The Tale of Despereaux: Book the Fourth–Coda

“That’s my philosophy with mice. If they’re alive, kill them. If they’re dead, kill them. That way you can be certain of having yourself a dead mouse, which is the only kind of mouse to have.”

He had time to think how miraculous the light was and then it disappeared and Mig’s face loomed into view.

“Little meecy,” she said, “ain’t you going to skedaddle?”

He was sitting on a bag of flour high atop a shelf in the pantry, crying for what he had lost.

So Despereaux wept with joy and with pain and with gratitude. He wept with exhaustion and despair and hope. He wept with all the emotions a young, small mouse who has been sent to his death and then been delivered from it in time to save his beloved can feel.

And may I further suggest that you keep your voice down to a whisper? We are, after all, on a covert mission.

"And you will not hurt her,” said Roscuro.
“No, I won’t. Because I want her to live so that she can be my lady in waiting when I become the princess.”
“Exactly,” said Roscuro. “That will be her divine comeuppance."

“Ha,” said Roscuro, “a little journey. That is right. Ha. I love the understatement of that phrase. A little journey. Oh, it will be a little journey. Indeed, it will.”

“Look again, Princess. Or can you not bear to look? Does it pain your royal sensibilities to let your eyes rest on a rat?"

“We must take our little journey while it is still dark and while the rest of the castle sleeps on—ignorant, oh so ignorant, I am afraid, of your fate.”

In this story, reader, we have talked about the heart of the mouse and the heart of the rat and the heart of the serving girl Miggery Sow, but we have not talked about the heart of the princess. Like most hearts, it was complicated, shaded with dark and dappled with light.

And what of the light in the princess’s heart? Reader, I am pleased to tell you that the Pea was a kind person, and perhaps more important, she was empathetic.

If she’s missing, I say good riddance! Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Once he was on the floor, he stuck his head around the door of the pantry and saw Cook standing in the center of the kitchen, wringing her fat hands.

And then she began to cry in earnest, wailing and sobbing.

“Fellow honored mice,” said the Most Very Honored Head Mouse, and then he looked up from the makeshift table and saw Despereaux.

And from the members of the Mouse Council, there came a tiny but emphatic chorus of “ayes.”

Tears were cascading from his eyes. A small puddle had formed at his feet.

Reader, have you ever seen a king cry? When the powerful are made weak, when they are revealed to be human, to have hearts, their diminishment is nothing short of terrifying.

And just as he had loved the queen with the whole of his heart, so, too, he loved his daughter with the whole of it, even more than the whole. He loved the Princess Pea with every particle of his being, and she had been taken from him.

“Where?” he said, and as he bent over to look more closely at Despereaux, one tear, two tears, three enormous, king-sized tears fell with an audible plop onto Despereaux's head and rolled down his back, washing away the white of the flour and revealing his own brown fur.

You just have to feel compelled to do the thing, the impossible, important task at hand.

As the mouse looked on, Cook put her face into the steam rising from the pot and took a deep breath. She smiled a beatific smile, and the steam rose around her and caught the light of the candle and made a halo over her head.

He had never in his life smelled anything so lovely, so inspiring. With each sniff he took, he felt himself growing stronger, braver.

The smell of soup again wafted in Despereaux’s direction.

“How is it?” asked Cook anxiously.

And so he began, immediately and without despair, the hard work of maneuvering the spool of thread down the narrow dungeon steps.

This story cheered up Despereaux considerably.

His eyes became accustomed to the gloom, and he moved down the stairs more quickly, more surely, whispering to himself the tale of a devious rat and a fat serving girl and a beautiful princess and a brave mouse and some soup and a spool of red thread.

He pushed the spool of thread with a great deal of gusto.

When it came to the end of the stairs, it rolled and rolled, until finally, lazily, it came to a stop right at the gnarled paw of a rat.

Oh my, what a cornucopia of scents.

Not only can I do a good deed for you and for the princess, but my actions will help to dispel this terrible myth of evil that seems to surround rats everywhere.

And at the end of it all, how tasty the mouse would be...seasoned with hope and tears and flour and oil and thwarted love!

He saw that the floor of the dungeon was littered with tufts of fur, knots of red thread, and the skeletons of mice.

“Ha-ha, exactly!” Botticelli laughed as he negotiated the twists and turns.

“This little treasure is all mine, gentlemen and ladies. Please, I beg you. Do not infringe on my discovery.”

“If you have any sense at all,” said Roscuro, “and I heartily doubt that you do, you will not use that instrument on me. Without me, you will never find your way out of the dungeon, and you will starve to death here, or worse.”

Oh, all of this is much better than I anticipated.

Mig, as you might have guessed, did not get to be a princess. But her father, to atone for what he had done, treated her like one for the rest of his days.