A Princess in the Age of Science: 3 / 6

By Iolanthe Portmanteaux

Georgie — or Georgia, as he was now known — knew that his subterfuge wouldn’t last forever. One day, his voice would change. One day, whiskers would appear on his face. Occasionally he had nightmares where he’d see himself as he was now: to all appearances, a young, pretty girl. In these dreams he was wearing a dress made of light cotton with a cute design: dark blue roses on a pale blue background. The hem of the dress didn’t reach the floor: like many designs for young girls, it was short enough to show her ankles and feet.

In this nightmare, Georgia would abruptly grow and mature at an accelerated, jumpy, visible pace. His feet grew and swelled and burst out of his shoes. His limbs lengthened, the seams on the sides of his dress and his sleeves split; coarse hairs appeared on his face, arms, and legs, and soon he presented the grotesque picture of a bulky, uncouth boy draped in the tatters of a young girl’s clothes.

Georgia was always able to shake off the disturbing effect of those dreams, but he knew very well that eventually his days of free room and board would come to an end. To make matters worse, he had long since developed a real affection for Mrs. Vendall and everyone at the institute: the staff, the girls, the teachers. Out of his affection grew a deep sense of guilt: he knew he was cheating Mrs. Vendall. To put it plainly, he was stealing from her. At some point, each girl in Mrs. Vendall's care would be placed: she’d go out from the institute and enter life in a domestic or commercial situation, and Mrs. Vendall would pocket a fee. Many girls were actually married off — but we’ll hear more of that later. The point was, Mrs. Vendall expected a return for her investment in each girl, and Georgia would end up denying his benefactor the recompense for all the trouble and expense she’d undertaken on his behalf.

In any case, Georgia didn’t idly wait for the axe to fall. He had formulated something like a plan. It wasn’t very detailed or well-thought-out: it basically amounted to running away. Some versions of his “plan” featured a pair of pants and other male clothes. As Georgia’s sewing skills improved, he gave some thought as to how he might make himself a set of man’s clothes, but the entire activity, from beginning to end, would be difficult to hide.

Frankly, if Georgia did run away, it wouldn’t be the first time one of Mrs. Vendall’s investments had gone awry. Every year or two, a girl would run off with some household money. Over the years a handful of girls turned out to be unteachable, intractable, and had to be let go. Certainly Mrs. Vendall had come to feel a special affection for Georgia, and his disappearance would be a blow, but still, it would be a blow Mrs. Vendall would recover from.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t how things fell out. Georgia temporized: the future, when his disguise would fail, always seemed comfortably far off. His voice hadn’t cracked; there weren’t any stray hairs on his chest or legs.

Georgia wasn’t the only one watching for signs of maturity: after the boy turned thirteen — or as near thirteen as anyone could guess — he became an object of special interest to Mrs. Vendall. Three of Georgia’s personal qualities emerged to set him apart from all the other girls, and Mrs. Vendall discovered that the boy was uniquely qualified for an unusual position that none of the other girls would be able to fill: Princess of the Far West.

The first of Georgia’s particular qualities was his activity. The second was his willingness — and sometimes eagerness — to get dirty. The third was his letters.

We’ll explore each quality in turn.

Georgia was active and industrious. The other girls were obedient for the most part, but they needed constant direction. Georgia, on the other hand, roamed the house, exploring every corner, talking to everyone, and if he found something that needed doing, he did it. He helped the cooks in the kitchen, he assisted the maids at their cleaning. He sorted, he organized, he found lost objects. Georgia was never at a loss for something to do.

Georgia not only didn’t mind getting dirty, he seemed to relish it. He attacked the worst jobs with gusto: he never shied away from work that was physically difficult or distasteful. He carried the coal scuttle in. He lugged the kitchen slops outside and tipped them into the sewer. More than once he chased down a rat in the kitchen or cellar, and after stunning the vermin with a broomhandle, he carried it outside by the tail, where he finished it off.

The only lesson Georgia had trouble with, was how to keep her clothes clean. It was this quality (or lack of quality) that first gave Mrs. Vendall the idea that Georgia might be best suited as a mail-order bride to a certain man of success in the Far West.

Now we must talk about Georgia’s letters: after much work and application, Georgia developed a clear, fine, feminine hand: what she wrote was elegant to look at and easy to read. She wrote with facility, grace, and economy.

Often the girls were asked to write letters. The younger girls assumed these were simple exercises, not written to any real person or anyone in particular, and sometimes this was so. In other cases, it was something of a trial.

In the case in question, Mrs. Vendall chose a dozen girls, all of them near or above Georgia’s age, and asked each of them to write a “pen-pal” letter to a man named Winston Prince. She gave them a few details: his age (24), his profession (mining engineer and geologist), and his location (Feldspar, Arizona).

All of the girls wrote good letters. Three of them wrote letters that were quite fine and highly polished. Georgia’s letter, on the other hand, was simply exceptional. It was the only letter that was truly personal. He did something none of the other girls did: he expressed a genuine, unfeigned interest in Prince’s work. The idea that a person could study rocks and make a good living at it astonished him, and he was full of questions. His interest prompted him to dip into the encyclopedia and consult an almanac before sitting down to write.

