Authors: Robin McKinley
“Embarrass us! Father! Wait till you hear Mrs Oldhouse, whom
we name Mrs Words-Without-End, but we cannot bring ourselves to turn her out,
not only because she has the biggest drawing-room and serves the best cakes—”
“Thank you,” murmured the young man called White-hand.
Jeweltongue reached towards him and just touched the back of
his hand with the tips of her fingers, but Beauty saw the sweet look that
passed between them as Jeweltongue continued. “But she is so genuinely kind,
and surprisingly has quite a good ear for other people’s work! But we shall put
you at the top of the list for your evening, because if she reads first, she
may frighten you away,”
“Not before I have eaten some of Mr Whilehand’s cakes, at
least,” said her father, and Beauty then remembered where she had seen Mr
Whitehand, for he was the baker in Longchance.
It
occurred to her then
that for quite sometime, as Jeweltongue divided up the errands when the two of
them went into Longchance together, it was never Beauty who went to the
baker’s, though
they
almost always had lardy-cake or crumpets for tea on
any day Jeweltongue had been to Longchance. But Beauty had never heard of
poetry-reading evenings.
“To be fair,” Jeweltongue went on, “she tells excellent stories—when
she doesn’t try to put them into verse first. She leamt them from her father,
who was a scholar, but his real love was collecting folk-tales....”
Beauty woke to a soft
shushing
sound. It was a gentle
sound, and her first thought was that there was water running somewhere nearby,
and she wondered if she had missed seeing some fountain, perhaps in the inner
courtyard, perhaps invisible behind the glasshouse. But the rhythm of the
shush
was wrong for water, she eventually decided, still half in her dream and
wondering about the young man and the new hearth-rug and wishing to hear her
fathers poems—and telling herself it was all only a dream again, just as last
night.
She eventually decided that it could not be water. It
sounded like something flying.
She opened her eyes. After a moment of reorienting herself,
she picked out the small shadow hurtling back and forth across her room which
went with the
shushing
sound. It flew very near each wall and ihen
wheeled away as if panic-stricken. It disappeared, while she watched, into the
other rooms through the wide doorless archway, and the
shushing
died
away, but then it came streaking back into the bedroom, straight towards the
clear glass of the closed balcony doors.
Beauty, still too sleep-dazed to make an attempt at scaring
it onto a safer course, held her breath for the inevitable col—
lision, but it swerved away at the last minute and raced
towards her bed. It flew straight under the canopy towards the wall, did another
of its last-minute, violent changes of direction before it struck, flew back
towards the bed, and collapsed on the counterpane.
When Beauty first saw the small flying figure, she guessed
it was a bird, trapped somehow indoors, having fallen down a chimney, or
mistakenly crept in through a half-open window. But she had caught a glimpse of
furry body and naked wing as it swept just in front of her and was now
expecting what she found lying panting in her lap. It was a bat.
Beauty had rescued members of most of the commoner animal
species in her life, including a few bats. The last one had been in much worse
case than this one, terrified by the housemaid’s screaming, beating itself
pathetically against a corner of Ihc attic where it had fled. Beauty had
trapped it finally by ordering the housemaid to
Go away
and, when it
flopped to the floor half stunned, put a wastebasket over it.
After a few days of hanging upside down in Beauty’s
dressing-room (which she kept locked for the duration, for fear of housemaids,
and entering it herself only long enough to change the water in the water-dish
and to release the fat house-flies she patiently coilccicd in jars), she
ordered the dogcart one evening, drove herself to the outskirts of town, and
released it.
She’d heard it whirr just a moment, as it had leapt out of
her restraining hands and the scarf she had wrapped it in, and had wanted to
believe that the perfectly silent shadow, which had then swept low twice over
her head—nowhere near enough to risk any danger of becoming tangled in her
hair, because as any sensible person knows, bats only lose their sense of
distance and direction under such duress as being screamed at by housemaids—had
been it saying thank-you, before it went off to find its friends and family.
She hoped it had not, during its convalescence, developed such a taste for
house-flies that it would ever risk any more attics.
