A second bird called. Beauty took a deep breath, trying not to begin crying yet again. I have done nothing but weep this evening, she thought. If I had wept less and thought more, I would not be—and then the tears came very close indeed, and she had to hold her breath altogether to keep them in.
She let her breath out finally and stood quietly, feeling her shoulders slump, listening to a third and fourth and fifth bird. I must bring the birds back to the Beast’s garden too, she thought idly; I want to hear them singing when we stand in the orchard together.… And then there was a scent on the air she remembered, a scent unique to itself, threading its way through all the other rose scents, heavy in the dew of predawn, and she turned and walked down the crosspath to the edge of a little side bed, still half invisible in the tentative light of early dawn. And there were two tiny, rather weakly bushes, but they were both alive, and by next season they would be growing strongly. One of them was wisely conserving all its strength for growing roots and leaves; the other one held one black-red bud, much smaller than the buds of its parent bush and barely open, open just enough for its first wisp of perfume to have escaped. She knelt by it slowly and touched it with the hand that still held the last petal from the dead flower, and as she knelt, she heard her sisters come up behind her.
She did not rise, but she turned her head to look at them. “Give me your blessing, please,” she said, “and know that I will come back to you when I can. But I must go back to my Beast just now, for he needs me most. Jeweltongue, give your Mr Whitehand his day, and let Aubrey Trueword and Lionheart share it, and have your wedding, and know that I bless you in it, wherever I am. Tell Father I love him, and I am sorry to have missed this meeting with him.
“And—and most especially know that I love you and that it is true that our hearts beat in one another’s breasts.” And for the first time in what felt like years, her hand touched the little embroidered heart that Jeweltongue had made her, on her leaving for the Beast’s palace the first time, but she did not draw it out from beneath her shift, and it was only then that she realised she was wearing the dressing-gown Jeweltongue had made for her, only last winter, that she had refused to take with her last spring. It smelt of washing day and faintly of dust, and she knew, even as she had known at her leaving, that neither of her sisters would have used it for the sorrow of her going.
She turned back to look at the little rose; it was half open now, and one of its outermost petals was trying to curl back, free from its sisters. “And … feed these two little bushes! Give them a few of the oldest, rottenest, shrivelledest scrapings from the back of the manure heap, just a few, not too many—that is what they like. Even if you haven’t time to build a compost heap, you can do that. Cuttings are very tender. They must be encouraged, not bullied, into growing.” She seized the petal that was separating itself from the others and gave it a gentle tug; it came free in her hand, and she set it in her mouth.
CHAPTER
14
She had remembered nothing of her earlier journey from the Beast’s glasshouse to the hearth-rug in Rose Cottage, but after she finished speaking to her sisters and set another rose-petal in her mouth, she seemed to fall into a dream, or rather into her old nightmare dream, when she was walking down a series of long dark corridors with a monster waiting for her at the end of all. And sometimes she hurried, for pity of the poor monster, and sometimes she tarried, for fear of it; but as she walked, and ran, and walked again, her anxiety rose and rose and rose till she no longer knew if she felt frightened or pitying and compassionate, only that there was this great humming something possessing her mind and her body and her spirit. And she felt less and less able to defy it, to think her own thoughts, to wrench her own will free of it, to set down one foot after another to her own direction, and not because she was driven to do so.
“My Beast,” she murmured, but her voice made no sound. She put her hands to her throat and spoke again: “My Beast. I seek for my Beast, and I know him, and he is no monster.” But though she felt her throat vibrate with her voice, she could not hear her words; and then she touched one hand to its opposite forearm, and there too was a vibration such as she had felt in her throat; and now she felt it through the soles of her bare feet, an itchy, fretful, maddening sensation.
She ran again, and this time she ran for a long way, till she had to stop for weariness. But when she stopped, she stood restlessly, lifting first one foot and then the other, disliking the contact with the thrumming floor; and she could no longer say if the darkness in her eyes was from exhaustion or the dimness of the corridors she ran down.
This will not do, she thought, and she sat down on the floor with her back against one wall, and closed her eyes, and tucked her feet under the hem of her dressing-gown, and wrapped the dressing-gown as close as she could round all of her, and she tried to think. Her legs were trembling from the long run they had just had, but she could feel the humming through her seat bones, though there was no audible sound in her ears, only the drumming of blood and fear. She thought of trying to speak aloud again, but then she thought: No. I have tried that experiment, and I know its result. I will not repeat it, over and over, to frighten myself again and again, till I am too frightened to do anything at all. I must find my Beast and tell him … tell him … I must find him.
She opened her eyes and looked both ways up and down the corridor, and all she could see in either direction was more corridor, the dull figures of its wallpaper, the occasional loom of furniture or ornament, and the driblets of light from the sconces. There were no windows and no doors. The hum she felt through her seat bones, through her back, through her entire body seemed suddenly both fiendish and triumphant, and she got to her feet again abruptly. “No,” she said, or rather, her mouth shaped the word, but she gave no voice to it that she would not be able to hear. “No.” And silently in her mind she said: You will not have me so easily, nor will you have him.