Mrs. Vendall was so impressed by the aptness and liveliness in Georgia’s production that she wrote a letter of her own to Mr. Prince. She sent both letters along with a recent photograph of Georgia.

Prince ran a mining operation in Arizona. The mine was doing well enough before Prince arrived, but Prince, armed as he was with geological insight, found several promising new placer deposits. He also began mining for a vein, a vein that paid handsomely on its promise. He also increased the output and quality of the mine’s refinery. Prince understood machinery, and he also brought with him his own method, based on electrolysis, of separating gold and silver. Most of the mined gold in that area was admixed with silver, and though precious, a purer gold brought a higher price than the amalgam.

Prince was happy and successful, but he was lonely. He had twice tried the expedient of a mail-order bride. Neither woman lived up to his hopes, and ended up marrying elsewhere. Prince came to realize that what he wanted was not simply a woman, however pretty she may be. He wanted a companion: someone he would grow to love just as she would grow to love him. Someone he could talk to: an intelligent woman with active interests of her own, and whose mind wasn’t bounded by the four walls of domestic life.

Prince read Mrs. Vendall’s letter with some skepticism. He rather liked Georgia’s face in the photo, though she was clearly only a child. But her letter—! After he finished reading, he turned it over and read it again. Then he read it a third time. In his bed than night, he fell asleep composing a reply. When he woke the next morning, he knew that the hole in his life was Georgia-shaped.

He wrote to Mrs. Vendall, expressing his desire to correspond with Georgia. From the very outset the agreement and expectation was clear: that Georgia and Prince would be “pen pals” until Georgia developed into a young woman. Once that happened, and if there was mutual interest, Georgia would travel to Feldspar so that a final decision would be made.

The “final decision” was, of course, about marriage.

Georgia knew none of this. Mrs. Vendall had been down this road many times in the past, and knew it was better to wait until the girl, of her own accord, found an interest and sense of connection for the man she was writing to.

Soon the correspondence was rapid-fire back and forth. Georgia consumed Prince’s letters as if they were novels. In Georgia’s estimation, Prince’s life was a nonstop adventure, and every element of it full of interest. Prince in his turn came to learn every detail of life in Mrs. Vendall’s institute. Living as he did among rough, uncultured men, he missed the wholesome domestic situation, the sense of belonging — in a word, he missed having family — and he often laughed aloud at Georgia’s natural, often unconscious, humor.

At first Georgia was taken aback by the small, tame expressions of affection on Prince’s part, but he reminded himself that he was playing the part of girl, so he responded in kind.

Everything was going great guns, on wide, well-oiled wheels of steel, except for one obvious problem: Georgia wasn’t developing. Mrs. Vendall could never send a child to Mr. Prince. Georgia needed to bloom!

We’ve already noted that Mrs. Vendall had a special medicinal preparation of her own: a closely-guarded secret. She meant to file a patent once she settled on a final version of the formula. For the past five or six years, she’d been dosing her younger girls with her “Female Excellizer” when she judged they were ready to enter womanhood. It had been noted by many that her institute was full of “early bloomers” but this was imputed to Mrs. Vendall’s skill in choosing her charges.

The formula seemed to favor the hormonal and physical changes that bring a girl from childhood to maidenhood. Perhaps Mrs. Vendall was presumptious in taking such liberties with her charges, but she had yet to see a negative result. On the contrary, all of the girls who had undergone these treatments were healthy, happy, and productive members of society. In fact, all the girls were proud of their early entry into the world of adults.

Georgia was the formula’s first failure. Even double doses of the Female Excellizer had no visible effect.

Mrs. Vendall needed help, so she turned to another “specialist”: her friend Absalom Lapsar. Lapsar, like Mrs. Vendall, was not a doctor, but he had highly developed scientific interests, particularly in the field of elevating home remedies and folk medicine to a more concentrated, essential form. He hoped to create a universal panacea, and had reason to believe that he was well on the way.

She described her conundrum to Lapsar, who listened attentively. When she finished speaking, he said, “I’m quite interested to hear this — did you know that I’ve developed a similar preparation? One aimed at assisting and abbreviating the process of female sexual maturity?” He got up, unlocked a cabinet, and withdrew a narrow white bottle whose label read “LN, batch #132.”

“This is Lapsar’s Nostrum — at least, that’s what I call it for now. I’ve given it with good effect to the young girls of the families who consult me. The results have been gratifying, I have to say.”

Mrs. Vendall couldn’t help but ask, “What’s in it? At least, what are the active ingredients?”

Lapsar replied with a sly smile. “Would be so good as to tell me your list of ingredients?”

Mrs. Vendall struggled between her desire to know, her desire to help Georgia, and her desire to eventually profit from an exclusive patent on her own Excellizer.

At last she told her colleague, “I don’t want to give the girl too much of a good thing, or two remedies that could contradict themselves and make the girl ill.”

Lapsar understood perfectly, so he suggested, “Why don’t you take this bottle with you? If your preparation, however excellent, isn’t providing the results you wish, you could suspend those doses and replace them with my Nostrum.”

“And if your Nostrum has no effect?”

Lapsar’s smile broadened. “It hasn’t failed me yet.”

Mrs. Vendall’s frown tightened. “Mine hadn’t either.”

She took the bottle from his hand and nodded thanks.