My Fair Pony

by 2K Chrome

Chapter Seven

When Applestia awoke the next morning, with the sun pouring onto her face, she could not remember at first why she was happy.

Then it all came back to her. “The rain in Spain,” she said out loud. “Bird in the High Hall garden.”

This was a gala day. She got up late, and the cook made her a special breakfast, with pancakes and fried tomatoes, for the word of her triumph had blazed round, and the others were as pleased as if she had conquered the world.

She was relaxing in the servants’ hall, with her hooves on the fender, the steam from her third cup of tea caressing her nose, and the sounds of everypony else at work about the house soothing her ears, when a furious blast from the speaking tube sent her bolt upright, with tea all over her dress.

“Where the hay are you?” cackled Jet’s voice when she picked up the tube. “You’re forty minutes late.”

“What for?”

“Lessons, of course.”

“Lessons? I thought we were going to take the day off.”

“Think again. We’ve only just begun.”

“High Hall.” The candle flame in the study flickered flat every time she brought out an h.

“Has Harold had hany hurricanes h-over in Hoofshire? Ain’t I doing well?” Lessons were not half as bad now that it was coming right. But he was no easier than before.

“Terrible. Has Harold had any hurricanes?”

“Ho, yus.”

“Oh, yes.”
If anything, he was even harder than before, now that he was off full-tilt toward his goal of bringing her out into society as a lady. But Applestia could stand it now, because she was beginning to succeed. She could hear on the recording machine that she was beginning to sound like a lady (me!), and it was all so exciting that sometimes up in her room she stood before the mirror and asked herself solemnly, “Little Applestia, is this really you?”

The Grand Galloping Gala, which would decide who won the bet, was just four months away. That seemed too long to Applestia, who felt she could go to Canterlot Palace next week, and no questions asked. But Jet was worried. “It will be a miracle if we bring it off, with so much yet to cram in. Tone, pitch, rhythm, vocabulary, phrasing, dancing… etiquette… Make a list, Fancypants. We’ve got to plan our campaign. Deportment…

“My dad had a friend who was deported. Tony Tangelo. Suspicion of foul play. I don’t want no deportment. I’m doing fine here.”

“No, no. Deportment is…. sort of behavior, and all that.” Fancypants waved his pencil vaguely. “Trotting about with a book on your head. How to sit down and stand up.”

“How to drink my tea?” Applestia said as a joke, but the professor said, “That’s right. How you drink your tea. Your table manners are still revolting. We’ll have to see that Upper Crust is more strict. When you have learned that a dining table is not a pig trough, you’ll take your meals with us, and we shall drill you.” He made delicate knife-and-fork and drinking gestures, and Applestia said, “Sweet Celestia, I’ll starve to death.”

“Deportment,” went on Jet. “Singing… world affairs…. a few phrases of conversational French she can drop in here and there.”

“I won’t learn French,” Applestia said, “and that’s flat. I’m having enough trouble learning English.”

“Applestia,” said Jet in the weary voice with which he warned her she was trying him too far, “there are approximately 2796 spoken languages in the world. If you are not a good filly, I shall make you learn every one of them.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The cold winds of March warmed into April, and a rainy April dried into a sunlit May, with the scent of stocks and gillyflowers rising from the walled back garden, and the lime tree thick with green outside Applestia's bedroom window. When she walked with Fancypants in the park, as she did most afternoons to get some exercise and freshen up her complexion, the crab-apple blossoms dropped soundlessly onto the bright turf, and all the mares in Canterlot seemed to be dressed like flowers.

In other years, in the drab streets where her life was set, the coming of spring had meant only that she could be warm again. The birds and blossoms were celebrating elsewhere, and the mares she knew had merely taken off a layer or two. But the mares among whom Applestia now walked cast off their furs and put on peacock colors. Their huge swooping hats changed from velvet with feathers to straw with flowers.

May bloomed into June, and Applestia and Fancypants walked among the roses, pronouncing their romantic names, “Damask, White Royal, Maiden’s Blush,” and conversing carefully of this and that.

