by P. J. Fox
Ash and Belle had returned from their trip and once again settled into something of a routine. Christmas was around the corner, now. Belle had said nothing about that. She wasn’t, still, entirely comfortable with Ash. Nor could she always predict his reactions to things. So she busied herself in her studio, testing slips and glazes.
Ash, too, was consumed with work. She’d seen him infrequently over the last week, and then he’d left on another trip. This time without her. He was going, he said, to evaluate a series of mines. None of which offered fit accommodation for a woman.
Belle minded, and yet she didn’t. She was grateful for the alone time. For the time to think.
She put down her current project, a dragon strangling a vase. She was using porcelain on this project, a mixture she’d developed herself. She needed something hard enough to hold detail, and yet supple enough to withstand the rigors of sculpting. Her work had begun to take on a surrealist tone, and this project was no different. First, she’d thrown a vase on the wheel and then, before the porcelain cured, she’d begun to manipulate it, pushing and pulling and stretching. The dragon’s body, a snake-like coil, took shape from those twists. Like an anaconda, coiling and contracting.
The head and arms she’d sculpted separately, along with the coils of the body, which she’d fitted into the natural depressions created for them. She’d just been testing a claw against its intended placement, when she found herself thinking of something else entirely.
Not the reddish copper glaze she intended to use for the under painting, but about her conversation with Ash at the inn.
Earlier that morning, over coffee, she’d been reading about an artist in Russia who’d been repurposing old sea mines into furniture. There were coffee tables, chairs, even a desk. She thought she might want one of the fireplaces, but she wasn’t entirely sure where to put it. Perhaps, if she did end up building a separate studio space, it could go there.
She’d started subscribing to a number of art and architecture magazines, in lieu of being able to look things up online.
After his revelation about his friend, and about the dangers faced by those in international business in general, Belle thought she understood Ash’s aversion to social media. And to the internet in general. In any event, she didn’t miss it. She’d always wished, on some level, that she’d been born in an earlier time. Living in the mountains, surrounded by toothless old—and not so old—men and horse-drawn plows, she’d gotten her wish. And come to see that certain things required sacrifice.
She set the claw apart to dry.
At least she lived in an age of penicillin. The castle’s original inhabitants hadn’t been so lucky.
There was an artist in London who carved landscapes into books. Belle wondered if Ash couldn’t be persuaded to attend his exhibition next month. Perhaps Professor Graham could come. That was, if he could keep himself from having apoplexy at the thought of damage to a book.
Belle smiled slightly. She liked the old man, and she’d enjoyed the window into Ash’s life. However brief.
His real life.
Ash’s parents’ marriage had been an arranged one, and miserable. His mother, by his own account, was a drunk and a liar. Who—and this he hadn’t said but Belle had gleaned—had made him the target of all her unhappiness. Much as Owen had made Donna, and Donna had in turn made Belle.
But the problem in that case wasn’t the fact of how they met, or why they married, but of their differing expectations. Uma had wanted the fairy tale; in real life there were no fairy tales. And while Belle’s first impulse was to side with the woman, simply because she understood the plight of women in so much of the world, she couldn’t help but think of things from Ash’s father’s point of view.
After two marriages of state, was it really so surprising that he wanted a woman with whom he could actually carry on a conversation? Someone whose company he enjoyed, both in and out of the bedroom? Stephanie was, by all accounts, as different from her husband as a man and woman could be—but wasn’t that part of her charm?
Belle thought she might like to meet Stephanie.
Then she looked up, and realized it was snowing.
“It’s snowing!” she said stupidly.
Luna looked up. “So?”
She’d dragged in a loveseat from somewhere and was curled up in a nest she’d made with it, all blankets and pillows. She’d been reading one of those dreadful romance novels she liked. Belle, in turn, liked having the company. Even if Luna didn’t do much except read and occasionally whine about snacks. Luna ate more than any ten fishermen; Belle had no idea where she put it, or how she wasn’t five hundred pounds at least.
