SSBBW, Fantasy Romance - the back story of a famous nursery tale from long long ago.
[Author’s Note: You already know part of this tale of love at first sight and the romance to follow. Watch for allusions and puns. Watch all the way to the end!]
It is a real chapel in a real castle, and a real organ is playing before a real marriage. My marriage! — I can scarce take it all in!
I stand near my father in the ‘tiring room at the back of the chapel listening for the cue from the organ and hardly believing that this castle — well, they call it a manor house nowadays, but a castle it was in olden times, they say — this manor house is to be my new home! How I have come up in this world in just a few short months!
Fortunately, the chapel is small. Thirty or forty people could be comfortable in it, though fifty might crowd in if needs be, I suppose. (Forty-eight if I was among their number!)
And so the chapel seems full, even though few friends of the bride are among the supposed well-wishers.
Truth to tell, the bride had few friends to invite. Louise the dresser, who has kept me garbed decently, if voluminously, for years. Still, I suspect she’s here mostly for the chapel, the castle, the organ, and the high-church ceremony. (And perhaps to see whether the seams on the dress she made for the bride are equal to their task of containment.) But I will have to call upon Louise often in the future, for ever-larger garments, and she will achieve some stature in the village from knowing folks “up ter th’ manner.” She will be able to lord it over all those catty girls and bratty boys who have made fun of me these many years, none of them accepting that my condition is something I cannot control.
Sitting with Louise are some stallholder friends from my old market days (the Manor will now be their customer) and some folks who will have to be friends to the Lady of the Manor, even though they aren’t my friends yet. There’s my maid, Mathilde (“Mattie,” I’m to call her) a big, strapping woman who looks as though she could lift an ox. I hope I don’t put her to the test, at least not soon!
As for the rest of the guests on the bride’s side, I count my mother and father, one of my brothers, come from two leagues away, (the other’s off to wherever armies march when they’re given marching orders), Aunt Dav and Uncle Seth with my three cousins, and my old Gran, who won’t be able to hear a thing and will probably still be prognosticating after the wedding and even after the honeymoon that I will never win a man!
And it may be unheard-of, but both the bride and the groom have kitchen staff in the back rows of the chapel. The high chef on my side, and the under chef on his, as is appropriate. —After all, what happens in the kitchen and at the dining table will matter so much in our marriage!
* ** * ** * ** *
The man I’m to marry in just a few moments, the man I adore now and will adore forever, strides confidently into the Chapel. Again, I find it startling to see his figure. Even with some extra width at the shoulders from dense wool pads, he still fits a description I first heard from his brother: “It’s as if he is the shadow cast by his shadow!”
The man I adore stands straight and tall, he speaks with a deep, resonant voice, he strides confidently where e’er he goes, he sits a horse manfully and with aplomb, but no one can say that he fills his clothes to any great extent!
He has been that way from birth, he says. He had not one but two wet-nurses, both trying to get him to accept more nourishment, both without success. When he was weaned, a bowl of porridge could have lasted him half a week, no matter how long his old nursey sat by his chair trying to get him to eat one more spoonful. Everyone thought he was sickly until he began to show the same energetic impishness that all boys have. And so he grew up, but not out, as nursey says. (And says, it seems, at every opportunity!)
* ** * ** * ** *
Then fate stepped in (unless it was God at last answering old Gran’s near constant prayer that I would somehow find a husband). Fate or God’s answer came in the form of Cloudhill Manor — this castle — whose owner died without issue some two years ago. When it developed that my beloved’s family had an obscure interest in the estate, his father swooped in and swept aside all others to secure Cloudhill for his third son, now a Baronet, now Lord of Cloudhill, and now standing at the front of the chapel awaiting his bride!
That fateful market day not yet three months ago, love rode into Cloudhill village on a magnificent dappled steed, love dressed modestly and without any sign that he bore a title. He gazed about the Market Square, seemingly missing not even a barleycorn spilled to the ground.
Then, as he alit, his deep blue eyes met mine, and I felt the tingling I normally feel only when Gran bakes her Christmas treacle cake. Dismounting, he immediately strode over to my stall by the church steps. (By the steps because, without them, I could neither get out of our vegetable cart in the morning nor get back into it at market’s end!)
