Authors: Robin McKinley
But the Beast was a sorcerer, wasn’t he? Of course. He must
be.
The corridor twisted and twisted again, and the sunlight
came through windows in what seemed any number of wrong directions, and she
began to wonder at the decisiveness of her feet, so briskly stepping along,
nearly scampering, like Teacosy after a thrown stick... . But then the world
straightened out, with a lurch she seemed almost to feel, and there was a door
to the outside, which opened for her, and she stepped through it and was in the
courtyard she had seen from her balcony, and the glasshouse was in front of
her.
She approached it slowly after all. It was very splendid and
very, very large, and she felt very small, and shy, and shabby—“Well, I am very
small and shabby,” she said aloud. “But at least my face and hands are clean.”
And she held up her clean hands like a token for entry. “No, that is the wrong
magic to enter even a magic garden,” she said, and looked up at the glasshouse
towering over her, and all its gorgeous festoonery seemed to be smiling down at
her, and again she laughed, both for the smiling and for the ridiculousness of
the notion.
“Here,” she said, and reached inside the breast of her shirt
with one hand, and drew out a small wrapped bundle of the cuttings she had brought,
and with her other hand reached into her pocket and drew out a handful of
rose-hips. She stepped forward again, holding her gifts to her body, hut when
she catnc Lo the glasshouse door, she held them out, as if beseechingly.
And then she laughed yet again, but a tiny, breathless snort
of a laugh, a laugh at her own absurdity, tucked her rose-hips and her cuttings
back inside her clothing, set her hand upon the glasshouse door, and stepped
inside.
She had been able to see little of what might lie inside the
glasshouse from her balcony because the sun was so bright; she had had some
impression of shadows cast, but she was unprepared for what she found. The
glasshouse’s vastness was entirely filled with rose-bushes. The tall walls were
woven over with climbers, and the great square centre of the house was divided
into quarters, and each quarter was a rose-bed stuffed with shrub roses.
But they were all dead, or dying.
Beauty walked slowly round the edges of the great centre
beds, looking to either side of her, looking up, looking down. Occasionally
some great skeletal bush had managed to throw up a spindling new shoot bearing
a few leaves; she saw no leaves on the climbers, only naked stems, many of them
as big around as her wrists. She had thought when she first saw the
thorn-bushes massed round the statue in the garden of Rose Cottage that they
were dead; but she had not known what sleeping rose-bushes look like. She knew
now. The Beast’s roses were dying.
In the last comer she came to, her head turned of its own
volition, following a breath of rich wild sweetness, and there was the bush
that had produced the dark red flower that had sat on her father’s breakfast
table in the Beast’s palace and on Rose Cottage’s windowsill. The living part
of it was much smaller than the dead, but living it was, in all the sad desert
of the magnificent glasshouse; three slender stems were well clothed in dark
green glossy leaves, and each stem bore a flower-bud. Two of these were still
green, with only their tips showing a faint stain of the crimson to come, but
the third was half open, just enough for its perfume to creep out and greet its
visitor. Beauty knelt down by the one living bush and slowly drew out and laid
her cuttings and her rosehips in her lap, as if demonstrating or offering them
or asking acceptance; and then, as if involuntarily, both hands reached out to
touch the bush. The stems nodded at her gently, and the open flower dipped as
if in greeting or blessing. “We have our work laid out for us, do we not?” she
said softly, as if speaking in the ear of a friend.
She left the rose-hips in a little heap under the living
bush but stood up again holding her cuttings, looking round her thoughtfully.
“Where shall I put you?” she said aloud. “Shall I make a little bed for you, so
that 1 can watch you, or shall I plant you now and hope you will give hope and
strength to your neighbours? You must be brave then, because I cannot spare
even one of you.” And so she planted them, one each in the four outer comers of
the centre beds, four more in the inner comers, sixteen more centred on each
side of each square.
