Authors: Robin McKinley
Beauty adopted the nerve-shattered horses, the dumbly confused
and despairing dogs that Lionheart left in her wake. She found homes for them
with quiet, timid, dull people—as well as homes for barn-loft kittens, canaries
which wouldn’t sing, parrots which wouldn’t talk, and sphinxes which curled up
into miserable little balls in the backs of their cages and refused to be
goaded into fighting.
She brought cups of tea with her own hands lo wounded swains
bleeding from cries of “Coward!” and “Lackwit!” and offered her own
handkerchiefs to maidservants and costumiers found weeping in corners after
run-ins with Jeweltongue. She found tactful things to say to urgent young
playwrights who wished to be invited to Jeweltongue’s salons, and got rid of
philanthropists who wished Jeweltongue to apply her notorious acuteness—and
perhaps some of the family’s money—to schemes towards the improvement of the
general human lot.
She also kept an eye on the household accounts, to make sure
that the calfbound set of modern philosophy Jeweltongue had ordered contained
all the twenty volumes she was charged for, that all twenty sets of horseshoes
the farrier included in his bill had indeed been nailed to the feet of
Lionheart’s carriage teams and hunters, and that the twenty brace of pheasant
delivered for a dinner-party were all served to their guests.
On some days, when it seemed to her that everyone she met
was either angry or unhappy, she would go out into the garden and hide. She had
learned to avoid the army of gardeners, run by an ambitious head gardener who
was as forceful and dominating as any general—or rather, she had never outgrown
her child’s instinct to drop quietly out of sight when a grown-up moving a
little too purposefully was nearby. As soon as she stepped out onto the lawn,
she felt tranquillity drift down over her like a veil; and almost as though it
were a veil, or as if she had suddenly become a plant herself (a tidy,
well-shaped, well-placed plant of a desirable colour and habit, for anything
else would have drawn attention at once), she was rarely noticed by the gardeners,
hurrying this way and that with military precision, even when they passed quite
close to her.
The old gardener who had been kind to her when she was small
had been pensioned off and lived in a cottage at some distance from their great
house, on the outskirts of the city, where the farmlands began and where he had
his own small garden for the first time in his long life. A few times a year
she found half a day to go visit him—once with a convalescent puppy who had
been stepped on by a carriage horse—but she missed having him in the garden.
Once she arranged the flowers for one of her sisters’ bails.
This was ordinarily the housekeeper’s job. Her sisters felt that flower
arranging was a pastime for servants or stupid people; Beauty felt that flowers
belonged in the garden where they grew. But on the morning of this party the
housekeeper had fallen downstairs and sprained her ankle, and was in too much
pain to do anything but lie in a darkened room and run the legs off the maid
assigned to attend her.
Beauty looked at the poor flowers standing in their buckets
of cold water, and at the array of noble vases laid out for them, and began to
arrange them, only half aware of what she was about, while her sisters were
rushing around the house shouting (in Lionheart’s case) or muttering savagely
(in Jeweltongue’s) while they attended to what should have been the
housekeeper’s other urgent duties on the day of an important party. Most of
Beauty’s mind was occupied with what the night’s events would bring; she would
much rather scrub a floor—not that she ever had scrubbed a floor, but she
assumed it would be hard, dull, unpleasant work—than attend a ball, which was
hard, dull, unpleasant work that didn’t even have a clean floor to show for it
afterwards.
Neither Lionheart nor Jeweltongue at best paid much
attention to flowers, beyond the fact that one did of course have to have them,
as one had place settings for seventy-five and a butler to cherish the wine;
but when they came downstairs to have a final look at the front hall and the
dining-room, even they were astonished by what Beauty had done.
“My saints!” said Lionheart. “If the conversation flags, we
can look at the flowers!”
‘ The conversation will not flag,’’ said Jeweltongue composedly,
“but that is not to say that Beauty has not done miracles,” and she patted her
sister’s shoulder absently, as one might pat a dog.
“I didn’t know flowers could look like this!” roared
Lionheart, and threw up her arms as if challenging an enemy to strike at her,
and laughed. “If Miss Fuss-and-Bother could see this, perhaps it would quiet
her nerves!” Miss Fuss-and-Bother was the name Lionheart had given to die
governess least patient with the frequent necessity of fishing Beauty out of
her latest muddy haven in the garden and bringing her indoors and dumping her
in the bath. Lionheart had often been obliged to join her there after other,
more dangerous adventures of her own.
