She walked the rest of that wall, and through the carriageway in the crosswall, and stood at the mouth of the tunnel and peered out. The trees looked as if they went on a very long way, but perhaps they did not. Perhaps there was a clearing just behind the first rank, where milk-white cows grazed, where an old woman made butter and cheese to bring to the poor imprisoned Beast and his guest.…
She sighed deeply, squared her shoulders, and walked into the glen. When she arrived at its edge, she took a bit of gardening string from her pocket and tied it round the trunk of a slender tree that stood opposite the carriage-way, and then she began working her way through the trees beyond, letting the string trail through her fingers behind her. If the old woman came here often, there should be a path, but perhaps the path was magic too, and only appeared on clear nights when the old woman wanted it.
She could find no glade where cows, milk-white or otherwise, grazed, nor any small secret huts where old women might churn their butter and draw off their whey and leave their cheeses to ripen. She followed her string back to the clearing, tied it to another tree, and set out in a slightly different direction, twice that morning and three times in the afternoon. She found nothing and gained only filthy bramble-scratched hands and smudges on her skirt where she had tripped and fallen, and crumbly leaves and sapsticky twigs in her hair and down her collar.
As the sun sank towards twilight, she gave it up, rolled her string into its ball for the last time, and went slowly through the carriage-way and into the courtyard. Slowly she entered her glasshouse for the first time that day, to water her cuttings and her seedbed, but she entered sadly and neither sang nor looked round her as she went about her tasks.
When she said good night to the one blooming rose-bush, she felt like asking it to forgive her. She did not, not because it was a foolish thing to say to a rose-bush but because she felt she could not bear it if the bush seized magic enough to give itself a voice for three words and forgave her as she asked.
Her bath towels this evening were as golden as the sunset on the glasshouse panes, and her dress was as golden as the towels, and her necklace was of great warm rough amber, strung with garnets so dark they looked nearly black till they caught the light and flared deepest crimson, like the heart of a rose.
Her mood lifted a little when she saw the Beast waiting for her, and she made an effort at the conversation over dinner, telling stories of her childhood in the city, of her governesses, of her sisters, of her garden. But when she touched the embroidered heart, as she inevitably did when she spoke her sisters’ names, she did so abstractedly, for her mind was on the old woman and on her roses, the Beast’s roses, which must be fed or die.
But she did notice that when she fell silent, the Beast offered no tales of his childhood in response to her own.
“Fourpaws does not join us this evening,” she said at last, as she sliced a pear; candlelight winked off the blade of her knife and warmed its ivory handle almost to the gold of her sleeve.
“She cannot come every night,” said the Beast, “or we would cease to hope for her appearance; I learnt that long ago.”
Beauty laid her knife down and took hold of her courage and said, “Why sat you alone in this dark hall, for all those nights, when you will not eat with knife and plate?”
There was a silence, and Beauty looked at her neatly sliced pear but did not move to pick up any bit of it. She folded her hands tightly in her lap and willed herself not to take her words back. She did not fear his anger, and she did fear to do him hurt; but it seemed to her that he held too much to himself as a burden and that if he had chosen—had demanded—had ensorcelled her to be his companion, she would do the best for him that she could. And so, while she waited for his answer, she thought again of the glasshouse, and the roses there, and the old woman, and the silver beasts in the wild wood, and did not offer to withdraw her question.
At last he spoke, and each word was like a boulder brought up from the bottom of a mine. “When the change first … came upon me, I … I lost what humanity remained to me … for a time. I still cannot … remember that time clearly. When I had learnt to … walk like a man again, and had … found … clothes that would cover me as I now was, and discovered that I could still speak … so that a man or woman might understand me, I … still wished some daily ritual of humanity to remind me of … what I had been and what I no longer was. And I chose … to sit in this dining-hall, though I cannot … wield knife and fork like a man. There might have been other rituals that would have done. This is the one which first … suited me, and … I have looked no further.”
