Something touched her back. Bryony leaped forward and saw only blackness behind her, but blackness with something in it. She began to run.
She was aware even as she ran that she was still laughing, that her besetting sin had followed her even into dreams. Even terrified, she still laughed, to keep from screaming.
The pools of moonlight began to wink out, one by one, behind her.
“No more,” she growled, waking up. Much more of this would drive her completely barking mad.
She pulled the blankets back and sat up in bed. Her head ached.
Someone was walking toward the bed.
“Enough!” Bryony yelled, suddenly furious beyond measure. She was sick of men in her dreams, sick of the Beast’s enforced silences, and most especially she was sick of footsteps coming through her room at night and scaring her senseless.
What if there was someone there? What if whatever-it-was attacked her or hurt her or killed her?
I don’t care! I don’t care if he uses my entrails to knit baby booties! I HAVE HAD ENOUGH!
She grabbed for the knife and swept the bed-curtains back. “All right, coward!” she yelled. “Show yourself!”
It was dark in the room. There was only moonlight through the window. Bryony looked around wildly, searching for a black shape that might indicate an intruder.
The Beast must have heard her yelling. The door let out two muffled cracks! and then he tore it quite neatly off its hinges.
“Light!” he bellowed, and the candles sprang guiltily into flame.
The room was empty.
The window stood open.
“Courtyard!” snapped Bryony. “He was just here! He can’t have gone far!”
The Beast nodded and swept her up in one arm, which rather startled Bryony. He tore through the doorway and down the hall, down the stairs at a breakneck pace—certainly faster than Bryony herself would have dared to run—and burst out the door into the courtyard. House barely had time to fling the door open before them, or else she expected that the Beast would simply have torn it off its hinges too.
The courtyard stood silently, bathed in moonlight. Bryony had been avoiding it since the Beast had shown her the book with the words birch tree and wild rose underlined, wondering if there was something sinister at work there. (The version of Holly in her head had pointed out that perhaps she was supposed to go there and begin tearing up the paving or something, but Holly wasn’t the one who had to deal with House.)
Now the courtyard looked little different than it had before—except for dozens of white shapes scattered about the ground like giant leaves.
She jerked back in the Beast’s arms, and he set her down. “What are those?” she whispered.
“Light!” growled the Beast again, and a candle began to burn on the little iron table. The Beast gave it a contemptuous look and said “Light,” with a hint of a roar in it.
Lanterns sprang to life above them, and suddenly the courtyard was lit like a festival pavilion. Bryony reached down and picked up one of the white objects.
It was a page from a book. She read the title on it three times before it sank in.
Ode To A Rose Not So Fair As My Mistress’s Voice…
“Good God,” she said blankly, “someone killed Irving’s poetry.”
There was absolutely no reason that she should feel like someone had died. It was a book of poems. The Honorable Matthias Irving himself had been dead for several centuries.
They weren’t even good poems.
Bryony told herself this three or four times and then the Beast picked up the covers, which had been wrenched apart and now hung connected by a dangling thread at the spine. She burst into tears.
“This is stupid,” she sobbed. The Beast was holding her, very cautiously, and she was aware that she was making an ungodly mess of his clothes. “I’m sorry. It’s only a book. I’m sorry.” Saying this made her cry even harder.
“Bryony,” said the Beast helplessly. “I’m sorry. It’s all right. You can cry for any reason you want.” He patted her awkwardly on the back, and she snuffled into his waistcoat.
Get yourself under control. It’s just a book. It wasn’t a person. You’re being stupid.
She took a few deep breaths, trying to choke back the sobs, and was only partly successful. It wasn’t logical and it didn’t make any sense, but she felt as if someone had taken the Irving she’d been talking to her in head and gutted him.
I’m going mad. Really. This has got to be how it starts. No more. I have got to figure out what’s happening. No more napping, no more puttering in the garden, no more card games. I have got to get to the bottom of this, while I’ve still got a shred of my mind left.
She pushed back from the Beast and ran a hand through her hair. ‘There wasn’t anyone there.”
The Beast shook his head.
“I wouldn’t have done this,” she said. She forced herself to look at the courtyard. Many of the pages were wedged into the rose bushes and impaled on the thorns. “I couldn’t have done this.”
“No,” said the Beast, “you could not have. I do not believe anyone human could—not without looking like a pincushion.” He eyed the rosebushes, and his lips pulled back in a snarl.
Wild rose. The rose. The rose is at the bottom of all of this.
I have got to find out how.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
She dragged herself downstairs the next morning, feeling as if she’d been beaten by hammers.
“You look terrible,” said the Beast, who was standing next to the front door, under the protection of the porch.
“Yeah, well, look who’s talking.” Bryony peered out into the yard and discovered that it was raining, a hard, steady thrumming rain. “Ungh. Well, I suppose we needed it.”
“Dreams?” he asked.