This one was not quite the length of the palm of her hand.
She could feel the quiver of its body through the counter—
pane as it tried to catch its breath, and could see into its
open mouth, the delicate pink tongue, smaller than the first ieaf of heartsease
to open in spring, and the teeth, finer than embroidery needles. Its dark brown
fur looked soft as velvet; its wide pricked ears and half-folded wings were
only a shade or two paler than its fur. It stared straight at her with its
bright black eyes, and lay in her lap, and panted.
“Well,” said Beauty, after a moment. “I have never heard of
a tame bat. I suppose you were merely confused. but you are very contused
indeed, to be lying in my lap like that and staring at me as if 1 were a
legendary saviour of lost bats whom you have recognised in your extremity. What
reputation I had of such is years and miles behind me, little one. The bats at
Rose Cottage had—have—the good sense to stay in the garden... . Which is to
say, I suppose I need something to muffle you with, so you cannot bite me with
all those tiny piercing teeth. Not that I would blame you, mind, but I get
quite enough of that sort of thing dealing with roses, ...” She reached slowly
behind her, so as not to frighten her visitor further, and began awkwardly to
work her top pillow out of its pillow slip.
The bat lay where it had fallen, but it had folded its wings
neatly against its body, and closed its mouth, and now looked perfectly
content. “If I didn’t know that you are supposed to hang upside down—or at
least creep into narrow cracks—I would expect you to curl up now, like a very
small Teacosy, and have a nap. Saints! This is a maddening activity when I
cannot see what I am doing!”
But the pillowslip came free at last, and she wrapped it softly
round her hands and picked up the bat, keeping its wings closed against its
body. It did not even tremble, but it did turn its head a little so it could go
on looking at her.
She groped her way out of bed and down the stairs till she
stood on the floor, the bat held gently in front of her. “Now. what do I do
with you? I cannot lock you in the water-closet, as it is the only one I know
where to find in all this mazy hulk of a palace; I would have something to say
to the architect about that, if I met him!
“My old dressing-room, where I used lo put your sort of visitor,
was quite a narrow closet, with one tiny window easily blocked off, and I never
used it anyway, even bat-frcc. But these rooms are full of sunlight, and you
know, none of your brethren that I have met have understood about keeping the
carpels clean, and so I need to. er, leave you somewhere J can spread
something, er, bat-proof beneath you—’’
She thought of the boll of poachers” jackets material the
sisters had found in the housekeeper’s room, and two tears dropped to the
breast of her nightgown; but her voice was as steady as ever. “What we need, I
feel, is—is an empty wardrobe or even a secret room, I would like that. I would
like a secret room.” She spoke half-idly. She had learnt the use of speaking
quietly to all rescued animals; even the wild ones seemed to find such noises
soothing, and she also wished to fling herself away as quickly as possible from
the sudden memory of her sisters.
She began to walk slowly away from her balcony, and when she
came to the room hung with the tapestries of a garden in all four seasons, she
paused. There came to her there some strange breath of air, some movement just
seen at the corner of her eye. She turned her head; the edge of the nearer
summer tapestry stirred. She looked down at her bat; her bat still looked at
her and lay calmly in her grasp. She shifted it, very slowly, in case it should
protest after all, into the crook of one elbow, where it settled, snug and
tranquil as a tired kitten. Now she had one hand free and could lift the edge
of the tapestry—and push open the crack of door revealed there.
There was a good smell in that darkness, of rich earth and
of.. . peace, of the sort of peace she had been used to find in her garden, and
she sighed. “There, little one. This should do for you—1 hope. And I will come
and let you out again just as soon as it is dusk.”
She raised the tapestry a little farther, so that she could
duck under it, as she was unwilling to leave any creature somewhere she had made
no attempt to investigate herself first, and found that she was standing in
what appeared to be an underground chamber.
If she turned to look behind her, she could see the daylight
shining across the rosy carpet of her rooms, could see it winking off the
corners of furniture and strips of hangings visible to her through the
half-open door: hut if she turned inwards again, she saw only rough shadows,
dimming quickly to blackness, the shapes of earth and stone only varied by what
looked very much like the roots of plants.