When the change first came upon me… If his words were boulders, they weighed her down too. Beauty leant towards him, so that she could lay her hand on the back of his nearer hand. Her hand and fingers together could not reach the full width of his palm, and when, after a moment, his other hand was laid over hers, it covered her wrist as well.
He released her and sat back. She ate her pear, and then picked up a nutcracker in the shape of a dragon, and began cracking nuts. “I guess you have not yet solved your dilemma,” said the Beast.
“Oh dear,” she said, fishing out a walnut half with a nut pick on whose end crouched a tiny silver griffin. “Is it so obvious? I have tried—”
“I have learnt your moods, a little,” said the Beast. “I see you are preoccupied.”
“I fear I am,” she admitted, “but—if you didn’t mind—a walk on the roof would be the pleasantest of distractions.”
“I would be honoured,” said the Beast, and this evening, as they walked up the whirlpool stairs together, Beauty kept her eyes firmly down and on the Beast’s black shoes and her soft gold slippers, coruscating with tiny gems. And when she left him, much later, on the roof, and he said to her, gravely, “Beauty, will you marry me?” she answered as she had the night before, “Good night, Beast,” only this time she did not shiver.
She kept her forearms crossed against her body as she hurried back to her room and pinched herself every few steps, saying aloud, “I am awake; I am still awake.” When she reached her rooms, she took off her dinner dress but put her day clothes back on. She almost thought her nightgown flapped its sleeves in protest; there was some pale flicker caught at the edge of her sight, where it always lay over the back of a chair by the fire, so it would be warm when she put it on. She turned sharply to look at it, but it only lay limply over its chair, as a nightgown should.
“Basket,” she said. “I need a basket, and I’m afraid I need it now, please. And a trowel. A wide one. I should have asked before, but I hadn’t thought of it yet.” She turned round looking, but there was no basket. “Never mind what I need it for,” she said. “The Beast did say you would provide anything in your power. I don’t believe you can’t find me a basket.” But there was still no basket.
“Well,” she said, and picked up a candle, kindled it at the edge of the fire, and began walking through her rooms, peering into dark corners. She found the basket at last, tucked behind a small ebony table, inlaid with hammered silver, which sparkled like snow in the candlelight. The glitter was such that she almost didn’t see the basket. The trowel lay in its bottom.
“That was not good-natured of you,” she said, “but I still thank you for the basket.” She returned to her balcony, a little anxiously, for she was not sure how much time had passed. She saw nothing and had to hope she had missed nothing.
She went quickly to the chamber of the star, but no door opened for her. She counted the doors: twelve. No, ten. No—eleven. Eleven? Can you make a star of eleven points? “Stop that,” she said. “Or I’ll make a rope out of the sheets on my bed and climb over the balcony.” A door opened. “And no nonsense about where this corridor goes,” she said. The door closed, and another one opened. She walked through it, and it closed behind her, but the corridor was dark. She was still carrying her candle from her basket search, and so she held it up before her in a hand that trembled only a little; fiercely she recalle
d her dream to her mind.… But there was the door into the courtyard. It was a little open; she could see a crack of starlight round it.
She stepped softly outside, and there was the old woman, already moving back towards the carriage-way, having left her basket at the palace doors. Beauty had been much longer in the corridor than she guessed. She flew after her, trying to make her feet strike the treacherous courtyard pebbles as quietly as the Beast always walked. The old woman did not look round, but perhaps it was only because she was old and deaf.
She disappeared into the shadows of the carriage-way so completely that Beauty, pausing at the tunnel’s edge for fear of being seen by the waiting silver beasts, thought suddenly that perhaps she had imagined her, that she had seen no old woman at all. Frightened and bewildered, she looked back over her shoulder; the basket by the doors was gone. She let her breath out on a sob—“Oh”—and moved forward again, and the old woman was on the far side of the bonfire clearing, about to disappear finally among the trees, but one of the milky-pale creatures that followed her turned its head at the sound of her sob and looked straight into Beauty’s eyes.
