was stealing his time.
“Stop, thief!”
The bystanders did not think he meant Applestia, who looked too skinny and ragtag to be a villain, so she escaped through the crowd into the park, where she spent two nights under the bushes and two days sharing thrown crusts with the birds and ducks, before she dared go home to her father.
After his wife’s death, Apple Cider had left the wretched rooms in the farm, and was lodging now in Hoofton Road; not grand, but better than Little Apple Acres. The smoke and smog of the new railroads by the farm was slowly destroying the trees that the Little Apple family had grown for generations. Apple Cider took it upon himself to sell the land before it became inexpensive.
He also had a steady job for the first time in his life. He called himself a “servant of the public,” which actually meant he was a dustpony, emptying bins full of ashes and other things ponies threw out, into his square dustcart.
It was not like him to be in such regular work: Monday those streets, Tuesday these, Wednesday dump the whole lot in the river, Thursday those other streets, Friday trot to the office for his pay. But he rather fancied his landpony, and wanted to impress her.
Mrs. Lyrica Highcastle lived on the ground floor of her house on Hoofton Road, in which Apple Cider, Public Servant, had a comfortable second-floor room, and his daughter, Applestia, a tiny attic, just wide enough to hold a rusty iron bed. When Applestia came nervously home, her father was having a cup of tea with Mrs. Highcastle in the landlady’s cozy kitchen, haunted by old smells of stews and kippers, the ghosts of all the meals she had cooked for the late Mr. Highcastle before his winter cough carried him off.
Mrs. Highcastle was an energetic, upright mare, like a soldier, with a thick poofy purple mane and a light pink coat. The high collar of her blouse was held up on her neck with whalebones, and fastened with a huge shell brooch in which she could hear the sea. Apple Cider had found it in somepony’s rubbish bin and brought it to her with pride.
“So there she is.” Mrs. Highcastle looked at Applestia without pleasure. “Two nights gone, we thought we’d seen the last of you.”
“Worried about me, Dad?” In the hideous event that Mrs. Highcastle ever became her stepmother, Applestia might have to talk to her. Meanwhile, she’d save her breath.
“Off and on, old girl,” her father replied. “Payday, ain’t it?” One hoof reached out to his daughter, beckoning for bits.
“Not from me. Ah chucked it,” Applestia said with a shrug.
“You what?!” Apple Cider yelled.
“Got fed up” Applestia pretended to be casual, although the kitchen smells made her faint with hunger. “What's fer tea then?”
“Nothing for them as ain’t in work.” Mrs. Highcastle shut her lips in a grim bar.
“You can’t send me back there,” Applestia said, glaring at her father. “He’ll put me in jail. What would that do to yer reputation?”
“We never had you in jail, that’s true.” Apple Cider was surprised to realize it.
“Always a first time,” Mrs. Highcastle said. “Take your eyes off those croissants, young filly.”
“Knock it off, Lyrica.” Apple Cider was a generous man, if it involved no personal effort. “The foal’s got to eat.”
Mrs. Highcastle shoved a plate of cold potatoes and half of a daisy sandwich at Applestia, and while she ate like a starving beast, they discussed her as if she were not there.
“Ought to take the buckle end of me belt to ‘er.”
“Strapping does not go well with that kind. Born bad, I always say.”
“What’s to be done with ‘er? She’s no good for nothing, except eat.”
“Sweep the crossings…”
“Kitchen maid…”
‘Who’d have Applestia in their kitchen? She’s always going on about apples. Send her back to Little Apple Acres, Cider. She can pick the few good apples and sell them off in the streets for profit,” Mrs. Highcastle said.
“Whose profit, Mrs. High Bargain?” Applestia’s father winked, and Mrs. Highcastle chuckled like water gurgling down the sink and said, “You are excused,” to Applestia.
So Little Applestia continued the family tradition, and for three years she sold apple pies, apple cider, caramel apples, apple fritters, and other apple products in the streets round the bustling central market, where fruit and flowers and vegetables were brought into the great city from all over Equestria. The theaters were nearby, and the Opera House, a palace of gold and red velvet. Applestia’s apples were often bought by elegant gentlecolts in top hats and glorious mares in dresses and jewels that wanted a quick bite of food.
Her friends and companions were the other shrill, ragged ponies who sold produce on street corners. One of them was Willow Grove. He was more muscle than brain, a simple stallion with mild blue eyes and a yellow coat with a blue mane. His heart was big, and he loved Little Applestia as if she was one of the fancy mares whose carts splashed them with mud as they sat on apple crates and watched the socialites drive by to the opera.
He even got flowers for her cheap, or “free,” which meant when the vendor wasn't looking. Once he brought her a bird in a little cage that he had “borrowed” from a drunken gentlecolt.
It was a lovebird, brilliant blue and green, named Azure. She kept him in her room, Mrs. Highcastle or no Mrs. Highcastle, and he greeted her with a chirrup when she came home late at night after offering her apple-based products to the crowds coming out of the theaters. With the bird chattering on her shoulder and her hooves on the iron bed head, she would gaze out over the slate roofs and chimneys and washing lines, and wonder where it had all gone to, the dreams of freedom, the journeys, the “something better.”
“We could marry old Willow,” she told the bird, “and git away from him and her.” She stuck out her tongue toward the kitchen where Mrs. Highcastle and her father were sharing a little late wine and a song.
“Willy Grove, willy grove, willy grove, willy grove,” said the bird, as she Applestia had taught him.
“But he’s not much in the top story. What’s ter become of us, Azure?”
“Azure, Azure, Azure.” His conversation was not brilliant.
“What’s it all about?” And though she was hungry and dirty and unremarks among the city’s socialites, Luna’s moon silvered the chimney pots for her, and the stars were as much hers as anypony else’, and she could not help the feeling somewhere…. some day…
“Lend us fifty bits, Lestia.”
“What do ya mean, lend? Ya’ve never paid me back the last bits I lent ya, or the one before that, or…”
“Ssh!” Applestia and her father were in the cabbage-scented hall of the house in Hoofton Road, and he jerked his head toward the kitchen door, behind which Mrs. Highcastle waited, like a whaleboned spider, for her rent.
“She’ll put us out on the street,” he said in the nearest his voice could get to a whisper.
“Not me. Ah can pay me way.”
“Come on, Lestia, be a good sport. I wouldn’t ask you, only I had a bit of bad luck with that three-legged brute that called himself a stallion. Won’t you help your poor old Dad? After all I’ve done for you. Fed you, clothed you, rocked you to sleep…” He honestly believed it, so it was not worth denying. “Taught you the Elements of Harmony. Ponies were put in this world to help each other, I told you, so you should be glad to fulfill your what’s-its-name by helping me.”
Applestia sighed. “I’ve got thirty bits. That’s all I took today.”
“Give us it, love. I’ll give it back tomorrow… double. Sure as my names Little Apple Cider.”
“If you’re going to put it on a race…” Applestia’s hoof stopped on its way into the pocket of her old saddlebag.
“Cross my heart.”
She gave him the thirty bits and grabbed him as he made for the front door. “No ya don’t! Not to Buck’s!” She pushed him the other way, through the kitchen door.
“Hello, Mr. Cider, this is a pleasant surprise!” Which it was to Mrs. Highcastle, when she saw the bits in his hoof.
Applestia had just come in after being out on the streets all day in the first nippy winds of winter, but she would have to go out again, or there would be nothing for her supper. She heard her father and the landpony laughing, and the enviable clinks of teacups. Half the time, Mrs. Highcastle did not save anything for her.
She wandered down to Market Square to see if Willow could find her some flowers. When she saw him, his face pale in the flare of a torch on one of the stalls, she stopped a few yards away behind a barrowload of rotting cabbages. What had he done wrong? Had someone found out about those white carnations? He was talking to a stallion in with a large monocle and a long tweed coat. He could only be a plain-clothes guard colt, or what would he want with old Willow?
She slipped through a pool of deep shadow beyond the light of the lantern, and ducked behind a pillar to hear what they were saying.
“He gimme ten bits fer a harf derzen oranges,” Willow said in his strange accent.
“Say it again, there’s a good chap.” The stallion in the tweed coat was a socialite, no mistake. No guard talked posh like that. But they were up to all sorts of tricks, the guards, you couldn’t be too careful. Don’t tell him, Willow Applestia urged silently.
“He gimme ten bits fer a harf derzen oranges,” Willow repeated obediently, a foolish grin splitting his broad face like a great sliced turnip.
“Yes….yes…” The gentlecolt had a notebook and pencil and was marking it down. Whinnysota?” Willow looked blank. “Born there, I mean?”
“Sright.”
“Go on talking.”
That was enough to strike poor Willow as dumb as a bed leg. “How… ah…. er…” He gasped and swallowed. Applestia could see sweat rolling down his brawny neck, as the strange stallion waited patiently, pencil poised.
“Are you having some sort of seizure, my good fellow?” The inquiry was civil enough, but you had the feeling that if it were a fit, he would stand and watch, rather than call for help.
“Ask mah girl,” Willow stammered out. “She does the talkin’.” He put out a hoof as large as half a ham and pulled Applestia from behind the pillar.
“How did ya know I was there?” She jerked her hoof away and stood angrily.
“I seen yer.” Sometimes it seemed that Willow had an odd extra sense, to make up for not having much of the ordinary kind.
“Ya in trouble?” she asked him. “What’s he got ya for?”
“Calm yourself,” said the stranger. “We’re just having a chat.”
“That’s what the guard said when he come after me cousin. Next thing we knew, he was inside wit two months hard.”
“Hard?” The stallion was not rude, but he didn’t seem polite either. Just point-blank inquisitive.
“Hard labor, as well as ya know, Mr. Nosy Parker. And if ya have come tryin to git poor Willow ter say somethin’ incrum…. incorm…”
“Incriminating?”
“Don’t take me up!” she flashed at him. “Ah’m as good as ya. Comin’ here attackin’ a poor innocent colt as don’t even know…” She ranted on, giving him the saw-toothed edge of her tongue, which years of shrieking and quarreling on the Canterlot streets had sharpened to the shrillest cockney.
“Fascinating… fascinating.” His pencil stabbed and flicked at the paper, making signs that did not look like letters to her, if she had read right at home. And then he looked up with one eyebrow raised, tapping the pencil on the good white teeth that were all his own. “Er… Apple family?”
Applestia nodded, in spite of herself.
“Little Apple Acres?” His lean head had swooped down at her. In the gassy light of the flare, she noticed that he had very bright blue eyes, witty and questioning, before she drew back afraid, for what did he want with her? What did he know about her?
“Nah,” she lied. “Ya got the wrong party. My family’s all Sweet Apple Acre folks,” she replied, thinking of her cousins down in Ponyville.
“Funny.” He shut his notebook with his magic. “I could have sworn to Little Apple Acres.” As he began to amble away, he turned to say over his tweedy shoulder, “with the slightest touch of Hoofton Road on top?”
Applestia spat at him like a cat, and Willow was shocked. His attitude had irritated her before. He was awed by the gentry.
“Don’t ya think he was a guard?”
Willow shook his head. Events had moved too fast for him, and he would speak no more that night.
“Well, he knows too much,” Applestia said darkly. “He’s bad luck. Ah wouldn’t give him the time of day, meself. Ah wouldn’t give him the dirt stuck on my hooves.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The next day, Applestia felt vaguely unhappy. It had turned colder, and she began to think of the long winter ahead, when the rain was chillier than the snow, and there was no escape from the wind which searched you out round corners and behind walls like your own bad conscience.
After she had forced herself groaning and muttering out of bed, and pushed through the bars of Azure’s cage the lettuce leaves she had brought home for him last night, she jammed on her flat straw hat and walked a different way to the market, to try to break up the deadly sameness of another deadly day.
It was one of those think Canterlot mornings when you can’t see who you are much before noon, and the light from a busy little shop fell pleasantly on the street corner ahead. It was a bakery. Two mares, one quite young, one older, were arranging cupcakes in the window and on the shelves, chatting to each other, like old friends.
Applestia walked into the bakery and ordered herself a cupcake. She sat down at a table and brooded there for some time, warming her hooves round the freshly made delight, before she became aware that last night's stranger was in there too, in the circle round the fire, his glasses clear over his bright blue eyes, and horn glowing with magic.
“Go on, Jet,” Bruce Mane was saying. “How bout me?”
“A-ow aba-out may?” The gray stallion imitated it carefully, like a foal repeating a lesson. “Unmistakably Neigh Zealand, I’d say.”
“ Struth, you can’t fault ‘im. Bet yer a screw of tobaccer yer can’t guess.”
“Do me.” “Guess me.” “Where was I borned then?” The thickset stallions and bundled up mares clamored at him from all round the group, and more colts and fillies wandered over from other parts of the market to see what was up.
“I’m not a music-hall turn,” the stallion said quite politely.
“What's the game then?” Bruce Mane asked suspiciously. “If you can’t make a livin at it on the music halls, what’s the sense of it?”
“I do make a living, my dear fellow, but not on the stage. I am writing books about language. I teach it at the University of Canterlot. I give private lessons in speech. You do behold, in short” he bowed slightly from his seat on an upturned basket, “Equestria famous Jet Set, Professor of Phonetics.”
“What’s that when it’s at home?” Bruce Mane asked rudely, leering at him.
“The science of speech. The way people talk. I’ve studied it for years. You can probably tell if a stallion’s Stalliongradian or broad Beaumount. If he’s a Canterlot pony, which is my specialty at the moment, I can tell you what street.”
A bit out of their depth, the crowd shifted and muttered uneasily, looking at each other to see what to say, and the stranger’s noticing eye fell on Applestia, frowning over her cupcake at the back of the group.
“We’ve heard nothing from Miss Little Apple Acres today. You were vocal enough last night. Where’s your tongue this fair morning?”
She stuck it out at him, and hoped it looked as bilious as it felt.
“Aha… the morning after. Well, it happens to the best of us.”
“Speak fer yerself,” Applestia growled. “Ah never touched a drop in my life.”
“What’s up then?” Jet… what’s his name? ... Jet Set smiled at her quite kindly. For all his outlandish talk, there were fleeting moments when you felt he might be almost a normal pony.
“Ah been slighted, that’s what.” She told him about her father and her landpony, half glad of his interest and the sympathy of the rest of them.
“Tchk, tchk.” He clicked his teeth. “But it’s no surprise.”
Applestia jumped up and faced him, bristling all over. She could even feel her hat brim quivering with rage. “Ya watch yer tongue, mister! Ah may be no oil paintin’, but ah don’t look as bad as all that!”
“You may have seen yourself in shop windows,” he said, guessing correctly that she had no mirror. “But have you ever listened to yourself?”
“How could ah, yer stupid…”
“If you came home with me, I could reproduce your dulcet tones on my recording machine. The marvels of phonographic science.” (Half of what he said Applestia could not properly understand.” “But since I’ll be dashed if I’ll invite you home,” he wrinkled his nose, “you’ll have to take my word for it. It’s not only the way you look, it’s the way you talk.”
“What’s wrong wit the way ah say things?”
“Out of your own mouth! ‘Wot’s wrong wit the wye ah sez things? ’”
Although the rest of the ponies talked the same as either Jet or Applestia, the crowd round the fire laughed, because it sounded so funny, coming out of the mouth of this surprising Jet Set gent.
“What did ah ought to have said ter them fancy ponies?” Applestia backed away, as if they were laughing at her. She talked to the unicorn, and kept her eyes on him.
“Try this another time: ‘Were you wanting extra help?’ That would sound so nice and refined, they might not notice you weren’t quite dressed for the part.”
Applestia took a deep breath. “Were you…” That sounded wrong to her. “Were ya wantin’ extra help?”
Jet screwed up his face as if he’d bitten on a sour apple. “Listen, filly. ‘Were you wanting extra help?’”
“Were ya wantin’ extra help?”
The crowd laughed again, and she yelled at them. “All right, you try it! You try it, if yall are so clever, ya stupid varmints!” She ran away, pursued by the same kind of empty cackling that would laugh at a drunken old mare, or a dog with a tin can tied to its tail.
In her narrow little room, with only Azure to listen, his right head cocked intelligently and his eyes unwinking, Applestia practiced the question which would unlock all doors for her. When she thought it sounded perfect, just like Fancypants, she took it along to the upper-class roads of Canterlot. She found a group and confronted them.
“Were yew wantin’ extra help?”
They laughed at her. Like the thick-headed idiots in the bakery, they laughed at her, and their laughter was even more unkind, because they all had clean manes and clean clothes and clean hooves and faces and should have known better.
After this, there was no more Professor Jet to be seen in Market Square, with his long tweed coat and quirky eyebrows and his eyes that saw a joke where no one else did guessing, “Neigh Zealand” and “Hoofton,” as easy as kiss your hoof.
Applestia did not expect to see him again. He had finished with them and done, like a flower split open to see how the seeds formed, and then thrown in the gutter.
Hearth’s Warming had come and gone, with nothing to mark it but the memory, grown dimmer each year, of her mother decorating a puny tree, and making a cloth animal for her, one each year. Applestia kept them all, but when they moved to Hoofton Road, Mrs. Highcastle had burned them in the kitchen stove, in case they carried bugs from Little Apple Acres.
And then on Saturday night when they had been performing the opera Hooferdammerung , Applestia saw him again.
“Buy a treat fer yer lady, sir?” She was just shoving her basket of apple goods under the nose of one of those pink-cheeked young simpletons with a bored filly on his leg wondering why she had gone to all that trouble with her dress and mane to spend an evening with this , when she saw him.
Jet came out of the Opera House with the chattering crowd, elegant in evening dress, with a black cape and a silk top hat which he clapped at a dashing slant onto the side of his head.
“How much are the fr-fr-fr-fritters?” Before the pink-cheeked young colt could stutter it out, Applestia had turned her back on him, and slipped through the crowd.
“Apple fer a snack, Professor?”
Jet was with a friend, a white stallion with a blue mane and bright blue eyes. He wore a monocle in front of his eye and had a very dignified expression.
“And so I tried to show her, my dear Fancypants…” As Applestia bumped her basket into the diamond studs on his coat, the professor said, “Speak of the devil! Here she is. Miss Little Apple Acres right here. I never thought I’d see you still street peddling.”
Jet asked her to repeat the words he had told her to say the night before. She repeated what she had said, and Jet, rot and blast his soul, laughed at her too, standing there outside the Opera House, with all the socialites looking in sideways surprise at him, and the duchesses raising their lorgnettes.
“Don’t laugh at the poor mare, Jet.” The white stallion caught his leg. “Come on, or we’ll never get a taxi.”
“I just want you to hear her talk. She’s so deliciously, hopelessly, incurably the crude voice of Canterlot.”
Fancypants tried to pull him toward the street, but Jet drew him back against the poster of a huge Stalliongradian mare on the wall, pushing Applestia in front of them.
“Wait, Fancypants. Just listen to her a minute. Part of your education. This is Fancypants, my dear. He’s an entrepreneur of Canterlot,” he said seriously, as if she could understand what he was talking about. “He’s come all the way from the most prestigious areas to work with me on a book about nineteenth-century international vowel sounds. Isn’t that exciting?”
“Yer making fun of me again.”
“Agyne . You see, Fancypants, how they murder the language?”