“Good day, fair damsel,” he said, doffing a hat whose brim seemed wider than his shoulders or hips, “How much are your excellent marrows? And what would I pay for your peas? And your succulent beans? And…”
He went on to ask the price of everything I had for sale that day. When I had quietly and respectfully told him, he said: “And (forgive me for presuming to ask, miss), when you have sold all of your wares, would you be perhaps be finished with your tasks for the day?"
I was flustered and perplexed, but I admitted to him that I was there only to sell the week’s produce, so when my goods were gone or the market closed, I would be done for the day.
At that point, Father Hartsbe walked near, and the one I was even then beginning to admire and, yes, desire, said: “Ho, Padre, would I be remiss in thinking that somewhere in your lovely parish of Cloudhill there are folk who might now welcome the gift of a marrow, or some beans, or a nice fresh melon? Folk, perhaps, who would buy them here today of this lovely damsel, but who might not, on this day, have quite the wherewithal to pay for them?”
Father Hartsbe looked quizzically at this fancy-speaking young man, but allowed that almost every parish had such folk, Cloudhill notwithstanding. “Then today, Father, we three shall together conspire to follow our Lord’s instruction to feed the poor! I am sure that watching from on high us mortals conspiring to follow, rather than evade, His teaching will confound and amaze Him, such a rare occurrence it must be!
“Good Father, this damsel offers the goods in her stall for sale. I offer to pay her price for the lot — for every last peapod and bean — and you, Father, if you will, shall discreetly convey them, fine specimens all, to the parish folk you know to be in need!”
Father Hartsbe was astonished and I was dumbfounded! But the “good Father” knew enough to accept unexpected blessings no matter whence they came. As the young man pulled a purse from ‘round his meager waist and started to measure copper, bronze, and even silver coins into my hands, the good Father began packing up the produce I had brought to market, borrowing a barrow from old Will to contain the goods.
“But just now, before you set off on that errand, Padre, could you perform another good deed…the grandest favor I can ask of you at this very moment? Could you introduce the vendress of all this good produce to me? And me to her?
“And Father, perhaps another tiny favor? Might you also find a reliable urchin of the neighborhood who will earn two of my remaining coppers by running out to this maiden’s farmstead and informing her family that she will be accompanied home this afternoon by a Gentleman who wishes to sup with her family? The urchin, good Padre, should tell them what is God’s honest truth: Awed in the presence of their daughter, the Gentleman will eat hardly a thing!”
It was a very pleasant Market Day for me, not the least because I had sold all my produce in the forenoon! And at the end of this very pleasant market day, the Gentleman did indeed accompany me home to sup. I was very conscious of my awkward jiggling and joggling with every lurch of the sturdy dray that Ben the cartwright had built to accommodate my needs, but I was also conscious that my beau (for how else should I now think of him?) never allowed his steed to advance beyond the dray. Neither, I believe, in all the travel to our farmstead, did he ever look at the road ahead, his gaze being fastened the whole way upon that very jiggling and joggling that was making me feel so awkward! It was enough to make a girl blush! (And to remind her of Gran’s Christmas treacle-cake!)
* ** * ** * ** *
And that was how I met the love of my life, Cloudhill’s Lord, the man whose love would lift me (hard as that might be!) beyond my station to become Cloudhill’s Lady, even though the title be a mere Baronetcy.
At dinner, “the Gentleman” explained his “condition” to my family, and likened that condition to my own, though, of course, as opposite sides of a coin.
“In that way, and in many others, I believe, your fair daughter and I are kindred spirits. After your daughter dutifully managed to sell all her vegetables today (he winked at me), she and I spent some lovely hours together sitting decorously in the park — in full view of townsfolk at every moment, I assure you! — and talking with each other.”
He turned to my father and mother and earnestly sought their formal permission to court me. “But I warn you, my courting will not be drawn out. — my decision is half-made now! I expect we can publish the banns beginning next Sunday! Sunday week at the latest!”
(Thank goodness old Gran had by then dropped into a doze at her end of the table — else she might have had an apoplectic fit on the spot!)
* ** * ** * ** *
The organ stops briefly. Father Hartsbe of the parish and Deacon Joyner of the See emerge and stand quietly, waiting with my husband-to-be to marry the two of us.
Now, I just need to get to them.
With much practice, I know just how to twist and turn my body to get through the ‘tiring-room door, and I do so with no damage to the fabric of my gown — Louise the dressers’ gown — where it stretches around the flesh at my hips and touches both sides of the jamb.
