//------------------------------// // Chapter Five // Story: My Fair Pony // by 2K Chrome //------------------------------// “Now, just once more, Applestia. Say your vowels, and try to get it right this time.” “Ah know my vowels.” “Say them.” “A. E. Ah. Ow. You.” “Listen to me. A-E-I-O-U. Doesn’t that sound better?” “Lovely,” said Applestia. “A. E. Ah. Ow. You.” “Now, Applestia,” said Jet patiently, although his mouth was a straight line and you could almost smell the sulphurous volcano smoldering within. “You wouldn’t want me to give up in the very first week, would you?” “At this rate, ah wouldn’t give a blow. This is much more borin’ than what we ever done at the factory. We used to draw pictures there, and say pomes and that.” “All right.” Jet got up from his seat across the desk from where she sat in a hard straight chair, day after day, moving her mouth to match his, trying to copy the gibberish sounds he made. Vowels! Whoever invented them, she’d gladly strangle him. “All right. We’ll recite some poetry, if that's what you like. What’s your favorite?” Applestia thought back into the dark mists of her factory days with cracked windows stuffed up with newspaper, and mice running over your feet after the sandwich crumbs. “Baa baa, black sheep?” she offered. “I’m not familiar with that.” It was hard to imagine that Jet had ever been a foal. He was born in long tweed trousers and a sporty yellow waistcoat with a chain across it for the turnip watch with which he timed the lessons of unfortunate flower fillies. “How about Good King What’s-is-name?” “I think we’ll save that for next Hearth’s Warming. I don’t feel strong enough for it now.” The professor went over to the bookcase and reached up for a book. Fancypants had the magic to grab books on high shelves, but used the stepladder. The ladder was fun. Applestia climbed it when she got the chance, and sat on the top step, looking out through the window at the well-bred life of Whinnypole Street: the carriages and chauffeurs, and the uniformed Pegasi, and the dolled-up ladies and gents with their little dogs and foals, who looked much too neat and clean to be real. But she wasn’t there for fun, as the professor reminded her twenty times a day, so he always said, “Get down. Ladies don't sit on stepladders.” And when she sat on the chair by the desk, Fancypants would fuss at her. “Don’t sprawl. Ladies keep their back straight and their hooves in their laps. “Ah hate ladies.” She had decided that in the first two days. She was never going to be one, not if they kept her here for a hundred years, making her open her mouth and put her lips just so and her tongue just so, and say them rotten vowels. “Here we are. Alonso Lord Saddleson.” He put an open book into her hooves. “One of the socials, eh? Ah didn’t know lords had ter work fer a livin.” “People like Saddleson don’t think of writing poetry as work.” “It is, though.” “How do you know? Have you ever written any?” That dancing, eager sparkle leaped into Jet’s blue eyes. “Git away. Ah mean, that putting words down on paper, that’s a lot of work. My dad wrote a letter once, and it took him three days. Nearly killed him.” A few tears cane into the back of her eyes at the thought of her father. She had wanted to get away from him, but it was insulting that he had not even tried to get her back. “Read here.” His eyes had gone chilly and severe again. “Say it after me: Come into the garden, Maud, for the black bat, Night, has flown.” “Come inter the garden, Maw-aw-awd. Cuz he was touch fresh, wasn’t he?” Jet continued, “Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone.” “Well, she didn’t expect him to bring all his friends, did she? Come inter the garden, Maud… blast it!” She threw the book away and collapsed in giggles, her hooves over her eyes. “Ah can’t say that stuff, professor. It’s too daft.” Diamond Mint, who was the parlormaid, came in with two cups of coffee and two croissants on a tray. “Nothing for me?” “Upper Crust said you weren’t to have anything between meals,” Diamond said primly, but as she passed close to Applestia’s chair, she dropped a ginger cake into her lap. Applestia crammed it into her mouth while the professor wasn’t looking, and when he suddenly said, “Say your vowels!” she spluttered and choked and sprayed the carpet with crumbs. “All right,” he said, “if you insist on putting things into your mouth, we’ll do the marbles again.” “Oh, not the marbles!” He was a torturer after all. Those guards with the rack and thumbscrews, up at the Tower of Canterlot, they had nothing on him. He took six marbles out of his pocket and put them in her mouth, and she sat