She might not have noticed if it had not turned its head. Its haunches were too round for a deer, its legs too long and slender for a horse, and the curling tail was like nothing she had ever seen, for it looked more like a waterfall than anything so solid and rooted as individual hairs, but it was still a tail. It turned its head to look at her, and so she saw, shimmering in the starlight, the long pearly horn that rose from its forehead.
She looked, blinked, and they were gone—old woman and unicorns. Gone as if they had never been; gone as the old woman’s basket at the palace doors was gone; gone without sound. The light of the stars still flooded the bonfire clearing, poured silver and glinting over the remains of Beauty’s bonfires, over the tiny-tempest piles of last year’s leaves, over the scatterings of stones, over the patches of earth seen among the rest. Over queerly gleaming golden heaps of …
Beauty emerged from the carriage-way in a daze and stooped at the first golden pile, took out her trowel, and … began to laugh. “Oh dear!” she said. “This is not the way a maiden is supposed to meet a unicorn. It should be a romantic and glamorous meeting … but if I had not needed what I need, I would not have been so interested in strange silvery creatures that met mysterious old women at the edges of wild woods, certainly not interested enough to dare to follow them here, in the middle of the night, in this … this place.” Her laughter stopped. “But then again … what would either the unicorn or I have done after it laid its head in my lap?”
She looked at her hands, dim in the starlight, at their short, broken nails and roughened skin. Her memory provided other details: the blotches of ingrained dirt, the thorn scabs and scars, the yellowy-grey streaks of bruising across the back of one hand where she’d pulled a ligament in her forefinger. “I wonder—I wonder, then, is it only that it is unicorn milk and butter and cheese? None of my dreams are my own—none of the animals—not even the spider—they all—they only—they come to a maiden who has drunk the milk of a unicorn? Is that all that matters?” she whispered, as if the Numen might hear and answer her. “This is a story like any nursery tale of magic? Where any maiden will do, any—any—monster, any hero, so long as they meet the right mysterious old women and discover the right enchanted doors during the right haunted midnights.…”
For a moment she felt as if some hidden spell had reached out and gripped her and turned her to stone. She felt that while her body was held motionless, she was falling away from herself, into some deep chasm. With a tremendous effort she opened her eyes again and spoke aloud, although her voice was not quite steady. “Well, I cannot know that, can I? I can only do what I can do—what I can guess to try—because I am the one who is here. I am the one who is here. Perhaps it will make a good nursery tale someday.”
She let her trowel fall into her lap and cupped her poor hands together, and the quick soft liquid rush of the salamander’s heat comforted her. But there was a juddering or a tingling to the warmth that sank through her skin and ran through the rest of her body—like the pinprick thumping of numberless tiny impatient feet. She knew the rhythm of those steps; they were the steps of someone going back to Check she’d latched the chicken-house gate, when she knew perfectly well that she had, or those of a nursemaid going to fetch the third clean handkerchief in as many minutes, trying to send her small charge to a party clean and combed and well dressed. “I am sorry, my friend,” she said to the salamander in her mind. “I suppose I am rather like a chicken or a small child—to a salamander.” There was a little extra thrill of heat between her palms—the nursemaid saying, You had better not lose this one—and then it was gone.
She rose to her feet again, laying down her basket and dropping her trowel, and moved towards the edge of the clearing. She put her hand on a convenient tree and paused, because she did not wish to lose herself in the wood, but she leant beyond her tree, peering into the tangled black wilderness where the starlight could not reach.
She felt almost as if there were gentle fingers rubbing her neck softly, then just touching her temple, to turn her face to look in the right direction.… The fingers were gone, if they had ever been, but there was a meadow before her—though the trunk of the tree was still beneath her own hand—and animals grazed there: ponies, horses, cows, and sheep. The meadow was large, larger than she saw at first, for it was dotted with clumps of trees, and she could see narrow bridges of grass through greater stands and thickets that led into other meadows.
She did not see the old woman for a little while, for she was hidden behind the flank of the cow she was milking. She heard her singing first, but since it was a song she often sang herself, she thought she was only hearing its echo in her own mind: “And from her heart grew a red, red rose, and from his heart a briar.”