“Leave her alone. It’s not her fault. After all, she’s never had anypony like you to teach her.” Although Fancypants seemed a kinder stallion than Jet, he was a bit toady, as if he were trying to flatter the professor. Perhaps Jet was somepony famous after all, though Applestia doubted it, after the way the duchesses had looked at him.
“That’s true,” said Jet, accepting the flattery. “I’ll bet you I could take a filly like this… any filly right out if the gutter… and in six months I could teach her to talk like a proper mare. Pass her off anywhere in society.”
“Ha ha ha!” The monocle of Fancypants fell to the ground as he threw back his head and laughed. “You’re quite a comedian, aren’t you, my dear chap?” He replaced his monocle. “Now that you’ve had your joke let’s get on home. There was some talk of brandy, if I….”
“No carriages about…. fine night…. trot it….”
Applestia hardly heard what they said as they moved away. There was an excited ringing in her ears, and an idea charging about in her mind like a dog trying to get out of a cage.
Keeping close to walls and railings, slipping across open spaces like a phantom, Applestia followed them, their long shadows thrown ahead as they passed a lamppost, thrown behind by the next lamp, and then forward as they passed it. It was a long trot. Up Charing Cross Road, then cutting though the hushed impressive squares where only one family lived in each pillared mansion.
Applestia had never been this way before. She marked the name on a corner sign, Whinnypole Street, and hung back as the professor, trotting jauntily, and Fancypants, slightly puffed, turned up a set of black-and-white marble steps and went inside. When the heavy double door shut behind them, she nipped forward and saw the number on the arched fanlight above the door. 27a Whinnypole Street. A light came on in an upstairs window, and she caught a glimpse of Fancypants, rubbing his hooves as he went toward the fireplace, before a thin white pony drew the velvet curtains across and shut Applestia out.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mrs. Highcastle always went to Pegasus races on Sundays, sitting bolt upright in a stiff guardsman’s coat buttoned high on the neck and a black tricorn hat, with eyes aimed like rifles at the leading Pegasi.
So the next morning, with the landpony at races, and Apple Cider asleep on his back and snoring, Applestia went down to Mrs. Highcastle’s ground-floor rooms and borrowed her spring hat with the roses and her ostrich feather boa. The hat was too big. It spun round on her head if turned too quickly. The feather boa, which was shedding a bit, like the old dog it was, tickled her nose and made her eyes water. But she felt quite posh enough for any Jet Set as she retraced her steps along the quiet Sunday pavements to 27a Whinnypole Street.
She had rehearsed what she would say. When a butler opened the door… a butler ! She hadn’t reckoned with a butler! She said: “Ah want to see Professor Jet. Ah have some property of his.”
“I’ll take it.” The butler, who looked like a worried monkey with gray side whiskers, not all that alarming, reached out, but Applestia held on to the leather glove which had once clothed the left hoof of the late Mr. Highcastle.
“Ah’ll give it to him meself.”
“I’m sorry, miss, I really can’t allow…”
“And ah’m sorry, but ah can’t allow none either. That makes two of us.”
Although the butler was dressed in a black jacket and striped trousers, and spoke in accents most refined, she recognized, underneath the clothes and the accent and the silvery whiskers, a fellow country pony like herself, come up in the world.
“I’ll thank you to remove yourself, my dear foal.” He wasn’t as tall as she.
“And ah’ll thank ya to git out of my way before ah…”
“What’s all the shouting? Shut that door Nutterville, there’s an infernal draft.” From the top of the stairs in a Paisley silk dressing gown with a tasseled sash, Professor Jet frowned down at them. “What’s going on down there?”
“It’s this young filly, sir. She…”
“Sweet Celestia, it’s Little Apple Acres. What the hay…”
“It seems she picked up your glove, sir.”
“Bring her up, bring her up. I say, Fancypants, this is extraordinary,” he called over his shoulder. “Here’s your education again, paying us a formal call. What a joke.”
No joke thought Applestia, as the trotted up the red carpet. She was shown into a large warm room full of deep chairs and rugs and desks and lamps and strange machinery, and books and books and books. All the books in the world on these walls. Where did he put the wallpaper? She stood in the middle of a deep carpet.
“Hello! What are you doing here?” From the depths of a chair in the corner, Fancypants arose, like a monster from the sea.
Applestia turned too fast, and had to straighten her hat.
“That’s not my glove, anyway,” said Jet.
“Ah know it’s not,” Applestia said pertly, as the door shut behind the butler. “It was just an excuse to git in. Ah want ter ask yer something.”
“You’ve got nerve.” Jet dropped into a chair. “Go away.” He closed his eyes. “You’re bringing on a headache.”
“Let’s hear her anyway.” Fancypants came forward to Applestia. “Sit down, my dear. Don’t be nervous.”
“Ah ain’t.” Applestia sat down on the edge of the chintzy sofa, tossing back the end of the feather boa, which kept rising up and threatening to choke her.
“Come on, come on.” Jet spoke with his eyes closed. “We haven’t got all day. I’m busy.”
“Well, this is business,” Applestia said, “so ah ain’t wastin’ yer time. In fact, ah’m bringin’ ya a stroke of good fortune, though ah say it myself.”
“Get on, foal. Get on with it.”
“Well, ya know what ya said down the market that day when all the colts and them were there, and you were guessin’ where they were borned, and that? Beaumount, Buckington, Neigh Zealand. Ya told ‘em you give lessons, didn’t ya, in speakin’ right? Well, ya have got a new customer. Ah’ve come fer me first lesson.”
“You must be mad.” Jet opened his eyes and sat upright. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Ah can pay, if that’s what ya mean,” Applestia said sharply. For months she had been saving for a warm coat, hiding bits in a paper bag under her pillow where Mrs. Highcastle could not claim them for rent, nor her father wheedle them out of her for beer.
“How much do you think I get for giving private speech lessons?” he asked, amused.
“Ah don’t know.” She looked round the room, at the comfortable furniture, the long brown velvet curtains, the cushions, the rugs, the lather-bound books, the complicated machinery. “But ah’ve got almost 70 bits saved. Now that’s a lot of money, mind.”
Jet laughed, but Fancypants said, “It is a lot, to her.”
“I don’t care if it’s a fortune,” Jet said irritably. “The girl is out of her mind, and I won’t listen to any more of her nonsense.” He reached behind him and pressed a bell on the wall.
“Out of my mind, am ah? Well, ah’ve got ears just the same. Were you out of yer mind last night when ya said to this here gentlecolt with the glasses, ‘Ah could take a filly like that and teach her to talk like a lady’?”
“You did, you know, Jet.” Fancypants nodded.
“He looked across the room at Applestia. The hat with the roses was wobbling over one eye. Her mane was coming down. She had a bit of ostrich feather up her nose and was wiping it away with her hoof. “And yet, you know,” he said thoughtfully, “it would be a bit of a lark. This hopeless guttersnipe… what a test of my skill.”
“Look here, I’ll lay you a bet! If you can make this poor filly into a proper mare, if you can pass her off in society at some grand affair like the Gala, I’ll pay all the expenses of it. Your fees for lessons, dance instruction, deportment, clothes, furs, jewels whatever she’d need.”
“It is tempting…”
“You rang, sir?” The butler opened the door.
“A mistake.” He waved a hoof without looking at him, and the butler went out, with a critical glance at Applestia on the sofa, as if he were thinking the cover would have to be washed after she left.
“If you can do it, you’ll be the greatest teacher in the world, and I’ll shout it from the rooftops!”
“Could it be done?”
“By you, it could.”
As they talked excitedly across her, Applestia turned her head from one to the other, the hat rocking like a boat in a rough sea.
“I’ll do it! I’ll take your bet!”
“Done!” They stood up and clasped hoofs.
Applestia jumped up too. “Wait just a second,” she said. “You’ve fergot one little detail, gents.” They turned in surprise, as if a grub had come out of the rose on her hat and spoken up.
“You’ve fergot to ask me.”
“It’s all settled.”
“Mot by me, it ain’t.” Ooh, he was a conceited devil. “Ah’ve got ideas of me own and feelins too, much as it may surprise you. Well…” She smiled from one to the other of them, making them wait, feeling her power. “Maybe ah will, and maybe ah won’t.”
“Oh, quiet.” Jet pricked the bubble of her power. “Don’t try to be coy with me. I don’t like mares. I learned that years ago to stay clear of them, so don’t expect me to treat you like a filly, or to notice how you look, or flirt with you or any rot like that.”
“How dare you!” Applestia tossed back the boa with an air. “If you were the last stallion in Equestria…”
“Though she isn’t as bad looking as all that, actually,” Fancypants said, screwing in his monocle, “under all the dirt.”
“Thanks fer nothing” Applestia growled, but Professor Jet said cheerfully, “Soon get that off!!” He went to the fireplace and picked up a tube like a snake that hung from the wall.
“What's that?” Applestia asked suspiciously.
“Speaking tube.” He put his lips to it and blew. In a moment, a hollow cackle could be faintly heard, as if there were a prisoner in a dungeon miles below.
“Ask Mrs. Crust to come up here, would you?” Jet said, and put the stopper back in the end of the tube. “She’ll fix you,” he told Applestia.
“Ah’m off.” She got up and went toward the door.
“No, no, you foal.” The professor was a man of many faces, depending on whether he was getting his own way. He pouted now, like a spoiled foal. “You’re not going to ruin everything, and make me lose the bet, and spoil all my fun.” He got between her and the door. “Listen, you ungrateful creature. I’m offering you far more than you’ve ever had in the whole of your miserable life. I’m offering you clothes, jewels, carriages, ball gowns, champagne and chocolates, rich young colts who will swoon at your hooves…”
“Get out!” Now she knew he was insane. “Me?”
“Yes, you, filly. You want to be a lady. You said so.”
“Ah never…”
“Yes, you did. You want to talk right, so you can go anywhere and they won’t laugh at you, don’t you?”
“Ah might get a job in upper Canterlot?” She looked up at him, and saw that his pout had changed to the eager smile that was so catching you had to smile back, however uncertain you felt.
“You might. You might indeed. You shall!” He grabbed her grubby hooves as if he were going to swing her off the ground.
The door opened, and a canary-yellow pony with a lavender and white mane stood there regarding him severely.
He dropped Applestia's hooves, and rubbed his own together.
“Take her away, Upper Crust, and clean her up. Give her a bath. Wash her mane. Throw away those clothes, or burn them. Find her something she can wear until we get her some decent things.”
“You’ll pardon me,” said Upper crust, “but I’ve been your housekeeper for ten years, Jet, and given satisfaction, I hope, and I think I’m entitled to ask for an explanation.”
“It’s like this Upper Crust,” Fancypants said soothingly. It was obviously his part in life to step in and smooth down the rough spots raised by the ruthlessness of ponies like Jet. “The professor and I have a new project. We’re going to… help this nice young filly to make something out of herself.”
Upper Crust stared at Applestia without comment.
“In short, we’re going to make a lady of her. Won’t that be fun?”
“You’ll never do it,” and “Fun for who?” said Upper Crust and Applestia at the same time, and glared at each other.
“Oh, yes, we will. With your help.” He was a great flatterer, Fancypants was. “Six months, that’s all it’s going to take, and then we’ll pass her off in the highest society.”
“And then what, may I ask?”
“Oh…” said Jet vaguely, “that’s her affair. Don’t be such a wet blanket, Upper Crust.”
“If it’s not too dampening to your spirit, Professor, may I enquire what is her name?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Call her anything you like.”
“My name’s Little Applestia, and don’t you ferget it.”
“Applestia.” The professor dropped his chin into his hoof in thought. “Yes, well, I daresay we can do something about that.”
“I still don’t quite understand, sir.” She understood all right, but didn’t want to. “You mean you’re actually going to take this young person into the house, and, as it were, remold her?”
:Precisely. Like a sculptor.” Jet made shaping movements with his hooves. “Now take her along, there’s a good Upper Crust, and find her a room and fix her up. I don’t want to see her again until she’s clean.”
“I don’t like to speak out of turn,” said Upper Curst, although she was obviously in the habit of saying what she liked when she liked in the household, “but you can’t just pick ponies up like pebbles, Professor. This young Miss…. miss….”
“Applestia,” muttered Applestia, who was beginning to feel depressed by all the talk.
“She must belong to somepony. What about your father, little filly?”
“Oh, he won’t care. Ah’m in his way really, and he’s in mine. Sometimes ah wish it was him and not my mum who died. Does that sound wicked?” She turned to the professor, because Upper Crust would be sure to say yes.
“Not at all. There have been times when I’ve whished I’d been born an orphan,” Jet said, unsmiling. You never quite knew whether he was joking or not. Even Fancypants did not always know. That was why he said, “Ha ha ha” nervously, and dropped his monocle.
Upper Crust heaved a great sigh. “Come along then, Applestia.” She jerked her head toward the door. “We’ll have to see what we can do.”
“Oh no.” Applestia clutched the feather boa, as if she were going to be stripped right there on the carpet. “Ah’m goin home, Ah’ve got to… got to miss my dad good-bye.”
She had not kissed Apple Cider for years, but she was not going to move in here without her bird Azure, that was one thing sure.
“How do we know you’ll come back?” Jet narrowed his eyes at her.
“Ah’ll leave you my valuable furs. Here ya are.” She unwound Mrs. Highcastle’s molting feather boa and handed it haughtily to Upper Crust, who looked as if she had been handed a bad fish.
Nutterville, the butler, was summoned to show Applestia out. At the front door, he said, “Shall I call my lady’s carriage?” and made a rude noise with his lips.
“Ah’ll be comin’ to live here, my good stallion,” Applestia said. “So watch yer manners.”
Out on the pavement, walking in a kind of a dream toward Hoofton Road, she suddenly realized that although the professor and Fancypants had got the whole thing fixed up, she had never actually told them “Yes.”
Back at the house in Hoofton Road, Applestia dropped Mrs. Highcastle’s big rose-garden hat over the railing into the basement dustbin, where old mare could find it when she went poking to see if anypony had thrown food out, and think what she liked.
The kitchen door was open and when the landpony heard Applestia come in, she called out, “You’re two hours late for dinner, so don’t come whining to me, my filly.”
Applestia went into the kitchen. “Ah couldn’t touch a thing,” she said grandly, although even the word dinner made the juices come to her mouth. As she left 27a Whinnypole Street, she had smelt roasting hay fries and potatoes baking in their jackets and the sweet spicy perfume of apple pie, and almost fainted from desire, right there on the checkerboard tiles of the front hall.
“Is the old colt in?” If he was, she was going to silently trot past his door and get away without telling him where she was going. She owed him nothing. She wanted nothing form him. He wouldn’t miss her. If Jet or Fancypants gave her any money, she might send him some, andhe would be glad that she had gone “to a better world,” as the preachers said, though they didn’t mean Whinnypole Street.
“The old colt?” Mrs. Highcastle shook her purple helmet of a mane carefully, so it wouldn’t come down. “He’s gone off with his crowd of drunkards. Somepony’s birthday they’re going to celebrate. We’ll not see him for three days at least, and nor will the corporation dustcart. I am going to tell you straight, Applestia, if he gets the push, it’s out. Highcastle by name but not by heart, but I won’t be put upon, and if he goes, you go too, and good riddance.”
“Oh, don’t bother about me,” Applestia said. “Ah’m off anyway. Ah shan’t trouble ya no more with my unwelcome company. Ah’m movin’ in with friends.”
“Hoity toity,” said Mrs. Highcastle, obviously thrown off balance. For the first time, Applestia was glad of the professor, rude and conceited and unfeeling as he was. Glad of Fancypants. Glad of the butler and Upper Crust, because of where they lived.
“Does your father know where you’re going?”
“Oh, yes,” lied Applestia.
“He didn’t tell me.” Mrs. Highcaslte could not stand anything to happen, even a fire ten streets away, and not be the first to hear of it. “He knows you owe me money, I suppose.”
“What fer?”
Mrs. Highcastle thought quickly. “Your share in this month’s coal.”
Applestia laughed, right in her face, for if there had been any fires in that house she had felt the heat of none of them. “Here’s my new address then,” she said. “27 a Whinnypole Street. Ya can send me the bill.”
And see if ah’ll pay she thought, running up the stairs, whistling to Azure. The bird and the cage and the paper bag of money were all she took. She had nothing else.
Arriving back at Whinnypole Street in a carriage, she met Fancypants on the front steps, and asked him to pay the fare.
“My word, you’re learning fast,” he said admiringly. “I believe we shall make a lady of you yet.”
Upper Crust gave a short squawk when she saw the bird cage, but it turned out that the butler liked birds, if only to spite Upper Crust. The butler and housekeeper, Applestia soon began to see, waged a kind of underground cold warfare. As housekeeper, Upper Crust thought herself head of the household, and let nopony forget it. So if she said, “The bird goes out,” Nutterville said, “He shall hang in the sunny window in the butler’s pantry,” and bore him off, chirping merrily.
Upper Crust pushed Applestia up the back stairs, pinching her foreleg to relieve her feelings.
“I’m not going to let you meet the rest of the domestic staff before you’ve had a bath.” She took Aplestia into a huge bathroom with a tub that had feet like lion’s claws, and a brass geyser that coughed and rattled and let off a cloud of steam like a locomotive when she turned the knobs.
“A bath? Ah don’t want a bath. Ah had one last month.” A bath was something you took two or three times a winter in the public bathhouse, mostly to get warm. Applestia didn’t think she was going to like Upper crust. She had a motherly shape and round pudgy face like a muffin, but there was nothing else cozy about her.
“And catch me death of cold? Not ah.”
“You’ll have to get used to it. Ladies bathe every day.”
“Ah don’t want to be a lady then.”
“But a lady you shall be,” Upper Crust said firmly, several times in the course of scrubbing Applestia, washing her mane and tying it back in a thick wet ponytail, and fitting her out in a plain pinafore dress that belonged to the housemaid. “A lady you shall be, if it kills us all. As well it may,” she said, planting Applestia in front of a mirror, and standing back to see what she thought of herself. “As well as it may.”
“Oh my stars and garters,” Applestia said peering. “Is that me?”
“Oh my stars,” said upper Crust, allowing herself a smile. “It is.”
The filly who looked at Applestia out of the mirror had big green eyes and thick green mane, a pale yellow coat, and a soft wide mouth that began to curve upward in delight.
“Hey…” she said in wonder. “Ah ain’t bad lookin’.”
“Whose room is this?” There was a chest of drawers, a little armchair, a dressing table, a bed with a flowered spread and three pillows.
“It’s yours.”
“Mine!”
“As long as you keep it clean and tidy,” Upper Crust said. “Otherwise you’ll go down next to the coal hole.” She jabbed a hoof downward as if she were pointing to hell.
“Mine.” There were flowered curtains at the window, and outside, the top branches of a tree, bare against the darkening sky. Three pillows! Applestia could have cried, but she wasn’t going to let the old mare see that it was paradise.
From far below, a gong sounded up the back stairs. “Are you hungry?” Upper Crust asked.
“Starvin.” It was so long since Applestia had eaten anything, she could not remember what it was. Oh yes, that pumpkin pie she had shared with Willow last night before she went to catch the ponies coming out of the opera. Willow! What would he do? He was the only one she minded about.
