First published in Great Britain in three separate editions:

Princess Florizella by Viking Kestrel 1988, Florizella and the Wolves by Walker Books Ltd 1991 and Florizella and the Giant by Walker Books Ltd 1992

This edition published in hardback by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2019

Published in this ebook edition in 2019

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

HarperCollins Publishers

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London SE1 9GF

The HarperCollins Children’s Books website address is

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Text copyright © Philippa Gregory 1988, 1991, 1992, 2019

Illustrations copyright © Chris Chatterton 2019

Cover design copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Philippa Gregory and Chris Chatterton assert the moral right to be identified as the author and illustrator of the work respectively.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008375485

Ebook Edition © November 2019 ISBN: 9780008339807

Version: 2019-10-23

For Freddie and Sebastian

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Princess Florizella

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Florizella and the Wolves

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Florizella and the Giant

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

About the Author

About the Publisher

Once upon a time (that means I don’t exactly know when, but it wasn’t that long ago), in the land called the Seven Kingdoms, the king and queen very much wanted a son. They waited and waited until one day the queen told her husband, ‘I have news for you. We are going to have a beautiful baby boy!’

‘And when he grows up he will be king,’ said the king, very pleased. ‘What a lovely surprise.’

But when the baby came, it was not a boy. It was a girl.

This was a big shock for the king and queen, but since they were royal they put on a smile and took the baby through the tall windows to the balcony of the palace and waved at everyone. They pretended that they did not mind that she was a girl when they had been counting on a boy, and after a little while they loved her anyway. ‘Besides,’ the king said, ‘undoubtedly she will marry a handsome rich prince, and they can be king and queen over his kingdom and ours. Undootedly!’

‘We’ll call her Florizella,’ said the queen. ‘Princess Florizella.’

Though they started with good intentions, the king and queen were dreadfully careless parents. They messed up the christening by inviting everyone, so that nobody was furiously offended. No angry witches blew in and put a fatal spell on the baby, nobody turned her into a mouse. The king and queen forgot all about locking her in a high tower so that a prince could climb up her hair to rescue her, they did not forbid her from spinning, or ban her from sharp needles. They did remind her not to run with scissors in her hands, but this is of no use to a fairytale princess – it’s just normal. They did not strap her into tight gowns so she had a tiny, tiny waist that a prince could span with one hand. They did not feed her poisoned apples and bury her in a glass coffin. The queen was particularly neglectful – she completely failed to die and leave her daughter to a cruel stepmother to make her herd geese or sit in the cinders.

They let Florizella do as she liked, and so it was partly their fault that she did not learn the Princess Rules, but grew up into a cheerful, noisy, bossy, happy girl who spent her mornings on her horse called Jellybean, and her afternoons working with them in the royal office. She particularly liked answering letters of complaint about the expense and the unimportance of a royal family. Mostly, she agreed with them. ‘We are dretfully ex-pence-sieve’ she wrote when she was six years old.

‘You’re never going to post it like that!’ said the king.

‘So sweet,’ said the queen, putting it in the bin.

Florizella was friends with some princesses who had studied the Princess Rules, and behaved just as the Rules said they should. Florizella thought their hair was lovely: so golden and so very long! And their clothes were nice: so richly embroidered by devoted peasants. And their shoes were delightful: so tiny and handmade in silk! But their days bored her to death!

In the morning, they got up, washed their faces and put cream on their cheeks and on their hands and on their noses. Then it was time for breakfast. They drank hot water and sometimes green tea. The Princess Rules were clear about breakfast: ‘Princesses live off air,’ the Rules said. They got dressed, and that took them hours because they wore petticoats and underclothes and beautiful gowns and overgowns and even those tall pointy hats called henins. By the time they got all that on, and did their hair, it was lunchtime.

In the afternoon, they were too tired to do anything but pluck their eyebrows.

In the evening, they said they were bored.