The organist begins the slow march we have chosen so carefully. From practice, father and I know that we cannot walk side by side down the aisle of the chapel — it simply isn’t wide enough. It will be my longest walk in years, save for my practice in the last three weeks. Yet I am bound and determined to do it without any kind of help, without, even the support of my father’s arm, no matter how slow and awkward I might be. I might never walk this far again after I am married, but I will do it today!
I walk down the aisle no faster than I have practiced because I do not wish to perspire any more than I must with the exertion. Unbidden, a remembrance enters my brain of village brats loudly imitating quacking ducks as I walked in the square on Market days. Perhaps my awkward gait did resemble a duck out of water, but the brats had no idea how much effort I made with each ponderous step. After that, father soon had Ben the cartwright start work on our market dray.
I am sure that father, following me oh, so slowly down the aisle, sees much relief in this marriage. Not only because he believed old Gran that I would never get a man (truth is, we all thought that), but also because he will have the equivalent of about two-and-a-half fewer mouths to feed now that I am leaving his table. I am sorry to have consumed so much of the food he could have sold over the years, but if I could control my appetite, then or now, I would have done so! And Gran will now have time each week to contemplate the irony of her prediction-gone-wrong, for it is Gran who will take my place on Market Days in the stall by the church steps now that I have defied her predictions and have indeed gotten a man!
* ** * ** * ** *
At last I am at the altar. My feet hurt, overflowing the sturdy, flat shoes that Willy the shoemaker has crafted. My brow, I suspect, is slightly shining with perspiration, and there seems to be a drop or two of the same running down the abyss between my breasts. But I seem not to be breathing too hard from the work I have done! I smile at the man who in moments will be my husband, knowing full well that the dimples I thus create in my chubby cheeks drive him to distraction.
Then for a moment the words of Father Hartsbe and Deacon Joyner seem to be a blur in the background as I ask myself and God why I, seemingly unfavored for so long, should now have such bliss...
...the momentary blur clears when I hear a deep, resonant voice beside me give a solemn (but to my ears decidedly lascivious!) answer to Father Hartsbe’s question:
“Do you, John Gaunt Sprat, take this woman...”
[Author’s Note: You already know part of this tale of love at first sight and the romance to follow. Watch for allusions and puns. Watch all the way to the end!]
On My Wedding Day
By Kilo Cal
By Kilo Cal
It is a real chapel in a real castle, and a real organ is playing before a real marriage. My marriage! — I can scarce take it all in!
I stand near my father in the ‘tiring room at the back of the chapel listening for the cue from the organ and hardly believing that this castle — well, they call it a manor house nowadays, but a castle it was in olden times, they say — this manor house is to be my new home! How I have come up in this world in just a few short months!
Fortunately, the chapel is small. Thirty or forty people could be comfortable in it, though fifty might crowd in if needs be, I suppose. (Forty-eight if I was among their number!)
And so the chapel seems full, even though few friends of the bride are among the supposed well-wishers.
Truth to tell, the bride had few friends to invite. Louise the dresser, who has kept me garbed decently, if voluminously, for years. Still, I suspect she’s here mostly for the chapel, the castle, the organ, and the high-church ceremony. (And perhaps to see whether the seams on the dress she made for the bride are equal to their task of containment.) But I will have to call upon Louise often in the future, for ever-larger garments, and she will achieve some stature in the village from knowing folks “up ter th’ manner.” She will be able to lord it over all those catty girls and bratty boys who have made fun of me these many years, none of them accepting that my condition is something I cannot control.
Sitting with Louise are some stallholder friends from my old market days (the Manor will now be their customer) and some folks who will have to be friends to the Lady of the Manor, even though they aren’t my friends yet. There’s my maid, Mathilde (“Mattie,” I’m to call her) a big, strapping woman who looks as though she could lift an ox. I hope I don’t put her to the test, at least not soon!
As for the rest of the guests on the bride’s side, I count my mother and father, one of my brothers, come from two leagues away, (the other’s off to wherever armies march when they’re given marching orders), Aunt Dav and Uncle Seth with my three cousins, and my old Gran, who won’t be able to hear a thing and will probably still be prognosticating after the wedding and even after the honeymoon that I will never win a man!