“You’ll take your meals with us in the servant’s hall of course.”
“Of course.” Applestia had no idea what a servant's hall was. It turned out to be a long, comfortable room in the basement next to the great stone-floored kitchen, with easy chairs before the fire, and a long table set with a white cloth and blue-and-white plates and more knives and forks than anypony could need, unless they were going to steal them.
The butler and the mare servants were sitting at the table. They stared at Applestia, and she stared back at them, feeling her face on fire.
“Here she is,” Upper crust announced. “His lordship’s new experiment.”
Somepony giggled, and she added sharply. “You’ll treat her right, Diamond Mint, and all the rest of you, or you’ll get the back of my hoof across your ear.”
Applestia sat next to the filly who had giggled, a saucy country mare with a very light cyan coat and a lavender and light indigo mane. “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered, “She won’t eat you.”
“Ah could eat her,” Applestia whispered back. “Or anythin’ right about now.” There was a piece of bread on her plate, and she had to clutch her hooves in her lap to stop herself grabbing it and stuffing it into her mouth.
Upper Crust was saying a long and haughty grace, but at last the little kitchen maid came staggering in with a huge plate of hay fries. The butler began passing out plates, and that was the end of talk, or even thought, for Applestia, as she filled the hungry gap of years.
She was too busy to copy the way the others ate. “Table manners will have to be her first lesson, Mr. Nutterville,” Upper Crust said, as the teapot came in, and Applestia sat back and blew out her cheeks, wondering if she would ever be able to get up.
The butler, he was called Mr. Nutterville down here, very polite, although the professor called him Nutterville or Nutters, said, “If you want the others to treat her right, you’d better do the same yourself.”
Hear, hear! thought Applestia. He was going to be on her side. She sent him a wide smile down the table, and he grinned and winked at her and said, “Keep your chin up, mate,” just like any of her friends in the market.
“What’s that?” She jumped and spilled her tea, as a piercing whistle blew in the room.
“His highness.” Diamond Mint made a face.
Mr. Nutterville went to the speaking tube, which hung from the wall like the one in the professor’s room, removed a whistle from the end of it and said in his refined, upstairs voice, “You blew, sir?”
The distant hollow voice said something, and the butler answered, “Very good, sir,” and put the whistle back for its next deafening performance.
“He wants you upstairs, Miss Applestia.” He pointed at the ceiling and made a solemn face.
She jumped up, and Diamond said, “Don’t get excited, dearie. He’s not the answer to a maiden's prayer.”
They all laughed, and Applestia thought This is going to be a bit of all right. Ah shan’t care how strict or rude them two are up there wit their old lessons. We’ll laugh about them down here and have more fun than they do.
The upstairs room was called the study. The fire was burning in a bright glow, and Jet and Fancypants were in such deep chairs that all she could see of them was their hooves stuck out on the brass fender, a hoof in one chair holding a glass of brandy, a hoof in the other dangling a cigar.
“The young pony, sir.” Nutterville sent her into the room and shut the door behind her. He wasn't going to let his tea get cold, even if hers had to.
“Come here, Applestia. Don’t stand there all night.”
She walked across the carpet and stood on the bearskin rug before the fire. The professor and Fancypants sat bolt upright as if she were the princess come to pay a surprise call.
“By Celestia, you wouldn’t know it was the same filly. When we get you some pretty clothes, you’ll be a knockout,” Fancypants said, screwing the glass round and round in his eye to see more of her.
“Git away, you old ham,” Applestia said, “Ah know yer kind.”
Jet winced. “Seeing her spruced-up exterior, one forgets how vile she still is within. Say, ‘Get away’ Applestia.”
“Git way.”
“No, no. Get a-way.”
“That’s what ah said.”
“Tomorrow, we shall make some recordings of your voice. Then you’ll be able to hear, if you can stand it, just what you sound like. Fancypants and I have mapped out a program for you.” He pointed to a large chart which hung on the wall behind the leather-topped desk. “Lessons begin at nine a.m. sharp.” He pulled himself up out of the deep chair like a stork unfolding from a nest. “Come, I’ll show you some of the apparatus.”
One end of the room turned round a corner, and was lined on three sides with books. Below the books were shelves and tables and trestles and tripods, holding all kinds of strange machinery, with wires and needles and trumpets and snaking tubes, and a weighted stick that raced madly back and forth- tick, tock, tick, tock- when she put a hoof to it.
“Here. What ya goin to do… torture me?”
“If you work hard and do what you’re told,” Jet said, “there won’t be any torture. Except to me,” he added, making the screwed-up pickle face again.
He stopped the tick-tock machine. “That’s a metronome, which is used to get perfect timing. It will also help you with your piano practice.”
“Piano! Ya didn’t say nothin’ about piano.”
“All part of a young lady’s cultural education,” Fancypants said. He got up and went over to the little piano that stood against a wall, with centaurs and Cerberuses painted on its graceful front. “Let’s test your musical ear.” He played a few bars. “What’s that?”
“Oh, shut up. If ya think ah don’t know ‘Celestia Save the Moon’…”
“It happens to be Beethoofen’s Pomp and Circumstance .”
“She’ll come to it, Fancypants. Don’t rush her. After all, there wouldn't be any point to the bet if she weren’t the most ignorant cabbagehead that ever came out of the back slums of nowhere. Excuse me.” He bowed. “Little Apple Acres. Here’s the recording machine, Applestia. The very latest model. You talk into this little receiver here, and that makes the needle print on this wax cylinder as it goes round, and presto! Your voice will come out of this big green horn just as if you were inside the box.”
“Ah never!” Applestia forgot how annoying he was, because the machine was so fascinating. “Ya mean ah could really hear myself?”
“You may regret it. Try something.”
“All right. Anything for a lark. Like me to give ya a song?”
The professor turned a knob, the cylinder began to roll, and Applestia clasped her hooves in front of the pinafore dress which felt so strangely stiff and clean, leaned forward to the receiver and sang one of the songs from the bad old days at the textile factory.
My old colt said, “Follow the van,
“Sweet Celestia, I like that!” Fancypants struck a couple of chords on the piano. “How does it go?” He picked up the tune as she sang it again, and they ended up singing together.
Oh, ya can’t trust a special like an old time copper,
“Well, well! Applestia, we’d make a fortune on the music halls.” Fancypants beamed at her, and mopped his white forehead with a great colored handkerchief.
Applestia was flushed and happy, but the professor clicked off the machine and said, “You’d better get to bed.”
“Ain’t ah goin’ to hear me lovely voice?”
“Tomorrow, perhaps, if you’re a good filly. Remember, nine o’clock sharp, I said. If you’re late late, you will get no lunch.”
Outside on the landing at the top of the stairs, Applestia did something she was to do many many times before the six months were up. She turned and stuck out her tongue as far as it would go at the oak-paneled door of Professor Jet Set’s study.
Nutterville
“Now, just once more, Applestia. Say your vowels, and try to get it right this time.”
“Ah know my vowels.”
“Say them.”
“A. E. Ah. Ow. You.”
“Listen to me. A-E-I-O-U. Doesn’t that sound better?”
“Lovely,” said Applestia. “A. E. Ah. Ow. You.”
“Now, Applestia,” said Jet patiently, although his mouth was a straight line and you could almost smell the sulphurous volcano smoldering within. “You wouldn’t want me to give up in the very first week, would you?”
“At this rate, ah wouldn’t give a blow. This is much more borin’ than what we ever done at the factory. We used to draw pictures there, and say pomes and that.”
“All right.” Jet got up from his seat across the desk from where she sat in a hard straight chair, day after day, moving her mouth to match his, trying to copy the gibberish sounds he made. Vowels! Whoever invented them, she’d gladly strangle him. “All right. We’ll recite some poetry, if that's what you like. What’s your favorite?”
Applestia thought back into the dark mists of her factory days with cracked windows stuffed up with newspaper, and mice running over your feet after the sandwich crumbs.
“Baa baa, black sheep?” she offered.
“I’m not familiar with that.” It was hard to imagine that Jet had ever been a foal. He was born in long tweed trousers and a sporty yellow waistcoat with a chain across it for the turnip watch with which he timed the lessons of unfortunate flower fillies.
“How about Good King What’s-is-name?”
“I think we’ll save that for next Hearth’s Warming. I don’t feel strong enough for it now.” The professor went over to the bookcase and reached up for a book. Fancypants had the magic to grab books on high shelves, but used the stepladder. The ladder was fun. Applestia climbed it when she got the chance, and sat on the top step, looking out through the window at the well-bred life of Whinnypole Street: the carriages and chauffeurs, and the uniformed Pegasi, and the dolled-up ladies and gents with their little dogs and foals, who looked much too neat and clean to be real.
But she wasn’t there for fun, as the professor reminded her twenty times a day, so he always said, “Get down. Ladies don't sit on stepladders.”
And when she sat on the chair by the desk, Fancypants would fuss at her. “Don’t sprawl. Ladies keep their back straight and their hooves in their laps.
“Ah hate ladies.” She had decided that in the first two days. She was never going to be one, not if
“Here we are. Alonso Lord Saddleson.” He put an open book into her hooves.
“One of the socials, eh? Ah didn’t know lords had ter work fer a livin.”
“People like Saddleson don’t think of writing poetry as work.”
“It is, though.”
“How do you know? Have you ever written any?” That dancing, eager sparkle leaped into Jet’s blue eyes.
“Git away. Ah mean, that putting words down on paper, that’s a lot of work. My dad wrote a letter once, and it took him three days. Nearly killed him.”
A few tears cane into the back of her eyes at the thought of her father. She had wanted to get away from him, but it was insulting that he had not even tried to get her back.
“Read here.” His eyes had gone chilly and severe again. “Say it after me: Come into the garden, Maud, for the black bat, Night, has flown. ”
“Come inter the garden, Maw-aw-awd . Cuz he was touch fresh, wasn’t he?”
Jet continued, “Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone. ”
“Well, she didn’t expect him to bring all his friends, did she? Come inter the garden, Maud… blast it!” She threw the book away and collapsed in giggles, her hooves over her eyes. “Ah can’t say that stuff, professor. It’s too daft.”
Diamond Mint, who was the parlormaid, came in with two cups of coffee and two croissants on a tray.
“Nothing for me?”
“Upper Crust said you weren’t to have anything between meals,” Diamond said primly, but as she passed close to Applestia’s chair, she dropped a ginger cake into her lap.
Applestia crammed it into her mouth while the professor wasn’t looking, and when he suddenly said, “Say your vowels!” she spluttered and choked and sprayed the carpet with crumbs.
“All right,” he said, “if you insist on putting things into your mouth, we’ll do the marbles again.”
“Oh, not the marbles!” He was a torturer after all. Those guards with the rack and thumbscrews, up at the Tower of Canterlot, they had nothing on him.
He took six marbles out of his pocket and put them in her mouth, and she sat there looking at him, her eyes and cheeks bulging.
“All right, we’ll try nursery rhymes, since you’re not ready for Saddleson. Mareseille Bridge is falling down, falling, falling down . Let me hear each word, clear as a bell.”
“Ma-sa Bwa ith fawa da…” She looked up at him like a despairing spaniel, and Fancypants grunted himself up out his chair in the corner and said, “Don’t be too hard on the filly, Jet. I’m not sure it’s legal.”
Fancypants could be almost as devilish as Jet when he got carried away by teaching, but he was at least not insane, which Applestia was sure by now the professor was. “Come on Applestia,” he said, “we know it’s difficult, but if you’ll just try your best…”
“Don’t slop over her,” Jet said sharply. “You don’t train a dog by stroking it.”
“Ah ain’t a dog!” Applestia cried, and gave a shriek. “Sweet Celestia! Ah’ve swallowed one!”
“That’s all right,” said Jet comfortably, putting his hoof in his pocket. “I’ve got plenty more.”
He tried to make her mumble on about Mareseille Bridge, until she was near tears. “It’th impoth…” She spat the marbles into her hoof and dropped them in his coffee cup. “It’s impossible. Ah ain’t goin to try no more.”
“If Demosthenes could do it, you can.”
“Who’s he and when he’s at home?”
“He was an ancient Pegasus who had almost as many problems as you… no breath, no enunciation… a complete disaster. But he trained himself to become a great speaker by shouting at the sea with his mouth full of pebbles.”
“Yes,” said Fancypants gloomily, “and look what he came to in the end. Suicide.”
“If you’re not going to help, I wish you’d go away.”
“And leave you with this wretched mare? No, sir.”
“When’s lunch?” Applestia asked.
“Not till you’ve done your breathing. The secret of all good speech is breath control, as I think I’ve told you.”
“Only half a derzon times.” She had to stand on a certain rose right in the middle of the carpet, the respiration rose, he called it, and not breathe in the ordinary way she had been breathing for eighteen years. Ho no, that was much too simple for his Lord High Jet Set. She had to take a deep breath and hold it while she moved her stomach in and out like a carriage horse with the heaves. Oh, it was sickening. And then he would hold a candle in front of her face and make her say, “Ha ha ha. Has Harold had any hurricanes over in Hoofshire?”
If she sounded the h properly, the candle flame would flicker. She did this for ten minutes by Jet’s watch, until she was dizzy from lack of breath, and if that Harold had come home from Hoofshire, she would have slapped him across is haggravating face.
By midday each day, she was ready to run away and never come back. She could tell from the professor’s face, let alone the sarcastic things he said to her, that she wasn’t doing any better. She would never get it right. She would never be a lady. She would never get into the fairyland of high society, and when the professor made her say those rotting vowels, “Just five more times before lunch,” she knew she didn’t care.
But when she staggered downstairs and fell into her place at the table in the servants’ hall. (“Sit up straight, Applestia, and have you washed your hooves?”), not Jet, nor Fancypants, nor Upper Crust, nor not being allowed to eat hayburgers with your hooves could spoil the bliss of a three-course meal, with soup and hay and cupcakes and pudding, and often a hunk of pie besides.
After lunch she knew she would stay, if only to see what there would before dinner.
One day, when she had been in the house for over a week, Nutterville went up to answer the front door bell at teatime, and came back dusting off the tips of his white gloves delicately.
“Her grace is honoring us with a visit.”
“Sweet Celestia! A duchess?” Upper Crust had been drilling Applestia in who was what among the titled personages she would meet when she was launched into society, “if that day should ever come,” Upper Crust always added, in case Applestia should fancy herself.
Nutterville laughed. “Only Mrs. Lemon Set, mother of the great professor of that name.”
“Well, somepony had to be his mother, I suppose,” Diamond Mint said, and Applestia added, “Poor mare.”
“Now fillies, I won’t allow that sort of idle talk about the master,” fussed Upper Crust, although she allowed it all right if she was the one who started it. She got up. “I’ve a hundred things to do, even if nopony else has.” She never actually did anything but give orders, but her life’s cry was that she was the only one in the house who did any work. “You fillies get busy now. Applestia, help Diamond Mint to clear the table.” Applestia was not supposed to do any work with the servants, because she must spend all her time and energies at her lessons, but Upper Crust, who did not approve of a common country mare spending all that time upstairs with the master, was always finding jobs for her, “to keep her in her place.”
As soon as all the others except Diamond had left the room, Applestia went to the speaking tube and put her ear to it so that she could what was going on upstairs.
“You haven’t been near me for days, Jet, so I’ve come to see what you’re up to, you shocking creature.”
Talk about Demosthenes and pebbles in the mouth! Mrs. Set’s throaty aristocratic voice sounded as if she had a head full of burned currants. “Dear Celestia,” Applestia whispered to Diamond Mint, “am ah goin to sound like that ?”
“I told you, Mother, Fancypants and I have been very busy. We’re working on a special project.”
“What project, if I may be so inquisitive as to ask?”
“Well it’s… it’s a bit of a secret at present. You’ll know, of course, some day. The whole world will know.”
“Do you think the whole world will be interested in nineteenth-century international vowel sounds?” She made it sound like manure.
“International…? Oh, yes, the book. Yes, that’s it. We’re working on it night and day.”
“Day and night,” added Fancypants solemnly, in case she was not convinced.
So! They were not going to tell Mother about Applestia. She couldn’t be trusted not to spill the beans, probably. Applestia imagined her, a talkative old mare in a hat trimmed with poor murdered birds, chattering gossip and scandal all over the tea table.
“You ought to get out more, Jet. Be seen about at the right places. Ponies think it very strange that my brilliant son never goes with me anywhere. Not that I care what they think, but you ought to be looking for some nice harmless mares with looks and money.”
“I’ve got plenty.”
“Yes, you’ve made money, in your own funny, famous way. But your father always used to say, don’t you know, that inheriting money is so much less vulgar than earning it.”
Applestia almost exploded with laughter, right into the tube, which would have blown the whistle in the study and shaken the old mare up.
“I’m rather nervous, Jet, of these… what I call intelligent … mares you meet at the university. Promise me you'll never be tempted to marry one of those bluestocking creatures with thick legs and a mane like a bird’s nest.”
“I’ll never marry anyone, Mother,” he said irritably. “There’s no such thing as the kind of mare I…”
The door of the servants’ hall opened, and Applestia dropped the tube quickly and picked up a pile of plates.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The lessons went on, even on Sundays, and Applestia grew more unhappy and Jet grew more irritable. Even Fancypants was depressed, although he looked like winning his bet.
“But I’d be glad to lose,” he told her, “if you can be turned into a lady, like the toad who became a Princess, I shan’t care how much it costs me.”
The only progress Applestia seemed to be making was that when the professor played his voice and hers back to her on the recording machine, she began to be able to see the difference.
But what of it? Just because he didn’t talk like her, that didn’t make him right and her wrong, any more than the griffons were wrong because they didn’t speak Equestrian.
“Ah ain’t so sure ah want to talk like ya anyway,” she told him one day as he switched off another recording of that miserable Maud and her colt friend by the garden gate. “So help me, ah ain’t.”
“So help me,” he corrected. “I’m not.”
“So help me. So help me. I like mine better. What’s wrong wit the way ah speak? All my friends talk like that, and there’s nothin wrong wit them. Ah’ll kill the stallion who says there is. What’s it matter how ponies speak? What’s the point of all this?” She waved a hoof round at the study with its books and desks and dictionaries, which had once seemed like luxury but now a prison. “What’s the point of it all?”
“The point, my dear Miss Applestia, is that English is language of the greatest power and beauty, and you are murdering it with your ain’t. Since cavemen first scratched on stones, poets have been clothing passionate ideas and trumpet calls of glory in the splendid garb of the English language. The noblest sentiments that ever flowed in the hearts of stallions are contained in its extraordinary, imaginative, and musical mixture of sounds. And you are massacring it your So help me. Are you following me?”
“So help me no, ah ain’t.”
Fancypants knew a bit about birds, and they brought poor old Azure up from the butler’s pantry, and taught him a few elegant phrases, if only to show that he could do better than Applestia.
“Good morning,” he now said, instead of “Hullo,” and, “Excuse my glove.”
He hung in the window of the study and cheeped and whistled at the sparrows in the street, and said, “Excuse my glove, excuse my glove, excuse my glove,” until Fancypants threw a silk handkerchief over the cage to shut him up.
