Beauty knew that was all. She dropped her head, and her hand from the trunk of the tree, and there were the wild woods close round her again, and the only light was from the stars, and the air was chill. She took the few steps back to her basket dully, but as she stooped again beside it, it was already full, full of the darkest, sweetest, richest compost she could imagine; and her unused trowel lay beside it, its clean blade winking in the starlight. She scooped up a handful of her basket’s contents and crumbled it between her fingers; it smelt of earth and kept promises. There was still a wink of gold in it, like no ordinary farmyard fertilizer, telling her where it had come from, but it was as if two seasons of weather and earthworms had already sieved and stirred and transformed it into something she and her rosebushes loved much better than gold. She could almost hear it sing: And from her heart a red, red rose.…
“I will never be able to shift the basket,” she murmured. “It must weigh more than I do.” She put the unused trowel in her pocket. Then she took a deep breath, and put her hand under the peak of the basket handle, and stood up. The basket came up too, as lightly as if it were empty.
She walked slowly through the bonfire glade, the carriage-way, and went at once to her glasshouse, and ran her free hand along its framed panes—slide-bump-slide-bump—as she walked between it and the palace wall, because her glasshouse would not change its length to dismay her. But she went on putting each foot down very carefully and breathing very gently and regularly, for she was still half afraid that the midnight magic that was carrying the basket for her would take fright at her mortal presence so near it and run off.
When she came to the glasshouse door, she went in at once and set the basket down with a happy sigh. The starlight seemed brighter in here than it did in the courtyard, despite the white reflecting walls of the palace and the pale stones underfoot, despite the black stems of the roses and the wild labyrinthine structure of the glasshouse itself, whose shadows fell on her like lace. She walked round her rose-beds, dropping a handful of her beautiful compost at the foot of every rose-bush. She smoothed it with her other hand, so that it formed a little ring at the base of each. After each handful she returned to the basket for the next; her trowel remained in her pocket, nor did she touch the hand fork lying on the water-butt. The last handful went to the dark red rose blooming in the corner. The basket of compost went just around, one handful for each, not a thimbleful was left; but that last handful was just as full as the first. There was no room in her heart and mind for words, even for a song; she was brimming over with joy.
She went slowly, baffled by happiness, upstairs to her room, where a bath awaited her; reproachfully, she thought, as her filthy skirt was very nearly whisked out of her hands as she pulled it off. “Now, you stop that,” she said, lightheaded and blithe. “What am I for if not to rescue the Beast’s roses?”
But there was a sudden frantic shimmer in the air as she spoke, as if something almost became visible, and the breath caught in her throat; she opened her eyes very wide and stared straight at it—tried to stare at it—and then screwed her eyes up to stare again, but whatever the something was, was gone.
She shook her head to clear the dizziness, and then lay down in the bath and closed her eyes. When, a little later, she put her hands on its rim, to rearrange her position, she knocked into something with her elbow, opened her eyes, and discovered a tray sitting over the bath, with a little round loaf, a little round cheese, a pot of jam, and a pot of mint tisane upon it. But it reminded her of one of Jeweltongue’s peace offerings, and she did not know whether to laugh or cry. Crying won, and her joy was all gone away in a rush, like bathwater down a drain, and even meeting unicorns was nothing in comparison to the absence of her sisters.
“It will all come right soon,” she said to herself. “Soon. The roses will grow again, and then I will be able to go home.” But this did not comfort her either, and she wept harder than ever, till she frightened herself with the violence of her weeping, and stood up out of the bath, and wrapped herself in several towels, and went to kneel by the little fire. Its heat on her face dried her tears at last, and she returned to the forlorn tray laid across the bath, and lifted it with her own hands, and set it down by the fire.
She began to eat, realised how hungry she was, and ate it all, wiping the last smear of jam from the bottom of its pot with her finger, because the jam spoon wasn’t thorough enough. She was by then only just awake enough to remember to divest herself of her towels and put on her nightgown before she crept up the stairs to her bed.
CHAPTER
11
She had no dreams she remembered. She woke, with daylight on her face, to a faint cheeping noise. She lay, still half asleep, her eyes still closed, with the bedclothes wrapped deliciously round her, and thought about things that cheep. It wasn’t a bird sound. She knew that immediately. It wasn’t exactly familiar, but it wasn’t totally strange either. It didn’t sound at all dangerous or threatening or—or—It did sound rather near at hand however. Near enough at hand that if it was something she did not want to be sharing her bed with …
She opened her eyes. Fourpaws had made a nest in the elbow between two pillows and had scrabbled up a hummock of coverlet to face it. She lay with her back against the pillows, and with the sun behind her—and shining in Beauty’s face—and with the hummock of the coverlet in the way as well, it took Beauty a moment to comprehend the tiny stirrings that went with the cheeping noise: kittens. Fourpaws responded to Beauty’s eyes opening, followed by her rolling up on an elbow and breathing a long “Oh!” by beginning to purr.
