Of three loathly ladies.¹

‘How ever shall any one of us top that?’ said Lady Lunesta.

I, the narrator of this tale, will tell you precisely how.

The pleasant shade was so refreshing that the storytellers felt obliged to continue their discourse, in spite of the rude and impertinent interruptions of the Constable Hercules of Brussels². Moreover, the weather was pleasant, the food and wine presented to the company were abundant and healthy, and everyone was having a good time.

See? There. Not hard at all. Note how I did not devolve this story into a hopelessly ineffectual meditation on the hopes, wants and fears of the assembled company. Nor did I see fit, moreover, to give the characters sexual tension. Usually those things are reserved for private times, well after the sun has set.

The company, having enjoyed the gifts that I, the narrator of this tale, gave them through the magnificent gift of pacing, plot and setting, then felt strengthened to continue their day of storytelling.

‘Dearest friends,’ Canva then said, ‘I wish to ask you all a question. Since we’re still on the subject of trust between governments and men³, has any one of you ever noticed how quickly the ruling men use women to their advantage? And how often such attempts fall flat?’

Nobody responded to this question immediately, mostly because nobody quite understood it. Nobody, of course, except for Princess Calamondin.

‘You speak of queen consorts⁴, princesses and ladies of high rank. Are you going to tell us a story of how a ruler was undone or made by one?’

‘I will speak of three women who have done both of these things. And just so that everyone is comfortable beforehand, this story won’t be as long as the last one, nor as short as the one preceding it. Also, there are animals in it, and everyone loves those.’

‘I don’t see a problem with that,’ Lady Ouiser said, and let Canva have the floor.

Wonderful. Great. Love the energy—let’s keep it going.

I know these three ladies because their stories are well known in these parts. The first story happened some years ago, and the other two more recently. But all the same, they are factual and interesting, and I hope you’ll find them entertaining.

In the Kingdom of Celica⁵, there was a king who was something of a tyrant. This King was famous for womanizing, and had lots of kept ladies⁶. When he took possession of the kingdom, he thought to put an end to the common uprising of the weary rabble⁷, who, he said, were having their chattels⁸ seized by persons coming across a certain wide and dirty river. Where the river made a U-shaped bend, there lived a lady named Christine de Gnome, Lady of Spänch. Her husband was a malodorous man named Ruel de Gnome, who, to some folks, did resemble a gnome⁹.

And interestingly enough, this lady fancied herself another St Hubert¹⁰ by scandalously attending the hunt with her husband. All of these things enticed this King.

So the King called Lord and Lady de Gnome to his estate, Pisse-en-lit¹¹, where the King’s right-hand man, Lord Cern, was speaking of the difficulty of finding a governor for the province of Chapstique, a frozen, mountainous waste. The King told Lord Cern: ‘You know, this Christine de Gnome has some great knockers. Keep her husband busy and send her on up to the fourth floor.’

So Lady Christine and the King met privately, and several days later she was put on his council of state¹². The Queen of Celica was a foreigner (I think she was a Dalmatian¹³), and apparently was too busy picking out new flats¹⁴ for Costnermas, whatever that is, to take notice.

‘Dalmatian?’ said Princess Calamondin.

‘Yes, the Queen! But I should not fail to mention that Celica’s queen is not a dog. Heavens, no. Some smarty-pants people have tried to draw a comparison, however. I’ll get to that here shortly.’

During a hunt, a minor noble gave Lord and Lady de Gnome a hound named Cricket. This dog was a shepherding dog, sort of like my corgi Biagio¹⁵. He’s nippy, but not at all mean. Well, anyway, this lady tried with some difficulty to take a shepherding dog on a pheasant hunt, and of course that went about as well as you’d expect.

She wrote about this just as the King of Celica was meeting with an important papal nuncio¹⁶. The King of Celica was at the same time working out a tax break for the Swedish government in return for storing its supply of flageolet beans¹⁷ in a place called the Grottoes of Hell near Celica’s capital city, Wino. The written account was newly published in a book of religious consolations¹⁸ meant for the Bridgettine Order¹⁹.

Anyway. Cricket and Lady Christine are hunting pheasant. Cricket gets excited, and he scatters the pheasant! Well, no shit, Duns Scotus²⁰—what’d you think would happen, huh? You send a beagle²¹ in to gather up fallen grouse, not a dog whose sole duty is to keep Fluffy and Puffball from getting tangled in the teasels²²!