She turned round and started to walk back down the corridor she had come up. No! No! No! shrieked … something. Some soundless subvibration of the hum that filled the corridor demanded that she turn round; but she had made her choice, and now she put one slow, heavy foot down after the other by her own will and of her own choice, and while each footstep was very hard, dragged as it was in the opposite direction, it was also a victory for her, and the hum changed its inaudible note and became fury.
She closed her eyes against it. She could not see it any more than she could hear it, but in this darkness of her own choosing she could hug herself round with her own thoughts, her own being, her own knowledge of her self and of her existence, as she hugged herself round with the dressing-gown her sister had made for her. She had none of her outer senses left: Blindness she had chosen, hearing and touch were deadened by the noiseless vibration, and her mouth was full of the flavour and scent of the rose-petal. She put one hand to her lips, touched the fingers with her tongue; here she felt no alien vibration, only the faint stir of her breath against her own skin.
She walked forward, expecting at any moment to bump into a wall, but she did not. And as she walked, hearing nothing but the silent pressure of not-hearing, she thought she began to hear some faint echo, as of wind, or footsteps in a cavern; and she listened, hopefully, and as she listened, she caught a faint smell—like that of damp earth—and her toes struck against something that was neither planed wood nor tile nor carpet fibre, and in astonishment she opened her eyes.
She stood in complete darkness. When her eyes opened, and she still could not see, she had stopped automatically. She blinked several times, waiting for her sight to clear, but the darkness remained. She held a hand up before her face and could see it no more than she had been able to hear her voice a little while before, and a little “Oh!” escaped her lips without her meaning it to and … she heard it. I am returned one while another is taken from me, she thought. Well.
She put her hands out on either side of her and felt rough crumbly wall with her right; she m
oved a little to her left and found a similar wall there. She faced left and ran her hands over the wall, and a few little earth crumbs fell away from her touch, and she realised she was walking on bare earth, and there was grit between her toes. Her feet were still half numb from the thrum of the corridor, and inclined to curl involuntarily away from what they stood on, without recognising that the irritation was gone. She let her hands climb upwards and found the earth corridor was quite low, and over her head she felt twining, irregularly hairy surfaces that she thought—and suddenly hoped—might be the roots of trees.
She began to walk forward again, in the direction she had been going, with her hands held out in front of her. She was walking much more slowly now, not from the effort of struggling against the intangible will that had wished her to turn round but from a simpler fear of the dark, of blindness without choice. She closed her eyes again, because she was making her head ache by straining to see when she could not; the darkness seemed a little less oppressive with her eyes shut, as the hum had been a little more bearable when she did not try to speak.
But her heart had risen with that first smell of earth, and it beat more strongly now that there was no foreign vibration trying to force it to follow some other rhythm; and in her mind she was trying not to let a certain idea form itself too clearly, in dread of disappointment.
Her outstretched hands touched a smooth surface. She stopped, both because she had to and because that hopeful idea would no longer be suppressed. She ran her hands quickly over the surface that blocked her way, found its squared edges, like a door strangely set in the end of this corridor of raw earth, and her heart beat very quickly indeed. Very well, it was a door, but could she open it? And where would she be if she could and did?
A tiny depression halfway down the left-hand edge, only about the size of a fingertip, with a tiny finger-curved latch or peg within it, as if the hole were a keyhole and a finger the key; and there was a small click, and she felt the door give. She pushed it and saw sunlight outlining the crack of its opening, and a few tears fell from her dark-strained eyes, and she stepped out from behind the summer tapestry into her rooms in the Beast’s palace.
Her strength returned to her in a rush at the sight of her rooms; but she hesitated, and turned away from her first impulse, and instead allowed herself a moment to stand on her little balcony and look round her. The glasshouse twinkled in the late-afternoon sun; but for the first time the sight of it could not lift her heart, and her only thought was to wonder what day it was and how long she had been gone.
Then she ran out into the chamber of the star and found all the doors open, and she chose one and ran through it, running down the twisting corridor towards the door into the courtyard, to the glasshouse, where she had left the Beast.
But the corridor did not lead her there. It led her to other corridors, to rooms, halls, staircases, antechambers, and more corridors, more and more doors to choose, one over another, always in hopes that the door she sought lay just beyond. All the doors she saw were already open, but she would not have trusted any that chose themselves for her.
Late afternoon gave way to twilight; it would be full dark soon. She plodded on. She began to wonder if she were merely going round and round the huge palace square, if the occasional apparently pointless half flights of stairs up or down were carrying her unaware over the carriage-ways to the wild wood and the orchard, though these came at no regular intervals; nor did any stairs seem to hold any relationship to any other stairs. She was increasingly oppressed by the vastness of the palace and the slightness of her own presence in it, and she recalled the evil hum of the dream corridor changing to a note of triumph; but she was near the end of her final strength now and of her hopes. One knee and one ankle throbbed as if bruised, and vaguely she remembered, as if it had happened in another life, that she had banged herself painfully against the ladder when the wind had seized her from beneath the Beast’s sheltering arm.