There were four of them. They were so small it was impossible to guess very much of what they would become, but three had vague stripes and looked as if they might take after their mother’s colouring, and the fourth was as black as the Beast’s clothing. Beauty stroked each with a finger down its tiny back, and Fourpaws’ purring redoubled. Their eyes were still fast closed and their ears infinitesimal soft flaps, and their legs made vague gestures as if they believed that the air was water, and they should attempt to swim in it.
Fourpaws leant over them and made a few brisk rearrangements, and the cheeping stopped and was replaced by minuscule sucking noises.
“Oh, Fourpaws, they are beautiful!” said Beauty, knowing what was expected of her, but speaking the truth as well. “I am so glad that this palace should have kittens in it! I only wish there were many more of them!”
Fourpaws stopped purring long enough to give Beauty a look like the edge of a dagger, and Beauty laughed. “You will produce more kittens if you wish, dear! And not if you don’t wish it. You needn’t look at me like that! I always want more of anything I think good; it is a character fault!”
She almost missed Fourpaws beginning to purr again, because as she said, “I always want more of anything I think good,” she remembered her adventure of the night before. “Oh—I must see—no—no, not yet. I mustn’t go into the glasshouse today at all—Oh, no, I can’t possibly wait all day! Till this afternoon then. Late this afternoon, when the light begins to grow long, and the glasshouse is at its most beautiful anyway, because the light is all gold and diamonds.” She turned back to Fourpaws and her kittens. “Oh, but whatever will I do till then? I can think of any number of things in this palace I should like to see a kitten unravel—supposing I could find any of them again—but your children are a little young for it. Well.”
She climbed carefully out of bed—Fourpaws’ nest was directly blocking the bed stairs—poured herself a cup of tea, and came back to the bed to drink it in company. The second time she maneuvered round the kittens to the bed stairs, once she was on the floor, she tried to push the stairs over a little; it was like trying to shift the palace by leaning against one of its walls. “Here,” she said. “If the magic that carried my basket last night is anywhere in call, I could use a little help.” As she stood looking at the stairs, there was a faint singing in her mind, and a half sense like a vision approaching, like
the odd sensation she’d had just before she saw the meadow with the old woman milking her cows. She put her hand against the side of the stairs, and they moved softly over and settled again. “Thank you,” said Beauty very quietly. The singing sensation faded and disappeared.
She spent as long as she could at breakfast—which wasn’t very. Fourpaws and her kittens fell asleep, and Beauty couldn’t bear her fidgety self near that peaceful scene. She dressed and ran out to the chamber of the star, but then thought again and tried to take her time in the corridor on the way to the courtyard. She curtsied to the painting of the bowl of fruit, which today hung opposite the lady who used to hold a pug dog, and then a fan, and now a bit of needlework in a tambour; Beauty examined her after her impertinent curtsy, and the lady looked stiff and offended, but then she always did.
Beauty opened the doors of a red-lacquered cabinet and closed the doors of a secretaire inlaid with mother-of-pearl. She moved an inkstand from another secretaire to a low marble table, and a tray from one sideboard to another. She set matching chairs facing each other instead of side by side; she turned vases and small statues on their pedestals and plinths; she flicked the noses of caryatids holding up mantelpieces. She twiddled and fiddled, poked and patted. She remembered the Beast’s warning to stop when she wished to look round, and the stopping let her fool away a little more time. She thought of having kittens with her.
She thought she noticed, or perhaps it was only her own mood, that the shadows did not seem to lie so thick in the palace rooms as they generally did; even in daylight, darkness tended to hang in the corners like swathes of heavy curtain. She did notice that there was no speck of dust anywhere she looked, no smudges of handling or of use, save what she left herself, and the floors, when she strayed off the carpets, were as impeccably brilliant as if the polisher had only just slipped out of the room as Beauty came into it.
She stepped at last into the courtyard, feeling as if she had bees buzzing in her brain. She scuffed her feet in the pebbles, and then looked up; there were big clouds in the sky today, for the first time; it had been clear every previous day she had been here. She saw shapes in the clouds she did not wish to see: Rose Cottage, her sisters’ faces. Lionheart’s hair was long again, and the cloud that was Jeweltongue held out her arm, and Beauty saw a great ruched, embroidered sleeve such as she had worn when they lived in the city. She looked back at their faces. She did not want the sisters who had lived in the city, she did not want the person she herself had been when they lived in the city.
But the clouds had shifted and her sisters had disappeared. For a moment longer she saw the door of Rose Cottage, framed with roses, and then it too was pulled apart and became a scud of cloud fragments.
The weather vane glinted when the sun broke through.
Finally Beauty wandered into the orchard to look for the Beast. She did not want to tell him what she had done, and she was afraid her mood would betray her into saying something, but she felt she could bear her own company no longer. She thought again of the Beast’s solitude—his solitary imprisonment—here; how had he borne all his own moods, with no one, ever, to talk to?
She found him under a different apple tree. “What is the weather vane that spins at the top of the glasshouse, do you know?” It was the first harmless remark she could think of. She wanted too to tell him of Fourpaws’ kittens but felt it was Fourpaws’ privilege to make that great announcement, and she did want to know about the weather vane. It had intrigued her since she had first come to this place. Even at the peak of the glasshouse it was not so very far away, nor was it so very small, that she should not be able to make some kind of guess at what it represented. The shape seemed very clear and fine and detailed, and then there were all the small curls and chips delicately cut out of the inside of the silhouette; these should have given it away at once. But they did not.
