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pursuits, but then, I was not like most girls preparing for lives managing farms and shops and moldy potatoes. Essential work, I grant you, and glad enough would I have been to learn it, the use of moldy potatoes being one of my mother's specialties. In her efforts to shield me from Sophia, however, I had, for better or worse, been kept from such practical education, with little being placed in its stead.
    The queen regent—as she now insisted on being addressed—developed an elaborate curriculum designed, so she explained, to produce a pearl of a princess from even a grain of sand such as myself. Her utter disdain for my abilities was tempered by her limitless faith in her own instructional expertise. The lessons she devised included comportment, dance, languages, history, penmanship, needlework, horsemanship, and music. To this day I cannot begin to identify which of them I despised the most.
    Much of each day I passed in the company of Lady Beatrix, a tall and bony woman of unknowable age who never appeared without a wig and a thick spackling of powder, rouge, and lipstick, a mole painted somewhere between her cheekbone and chin depending on the formality of the occasion. As an educator, she was utterly lacking.
    Her notion of history centered on genealogy, emphasizing Queen Sophia's superior bloodlines. Though she spoke several languages, her vocabulary consisted of fashion and dining terms and fawning, useless phrases. Because she insisted on teaching me three tongues at once, I eventually uttered such nonsense as "the draperies in this hall are lovely," but in a tangle of languages and grammar that not even she could unravel. Penmanship I found equally wretched, for I had far less interest in the appearance of my words than in their substance, a concept that held no meaning for my teacher. Gladly would I have returned to my task of recipe transcription, but such practical work was now denied me.
    My friends from Market Town, on learning the queen forbade their visits, set about corresponding instead. As these letters were presented in the presence of Lady Beatrix, she insisted that my replies employ "the palace tongue," as she phrased it. She would, moreover, dictate my responses so that I might familiarize myself with the ornate and gauzy drivel of formal court communication. Needless to say, my correspondents' interest soon faded as their heartfelt questions and familiar anecdotes were answered with simpering generalities.
    Needlework—oh, hateful needlework! How many
loathsome hours did I spend embroidering handkerchiefs with ridiculous flowers and illegible initials, only for Beatrix to reject them. "Someday," she would simper, "a prince himself will request your handkerchief as token. This would be shameful to present."
    "I don't care about tokens!" I snapped. "I don't care about princes, either!" I found it effortless to talk back to her, but ultimately unsatisfying, as she ignored me utterly.
    "Remember, Benevolence," she would say, handing me another square of linen, " 'Tis a needle, not a lance. Gentle stitches."
    Dance and music were taught by stout little Monsieur Grosbouche, whose hands were as cold and damp as freshly caught fish. He, too, believed that the promise of well-born bachelors should inspire my greatest exertions. As he dragged me through each minuet, polonaise, and gavotte, puffing the beat with odiferous breath, I entertained myself by stepping on the wide bows of his high-heeled dance slippers, then sweetly awaiting his stumble.
    Astoundingly, he never identified my role in the unruliness of his laces. As with Lady Beatrix, who sat at the harpsichord banging through the same handful of songs, he
believed my inherent clumsiness, not my wits, left him with aching ankles at the end of every class.
    I shall not describe my attempts at violin.
    Horsemanship, such as it was, consisted of being led sidesaddle around the inner courtyard. However longingly I gazed through the gates, I could never