The Birthday Ball Read Online Free PDF Page B

either, that he comb his hair. Or cut it. The coarse red-brown tuft at the top of his head was long and snarled. When he tossed his head, as he frequently did in fits of anger, the hair moved like a thick whip from side to side, and those in its path were in danger from it. One small serving maid had been knocked to the floor by the hair and had her brain permanently addled. The duke's barrister had made a gift to the maid's family of a large sum of money to make up for it, and other servants had learned to stand clear in the future.
    The most heinous of individuals (and Duke Desmond was certainly one of those) all seem to have a deeply hidden sorrow. For the duke, it was that he had no child.
    Without a child, he had no heir. When he died, Duke Desmond knew, his wealth—his wells and mines and vineyards—would all go to the populace. Peasants would own it all, control it all, and the thought made him seethe with angry despair.
    But that was not the whole of it. He wanted a child for another deeply human reason. He wanted someone to love him.
    And so he needed a wife.
    He had chosen Princess Patricia Priscilla.
    ***
    It can be said, and has been said, often, that money cannot buy happiness. But Duke Desmond thought that it could, and that he had figured out the way to bring it about.
    His spies had been sent to the domain where the princess lived with her parents in the castle. They went disguised as peddlers, carrying displays of hair products and encyclopedias. The queen, who began each day with a visit to her private beauty salon, welcomed the spy who proclaimed that he carried a line of amazing shampoos and curling lotions newly invented by cloistered nuns in a distant and holy place.
    "Eh?" the queen said to the imposter peddler. "Blistered buns, you say?"
    "No, ma'am, cloistered nuns! "
    "Holstered guns!" she said. "Amazing. I'll take three hundred of each."
    The king summoned the other spy to the counting house. He examined the encyclopedia and ordered several to be delivered to the royal library. The imposter peddler wrote down the order meticulously, but in truth his interest was not on the order but on what about the encyclopedia had most interested the king.
    It was Volume B.
    It was, specifically, butterflies.
    Of course the spy had noticed the elaborate shelves that housed the king's butterfly collection and where the mounted winged creatures were on display, with special lighting. They were arranged two ways: one by color, so that the lengthy shelf began with pale yellow and made its way through each gradation and hue—oranges, reds, blues, greens—so that the wall seemed a rainbow. But the opposite wall held the same collection, duplicates, arranged by scientific names: In the section marked nympkingidae, the spy saw the amazing

    multicolored Prepona praeneste praenestina; nearby, under ORNITHOPTERA, was the semitranslucent Papuana; and in the PAPILIONIDAE section he marveled at the huge deep orange Papiio antimachus.
    Yet on each wall, the spy noticed, there was an empty spot. A label was attached—he could read Charaxes acraeoides. But there was no such mounted butterfly.
    Stealthily, in his little notebook, he wrote the name of the missing butterfly.
    "I notice that one of your specimens is out for cleaning, sir," he commented.
    The king looked up from Volume B of the encyclopedia. He saw that the spy was referring to the empty places on the shelves. His face fell.
    "Missing. Rare," the king explained. "Hard to acquire. Working on it."
    And so the spy went back to Duke Desmond's principality with the knowledge of how money could, indeed, buy happiness, at least when happiness took the form of a rare butterfly. His fellow spy was glum, having acquired nothing but an order for three hundred bottles of shampoo and three hundred bottles of curling lotion. "Funnels," he muttered. "I'll have to do it with funnels."
    "Do what?" They were riding their horses side by side behind the cart that carried their