Mr Wolf and the White Princess

Chapter Five

Chapter Five

            The taxi bangs back down onto its wheels as the giraffe legs retract and vanish.

            Mr Wolf leans forwards and says, ‘Worstfield shopping centre, please,’ to the cabbie who grunts and gets on with driving them along the Embankment through the City. Around them a normal bright and sunny summer day is going on with traffic flowing and people taking morning coffee breaks from work.

            The White Princess claps her hands with relief, ‘Oh! What joy! We are free!’

The wolf turns and double takes as he looks at her sitting next to him on the back seat, her clothing has changed with her mood from her drab prison smock.

            She is now wearing a fashionable summer day dress from the 1780s, an elegant long gown of white ribbed silk with matching silk petticoats, wide hooped away from her hips to cover any unseemly display of leg, but with a nipped in, corseted waist to show her slim figure to its best advantage.

            The dress is decorated in the English rococo style; embroidered and couched with floral elements in a naturalistic design. As Mr Wolf watches, a pattern is coiling over the white silk, climbing roses sprout a light palette of green leaves and pink buds. Tiny yellow honeysuckle and blue cornflowers emerge between them.

His eyes wander admiringly over her tightly fitted bodice with its low décolletage and short sleeves. These are trimmed with lace fringes flowing from the back of her upper arm and shaped to the elbow to show off the smooth milky skin of her shapely forearms. The whole ensemble is worked finely in different stitching: chain, stem, satin, trellis, darning, plaited braid and couching with gold and silver gilt thread.

Mr Wolf stops staring at her cleavage and says with a raised eyebrow, ‘Charming my dear.’

‘Why thank you kind sir,’ she smiles and touches the white lace ribbon that now adorns her throat and then adjusts the white ostrich feather stuck in the side of her hair, which has grown even higher and now has a string of pearls draped around it.

She lifts her legs off the grubby floor of the cab, complete with little pancakes of greyed chewing gum, and waggles her pearl encrusted slippers with delight. Her dress glows a brighter white as she does so.

She returns the compliment, ‘I see you have your accoutrements as well?’ She nods at the Cavalier Hat and Rapier Wit which have returned to him as he regains his innate poise.

The wolf grins and sets his hat a rakish angle.

She continues in a joyous tone, ‘I am so pleased at how the G-Gnome’s plan worked out. Imagination is such a powerful force; in fact I do believe that Mr G.K. Chesterton once wrote that ‘Stories are more real than reality’.

She looks at Mr Wolf with bright expectation but he looks at her blankly.

She continues to wax lyrical, ‘Why Mr Wolf, imagination is at the heart of love! If we cannot write a person into the story of our hearts then we cannot love them. Have you ever loved Mr Wolf?’

The wolf frowns and looks genuinely puzzled as his gaze turns inward and he searches his emotional history. He purses his lips and then shakes his head.

‘Oh come now sir, I am sure that a wolf of the world such as yourself has had a string of inamoratas? Even if they have not been requited then you could use your faculties and at least Imagine yourself to be in love, could you not find this to be true?’

Mr Wolf looks at her with an expression balanced between boredom and irritation, and then looks away out of the window and mutters, ‘What is truth?’