Dealing with Difficult People

O0O0O0O

"I could wring ten necks tonight!" Peter fumed, and Lucy looked up from her seat on the couch in deep alarm.

"Peter!" she said. "Peter, shut the door, first!"

Peter did so with such vigour that the mighty oak portal might have taken three of his fingers clean off, had he not pulled them clear just in time. Lucy pursed her lips and watched Peter glare at the door for a minute before he finally turned and stomped over to slump into the chair across from his sister.

"Ten?" she said at last, and Peter buried his face in his hands.

"At the very least," he mumbled, and Lucy bit her lip.

"Oh, dear."

They then sat for a minute in tense, if companionable, silence, and tried not to think about how very trying the people of the Seven Isles were proving to be. It might not have been so bad, really, had they not just come from the Lone Islands where everyone was so merry and easygoing, or even if they'd had the opportunity before reaching the Seven Isles to listen to Queen Lora describe the inhabitants of her mother's homeland. As it was, though, they found themselves in a land populated by people who, though certainly honest and upright in every way, were nevertheless unaccustomed to merrymaking, or even smiling overmuch. The vast majority of them also took everything one said at face value, which meant Peter was having to be very careful of his use of irony, and Lucy had pretty well given up joking entirely; it got to be quite trying, having to explain everything so much.

"What was it this time?"

"It—" Peter looked up in vague bewilderment. "I can't even be sure. I think it started with the treaties I agreed to witness. There was some sort of polite feud going on over some orchard or other, and they finally came to an agreement and I was asked to bear witness. I didn't mind at all but one of our ministers —Ruggle, you know, that nervous Dwarf— worried it might show favouritism of some sort, and I didn't see how but you know that I don't really know enough about these things yet to make a good argument against something like that so I just sort of stood there like an idiot in front of all of them, and then somebody made a remark, and I think it was well deserved, really, because if Ruggle had a problem with this he ought not to have voiced it in front of everyone, but he took offence and made some remark of his own, and it went very badly from there."

"Goodness," Lucy looked worried, "do you really mean to say they were standing there and slinging insults at one another? In the middle of a . . . well, whatever you call the ceremony for signing a treaty over an orchard."

"I don't know that there is such a word, and no, it wasn't anything so obvious as that. You know how grown ups are," with a sudden, brief reversion to boyishness, "grown ups, and diplomats too. They won't come out and say a thing and get it all in the open, they insist on making one remark that could have been inoffensive in one way, except that you can tell by the way they say it, they really mean it quite another."

"Oh, yes," Lucy said with great feeling. "I know exactly what you mean. It's the same as when a woman says 'my, what an interesting gown. Such a singular creation!' and smiles at you in an awful, brittle way, and you know she means that it's so odd and different that nobody ever ought to like it, and you were a fool to wear it."

"Lucy," Peter looked at his sister in surprise, "did somebody say that to you?"

"Just once," said Lucy, and scowled.

"Lucy," Peter looked concerned, but Lucy shook her head.

"I tried to be very diplomatic, Peter, and I think I was. It didn't even happen here, it was just once at the Lone Islands and it didn't matter so very much. I only meant to say that I knew what you meant. People can have an awful way of being two-faced about things, can't they? Or, in this case, two-phrased."

"People of every species," Peter agreed, and managed to find a very slight smile for his little sister, who promptly beamed back.

"There," she said encouragingly. "Now, what of the rest of it? You said you wanted to wring ten necks. Was there more that happened?"

"Oh, yes, there was more," Peter grimaced. "After that whole mess was more or less sorted —and I did sign my name as witness after all, so you can expect to hear from Ruggle about that, I am afraid— the Duck made a remark that I know he intended to lighten the mood, except three nobles from the court and one of our own Ministers all took it seriously and there was another to-do over that, and in the end King Riordan and I just escaped the council chambers and walked in the halls for a while and didn't say anything at all. Lucy," with great feeling, "you've no idea what it is to walk with a man who actually understands that it can be a relief to just not have to say anything at all."

"I expect in his line of work he's come to feel the same way," Lucy observed, and Peter said yes, he supposed that she had something there.