“How do you do?” Fancypants would say politely.

“How do you do?”

“May I introduce Her Grace the Duchess of Overdone?”

“Charmed, I’m sure.” Applestia bent her head with a gracious smile, and an elderly stallion passed by squared his shoulders and put up a hoof to spruce the ends of his bristling white moustache.

“What a charming gown, my dear,” Fnaycpanyts said in a high falsetto, playing the Duchess of Overdone.”

Thank ya… excuse me… thank you, your grace. I’m very flattered.”

“Where do you buy your beautiful clothes, my dear?”

“Whiteley’s,” said Applestia, with a great puff of breath, managing to sound both the w and the h, which was a great feat. “When can we go ter Whiteley’s, Fancypants?” She slipped back into cockney, as she still did when she spoke quickly.

“How do you take your tea, my…”

He hastily dropped the falsetto voice, as a slender young colt in a gray suit raised his straw boater and said: “Good afternoon, Fancypants. Lovely day for a stroll, yes?”

“What, what?” Fancypants was flustered. “Oh… er… hello Phoenix. Yes, yes. For a stroll, as you say. Ha ha ha…”

The young colt had stepped forward expectantly, looking at Applestia, but Fancypants said, “You must excuse us. We have a train to catch,” as if anyone would be strolling among the rose beds on their way to a train, and hurried Applestia ahead and round the corner of a hedge, leaving the elegant young colt gaping.

“Where’s the fire?” Applestia wanted to know.

“I can’t have you meeting socialites yet. You’re not ready. It would spoil everything.”

“He looked a bit of all right though. Ah ain’t spoken ter a young colt fer weeks. Ah’m getting sick of never speaking ter nopony.”

“Anypony.”

“Who was he?”

“Young Scarling Phoenix. His mother is a great friend of the professor’s mother. If those two mares got hold of this, it would be all over Canterlot long before July.”

“I thought the Gala was August.”

“It is, but you’re doing so well, my dear, that we’re thinking we might give you a little tryout at some social event.”

“And go to Whiteley’s?” She plucked disgustedly at the plain brown-and-white dress which Upper Crust had chosen for her to greet the summer. “And get me some pretty dresses? Oh, Fancypants, when?”

“Soon.” He took her leg after glancing around to see that the straw boater was not following. “We’ll buy you some dresses and… perhaps we might take you to the Wonderbolts’ races.”

“To the Wonderbolts?” It was the most fashionable race meeting of the season. Even Applestia knew that.

“The professor thinks it might be a good idea to give you a trial gallop. He wants you to meet his mother.”

“Why didn’t he tell me?”

“He doesn’t want you to get carried away and stop working.”

“Fat chance. When he gets to hell, that stallion, he’ll put Old Nick himself to work, and all the little demons will have to write in copybooks with their pitchforks.”

But although Jet still drove her like a galley slave, the lessons were not torture any more. Every day, she made a new recording on the machine, and every day she could hear her own voice changing: softer, clearer, more musical. Sometimes they played one of the early recordings, of Applestia saying things like, “Cone inter the garden, Mawd. Ah am here at the gate aglowin.” She could laugh at it with them, although if they had laughed when she said it all those weeks ago, she would have bucked them in the… private areas.

She was learning so quickly now that the professor was moved to say, “You know Fancypants, I begin to suspect this filly might have some intelligence after all.”

“I’m a genius, I am.”

“No, I am. The sculptor is the artist, not the statue.”

Intelligence. That was a word that had no more been used in the old life than fish knives. Now it might be hers. Using her brain was an adventure, like using a limb that had once been crippled. She had begun to take books off the crowded shelves without being told to. Crouched in the window seat, with the cries of the strawberry seller in the street below, she read:

The red rose cries, “She is near, she is near;”
And the white rose weeps, “She is late;”
The larkspur listens, “I hear, I hear;”
And the lily whispers, “I wait.”