‘What do you do all day?’ they asked Florizella, looking in bewilderment at her. She wore trousers and a shirt for riding, and a skirt or a dress for best.

‘I’m learning how to run the Seven Kingdoms when I’m grown up,’ she told them. ‘I’ve got a lot of ideas.’

‘Ideas!’ They were all quite horrified. ‘We don’t have ideas! We have the Rules.’

But Florizella thought that everyone should live in the size of house that they needed. So families with lots of children, or who had friends living with them, should have the biggest houses, and small families should have the smaller houses.

‘Actually, that sounds rather sensible,’ said the queen, who was sick of dusting the 134 royal rooms of the palace.

Florizella thought that everyone should be paid whether they had a job or not. They should be paid to garden or think, to paint or run. Fathers could stay at home and look after the children, and when mothers went out to interesting jobs they could come home to a clean, tidy house.

‘That would never work,’ said the king, who had no intention of dusting 134 rooms, not even one or two.

Florizella laughed and went out to canoe in the moat. ‘You know, she’s not like a regular princess at all,’ the king complained to the queen. ‘I think you must have gone very badly wrong somewhere.’

‘She’ll find her own way, in her own time,’ the queen said comfortably. ‘And surely, since she’s a princess born and bred, she’ll just naturally come to the Princess Rules in time? Won’t she?’

One day an invitation came to the palace. It said ‘Princess Florizella’ on the front in wonderful curly writing. It was an invitation for a ball, to be given by Prince Bennett in the next-door kingdom – the Land of Deep Lakes. He wanted to meet all the princesses in the neighbouring realms so that he could choose one to marry.

‘I’d like to go,’ said Princess Florizella at breakfast when the invitation arrived.

The king gave the queen a look, which meant that she must start the job of telling Florizella ‘no’.

‘I don’t think you’d enjoy it,’ the queen said nicely.

Florizella said she thought she would.

The queen gave the king That Look, and he said, rather impatiently, for he was uncomfortable when he thought he might hurt Florizella’s feelings:

‘Thing is, Florizella, Prince Bennett will never choose you to be his bride because there will be very, very pretty princesses there, trained in the Princess Rules. And you have never been like that. Not at all.’

‘I know that,’ said Florizella. ‘But I’m not going there to get married to Prince Bennett. I’m going to see my friends and enjoy the party.’

‘Ah,’ the king said. ‘Then you may go. Undoubtedly. Undootedly!’

So she threw a clean pair of jeans in a bag, and after lunch she hopped into the glass coach – for they had no cars and trains or buses in the Seven Kingdoms – and drove off with her horse, Jellybean, trotting behind.

Prince Bennett’s kingdom wasn’t far from Florizella’s home, and Florizella was the first to arrive. The prince had invited one hundred and twenty-one princesses, and Florizella waited at the gate to watch them all drive past. One hundred and twenty princesses went by, some in fine carriages, some in smaller ones, and one or two in carts. One very poor princess came in a wheelbarrow. Some of them were very beautiful and some were less so, but they all desperately wanted to marry Prince Bennett. They didn’t have anything else to do in those days, and the Princess Rule no. 500 (the last) said: Marry a handsome prince.

The one hundred and twenty-first princess, Florizella, was the only one not planning marriage. She was just there for the party.

‘And to eat the food!’ said Princess Florizella longingly when she saw the banquet.

She had a wonderful time. There were tons of cakes, and three hundred different sorts of ice cream and forty different coloured jellies. There were meringues, pizzas and hot dogs. There were sticks of rock and candyfloss. There were toffee apples, and strawberries still growing in the strawberry beds that you could pick yourself and eat – as many as you wanted. Florizella ate a very good dinner indeed.

But the one hundred and twenty princesses ate a little bread and butter and nothing more. They were worried about spilling on their best ballgowns. They were worried about whether they would be able to dance lightly on their toes. They were worried that someone might think they were greedy. (Princess Rule no. 42: Princesses Live Off Air.) Florizella worried about nothing. She had seconds and thirds of nearly everything.

