“Rivet!” he boomed...
When Crown Prince Hugo (may his father live forever!) felt the need to strike a regal pose, he liked to ape one of the ancestral likenesses hanging in the Royal Portrait Gallery. Shutting the door on the ballroom noises, he looked left and right for eavesdroppers and lay a much-ringed finger alongside his nose in imitation of his grandfather, King Secundus II, whom history has nicknamed the Terrible Twos. It was an impersonation weakened by poor posture. Young Count Sonderborg, who was cursed with tidiness, fought the urge to grab the prince by the shoulders and straighten him as one might a crooked picture on the wall.
“An orange carriage, Sonderborg,” said Prince Hugo, resuming his story. “Footmen in green livery. A grey-whiskered coachman who shouted the team of white horses out the gate with a thick Skandahoovian accent. But in her coy, girlish flight from us, our mystery girl lost this on the palace steps.” Prince Hugo drew a glass slipper from inside his starred tunic. “Find her for us, Sonderborg. Your prince will marry no other.”
“Might I suggest the traditional kingdomwide trying on of the slipper, Your Highness?” asked Sonderborg.
Prince Hugo assumed the startled, umber-colored expression of King Guido, the Ever-Unexpecting, as the artist Clementi captured him with one leg in the royal trousers. “But if word got out she’d run away from her Crown Prince, people would say she was insane, unfit to bear royal children,” insisted the prince. “That’s why we turn to you, Sonderborg. You are discretion itself. Nor are we unaware that your family has fallen on hard times.” (Sonderborg’s grandfather had lost everything speculating in magic bean futures of the Jack-and-the-Beanstalk strain just before such things were outlawed by the Omnibus Magic Bill.) “Succeed in this task and we will make you master of one of our country estates. We had in mind Fen House. Do you know it?”
The prince’s perfectly shaped smile slipped a notch at Sonderborg’s affirmative bow. “True, the grounds could stand a dose of drainage,” the prince admitted. “But don’t forget, you’ll also have your sovereign’s gratitude when we inherit the throne.”
“May your father live forever, Your Highness,” prayed Sonderborg earnestly.
“Of course, of course,” replied Prince Hugo with considerably less enthusiasm.
Because the Crown Prince’s Ball was still in full swing, Sonderborg, who had come with friends in their carriage, decided to walk back the few miles to the city. The promise of Fen House made him anxious to begin. For years now, he had been secretly engaged to that soul of patience, the Lady Cunegunda, a plump, ever-smiling little thing with chestnut eyes. Whatever Fen House’s shortcomings, finding the mystery girl would reinscribe the Sonderborg name on the roll of the landed gentry, removing her father’s main objection to the marriage.
The count left the castle on foot, stepping out hopefully with a healthy red slice of moon riding ahead of him just above the treetops. His initial examination of the glass slipper had convinced him that it shouldn’t be too difficult to trace. It wasn’t blown glass, because there was no pontil mark which the blower’s pipe would have left behind. Nor was there a seam, which meant it hadn’t been molded. So the slipper had to have been made by magic. What else was left? And that meant he could expect help from his old college friend, Inspector Rinaldo, who headed up the Magic Squad, the department charged with keeping the kingdom safe for the free-enterprise system by tying the can on illegal magical practices. After all, free enterprise rang hollow if one guy had a genie out of a bottle working for him gratis while the next guy was paying union scale. And sound currency would be a joke if enchanted horses were allowed to sneeze doubloons or certain hens laid golden eggs, or there really existed that fabled credit card (“Don’t leave Never-Never Land without it!”) whose holders are never, never billed.
Before Sonderborg had walked far, he came upon a hollowed-out pumpkin lying by the side of the road. Smiling, he looked around quickly to see if anyone was watching and was all set to dropkick the thing into the bushes when he noticed a fat, thickly bespectacled man in light-grey tweeds sitting in a tree right above his head. To cover his embarrassment, the count asked, “Excuse me, sir, but did a young woman in an orange carriage pass by a few minutes ago?”
The man blinked. “Who?” he asked, dabbing at his lips with a red-and-white-checkered napkin. Then he hiccuped loudly and something silver flashed in the moonlight. Sonderborg stooped and picked up what, except for its very small size, appeared to be a button such as liveried footmen wear. When he looked up again, the tree was empty and the fat man was disappearing through the forest, running on silent tiptoe, his short arms outstretched and dipping now to this side, now to that, like a boy playing airplane.
Sonderborg watched him go with a thoughtful eye.
In his youth, Inspector Rinaldo’s grandfather and the grandfather’s six brothers had been changed into swans by a grudge enchantment. Their sister broke the spell by weaving each brother a coat of nettles, but unhappily failed to complete the grandfather’s right sleeve within the time prescribed. As a result, all his descendants, including Rinaldo, had a white swan’s wing where a right arm should have been. Small wonder the Inspector hated magic in all its forms.
When Sonderborg reached police headquarters; he found the corridors filled with men armed with fire axes, battering rams, and buckets of wet cement. Rinaldo explained that though the Omnibus Magic Act had outlawed wishing wells years before, certain bootleg operations still operated — mainly basement sump holes where, if you knew the password, they’d let you in to toss a coin or two and make your wish. Tonight the Magic Squad was going to close down these dens of illegality. But Rinaldo could always spare an old friend a minute.
He held the glass slipper up to the light with his good hand and said, “Fairy-godmother stuff for sure, Sondy. You know the drill. There’s this kid moping around because he can’t make the prom. Enter his fairy godmother in a shimmer of harp. One wave of the wand and, voila, his acne clears up and he’s sporting a spiffy new tux, fat cat’s-eye cufflinks, and a pair of official Fred Astaire dancing pumps. Yes, Sondy, the powers-that-be knew making fairy-god-mother stuff illegal would be like shooting Santa Claus. So they framed the law so that fairy godmothers can work their magic only if they derive no financial profit — the formal-clothes-rental people made them put that in — and provided the spell lasts no longer than midnight of the day it’s cast.”
He held the slipper up to the light again. “There must have been a manufacturing defect. This thing should have self-destructed at the stroke of twelve.” Handing back the slipper, he said, “Got to go before the cement sets, Sondy. Sounds to me there’s a fairy godmother in the woodpile somewhere.”
After midnight, when the pressure’s off, fairy godmothers picnic until dawn in a bower hung with Chinese lanterns deep in the Crabtree Forest. Sonderborg found Natalie, the one he was looking for, sitting at a picnic table apart from the others in front of a heap of potato salad, cold cuts, and pickles. An immense, broad-beamed woman with fist-sized dimples in her elbows and knuckles like elephant knees, she wore the conical hat and bo-peep skirt which has somehow become the uniform of her profession. “Good to see you again, Fairy Godmother,” he smiled.
“Fairy Godmother? The name’s a knife in my heart, Sondy,” moaned Natalie. “Better call me the Curse of the Sonderborgs. What have I done for you lately? What good’s a fairy godmother who can’t make a house call now and then?”