Pascale Auber & the Ruritanian Riddle

Author's note: Regarding Ruritania, or why this isn't, technically, fanfiction

Wattpad's own Tevun Krus magazine (@Ooorah - check them out, they are awesome!) runs a short fiction contest most months. Back in 2014, one of the contests invited writers to write exactly 500 words describing the adventures of a steampunk spy. I am delighted to say that my entry ended up being the winning entry for the month. Not only that, but I had great fun writing it. That little snippet of a story, and its two main characters, have lived in my mind ever since, and it is that snippet that slowly grew into the story you have just read.

In the original 500-word short I needed a place that I could say was home to the perfidious archduke. I used Ruritania from Anthony Hope's  The Prisoner of Zenda for a number of reasons. First of all, there is the idea of something being "ruritanian" - a romantic sort of place stuck in the mid-1800s, with fancy uniforms, big hats, and royalty. I also like that Ruritania is widely used in education as a fictional 'placeholder' country to demonstrate concepts in sociology, law, and history. Finally, and most importantly, when I was writing the short I imagined the young man looking just like what I imagine the main character of The Prisoner of Zenda  looks like.

So, I had a Ruritanian, and a Ruritania, but as I continued to write, my Ruritania diverged from the "real" Ruritania . . . and diverged, and diverged, and diverged. What you see in these pages is only related to Anthony Hope's work in a few ways. I retained the following from Prisoner of Zenda:

1) The names preferred by the royal family (particularly Rudolf, Rudolf, and did I mention Rudolf?)

2) The family names of the royal family and their associates (Hentzau; Elphberg, etc.)

3) That the king had a half-brother who could not inherit the throne as he was the product of a morganatic marriage

4) A few basic facts about Ruritania (that they mostly speak German; that they are mostly Catholic; that the capital is Strelsau; that there is a city called Zenda)

and that is about it. In Prisoner of Zenda there are no Archdukes, the half-brother died unmarried and without children, and there are no steam-powered airships. There are also no red-headed diplomats who were in childhood sent to be playmates for their foreign cousins. Furthermore, this story doesn't take place in Ruritania or indeed, in anything pretending to be the real world at all.

If you haven't read Prisoner of Zenda, I highly recommend it. There are swordfights, mistaken identity issues (identical cousins), and a simply delightful adventure. You can read an illustrated version, entirely free, here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Prisoner_of_Zenda