She had a much better dinner than Prince Bennett, who had to dance with every single one of the hundred and twenty-one princesses. He thought he had better make an early start. He danced with each princess, one after another, and they all smiled and agreed with whatever he said.

They were lovely. They were the nicest girls he had ever met. They were so pleasant that he could not tell them apart. They were so charming that he had the horrid feeling that nobody could be that nice all the time. So how could he possibly know which were nice for most of the time? One or two might not be nice at all, but might just be putting it on for the party. And very sorry he would be if he married one of them! Prince Bennett’s head was spinning by the time he came and sat down beside Florizella, who was just finishing a bowl of raspberries.

‘Would you like a dance?’ he asked politely.

‘Not especially,’ said Florizella. ‘And I would have thought you might have had enough.’

‘Yes, I have,’ Prince Bennett said honestly. ‘I think it’s the worst party I’ve ever been to.’

‘Have a choc-ice,’ said Florizella to cheer him up, and Prince Bennett started to feel better.

‘You’re a girl,’ he said trustingly. ‘You advise me. How can you tell which princesses are really nice and which are just pretending?’

Florizella looked around. ‘I only know a few of them. Most of them I don’t know any better than you do,’ she said. ‘The thing you have to remember is that they all have to be nice to you because it’s in the Rules. You’re the handsome prince.’

‘That’s just it!’ Bennett groaned. ‘How do I choose which one to marry?’

‘You could disguise yourself as a woodcutter,’ Florizella said helpfully, ‘and go away for seven years, walk all round other kingdoms and see if you meet your True Love.’

‘That’s a really rubbish idea,’ Prince Bennett said. ‘I’m not cutting wood for seven years.’

‘Or you could go and work as a swineherd in a royal palace and see if the princess chooses you?’

‘I’m not being a swineherd!’ Bennett exclaimed. ‘Do you have any idea what swine are?’

‘Then don’t marry anyone,’ Florizella said helpfully. ‘I wouldn’t.’

‘But I have to! All princes have to give balls and choose their princess and get married. Then they have to live happily ever after.’

Florizella frowned. ‘I know people say that’s a happy ending, but they never say exactly how to do it.’

Prince Bennett nodded. ‘Or how to do it forever after,’ he said dolefully. ‘That’s the whole problem with being a fairytale prince.’

Then the band played and poor Prince Bennett had to go and dance with another princess, and then another and another, until the clock struck midnight and all the princesses got up at once, rushed up the stairs and limped to their beds. There were one hundred and twenty glass slippers dumped on the stairs like a jumble sale. Bennett picked up sixty of them, and then gave up.

‘This is getting completely ridiculous,’ said Florizella.

That night all the beautiful princesses set their alarm clocks for six in the morning to give themselves time to get up early and find their shoes, have their baths, wash their hair and put on new dresses for breakfast.

The next day, Prince Bennett was in the parlour waiting for them, and as each princess came in, he bowed very low and said, ‘Good morning!’

Each princess curtsied and smiled, and said, ‘Good morning, Prince Bennett!’

Then the tired prince said, ‘What would you like for breakfast?’

And each princess said, ‘I don’t know. What are you having?’

When Prince Bennett said he was having porridge, every one of the one hundred and twenty princesses gasped as if he had said something dreadful, and said, ‘Oh, no! Not for me! Just a glass of herbal tea, please! Nothing else!’

One or two of them even said, ‘Just a glass of hot water!’ and all the other princesses looked envious that they had not thought of that, and gazed at Prince Bennett to see if he was impressed.

So he was very glad to see Princess Florizella, who came in late because she had been out to the stables to see her horse. And he was very glad when she said at once that she would like bacon and eggs, and tomatoes and sausages too, if they had any. They had a most peaceful, hearty breakfast while, all around, the one hundred and twenty princesses sipped tea and looked beautiful but hungry.