She raised her hand to feel over her head, having the sense
of little trailing things touching her softly, and tearing spiders, as even she
was a little hesitant about spiders; and found instead a great net of what fell
like tree roots, if she could imagine what tree roots might feel like from
underneath. The trailing things were root hairs. Could anything but root hairs
look so like root hairs?
“But we are two storeys above the ground,” she said, bewildered,
and turned again to look at the sunlight lying on her carpet. She lifted her
gaze to the hinges of the door; it seemed to be pegged straight into the rock,
and the frame to be made of some impossible mix of stone fragments and woven
roots, impossible, but strangely beautiful, as the vein-ing of marble is
beautiful.
“Well,” she said to the bat,
“I
guess I do not have
to worry about protecting the floor here—wherever here is. And there are
lovely, er, tree roots for you to hang from, should you wish to hang, and—and
bat droppings are excellent fertilizer. I will need fertilizer for my roses as
soon as I finish pruning them. I should wish to find a whole colony of you
here, I suppose, but—I don’t quite think I do. The results might be a bit...
complex. Good-bye, then, till this evening.”
She laid her tiny parcel down in a little hollow in the
earth between two roots, loosened the pillow slip so that it could crawl out
when it chose, and stepped back, under the summer tapestry, and onto a carpet
covered with roses. She closed the door, which from this side was panelled with
plain wood, to match the panelling of the wall (plain but for the occasional
carving of a rose), and went, very thoughtfully, to eat her breakfast.
She found her gloves with the pruning-knife and the saw on
the water-butt in the glasshouse this morning. “Today we will be bold,” she
announced, and she was. She cut and lopped and hacked and sawed, and then she
stopped long enough to water her cuttings and check her seedbed, and then her
stomach told her it was lunchtime, and she went back to her bedroom balcony,
and lunch was waiting for her.
When she returned to the glasshouse after lunch, she looked
at the scatter of rubbish she had produced and said, “I need somewhere to build
a bonfire.”
She left the glasshouse again and stood in front of its
door, looking down the side of the palace away from her balcony. The bulk of
the glasshouse prevented her from seeing very far, but she knew there was
nothing, between the door to the glasshouse and the door (if it was the same
door) she used to enter the palace and return to her rooms, that would do for a
bonfire.
This area of the inner courtyard was covered with gravel,
gravel just coarse enough not to take footprints, but fine enough that it was
smooth and easy to walk on. It was also the same eye-confusing glittery
grey-white as the palace and the front drive. Studying it now. Beauty teased
herself with the notion that if she narrowed her eyes to take in none of the
details of where pebbles became walls, she might walk straight to the end of
the courtyard and up the wall without noticing, like an ant or beetle. .. . She
looked up, blinking, at the bright sky. The scale was about right, she thought.
If Rose Cottage is the right size for human beings, then here I am an ant or a
beetle. A small beetle. Probably an ant. Even if my feet cannot carry me up
walls. How confusing, when one came to walk on the ceiling, to be abruptly
blinded by one’s skirts....
In any event, there was nowhere here to light a bonfire: it
would make a dreadful mess of the whiteness, and even magical invisible rakers
and polishers might resent the effort to remove the ashes and the heat-sealed
stains and the bits that wouldn’t burn no matter how often you poked them back
into the hottest heart of the fire. And she didn’t want to annoy—any more than
she could help—whoever was responsible here... the Beast? She was beginning to
wonder. She remembered his words lasl night:
When I was first here . . . I
had forgotten ... I was very glad when Fourpaws came.
She had never seen any sorcerer who had chosen not to appear
human, though she had heard tales of them; her friend the salamander had met
one who looked like a centaur.
His familiar pretended to be a lion, and
while J knew he was not, still, he kept me busy enough with his great paws and
his sense of humour that I could never look long enough at cither him or his
master to see who—or what
—
he really was,
the salamander had said,
laughing his rustling laugh.
My master was vexed with me, but I told him he
should have made me appear to be a panther.