And it may be unheard-of, but both the bride and the groom have kitchen staff in the back rows of the chapel. The high chef on my side, and the under chef on his, as is appropriate. —After all, what happens in the kitchen and at the dining table will matter so much in our marriage!
* ** * ** * ** *
The man I’m to marry in just a few moments, the man I adore now and will adore forever, strides confidently into the Chapel. Again, I find it startling to see his figure. Even with some extra width at the shoulders from dense wool pads, he still fits a description I first heard from his brother: “It’s as if he is the shadow cast by his shadow!”
The man I adore stands straight and tall, he speaks with a deep, resonant voice, he strides confidently where e’er he goes, he sits a horse manfully and with aplomb, but no one can say that he fills his clothes to any great extent!
He has been that way from birth, he says. He had not one but two wet-nurses, both trying to get him to accept more nourishment, both without success. When he was weaned, a bowl of porridge could have lasted him half a week, no matter how long his old nursey sat by his chair trying to get him to eat one more spoonful. Everyone thought he was sickly until he began to show the same energetic impishness that all boys have. And so he grew up, but not out, as nursey says. (And says, it seems, at every opportunity!)
* ** * ** * ** *
Then fate stepped in (unless it was God at last answering old Gran’s near constant prayer that I would somehow find a husband). Fate or God’s answer came in the form of Cloudhill Manor — this castle — whose owner died without issue some two years ago. When it developed that my beloved’s family had an obscure interest in the estate, his father swooped in and swept aside all others to secure Cloudhill for his third son, now a Baronet, now Lord of Cloudhill, and now standing at the front of the chapel awaiting his bride!
That fateful market day not yet three months ago, love rode into Cloudhill village on a magnificent dappled steed, love dressed modestly and without any sign that he bore a title. He gazed about the Market Square, seemingly missing not even a barleycorn spilled to the ground.
Then, as he alit, his deep blue eyes met mine, and I felt the tingling I normally feel only when Gran bakes her Christmas treacle cake. Dismounting, he immediately strode over to my stall by the church steps. (By the steps because, without them, I could neither get out of our vegetable cart in the morning nor get back into it at market’s end!)
“Good day, fair damsel,” he said, doffing a hat whose brim seemed wider than his shoulders or hips, “How much are your excellent marrows? And what would I pay for your peas? And your succulent beans? And…”
He went on to ask the price of everything I had for sale that day. When I had quietly and respectfully told him, he said: “And (forgive me for presuming to ask, miss), when you have sold all of your wares, would you be perhaps be finished with your tasks for the day?"
I was flustered and perplexed, but I admitted to him that I was there only to sell the week’s produce, so when my goods were gone or the market closed, I would be done for the day.
At that point, Father Hartsbe walked near, and the one I was even then beginning to admire and, yes, desire, said: “Ho, Padre, would I be remiss in thinking that somewhere in your lovely parish of Cloudhill there are folk who might now welcome the gift of a marrow, or some beans, or a nice fresh melon? Folk, perhaps, who would buy them here today of this lovely damsel, but who might not, on this day, have quite the wherewithal to pay for them?”
Father Hartsbe looked quizzically at this fancy-speaking young man, but allowed that almost every parish had such folk, Cloudhill notwithstanding. “Then today, Father, we three shall together conspire to follow our Lord’s instruction to feed the poor! I am sure that watching from on high us mortals conspiring to follow, rather than evade, His teaching will confound and amaze Him, such a rare occurrence it must be!
“Good Father, this damsel offers the goods in her stall for sale. I offer to pay her price for the lot — for every last peapod and bean — and you, Father, if you will, shall discreetly convey them, fine specimens all, to the parish folk you know to be in need!”
Father Hartsbe was astonished and I was dumbfounded! But the “good Father” knew enough to accept unexpected blessings no matter whence they came. As the young man pulled a purse from ‘round his meager waist and started to measure copper, bronze, and even silver coins into my hands, the good Father began packing up the produce I had brought to market, borrowing a barrow from old Will to contain the goods.
“But just now, before you set off on that errand, Padre, could you perform another good deed…the grandest favor I can ask of you at this very moment? Could you introduce the vendress of all this good produce to me? And me to her?
“And Father, perhaps another tiny favor? Might you also find a reliable urchin of the neighborhood who will earn two of my remaining coppers by running out to this maiden’s farmstead and informing her family that she will be accompanied home this afternoon by a Gentleman who wishes to sup with her family? The urchin, good Padre, should tell them what is God’s honest truth: Awed in the presence of their daughter, the Gentleman will eat hardly a thing!”