The old woman stood up, her head appearing above the fawn-coloured back of the cow, and as she rounded its tail and the rest of her came into Beauty’s view, Beauty saw the pail of milk in one hand and the stool in the other. She walked carefully to the next cow, sat down on the stool, and again began to milk and to sing; she had the voice of a young girl, sweet and joyous.
Now Beauty could see the entire process: the old woman’s head half buried in the cow’s flank, the slight movement of each wrist in turn, the faint quick twinkle of the streams of milk. It was only then that Beauty began to see what she had assumed to be piles of earth or stones in the long flowery grass were small leggy sleeping heaps of calves and lambs and foals. Two lambs lay on top of their dozing mother not far from Beauty’s tree, looking very like the cow-parsley they lay among.
Beauty still stood in starlight, but she looked onto a morning scene and felt the sleepy summer heat of it against her face and against the hand on the cool trunk of the tree. She did not think her feet could be made to move, out of the starlight and into some strange dawn, but there was a great peace held in this meadow, like water in a lake. She wished she had a goblet, or a ewer, and might dip it up, like lake water; she could smell it where she stood, a fresh morning smell, mixed in with the warm smells of grass and grazing animals. She stretched her other hand out and felt something—something—something just brush against her fingertips that was neither sunlight, nor starlight, nor grass, nor tree. She closed her eyes to concentrate, and the sensation became just the tiniest bit like velvet, just the tiniest bit like someone’s breath, just the tiniest bit like whiskers. She opened her eyes.
It was a unicorn, of course. She was expecting that. Its eyes were deepest gold-brown-green-blue and held her own. What she was not expecting … she could see the meadow through the rest of it. As it bowed its head to settle its muzzle more snugly into her hand—carefully, for its luminous horn stretched past her shoulder—she saw it as she might see leaf shadows moving across the meadow, except that these shadows were dappled silver-white, instead of dappled dark, and the shape of them was not scattered, like tossing leaves on
wind-struck branches, but formed quite clearly the long beautiful head, the graceful neck, the wide-chested body, the silken mane and curling tail, the exquisitely slender legs of the unicorn. If it were not for the eyes and the faint whiskery velvet against her hand, she might have thought it was not there at all.
In the back of her mind—in the part of her brain and body still in the bonfire clearing in the middle of the night—a voice said, What makes you think you are seeing anything but the shadows cast by your own fancies? The meadow, the old woman, all the grazing beasts and their little ones, the serenity, tangible as a warm bath smelling of roses at the end of a long weary day, all this you think you see is because you live alone in a huge haunted palace with a huge haunted Beast, whose secrets you cannot guess. All you see is only because you miss Rose Cottage, you miss your sisters, your father.
What makes you think any of it is there?
And the silver-dappled shape before her shivered like smoke, like cloud beginning to uncurl itself into some further metamorphosis of the imagination; perhaps it would become a lion, a sphinx, a rose-bush.…
But a tiny singing voice in another part of her mind answered: I know it is all, all there, all as I see it. And the unicorn raised its nose from her hand and breathed its warm breath into her face, a breath smelling of roses, but light and gay and fresh, as exhilarating as spring after winter, but with a faint sweet tang a little like the smell of apples after rain. The currents of air touched her skin like rose-petals; it breathed into her face and vanished.
But her eyes had adjusted now, and she saw the old woman, moving very carefully indeed with a full pail, walking towards the edge of one of the bigger stands of trees, and in the dark shadows under their branches, she saw the silver shadows. The old woman turned, just before she entered the dark-and-silver shadows, and, framed by them, looked towards where Beauty stood, as if she knew someone watched there. She was too far away for Beauty to see her plainly, but Beauty thought she had the face of a friend, and she was strangely reassured by that brief indistinct glimpse of the old woman’s face, as if some memory of long-ago comfort had been stirred. Then the old woman turned away again, and the silver shadows parted to let her through.