"But all the same," he said, "I just think —and I don't mean this in a rude way or anything like that, of course, and I hope you know—"

"Peter," Lucy interrupted, a little alarmed, "I'm still me, you know. You needn't qualify everything you say to me."

"No," Peter said, and again a ghost of a smile found its way to his lips, "no, I suppose I needn't. What I meant to say was that I just think people here might take things a trifle more seriously than can possibly be . . . well, as Susan would put it, than can possibly be really good for them."

"Yes. Yes, I see that. Only . . . I don't suppose they can help it," Lucy said, after a moment's reflection.

"No, no," Peter shook his head. "You're right. They can't. Not really. Not if it's the only way of being that they've ever known, and the only way they have ever been. And they truly are good people, mostly . . . King Riordan's counsel is certainly wise, and sound, and he never pushes it on me or anything like that, he simply offers it, and . . . and mostly I think I'll be taking it. He never treats me as a child, either, and that's more than I can say even for some of the noblemen we met on the Lone Islands. They're the same mix of people you find anywhere, really, only . . . only . . ."

"Only," Lucy took up, "it really would be nice if they knew how to laugh."

"Yes," Peter said, and smiled at the little Queen who, even at her most earnest and frustrated moments, seemed always to have the promise of laughter hovering in the corners of her eyes. "Yes, I think I should like it very much if they knew how to laugh."

"Perhaps we might teach them, by and by," Lucy pondered. "We could call it a sort of diplomatic mission."

"And if diplomacy fails, we declare war on them until they learn to laugh?" Peter suggested, drawing a giggle from his sister.

"Very well," Lucy smiled, "perhaps it's not the cleverest idea . . . still," she tapped a thoughtful little finger on the cover of the book she had been reading before Peter burst in upon her, "still, I think I will . . . I don't know. Something. It's never good, I think," with genuine concern, "when people don't know how to laugh. It makes me sad."

"Well," said Peter, "we can't have that." Then with brotherly devotion he leaped up from his seat, pounced upon Lucy and set about tickling his little sister with chivalrous abandon until, thoroughly weakened, teary-eyed and rendered completely helpless by the force of her own mirth, Lucy was no longer sad.

O0O0O0O

Although sadness passed quickly for Lucy as a general rule, frustration did not. This was especially problematic because in the Seven Isles, Lucy found all too many things to frustrate her, and it was terribly unfortunate, she thought, that just when she ought to be at her most gracious and her most diplomatic, she found herself wanting more badly than she ever had in her whole life to lose her temper entirely, and perhaps even slap somebody into the bargain. Queens, of course, don't slap people (or at least they shouldn't) so Lucy kept her little hands still at her sides, but that didn't mean she didn't have her moments.

The Seven Isles, the Narnians learned not long after their arrival, seemed to take a very dim view of women in politics, and Lucy, though a very small woman, and not exactly even entirely a woman yet, was undeniably female, and therefore seemed to have fallen afoul of some long-held tradition that even the very nicest diplomats of the Seven Isles would clearly have rather died than overthrow. So, after much private debate on this matter between the two monarchs and their ministers, and then between Peter and their ministers, and finally just between Peter and Lucy (and this was the teariest and most heated debate of the lot, for Peter despised the idea that Lucy might be so undeservedly short-changed whereas Lucy, by that point, was actually prepared to be very understanding about things), they had decided that now was not the time to tread on toes. So Lucy, on their seventh day in the Seven Isles, had retired herself from the council chambers with a grace that rather awed Peter to see, and from that point on she mostly only tried very hard to make polite conversation with women who were more than three times her age.

It went badly.

Lucy, lacking Susan's easy grace when dealing with adults, had to work very hard not to behave as the little girl they all seemed to expect her to be, but it did her little good as far too many of the ladies seemed determined to see her in no other way but that of their own choosing. The fact that she was actually, by anyone's definition, a very little girl was one on which Lucy quite consciously chose not to dwell, deciding that a foreign country was not the place to take the time to figure out how she could best become what she was meant to be. At home, yes, of course there would be time for her to sort out the oddity of being a queen and being a child at the same time. At home there would be Susan to help her think it through; Susan, whom she trusted, Susan, who would poke her neck when she washed it but who would also listen with loving concern as Lucy poured out her every heartbreak and struggle in the privacy of their own chambers, rather than sitting all by herself, alone (and very angry) on a low couch in a room that wasn't hers in a home that didn't belong to her, glowering mutinously at having been more or less shamed into leaving a dinner party earlier than all the other guests because she —a Queen!— had been asked by a woman there if perhaps she oughtn't be running along to bed now, so she wouldn't be too tired in the morning.