And she realized, with a shock of surprise, that she was actually reading Saddleson for pleasure. It was as if a key had been turned in a lock and opened a door to a flood of bright knowledge and understanding that cleared away the mists that had shrouded her mind.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Dinner is served, sir.”

“Come along, Applestia,” Jet said. “You are going to take your meals in the dining room with us now.”

“I’d rather be downstairs with all my friends, thank you very much,” she said, with the new politeness that growing on her like moss.

“Ladies don’t eat in the servants’ hall.”

“Then I don’t want to be a lady.”

“That’s a remark I seem to have heard before,” Jet sighed. “You explain to her, Fancypants.”

“Well, you see, Applestia, it’s like this.” Fancypants ran a hoof nervously round between his high collar and his moustache. “They are your friends, of course, but it won’t do… well you can’t…. I mean, it’s different, understand?”

“No.”

“Well, in society, you see…. Oh dear, how can I explain?”

Nutterville, who had been standing by the door, listening with interest said, “Perhaps I can help. Listen here, Applestia, it’s like this. The gentry is the gentry, and the servants are the servants. Right?”

“What am I?”

“If you eat in the dining room, you’re the gentry. Got it?”

Applestia nodded, and followed Jet and Fancypants meekly to the dining room.

“You’ll be too grand to talk to the likes of us,” Diamond Mint teased her afterward, and Upper Crust said, “Tuppence to speak to you now, I suppose,” and added, “If you forget to wipe your mouth like I taught you, you’ll get the back of my hoof across your ear.” But Applestia still sneaked downstairs as often as she could, and drank tea and gossiped and played cards in the servants’ hall, and sang duets with Uncle Nutters.

She still had not met the professor’s mother. She was always smuggled away if she came to call, in case she said the wrong thing, or dropped an h, or dipped cake in her tea. Mrs. Set did not come often, because she had been well-trained by her son, who trained ponies as other stallions train animals, not to bother him when he was busy.

Now they were going to take Applestia to Mrs. Set’s private box at the Wonderbolts race meeting.

“We’ll surprise her.”

“Surprise her with Applestia. By Celestia…” Fancypants’s monocle fell out. “I made a poem! What shall she be? Your niece?”

“How could I have a niece without Mother knowing it?”

“I could be your niece, Fancypants.”

“I’ve got no brothers or sisters.”

“She’ll be just a mare we know,” Jet said shortly. “Don’t make problems. We’ve got enough of those already.”

The first was the choosing of the dress. Ladies always dressed to kill at Wonderbolts races, and Applestia must be the most deadly of all. They could not ask advice of any mares they knew, because the professor would not trust a mare with any secret, let alone the tremendous secret of the transformation of Little Applestia.

Upper Crust, puckering up her mouth like a dressmaker holding pins, advices, “Something frilly and flowered, with little scarfy bits here and there. Beading, lace, very á la mode.”

“I want something simple. Stunningly simple.”

“Something simple,” Jet told the salesmare in the model gown department at Whiteley’s, the biggest store in Canterlot. “Something young, but not girlish. Plain, but not ordinary. You know what I mean?” He looked up at her with his face screwed up and one eyebrow raised.

He and Fancypants were perching on little gilded chairs, looking as uncomfortable as bulls at a garden party.

“Is it for this young mare, sir?” The salesmare was long and purple and dressed in black from chin to hoof, with a dead-white disapproving face above.

“Well, it’s not for me,” Jet said rudely. Like a trapped beast, he looked around the elegant salon with its mirrors and gold paint and die-away mannequins wandering among the silks and laces like lost souls.

“I’ll see what we can find for your wife.”

“She’s not my wife.”

“Oh, excuse me. Your fiancée. Charming,” said the salesmare, not looking charmed at all. She clapped her hooves at one of the fade-away fillies, and said, “Model the turquoise taffeta, Miss Rose, if you please.”

