The princess knew about death: she had read about it. The cat lay at the foot of the bed, as if asleep, but she wasn’t breathing and took no interest when breakfast came through the doorflap. One morning, the princess woke to find that Dinah had died in the night. She left a note with her soiled laundry to explain this to her keepers. The provision of books, she felt, was a mistake. There was no reason, of course, to write about princesses such as her: a life of waiting without an end was not the stuff that stories were made of, but it did give an unbalanced view and a possibly unreasonable expectation to those princesses whose destiny failed to turn up. She began to see that the problem was with the books, and felt some resentment at her keepers for having provided her with stories which took only part of the truth into account. Who could tell, there might even be more of her kind of princess than the sort for whom destiny finally arrived. There might be hundreds-thousands-like her. Perhaps their towers were too far off the beaten track for destiny to find them or it might be that destiny was a limited commodity, and while every princess waited, not all of them could be accommodated. There might be many princesses to whom nothing had ever happened, and who simply lived in their towers day by day.

What if there were other princesses in other towers, scattered here and there, who also waited in vain? Perhaps the stories had simply omitted to tell about her sort of princess, or, simply by chance, she had never received those stories through the doorflap. For some time now there had been no sanitary towels.Ī new idea came to her.

She used the revelation to put a stop to the chiming of the big clock on the lower landing, and then returned to her room, where she found her clean laundry waiting for her, just inside the doorflap. Eventually, she had to admit to herself that it was simply the case that she alone among princesses lacked a destiny and then she discovered that the door to her turret was not locked. She came across no answer to this question in any of her books, though she took to re-reading the Psychology and Genetic Sciences sections with some attention.

Jenny diski the vanishing princess