The snow was falling in large, fat flakes. Not the kind that fell in New England but the kind that fell in Utah, and other places with skiing. The kind that Belle had imagined the fictional Heidi dancing in, when she was a child.
Winters in New England were wet. The snow, even at the best of times, was heavy. Compacted down, and down, like so many miniature glaciers, each snow pile became a hunk of ice. Black ice, treacherous in its invisibility, slicked the roads. Snowmobiles, manned by inexperienced drivers, broke through the permafrost or broke through rotten patches of lake ice or lost traction and shot into space. Intelligent people stayed home, until the thaws came. But this….
“This is so exciting!”
“It’s snow.”
“I know it’s snow!”
“It’s cold.”
Belle shot Luna a look. “Put on boots! You must have them.”
“Do you?” Luna’s tone was challenging. But she was smiling. She liked adventures, too. Even little ones. As much as she pretended she didn’t.
“As a matter of fact, yes.” Belle sniffed.
The friendship between them was such that they could tease each other. Thinking back over the weeks—months, now—Belle wasn’t entirely sure when it had become a friendship. When she’d stopped thinking of Luna as an agent of evil and started seeing her as a confidante. The girl who was her own age and with whom she had so much in common. The girl who, underneath the accumulated layers of eye shadow and romance novels, wanted the same things Belle did.
With a groan, Luna got up and padded off in search of appropriate footwear.
Belle met her at the colonnade ten minutes later.
“I’ve never seen snow like this,” she said.
“Really?”
“Some day, I’ll take you to Maine.”
“That sounds so glamorous.” Luna sighed.
“It isn’t. All there are in Maine are bears and tourists.”
“The one doesn’t take care of the other?”
Belle laughed.
“I’ve never seen the ocean.” Luna sighed. “Except in pictures.”
To Belle, growing up, the ocean hadn’t been romantic. It had been a horror, barely contained. Fishermen of all stripes lived in fear of its power, as did those who loved them. It wasn’t God who gave and took with impunity, but the waves.
Her favorite book as a child had been The Eyes of the Amaryllis, a terrifying tale of the ocean reclaiming its own. She’d known, watching the waves, that at heart it wasn’t fiction. The ocean crept forward, a little more each year. Chunks of earth fell; rocks split apart and crashed. A storm had come when she was a child, pummeling the cliffs until they collapsed and took several houses with them into the deep.
All a part of life. The locals made fun of the tourists who feared the ocean, and who asked questions like were there waves in this part of it. But for a child who’d learned to swim while avoiding sharks and riptides, the humor had a bitter edge.
She’d always thought, even after she left for college, that she couldn’t live away from the water. But now, gazing out at the vast white expanse, she felt like she’d been freed. From a curse she hadn’t even known was laid on her, like Aurora with the spinning wheel.
Was this what she’d waited for? All those years when she’d stared off into the distance, willing so
me trans-dimensional portal to open? All her life, she’d had a sense of waiting. Of something being not quite right. She’d related to her namesake, Belle of Beauty and the Beast, because she, too, had felt unfulfilled by her surroundings. She’d thought, at first, that that was because she’d been meant to dance. That dance had been her ticket to escape. How much had she ever really loved dancing, though? How much of her talent had been driven by pure desperation?
And then—had she ever truly wanted what Cambridge had to offer?
Alone in her studio, mixing glazes and sculpting dragon claws, she’d been happier than she’d ever been. Without the relentless pressures of school, of family, to do something useful, she’d come alive. Her time was, for the first time, her own. She woke up in the morning knowing that she could do whatever she wanted. She didn’t have to read some book, or stack of journal articles, on a subject she didn’t care about so she could get a good grade on a paper she didn’t care about so she could some day get a job. She could sculpt dragons.
She’d fallen in love, a bit, with her own pottery and she thought that was partially because it expressed the feelings she couldn’t put into words. The realizations that were too large for words.