After breakfast, Prince Bennett asked the princess on his right what she would like to do that day. And the princess on his right said, ‘I don’t know. What would you like to do?’

Then Prince Bennett asked the princess on his left what she would like to do that day. And she said, ‘I don’t know. What would you like to do?’

Then Princess Florizella suggested very helpfully, ‘Why don’t we all ride down to the Deep Lakes and go swimming? We could take a picnic with us.’

Well – some of the princesses couldn’t ride, and some of them couldn’t swim. Some of them hadn’t got trousers for riding, and some of them hadn’t got swimming costumes. Some of them were frightened of cold water, and some of them were frightened of horses, and none of them would dream of eating a picnic sitting on the ground where there might be ants or wasps.

‘Or grass!’ one of them exclaimed.

And they all said, ‘Grass stains! Oh no!’

So in the end, no one went … except Princess Florizella and Prince Bennett.

They had a lovely day.

When they were trotting back to the prince’s palace in the evening, just as the stars were starting to come out and the sky was getting grey, Prince Bennett said happily, ‘Florizella, I’ve had the most brilliant idea. I won’t marry any of the one hundred and twenty beautiful princesses. I’ll marry you!’

And then Florizella said something that surprised him so much that he nearly fell off his horse.

‘No, thank you,’ she said politely.

Prince Bennett gawped at her. ‘Why ever not?’ he asked. ‘I am a fairytale prince, remember. And you would be my queen.’

‘Look here,’ said Florizella reasonably, ‘I told you I wasn’t going to marry, and I meant it. One day I shall inherit the Seven Kingdoms, and there are a lot of things I want to do there. I don’t want to come and be your queen. I’m not even sure that I think kings and queens are a good idea. It might be a lot better for everyone if people made up their own laws and didn’t have one person ruling everything.

‘Why should I come and live in your palace when I’ve got a perfectly good palace of my own? I’m not even planning to keep that one all to myself – I’m going to share it. Another home would just be greedy.

‘And I don’t want to live in your country. I’ve got one of my own. I don’t need your fortune. I can earn my own money. I’d very much like it if you were my friend, though – my best friend, if you like. But I don’t want to marry you. I’m not actually intending to marry anyone.’

Prince Bennett rode along saying nothing for a little while. He was wondering if he really liked this new sort of princess. Certainly, she wasn’t like the normal ones in fairy tales. This was not how the Rules said it should be. Perhaps it was better for him to have a princess at his side who agreed with every single thing he said, however stupid? But then he smiled.

‘Florizella,’ he said, ‘I think I agree with you. I won’t choose a princess to marry, either. I shall tell my mother and father. And I should like to be best friends with you.’

So Princess Florizella and Prince Bennett shook hands and rode back side by side in the starlight.

When Florizella got home, the king and queen were waiting for her at the door of the palace.

‘How did you get on?’ asked the queen.

‘Who did he choose for his bride?’ asked the king.

‘How many princesses were there at the ball?’ asked the queen.

‘Did he choose the princess of Three Rivers?’ the king asked.

Florizella laughed and jumped out of the carriage.

‘I had a lovely time,’ she said. ‘And he decided not to marry anybody just yet. There were one hundred and twenty princesses there as well as me, and I didn’t spot the princess of the Three Rivers, but the place was so awash with princesses that I didn’t even see the princess of the Two Mountains, who promised to meet me there.’

‘Not choosing a bride!’ said the king.

‘Not choosing a bride!’ said the queen.

Then they both fell on Florizella at once, demanding to know what on earth could have made him decide not to choose a princess at a princess-choosing ball. They were secretly afraid that Florizella had somehow put him off marriage.

So Florizella explained that Prince Bennett thought the nice princesses might have been just pretending to be nice and might be secretly rather awful to live with, and he hadn’t wanted to take the chance.

‘Did he ask no one at all, then?’ demanded the king. ‘Not one of them?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Florizella. ‘He asked me. But I told him I didn’t want to marry yet.’