"Next they shall be giving me dollies and sweeties and petting my hair!" Lucy fumed, kicking her little slippered heels against the legs of the unoffending piece of furniture that supported her. Her heels struck the solid oak frame and hurt almost unbearably for a moment, but at least the pain was a distraction from her anger— futile anger that Lucy knew full well was unbecoming of even a little girl, much less a queen.

"I shouldn't be angry," she told herself, "I really mustn't be angry." However, after a moment more of sitting she found that particular edict was too tricky to follow, and so she altered it a little. "I may be angry, but only when being angry can help me do something to make things better. I just mustn't sit here and be angry and not do anything about it, or else I think it will sit in my stomach and make me sick, eventually."

For Lucy was, in her own way, an extremely gown-up person for a little girl only just turned nine.

"If I mayn't be angry without doing something to fix it," she went on, calming down even a little as she spoke the words quietly aloud, "then I must decide if I will do something or not, so I can see if I am allowed to be angry this time." That settled, she tried to think of what she might reasonably and diplomatically do to fix this particular situation.

"I shouldn't," she realised at last, "have left when Lady Bel said what she did. I excused myself properly, of course, and thanked Queen Irine for the food all of that, but I did still leave. And that woman probably either now thinks she's gotten the better of me, or," with a spirit of charity to which none of her other siblings would likely have been equal in the same situation, "perhaps she didn't even know there was anything wrong in what she said. Perhaps she only saw that I was a small girl and forgot for just a moment that I am a Queen as well, and she ought by rights address me as 'Your Majesty' first and 'Ma'am' after that, and not Dear Little Lucy . . . which perhaps I was wrong to mind when she did it, if she only saw me as a little girl."

Quite calmed and hardly angry at all, now, Lucy considered just a moment longer, then decided that there was nothing for it but for her to return to Queen Irine's dinner party.

"For I didn't actually come right out and say I was excusing myself for the evening, although I suppose they all must have thought it, since they all heard what Lady Bel said to me . . . still, I didn't say I wouldn't be back, so that's only their assumption, and I can't help that, really, though if anyone actually asks if I hadn't meant to leave for the night I certainly won't lie . . . I think I shall only say that I had thought I was tired, only I then realised I was not. I would rather be thought inconsistent than actually be a liar."

Now thoroughly settled in her own spirit as to how she should behave (and quite awed at her own ability to talk to herself; Lucy had rarely in her life been so often alone as much as she had all the past week, and by being alone so often had quite by accident discovered in herself previously-unsuspected powers of soliloquy) the young Queen arose from her perch, straightened her surcote a little, left the room behind her and walked resolutely down the hall, back to the party.

O0O0O0O

I wish I could say that things got better for the monarchs and their envoy as they spent more time on the Seven Isles, the Narnians growing more accustomed to the inhabitants and the inhabitants to them, but unfortunately it was not so. Peter continued to struggle with the dual burden of kingship and mediation —for his ministers, diplomats though they might have been, had not had much opportunity to be very diplomatic over the course of the Long Winter, and the skill was much in need of polishing in all of them— and Lucy continued to find ample difficulties of her own with which to contend.

I am glad to say, though, that although their stay was a trying one, Peter and Lucy, for the most part, rose to the challenges set before them with admirable grace. Peter worked very hard to be the first to act to settle disputes that arose between his own ministers and any of those of the Seven Isles, although at the same time he was also very careful not to overstep his authority and tread on the toes of King Riordan, who would possibly have forgiven the slight but would almost certainly have thought much less of Peter's abilities for him having made the gaffe in the first place.