“Not after I woke you up.” Her door had been repaired in the morning. She hoped that Irving’s pages were gone from the courtyard. She didn’t think she could face them right now.
The Beast stared out at the rain. After a moment he said, “I hope that you know if you wish to talk about them—about anything—”
“Heh.” She dropped her forehead against his arm and slumped against him, resigned. Crying on him the night before seemed to have broken some barrier of intimacy. If she touched him now, what of it? At least she wasn’t getting snot on his waistcoat again.
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? We can’t talk about just anything, can we?”
The Beast sighed. It occurred to her vaguely that she had been able to breathe normally around the Beast for quite some time now. She wondered when that had happened.
“I suppose not,” he said. “I wish we could.”
Bryony sighed and pulled herself away. He had been very warm and the air was cold, and she wished that he would put an arm around her, and some other part of her mind said Have you gone completely mad? and the part that sounded like Holly said Oh shut up, what do you know? and now she was arguing with herself in her head, and if that wasn’t madness, what was?
“I miss my sisters,” she said.
The Beast nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s my fault.”
“Yeah.”
She left him on the porch to do whatever melancholy things that Beasts do in the rain, and went pacing through the manor. House obliged by opening doors in front of her, so she walked, more or less at random. She was never quite sure if she was in a hall she knew or another one like it, because they all had the same color carpet and the same candlesticks and not much in the way of artwork.
Her last remarks with the Beast galled her. She could not abide self-pity, but he hadn’t seemed particularly self-pitying. Acknowledgement of fault wasn’t self-pity, was it?
Does it matter? I should be thinking about getting out of this magical madhouse, not picking at the Beast’s motives.
Her thoughts veered much too easily to the Beast. He had held her in the courtyard and he had been enormous and his embrace mor
e solid than any she’d ever experienced.
Was it?
Well, certainly more so than the wainwright’s son… Bryony smiled, half-ruefully. The wainwright’s son had cheerfully freed her of the burden of virginity last year. It had been a bit messy, a trifle uncomfortable, neither terrible nor amazing. He had, it seemed, mostly been made of elbows and knees. He had gone off to apprentice to his uncle not long after, and Bryony hadn’t felt much of a pang on seeing him go.
The Beast was not made of elbows. Presumably he had the usual number. She had never paid close attention. They were probably slightly furry.
I shall have to look the next time his arms are bare. If I can get past all the muscles.
When he had picked her up and run through the house, she had been surprised, but not frightened. No, she was angry and frightened about the intruder in the house, and it had not occurred to her to be frightened of the Beast.
It has been a long time since I have been entirely frightened of the Beast.
She stared at her own feet, not really watching where she was going, glancing up occasionally to the next open door.
Am I asking him the wrong questions? How can I ask what questions I should ask, while phrasing it all in the language of poetry criticism?
She tried to lay out the thoughts in her head as clearly as she could.
The Beast was a young man, and something transformed him. Possibly out of unrequited love, something about hunting and limericks. I don’t think that bit’s important.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t human.
What was it?
“They,” she said aloud, stopping and staring at a marble-topped table that had done nothing to merit her intense interest. “They. He said ‘they.’ Not ‘it.’”
Was there more than one?
Unless he had been careless with his language. Unless he was being deliberately imprecise to try and throw the house off the track. Of course, sometimes the house felt like two different creatures as well—one of them eager to please, as hopeful as a puppy, one of them listening jealously and throwing tantrums when the Beast came too close to speaking.
She had the nagging feeling that she was on to something here, that she was right at the edge of piecing the mystery together, but she couldn’t make it all come into focus. She kept thinking of the rose, wild rose underlined in a book, roses twining around the birch tree, the rose on the breakfast table, the single rose that had cost her her freedom.
What had he said, all those weeks ago? You cannot take the rose? The rose cannot leave here.
Something like that.
Why the rose? Did they catch him with an enchanted rose? And what about the birch tree?
Did he come here once, and grab an enchanted rose?
Bryony paused.
If I stay here too long, will I become a Beast?
Could he have brought me here to take his place?
No, she couldn’t believe that. When she first arrived, perhaps she might have, but she had spent too long with the Beast, long enough to hear his sarcasm give way to kindness. Long enough to see him sleeping outside her doorway.
Long enough that she had forgotten that his face was strange, and now it was simply what he looked like. And she was no longer afraid.
She wished Holly were here. Her homesickness had become part of the background now, a thing that she woke up with and went to bed with, a chronic ache she hardly noticed any more. But she wanted Holly here, right now, to say something clever and cutting, to take the pieces that were in her mind and whirl them together and set them down in a pattern that made everything come together.
“What do I do about the Beast?” she asked her absent sister, feeling aggravated tears in her eyes.
You could always jump his bones, suggested her sister. I probably would have by now.
“Holly!” Bryony was actually a little shocked, and then started laughing at herself for having conversations with someone who wasn’t there and being appalled at what they said.
