The Princess and the Pea.

Once upon a time, isn´t that the way all fairy stories begin?
Upon a time, beyond time, a realm where imagination is paramount and rules over a kingdom lush and fertile. So to begin again.
Once beyond a time there was, of course a kingdom. This kingdom is ruled, of course, by a king. The king had a son, a prince of course! The years pass, the king ages and the prince begins to think about finding a princess to marry.
However this is a very picky and determined prince. Not just any princess will do, ( only child). He travels far and wide to search for a suitable princess, but where-ever he goes, the princesses are not to his liking.
Some are too tall, others too short, some are too proud and others too meek. Some were too fretful, others too stubborn. He has an idea in his head about what a REAL princess should be. But he cannot find any that will fit at all. He returns home again feeling most unfulfilled and desolate.
In another kingdom far away ( you knew this bit was coming), the was a princess with a thirst for adventure. She too was most displeased with her local choice of princes, but being a princess, her opinion was not so highly valued. And so, she decided to take herself off and escape from her kingdom. She too travelled far and wide. She travelled so far away that even the stars in the sky looked unfamiliar. She eventually arrived in the kingdom of the prince during an enormous thunder storm. The lightening was so bright, it turned night into day, and the thunder was so loud that the castle shook in its foundations.
The king was preparing for bed, when he heard the jangle of the bell pull outside the castle gate. This in itself was special, as few except those of royal blood could activate the bell. As the servants were all hiding in the cellar from the storm, the king himself went to open the door.
Outside stood the princess. She was soaking. The water ran like a stream off the tips of her hair and dripped from the cuffs of her robe. It trickled into her shoes off her hem and her feet slopped about like boats tossed on the sea. However, only a real princess would wear heels in such weather. The king saw at once that she had many traits of a real princess, so he asked her what she wanted. But alas! The princess was so far from home that she could not understand the language that the old king was speaking. She replied as best she could. ¨Please kind sir, my name is Rosebud and I am far from home. Do you have a place for me to stay the night?¨
Now all clever girls know that it is never a good idea to knock on the door of a strange house, in a strange place on a dark night, and the ask to be let in! However, the etiquette amongst the royals is different in `Upon Time´ places. This is considered a perfectly reasonable thing to do for a young princess travelling alone.
Anyway, luckily `Rosebud´ in the king´s language meant `Real princess´ (fortunate no?) And so the king led the princess inside.
When the prince laid eyes on the princess he was immediately very taken by her. But, being still unable to trust his instincts, he decided to carry out a test to prove whether or not she was truly a real princess.
The prince made up a bed for the princess. He first placed a pea on the mattress, then piled twenty more mattresses on top of it. Over this he laid twenty eiderdown quilts, and twenty woven blankets and twenty silk sheets. He had to place a ladder next to the bed so that the princess could climb up.
The princess thought this bed a little odd, it was quite different to the beds she was used to back in her own kingdom. Yet she put it down to cultural differences and climbed up. During the night she got cold, and so she snuggled down to be under three of the woven blankets. When she went to sleep, she found the blankets too itchy, and so threw them off. She woke up cold again and so wriggled down to the eiderdown quilts. However she got too hot and so threw these off too. As she was lying there, wondering what to do now with no covers, she smelt something tasty. It was late and she had eaten very little, so she sniffed around on the highest mattress to discover what the smell was. She sniffed over the side of the mattress, and found the smell stronger between the next mattress, so she maneuvered herself own to that one and resumed sniffing. This continued down through all the mattresses untill she found herself squashed between the bottom two mattresses with all the others still piled on top. The princess ignored the weight and continued to sniff about, so that she eventually found the pea, now a flat circle of green muck pressed into the last mattress. Still the princess wasn´t going to waste her grand effort, so she scraped off the pea with a fingernail and ate it. She wriggled out of the mattresses bum first and remade a bed with the right combination of everything, except for the mattresses, as it was an adventure for her to sleep so high.
The next morning, the prince came to the princesses room with a cup of coffee. She was just climbing down from her bed, again bum first. Her hair was a mess, it looked like a birds nest due to her nights excursion in search of the pea.
The prince held his breath and asked her how she had slept. `Not bad´ she replied, deducing what the question had been ( she was, after all a very well raised lady) From the state of the room and the state of the princess, the prince knew that it was not the truth.
He knew she had the most delicate skin that could not touch such coarse blankets, such a subtle temperament that could not bear too many quilts and an acute sense of smell that had found the pea. Only a REAL princess could have these attributes.
The princess, as princesses do, had little choice in the matter, but he smelled alright, a proven factor in lasting relationships, and also he was quite kind and handsome.
So they married and learned to communicate with each other and lived in the storybook sense, happily ever after.

As a final note, I am sure that all those other princesses that had seemed less than perfect to the prince found their own kind of partners who also considered them to be real princesses.