The Beast turned and looked towards the archway, but from where they were standing they could not see the courtyard. “Would you like to examine it?”
“Oh yes—but how?”
“How is your head for heights?”
“I do not mind heights,” said Beauty, remembering her efforts to help Lionheart poke the sitting-room chimney clear from the roof.
“Do you not?” said the Beast thoughtfully. “I dread heights. When I am painting on the roof, I am careful not to let my eyes wander. But if you do not mind them, I think we can find a ladder.”
He looked preoccupied for a moment, and then his face cleared, as if he had received the correct answer to a question, and he led the way back towards the arch but stood aside that she might precede him through it. When they made their way round the side of the glasshouse facing the archway, they found a ladder already in place, braced against the silvery architecture that held the panes, nowhere touching the glass, and it reached to within an arm’s length of the distant weather vane.
Beauty set her foot on the lowest rung. Her heart was beating a little quickly, for she had never climbed anything half so tall; Rose Cottage’s roof had been her limit. But she did want to see the weather vane. She looked up; white clouds were still scudding merrily overhead, but there was no breeze in the courtyard, surrounded by the palace walls.
“I will hold the base,” said the Beast.
“Thank you,” she replied, and mounted quickly, before she could have second thoughts.
She was above his head at once and climbing past the slender silver girder that marked what would have been the first storey, had there been any floor or ceiling; climbed on, and then on and on. It was farther—higher—than she’d realised, looking up from ground level. She thought of the long, long staircases inside the palace and the fact that her glasshouse stood taller yet. And she took a deep breath, ignored the beginnings of rubberiness in her legs, and of ache in her lower back, and climbed on.
She began to feel the wind up here; it tugged at her hair and teased her skirts, but it was a little, friendly wind, whistling to itself a thin gay tune. Her heart was still beating quickly, but now from the speed of her climb and with excitement. She paused a moment; her leg muscles were growing stiff and clumsy, and she couldn’t risk being clumsy this far up. This was the final stretch of her journey; the glasshouse was narrowing gracefully towards its little cupola at the peak of its third storey, and she suddenly didn’t want to hurry to its end. She deliberately looked away from the weather vane, saving the moment she would see it till she was at the very top of the ladder, of her adventure. She looked round her instead.
She was above the flat roof of the palace here and could see in all directions. First she looked at the roof itself, hoping to have some provocative glimpse of the Beast’s work from this distance, not knowing if she might see anything at all; perhaps the gorgeous roof was a nighttime enchantment.
Directly in front of her lay an expanse of pure white-grey, with the same shimmery surface of the walls and the pebbles in the courtyard. She was facing the front wing, with the formal gardens beyond; she could just see the farthest edge of them. To her left was the wing that contained her rooms; to her right the bonfire glade. She looked closely at the roof immediately before her—having to look round the final peak of the glasshouse and the weather vane itself, whose shape tickled her peripheral vision—till she was satisfied she could see no glint of any color in its confusingly reflective surface.
Then, her heart sinking a little, she looked to her right, and there was nothing there either. Very calmly now, like a polite child who believes no one has remembered its birthday, she turned her head to look left.… Down the centre of that wing of roof to about halfway ran a slender stream of colour, curving precisely round invisible islands that were only blank spaces to Beauty’s eye. It widened at its leftmost end, and Beauty tracked it round that corner, turning carefully on her rung of the ladder, to look at the final wing of the palace the one that had lain behind her, the one that was backed by the orchard.
The buffet to the sense of sight was so powerful that f
or a moment Beauty felt she was tasting, touching, smelling, and hearing what she looked at as well. Here was something like the coloured version of the wild geometry of the glasshouse; she could see the exuberant complexity of shape and design not merely covering the flat roof from edge to edge but splashing up the low balustrade; in places it spilled over the top and made little pools of vividness there.
Wherever she looked, her eyes were drawn both farther on and back the way they had come, as every figure, every contour she saw held its individuality only in relation to every other one. And looking, she wondered, if she looked at the glasshouse more intently, might she see the tales of stars and heroes written in the silver struts and the clear glitter of the panes? Perhaps she had only to learn how to see them. One hand of its own volition loosed its hold on the ladder and slipped off to touch softly the nearest pane of the glasshouse; it was the same caress she used when she touched her little embroidered heart.
The life and vibrancy of the coloured roof were the greater in contrast to the palace it crowned—as if, having risked much to gain entry to the dread presence of the sorcerer, one found his hydra in the kitchen wearing an apron and baking teacakes. Why had she only seen the roof at night? She must ask the Beast to allow her to come up during daylight. She looked back at the single tendril of colour running down the second wing of the palace roof. Suddenly it was easy to see it as a long stem of some wandering rose, easy then to see it arching round a familiar doorway and small leaded windows Lionheart had once thought too small, and now she seemed to make out the two corner bushes, guarding the front face of the house.…