Floralinda was deeply embarrassed. But by the time she had gathered up the courage required to stand on the balcony and say things like, “Oh, please don’t,” or, “Could somebody send for a ladder instead,”—the princes stopped coming, and she never got a chance to say them.
For if one prince being crunched up by a dragon is inspirational, twenty-four princes being crunched up by a dragon is cautionary. By the time Floralinda had become used to feather pillows and had read all of Monarchic Positions, which was easily over eight hundred pages in small type, and had grown sick of milk and wheaten loaf and white, and oranges, the princes had dried up. She had waited quite as patiently and meekly as any Griselda, and perhaps it had been a good thing that she had never emerged to greet her saviours, because her petticoats were extremely tired and her butter-coloured curls were growing limp.
This was not the only issue, though it was the most distressing. Once the princes stopped coming, something had begun to make an appalling noise. A low, bubbling howl sounded continually from the first floor of the tower, rattling through each rock and stair before it abruptly stopped. Then it would begin again, and every so often after that, and each time the noise grew more maddened and plaintive. Floralinda thought it must be the dragon with the diamond scales.
During the day, it made her feel very pensive. When it came at night, she began to feel afraid. It made all the other sounds of the night-time strange and unfriendly, in the way that an ordinary conversation, heard through a wall, can sound not like language at all; and at times it sounded as though it were happening right outside her door. Floralinda went to the door and turned the big, heavy key, and opened it just a crack, to hear: there was a flight of stairs, and down the stairs was a very empty, gnawing sort of darkness. The silence in that staircase was complete.
But then there came a scraping sound—like a cat wanting to be let in—far off, but not too far off; and having spent all her courage, Floralinda pulled the door closed and locked it all in a hurry. She did not sleep easy that night on the feather pillows or the musty sheets.
The discovery of the diary came as a total surprise. She had looked nearly everywhere, but not in the first place she should have looked, which was down the back of the armchair. If you have ever tried to find a good hiding-place in a sitting room, you would have known to check there; but Floralinda, it must be said, suffered a little too much from being good. The diary had been forced nearly to the bottom of the seat, which was her only excuse.
Its contents were written in a pretty, careful hand much like Floralinda’s own pretty, careful hand. The first pages after the fly-leaf were nothing but charts—Floralinda puzzled over these; afterwards, a series of tallymarks. The diary part started a few pages after this, and at first the entries were disappointingly nondescript, such as “Day twenty-two: cluster of godwits flying south” and on “day twenty-nine,” a sketch of a great many points on a grid. On day thirty—
A prince has come. I saw him quite plainly and waved to him from the balcony (Shocking! thought Floralinda) and his man held the destrier. I thought I saw the sword glint in the sunshine.
And at the end of the page: Now it is sunset and he has not yet come out.
Day thirty-two—
He did not come out.
Day thirty-three—
He did not come out. The sword glimmers at the gate. Why does it shine still, with such cheer?
Floralinda pored over the pages until there was really no daylight to read by, hastening past entries such as “I sicken of oranges,” and squinted her way to “Day seventy,”—
I was mistaken. The stars here are so different from my stars that I might be at the end of the earth. The prince will not come out. I am killed by bread. The golden sword at the gate has no heart. Each night the diamond-encrusted dragon howls its head off and nobody will shut it up, will nobody hear and come to shut it up
And then the entries stopped being dated; and the last entry read—
He did not come out. I shall go out the window. Remember me to my parents as their loving Princess