The king and queen stared at each other for a stunned moment, then they both rushed at Florizella again and made her sit down and tell them all about the ball and the breakfast and the horseride and the picnic for two and Prince Bennett asking her to marry him under the stars. They took a lot of interest in the stars. And if there was a nightingale singing. Then the king jumped to his feet and went to the window and said, ‘Undoubtedly! Undootedly!’ a great many times, very softly.

And the queen had a little smile on her face as she looked at Florizella.

‘What a match!’ said the king. ‘Prince Bennett’s kingdom! The Land of Deep Lakes! It’s beyond my wildest dreams!’

‘What a triumph!’ said the queen. ‘And everyone always said she was such an odd sort of princess!’

Florizella looked from one to the other.

‘I said I didn’t want to marry him, and we agreed to be just friends,’ she said. But she could tell they weren’t listening.

The next day, her father the king laughed and teased her all day, calling her the Queen of the Land of Deep Lakes, which was rather irritating.

The second day, the queen spoke of inviting Prince Bennett over to stay.

The next couple of days there were lots of letters between Prince Bennett’s parents and Florizella’s mother and father. Then on the fifth day the king told Florizella that she was going to marry Bennett whether she wanted to or not.

Florizella looked at him as if he were crazy. ‘You can’t make me marry someone if I don’t want to,’ she said. ‘It’s just wrong.’

‘Oh, can’t I?’ said the king.

He snatched Florizella up and bundled her upstairs, and locked her in her bedroom.

‘You’ll stay there until you agree to marry Prince Bennett!’ he bawled through the keyhole.

‘Nonsense,’ said Florizella. She knew perfectly well that her father had no right to lock her up, or to order her to marry anyone. No one can tell a girl who she has to marry. She also knew that if she wanted to leave, nothing was easier than to open her bedroom window and climb down the drainpipe. After all, she went out like that most mornings to go horseriding. It was so much easier than opening the great double doors, raising the portcullis and lowering the drawbridge on her own. But, instead of running off, she thought she would wait until her father came to let her out and talk the whole thing over with him. So she got one of her favourite storybooks and settled down for a quiet morning’s reading.

Florizella’s lunch was served on a tray in her room by ten footmen.

At teatime they arrived again with a cup of tea and a slice of cake.

By dinnertime Florizella had finished her book and was pretty bored.

At bedtime her father came to the door and said in his most kingly voice, ‘My daughter, Princess Florizella, this is your father.’

‘I did know that already,’ she said.

‘Do you agree to marry Prince Bennett?’

Florizella, who was rather sulky, for she had wasted a whole day indoors while the sun was shining outside, said, ‘Certainly not! And you know you shouldn’t treat a daughter like this. Not even in a fairy story.’

At that, the king stamped off to bed in a terrible temper. He was cross because Florizella would not do as he wanted, and he was cross because he knew perfectly well he was in the wrong.

‘She’s acting like she thinks she’s a prince!’ he complained to the queen as they went to bed that night.

‘A princess is just a prince with more s’s,’ she replied.

The king thought for a moment. ‘What do the s’s stand for?’

‘Sass,’ she said. ‘Sass and science, sensibility and scepticism. Sincerity, spirit and certainty.’

‘That’s a c,’ said the king. ‘Undoubtedly.’

‘And tomorrow,’ the queen continued, ‘Florizella is to be let out, whatever she says about Prince Bennett.’

The king said, ‘Humph,’ as if he meant No. But he really meant Yes. There is nothing more boring than being a tyrant.

But next morning, before anyone was up, there was a great Tooroo! Tooroo! at the palace gates, and in galloped Prince Bennett with half a dozen of his courtiers, a dozen soldiers and a couple of trumpeters. Just a small informal visit.

He had come to see the king, for someone had told him that Princess Florizella was locked in her room and that the king would not let her out until she promised to marry the prince.

