Free Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle by Beverly Bartlett Page B

days that followed, Princess Isabella couldn’t get the lines out of her head. They seemed, she thought, to be written
     particularly for princesses of her generation. Suddenly, she was at ease. Her taste in clothes became unfaltering. At the
     same time, her knack for picking appropriate causes became unwaveringly accurate. She learned how to look directly into people’s
     eyes, even when looking at six hundred people at once. And, in an unexplained twist, she even finally developed nice skin,
     which allowed her to wear less makeup.
    Her newfound knack for capturing the public fancy became, perhaps, most apparent in what became known as the “sock incident”—the
     near disaster that ensued when Isabella was photographed hopping off a train in celebration of Public Transport Day wearing
     one black sock and one blue.
    We are not, I’m sorry to report, speaking of a mere flash of color peeking out from a royal trouser leg. There was, in this
     outfit, a lot of sock. Isabella was wearing knee-high stockings with a short plaid skirt, capturing the so-called schoolgirl
     look that the queen thought was questionable enough for a woman of Isabella’s age, even if the colors were right.
    But, in this case, the colors were quite clearly wrong.
    Secrest had, needless to say, been on vacation. Otherwise, she would have personally checked the tags for dye-lot numbers
     and held them up to the window, as was her routine, to detect any unfortunate fading issues, which can sometimes occur even
     with the best laundries. Yes, the clothes were as right as rain whenever Secrest checked them.
    But Secrest was lying on a beach in southern Spain that day. So the niece of one of the castle gardeners, a young intern originally
     hired to walk the royal dogs, had taken Secrest’s place in handling the princess’s clothes. Although it appears that by “handle,”
     we mean only that she “handed” them over, because the subsequent investigation found evidence of slipshod work from toe to
     top. In addition to the color problem, the socks were from two different designers, and one of the princess’s bobby pins had
     a speck of rust.
    Isabella herself, I suppose, could have saved the day by glancing at her feet herself. But she was not accustomed to paying
     much attention to such things and probably could not have been expected to notice the coloration differential in the dim light
     of her dressing room.
    However, the difference screamed for attention in the early-morning train-station light and caused gasps of wonder and astonishment
     from the crowds bottlenecked at the station. (It is one of the ironies of Public Transport Day that the efforts to accommodate
     visiting dignitaries make everyone else late for work.)
    Hubert was beside himself with rage and hurt. He fired two laundry maids and, of course, the inattentive intern and further
     launched a review of the castle vacation policy.
    “Why on earth would Secrest be on vacation on Public Transport Day?” he kept asking the other senior advisers, who all agreed
     that they could not imagine a legitimate reason.
    The queen herself launched the internal review of how the intern came to replace Secrest, and the review provided weeks of
     surprising revelations. I’ll spare you the sordid details of how an unrequited crush on the dog groom had served to distract
     the young worker. But I will say that the entire staff was beside itself with shame and self-loathing after the investigation
     turned up an ominous memo, carefully filed away but never followed up on, from the head of kennel operations, who complained
     just days before the sock incident that the intern had twice walked Grover, the royal greyhound, using a leash that did not
     match his collar.
    “The leash was red. The collar blue. Dear Grover is a rare milky white,” the kennel chief wrote. “The poor dog looked like
     the flag of France! Scandalous!”
    Hubert, who had found the memo in his own file cabinet but