there looking at him, her eyes and cheeks bulging. “All right, we’ll try nursery rhymes, since you’re not ready for Saddleson. Mareseille Bridge is falling down, falling, falling down. Let me hear each word, clear as a bell.” “Ma-sa Bwa ith fawa da…” She looked up at him like a despairing spaniel, and Fancypants grunted himself up out his chair in the corner and said, “Don’t be too hard on the filly, Jet. I’m not sure it’s legal.” Fancypants could be almost as devilish as Jet when he got carried away by teaching, but he was at least not insane, which Applestia was sure by now the professor was. “Come on Applestia,” he said, “we know it’s difficult, but if you’ll just try your best…” “Don’t slop over her,” Jet said sharply. “You don’t train a dog by stroking it.” “Ah ain’t a dog!” Applestia cried, and gave a shriek. “Sweet Celestia! Ah’ve swallowed one!” “That’s all right,” said Jet comfortably, putting his hoof in his pocket. “I’ve got plenty more.” He tried to make her mumble on about Mareseille Bridge, until she was near tears. “It’th impoth…” She spat the marbles into her hoof and dropped them in his coffee cup. “It’s impossible. Ah ain’t goin to try no more.” “If Demosthenes could do it, you can.” “Who’s he and when he’s at home?” “He was an ancient Pegasus who had almost as many problems as you… no breath, no enunciation… a complete disaster. But he trained himself to become a great speaker by shouting at the sea with his mouth full of pebbles.” “Yes,” said Fancypants gloomily, “and look what he came to in the end. Suicide.” “If you’re not going to help, I wish you’d go away.” “And leave you with this wretched mare? No, sir.” “When’s lunch?” Applestia asked. “Not till you’ve done your breathing. The secret of all good speech is breath control, as I think I’ve told you.” “Only half a derzon times.” She had to stand on a certain rose right in the middle of the carpet, the respiration rose, he called it, and not breathe in the ordinary way she had been breathing for eighteen years. Ho no, that was much too simple for his Lord High Jet Set. She had to take a deep breath and hold it while she moved her stomach in and out like a carriage horse with the heaves. Oh, it was sickening. And then he would hold a candle in front of her face and make her say, “Ha ha ha. Has Harold had any hurricanes over in Hoofshire?” If she sounded the h properly, the candle flame would flicker. She did this for ten minutes by Jet’s watch, until she was dizzy from lack of breath, and if that Harold had come home from Hoofshire, she would have slapped him across is haggravating face. By midday each day, she was ready to run away and never come back. She could tell from the professor’s face, let alone the sarcastic things he said to her, that she wasn’t doing any better. She would never get it right. She would never be a lady. She would never get into the fairyland of high society, and when the professor made her say those rotting vowels, “Just five more times before lunch,” she knew she didn’t care. But when she staggered downstairs and fell into her place at the table in the servants’ hall. (“Sit up straight, Applestia, and have you washed your hooves?”), not Jet, nor Fancypants, nor Upper Crust, nor not being allowed to eat hayburgers with your hooves could spoil the bliss of a three-course meal, with soup and hay and cupcakes and pudding, and often a hunk of pie besides. After lunch she knew she would stay, if only to see what there would before dinner. One day, when she had been in the house for over a week, Nutterville went up to answer the front door bell at teatime, and came back dusting off the tips of his white gloves delicately. “Her grace is honoring us with a visit.” “Sweet Celestia! A duchess?” Upper Crust had been drilling Applestia in who was what among the titled personages she would meet when she was launched into society, “if that day should ever come,” Upper Crust always added, in case Applestia should fancy herself. Nutterville laughed. “Only Mrs. Lemon Set, mother of the great professor of that name.” “Well, somepony had to be his mother, I suppose,” Diamond Mint said, and Applestia added, “Poor mare.” “Now fillies, I won’t allow that sort of idle talk about the master,” fussed Upper Crust, although she allowed it all right if she was the one who started it. She got up. “I’ve a hundred things to do, even if nopony else has.” She never actually did anything but give orders, but her life’s cry was that she was the only one in the house who did any work. “You fillies get busy now. Applestia, help Diamond Mint to clear the table.” Applestia was not supposed to do any work with the