Applestia thought the turquoise taffeta was lovely, and also the primrose moiré silk, and the polka-dot organza, as the mannequins paraded blank-faced before them in one gown after another. The idea of wearing any one of those gorgeous dresses made her heart flutter under her starched white blouse; but the professor kept saying, “No,” and “No, that’s not it,” and groaning, “Take it away,” as Miss Chatoyante minced out in a raspberries-and-cream confection of ruffles and floating flounces.

Fancypants was too busy staring at the mares to say anything at all. The salesmare was getting sick of it. She shifted her hooves as if her corns bothered her. “There is another gown by the Miss Rarity,” she said, “a black-and-white lace that was made for poor Lady Amethyst Showers, but then she… oh, but you wouldn’t want it.”

“Why not?” The professor sat up straight and stopped yawning.

“It’s very expensive.”

“How much?”

When she named the price, Fancypants whistled. “That’s far too much.” But Jet said, “Who cares? You’ll have to pay for it when I win the bet. Show us the dress and stop haggling,” he said irritably to the salesmare.

It was the most beautiful dress Applestia had ever seen. A sheath of ice-white lace slashed with black and white ribbon, which hobbled her in below the mid-section of her legs fashionably. The long shirt kicked out into a train, and the collar frothed up round her chin as if her face were precious china packed in tissue paper.

To go with it they bought a parasol like a white chiffon cloud, and a huge swooping chocolate-and-vanilla cake of a hat, with more feathers and plumes and bows than Applestia’s head could possibly support.

“Hold your head up,” commanded the salesmare, taking more interest now that she had made a firm sale, as Applestia began to shake and giggle under the astonishing hat. “It isn’t supposed to be comfortable. Keep your neck stiff, miss.”

“All day?”

“Forever, if necessary. Il faut souffrir, mademoiselle… one must suffer,” she translated, to Applestia’s blank look, “in order to be beautiful.” And allowed herself a smile, to go with the best she could do in the way of a compliment.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

On the morning of the races, Diamond Mint, who had once been a lady’s maid, helped Applestia to put up her mane, cinched her into the dress, and fixed the great hat to her head with ornamental hatpins as long as meat skewers. Applestia took her ruffled parasol and hobbled insecurely downstairs to show herself to her friends in the basement.

“Oh, Applestia!” The kitchenmaid shrieked. The cook was speechless. Uncle Nutters grinned his monkey grin and told her she was a real little topper, and Upper Crust, she actually cried, did Upper Crust, to see her ugly duckling become a swan.

“Applestia! Confound that girl…. Applestia!” Jet was ringing bells and calling all over the house. She came up the back stairs. “The carriage’s here. We’re late. What the hay are you doing down there, you blasted idiot?”

“You mind your tongue, mister,” Applestia said, waving her parasol, “or ah’ll bash ya one in the guts wit me umbrellar.”

“If you talk cockney today, even as a joke,” he said through his closed lips, “if you say any ghastly word like ‘guts,’ so help me, I’ll buck you out into the gutter where I found you.”

“If you do,” Applestia blew him a light kiss to calm his nerves, “you’ll lose the bet and have to pay for this dress.”

He was nervous. All the way down in the carriage, with the traffic of other observers as they crossed the river at Staines onto Flying High Stadium, he fussed and fidgeted. It made Applestia feel very powerful. He had staked so much on her.

For the first time in her young life, she was the center of attention. She sat up straight, her neck rigid “forever,” as the salesmare had commanded, and a cool aristocratic smile on lips that wanted to laugh and sing. Ponies stared and peered at her as they passed. Would they think she was poor Lady Amethyst Showers, because of the dress? She was Miss Twinkling Appleshine, only daughter of a retired Stalliongradian rubber planter and his invalid wife, living quietly and respectably in Northhooferland, and she hoped her profile did not show that she had never ridden in a deluxe carriage before and was practically taking flight from excitement.