She breathed in the bitter cold air and smiled.
“What?” Luna asked.
Luna was wonderful, but she didn’t understand. She hadn’t traveled to enough places. To her, the vista in front of them was normal. She didn’t see that it wasn’t, at all, that it was a fairy kingdom out of time. The gardens were covered in white, the bushes fluffy lumps. And beyond were the fir trees.
More perfect than any Christmas card, they waited only for Santa’s sleigh to drive through them.
“This is home,” she said.
Luna looked confused. “Of course it is.” She pointed up at the clouds. “And you should be glad we’re home, too. This snow is going to last awhile.”
“That’s wonderful!”
“You’re crazy.”
Belle took the steps two at a time, her coat swirling around her legs. Her fingers were chill inside her mittens but she didn’t care. She laughed, scooping up an armload of snow and throwing it. And then she made a snowball, and pitched it at Luna. The snow was just dense enough to pack, but it exploded on contact with Luna’s shoulder.
“Hey,” the other girl complained.
Belle danced around in a circle.
“Let’s go make snow angels!” The idea, suddenly, sounded fantastic. An idea that no one had ever had before. “In the rose garden!” The rose garden would make a perfectly level playing field, the statuary ideal to hide behind during any resultant snowball fights.
Without waiting for Luna, she dashed off.
And found another girl waiting there for her.
SIXTY-FOUR
Belle drew to a halt, her eyes on the other girl’s.
This was someone she’d never seen before.
The other girl had been playing in the snow, too. Ice crystals clung to her long, dark hair. She’d been laughing, until she saw Belle. Her perfect, somewhat sharp features had been expertly emphasized with a host of different cosmetics. All of this might have been clue enough to who she was, and probably would have been, but it was how she froze when she saw Belle that told Belle what she needed to know. This was one of Ash’s women.
She straightened. “Hello,” came the tentative greeting.
Belle’s expensive wool coat didn’t seem protection enough, suddenly. The fox fur on her collar blew in the wind, which gusted back and forth. Her nose was cold, and must be red.
“Hello,” she said.
Luna rushed up behind her, panting, and took her place next to her mistress. Belle glanced over at her. The little maid was glaring daggers at the other woman. “Ma’am,” she began, which was a bad sign. She’d long ago acquiesced to calling Belle by her given name.
“Would you like this trash removed?”
The woman blushed, but didn’t seem upset. “You must be the rani.”
Belle’s eyes widened. “What?”
The other woman mistook her surprise. “I knew he must be married. Men like him always are.” And then, “of course, he doesn’t discuss his personal life with me. I know I’m not supposed to be out here but the snow…and it was so exciting. I’m sorry.”
“She should leave.” Luna was still attempting to kill the woman with her eyes. She, evidently, didn’t rate a name. Or to be addressed directly.
But Belle was curious. And she wasn’t comfortable treating any human being like a second class citizen. Especially since she’d come so close to becoming one, herself. The shoe, she knew, with a growing sense of discomfort, could very well have been on the other foot.
“No,” she said.
Luna gave her a sharp glance but said nothing. She’d hardly balk her mistress now, of all times. Instead, she resumed glaring at the intruder. Luna, sometimes, reminded Belle of Julianne. Or perhaps it was the reverse, and that was what had drawn Belle to the wife-slave. Luna had a keen sense of her place, and reveled in it.
So Belle did the only thing she could think of.
“Have coffee with me?” she asked.
“I—yes.” The woman seemed surprised. And pleased. “I’d love to.”
Belle turned to Luna, who was doing her best to suppress her disapproval. “Have coffee and sandwiches brought to the small parlor.” She used her most imperious tone. Luna wasn’t about to forget who was in charge. Or cause a minor—or not so minor—incident by launching herself at the woman and clawing her eyes out. “And see that a fire is lit.”
After a beat, Luna nodded.
Ash’s two lovers were left alone in the snow.