It was a very pleasant Market Day for me, not the least because I had sold all my produce in the forenoon! And at the end of this very pleasant market day, the Gentleman did indeed accompany me home to sup. I was very conscious of my awkward jiggling and joggling with every lurch of the sturdy dray that Ben the cartwright had built to accommodate my needs, but I was also conscious that my beau (for how else should I now think of him?) never allowed his steed to advance beyond the dray. Neither, I believe, in all the travel to our farmstead, did he ever look at the road ahead, his gaze being fastened the whole way upon that very jiggling and joggling that was making me feel so awkward! It was enough to make a girl blush! (And to remind her of Gran’s Christmas treacle-cake!)
* ** * ** * ** *
And that was how I met the love of my life, Cloudhill’s Lord, the man whose love would lift me (hard as that might be!) beyond my station to become Cloudhill’s Lady, even though the title be a mere Baronetcy.
At dinner, “the Gentleman” explained his “condition” to my family, and likened that condition to my own, though, of course, as opposite sides of a coin.
“In that way, and in many others, I believe, your fair daughter and I are kindred spirits. After your daughter dutifully managed to sell all her vegetables today (he winked at me), she and I spent some lovely hours together sitting decorously in the park — in full view of townsfolk at every moment, I assure you! — and talking with each other.”
He turned to my father and mother and earnestly sought their formal permission to court me. “But I warn you, my courting will not be drawn out. — my decision is half-made now! I expect we can publish the banns beginning next Sunday! Sunday week at the latest!”
(Thank goodness old Gran had by then dropped into a doze at her end of the table — else she might have had an apoplectic fit on the spot!)
* ** * ** * ** *
The organ stops briefly. Father Hartsbe of the parish and Deacon Joyner of the See emerge and stand quietly, waiting with my husband-to-be to marry the two of us.
Now, I just need to get to them.
With much practice, I know just how to twist and turn my body to get through the ‘tiring-room door, and I do so with no damage to the fabric of my gown — Louise the dressers’ gown — where it stretches around the flesh at my hips and touches both sides of the jamb.
The organist begins the slow march we have chosen so carefully. From practice, father and I know that we cannot walk side by side down the aisle of the chapel — it simply isn’t wide enough. It will be my longest walk in years, save for my practice in the last three weeks. Yet I am bound and determined to do it without any kind of help, without, even the support of my father’s arm, no matter how slow and awkward I might be. I might never walk this far again after I am married, but I will do it today!
I walk down the aisle no faster than I have practiced because I do not wish to perspire any more than I must with the exertion. Unbidden, a remembrance enters my brain of village brats loudly imitating quacking ducks as I walked in the square on Market days. Perhaps my awkward gait did resemble a duck out of water, but the brats had no idea how much effort I made with each ponderous step. After that, father soon had Ben the cartwright start work on our market dray.
I am sure that father, following me oh, so slowly down the aisle, sees much relief in this marriage. Not only because he believed old Gran that I would never get a man (truth is, we all thought that), but also because he will have the equivalent of about two-and-a-half fewer mouths to feed now that I am leaving his table. I am sorry to have consumed so much of the food he could have sold over the years, but if I could control my appetite, then or now, I would have done so! And Gran will now have time each week to contemplate the irony of her prediction-gone-wrong, for it is Gran who will take my place on Market Days in the stall by the church steps now that I have defied her predictions and have indeed gotten a man!
* ** * ** * ** *
At last I am at the altar. My feet hurt, overflowing the sturdy, flat shoes that Willy the shoemaker has crafted. My brow, I suspect, is slightly shining with perspiration, and there seems to be a drop or two of the same running down the abyss between my breasts. But I seem not to be breathing too hard from the work I have done! I smile at the man who in moments will be my husband, knowing full well that the dimples I thus create in my chubby cheeks drive him to distraction.
Then for a moment the words of Father Hartsbe and Deacon Joyner seem to be a blur in the background as I ask myself and God why I, seemingly unfavored for so long, should now have such bliss...
...the momentary blur clears when I hear a deep, resonant voice beside me give a solemn (but to my ears decidedly lascivious!) answer to Father Hartsbe’s question:
“Do you, John Gaunt Sprat, take this woman...”