Prince Bennett popped up to the king’s bedroom and argued with him while the king sat up in bed and longed for his morning tea. He had never liked Bennett less than he did at that moment.

Just think of him married to Florizella and living in the palace! the king warned himself. I’d never have a peaceful morning.

But, out loud, all he said was that Prince Bennett should go home and wait for a message, and that he was certain Florizella would agree to a wedding soon. And then the footmen finally poured the morning cup of tea, and the king looked so hard at the door and at Prince Bennett and back again, that even the prince could see he was very much in the way. So he made a bow and got himself out of the room as quickly as he could go backwards. (You’re not supposed to turn your back on the royals. It’s a nuisance when you’re in a hurry.)

Prince Bennett didn’t go home, of course. He at least knew how a prince should behave in a crisis. He popped round to the back of the castle and hooted like an owl until Princess Florizella put her head out of the window and said, ‘Don’t be silly, Bennett. Everyone knows owls come out at night. Besides, that wasn’t anything like an owl.’

Then they argued about whether or not owls made calls like too-wit-too-whoo, or whether it was more like hoo-hee, hoo-hoo, and whether they came out at dawn or dusk. They made owl calls at each other until all the windows of the castle opened and lots of people put their heads out to see what was going on.

‘What on earth is that racket?’ the queen asked her maid, pausing in the middle of trying on one of her twenty crowns.

‘Princess Florizella’s young prince, Your Majesty, making secret signals to her,’ said the maid, leaning out of the window to have a good look.

‘He’s come to rescue her, then,’ said the queen, extremely pleased. ‘That’s very prompt. I like a young man who gets on with a rescue. When I was a princess, my future husband, the dear king, was very late. I was tied to a rock for three days, and if the sea monster had not had an upset stomach, my dear husband might have been too late altogether. It’s not all fun being a princess, you know.’

The maid nodded and looked out of the window again.

‘He’s climbing up to her bedroom, ma’am,’ she said.

‘That’s unusual,’ said the queen, with interest. ‘I’d have thought Florizella would have had the sheets knotted together by now. How is he climbing? Not by her hair – it’s not nearly long enough. She will keep having it cut. I told her she’d need it one of these days.’

‘Up the ivy, ma’am,’ said the maid. ‘Looks a bit unsteady to me.’

The queen smiled because it had been her idea to plant the ivy outside Princess Florizella’s bedroom on the very morning that she was born, to be ready for just such an occasion. And now here was Prince Bennett climbing up it to free Florizella! It was very gratifying. Next, Bennett would rescue Florizella and ride away with her. Then the queen and the king could forgive them and they could all have a wonderful party and live happily ever after.

But she should have remembered that Florizella was not like other princesses.

Prince Bennett should have remembered that Florizella was not like other princesses.

She was not a bit grateful to him for climbing up the ivy.

‘But I’ve come to rescue you!’ Bennett protested, scrambling through the window and diving head-first on to the floor.

‘How did you get to my bedroom window?’ she demanded as if she had not seen him scrambling, and grabbing for the drainpipe when a branch broke.

‘The ivy,’ Bennett said, surprised at the question.

‘And don’t you think,’ said Florizella sarcastically, ‘that if you can climb up, then I can perfectly well climb down?’

Bennett said nothing. He hadn’t thought of that. He was so used to the old idea of princesses sitting still and waiting to be rescued that he had forgotten Florizella did not follow the Princess Rules.

‘Just go,’ said Florizella, giving him a little push towards the window. ‘It’s bad enough with everyone nagging me to marry you, without you carrying on like a prince in an old fairy story as well.’

‘But what about you?’ Bennett asked, rather worried.

Florizella laughed. ‘My father will let me out soon enough,’ she said. ‘And, if I get too bored, I can always climb down the drainpipe and go for a ride. When I’m out, I’ll come over and see you. But I’ll stay here for now. My father shouldn’t have locked me in, and I want to talk to him about it. He’ll never learn to treat girls properly unless I tell him.’