Jet had brought in a long mirror on a stand, and Applestia had to stand in front of it by the hour, with her hooves just so, one hoof against the other instep, and watch the movements of her lips and her pink tongue against her small white teeth.
“A. E. Ah. Ow. You.” In the mirror, she saw a filly in a long dark pleated dress with big pockets and buttons, which Fancypants said made her look studious. He and Upper Crust were in charge of clothes. Jet didn’t want to bother with that, though he was sharp enough if she came in with her cuffs unbuttoned or her mane untidy. In what she was beginning to think of as the dear old days of Hoofton Road, she had tied her hair and gathered it up all anyhow, with a few pins stuck in if she could find any. Now it was drawn smoothly back in two dark wings, falling shining behind her and tied with a big black bow. It was still hard to get used to herself.
“Stop admiring yourself,” the professor would snap. “You’re there to watch your lip movements, not the thrilling beauty of your countenance.”
He kept on at her and on at her and on at her, making her repeat over and over again the sounds which she could never hope to get right, and making her read endless passages from boring books she could not possibly understand.
Everypony except Jet was sorry for her. Even Upper Crust was not so hard on her now that she was not the professor’s pet, but his victim. Applestia was miserable upstairs, but below stairs they played cards and told fortunes in teacups, and had many honest laughs at the expense of the helpless gentry who paid good bits to servants for doing things they could have done themselves.
Mr. Nutterville, the butler, who had once been a jockey, had taken to Applestia as if she were a daughter. She called him Uncle Nutters. He dropped the fancy talk now, and answered her back in her own cockney, and went so far as to let her see that the dignified silvery side whiskers were stuck on with spirit gum.
He would take them off sometimes after supper and they would all have a glass of wine if he managed to smuggle some down from the dining room, and Applestia and he would entertain with duets of “Two Lovely Black Eyes”.
Some evenings the bell would ring or the whistle shriek rudely from the wall, and it would be a summons for Applestia to go back upstairs to Jet and Fancypants while they had their brandy and cigars.
“Rot them,” she said, but she had to go. In spite of all the rebellious talk, there was no mutiny in this house.
Sometimes it was lessons again, until she nearly dropped from exhaustion. Sometimes Fancypants would go to the piano and she would sing. They were trying to take the foggy Southern harshness out of her voice and put sweetness in.
They made her sing “Beautiful Dreamer,” and “You are the Honey, Honeysuckle, and I Am the Bee,” and “Cherry Ripe, Cherry Ripe,” and other such soppy ballads. If she tried hard, she was allowed to let herself go into her own kind of song, and the nicest times they had up there, with the fire a flickering glow and the winter night shut out, was when she sang for them “Won’t you Come Home, Bill Bailey,” and “My Old Colt Said Follow the Van.”
It was the only time the professor relaxed and enjoyed himself. You saw what he could be like if he was not possessed by his mania, like a drug or alcohol, to make a silk purse out of the sow’s ear that was Little Applestia.
One evening Uncle Nutters brought in the late post on a silver tray. There was a letter from Amareica, which made the professor get up and pace the floor, long legs spanning half a dozen roses on the carpet at each stride.
“Moral Reform League,” he fumed. “What do I care about moral reform, Applestia?”
“Ah dunno. Ah don’t even know what a moral is, let alone reform it.”
“Lucky filly. Morals is being told not to do what you want to do by somepony who doesn’t want to do it. Moral reform! Just because this Silver Snake is a millionaire, he thinks he can get me to drop everything and go charging across to make a speech at his annual meeting. It’s the third letter I’ve had. I can’t stop the wretched stallion.”
“Perhaps,” suggested Fancypants sensibly, “if you answered his letters, he might stop.”
“Brilliant, Fancypants, but I’m ahead of you. I’m already considering in my head the most insulting way of saying no. You shall write it, Applestia. That will be even more insulting.”
Breathing hard, tongue between teeth, hooves cramped round the pen, Applestia painfully wrote out what Jet told her. The lines ran crooked down the page and there were blots and even holes where the nib had caught the paper.
“Splendid!” Jet put it in an envelope and stamped it. “Run down to the corner right away and post it before I lose my nerve.”
“The day you lose that,” Applestia said, “Ah’ll know yer perishin well dead.”
She put on her warm coat and ran down to the red pillar box on the corner of the street, mane flying behind in the crisp cold night. It felt so good to be out and free and young that she ran all the way round the block of houses, and came back to number 27a panting and glowing.
A stallion was standing on the doorstep with his hoof on the bell. A stallion in a sagging leather jacket and a leather hat with a flap behind.
It was her father. Applestia was opening her mouth to say, “Hello, Dad,” when he stepped aside with unusual politeness and said, “Good evening, miss. Am I right for Professor Jet Set?”
He didn’t recognize her! He didn’t know his own daughter. Well, since he had not bothered whether she lived or died for three blooming weeks, she was not going to bother to tell him who she was.
Nutters opened the door, and Applestia went into the hall. “Tradesmen’s entrance is round the back,” he said as soon as he saw Little Apple Cider.
“Not for me, it ain’t,” he said. “I’ve come to see my daughter, Little Applestia, and find out what’s goin on here.”
Nutters, who was quite quick in the uptake, realized that he had not recognized Applestia and grinned.
“Bert Nutt!” Apple Cider stepped through the doorway in his clumping dustpony’s boots and peered at the butler. “Strike me dead if it ain’t Bert Nutt from the old crowd I used to meet at Buck Daniels after the races. Ex-jockey, wasn’t you? What are you doin here?”
“Pardon me.” Nutterville drew back from the gust of the beer with which Apple Cider had fueled himself before he came. “My name is Shining Nutterville, and I am not acquainted with Buck Daniels or the Old Crowd. I don't recall we’ve ever met.”
“If he didn’t recognize you,” he told Applestia as they went down the basement stairs after he had taken her father up to the study, “I’ll be blowed if I’ll let on I recognized him.”
Applestia went straight to the servants’ hall and picked up the speaking tube. This should be something to hear! If Jet had been annoyed over that millionaire, thousand of miles away in Amareica, what would he say to her father on the carpet on his study, smelling of beer and garbage?
She heard her father’s voice, faint at first, and then louder and all too familiar, hoarse and jovial, as he came nearer the fireplace. He told them that he had got the address from the landpony. “I would have come before, of course, to see me beloved daughter, the pride of me heart, but I’ve been away on business.”
He must have taken off his leather hat, because the professor said, with his usual rudeness. “There are only two places where they give you a manecut like that. Prison and the army.”
“Take your pick,” said Apple Cider cheerfully.
So that’s where he’d been! He’d been in jail before, without caring too much, because the company was good and the food regular.
“Now listen here,” Applestia heard her father say, in the bullying tone that always pushed into his voice when he’d been on the beer, “I don’t want no jokes. I’ve come on very serious business.”
“Born in Flanksachusetts,” Jet jumped in, as if he were playing Snap. “Apple family, I think. Could there be a dash of Zebrican somewhere in his family?”
“None of your business, mister. Where’s my daughter?”
“Is that any of your business…. now?”
“She’s my daughter. She’s under twenty-one. The law’s the law. She belongs to me.”
Applestia’s heart was beating excitedly. It was thrilling to hear them going at it in a tug of war over her. Like in the olden days when knights fought duels over fair maidens.
“Well, not quite.”
“All right.” Jet suddenly let go of the tug rope before he’d even started pulling. “If you want her, take her.”
“Wait a minute. You got me wrong. I'm not saying you can’t have her. I just want to know, where do I come in?”
“The law,” said Jet, at his most chilly, “is most certainly the law, as you so brilliantly put it. One of the things it’s very firm about is blackmail.”
“Blackmail!” she could imagine her father outing on his saintly bishop’s face, dustpony’s hat held over his heart, outraged to be so accused.
“If you sent her here in order to get money from me, you miserable stallion, you can take her away this minute, before I knock your teeth out.”
“Two can play that game,” Apple Cider said. “I could take my hooves to you for blackening me good name.”
The professor suddenly gave a shout of laughter, and her father laughed too. What was going wrong? Why weren’t they fighting over her?
“Well, I mean, we’re all friends here, and if you want the foal, I’ll let you have her, but if I mention that I don’t think it should be for nothing. I don’t want you jumping down me throat again with blackmail. Because it ain’t.”
“What is it then?”
“It’s like this. You want Applestia, the devil knows why. I don’t want her, and the devil knows why that is too. Look at it this way. If a pub keeper had a pint of beer, and you were thirsty and he wasn’t, would he give it to you?”
“He would not.”
“There, you get the point. I knew you would. I can tell a real gentlecolt when I see one. And what’s 150 bits to you, after all?”
“To… buy her?”
“Sort of on hire. If you want to buy her, I’d have to ask 500.”
“You’d sell your daughter for 500 bits?” Even the professor was slightly shocked, and Fancypants said, “Have you no morals?”
“Can’t afford them. If Applestia is going to get a bit out of you, why not me too? Them what they call deserving poor, widow mares and that, they get all the charity. I’m just as poor, but if there’s anything going and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same story. You’re not deserving, so you can’t have it. But I’m just as poor as a deserving widow. I don’t need less. I need more, because I eat and drink more and expect to get more fun out of life. I put it to you gents, is it right for you to take advantage of me faults to do me out of the price of me own daughter what I’ve fed and clothed by the sweat of me brow? Would you grudge me 150 miserable bits?”
Applestia smiled to herself. He’d never take them in with that slippery line of talk. But Jet said, and sounded serious, “You know, Fancypants, this chap is so gloriously double-tongued, we could make him a politician or a preacher in three months. It’s not so much that he has no morals. He’s got new morals. Do you think we ought to give him 150?”
“He’ll only make bad use…” Fancypants began, but Apple Cider interrupted.
“Not me. I need it desperate. I’m behind on me rent, see, and if I can’t pay up, there’s only one way out. I’m going to have to marry me landmare, Mrs. Highcastle by name. Lyrica Highcastle. Lyric and lime, I call her. She’s got me trapped. But with 150 bits, I could pay what I owe and keep me freedom. Take her on a spree, perhaps, keep her sweetened up, but not marry her.
“You know,” the professor said, “I like this stallion. He’s so absolutely shameless, you’ve got to love him.”
Oh, it was sickening! Applestia would have blown a raspberry up the tube if she had not wanted to hear more. He’d fooled them, as he fooled everypony, from her mother on. “You’ve got to love him,” ponies were always saying. Why?
Jet must have handed over 150 bits, for Apple Cider said in the rich glowing voice that came from bits in his pocket. “Applestia is all yours. If she don’t behave, give her a lick of your belt. That’s the way I brought her up, and look where it’s got her… 27a Whinnypole Street. Very classy. You must admit, 150 bits isn’t much return for all I done for her.”
Jet laughed. “Get rid of him, Fancypants,” he said helplessly, “before I give him 300. By Celestia, Silver Snake should hear his ideas. That would make them sit up at the Moral Reform League. I tell you what, let’s write Silver another letter. I mean a real one, not an Applestia letter. And tell him he ought to send for Little Apple Cider. A common dustpony, but one of the most original moralists in Canterlot. We’ll have a drink on that. Whiskey, my dear Cider?”
“Well, I don’t normally touch a drop…” (Ooh, thought Applestia, may Celestia forgive you. Or strike you dead.) … “but seeing as you’ve been so understanding…”
Applestia heard the clink of glasses. “Cheerio.”
“All the best.”
“Let’s get Applestia up to see you,” Jet said, and before she could move away, a piercing whistle nearly blew her eardrum clean through her head and out the other side.
She stamped her hoof, her eyes filling with tears of pain and rage. Whistle yourselves blue in the face, ah won’t go!
She ran up the back stairs, went into her room, and bolted the door. Some father! Sold his only daughter for 150 bits! That Jet was just as bad to give it to him, and there they were, drinking and laughing, as if they'd done something clever. “You’ve got to love him.” Love him! They ought to shoot him. Some father!
She threw herself on the bed, and hot tears poured out onto the pretty flowered spread. “Oh, Mum… why did you have to go and die!”
After that, Applestia was so disgusted that she didn't care about anything.
Like a puppet, she dressed herself in the plain, school-filly dresses that Upper Crust put out for her. Without even bothering to look in the mirror, for who cared whether she lived or died, let alone what she looked like? She pulled back her mane in a think braid or a swinging ponytail, or coiled it up in a bun, as Upper Crust ordered.
She mouthed through her lessons with no interest and no improvement. She stood sullenly on the respiration rose and lifted up her diaphragm obediently up and down in time to the tick of the metronome. She blew up balloons to help her lung control, but no longer bothered to burst them in the professor’s face, as she used to. Even when she was allowed to move on to a new verse of”Maud,” it was all the same to her.
Birds in the ‘Igh Hall garden,
“High Hall garden,” Jet corrected her for the umpteenth time. He lit that dratted candle, and set it on the desk in front of her. “High Hall garden. Say that twenty times and blow out the flame.”
“Igh Hall garden, ‘Igh Hall garden,” Applestia repeated tonelessly. She was almost as disgusted with Jet as with her father. “A great character. Salt of the earth,” he told her. “If I had him to teach, instead of you…”
He thought Apple Cider was a rare and lovable joke.
Well you can have him, Jet. The two of them were a fine pair, for they were both dead selfish, and neither of them had any idea that anypony else had any feelings.
Quite blind to her wretchedness, driving her like a slave master to get what he wanted, Jet was working her harder than ever, and losing patience more quickly. There had not been much fun before, but now there was none at all. There was no more singing and Applestia would not have sung if he asked her.
He had moved her over to his swivel chair on the other side of the desk, so that she could turn north, south, east, and west, and throw her voice to all corners of the room. He would take one vowel sound at a time, and keep on and on at it, until she was ready to scream, or kill herself. Or him.
There was a long paper knife on the desk, shaped like a dagger. Once she picked it up and looked at the point as Jet was saying, “Let me hear it once more. ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain’.”
“The rine in Spine stays minely in the pline.” At each hated vowel sound, Applestia jabbed the point of the paperknife viciously into the red leather top of the desk.
“Wishing that desk was me?” Jet said serenely.
She glowered, gripping the handle of the dagger.
“But don’t forget, your daddy has sold you. I’m all you’ve got now.”
Applestia burst into tears of rage and exhaustion.
“Oh, for Celestia’s sake! If you’re going to blubber like a baby…”
Fancypants, who was a kindly soul, but no use at controlling Jet, came and patted her shoulder nervously, as if she were a dog and he never had a dog, and said, “Dash it all, Jet. The mare does have some feelings, after all.”
“There’s no time for feelings,” Jet said. “Here’s over a month gone by, and she still can’t tell me where the rain falls in Spain.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The servants were all against him now, and on Applestia’s side. Often he would make her work right through a mealtime, and sometimes her sent her to bed without any supper, for things like losing her temper and swiveling the chair round so violently that the seat came right off its screw and landed on the carpet with her still in it. Then Uncle Nutters would send her up a daisy sandwich and a glass of wine, or Diamond Mint would creep up the back stairs with cups of tea and croissants, and they would picnic on her bed in the dark, so that old hawkeye Jet should not spot the light shining into the back garden.
One wet January day, when he had tried to make her sing “Celestia Save the King” with her mouth full of marbles, she ran away.
She put on her double-breasted coat with the big brass buttons and the pockets like huge envelopes, bundled her mane up out of the rain under her green turban, and went back to the dingy house in Hoofton Road.
“Take me back, Dad,” she was going to say, but he was out, and so was Mrs. Highcastle. One of the lodgers let her in, and she climbed up through the stale food smells which hung about the bare familiar stairs.
Her tiny slot of a room at the top of the house was open. The mattress was gone, and Applestia climbed over the rusty bed springs, and knelt to look through the grime on the window at the wet gray landscape of slate roofs and blackened chimney pots.
Kneeling there on that sagging iron bed, with the springs cutting into her flesh, and the dirty peeling walls closing in on her like a coffin, she thought of her bedroom at 27a Whinnypole Street: a white painted furniture, flowered curtains, and the sparrows in the lime tree waiting for her to bring crumbs for the window sill.
The cracked bell on the church struck three o’clock through the sooty rain. “Can’t… turn…. back,” it said flatly.
Applestia scrambled back over the bed, and ran down the stairs and banged the door behind her, as if she wanted to shut the hateful house up forever. Her coat and the bottom of her long dress were dirty already just from being in the place ten minutes. Upper Curst would flay her alive. When she saw dirt, she screamed as if she had seen a mouse.
Threading her way with remembered ease among the carriages and trundling open buses of Hoofton Road, Applestia walked down the long street she had trodden so many times in her draggled skirts and her leaky cracked boots, and went in among the cobbled archways of the Market Square, looking for Willow.
She had forgotten that she was not dressed right for the market. Some of the porters whistled at her, and one cried, “Oh, I say!” in a fancy voice.
She saw Willow before he saw her. He was sheltering under an archway, leaning against a pillar with his hooves in his pockets and coat collar turned up, his mane plastered over his forehead like wet straw. He often stood like that, not thinking, not seeing. Not asleep, but not quite awake either.
She came right up to him, and he looked at her blankly. He didn't recognize her, until she said softly, “Hello, Willow, my old mate.”
“Celestia…” His jaw dropped like a ton weight. “Applestia!”
“Don’t know me with my face washed?”
He nodded and shook his head and smiled and frowned and blinked and stared all at the same time, totally at a loss. He took his hooves out of his pockets, reached to put them round her, and drew them back, gasping and stuttering and treading on his own hooves.
Applestia laughed. “Well, ya haven’t changed, that’s fer sure,” she said. “How do ya like my duds?” She twirled, showing off her clothes, and minced a few steps over the wet cobbles, like the ladies she could see parading when she sat on the stepladder in the study in Whinnypole Street.
She thought he would tell hrt that she was lovely, or at least be quite impressed by the change in her. But when he got enough control of his breath and his tongue and his wits to speak, all he said was, “Well, we’ll soon get them things off you, my little filly,” as if she was covered with ants or cobwebs.
“Ya missed me, Willow?”
She hoped he would tell her that he had not looked at another mare, but Willow didn't look at mares anyway. He was scared of them, so it was no compliment, even if he had stayed loyal. Flummoxed by her questions, he cleared his throat and spat among the sodden cabbage leaves in the gutter. “Going to take the barrer down to Maredonian Market,” he said. “Get a shawl or something, and you can come on down with me. See if we can sell some of them brussel sprouts.”
“Brussel sprouts! Yer old chum comes back ter see ya after all this time, and all ya can talk about is brussel sprouts. Willow, ain’t ya got no soul?”
“I dunno,” he said blankly. “But I do know I got to get rid of them sprouts before they rot on me.”
Can’t… turn…. back. The words beat in Applestia’s head as she trudged away through the darkening streets. She had enough bits in her pocket to take a carriage, but she wanted the dark, and the bright streaks of rain across the gas lamps, and the evening noises of the city. Hooves hurrying home on the wet pavements, the clop of the bearded colts pulling the empty coal wagon home over the wood paving blocks, the switch of carriage wheels through the muddy gutters, carrying ponies home.
Everypony was going home. It was time for her to go too.