Peter, who did not care for his own reputation in the way that an ordinary boy might do, cared very deeply how he represented his kingdom when he was abroad. He would not have foreign monarchs thinking his people were governed by an unfit man, and he would not have Narnia made to look lesser for having a king who could not rise to the challenge of adapting to new customs and being exceptionally diplomatic when it was called for. With this in mind, he bent his every effort to studying at close hand the customs he had heretofore only read of in books, and resolved that he would not be found wanting. He could not show manhood by height or breadth or even experience, but he could show it by his knowledge, his wisdom, and his willingness to be silent and listen in the quest to acquire more of both, and it was not long before the ministers of the Seven Isles and of Narnia alike took note of the change in the young king.

Lucy, for her part, had rather a trickier time of it, because while Peter's diplomats were mostly ready to meet him as a king, at least until he proved himself unfit, the ladies with whom she was expected to consort seemed determined to view her as nothing much more than a very sweet little girl who had gotten a little above herself but could be indulged because she was so very charming about the whole thing.

Since it's not usually the way in groups of women for one to confront the others directly when something they have done has offended her, Lucy was in much more of a bind, and she struggled over it for some time because she did not know what to do and yet hated the idea of burdening Peter with a problem he would almost certainly not even understand, much less know how to solve. Lucy wrote many woebegone and heartfelt letters to Susan at that time, although they were all so indiscreet and undiplomatic in tone and content that she burned most and posted none, secreting those few she meant to pass along to Susan later in the very bottom of her trunk, inside the right of a pair of dancing slippers she had stained on the Lone Islands and would not be wearing again.

The real difficulty, Lucy thought, as she sat beside Queen Irine and answered the woman's polite questions about her sister, was that most of the women didn't even know they were doing anything wrong. Unlike Lady Bel, who had said something so cutting and in such a tone that Lucy was not able to wholly believe it had not been meant as a slight to her age, most of these women honestly did mean to be kind to her. They simply had no idea what they were to do with a little girl the age of their daughters —and in some cases their daughters' daughters— who also happened to be a queen, and so they chose to treat her as a little girl, because little girls were something they knew how to handle.

And really, Lucy thought, listening to Queen Irine speak of her own son, who was very nearly Peter's age, it was understandable that the Queen was used to speaking to other queens about husbands and households and children. What could she think of that she could say to Lucy, who was younger than all but one of her own children? In a country where women were not involved in politics, and only minimally involved in trade . . . why, of course, Lucy thought, the realisation striking her quite forcefully, of course they would have nothing in common with her. Even if she were grown and had a husband and babies, she would have only those things to share with these women. She could not tell them of the way that Tupprong the Goat was teaching her rhetoric, nor of the way that Kip the Duck was instructing her on the finer points of Narnian criminal law. They wouldn't be interested, or if they were, they would only be able to listen and make polite remarks without really understanding, as she was doing now with Queen Irine.

And who am I to look down on that? she asked herself. Who am I to think that they must be spiteful or silly or annoying if the only things they are doing are the same things they do every day . . . talk with one another about the things they are allowed to know. There are nasty ones, of course, like Lady Bel and Lady Anna, who talk about the others when they're not here, and I think probably Lady Shance too, because I am sure it can't be an accident that she speaks so pointedly of the way she instructs her daughters to be gentle and quiet and keep to their own house and gardens just when she sees me listening to her, but . . . well, it doesn't matter, really. I needn't like those ones, I need only be polite and courteous to them, and I can like the others well enough, because after all, with a sudden rush of affection for gentle Queen Irine, they have mostly been very kind to me. They are just being the only way they know how to be.

There is nothing like an epiphany, however small, to completely change your outlook on everything. After that, the way that the ladies behaved to Lucy did not change in the least but the way Lucy viewed their treatment of her underwent a complete turnaround, and with it, so did the little girl's attitude. She no longer took their every gentle comment to her about how she must enjoy the time outside of the council chambers to play as a direct insult to the Narnian policy of welcoming its Queens onto the council as readily as it did its Kings; she saw them as comments honestly believed and intended only as a way of welcoming her into the circle of the ladies at court.