At the racecourse, all eyes were on her as she and Fancypants strolled over the grass toward the grandstand. The professor had marched on ahead, like a stallion forgetting his dog. She had to take tiny steps on account of the bow round her legs, “Like the string round me dad’s workin’ trousers,” she suddenly thought, and clapped a gloved hoof to her mouth of smother a giggle.

The professor, who despised conventions and fashions, was wearing his usual tweeds, but Fancypants was decked out in full; a black coat and trousers, silk cravat, gray top hat, a carnation in his buttonhole. She was very proud of him.

“And I of you, my dear.” They passed below the row of private boxes facing the racecourse above the heads of the colorful crowd. “That’s Mrs. Set.” Fancypants jerked his head and spoke out of the side of his mouth. “In the hat like a winged muffin. Remember, say nothing except what we rehearsed.”

Mrs. Set already had her race glasses focused downward on them. When Applestia came into the box on Fancypant’s foreleg, she glided forward as if on wheels in a way Applestia would have to copy if she was going to get about much in these hobble skirts, and cried: “So there she is, Jet! Wherever have you been keeping her all this time, you wretched colt? She’s beautiful!”

Applestia blushed, and turned her head away, because her deportment teacher, a prim old maid who had never been a filly, had told her that ladies did not blush unless a gentlecolt made advances.

“Her parents are retired, Mother, I told you. Up in the North.” He had chosen Northhooferland because it was the farthest place he could think of, and nopony who was anypony ever went there. “They don’t get about much. Appleshine has been hardly anywhere.”

“Well, we’ll soon put that right,” his mother said delightedly. “She must go everywhere, a lovely mare like her.” She held out a hoof, and Applestia took it limply and muttered something, keeping her lips stiff to stop them trembling. She was suddenly paralyzed with shyness, not because Mrs. Set was an alarming old battle axe, but because she was much younger and prettier and nicer than she had imagined when she had eavesdropped on her through the speaking tube.

“Er…. she’s, well…. she’s…. er, rather shy, Mother.” (If yer goin’ ter git rattled too, Jet, that’ll cook my goose.)

“Nonsense, a lovely mare like her. Come, my dear. I’ll introduce you to everypony.”

There was a small crowd of ponies in the box, the stallions in gray suits and toppers, and the mares in a dazzling rainbow assortment of flowers and frills and tassels and waterfall feathers that made Applestia glad of her dramatic black and white.

She managed to say, “How do you do” to everypony without missing a single h, but when she got to the last gentlecolt, “And this is Mrs. Phoenix’s son, Scarling” she opened her mouth without bringing out any sound, because it was the young colt who had goggled at her in the park.

He was goggling now, and also bringing forth no sound. Love at first sight! They read about it in the novels.This would be something to tell Diamond Mint!

“Do sit down, Miss Er…” Scarling Phoenix, who has good looks, but could never lift a hundredweight of potatoes, if you got him in the market, found his tongue and chair. “Haven’t we met before? Were you at Nightgown’s ball last week?”

“I don’t think so,” Applestia had the wits to say. “But I go to so many I lose count.”

“I heard Professor Jet say you’ve hardly been anywhere.”

“He doesn’t know everywhere I go.” Applestia sat on the edge of the chair, crossing her hindlegs as taught, and nodded at Jet. One up to me.

“I’ll get you some food. One moment.” Scarling spoke mostly in half words and half sentences, to conserve what little energy a life of exhausting idleness had left him.

“Let the others do the talking,” Jet had told her. But Scarling, who seemed to have more beauty than brains, merely stared at her as she juggled a glass of champagne and a plate of strawberries. His mother was watching them, and so was Mrs. Set, the two queens of gossip. They would class her a mute idiot if she iddn’t say something, and when they classed somepony, Jet said, it was around Canterlot. So she took a deep drink of champagne and said carefully, “What delightful weather.”

If there was no sun, she was to say, “What disappointing weather.” Good thing she hadn’t got them mixed, and bucked it up.

“Oh, rather,” Scarling said as admiringly as if she had made up a whole poem and recited it.