servants, because she must spend all her time and energies at her lessons, but Upper Crust, who did not approve of a common country mare spending all that time upstairs with the master, was always finding jobs for her, “to keep her in her place.” As soon as all the others except Diamond had left the room, Applestia went to the speaking tube and put her ear to it so that she could what was going on upstairs. “You haven’t been near me for days, Jet, so I’ve come to see what you’re up to, you shocking creature.” Talk about Demosthenes and pebbles in the mouth! Mrs. Set’s throaty aristocratic voice sounded as if she had a head full of burned currants. “Dear Celestia,” Applestia whispered to Diamond Mint, “am ah goin to sound like that?” “I told you, Mother, Fancypants and I have been very busy. We’re working on a special project.” “What project, if I may be so inquisitive as to ask?” “Well it’s… it’s a bit of a secret at present. You’ll know, of course, some day. The whole world will know.” “Do you think the whole world will be interested in nineteenth-century international vowel sounds?” She made it sound like manure. “International…? Oh, yes, the book. Yes, that’s it. We’re working on it night and day.” “Day and night,” added Fancypants solemnly, in case she was not convinced. So! They were not going to tell Mother about Applestia. She couldn’t be trusted not to spill the beans, probably. Applestia imagined her, a talkative old mare in a hat trimmed with poor murdered birds, chattering gossip and scandal all over the tea table. “You ought to get out more, Jet. Be seen about at the right places. Ponies think it very strange that my brilliant son never goes with me anywhere. Not that I care what they think, but you ought to be looking for some nice harmless mares with looks and money.” “I’ve got plenty.” “Yes, you’ve made money, in your own funny, famous way. But your father always used to say, don’t you know, that inheriting money is so much less vulgar than earning it.” Applestia almost exploded with laughter, right into the tube, which would have blown the whistle in the study and shaken the old mare up. “I’m rather nervous, Jet, of these… what I call intelligent… mares you meet at the university. Promise me you'll never be tempted to marry one of those bluestocking creatures with thick legs and a mane like a bird’s nest.” “I’ll never marry anyone, Mother,” he said irritably. “There’s no such thing as the kind of mare I…” The door of the servants’ hall opened, and Applestia dropped the tube quickly and picked up a pile of plates. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The lessons went on, even on Sundays, and Applestia grew more unhappy and Jet grew more irritable. Even Fancypants was depressed, although he looked like winning his bet. “But I’d be glad to lose,” he told her, “if you can be turned into a lady, like the toad who became a Princess, I shan’t care how much it costs me.” The only progress Applestia seemed to be making was that when the professor played his voice and hers back to her on the recording machine, she began to be able to see the difference. But what of it? Just because he didn’t talk like her, that didn’t make him right and her wrong, any more than the griffons were wrong because they didn’t speak Equestrian. “Ah ain’t so sure ah want to talk like ya anyway,” she told him one day as he switched off another recording of that miserable Maud and her colt friend by the garden gate. “So help me, ah ain’t.” “So help me,” he corrected. “I’m not.” “So help me. So help me. I like mine better. What’s wrong wit the way ah speak? All my friends talk like that, and there’s nothin wrong wit them. Ah’ll kill the stallion who says there is. What’s it matter how ponies speak? What’s the point of all this?” She waved a hoof round at the study with its books and desks and dictionaries, which had once seemed like luxury but now a prison. “What’s the point of it all?” “The point, my dear Miss Applestia, is that English is language of the greatest power and beauty, and you are murdering it with your ain’t. Since cavemen first scratched on stones, poets have been clothing passionate ideas and trumpet calls of glory in the splendid garb of the English language. The noblest sentiments that ever flowed in the hearts of stallions are contained in its extraordinary, imaginative, and musical mixture of sounds. And you are massacring it your So help me. Are you following me?” “So help me no, ah ain’t.” Fancypants knew a bit about birds, and they brought poor old Azure up from the butler’s pantry, and taught him a few elegant phrases, if only to show that he could do better than