Her four cuttings from Rose Cottage’s two climbers she
placed in the four comers of the glasshouse, beneath the skew-whiff jungle ot”
the old climbing stems. She found a water-butt and watering-can near the door
she had entered by, and she watered each of her tiny stems, murmuring to them
as she did so, and by then the sun was sinking down the sky, and the glasshouse
was growing dim, and she was tired.
She said good-evening to the one living bush and the pile of
rose-hips and went to the door; with her hand on the faceted crystal doorknob
she turned and said: “I will return tomorrow; I will make a start by pruning—by
trying to prune you—all of you—Oh dear. There are so many of you! But I shall
attend to you all, I promise. And I must think about where to make my seedbed.
Sleep well, my new friends. Sleep well.” She went out and closed the door
softly behind her.
She had taken little thought of how to go where she wished
to go; she had turned automatically in the direction she had come, but brooding
about the dying roses, she had only begun to notice that she seemed to be
walking into a blank wall ... when suddenly there was an opening door there.
She stopped and blinked at it. She supposed it was the same door she had come
out by; all the palace walls looked very much alike. She turned and looked at
the glasshouse. The glasshouse had only one door; she had looked very carefully
while she was inside it. Very well, the glasshouse was her compass, and this
was the way she had come when she left the palace, and the door was set very
cleverly into the palace wall so that it was invisible until you were very
near, and an awful lot of these doors did seem to open of themselves, although
the Beast had opened doors in the usual way, and the glasshouse had waited (politely,
she felt; it was what doors were supposed to do) for her to open its door.
She stared at the palace door, now standing open like any
ordinary door having been opened by ordinary means. Very well, she knew she had
entered an enchantment as soon as she set foot on the white-pebbled drive
leading to the palace; if self-opening doors were the worst of it, she was ...
she could grow accustomed.
She looked up again and could see the weather vane twinkling
in the golden light of the setting sun. She thought for a moment that it
twinkled because it was studded with gems—anything seemed possible in this
palace, even a jewel-encrusted weather vane—but then she realised that it was
carved, or cut out, in such a way that what she was seeing were tiny flashes of
sunlight through the gaps as it turned slowly back and forth on its stem. She
strained her eyes, but she was no nearer guessing what its shape was. Twinkle.
Twinkle. There was no breath of the breeze that the weather vane felt on the
ground where she stood.
She went through the open palace door, and some of the candles
were now lit in their sconces—even though the sconces lit seemed to be in
different locations on the walls from when they had been unlit—and shone
brighter than the grey light coming through the tall windows. Just over the
threshold she paused and looked round her. There had been a little square table
beside the door to the courtyard, a little square table of some dark reddish
wood, with a slope-shouldered clock on it, and the clock had a pretty painted
face. She had only caught a glimpse of it, for she had been in a hurry to go to
the glasshouse, but she was quite sure of the table and the clock. The clock was
still there, but it now had an inadequately clad shepherdess and two lambs
gambolling over its curved housing, and the table was round.
She followed the lighted corridor till she came to the
chamber of the star—eight doors; she counted and shook her head—and found the
door to her rooms open for her. She drifted through them till she came to her
bedroom, and she looked at the bed, longing to lie down on it and be lost in
sleep, and her hand readied up and grasped the embroidered heart.
But there was a beautiful scarlet and crimson dress laid
across the bed, and stockings and shoes, and a necklace lay almost invisible on
the ruby towels of the washstand, so dark were its red stones, and there was
fresh warm water in the basin and a steaming ewer at the foot of the table. “I
am to dress for dinner, am 1?” she said wearily; but she was too tired either
to protest or to be afraid of seeing the Beast again (he is so very large,
whispered a little voice in her mind), and so she washed, and dressed herself,
and clasped the necklace round her neck and the drops in her ears, and tucked
the little embroidered heart at the end of its long rope into the front of her
bodice, and tied up her hair with the ruby-tipped pins she found under the
necklace.