Belle gestured, and they began walking back toward the house. So much snow made the going difficult. There was silence for a minute or two, even the sounds of their movements sucked into the void of white. And then, “what’s your name?”
“Sasha.” The girl blushed.
The colonnade reared before them.
“I hope—I hope my comment about men like him wasn’t offensive. I didn’t mean it to be, I just—”
Belle waved her off. “I know. I understand.” And she did.
But Ash wasn’t here right now to express his disapproval of this meeting. To forbid it outright, as Belle knew he would. His rage, when he discovered what she’d done, would be both cold and formidable. Inexorable, like a glacier. Belle wasn’t looking forward to that conversation. Even so, to borrow a phrase from Charlotte, she’d rather apologize than ask for permission. Permission she’d never get, to see inside this part of his world.
Why not? She had her suspicions. That he hid his stable of women from her for the same reason he needed her to take pain. Needed her to want pain, from him. Because, somewhere in the deepest recesses of his being, he didn’t believe himself lovable. Not genuinely. Not where it counted. His looks were compelling, yes; his wealth enviable. But him?
He had wants and needs that disturbed, even frightened Belle. She didn’t understand them. Or, often, him. But, increasingly, that didn’t matter. The first time he’d ever touched her, she’d felt fire. As miserable and terrified as she’d been. She’d wanted him, even when she didn’t want to want him. And she did still. She couldn’t help herself. She was drawn to him like a moth to flame.
Sasha looked around. “I’ve never been to this part of the house.”
“It’s still being decorated.” Belle stripped off her gloves. She led Sasha into the small parlor, where a fire had indeed been lit. A small smile flickered across her lips and was gone.
Belle took her coat off and threw it over one of the chairs, before curling up in one corner of the couch. She gestured to Sasha to sit where she wanted. After hesitating for a minute, Sasha chose the other end of the couch. She smiled briefly. This was awkward for the other woman. She’d obviously never expected to meet Belle, and it was doubtful how much she knew about what Belle herself knew.
This whole situation should be awk
ward for Belle, too. But, strangely, it wasn’t. Belle was simply fascinated.
Diana appeared with a tray. If she disapproved, she gave no sign. Belle thanked her. She nodded once, turned, and left.
They were alone.
“So will he—I mean, won’t he mind? That I’m here?”
“Undoubtedly.”
Belle fixed them both coffee, and helped herself to one of the diminutive tea sandwiches. Watercress on white bread. One of her favorites. The feeling was slowly returning to her fingers, but they were still stiff. It was cold. Those same errant gusts of wind buffeted the windows, shaking the glass in its panes. She was glad that she was indoors. But glad she’d gone out, too.
“You—you don’t think he’ll find out?” Sasha sounded nervous.
“Oh, he’ll find out.” Belle sipped her coffee. “I’ll tell him.”
“And he won’t be furious?”
She laughed. “Of course he will! He’ll undoubtedly threaten to lock me in the closet with the shoes until I learn to behave. Or might actually do it! I don’t mind, though; he’s charming when he’s angry. And he comes up with such creative insults.” And afterward…God, how he touched her.
“Of course,” Sasha said, “you can get away with that.”
“What?”
“Well he loves you.”
Belle’s eyes widened.
Sasha, again misinterpreting her expression, explained, “whatever he keeps us around for, it isn’t love.” And then, “you’re not—upset, are you?”
If by upset Sasha meant threatened, then no. Belle shook her head. Although she did wonder how many women were us. She’d ask, but she didn’t want Sasha to know that she didn’t know. Rather, she wanted to appear as in control as Sasha clearly believed her.
“Good. You have no reason to be. He—your husband—collects women like some men collect watches.”
Sasha realized what she’d just said and clapped a hand over her mouth. She was very nervous, which struck Belle as odd. Shouldn’t Belle be the nervous one, a thin, mouse-like girl sitting across the couch from her lover’s plaything? A voluptuous creature who stood as living testament to the fact that she, Belle, wasn’t enough to sate him?