Applestia. “Good morning,” he now said, instead of “Hullo,” and, “Excuse my glove.” He hung in the window of the study and cheeped and whistled at the sparrows in the street, and said, “Excuse my glove, excuse my glove, excuse my glove,” until Fancypants threw a silk handkerchief over the cage to shut him up. Jet had brought in a long mirror on a stand, and Applestia had to stand in front of it by the hour, with her hooves just so, one hoof against the other instep, and watch the movements of her lips and her pink tongue against her small white teeth. “A. E. Ah. Ow. You.” In the mirror, she saw a filly in a long dark pleated dress with big pockets and buttons, which Fancypants said made her look studious. He and Upper Crust were in charge of clothes. Jet didn’t want to bother with that, though he was sharp enough if she came in with her cuffs unbuttoned or her mane untidy. In what she was beginning to think of as the dear old days of Hoofton Road, she had tied her hair and gathered it up all anyhow, with a few pins stuck in if she could find any. Now it was drawn smoothly back in two dark wings, falling shining behind her and tied with a big black bow. It was still hard to get used to herself. “Stop admiring yourself,” the professor would snap. “You’re there to watch your lip movements, not the thrilling beauty of your countenance.” He kept on at her and on at her and on at her, making her repeat over and over again the sounds which she could never hope to get right, and making her read endless passages from boring books she could not possibly understand. Everypony except Jet was sorry for her. Even Upper Crust was not so hard on her now that she was not the professor’s pet, but his victim. Applestia was miserable upstairs, but below stairs they played cards and told fortunes in teacups, and had many honest laughs at the expense of the helpless gentry who paid good bits to servants for doing things they could have done themselves. Mr. Nutterville, the butler, who had once been a jockey, had taken to Applestia as if she were a daughter. She called him Uncle Nutters. He dropped the fancy talk now, and answered her back in her own cockney, and went so far as to let her see that the dignified silvery side whiskers were stuck on with spirit gum. He would take them off sometimes after supper and they would all have a glass of wine if he managed to smuggle some down from the dining room, and Applestia and he would entertain with duets of “Two Lovely Black Eyes”. Some evenings the bell would ring or the whistle shriek rudely from the wall, and it would be a summons for Applestia to go back upstairs to Jet and Fancypants while they had their brandy and cigars. “Rot them,” she said, but she had to go. In spite of all the rebellious talk, there was no mutiny in this house. Sometimes it was lessons again, until she nearly dropped from exhaustion. Sometimes Fancypants would go to the piano and she would sing. They were trying to take the foggy Southern harshness out of her voice and put sweetness in. They made her sing “Beautiful Dreamer,” and “You are the Honey, Honeysuckle, and I Am the Bee,” and “Cherry Ripe, Cherry Ripe,” and other such soppy ballads. If she tried hard, she was allowed to let herself go into her own kind of song, and the nicest times they had up there, with the fire a flickering glow and the winter night shut out, was when she sang for them “Won’t you Come Home, Bill Bailey,” and “My Old Colt Said Follow the Van.” It was the only time the professor relaxed and enjoyed himself. You saw what he could be like if he was not possessed by his mania, like a drug or alcohol, to make a silk purse out of the sow’s ear that was Little Applestia. One evening Uncle Nutters brought in the late post on a silver tray. There was a letter from Amareica, which made the professor get up and pace the floor, long legs spanning half a dozen roses on the carpet at each stride. “Moral Reform League,” he fumed. “What do I care about moral reform, Applestia?” “Ah dunno. Ah don’t even know what a moral is, let alone reform it.” “Lucky filly. Morals is being told not to do what you want to do by somepony who doesn’t want to do it. Moral reform! Just because this Silver Snake is a millionaire, he thinks he can get me to drop everything and go charging across to make a speech at his annual meeting. It’s the third letter I’ve had. I can’t stop the wretched stallion.” “Perhaps,” suggested Fancypants sensibly, “if you answered his letters, he might stop.” “Brilliant, Fancypants, but I’m ahead of you. I’m already considering in my head the most insulting way of saying no. You shall write it, Applestia. That will be