Once she paused in a corridor that seemed familiar—but so many of them seemed familiar—paused by what appeared to be a stain on the carpet. There were never stains on the carpet in the Beast’s palace, any more than there were marks on the wallpaper, smudges on the furniture, or chips off the statues. The carpet here was crimson, solid crimson, and unfigured, which was perhaps how the stain had caught her eye; it was not very large, much nearer one edge of the carpet than the other, and looked a little like a three-petalled flower or the first unfurling of a rose-bud. The stain was brown, perhaps a rusty brown, but difficult to tell against the crimson of the carpet. It might have been blood. She knelt and touched it gently, not knowing why she did so, and opened her right palm and looked again at the three small scratches there left by the Beast’s rose.
She was now standing in a huge room with windows on opposite walls. She had been mindful heretofore of the Beast’s advice not to look directly out any windows, and the wearier she became, the more careful she had been not to look round her unless she was standing still. She thought now that she would risk looking out a window—because she could think of nothing else to try. At least she could discover on which side lay the courtyard, after the palace’s maze of corridors and smaller rooms which threw windows at her from unexpected directions. The courtyard had to be on one side or the other, whether the outer wall faced garden, orchard, or wild wood, and perhaps, at least before the palace confused her utterly again, she could concentrate on that courtyard wall. Perhaps the door to it now lay hidden behind some drapery or arras, like the door to the earth corridor in her rooms, invisible behind the summer tapestry. Perhaps, before the palace lost her again, she would be able to turn round, and cling to that courtyard wall, and search every finger’s-breadth till she found what she was looking for.
She stood still, and spread her feet a little, and put her hand on a torchère to steady herself, and looked towards a window. But her eyes shied away from looking out and paused on the curtain instead. Her gaze traced the sweep of drapery, which led back towards the wall, away from the dangerous window. There was a small square table tucked against the curtain’s outer edge.
Hadn’t she just seen—in the room before this one, or the room before that, or perhaps even the room before that one, which had been, hadn’t it, tucked in what should have been a niche between the angled walls of two other rooms, except that there was not space enough for it to have existed at all—hadn’t she just seen that little end table, that very table, with its checkerboard of marble squares of different colours inlaid in its ebony surface? And hadn’t it, in that room that could not have been where it was, stood next to just that same painting of that handsome, haughty young man? He was wearing a deep blue robe and a large soft hat, that hung down towards his shoulder, with a feather that curved from its crown elegantly beneath his chin, and over his other shoulder a bird face stared with angry, intelligent eyes above its great curved beak. She did not like the young man’s face. It was not the face of a man who would help you if you were in trouble.
She turned her eyes with a jerk and looked directly out the window next to him and saw the wild wood just beyond the panes, a wind blew, and the branches nodded to her like bony flapping hands.
She let go her torchère and walked across the room to be nearer the windows on the other side. She found another torchère and planted herself beside it, holding on its stem rather too tightly with one hand. There was another familiar painting near this window, of a lady who held a pug dog in one hand and a fan in the other, and her discarded needlework lay on the arm of her chair.
She was smiling. It was not at all a nice smile.
The wild wood pressed against this window too.
Beauty closed her eyes. She thrust her tongue against the roof of her mouth, but the rose-petal had dissolved long ago. She opened her eyes again and gave a brief glance to the torchère she still clung to. It had been brass, with six curving arms when she had first touched it; the upright where her hand rested was smooth, but the six arms each held
three candles, and each candle rose from a waterlily, and each arm was made as of three waterlily stems wound together, and its base, below the upright, was wide and shallow, like waterlily leaves floating in a small pond. The smooth brass upright remained, but she now clutched a torchère whose crown held eight plain upright candlesticks bound in silver, and whose base was a solid conic pedestal of brass laid round with silver bands.
She let go of it as if it had produced teeth and bitten her. She took a step away from it, and turned, and looked behind her, towards the portrait of the young man in blue. He looked older now, and his posture, proud and haughty before, was now magisterial, the supple pose of known and proven power. His fingers were slightly curled, and the palms shimmered, as if he held sorcery there. His eyes were staring into hers, and for a moment she felt a thrum in the floor beneath her feet, felt her memory beginning to grow dark, like a landscape under a storm cloud. She jerked her eyes free of his and saw that the bird that stood behind his shoulder had half spread its wings and that it was as tall as a man.
Beauty walked to the nearest window, which lay beside the lady with the pug dog, threw up its sash, climbed through the narrow gap, and slid down the outside wall. Even the palace’s ground floor, where she had been, was built up high above the real ground, and she had to hang by her fingers and finally let go without knowing where her feet would strike. She landed heavily, her injured knee buckled, and because she was so tired, she fell.
She lay still for a moment, almost tempted not to move. But the ground was cold and hard, and her urgency was still on her. She stirred, with an effort came to her elbows, and looked round. A great tangle of wild wood rose all round her. She looked up, at the building she had just fled; she had no way back. The white stone gleamed vaguely in the light of the rising moon, scattered by leaf shadow. She could not feel the wind from where she lay upon the ground, but she could hear it singing through the trees. She refused to hear if it sang words; she was sure she would not like them.
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