She had thought Professor Jet would be angry because she had run away, but he had not even noticed her rebellion. He merely said that since she had chosen to take the afternoon off, she would have to work later than usual that night.
She changed her wet clothes and ate some supper, and refused to answer the questions in the servants’ hall about where she had been and what had she done and why had she gone out without telling anypony.
“I thought you were gone for good,” Diamond Mint said, through a mouthful of pudding. “ ‘We’ll never see her again,’ I said to Mr. Nutterville. ‘She’s gone and I don’t blame her.’ Why did you come back, you soppy thing?”
“Oh, shut up your noise,” Applestia said. “Ah’m tired.” No use trying to explain to them what she had found out. You can’t turn back. They wouldn’t understand.
The professor was harder on her than ever that night. Perhaps he did know that she had tried to run away? They worked on and on, while Fancypants fell asleep before the dwindling fire, and the clock on the mantelpiece chimed the quarters and the hours, and Upper Crust came in, fussing like a hen, and said that it was past midnight and everypony ought to be in bed.
“No pony is going to bed,” Jet snapped, “until somepony can speak like a pony instead of a savage. I’m not even asking her to speak like a lady anymore,” he said bitterly. “Just like a normal pony.”
“You’ll make the filly ill,” Upper Crust said smugly as she went out, as if it would be worth doing, to prove her right.
“Ah’m ill already.” Applestia put her head in her hooves. “Ah’ve got a headache and a throat ache and a backache, and my hooves are killin’ me.”
“You shouldn’t go walking all afternoon in the rain. Rain. Rain.” He clapped his hooves, as if she were a trick seal.
“Rine, rine,” she said, without looking up.
“The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain.”
“The rine in Spine stys minely in the pline.”
“You think you’ve got a headache! The top of my head is opening and shutting like a door. Every time it opens your hideous vowel sound come in like a caterwauling tomcat.”
“Ah don’t care.”
“Look, Little Applestia.” He dropped his long body into the opposite chair, and flung his hooves out on the desk. “This is your last chance. Bet or no bet, I can’t go on much longer. This is your last chance to be a lady. Don’t you want to go to the Grand Galloping Gala in a golden coach with six white horses and a prince to kiss your hoof? Don’t you want to sit in a velvet box at the opera with diamonds round your throat and in your shining mane, and all the duchesses peering up at you through their lorgnettes (small binoculars) and asking, ‘Who is she?’ Don’t you want to have a satin gown with a long train and three feathers on your head and go to Canterlot Palace and meet the princess?”
“And if ah ever did,” Applestia said, jutting out her jaw at him and narrowing her eyes, “ya know what ah’d say?”
“The rine in Spine stys minely in the pline, I suppose. She’d love that.”
“Ah’d say, ‘You can arrest Jet Set, Yer Majesty, You can lock him up because ah say so, and if ya like ya can cut off his head and he can cry all he wants fer mercy, before and after it’s off, but all ah’ll do is cheer, because ah’ll be glad… glad… glad!” Flushed and angry, half sobbing, she glared at him across the desk.
But he would never rise to a fight. That was the most maddening thing of all. “The rain,” he droned, with his eyes closed, “in Spain…. stays mainly…”
And all of a sudden, as Applestia sat there with her mane tumbling down and tears straining her cheeks and her eyes swimming with hopeless hatred for this cruel, pig-headed tyrant, she took a deep sobbing breath and said, very clearly, “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.”
“Who said that?” He did not open his eyes.
“I did.” Applestia was as surprised as he was.
“Say it again.”
He slowly opened his eyes, like a colt reluctant to wake up from a dream, as Applestia found her voice repeating, “The… rain in Spain stays…”
Jet gave a shout that woke Fancypants with such a shock that he leaped out of his chair, waving an imaginary sword and yelling “Charge!”
After that, it was pandemonium. Applestia laughed and cried and laughed, and swiveled the chair round and round with her hooves in the air, shrieking “Come into the garden, Maud!” for all of a sudden, she could say that too.
The professor grabbed her hooves and swung her off the chair and into a capering waltz, while Fancypants letting out cries of “View halloo!” from his old days, dashed to the piano and crashed out triumphant music.
“Excuse my glove, excuse my glove, excuse my glove!” She twitched the cover off Azure’s cage, and he joined hysterically in the excitement, reeling off all the words he knew and some he never knew before, and dashing his beak along the bars of his cage like a demented harpist.
The tall oak door of the study opened, and there stood Upper Crust and Nutters. She was bundled in a dressing gown like next week’s laundry, with her mane in a skimpy pigtail tied with tape.
“What’s up, sir,” Nutter cried. “Is it a fire?”
Upper Crust said, “What in the world is going on here?”
“She got it! She got it right. Rejoice with us, for this day has been won a great victory!” The professor advanced on her with such a lunatic grin that she reeled back against Nutterville, and clutched the billows of cloth where her heart was supposed to be.
While Fancypants thumped on the piano fit to wake the whole lower end of Whinnypole Street, Jet seized Upper Crust round the middle, and Applestia seized Uncle Nutters, and they twirled round in a crazy dance, with the butler tripping, and the housekeeper gasping, “Let me go! Stop, stop! It will be the ruin of my blood pressure!”
It seemed to Applestia that she had never been so happy in her life. Half an hour ago, she had not cared two bits how she talked, nor what became of her. But suddenly now she could do it. Her headache had vanished. She felt strong as a lion and light as a butterfly, and she knew how that Pegasus felt who flew to the sun. His wings had melted though, but hers wouldn’t. She could go anywhere, do anything.
“She even looks different,” Jet said wonderingly. He had poured champagne for them all to celebrate, and she raised her glass to him, her eyes dancing and sparkling over the bubbling sparkles in the glass. “Sweet Celestia, Fancypants, I feel marvelous. I feel like Pygmalion. Your health, Galatea!” He clinked his glasses with Applestia.
“Same to you. And everything else, if I knew who she was.”
“Galatea was the ivory statue Pygmalion carved, and the goddess of love brought it to life for him.”
“And then he married her,” put in Fancypants.
“Bedtime,” said Jet abruptly. “The party’s over. Bedtime, everypony.”
When Applestia awoke the next morning, with the sun pouring onto her face, she could not remember at first why she was happy.
Then it all came back to her. “The rain in Spain,” she said out loud. “Bird in the High Hall garden.”
This was a gala day. She got up late, and the cook made her a special breakfast, with pancakes and fried tomatoes, for the word of her triumph had blazed round, and the others were as pleased as if she had conquered the world.
She was relaxing in the servants’ hall, with her hooves on the fender, the steam from her third cup of tea caressing her nose, and the sounds of everypony else at work about the house soothing her ears, when a furious blast from the speaking tube sent her bolt upright, with tea all over her dress.
“Where the hay are you?” cackled Jet’s voice when she picked up the tube. “You’re forty minutes late.”
“What for?”
“Lessons, of course.”
“Lessons? I thought we were going to take the day off.”
“Think again. We’ve only just begun.”
“High Hall.” The candle flame in the study flickered flat every time she brought out an h.
“Has Harold had hany hurricanes h-over in Hoofshire? Ain’t I doing well?” Lessons were not half as bad now that it was coming right. But he was no easier than before.
“Terrible. Has Harold had any hurricanes?”
“Ho, yus.”
“Oh, yes.”me !), and it was all so exciting that sometimes up in her room she stood before the mirror and asked herself solemnly, “Little Applestia, is this really you?”
The Grand Galloping Gala, which would decide who won the bet, was just four months away. That seemed too long to Applestia, who felt she could go to Canterlot Palace next week, and no questions asked. But Jet was worried. “It will be a miracle if we bring it off, with so much yet to cram in. Tone, pitch, rhythm, vocabulary, phrasing, dancing… etiquette… Make a list, Fancypants. We’ve got to plan our campaign. Deportment…
“My dad had a friend who was deported. Tony Tangelo. Suspicion of foul play. I don’t want no deportment. I’m doing fine here.”
“No, no. Deportment is…. sort of behavior, and all that.” Fancypants waved his pencil vaguely. “Trotting about with a book on your head. How to sit down and stand up.”
“How to drink my tea?” Applestia said as a joke, but the professor said, “That’s right. How you drink your tea. Your table manners are still revolting. We’ll have to see that Upper Crust is more strict. When you have learned that a dining table is not a pig trough, you’ll take your meals with us, and we shall drill you.” He made delicate knife-and-fork and drinking gestures, and Applestia said, “Sweet Celestia, I’ll starve to death.”
“Deportment,” went on Jet. “Singing… world affairs…. a few phrases of conversational French she can drop in here and there.”
“I won’t learn French,” Applestia said, “and that’s flat. I’m having enough trouble learning English.”
“Applestia,” said Jet in the weary voice with which he warned her she was trying him too far, “there are approximately 2796 spoken languages in the world. If you are not a good filly, I shall make you learn every one of them.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The cold winds of March warmed into April, and a rainy April dried into a sunlit May, with the scent of stocks and gillyflowers rising from the walled back garden, and the lime tree thick with green outside Applestia's bedroom window. When she walked with Fancypants in the park, as she did most afternoons to get some exercise and freshen up her complexion, the crab-apple blossoms dropped soundlessly onto the bright turf, and all the mares in Canterlot seemed to be dressed like flowers.
In other years, in the drab streets where her life was set, the coming of spring had meant only that she could be warm again. The birds and blossoms were celebrating elsewhere, and the mares she knew had merely taken off a layer or two. But the mares among whom Applestia now walked cast off their furs and put on peacock colors. Their huge swooping hats changed from velvet with feathers to straw with flowers.
May bloomed into June, and Applestia and Fancypants walked among the roses, pronouncing their romantic names, “Damask, White Royal, Maiden’s Blush,” and conversing carefully of this and that.
“How do you do?” Fancypants would say politely.
“How do you do?”
“May I introduce Her Grace the Duchess of Overdone?”
“Charmed, I’m sure.” Applestia bent her head with a gracious smile, and an elderly stallion passed by squared his shoulders and put up a hoof to spruce the ends of his bristling white moustache.
“What a charming gown, my dear,” Fnaycpanyts said in a high falsetto, playing the Duchess of Overdone.”
Thank ya… excuse me… thank you, your grace. I’m very flattered.”
“Where do you buy your beautiful clothes, my dear?”
“Whiteley’s,” said Applestia, with a great puff of breath, managing to sound both the w and the h, which was a great feat. “When can we go ter Whiteley’s, Fancypants?” She slipped back into cockney, as she still did when she spoke quickly.
“How do you take your tea, my…”
He hastily dropped the falsetto voice, as a slender young colt in a gray suit raised his straw boater and said: “Good afternoon, Fancypants. Lovely day for a stroll, yes?”
“What, what?” Fancypants was flustered. “Oh… er… hello Phoenix. Yes, yes. For a stroll, as you say. Ha ha ha…”
The young colt had stepped forward expectantly, looking at Applestia, but Fancypants said, “You must excuse us. We have a train to catch,” as if anyone would be strolling among the rose beds on their way to a train, and hurried Applestia ahead and round the corner of a hedge, leaving the elegant young colt gaping.
“Where’s the fire?” Applestia wanted to know.
“I can’t have you meeting socialites yet. You’re not ready. It would spoil everything.”
“He looked a bit of all right though. Ah ain’t spoken ter a young colt fer weeks. Ah’m getting sick of never speaking ter nopony.”
“Anypony.”
“Who was he?”
“Young Scarling Phoenix. His mother is a great friend of the professor’s mother. If those two mares got hold of this, it would be all over Canterlot long before July.”
“I thought the Gala was August.”
“It is, but you’re doing so well, my dear, that we’re thinking we might give you a little tryout at some social event.”
“And go to Whiteley’s?” She plucked disgustedly at the plain brown-and-white dress which Upper Crust had chosen for her to greet the summer. “And get me some pretty dresses? Oh, Fancypants, when?”
“Soon.” He took her leg after glancing around to see that the straw boater was not following. “We’ll buy you some dresses and… perhaps we might take you to the Wonderbolts’ races.”
“To the Wonderbolts?” It was the most fashionable race meeting of the season. Even Applestia knew that.
“The professor thinks it might be a good idea to give you a trial gallop. He wants you to meet his mother.”
“Why didn’t he tell me?”
“He doesn’t want you to get carried away and stop working.”
“Fat chance. When he gets to hell, that stallion, he’ll put Old Nick himself to work, and all the little demons will have to write in copybooks with their pitchforks.”
But although Jet still drove her like a galley slave, the lessons were not torture any more. Every day, she made a new recording on the machine, and every day she could hear her own voice changing: softer, clearer, more musical. Sometimes they played one of the early recordings, of Applestia saying things like, “Cone inter the garden, Mawd. Ah am here at the gate aglowin.” She could laugh at it with them, although if they had laughed when she said it all those weeks ago, she would have bucked them in the… private areas.
She was learning so quickly now that the professor was moved to say, “You know Fancypants, I begin to suspect this filly might have some intelligence after all.”
“I’m a genius, I am.”
“No, I am. The sculptor is the artist, not the statue.”
Intelligence. That was a word that had no more been used in the old life than fish knives. Now it might be hers. Using her brain was an adventure, like using a limb that had once been crippled. She had begun to take books off the crowded shelves without being told to. Crouched in the window seat, with the cries of the strawberry seller in the street below, she read:
The red rose cries, “She is near, she is near;”
And she realized, with a shock of surprise, that she was actually reading Saddleson for pleasure. It was as if a key had been turned in a lock and opened a door to a flood of bright knowledge and understanding that cleared away the mists that had shrouded her mind.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Dinner is served, sir.”
“Come along, Applestia,” Jet said. “You are going to take your meals in the dining room with us now.”
“I’d rather be downstairs with all my friends, thank you very much,” she said, with the new politeness that growing on her like moss.
“Ladies don’t eat in the servants’ hall.”
“Then I don’t want to be a lady.”
“That’s a remark I seem to have heard before,” Jet sighed. “You explain to her, Fancypants.”
“Well, you see, Applestia, it’s like this.” Fancypants ran a hoof nervously round between his high collar and his moustache. “They are your friends, of course, but it won’t do… well you can’t…. I mean, it’s different, understand?”
“No.”
“Well, in society, you see…. Oh dear, how can I explain?”
Nutterville, who had been standing by the door, listening with interest said, “Perhaps I can help. Listen here, Applestia, it’s like this. The gentry is the gentry, and the servants are the servants. Right?”
“What am I?”
“If you eat in the dining room, you’re the gentry. Got it?”
Applestia nodded, and followed Jet and Fancypants meekly to the dining room.
“You’ll be too grand to talk to the likes of us,” Diamond Mint teased her afterward, and Upper Crust said, “Tuppence to speak to you now, I suppose,” and added, “If you forget to wipe your mouth like I taught you, you’ll get the back of my hoof across your ear.” But Applestia still sneaked downstairs as often as she could, and drank tea and gossiped and played cards in the servants’ hall, and sang duets with Uncle Nutters.
She still had not met the professor’s mother. She was always smuggled away if she came to call, in case she said the wrong thing, or dropped an h , or dipped cake in her tea. Mrs. Set did not come often, because she had been well-trained by her son, who trained ponies as other stallions train animals, not to bother him when he was busy.
Now they were going to take Applestia to Mrs. Set’s private box at the Wonderbolts race meeting.
“We’ll surprise her.”
“Surprise her with Applestia. By Celestia…” Fancypants’s monocle fell out. “I made a poem! What shall she be? Your niece?”
“How could I have a niece without Mother knowing it?”
“I could be your niece, Fancypants.”
“I’ve got no brothers or sisters.”
“She’ll be just a mare we know,” Jet said shortly. “Don’t make problems. We’ve got enough of those already.”
The first was the choosing of the dress. Ladies always dressed to kill at Wonderbolts races, and Applestia must be the most deadly of all. They could not ask advice of any mares they knew, because the professor would not trust a mare with any secret, let alone the tremendous secret of the transformation of Little Applestia.
Upper Crust, puckering up her mouth like a dressmaker holding pins, advices, “Something frilly and flowered, with little scarfy bits here and there. Beading, lace, very á la mode.”
“I want something simple. Stunningly simple.”
“Something simple,” Jet told the salesmare in the model gown department at Whiteley’s, the biggest store in Canterlot. “Something young, but not girlish. Plain, but not ordinary. You know what I mean?” He looked up at her with his face screwed up and one eyebrow raised.
He and Fancypants were perching on little gilded chairs, looking as uncomfortable as bulls at a garden party.
“Is it for this young mare, sir?” The salesmare was long and purple and dressed in black from chin to hoof, with a dead-white disapproving face above.
“Well, it’s not for me,” Jet said rudely. Like a trapped beast, he looked around the elegant salon with its mirrors and gold paint and die-away mannequins wandering among the silks and laces like lost souls.
“I’ll see what we can find for your wife.”
“She’s not my wife.”
“Oh, excuse me. Your fiancée. Charming,” said the salesmare, not looking charmed at all. She clapped her hooves at one of the fade-away fillies, and said, “Model the turquoise taffeta, Miss Rose, if you please.”
Applestia thought the turquoise taffeta was lovely, and also the primrose moiré silk, and the polka-dot organza, as the mannequins paraded blank-faced before them in one gown after another. The idea of wearing any one of those gorgeous dresses made her heart flutter under her starched white blouse; but the professor kept saying, “No,” and “No, that’s not it,” and groaning, “Take it away,” as Miss Chatoyante minced out in a raspberries-and-cream confection of ruffles and floating flounces.
Fancypants was too busy staring at the mares to say anything at all. The salesmare was getting sick of it. She shifted her hooves as if her corns bothered her. “There is another gown by the Miss Rarity,” she said, “a black-and-white lace that was made for poor Lady Amethyst Showers, but then she… oh, but you wouldn’t want it.”
“Why not?” The professor sat up straight and stopped yawning.
“It’s very expensive.”
“How much?”
When she named the price, Fancypants whistled. “That’s far too much.” But Jet said, “Who cares? You’ll have to pay for it when I win the bet. Show us the dress and stop haggling,” he said irritably to the salesmare.
It was the most beautiful dress Applestia had ever seen. A sheath of ice-white lace slashed with black and white ribbon, which hobbled her in below the mid-section of her legs fashionably. The long shirt kicked out into a train, and the collar frothed up round her chin as if her face were precious china packed in tissue paper.
To go with it they bought a parasol like a white chiffon cloud, and a huge swooping chocolate-and-vanilla cake of a hat, with more feathers and plumes and bows than Applestia’s head could possibly support.
“Hold your head up,” commanded the salesmare, taking more interest now that she had made a firm sale, as Applestia began to shake and giggle under the astonishing hat. “It isn’t supposed to be comfortable. Keep your neck stiff, miss.”
“All day?”
“Forever, if necessary. Il faut souffrir, mademoiselle … one must suffer,” she translated, to Applestia’s blank look, “in order to be beautiful.” And allowed herself a smile, to go with the best she could do in the way of a compliment.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
On the morning of the races, Diamond Mint, who had once been a lady’s maid, helped Applestia to put up her mane, cinched her into the dress, and fixed the great hat to her head with ornamental hatpins as long as meat skewers. Applestia took her ruffled parasol and hobbled insecurely downstairs to show herself to her friends in the basement.