even more insulting.” Breathing hard, tongue between teeth, hooves cramped round the pen, Applestia painfully wrote out what Jet told her. The lines ran crooked down the page and there were blots and even holes where the nib had caught the paper. “Splendid!” Jet put it in an envelope and stamped it. “Run down to the corner right away and post it before I lose my nerve.” “The day you lose that,” Applestia said, “Ah’ll know yer perishin well dead.” She put on her warm coat and ran down to the red pillar box on the corner of the street, mane flying behind in the crisp cold night. It felt so good to be out and free and young that she ran all the way round the block of houses, and came back to number 27a panting and glowing. A stallion was standing on the doorstep with his hoof on the bell. A stallion in a sagging leather jacket and a leather hat with a flap behind. It was her father. Applestia was opening her mouth to say, “Hello, Dad,” when he stepped aside with unusual politeness and said, “Good evening, miss. Am I right for Professor Jet Set?” He didn’t recognize her! He didn’t know his own daughter. Well, since he had not bothered whether she lived or died for three blooming weeks, she was not going to bother to tell him who she was. Nutters opened the door, and Applestia went into the hall. “Tradesmen’s entrance is round the back,” he said as soon as he saw Little Apple Cider. “Not for me, it ain’t,” he said. “I’ve come to see my daughter, Little Applestia, and find out what’s goin on here.” Nutters, who was quite quick in the uptake, realized that he had not recognized Applestia and grinned. “Bert Nutt!” Apple Cider stepped through the doorway in his clumping dustpony’s boots and peered at the butler. “Strike me dead if it ain’t Bert Nutt from the old crowd I used to meet at Buck Daniels after the races. Ex-jockey, wasn’t you? What are you doin here?” “Pardon me.” Nutterville drew back from the gust of the beer with which Apple Cider had fueled himself before he came. “My name is Shining Nutterville, and I am not acquainted with Buck Daniels or the Old Crowd. I don't recall we’ve ever met.” “If he didn’t recognize you,” he told Applestia as they went down the basement stairs after he had taken her father up to the study, “I’ll be blowed if I’ll let on I recognized him.” Applestia went straight to the servants’ hall and picked up the speaking tube. This should be something to hear! If Jet had been annoyed over that millionaire, thousand of miles away in Amareica, what would he say to her father on the carpet on his study, smelling of beer and garbage? She heard her father’s voice, faint at first, and then louder and all too familiar, hoarse and jovial, as he came nearer the fireplace. He told them that he had got the address from the landpony. “I would have come before, of course, to see me beloved daughter, the pride of me heart, but I’ve been away on business.” He must have taken off his leather hat, because the professor said, with his usual rudeness. “There are only two places where they give you a manecut like that. Prison and the army.” “Take your pick,” said Apple Cider cheerfully. So that’s where he’d been! He’d been in jail before, without caring too much, because the company was good and the food regular. “Now listen here,” Applestia heard her father say, in the bullying tone that always pushed into his voice when he’d been on the beer, “I don’t want no jokes. I’ve come on very serious business.” “Born in Flanksachusetts,” Jet jumped in, as if he were playing Snap. “Apple family, I think. Could there be a dash of Zebrican somewhere in his family?” “None of your business, mister. Where’s my daughter?” “Is that any of your business…. now?” “She’s my daughter. She’s under twenty-one. The law’s the law. She belongs to me.” Applestia’s heart was beating excitedly. It was thrilling to hear them going at it in a tug of war over her. Like in the olden days when knights fought duels over fair maidens. “Well, not quite.” “All right.” Jet suddenly let go of the tug rope before he’d even started pulling. “If you want her, take her.” “Wait a minute. You got me wrong. I'm not saying you can’t have her. I just want to know, where do I come in?” “The law,” said Jet, at his most chilly, “is most certainly the law, as you so brilliantly put it. One of the things it’s very firm about is blackmail.” “Blackmail!” she could imagine her father outing on his saintly bishop’s face, dustpony’s hat held over his heart, outraged to be so accused. “If you sent her here in order to get money from me, you miserable stallion, you can take her away this minute, before I knock your teeth out.” “Two can