But does Christine think once to kindly and gently nudge Cricket back? No. Instead she pulls the dog back to her family farm, where she keeps chickens, geese, ducks and goats. Another fatal mistake. Because why on earth would you want to keep a shepherding dog around prized astrakhan goats²³ that have the biting power of horses combined with a hind-leg kick of a mercenary? Don’t even open your mouth, Persiflage—I know you want to tell us all.

Cricket is just a pup, mind you! Fourteen months! Practically a baby. He goes straight for Cluck-Cluck. A scatter of white feathers lands across the grey-green grass of March like a pillow thrown across a room. But these were not Christine’s chickens, no. They properly belonged to Lord de Gnome’s mother, Griselda²⁴.

Now. I know what you are all thinking. Yet another poor, unfortunate lady named Griselda has had another catastrophe involving—you guessed it—food. And of course this lady is cussing and kicking at the door: ‘You scraggly-haired wench! How dare you let that filthy animal eat Cluck-Cluck and Billeena! I’ll see you before a magistrate²⁵!’ And so on, and so on. Well, Christine had just about had the worst day ever.

So what does she do? Friends, what any rational, sane person would—at least that’s what she said in her book, anyway. She takes Cricket down into a gravel pit, and she puts the dog to the sword, just like good saint Guinefort²⁶.

‘That’s horrible!’ cried Lady Arbonne.

‘Wouldn’t you believe it, though? Sixty percent of peasants over the age of thirty-and-five years disagreed. With a margin of error of five percent²⁷, if you choose to believe that bullshit Quinnipiac poll.’

‘But why kill the poor animal? It was only behaving as an animal should.’

The people of Celica agreed. When the account went out people asked many questions, and said it should not stand that a woman who killed her dog simply because it was overenthusiastic should have any place in the government.

‘And the husband?’ asked the Abbot of Costello.

Canva shrugged. ‘I am told Lady Christine left him when she found images he had commissioned to be painted that showed him endowed with breasts. I am told the intended recipient was a certain young noble attached to the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg²⁸.’

But before Christine de Gnome, there was another lady, of the King’s fancy. She had been betrothed to the King’s son, but as he was quite dissipated²⁹, she avenged herself by dating the King’s rival, a noble of some rank, but of equally distressing ambitions to power. When that betrothal failed, she went to France—to Amboise³⁰, in fact, to have ‘work’ done. I presume this involved tailoring of some kind, as the lady returned with a totally different face and wardrobe, which both the King and his son took as a compliment to the whole royal house. Well, in time, she married the King’s son Lord Byron, of the province of Ducquingquam.

‘Oh me! I have heard of Ducquingquam. It is a shadow-filled land, filled with many poets. I’ve heard it bears a similarity to the Black Forest³¹,’ Lady Jardiance said.

‘You are correct in that it bears a similarity, Your Ladyship, but in terms of ham only. Little else there resembles anything remotely Catholic or Bavarian. And this Lord Byron was no poet, I’ll tell you that much.’

Lord Byron was fond of the lady and would have preferred she remain attached to the royal household in silence, but this lady had a propensity for appearing in ways patently distressing to everyone but the King. Once, while addressing the King’s flatterers, she made a sound of approval so shocking that many people wondered if she had gone mad. But the King saw this all to his advantage. Since Celica’s Kings are acclaimed³², and the King had put his pretenders to flight³³, she attended the ceremony in gowns that were very unusual, and these were also the subject of a lot of talk.

Eventually, the King sent her to the Duchy of Athens³⁴. She already owed the seamstress in Amboise for the new gowns, and had commissioned new portraits of herself and Lord Byron, to the patent disapproval of the Councillor of the Exchequer³⁵. Those in Athens complained much about her, as well. While in Athens, she wrote to the King’s friend to ask him to lend her some money to pay down an enormous expense—I think it was some hundred thousand scudi d’oro³⁶!—on the condition that he would not tell the King. But the council found all this very odd and she was called back home. If the story I got from the guy I met on the road here is true, some Athenian churchman found her voice utterly alarming.

Master Xerox’s brow furrowed again.

‘The Duchy of Athens, my dear, is either in hiding or attached to some Ottoman noble’s stable-boy.’

‘I’m told she liked riding horses,’ Canva said. ‘That very well could have been what she was sent there to do.’