“Oh, Applestia!” The kitchenmaid shrieked. The cook was speechless. Uncle Nutters grinned his monkey grin and told her she was a real little topper, and Upper Crust, she actually cried, did Upper Crust, to see her ugly duckling become a swan.
“Applestia! Confound that girl…. Applestia!” Jet was ringing bells and calling all over the house. She came up the back stairs. “The carriage’s here. We’re late. What the hay are you doing down there, you blasted idiot?”
“You mind your tongue, mister,” Applestia said, waving her parasol, “or ah’ll bash ya one in the guts wit me umbrellar.”
“If you talk cockney today, even as a joke,” he said through his closed lips, “if you say any ghastly word like ‘guts,’ so help me, I’ll buck you out into the gutter where I found you.”
“If you do,” Applestia blew him a light kiss to calm his nerves, “you’ll lose the bet and have to pay for this dress.”
He was nervous. All the way down in the carriage, with the traffic of other observers as they crossed the river at Staines onto Flying High Stadium, he fussed and fidgeted. It made Applestia feel very powerful. He had staked so much on her.
For the first time in her young life, she was the center of attention. She sat up straight, her neck rigid “forever,” as the salesmare had commanded, and a cool aristocratic smile on lips that wanted to laugh and sing. Ponies stared and peered at her as they passed. Would they think she was poor Lady Amethyst Showers, because of the dress? She was Miss Twinkling Appleshine, only daughter of a retired Stalliongradian rubber planter and his invalid wife, living quietly and respectably in Northhooferland, and she hoped her profile did not show that she had never ridden in a deluxe carriage before and was practically taking flight from excitement.
At the racecourse, all eyes were on her as she and Fancypants strolled over the grass toward the grandstand. The professor had marched on ahead, like a stallion forgetting his dog. She had to take tiny steps on account of the bow round her legs, “Like the string round me dad’s workin’ trousers,” she suddenly thought, and clapped a gloved hoof to her mouth of smother a giggle.
The professor, who despised conventions and fashions, was wearing his usual tweeds, but Fancypants was decked out in full; a black coat and trousers, silk cravat, gray top hat, a carnation in his buttonhole. She was very proud of him.
“And I of you, my dear.” They passed below the row of private boxes facing the racecourse above the heads of the colorful crowd. “That’s Mrs. Set.” Fancypants jerked his head and spoke out of the side of his mouth. “In the hat like a winged muffin. Remember, say nothing except what we rehearsed.”
Mrs. Set already had her race glasses focused downward on them. When Applestia came into the box on Fancypant’s foreleg, she glided forward as if on wheels in a way Applestia would have to copy if she was going to get about much in these hobble skirts, and cried: “So there she is, Jet! Wherever have you been keeping her all this time, you wretched colt? She’s beautiful!”
Applestia blushed, and turned her head away, because her deportment teacher, a prim old maid who had never been a filly, had told her that ladies did not blush unless a gentlecolt made advances.
“Her parents are retired, Mother, I told you. Up in the North.” He had chosen Northhooferland because it was the farthest place he could think of, and nopony who was anypony ever went there. “They don’t get about much. Appleshine has been hardly anywhere.”
“Well, we’ll soon put that right,” his mother said delightedly. “She must go everywhere , a lovely mare like her.” She held out a hoof, and Applestia took it limply and muttered something, keeping her lips stiff to stop them trembling. She was suddenly paralyzed with shyness, not because Mrs. Set was an alarming old battle axe, but because she was much younger and prettier and nicer than she had imagined when she had eavesdropped on her through the speaking tube.
“Er…. she’s, well…. she’s…. er, rather shy, Mother.” (If yer goin’ ter git rattled too, Jet, that’ll cook my goose .)
“Nonsense, a lovely mare like her. Come, my dear. I’ll introduce you to everypony.”
There was a small crowd of ponies in the box, the stallions in gray suits and toppers, and the mares in a dazzling rainbow assortment of flowers and frills and tassels and waterfall feathers that made Applestia glad of her dramatic black and white.
She managed to say, “How do you do” to everypony without missing a single h , but when she got to the last gentlecolt, “And this is Mrs. Phoenix’s son, Scarling” she opened her mouth without bringing out any sound, because it was the young colt who had goggled at her in the park.
He was goggling now, and also bringing forth no sound. Love at first sight! They read about it in the novels.This would be something to tell Diamond Mint!
“Do sit down, Miss Er…” Scarling Phoenix, who has good looks, but could never lift a hundredweight of potatoes, if you got him in the market, found his tongue and chair. “Haven’t we met before? Were you at Nightgown’s ball last week?”
“I don’t think so,” Applestia had the wits to say. “But I go to so many I lose count.”
“I heard Professor Jet say you’ve hardly been anywhere.”
“He doesn’t know everywhere I go.” Applestia sat on the edge of the chair, crossing her hindlegs as taught, and nodded at Jet. One up to me.
“I’ll get you some food. One moment.” Scarling spoke mostly in half words and half sentences, to conserve what little energy a life of exhausting idleness had left him.
“Let the others do the talking,” Jet had told her. But Scarling, who seemed to have more beauty than brains, merely stared at her as she juggled a glass of champagne and a plate of strawberries. His mother was watching them, and so was Mrs. Set, the two queens of gossip. They would class her a mute idiot if she iddn’t say something, and when they classed somepony, Jet said, it was around Canterlot. So she took a deep drink of champagne and said carefully, “What delightful weather.”
If there was no sun, she was to say, “What disappointing weather.” Good thing she hadn’t got them mixed, and bucked it up.
“Oh, rather,” Scarling said as admiringly as if she had made up a whole poem and recited it.
“Do you enjoy the races?” There was not a Pegasus in sight yet, but that was her number two sentence.
“Oh, terrif.” He beamed at her as if she had asked, “Do you think I’m pretty?”
He did think so. No one had ever looked at her like that, with his heart in his brown eyes. “What do you do?” she asked, forgetting her practiced sentences, but really wanting to know.
“Do?” He looked puzzled. “Oh… nothing really. What is there to do?”
“I mean work, and that. A job.”
“A job?” He looked as if he were going to faint or vomit, perhaps both. “I live with my mother.”
“Do you let your old mare support you, a great big colt like you?” Applestia spoke slowly, watching her vowel sounds like dangerous criminals. “You” escaped as “ya,” but Scarling drowned it with a bray of laughter.
“I say, Miss Appleshine, you do make ripping jokes!”
The other ponies stopped talking to hear what the ripping joke was, and Jet came over and stood behind her chair, with one hoof in the small of her back, as if she were his doll to wind up.
“I only said, ‘Do you…’”
Jet poked her sharply in the back. “Let me get you some more champagne, Miss Appleshine.” He bent forward and hissed, “What have you said?”
“Quite all right, Professor Jet.” She smiled sweetly up at him, drained her champagne and handed him the glass as if he was her slave, instead of she his.
She was quite all right. She was doing all right, she was. Little Applestia, late of Hoofton Road, up here with all the swells and socialites, with one gentlecolt in a topper looking at her as if she was Celestia, and holding her own as if born to the job.
By the times the races started, she drunk three glasses of champagne and had forgotten that she had ever been anypony else but Miss Twinkling Appleshine, the best dressed lady at the Wonderbolts. She talked more than she had been told to. “Because of the booze,” she whispered to Fancypants, when he muttered to her, “Steady,” and “Whoa there,” as if she were one of the racing Pegasi who swept round the track at intervals, with nopony paying much attention to them.
She was doing all right though. They would never regret the price of this dress. When she started on another glass of champagne and said, “Ah hope the bubbles don’t come back down my nose,” Jet explained it away as, “The new slang. All the fillies talk like that.”
“In Northhooferland?” asked Mrs. Phoenix, who was a grim hulk of a mare with a nose like the prow of a ship and a hat in full sail.
“She’s been in Canterlot quite a while.”
“She’s not one of your bluestocking students at the university?” the professor’s mother asked in her amused voice, as if she had a private joke. “She doesn’t seem to be the intellectual type.”
“Don’t worry,” Applestia said cheerfully. “Ah ain’t.”
Scarling chuckled. “Oh, I say, that new slang’s topping. Do teach it to me.”
“Ah aren’t.” Applestia corrected herself a little sulkily. All of a sudden, he looked less handsome and more stupid. The champagne and the races and the whole of society was going a little sour. She’d had better times by far at the Minor Pegasus Derby. If this was all there was to begin a lady, they could have it. “Don’t ya ever bet on a race?” she asked Scarling. “My father would have a fit if he knew ah went to a race and didn’t back nothing. Anythin.”
“I didn’t think fillies were allowed to place bets,” Scarling said.
“They aren’t,” put in his mother.
“There’s a good Pegasus called Soarin in the next race. I’ll put fifty bits on him for you,” Scarling said, half to spite his mother, half of please Applestia.
It was much more exciting when you had bits on a race. Applestia stood at the front of the box, with the champagne spinning in her head, and watched the Pegasi all come round in a bunch into the straight.
“Come on, Soarin!” At the stadium, nopony shouted at the Pegasi, like they did at the Derby, but Soarin was inching ahead, and he had Applestia’s fifty bits on him.
“Come on,” she yelled, waving her parasol. “Come on, ya rotten Pegasus. Fly yer lousy guts out!”
It was over. “He got pipped at the post.” She turned and saw all the snobby ponies in the box gaping at her, Jet doubled up as if he was laughing…. or dying, and Fancypants reaching like a drowning stallion for a bottle of champagne.
“We have taught her how to speak,” the professor said, talking across Applestia as if she were not there. “Now I think, my dear Fancypants, we had better teach her to listen.”
It was breakfast time on the day after the races. Applestia was sitting at her usual place halfway down the long mahogany table. Jet and Fancypants, like an allergic married couple, sat on opposite ends, so that Uncle Nutters and Diamond Mint walked half a mile each meal to serve them.
“What’s that you say?” Fancypants brought a hoof up to his ear.
“Sorry, mouthful of hay.”
The two stallions were eating their usual enormous breakfast of eggs and haysh browns, and gallons of tea in giant cups like soup bowls, but Applestia could eat nothing. She sat humbly between them with her eyes cast down, a naughty foal waiting to be punished.
Nothing much had been said yesterday. In the carriage on the way home, they laughed and spoke French to each other, which meant they were talking no good about Applestia. When they got home she said she had a headache, which was true, and went to bed before dinner.
When Diamond Mint came up eager for news, she found the door bolted and Applestia pretending to be asleep.
This morning she would get it. This would be the end. Her last breakfast and she wouldn’t eat a thing! What a waste.
“No, thanks,” she said to the scrambled egg and pancakes. Diamond Mint looked sorry for her, although she would gobble it herself in the serving pantry beyond the swing door.
What was the professor saying? He raised his voice and repeated down the length of white tablecloth, “I said, now we must teach her to listen.”
“Teach?” Applestia raised her head.
“Every living creature, even a beetle or a fish, knows how to listen. Only a chump like you has to be taught.”
“Taught?”
“Don’t keep repeating like a machine. What’s the matter with you today, girl? You look like a sick cow.”
“But I thought you weren’t going to teach me anymore.” She looked down at the tablecloth, blurred through her tears.
“You thought you knew it all?”
“I thought you were throwing me out,” she whispered, and Fancypants called testily. “What… what’s she say?”
“Throw you out…. with the Grand Galloping Gala six weeks away and all Canterlot agog to meet you?”
“To laugh at me. I…. ah let ya down. Ah shamed ya in front of all them swells.” She was talking broad cockney again. Might as well. She’d soon be back to it.
“No, you didn’t, you stupid girl. They loved it.”
“Didn’t they guess then, that I was only a common apple mare?” She looked up at him with shining new hope, as if he were a god.
“Of course not. After Fancypants whistled you off to the carriage, I explained about this cockney play you’d been rehearsing. In Northhooferland. You were saying bits of your part. They thought it was terrific. Such a clever mimic. So much vitality.” He imitated Mrs. Set’s drawly voice. “My mother is wild to see you again. She’s going to take you shopping, and to the art galleries, and to Phoenix’s for tea… oh, you’re It, Little Applestia!”
“Nah.” The hope died into reality. He was just an ordinary stallion again, with a raw morning chin, and egg on his top lip. “Ah can’t do it. That wasn’t no play-actin’. That was me.”
“That was I.”
“Ah… me…. what’s the difference? Ah am only a little cockney filly.”
“You’re not! You’re Little Applestia. My Little Applestia.” He reached out and took her hoof.
“It’s no good. Ah’ll have to chuck it. Ah can’t go ter the ball.”
“You can, and you will, and you’ll be the loveliest mare there. You’ll see. Oh, come on, Applestia, for my sake. I believe in you. Won’t you believe in me?”
She nodded. He could charm the wallpaper off the wall, that stallion.
“What the hay are you two whispering about?” Fancypants threw down his napkin and got up. “If you’re talking to me, I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”
“We’re saying we’ve got six weeks to do six years of work.” Jet got up. “Come on everypony. Lessons.”
Suddenly hungry, Applestia stayed behind to snatch a piece of toast. When she got to the study door, she heard Jet say exultantly, “We’ll do it!”
Not, “She’ll do it.” Oh yes, charm the wallpaper all right, but he was still the sculptor Pygmalion, she still Galatea, his puppet: valuable only as an experiment, not for herself.
So naturally, when Scarling Phoenix came calling, loaded with violets and love, she encouraged him. He was allowed to visit her in the drawing room, where he sat adoring her with his eyes and laughing at everything she said, but Jet would not let him take her for a walk, or for a drive in his deluxe double-carriage.
“Why not?” Applestia protested. “He loves me for myself. I’m not a doll to him. I’m a real mare.”
“Doll or mare, you’re not going out alone with him,” Jet said. “He’s too much of an ass to keep you out of trouble.”
“Don’t you speak like that about my stallion,” Applestia said sharply. “Are you jealous?”
“Oh, shut up,” Jet said. “Get on with the dictation.”
As well as teaching her other important tasks, like how to toast his crumpets in front of the study fire, he had taught her how to write letters, and part of her work was to read and sort and answer the letters that came to him from all over Equestria. Upper Crust and the maids were forbidden under threats of burning alive to touch his papers, or even to dust. But he had taught Applestia to take care of his desk and the file drawers and the tottering piles of work from his university students, which he was going to attend to someday.
One afternoon when Applestia was sorting papers, Mrs. Set came to the house in a swatched dress of Paisley silk.
“I didn’t know she was your secretary, Jet.”
“I just let her fool about. What do I need a secretary for?”
He waved a hoof at the chaos of books and notes and manuscripts on the desk. “Where the hay is the note I made about the musical sequence of the milkman’s morning hymn of, “Milko-o-?”
“You stuck it in a picture frame.” Applestia pulled out a scribbled scrap of paper.
“She seems to be very useful to you,” the professor’s mother said. She had a jokey sort of voice, so that you were never sure if she were laughing or serious.
“She has her issues.”
“But not today,” his mother said. “Today we are going shopping.”
“To Whiteley’s?” Applestia loved to go shopping at Whiteley’s.
“The Universal Provider?” Mrs. Set wrinkled her aristocratic nose, as if Whiteley’s was bad drains. “They say, you know, that Brightness Whiteley once boasted he could supply anything in Equestria. So a customer asked for a white elephant. And got it. No doubt an excellent store for elephants, Appleshine, but for a ball gown, there’s only Hoity Toity’s Maison Francoise .”
“Oh goodness, Mrs. Set, how glorious!”
Applestia and Mrs. Set were becoming good friends. She was not nearly as alarming as Applestia had feared. She was not alarming at all, like Scarling’s mother, or the hard and coldly elegant ladies they met when they were shopping, or having meringues and pralin ices at the tearoom, or listening to military bands in the park, or any of the things that were right for a country mare from Northhooferland to do. Although she had been born and bred among classy ladies like these, Mrs. Set laughed at their artificial airs. She was a rebel, like her son. You could see where he got it from.
If she had not promised to keep the secret, Applestia might have been tempted to tell Mrs. Set the truth. Perhaps she would, after the gala, when the best was won and she was accepted everywhere by the lordliest in the land. It would be the sort of joke Mrs. Set would enjoy. But she was too loose-tongued with the secret, so Applestia had to be careful to stick to the imaginary family history, in which Jet and Fancypants had drilled her dozens of times.
“Who are you?”
“Twinkling Appleshine.”
“Who is your father?”
“Sir Shining Cornelius Appleshine, ex-President of the Northhooferland Rubber Company.”
“Appleshine? That’s a weird sort of name, my dear young lady.”
This was the point of the lesson at which Applestia usually started to giggle. She had to pull down her mouth and think of something sad, before she could answer. “The name descends to us from our ancestor, Sir Frosty Appleshine. So called because although he lived up in the cold regions of Northhooferland, he was able to sell apples to all of the townsfolk and make quite a profit.”
“Why hasn’t your mother taken you anywhere?”
A sigh. “She not strong, poor Mother. All that time in the East, you know. Her blood is as thin as water, the doctors say. We live very quietly in a small manor house in Northhooferland. Only a hundred acres of land, but my father, like Sir Frosty, does not believe in killing even a pheasant, so there are no shooting parties.”
“Your mother comes originally from Horsefolk, you say?” Mrs. Set asked, as they drove to the fashion salon of Hoity Toity in Hayfair. “And your father from Durhoof?”
“That’s… I mean, yes.”
“That’s right” was one of the things you were not supposed to say, for some daft reason. It was ridiculous, the whole thing, but Applestia had worked at her new language so long and so hard that she could even detect a small mistake made by a society lady who was not as grand as she pretended.
“And yet, you know,” mused Mrs. Set, “there is some charming quality in your speaking voice I can’t quite place. A touch of French blood, perhaps?” (The professor had got his gift for accents from her, as well as his rebelliousness.)
“That must be from my Great-aunt Sherry,” Applestia invented hastily. “In wines, her family was.” Fairly pickled in wine, she had been, so it wasn't quite a lie, although the only French Aunt Sherry she knew was cognac.
“Whereabouts in France?”
Before Applestia could get tangled in her own inventions, they arrived at the salon, and the next two hours were a dream of satins and laces and chiffons and pearls, and French mares (relations of Aunt Sherry?) crying, “But, mademoiselle, ees bee-oo-tee-fool!”
Jet and Fancypants were not allowed to see the gown until the evening of the ball.
When Applestia came down to the drawing room, where they were formally awaiting her, she found all the servants lined up before the door in a guard of honor. The cook, the kitchenmaid, the housemaid, Daimond Mint, Upper Crust, Uncle Nutters... they all embraced her and wished her luck. It was a moment of great emotion. Applestia felt that all her life had been leading toward this one evening.
“If that Scarling don’t pop the question tonight,” Diamond Mint whispered as she kissed her, “he’s a bigger fool than he looks.”
But that was not the excitement that gripped Applestia’s hear so that she could hardly speak. It was something much more important. It was proving of herself. Perhaps tonight she would find out who she really was.
Who am I?
As if in answer, Uncle Nutters flung open the door, flung out his narrow chest, and flung his grandest master-of-ceremonies into the drawing room.
“Miss Twinkling Appleshine!”
Applestia stepped forward into the middle of the room and stood, knowing what she looked like, waiting to be told she was beautiful.