play that game,” Apple Cider said. “I could take my hooves to you for blackening me good name.” The professor suddenly gave a shout of laughter, and her father laughed too. What was going wrong? Why weren’t they fighting over her? “Well, I mean, we’re all friends here, and if you want the foal, I’ll let you have her, but if I mention that I don’t think it should be for nothing. I don’t want you jumping down me throat again with blackmail. Because it ain’t.” “What is it then?” “It’s like this. You want Applestia, the devil knows why. I don’t want her, and the devil knows why that is too. Look at it this way. If a pub keeper had a pint of beer, and you were thirsty and he wasn’t, would he give it to you?” “He would not.” “There, you get the point. I knew you would. I can tell a real gentlecolt when I see one. And what’s 150 bits to you, after all?” “To… buy her?” “Sort of on hire. If you want to buy her, I’d have to ask 500.” “You’d sell your daughter for 500 bits?” Even the professor was slightly shocked, and Fancypants said, “Have you no morals?” “Can’t afford them. If Applestia is going to get a bit out of you, why not me too? Them what they call deserving poor, widow mares and that, they get all the charity. I’m just as poor, but if there’s anything going and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same story. You’re not deserving, so you can’t have it. But I’m just as poor as a deserving widow. I don’t need less. I need more, because I eat and drink more and expect to get more fun out of life. I put it to you gents, is it right for you to take advantage of me faults to do me out of the price of me own daughter what I’ve fed and clothed by the sweat of me brow? Would you grudge me 150 miserable bits?” Applestia smiled to herself. He’d never take them in with that slippery line of talk. But Jet said, and sounded serious, “You know, Fancypants, this chap is so gloriously double-tongued, we could make him a politician or a preacher in three months. It’s not so much that he has no morals. He’s got new morals. Do you think we ought to give him 150?” “He’ll only make bad use…” Fancypants began, but Apple Cider interrupted. “Not me. I need it desperate. I’m behind on me rent, see, and if I can’t pay up, there’s only one way out. I’m going to have to marry me landmare, Mrs. Highcastle by name. Lyrica Highcastle. Lyric and lime, I call her. She’s got me trapped. But with 150 bits, I could pay what I owe and keep me freedom. Take her on a spree, perhaps, keep her sweetened up, but not marry her. “You know,” the professor said, “I like this stallion. He’s so absolutely shameless, you’ve got to love him.” Oh, it was sickening! Applestia would have blown a raspberry up the tube if she had not wanted to hear more. He’d fooled them, as he fooled everypony, from her mother on. “You’ve got to love him,” ponies were always saying. Why? Jet must have handed over 150 bits, for Apple Cider said in the rich glowing voice that came from bits in his pocket. “Applestia is all yours. If she don’t behave, give her a lick of your belt. That’s the way I brought her up, and look where it’s got her… 27a Whinnypole Street. Very classy. You must admit, 150 bits isn’t much return for all I done for her.” Jet laughed. “Get rid of him, Fancypants,” he said helplessly, “before I give him 300. By Celestia, Silver Snake should hear his ideas. That would make them sit up at the Moral Reform League. I tell you what, let’s write Silver another letter. I mean a real one, not an Applestia letter. And tell him he ought to send for Little Apple Cider. A common dustpony, but one of the most original moralists in Canterlot. We’ll have a drink on that. Whiskey, my dear Cider?” “Well, I don’t normally touch a drop…” (Ooh, thought Applestia, may Celestia forgive you. Or strike you dead.)… “but seeing as you’ve been so understanding…” Applestia heard the clink of glasses. “Cheerio.” “All the best.” “Let’s get Applestia up to see you,” Jet said, and before she could move away, a piercing whistle nearly blew her eardrum clean through her head and out the other side. She stamped her hoof, her eyes filling with tears of pain and rage. Whistle yourselves blue in the face, ah won’t go! She ran up the back stairs, went into her room, and bolted the door. Some father! Sold his only daughter for 150 bits! That Jet was just as bad to give it to him, and there they were, drinking and laughing, as if they'd done something clever. “You’ve got to love him.” Love him! They ought to shoot him. Some father! She threw herself on the bed, and hot tears poured out onto the pretty flowered spread. “Oh, Mum… why did you have to go and die!”