While I rather enjoy being a princess, there are certain parts of the job I simply detest. Father informed me today just whilst throwing out ripe fruit and painting my goldfish with a thin golden lacquer (my 11th goldfish, which I am told is a lucky number in certain parts of Eastern Asia, and so wish that this one survives past my painting of it) that I was to marry the Edward boy  from House Haythorn. He hails from holy and great halls, but still lacks a certain sophistication which I need if I am to be a sufficiently impressive member of the aristocracy. He has a cross-eyed quality, in which both of his eyes seem perpetually in search of each other, as if two long-lost loves of a previous life, reincarnated as eyes as a punishment for a terrible terrible misdeed, like poking another in the eye sockets.

My true love belongs to a boy of the fief, of approximately nine-teen years of age. Needless to say wise and worn by age at this the September of his years. Several weeks ago, while out in the town square attending a public flogging of which the subject was randomly chosen out of a lottery, for unfortunately nobody had done wrong that particular week, and there exists a contract between the state and the big pillory companies that necessitates a certain quota of flagellation, he first caught mine eye. We walked and talked and skylarked all that day and night, and the next one, and the one after that, and, well not the one after that because I had made a promise to be home that day, but the one after that as well. I would walk through fire for that boy. I would jump through a hoop if he asked me to. He must have sense this quality in me. He produced a hoop from his luggage and asked me to jump through it. 

Father tells us we must be kept apart. Father tells me there is no room for romance between a princess and a lowly bootblack. He tells me that I come from pure stock, and that my great grandfather invented the concept of the duel, and we must honor his memory, for he died shortly after this invention of natural causes (blood flowed out of him in tiny holes) by keeping our family lineage 100% aristocratic. 

All of this is why I have decided to run for the hills with my star-crossed lover. We will run to the other side of the world together: we’ll go from central Britain all the way to South Britain, and trade these slate grey skies for light slate grey clouds. All our troubles will just melt away under the tropical heat. Melt like butter, which I’m not sure has been invented yet. Or gristle, which, to me, sounds contemporary to this time period. I plan on finding work as a tower-loafer, and my soon-to-be-groom already has a job lined up as a human shield. I am a princess in Medieval England!