‘It stands to reason that if she was in Athens, it must have been to resolve that little quibble that sent everyone over the edge in 1054³⁷,’ Father Bunion said.

‘That’s your Church’s fault, not ours,’ Master Xerox said.

‘And Lord Byron?’ asked Persiflage.

‘God knows, Ser Persiflage. I’m also told that the man has a standing order from His Holiness³⁸ to give up his claim on Villena, Viennes, Vienne, Vienna and Vins³⁹. His Lordship says that since he and his brother share a mayorship of Wino, and that this city has the same Latin root, it should stand that the Pope grant him mayoralties in these other places, too. But I don’t know politics or the Church.’

But I should really finish up my story, as I can see all of you are becoming thoroughly displeased with me.

The last lady is truly the worst of them all, because she was really once very pretty, but her avarice and cruelty truly turned her into a Gorgon⁴⁰ of the worst kind. And she’s not even from Celica! She just has a house there.

This woman, I’m told, is from Prato⁴¹, and her name is Lauretta. I don’t know her last name, and the last time we took the sheep to be sold there, nobody knew if the family still lives there. I suppose it doesn’t matter since she’s in Celica now, in a big house close to that of the King. But the funny thing is the King never invites her into the royal palace. She stands outside with placards and images and cries aloud that she is doing the King’s work for him. But I’ve never seen him invite her in—not even once for supper.

‘Now I’ve heard everything,’ the Abbot of Costello said.

Master Xerox, the Abbot and Father Bunion all gasped for different reasons.

Let me finish my story and then you can decide how shocked you want to be. Under the pretense of looking for documents substantiating one of the King’s more controversial claims on a territory he neither owned nor had any right to, this Lauretta chained herself to the Embassy of France like some anchorite⁴² in a western town of Celica named for St Clodoald⁴³. People laughed at her and asked if she would take orders⁴⁴ so that the French could toss their half-eaten pastries to her in the morning. But she mistook the embassy for the residence of some royal warranter⁴⁵ whom she’d had some sort of political tiff with. I don’t precisely know. The King approved of this, as he usually did, by acknowledging her in speeches from the throne and doing little else.

But the worst thing, aside from this woman’s alarming expressions, speeches and pronouncements, friends, was this. When the King finally assented to have her aboard the royal flotilla⁴⁶ on a summer cruise, she was overjoyed to the extent that all of Wino heard her proclaim it. The cruise was held to recall with some solemnity the attack of Nice⁴⁷ upon the city in the time of the Third Crusade⁴⁸, in which a number of innocent men, women and children were killed. The King invited her to sit with him, and said:

‘Now, my dear, what think you of our assemblage? The weather is fine, the air pleasant and the waters not so malodorous as they normally would be at this time of the year.’

But wouldn’t you know it, the gal was completely lost for words! So she does this.

She touches the Royal Person⁴⁹—a big no-no there—and says, ‘Your Majesty, hear me out. Nice sent their worst to us, but Paris and Rome did as well, through some men and messengers, and above all the Church. And you know how rascally those cardinals are!’

And just behind them were sitting the Doge’s men⁵⁰, some Frenchmen, some men from Spoleto, Parmesans⁵¹, Niçois and more than a few sitting cardinals.

When it all came to an end, the boat touched the dock and the lady was pushed off. They continued on without her, and nobody knows where she is now.

But before I sit down again, let me say that many men made it seem all these women were uniquely ugly—not because they sat in proximity to an evil man, mind you—but because, as they saw it, these women had once been very pretty and their hatred for their fellow men had made them ugly.

It’s like those fairy tales where there’s an ugly old princess who has to do such-and-such a thing in order to get a prince to love her so she can be pretty again. But here it’s in reverse. You do ugly things in the name of the ruling class, and you get uglier.

And soon enough, whether you like it or not, people think you’re the most horribly ugly woman to look at! And what does that get you?

I’ll tell you—Giannetta at the market doesn’t give you a fresh slice of goat cheese when she puts up her stall on market day. Enrico the baker gives you the tartest, crustiest loaf of sourdough he can make, and Father Olibio tells you to cover up so that people don’t see the freckles on your boobs.

Don’t be ugly, ladies. Neither to yourselves nor to anyone, not even if the King himself tells you so. His boss who is in Heaven will deal with his incompetence soon enough. Let’s not do his homework and our own while we’re at it.