The Ogre of Oglefort

CHAPTER 8 Grief in The Palace

At first no one at the palace could believe that Mirella had gone. They were sure she was playing a trick on them, hiding somewhere close by, and they searched in all sorts of ridiculous places. Inside chests of drawers, or behind curtains or in cooking pots. They called and whistled and begged and entreated her to come out from wherever she was, and her mother even offered to bring Squinter back if only Mirella stopped teasing them.

When this didn’t work a proper hunt began. The police were called and scoured every inch of the palace grounds and went into every house in Waterfield, and the army was sent out to hunt in the surrounding countryside. The sound of bloodhounds baying could be heard all through the night, the schoolchildren were told to pray and sing hymns, and people wept openly in the streets.

At first her parents had thought it might be a kidnap attempt, and they waited every moment of every day for a ransom note but none came.

“She can’t possibly have run away,” said her mother. “Not when she had everything a girl could want.”

So had she met with some dreadful accident? Wells and rivers were searched, the lifeguards put out to sea, the Boy Scouts looked in potholes and caves — but still day followed day and there was no sign of the princess.

Both her sisters were sent for — Sidony came with her husband, who had brought his stamp collection to sort out while they waited, and Angeline came with her husband, who sucked even more peppermints when he was worried. Both the sisters were expecting babies and they sat and knitted baby clothes and shook their heads.

“Could she have run away to a traveling zoo or something?” Sidony wondered. “She was so nutty about animals.”

But there hadn’t been any traveling zoos or circuses in the neighborhood for many months, and their mother always began to cry again when anyone suggested that Mirella had not been entirely happy at home.

After a week the schoolchildren were given a day’s holiday; the flags flew at half-mast as people began to think that Mirella might be dead; and they could no longer put off giving the terrible news to Prince Umberto.

So Mirella’s father went to Amora, where he found Prince Umberto in a mauve quilted dressing gown being measured for a new suit by his tailor while a hairdresser rubbed pomade into his hair.

The prince was very upset indeed to hear that his intended bride was missing and perhaps dead.

“Oh dear,” he said. “This is terrible. Quite terrible.”

And indeed it was. Umberto owed money to his tailor and his shoemaker and to the man who trained his racehorses, and he hadn’t paid for his new carriage. Up to now he had kept everyone quiet by telling them he was going to marry a princess whose father was very rich and would pay all his debts, and now he didn’t know what to do.

“I shall have to order some mourning clothes, I suppose — fortunately black suits me — or is it too early? I mean, there may still be good news.”

But as the days passed there was no news at all. In the war, when someone disappeared, they put out bulletins saying “Missing: Presumed Dead.”

It was these words that the police now wrote in their files.