"You see?" she burbled to Peter the evening after she discovered this. "You see how it is? They're really almost all just like we thought— they don't know how to say one thing and mean another. Only a few of them do, I think, and those are the really cruel ones. The nice ones, they do think I am too little and they don't think I should be on the council, probably, but they don't mean it at all the way I thought they did! Well, most of them don't, anyway; some of them really don't think I should, and they think it in exactly the way I thought all of them did, but that's all right, because most of them aren't that way at all, do you see?"

"I don't, exactly, to be honest," said Peter, looking bewildered but pleased for his sister all the same. "I'm happy for you, though, Lucy. I really am. I hated the thought of you being bored and miserable while I tried to get through all of these papers on my own this time. I know you wanted to help with everything."

"I did," Lucy said, nodding thoughtfully, "and in most ways I still do, Peter, and I dearly wish I could. But I think this is probably part of the— the job, isn't it? The one we've got to do? We need to have a plan, of course, and a way in which we mean to sort things, but we also need to be ready to change things for the good of others, and in this case I think it's what we've done. The way we do things at home just isn't done here, and if we can work around that and still accomplish all we meant to . . . well, I think we'll have done pretty well for ourselves, don't you?"

Peter at that moment looked at Lucy with an expression of deep wonder, but she missed it because she was plucking a loose thread from the sleeve of her chemise. Was this truly, Peter wondered, the scrape-knuckled little girl with the wispy plaits and sunburnt nose with whom he had sailed to the Lone Islands? Was it actually possible that the course of mere months had changed her so much? Lucy was not taller, exactly, nor even had her hair grown terribly much (although it now no longer was bound in plaits, but actually curled rather sweetly down her neck and well past her shoulders) but there was something much more adult in her face than had been there even one month before.

"If they can't see that you are a queen," he said suddenly, "then however nice they are, I think they must be fools."

"Peter," Lucy chided gently, but her round cheeks dimpled and reddened at the compliment all the same. "You shouldn't say that of them, really; they can't help it, it's all they know. It doesn't make them simple or anything. Just different. But . . . thank you, for saying that. I am glad you think I am a queen. Now," with a sudden, eager hunger coming into her little face, "tell me! What was done in council today?"

"Well," Peter tugged a rumpled piece of parchment from the depths of his doublet, and consulted his carefully-written notes, taken down purely for Lucy's benefit, "we saw the last of the claimants from Brenn today, and I think we'll be able to accept them all."

"Oh, how lovely," Lucy clapped, and moved from the couch to perch on the arm of Peter's chair and study the parchment he held. "And we start in on Mull tomorrow, is it?"

"Mull tomorrow, and I am hopeful of them, too. Though one does worry me, actually. Tell me, Lucy do you remember . . ." and he launched into a detailed description of one petition, which Lucy did remember and assured him worried her too, and together they tried to sort out what might best be done to fix things.

And on it went, late into the night, brother and sister curled up together in the depths of the large chair, the treasured scrap of paper held carefully between them both. Peter and Lucy shared counsel and talked of great and weighty things, a King in hose he was fast outgrowing and a Queen whose knuckles were still scraped at times, both of them making state decisions in an armchair by the fireside until the embers burned low in the grate. Night passed, stars brightened and then faded, and still they talked, sharing the decisions of the day until at last dawn kissed the far horizon and sent pink rays shooting across the sparkling seas. The grey light entered the room and rested on the children as they sat, Peter's head at last drooping with the weight of sound slumber and Lucy, her fair curls tumbling into her face, pillowing her head on her brother's broadening shoulders and sleeping as sweetly as any little girl could wish.

O0O0O0O

A.N.: If I went into detail about even half of what's happened over the past few months . . . well you'd certainly find this story much less interesting compared to some of my real life drama! Some things are more settled, now, however, and those that aren't yet can't be rushed into settling by any amount of shaking (except for the remainder of my unpacking. What does it say about my life as of late that the LEAST stressful thing we have done is move house?) so I'm trying to focus a bit more on writing again, and reading, too! I have sorely missed the opportunity to catch up on reading the work of my own favourite authors in this section, and I am working on remedying that even now. I suppose we'll see soon enough how well that works out for me!

Up next: Making Sense of Southerners, in which Edmund must deal with Northern prejudice and the Southern reasons for it.