When she went to the chamber of the star, she was too tired
to count the doors, too tired to do anything but concentrate on not listening
to the little voice in her head, saying, You will not be able to see him
clearly, now, as the twilight deepens, and the candle flames throw such strange
shadows; he is dark, almost black, and he wears black clothing, and he walks
very quietly—noiselessly; you will not know where he is until he is just beside
you....
The chamber of the star itself was dark, the first stars
showing through the dome overhead, but another door was open for her, and
candles gleamed through it, and she went towards the light at once, her shoes
pattering like mice..., He is so very large, whispered the voice.
She went down the dim candlelit corridor surrounded by darkness,
and suddenly she was in her dream.
Her tiredness dropped away, and panic replaced it. Her heart
drummed in her ears, and her vision began to fail her; she sat down where she
was, in the middle of the corridor, with her cascades of skirts and petticoats
flying round her, and she was weeping again, weeping like a child, wholehearted
and despairing, for she was all, all alone, and the monster waited for her—for
her—
“Beauty—”
The Beast had approached her as silently as he had done that
morning, as silently as the little voice had said he would. She looked up
through her tears, snapping her head back so quickly her neck sent a sharp
shock of pain up and down her spine, and all she could see was a great dark
shape bending over her from the coiling shadows. She shrieked and scrabbled
away from him, dragging herself along on all fours, smothered by her skirts.
She could not see properly, between tears and darkness; she thudded into the corridor
wall and stopped because she had to. The jolt shook the panic’s hold on her;
she still wept, but less violently, and then she remembered the Beast.
She rubbed her face with her hands and tried to look up at
him again, but she could not find him in the shadows. Was he there, in the
corner between the tallboy and the wall, or there, where the shadow of that
plinth extended the black pool of shadow left by the heavy deep frame of that
picture? .. . Fear seized and shook her, as savagely as if cruel hands held her
shoulders; but she set her will against it and forced it back, and then another
little unhappy fear said to her: What if he had left her before she had a
chance to apologise?
Speaking into the darkness, she said; “I—1 am sorry—please
forgive me—it is a dream—a dream I have had since childhood—that I am
lost—walking down a dark corridor, alone, and—and—” She scrambled somehow to
her feet, stepping on her skirts, needing to lean against the wall to sort
herself out, knocking her hand against the frame of another picture, its
subject invisible in the gloom though she stood directly next to it. The Beast
had emerged from the shadows by taking a step towards her, his hand outstretched
to offer her his aid, but she saw
him
check himself before the gesture
was completed; had she not shrieked at the sight of him but a moment before?
She was ashamed. She would not—she
would not
—be frightened
of him; he was what he was, and he had made a promise he would keep, ll is only
the silly human way of needing to be able to see everything; if Teacosy were
here, she would know at once everything she needed to know through her nose..
.. The shadows fell across his face, but she could hear him breathing. There
was a faint, elusive odor; it reminded her of the scent she had caught—or
imagined—in her rooms that afternoon.
“The dream—the dream has frightened me all my life.” She
moved towards him in such a manner that he must turn to look at her, turn so
that the candlelight fell once more on his face. She saw him flinch as it
touched him, and she kept her eyes steadily on his face. “I am ashamed of
myself.”
She heard the rumble of his voice, like a low growl, before
he spoke any words: “Do not be ashamed. There is nothing to forgive. This ...
house ... is large, and it is strange to you. As am I,” He paused. “But I know
that dream. 1 have had it too. And you have not told me all of it, have you?
There is something that waits for you at the end of the corridor. Something
that waits just for you. Something terrible. A monster—or a Beast.”
“Yes.” said Beauty gravely. “You are right. Something does wait
at the end of the corridor. But it is a monster—not a Beast.”
They stood still, the shadows curling round them, the little
glow of the candlelight on their two faces.
The Beast turned away at last, saying, “I am keeping you
from your dinner.” He raised his arm, that she might precede him, but she
slipped up to him, and put her arm through his, and led him down the corridor,
the long train of her skirts rustling behind them, the Beast silent beside her.
It was only then that she realised that the corridor was full of a wild rich
rose smell, and that the smell came from the Beast himself.