“Do you enjoy the races?” There was not a Pegasus in sight yet, but that was her number two sentence.

“Oh, terrif.” He beamed at her as if she had asked, “Do you think I’m pretty?”

He did think so. No one had ever looked at her like that, with his heart in his brown eyes. “What do you do?” she asked, forgetting her practiced sentences, but really wanting to know.

“Do?” He looked puzzled. “Oh… nothing really. What is there to do?”

“I mean work, and that. A job.”

“A job?” He looked as if he were going to faint or vomit, perhaps both. “I live with my mother.”

“Do you let your old mare support you, a great big colt like you?” Applestia spoke slowly, watching her vowel sounds like dangerous criminals. “You” escaped as “ya,” but Scarling drowned it with a bray of laughter.

“I say, Miss Appleshine, you do make ripping jokes!”

The other ponies stopped talking to hear what the ripping joke was, and Jet came over and stood behind her chair, with one hoof in the small of her back, as if she were his doll to wind up.

“I only said, ‘Do you…’”

Jet poked her sharply in the back. “Let me get you some more champagne, Miss Appleshine.” He bent forward and hissed, “What have you said?”

“Quite all right, Professor Jet.” She smiled sweetly up at him, drained her champagne and handed him the glass as if he was her slave, instead of she his.

She was quite all right. She was doing all right, she was. Little Applestia, late of Hoofton Road, up here with all the swells and socialites, with one gentlecolt in a topper looking at her as if she was Celestia, and holding her own as if born to the job.

By the times the races started, she drunk three glasses of champagne and had forgotten that she had ever been anypony else but Miss Twinkling Appleshine, the best dressed lady at the Wonderbolts. She talked more than she had been told to. “Because of the booze,” she whispered to Fancypants, when he muttered to her, “Steady,” and “Whoa there,” as if she were one of the racing Pegasi who swept round the track at intervals, with nopony paying much attention to them.

She was doing all right though. They would never regret the price of this dress. When she started on another glass of champagne and said, “Ah hope the bubbles don’t come back down my nose,” Jet explained it away as, “The new slang. All the fillies talk like that.”

“In Northhooferland?” asked Mrs. Phoenix, who was a grim hulk of a mare with a nose like the prow of a ship and a hat in full sail.

“She’s been in Canterlot quite a while.”

“She’s not one of your bluestocking students at the university?” the professor’s mother asked in her amused voice, as if she had a private joke. “She doesn’t seem to be the intellectual type.”

“Don’t worry,” Applestia said cheerfully. “Ah ain’t.”

Scarling chuckled. “Oh, I say, that new slang’s topping. Do teach it to me.”

“Ah aren’t.” Applestia corrected herself a little sulkily. All of a sudden, he looked less handsome and more stupid. The champagne and the races and the whole of society was going a little sour. She’d had better times by far at the Minor Pegasus Derby. If this was all there was to begin a lady, they could have it. “Don’t ya ever bet on a race?” she asked Scarling. “My father would have a fit if he knew ah went to a race and didn’t back nothing. Anythin.”

“I didn’t think fillies were allowed to place bets,” Scarling said.

“They aren’t,” put in his mother.

“There’s a good Pegasus called Soarin in the next race. I’ll put fifty bits on him for you,” Scarling said, half to spite his mother, half of please Applestia.

It was much more exciting when you had bits on a race. Applestia stood at the front of the box, with the champagne spinning in her head, and watched the Pegasi all come round in a bunch into the straight.

“Come on, Soarin!” At the stadium, nopony shouted at the Pegasi, like they did at the Derby, but Soarin was inching ahead, and he had Applestia’s fifty bits on him.

“Come on,” she yelled, waving her parasol. “Come on, ya rotten Pegasus. Fly yer lousy guts out!”

It was over. “He got pipped at the post.” She turned and saw all the snobby ponies in the box gaping at her, Jet doubled up as if he was laughing…. or dying, and Fancypants reaching like a drowning stallion for a bottle of champagne.