And here I am roaming the halls and muttering to myself, just like a crazy person again. Oh, how will this all end? Will I go completely mad after all? I suppose the Beast won’t have to lock me up in the attic, since I can hardly wander off the grounds by myself…
Another door opened in front of her, and she stepped through it without looking—and froze.
It was another bedroom, much like her own. This one was in white, white sheets, white carpet, white walls, and everywhere white roses.
“Oh,” she said, feeling as if she were trespassing, although she knew that no one was there.
Well, the white’s not so overwhelming as the pink, although it’s a very cold sort of room. Not much color to warm it up. There’s a little bit of pink in the roses, I suppose, and the rug there has those burgundy petals, but…
And she stopped then, because it occurred to her that the red-black petals on the rug were not so regular as rose petals, but dark, ugly blotches. She lifted her head, and saw that there were blotches across the sheets as well, and even if Bryony was not so intelligent as her sister, she knew bloodstains perfectly well when she saw them.
The Beast arrived before she was even remotely done screaming.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
She huddled in a parlor, like the one she’d found on the first day, with her teeth chattering and a cup of tea in her hand. She could not seem to stop shaking. House had made tea, which was very sensible of House, wasn’t it, the sort of thing Iris might do, not that Iris was sensible, not at all, but she understood tea and that counted for a lot in this world—
“I’m sorry,” said the Beast.
Bryony’s laughter sounded horrible through her chattering teeth, so she tried to stop it, and when that didn’t work, she took a large swallow of tea and tried not to choke.
After a moment she said “So I wasn’t the first.”
“I never said you were,” said the Beast.
There was no reason that she should feel like she’d been kicked in the stomach, none at all. Hadn’t she suspected as much? Hadn’t she asked herself that question?
Good God, there was blood all over that room, somebody had died there, and she was feeling jealous?
Oh, yes, very sane, very sensible of you. There’s another woman! Never mind that she’s dead, what bearing could that possibly have on the matter?
“Did you kill her?” asked Bryony. She thought that came out very calmly, considering.
The Beast flinched, as he had not flinched when she stabbed him. He said “No.”
Even knowing that he might be lying, relief went shuddering down her spine. Surely there was a logical explanation. Logical explanations were good.
He didn’t deny that it was a she, though. Of course, with that bedroom, what else could it be? I doubt House would make a man live in a room covered in roses. There aren’t even roses on the Beast’s waistcoat, and that changes nearly every day.
It was coppery leaves today, on a black background. She stared at it, because if she had to meet the Beast’s eyes, she was going to cry again.
I don’t have any reason to cry. I’m not dead, unlike some people.
She took another slug of tea and wondered if she could ask House to put some brandy in it.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I heard you screaming,” said the Beast. “I’m sorry, I had to carry you here.”
“Not my finest hour,” she said. Her voice was quavering, which made her angry. “But yes, I remember that perfectly well.” Her face had been pressed against the Beast’s chest, and she had wanted to howl like a baby and sob into him and have it all go away, while simultaneously wanting to pull her knife and stab him a couple of dozen times.
Interestingly, neither of those feelings had subsided very much.
“That wasn’t what I meant,” she said. “What happened—why—”
Why is there a bloody bedroom in your enchanted manor house? Where did she go? What happened? Is that going to ha
ppen to me? What is going on?
There were too many questions. The Beast nodded as if she’d managed to actually ask them, instead of stammer herself into silence.
“She killed herself,” he said. “Her father took a rose from my table, and I was young and foolish and still thought that I might find a way around the curse.”
The candles began to wink out, one by one. The house was listening. The Beast reached out and took one in his hand.
“I demanded that he bring his daughter to me, and he did. I thought she might be able to break the curse.”
The air was as thick as syrup. Bryony took a shuddering breath and nearly choked on it. The walls seemed to lean in over them, the ceiling lost in shadow.
It’s only the parlor room, they’re only walls, they have that stupid rose-pattern border, it can’t do anything to us, they’re only walls—
Bryony found that she did not believe herself, and stopped trying.
“She did badly,” said the Beast. “I think the spirit of the—the—” The horrible silence seemed to slash at him. He hunched his shoulders and retreated from whatever he was going to say. “I think the house tormented her, a little, but mostly it was fear of me. She screamed whenever I came in the room. I would have released her—you must believe me, I would have—but I could not get near her. In order to tell her she was free to go, I would have had to stalk her like an animal through the halls, and I thought that it might drive her mad at last.”
The only candle left in the room was the one in the Beast’s hand. Candlewax flowed down its sides and over his fingers. It must have burned, even through his fur, but he did not release it.
If he does, it will go out, and we’ll be left with whatever’s in the dark. She willed him to hold the candle. Her own fingers seemed to be frozen on the handle of the teacup.
“I left her notes, telling her she was free. I do not think she found them.”
Of course not. House would have dealt with notes easily, even if it did not know what they said.
Bryony and Roses Page 15