Bennett thought that perhaps Florizella was not a very comfortable daughter for anyone to have. And he thought that perhaps she would not be a very obedient wife. But she was a great friend. So he shook hands with her and climbed out of the window.

‘Gracious me, ma’am!’ squawked the queen’s maid. ‘It’s Prince Bennett coming back down the ivy. On his own! He’s left the princess behind!’

The queen dashed to the window and watched Prince Bennett scramble down, whistle for his horse, mount up, signal to his trumpeters to go Tooroo! Tooroo! and gallop off without a care in the world and – more importantly – without a rescued princess across his saddlebow.

‘Oh no!’ she said. She had no doubt who was to blame. ‘Oh no! Oh, Florizella!’

When the king heard what had happened, he went bananas.

There was no chance that he was going to let Florizella out now. He had been so sure that Bennett was going to rescue her, he was even prepared to overlook the way the prince had bothered him so early in the morning. But for the prince to leave without taking Princess Florizella with him, breaking all the traditions of fairy stories and happy endings!

‘Amateur!’ he snapped and stumped off to the garden to prune the roses. ‘Half-hearted,’ he said with a snip. ‘Half-witted, more like,’ he said, taking off another flower.

There wasn’t a single rose blooming by lunchtime, but the king was feeling a lot better.

Until the messenger came, that is.

It was one of Prince Bennett’s trumpeters. She came Tooroo, Toorooing into the courtyard in a terrible hurry, scaring the hens half to death and setting the guard dogs barking.

‘Prince Bennett has been captured!’ she shouted. ‘He was on his way home when he was captured by a dragon in the Purple Forest!’

Everyone came running at once. Florizella opened her window to listen. The messenger told them that the great two-headed dragon of the Purple Forest had jumped out at the prince and his courtiers, and everyone had ridden away as fast as they could except for Prince Bennett, whose horse reared and dropped him right at the dragon’s feet. Bennett had bent his sword in the fall and couldn’t draw it from the scabbard! As he lay there, stunned and helpless (‘Amateur!’ the king exclaimed. ‘As I said. Nincompoop!’), the dragon had picked him up and tied him to a tree, using all sorts of particularly difficult knots, and was sitting beside him, waiting for forty-eight hours (according to Dragon Association Rules) for the rescue party to arrive, before eating the prince up – every little bit of him except, possibly, the bent sword.

‘Ooo!’ said Florizella, privately rather pleased at hearing this, and she leaned out of the window and whistled a loud, clear whistle that Jellybean could hear wherever he happened to be. He was in his stable and had to back up against the far wall and take a little run at the door and rear up to jump over it, and then he came galloping round and crashed to a stop under Florizella’s window. Florizella grabbed her sword and her dagger, and a spare sword for Prince Bennett (which she kept in the wardrobe in the space for the long dresses) and shinned down the drainpipe as quickly as she could.

She dropped on to Jellybean’s back and galloped as fast as she could to the Purple Forest, steering Jellybean with the halter rope and clinging on tightly to the two swords.

She saw the dragon before he saw her.

He had dozed off while he was waiting, with an alarm clock in one of his great green ears to wake him when the forty-eight hours were up. His snores bent the tallest trees of the Purple Forest and made a noise like a thousand thunderstorms. His reeking, smoky breath scorched all the grass and flowers and bushes for three miles around, so that Jellybean snorted and shivered at the dreadful smell of burning.

Bennett was tied to a tree with fiendishly complicated dragon knots, looking rather white and scared. But as soon as he saw Florizella, he whispered as softly as he could, ‘Florizella! Untie me, quick!’

Florizella had a look at the knots as she jumped out of the saddle and thought it would take her all of the forty-eight hours to get even one of them undone and, drawing her sharp sword, she cut through the rope. She and Bennett were just about to get up on Jellybean and gallop away, when …

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