Jet and Fancypants were standing by the white marble fireplace, splendid in their swallowtail coats and white waistcoats, a whole kaleidoscope of medals decorating one side of Fancypants’s chest. For a moment, they did not move or speak. “Struck dumb by beauty .” The phrase popped into Applestia’s head, and her mouth twitched, but she would not let it giggle. Then Fancypants’s monocle fell out and he lunged forward like a hippopotamus who has seen its mate.
“Applestia,” he said, very moved. “Oh, my dear girl, you are the most divine vision that ever delighted these wicked old eyes.”
“Thank you, Fancypants.” She tapped him lightly with her fan, as girls like Saddleson’s Maud did when they were flirting.
“What do you say, Jet, what do you say? Would you believe she…”
The professor was pacing toward her, his head down. He circled her once, twice, eyes narrowed, inspecting it all: the floating white and silver dress, all sewn with pearls and diamanté flowers, the tiara in the shining coiled mane and the diamonds round her white throat, that were no less dazzling for being hired for the night.
“Mareseille Bridge is falling down …” Softly he started to sing the old rhyme he had so often forced her to say through a mouthful of marbles.
…falling down, falling down.
It was the nicest compliment he had ever paid her.
“But I can’t do it, you know.” Applestia stood before them, trembling. “They’ll see through me, like they should have done at the races. I can’t do it.”
The Grand Galloping Gala had hung before her like a glittering treasure, beckoning her on. Now suddenly she wanted to turn and run and hide and be a nopony.
“You can do it.” Jet put his hoof on her shoulder to stop her shaking. “You can do anything.”
Outside in the hall, a clamor of loud mouth and loud boots. Nutterville opened the door and said, of all things, “Miss Applestia’s father is here.”
“Oh, no !”
Oh, no, not now. Why did he have to come now? But Jet said, “Bring him in, bring him in. A bit of comic relief. Just what we need. Welcome, my dear Apple Cider.” For Applestia’s father was already pushing in past Nutterville, not being a stallion to be kept standing in the hallways. “And who have I the honor….?”
For Little Apple Cider was not alone. A few paces behind, in a purple bonnet and cape, jaw clenched like a fist to show she was not impressed by the address, was his landpony, Mrs. Highcastle.
“This here is the mare I told you about. Mrs. Lyrica…. Sweet Celestia…” He took a second look at the vision in the middle of the room. “Applestia!”
“If you’ve come here for bits,” she said in her carefully cultured voice, “you’re wasting your time.”
“That’s a nice thing for a father to hear from the lips of his only foal.” He appealed to the room. “It don’t look like me daughter. It don’t sound like me daughter. But so help me, it’s the sort of thing me daughter would say.”
“I know you,” Applestia said, aware that she was saying the old kind of things to him, but in a new kind of voice. “You’re up to something.”
“It so happens,” her father said with dignity, “that the only thing I’m up to is matrimony.” He drew Mrs. Highcastle forward, the hatpins in her purple bonnet bristling like a porcupine. “Your new stepmother. Professor Jet. Fancy what’s-his-name. My fiancée.”
“Your what?!” Applestia’s jaw hung.
“I come here to tell you that Mrs. H. is going to do me the honor of becoming Mrs. L. Nothing for it,” he whispered hoarsely to Applestia, under cover of the general commotion of congratulations and the pouring of wine to celebrate. “Four months behind on me rent, she’s got me trapped. Though if you could slip me 200 bits, I might still….”
“The bride and groom!” Jet raised his glass.
Mrs. Highcastle drank with little sipping pecks, like a finicky hen. Mr. Little tipped back his glass and smacked his lips gloomily.
“Why’s that filly dressed up like her own funeral?” he wanted to know.
“I’m going to a ball, Father.”
“Ah’m goin’ to a ball, Father.” He mimicked her old voice. “What do you think of that, Lyrica?”
“I wouldn’t know her,” Mrs. Highcastle said, then added sharply, in case that might be taken as flattery, “That dress is cut very low.”
“Father from Stalliongrad, mother Manehattan…. no, Trottingham,” Jet murmured automatically, and Lyrica said, “I beg yours !” and raked him up and down with her military eye.
“I’m forced to stay,” Little Apple Cider was walking round Applestia as if she were a painting at auction, “you’ve done a good job, professor. Cinderella at the ball, eh?”
“Tonight Applestia makes her entry into society at the Grand Galloping Gala.”
“You’ll never get away with it.” Apple Cider shook his head with the wisdom of a stallion who has tried to get away with many things, and failed. “They’ll rumble her, you’ll see. Dresses, jools, sparklers in her mane…. she’s still a plain street mare, when all’s said and done. Just because you’ve taught her to speak all la-di-da don’t make no difference.”
“But it does! Her speech makes her a different pony, don’t you see? That’s what I’m trying to prove. It’s the bridge across the huge gulf that separates class from class, soul from soul.”
“I got a nice one of them,” Apple Cider said. “That balmy old millionaire in Amareica, what yer wrote to, he likes my soul so much, he wants me to go over there and give a talk about right and wrong.”
“Why don’t you?”” Applestia asked. Anything would be better than marrying his landpony.
“She wouldn’t let me.” he jerked his head at Mrs. Highcastle who did not like the wine or the turn of the conversation, and was on her way out. “She’d have the seaports watched, have me arrested at the gangway. Well, ta-ta for now, girl. After tonight, I may see yer back in the market. Bring me one of them diamonds bright, if yer can get away with it.” He blew Applestia a kiss, waved a hoof at the professor, and saluted Fancypants.
“How do?” he said genially to Mrs. Set, meeting her in the hall in old-rose brocade, ablaze with family jewels.
“How do?” she said, unsurprised. You never knew who you would meet at Jet’s. “What market?” she asked, gliding into the drawing room, but was too entranced with the sight of Applestia to notice that nopony answered.
In the carriage she told them casually, “I understand Princess Celestia as well as Princess Luna will be at the gala.”
The princess! Applestia went white and almost jumped out of the car, but Jet rubbed his hooves and said, “Just what we need.”
“And you’ll be able to meet that marvelous Hoofarian everypony talks about. The great speech expert, Professor Harmony. He goes everywhere with ambassadors, because he can spot an impostor, they say, as soon as he opens his mouth. He knows almost as much about languages as you do, dear. You’ll have so much in common.”
“Won’t we?” Jet looked a little sick, and Fancypants groaned under his breath. “Just our blithering luck.”
“Nonsense. have you ever met royalty before?”
The Grand Galloping Gala was in the vast white castle of Princess Celestia, with a blaze of lights and flowers and polished floors, and a great many handsome coltservants whom Applestia thought were guests, until Jet poked her in the side for smiling at them. The great ballroom was at the bottom of a wide curving staircase. You had to trot down it alone, while the handsomest coltservant of all, in a scarlet jacket and white leg breeches, roared your name to wake the dead.
“Lord and Lady Noteworthy!”
“Sir Davenport and Lady Dainty Dove!”
“Misses Rarity and Twilight Sparkle!”
“His excellency Count Elle Cuisine!”
“I can’t…” Applestia shrank back, and met the stern waistcoat of Jet, cutting off her retreat.
“Get down there,” he snarled out of the side of his mouth, “or I’ll send you back to your stepmother.”
She walked forward, gave her name.
“Miss Twinkling Appleshine!”
The ballroom held its breath. It seemed that all the faces looked up, like flowers turning to the sun. It seemed that all the crystal drops in the great chandeliers shed sparkling tears of gladness. It seemed that the band struck up a triumphal march just for her, as she paced down the stairs and touched hooves with the ambassador and his wife, and curtsied low to the Princess of the sun, a slender white alicorn with a cotton-candy like flowing mane. So this was royalty!
Scarling was there, of course. He had got himself an invitation when he found out Applestia was going. His mother was in full sail as usual, billowing across the floor in waltz time in a lavender organdy rig about thirty years too young for her. Scarling was waiting behind a pillar to spring out at Applestia and stammer, “I say, Miss Twinkling, you look smashing. You must give me all the dances on your p-p-p-program.”
“Now, now, my boy, don’t be selfish.” Jet took Applestia round the waist himself. “To get your sea legs,” he murmured in her ear, keeping her in the middle of the crowded floor until he saw how she went.
“How did she go?” Fancypants whispered anxiously when they joined him in a bower of potted palms under the balcony.
“Like a bird,” said Jet. “Those dancing lessons are worth every cent you’re going to pay for them.”
“If I pay.” He looked gloomy. “I’ve just seen that villain Harmony.”
“How does he look?”
“Like a black bear. And he was staring at Applestia as if she were a pot of honey.”
“I’ll go and scout out the lie of the land. Here you are, young colt.” As Scarling came hopefully up, the professor passed over Applestia’s hoof with a flourish. “She’s all yours.”
“I wish you were,” Scarling said, as he danced her away. “Golly, Miss Twinkling, you turkey tort like an angel.”
“I’ve asked you a thousand times to call me Appleshine,” she said loftily. She was not afraid any more. She was Cinderella in her glory, on wings in fairyland. But she kept glimpsing at princes much more charming than the chinless one who held her as cautiously as fragile china. It seemed a waste to be in a glittering dress at a glittering gala and have only Scarling, whom she could have any day, perched on the sofa guffawing at her jokes.
When the music stopped, he took her out to walk on the terrace. It was a perfect night. Beyond the lighted terrace, the dark trees and bushes of the Gala garden bloomed with tiny colored lanterns. Romantic. And all she had was Scarling, asking, “Say some of that funny slang for me, Miss….er…. Appleshine.”
“I can’t,” she said. “It’s not allowed. Don’t bother me.”
She turned away from him, but he picked up her gloved hoof from the balustrade. “Be nice to me,” he pleaded, and she was reminded with a jolt of poor Willow with his thatch of blue mane and his empty blue eyes. Why did she always get the soppy, doglike ones?”
“I s-s-say.” Scarling struggled wetly to give voice to his feelings. “Wouldn’t it be s-s-simply ripping if you and I got hitched?”
“No,” she said unkindly. Some proposal! “It wouldn’t.”
“I’ll sit on your doorstep. You’ll fall over me every time you come out.”
“I’ll go out the back.”
“I’ll sit there till you say yes.”
“You’re going to have an awfully cold winter,” she said briskly. “Don’t be such a bore, Scarling. Let’s dance. That’s something you do quite well, at least.”
“Golly…. thanks.” You could not even insult him.
When they came around to the opposite corner, Jet went, “Psst! Psst!” like a spy, and beckoned her from under the balcony.
“Your mother wants you.” She pushed Scarling in the opposite direction, and joined Jet and Fancypants among the potted palms.
“You’re doing splendidly,” Jet reported. “The ambassador and his wife say they are enchanted with you, and so does the Princess. Now they’ve got this blasted bearded Hoofarian interested, and he wants to meet with you.”
She nodded, eyes sparkling, silver slipper tapping to the music. Ponies glanced at her admiringly as they danced by. She felt equal to anything.
“Avoid him,” the Professor said dramatically, “at all costs. He’s out to sink us. I’ve had a chat with him. He’s brilliant, but he’s crooked. He teaches ponies new voices to disguise their real identity…”
“Like you with me.” She giggled.
“…and then demands money not to give them away.
“Blackmail,” Fancypants said darkly.
Between themselves and Scarling, they kept her away from him until just before supper. Then a servant came to Jet. “Telephone call for you, Professor. Urgent.” And almost immediately, a page pony came to tell Fancypants the same thing.
“Let’s get some grub,” Scarling said in his romantic way, but a great grizzly of a pony with a wide black beard that reached halfway to the floor was bowing before Applestia.
“Allow me to present myself, my dear Miss Appleshine. Professor Vocaliz Harmony, from Hoovapest, your partner for the supper.”
Applestia looked round in a fluster, but there was only moonfaced Scarling, letting her go to her doom without lifting a hoof. Offering her his foreleg, Harmony steered her toward the buffet. To pull away or make a fuss would be worse than to go with him. She held up her head and tried to look as if he were her choice for supper, as he nodded and smiled and greeted ponies and introduced her: The famous Miss Appleshine.”
“Why am I famous?” she asked when they reached the long buffet, which had enough hors d’oeuvres and desserts on it to feed all the Market Square ponies for a year.
“Because you are beautiful, and also mysterious. Everypony vant to know: ‘Who is she?’ I alone shall discover.”
“You know who I am,” she said. “I’m Twinkling Appleshine.”
“Aha.” He put a hoof to his nose and winked at her, like a sinister goblin. “Now let us see…. pheasant in aspeec…. saddle of venison…. lobster salad…” He filled her plate with exquisite food, and brought her champagne.
“If you’re such a language expert,” she said, when they were sitting on a little brocaded settee in an alcove, “why do you talk with such a thick accent?”
“If I didn’t,” he said in perfect English, “nopony would believe I was Hoofarian. You should know that.” He bent forward and put her under the microscope of his bright little black eyes.
There was a catch in that remark somewhere. Watch out, Appleshine .
Nervous as she was, she could not help eating. This was the first time she had even seen such sumptuous food…. and probably the last, if the game was up.
He questioned her for what seemed like hours, listening carefully to her careful voice, his black button eyes observing the way she held her fork, the way she drank. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jet and Fancypants in the doorway. When they saw her, they slumped, and went dejectedly out onto the terrace, without even looking at the display of food on the buffet.
“That is a very pretty fairy tale,” Vocaliz Harmony said finally, when she had told him all her practiced story, plus a lot she had heroically invented. “You’re a good liar. Now I want the truth.”
So it was all up. Born Little Apple Acres. Taught herself. Textile factory. Apple seller. She might as well tell him the whole lot of it before he guessed at something even worse.
“Can I have some more champagne?” she asked desperately. She would run while he was gone for it.
“At your command.” He plucked a glass off the tray of a passing waiter. “Your health, princess.” He raised his glass.
“Don’t make fun of me.” Applestia looked down at her pearl and silver lap.
“Fun? No. Impertinence? Yes, perhaps, your highness. You have your own reasons for remaining incognito. I shall honor your secret. I just want you to know that the great Harmony is not deceived. Your English is perfect. Too perfect. These idle Canterlot ponies never bother to learn their own language properly. Your vowel sounds reveal to me most clearly that you are Hoofarian. I knew it half an hour ago, but it was when you said ‘champagne’ with that slight, that exquisite, hint of ‘cham-pyne’ that your royal blood was revealed.” He stood up. “Au revoir, princess.” He bowed low, and tickled the back of her hoof with his whiskers. “Enjoy yourself. My lips are sealed.”
He walked away with his hoof to the hole in his beard where his mouth was. A duchess claimed him, and he started to talk his gargling broken English again.
Applestia sat in the alcove paralyzed. Then a slow serene smile spread over her face, and she rose, and trotted very regally out to the terrace, to give her subjects the royal proclamation: “I did it!”
The terrace was empty. She found them halfway down the garden, sitting miserably on the plinth of a statue of Starswirl with their backs against the legs of the wizard.
When they saw her dress shimmering before them in the shadows, they raised their eyes but not their heads, like beaten stallions.
“I did it,” she said quietly, and told them what had happened.
“We did it!” They both jumped up, grabbed her hooves and romped around the statue like drunken revelers.
“I win the bet! I win, I win!” Jet shouted to the night, and a young stallion and a mare came round from behind a laurel bush to look at him.
“We did it,” he told them, “and he’ll have to pay all the bills.”
“I don’t care.” Fancypants said. “We did it!”
They reeled back indoors for champagne. Applestia followed. She was always following Jet, who was never gentlecoltly enough to let her go ahead, unless it was somewhere he didn’t want to go, like down the Gala’s stairs into the ballroom.
Professor Harmony had left. Now that she was free to talk to anypony, Applestia was the queen. Good Princess Sunny… Oh, Mum, if you were here to see me now! Everypony wanted to meet her, admire her, to dance with her. She flung herself so furiously into the party that she did not Jet until it was over.
“The belle of the ball!” Mrs. Set put her cloak around her with a friendly embrace, then took a closer look. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” How could Applestia stamp her hoof and say, “He didn’t do it… I did!”
But Mrs. Set was nopony’s fool. “Jet?” she asked.
Applestia nodded, and immediately would have given anything ot have the nod back. Now it would be all around Canterlot that she was in love with the stallion she hated most in all of Equestria.
At home, all the servants, who were as excited about Applestia as if she were their champion winning daughter, had waited up to hear if she had won.
“We did it!” Jet cried out as he came into the house, and they came sleepily out onto the staircase, beaming down on him like frowsy cherubs.
“I did it!” he proclaimed, swaggering on the black and white tiles of the hall, with his top hat and his silk-lined cloak. “She was the sensation of the evening. I fooled them all. I proved it can be done.”
Everypony crowded into the study, and there was a great celebration, with congratulations and rejoicing and Fancypants dancing a jig, and the kitchenmaid, who was only fifteen, curled up in Fancypant’s deep armchair with her shoes off, snoring.
Everypony kissed “the princess” and Upper Crust was so carried away by emotion that she actually kissed the professor and said huskily, “Bless you, sir.”
“I am the great Pygmalion,” the professor chanted. “Behold, my living statue, my Galatea. Though I must give credit,” he admitted, happily generous, “where credit is due.”
Oh well, Applestia thought, at last he’s getting round to it, and none too soon.
“Let’s not forget,” he reminded Nutters and Upper Crust and Diamond Mint and the cook and the housemaid and the sleeping kitchenmaid, “let us not forget the one who has worked with me day in, day out, cheerful, helpful, the truest of companions through thick and thin…”
Geez Jet Set, Applestia thought, don’t swell my head.
“…my excellent friend, Fancypants! We did it!”
“We did it, Jet!”
“A victory song!” the Professor cried. “Applestia’s song!” Fancypants began to thump on the piano and everypony joined in:
My old colt said, “Follow the van,
Applestia slipped away while they were singing.
…can’t trust a special like an old time copper
The raucous music followed her as she stumbled down the stairs in her tight skirt, and went along the basement passage to the butler's pantry.
It was dark. Azure was asleep, but he took his head out from under his wing to chirp at her. She opened the cage, and took him out on her hoof.
“Pretty Apple, pretty Apple.” He pecked at the diamond earrings, due to go back to the shop for it was already tomorrow. “Azure, Azure, Azure.”
He was the same anyway. Everything else was spoiled and rotten, but birds and animals never let you down.
“Applestia?” The opening door threw in a shaft of flickering gaslight from the passage. “What are you doing down here in the dark?”
“Talking to my Azure.” The bird nibbled at her mane.
“I saw you sneak away.” Uncle Nutters put his leg around her weary shoulders. “What's up, mate?”
“I hate him.” She turned around. “I hate them both, conceited selfish beasts. ‘We did it Jet. We did it, Fancypants.’ Who did it? That’s what I want to know. Who did it?”
“Why you, of course.” Nutterville struck a match and reached up on high to light the gas. In this kind of house, the folk upstairs had electric light. The folk downstairs still had gas.
“That’s just it.” She looked down at his worried monkey face, creased with pity for her, and saw that he was the only one who cared. “They don’t care about me,” she said bitterly. “I’ve won their stupid bet for them. I’ve been through the tortures of hell these last six months, you know I have. I went through worse tonight, with that bearded spy. And what thanks do I get? Oh, Uncle Nutters, it’s all so beastly, whatever shall I do?”
“Why don’t you chuck it?” he said. “You’ve had a taste of this life, and those kind of ponies.” He jerked his chin upward. “Why don’t you go back to your own folk?”
“My dad? That mare?” She could not get her lips around the word stepmother, if it applied to Mrs. Highcastle. “You can’t go back. I found that out ages ago.”
“He’ll drop you though.” Nutters was not disloyal to his boss, but honest. “He’s finished with you, you’ll see. You won his bet from him, that’s all he wanted from you. I remember there was a Pegasus who won six big races in a row. The stable’s darling he was. Pint of beer every day. Pure silk clothing. Best wheat straw. The biggest of mansions. The lot. Then he went lame, and couldn’t race again. He lost nearly everything through tactless spendings and no income, and he ended up drawing a junk cart. Just like what will happen to you, now that the professor is finished.
“I can’t believe that,” Applestia said. “He can’t be as heartless at that.”
“Ten minutes ago, you thought he could. ‘He doesn’t care,’ you said. I’ve known him longer than you, me old mate, and I’m afraid you might be right.”
But Uncle Nutters was disillusioned by a hard life, first as a colt up at five to knock ice out of buckets, then as a jockey, drinking vinegar to lose weight, then as a butler, serving with food and drink.
Life could not be as unfair as all that. The next morning, Applestia woke more cheerful, and knew that everything would be all right. There were telephone calls, invitations, flowers arriving for her. She was a smash hit in society, and this morning Jet would see her with fresh eyes, as a somepony in her own right.
The only trouble was, he was not there to see her. He had breakfasted very early, and was shut in the study with a notice on the door saying, “Everypony but ME- Keep Out!”
Applestia was hovering uncertainly outside, wondering whether she should knock, or wait till lunchtime, when she heard Scarling come into the hall, asking for her.
She moved back, so that he would not see her at the top of the staircase, and when Nutterville came up with more roses, she said, “Tell him I’m out, or ill, or broken my leg. Get rid of him.”
“He won’t be rid of. He’s been sitting on that doorstep since nine o’clock this morning. Only gets up to go and buy some flowers, and then he sits down again. Anypony who comes to the door has to step over him. It’s quite inconvenient.”
“Tell him…”
From behind the study door came a shout: “Applestia! Where the hay…. Applestia!” and she went in without a backward glance.
Jet was crouched over the desk, with a jumble of papers and notebooks all round him, books and crumpled balls of papers on the floor, the wastebasket frothing over like beer, the drawer she kept so tidy half open, and spilling out old letters and torn magazine cuttings and loops of typewriter ribbon.
“Where’s that story I cut out of the Times, about the deaf and dumb Appleloosan?” he grunted, without looking up at her.
She went to the right file, found it at once, and gave it to him. He took it without thanks, and then, aware that she was still standing behind him, said irritably, “Run away, I’m working.”
“I just…” She had rehearsed something to say to get his attention if she got the chance.
“Later.”
“I just wanted to ask you. Remember that wallpaper we saw with all the little rosebuds and the chintz material to match, and you said we might redecorate my room?”
He grunted, writing.
“Well, I thought, as everything went so well last night, perhaps I could…”
“Not now, not now. Why do you bother me with such rubbish now?”
“Are you busy?” she asked stupidly.
“Busy! I’m writing the chronicle of my great experiment. I’m constructing the classic document that will be read with awe and wonder all over Equestria, and she asks me, ‘Are you busy?’”.
“I only thought…”
“Don’t you realize, girl?” He threw down his pen and leaned back, running a hoof through his soft untidy mane. “This is the most important thing in my whole life. What I‘ve done will make language history.”
“What you’ve done! Horsefeathers!”
“Horsefeathers, Applestia?” he repeated mildly. “Do I allow that word?”
“It’s the only one to express how I feel.” She stood across the desk from him, feeling her face burn red and her skin prickle with rage.
“If you’re angry because of the wallpaper,” he said blindly, “go out and order it. We’ve spent so much on you already, a bit more won’t matter.”
“I didn't ask you to spend nothing. Anything. Take it all back. I don’t want it.”
He raised an eyebrow calmly. “The diamonds have got to be sent back today anyway, since they were rented.”
“And so was I! You gave my dad 150 bits for me, and don’t deny it. Rented for your experiment, that’s all I was, and now I’m no more use to you than that poor lame race Pegasus.”
“What Pegasus? What in the world are you talking about?”
“What happens to me now? Am I sent back, like the diamonds?”
“You’re free to do what you want, of course. You always have been.”
“That’s a lie, for a start.” Applestia laughed with mirth. “And what am I fit to do? I can’t go back. I can’t stay here. I don’t belong anywhere, thanks to you.”
“I said you could stay here, if that’s what you want.” Jet took off the think-rimmed glasses he wore for work, and rubbed his eyes wearily.
“I wouldn’t stay here if you were the King of Equestria,” Applestia said with great scorn.
“If I were the King, the Queen wouldn’t let you.” He put on his glasses, picked up his pen, and bent over his papers again.
“Because I'm pretty? Look at me!” She snatched up a notebook and threw it at his head. “You think I’m pretty?”
“Not bad.” He rubbed his head, but did not look up. “I don’t see why you’re so fussed about your future. You can get Scarling, or some other well-born chinless wonder, to marry you, I’m sure.”
“I’d rather be dead.”
“Or we could set you up in a flower shop.”
“Ooh… you devil! Buy me off, is that the idea?” She lunged around the desk and hit him, and he was angry now at last. Cursing, he jumped up and dodged around to keep the desk between them.
“Wait till I get you… Pygmalion!” She laughed wildly, her hooves grabbing the air like claws. “Pig, more like. Pig, pig, pig!”
“I was wrong,” he said trying to recover his temper, but still flushed and breathing fast. “I’m Frankenstein, not Pygmalion. It’s not Galatea I’ve made, but a little spitting monster.”
“You made! You made! Oh…” she beat childishly on the desk with her hooves. ‘You’re the most hateful, conceited stallion I ever met!” She ran out of the room in tears, down the staircase, and out of the front door, banging it with a thunderous crash that she hoped would bring the house down.
Scarling was still sitting on the doorstep. “Come on.” She called him like a pet dog, and marched off up the street. He caught her up as she crossed the main road and turned into the park.
“What’s the matter Twinkling?” he said panting and blinking. “Has something upset you?”
“Upset me!” She flung herself down on the cool sweet grass among the foals and nursemaids and doll prams and hoops and pet poodles. “I’m so angry, I could kill myself.”
“You don’t have to do that,” he said hopefully. “You can marry me.”
“What on? I’m not going to live off your mother. You’d have to get a job.”
“A job?” He had put down a newspaper to sit on, careful of his elegant pale trousers. “What do you mean, a job?” She might have said the moon.
“We could live cheaply enough, two rooms somewhere and I could get a job at the apple farm. Start my own business, after a bit, if we…”
“But, my dear.” Scarling was beginning to look very shocked. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Two rooms… you’re joking. How could we entertain? And then there’s the Season, Wonderbolts, Whiteley’s…. It will have to be a very successful apple farm.”
“Where I come from,” Applestia got up, “mares don’t work to support useless stallions.”
Though that’s just what my poor mum did , she thought, running away across the grass.
“Where are you going?” Scarling was gasping behind.
“Back where I come from?” A carriage was standing outside the park gates. She jumped into it and slammed the door in poor Scarling’s face, open-mouthed to ask, “Where?”
In Market Square, the early morning rush of buying and selling was over. The vans of the wholesalers and the big shops had gone. Only a few carts and some of the barrows that went out later to sell of the small stuff were standing about among the arches and worn stone pillars. The ponies wore nosebags and were blowing chaff among the trodden cabbage leaves on the cobbles. The porters and costermongers were lunching too, lounging around the stall that sold hot pies and muffins, with tin mugs of tea and the cigar ends they picked up outside the Opera House.
As Applestia approached, picking her way carefully over the piles of vegetable rubbish, they looked at her without curiosity, for ladies and gents quite often took the short cut through the market from Strand to Longacre, or came poking about, absorbing the atmosphere of colorful Old Canterlot.
“You looking for something, lady?” a stallion in a checked cap asked, as she hesitated a few yards from the pie stall.
“Yes. Do you know somepony called…” The group of ponies shifted a little, and she saw that one of them was Willow. He had his leg around a stout filly with a greasy red face and mane that had not been washed for weeks.
“Called what?” The stallion was Applestia’s old chum Bruce Mane. He did not recognize her with her mane piled up high and her pink and white linen dress, and of course her new voice.
Willow did not recognize her either. She smiled at him, but he looked through her with that vacant blue stare. She could have spoken to him in her old voice, but that mare…. “Oh somepony I used to know,” she said vaguely. “I don’t think he’s here anymore.”
“I don’t think anyone you’d know would be lunchin’ here, miss,” Bruce Mane said, and they all tittered. Willow pinched the greasy-faced filly and she squealed like a pig.
“But thank you very much all the same,” Applestia said, and as she turned away, the mare tried a bad imitation, “Thank ya veddy much,” and squawked with mocking laughter.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The house in Hoofton Road looked so different that Applestia walked past it, then came back when she saw the number on the grimy fanlight over the next door. Mrs. Highcastle’s house had come into money. The doors and window frames and the new window boxes stuck with artificial flowers were painted a curious shade of glistening violet. All the windows had new frilly white curtains, looping and swooping and tied with great satin bows. The iron railings above the basement steps were gilded, with silver tips. The little tarnished frame that used to hold cards with names of lodgers, some long gone, had been replaced by a dazzling brass plaque that said, “Mr. and Mrs. Little. Knock and Ring.”
Applestia did both. It was necessary, to be heard over the noise of a Gramophone in the front room, and a lot of chatter and clatter from the kitchen at the back. A small hungry filly with a sore face and a green coat opened the door, and Applestia followed the noise into the front room, getting a glimpse down the passage of several overweight ponies stuffing their mouths around a loaded table in the kitchen, where it had once been like a treasure hunt to find a crust of bread.
The front parlor, always empty before, and sheeted, as if the furniture were dead, now contained Mr. and Mrs. Little on uncomfortable brocade chairs, wearing their best clothes and listening to a Gramophone blaring out ragtime music through its wide green horn.
“Good afternoon, miss,” sniffed Mrs. Highcastle. Applestia would cut out her tongue before she would address her, or even think of her as Mrs. Little.
“How do ya do?” her father said unhappily, turning his whole body to look at her, since his neck was clamped in a collar made for a giraffe.
It was not Mrs. Highcastle or her house that had come into money. It was Little Apple Cider. “Remember that Amareican millionaire?” he said mournfully. “You know what he done? He up and died and left me forty thousand bits.”
“40,000 bits! You could live in a palace.
He slid his eyes round to his wife, who was wearing plum-colored satin with a monkey fur collar and fur round the hem, although it was warm outside and baking in the parlor, whose windows were nailed up because of burglars. “She wants to stay here, so we can impress the neighbors.”
“It’s…. it’s wonderful for you, Dad.”
The record ground to a stop and Lyrica wound up the machine grimly and put on a tinny tango.
“Not really. I was better off before,” Apple Cider said under the cover of the noise. “Now I’m respectable, it ain’t half so much fun. That’s what your precious Jet Set has done by messing about with millionaires.”
“Not my Jet anymore.”
“Kicked you out, eh? I said he would. Well, if he thinks I’m going to keep you, you just go right back and prove him wrong, because I ain’t. Got troubles enough of me own.” He leaned closer and whispered, although the tango was so loud you could not have heard an elephant trumpet. “She’s spending my bits like water. Got all her relations in the kitchen there, swilling and guzzling. And the worst of it is, girl, if I’d only known old Silver Snake was going to kick the bucket and leave me all this loot, I never need have married her!”
Applestia had some bits in her pocket when she stormed out of 27a Whinnypole Street that morning. She bought a saddlebag and filled it with newspapers, so that the maid in the dingy little hotel by the railway station should think it was proper luggage.
She spent all that evening reading the Situations Vacant advertisements in the newspapers, and all the next two days in employment agencies, looking for a job. At last she was offered an interview with a couple seeking a governess for three foals in a country house in, of all places, Northhooferland, home country of that belle of the ball, Miss Twinkling Appleshine.
Her pink linen dress was now too crumpled and dirty to wear for an interview, so she had to go back to Whinnypole Street to get something to wear. She would leave all her fine clothes behind, and Jet could sell them, or give them to the next filly who was unlucky enough to be one of his experiences. She would take only the plain skirts and blouses she used to wear when she was struggling over the Rine in Spine, and Come Inter the Garden, Mawd.
She went in at the kitchen entrance, and at once the hullabaloo started. Where had she been? What had happened? Had she been kidnapped? Why had she run away without telling anypony?
“What did you expect me to do?” she asked. “Send you a telegram: Safe and well, wish you were here?”
“I wasn’t worried,” Uncle Nutters said, although she noticed the slight quiver of his lip and his hooves shaking. “Upper Crust said we’d seen the last of you, but I knew you’d come back.”
“I’ve only come for something to wear.”
“What about the bird?” he said. “I knew you’d come back because of the bird.”
“Yes. Azure.” She saw herself stepping off the train at some tiny backwater station in Northhooferland where the signalpony grew prize geraniums to pass the time between the trains, with her saddlebag and her birdcage.
“Where in Equestria have you been?” Mrs. Set came down to the kitchen, since everypony was too busy exclaiming over Applestia to answer the bell she had been ringing. “We’ve had the police out searching, detectives, bloodhounds… you never saw such a hue and cry.”
“I went back.” Mrs. Set would think she meant back to Sir Shining and Lady Appleshine in Northhooferland.
But Mrs. Set did not think that. “To Market Square?” she asked quite easily.
“He told you.” The rat . It didn't matter about anypony else, but for some reason, it was important that Mrs. Set should still believe in her.
“No.” The professor’s mother smiled. I knew Jet was up to some game, of course, before he ever let me meet you. I’m not as simple as he thinks. But when I saw you, I recognized you immediately. You once sold me apples, three years ago, when my husband was still alive. He bought me a snack and he gave you an extra bit because you looked cold and hungry. ‘Good luck sir,’ you said, but you had better luck than he did. He lost his life soon after. You found yours.”
“Why did you never tell?” Applestia asked. “Why did you let me make a fool of myself, thinking you believe in me?”
“You were never a fool, my dear. And I have believed in you all along. I didn't want to spoil it. I wanted us to be proper friends. We are still friends, aren’t we?”
“Yes.” The older mare’s smile was so warm and coaxing that Applestia had to smile too. “But I’m never coming back,” she added fiercely.
“Pity. My spoiled son has been quite lost without you,” Mrs. Set said in the voice that might or might not be a joke. “It’s the first thing he’s wanted that he couldn’t have.”
“He don’t want me. He doesn’t…”
“Mother!” Jet was yelling down the back stairs. “What in Equestria are you doing? Are they bringing the soda water?”
His mother grinned, and nodded to Applestia. She went to the bottom of the stairs, which ran up with a angled turn, so that she was hidden.
“Comin’ up right away,” she called, in the old voice.
“Applestia,” he said severely, “where the devil have you been?”
“None of yer business.”
“Isn’t that just like a mare? Here’s everypony been worried sick, half the guards in Canterlot out looking for you, ships at Fillybury Docks searched, the canal dragged for your body, and you say, ‘None of your business.’ Well, it’s my own fault. I wanted to change you from a street urchin into a real, complicated lady. At least I’ve done that.”
“Ah thought you didn’t like mares!” They were shouting up and down the stairs, still out of sight of each other, with Mrs. Set and all the servants enjoying it.
“I don’t, when they’re like you!”
“How did you ever learn manners, with Jet around?” Mrs. Set asked pleasantly.
“Fancypants taught me all that side of it,” Applestia answered, loud enough for Jet to hear.
“I’ve taught her everything she knows,” he shouted back. “I’ve wasted months of effort and a lifetime of precious knowledge on this…. this ungrateful squashed cabbage leaf…. this heartless market guttersnipe!”
“You watch yer tongue, Jet, there’s ladies present. Very respectable too, ah am. Goin’ ter be a governess.”
“What will you teach?” He was taken aback.
“Oh… ah dunno. Ponyetics probably. Saddleson. I may even get to the end of that poem before I get the sack. Find out if Maud ever got into that blasted garden.”
“You’ll never get away with it on your own.”
“Equestria hasn’t stopped, you know, because I’ve left you. I’ll get along all right”
Mrs. Set nodded and made applauding gestures, and Diamond Mint, hiding in the broom cupboard, shouted faintly, “Hooray!”
She shut the cupboard door quickly as Jet came down to the turn of the stairs to say sulkily, “I suppose you’ve never thought how I’ll get along without you.”
“You got along before I came,” Applestia retorted, hiding her surprise.
“Who’ll write my letters? Who will keep my engagements straight? I missed my appointment with the dentist yesterday. Who’ll toast my crumpets just the way I like? Dash it, Applestia, I’ve got used to having you here.”
“Too bad.” She pushed past him, and went with dignity up the stairs.
The door of Fancypants’s room was ajar. All the drawers and cupboards were open, and his tin trunk was in the middle of the floor. He was packing.
“Hello,” Applestia said in the doorway.
“Thank heavens you’re safe.”
She came into the room and he kissed her warmly on the cheeks, clutching a pile of shirts. He was the only one who did not ask her, “Where have you been?” He had always treated her as if she had a right to a life of her own.
“Why are you leaving, Fancypants?”
“Got to. Jet has been like a bear with two sore heads, and I…. well, it’s no fun anymore, without you.”
“That’s kind of you,” she said, “to feel like that.”
“Frankly, Applestia,” he bent with a grunt to put the shirts in the trunk, “the professor has been just as upset. More so really, because…”
“Missed his dentist,” she sniffed. “No one to toast his crumpets.”
When she went up to her room, she stood in the doorway for a long time, without moving or changing her expression.
The walls were newly papered with the little delicate rosebuds she and Mrs. Set had seen the last time they went shopping. At the window, matching chintz curtains stirred gently in the breeze that filtered through the sweet-smelling lime tree. There was a new rug on the floor, all the paint was freshly white, and the bed was made up with clean sheets and turned down for her to get in.
As if in a dream, Applestia took off her linen dress and left it lying in a crumpled heap on the new rug while she put on her old blue serge skirt with the big buttons and pockets and the white blouse and the blue sailor tie. Moving like a sleepwalker, she went downstairs and into the study. She walked into the exact middle of the carpet to the respiration rose, where she had so often stood and lifted her diaphragm up and down in time to the metronome.
He did not hear her come in. He was standing in the window, looking down at the street. The wax cylinder of the recording machine was turning slowly around under the needle, and out of the speaker came Applestia’s voice, slightly out of tune, with all the vowels agonizing.
My old colt said, “Follow the van,
Applestia picked up the song and sang with herself, the two cockney voices blending, so that it was a moment before he turned, a wide smile spreading over his dear face.
…Ya can’t trust a special like an old time copper
“Home,” he said. “Home, Applestia.”