But that ball was particularly successful, and her sisters
teased Beauty that it was on account of her flowers and asked if she was
keeping a greenwitch in her cupboard, who could work such charms. Beauty,
distressed, tried to prevent any of this from reaching their father’s ears, for
he would not have taken even a joke about a greenwitch in their house in good
part. The housekeeper, who did hear some of it as she hobbled around the house
on a stick, was not pleased and contrived to snub “Miss Beauty” for a fortnight
after. (She might also have denuded the garden of flowers in her efforts to
have a grander show than Beauty’s for the next party, but the head gardener was
more than a match for her.) Beauty stayed out of her way till she had moved her
ill will to another target; there was too much temper and spitefulness in the
house already, and she thought she might forget her promise to herself never to
add to it, and tell the housekeeper what a dreadful old woman she thought her.
Besides, she would probably then have to hire another housekeeper
afterwards, and she could think of few things she less wanted to do.
The sisters’ parties, over the course of several seasons,
became famous as the finest in the city, as fine as their mother’s had been.
Perhaps not quite so grand as the mayor’s, but perhaps more enjoyable; the
mayor’s daughters were, after all, rather plain.
Only the ill-natured—especially those whose own parties were
slighted in favor of the sisters’—ever suggested that it was the work of any
hired magician. Their father’s attitude towards magic was well known. His
sudden revulsion of feeling upon his wife’s death had indeed been much talked
of; but much more surprising was its result.
It was true that he was the wealthiest merchant in the city,
but that was all he was; and if he had long had what seemed, were it not absurd
to think so. an almost magical ability to seize what chance he wished when he
wished to seize it, well, seers and soothsayers were always going on about how
there was no such thing as luck, but that everyone possessed some seeds of
magic within themselves, whether or not they ever found them or nursed them
into growth. But no mere merchant, even the wealthiest merchant in the biggest
city in the country, and whatever the origins of his business luck, should have
been able to dislodge any magical practitioner who did not wish to be dislodged;
but so it was in this case. Not only were all the magicians, astrologers, and
soothsayers who had been members of his wife’s entourage thrown out of his
house—which ban was acceptably within his purview—but he saw them driven out of
the city.
The sisters were forbidden to have anything to do with
magic; the two elder girls still bought small street charms occasionally, and
Beauty was good friends with the elderly salamander belonging to the retired
sorcerer who lived near them; but none of them would ever hire any practitioner
to do a personal spell.
It was no surprise to anyone who paid attention to such
matters when Lionheart contracted an engagement with the Duke of Dauntless, who
owned six thousand of the finest hunting acres in the entire country, and much
else besides. Jeweltongue affianced herself to the Baron of Grandiloquence, who
was even wealthier than the Duke, and had a bigger town house. They planned a
double wedding; Beauty and the three sisters of the Duke and the four sisters
of the Baron should be bridesmaids. It would be the finest wedding of the
season, if not the century. Everyone would be there. admiring, envious, and
beautifully dressed.
In all the bustle of preparations, no one, not even Beauty,
noticed that the old merchant seemed unusually preoccupied.
He had hoped he could put off his business’s ruin till after
the wedding. He loved his daughters, but he felt his life had ended with his
wife’s death; he had been increasingly unable to concentrate on his business
affairs in the years since. His greatest pain as he watched the impending storm
approach was the thought that be had not been able to provide a husband for
Beauty. It was true that she was not very noticeable in the company of her
sisters, hut she should have been able to find a suitable husband among all the
young men who flocked to their house to court Lionheart and Jeweltongue.
He thought of hiring a good magician or a sorcerer to throw
a few days’ hold over the worst of the wreck, but his antipathy to all things
magical since his wife’s death meant not only had he lost all his contacts in
the magical professions, but a sudden search now for a powerful practitioner
was sure to raise gossip—and suspicion. He was not at all certain he would have
been able to find one who would accept such a commission from him anyway. It
had occurred to him, as the worst of the dull oppression of grief had lifted
from his mind, to be surprised no magical practitioner had tried to win revenge
for his turning half a dozen of them out of the city; perhaps they had known it
was not necessary, The unnatural strength that had enabled him to perform that
feat had taken most of his remaining vitality—and business acumen—with it.
The bills for the wedding itself he paid for in his last
days as the wealthiest merchant in the city. He would not be able to fulfill
the contracts for his daughters’ dowries, but his two elder daughters were in
themselves reward enough for any man. And her sisters would do something for
Beauty.
It was ten days before the wedding when the news broke. People
were stunned. It was all anyone talked about for three days—and then the next
news came: The Duke of Dauntless and the Baron of Grandiloquence had broken off
the wedding.
The messengers from their fiancés brought the sisters’ fate
to them on small squares of thick cream-laid paper, folded and sealed with the
heavy heirloom seals of their fiancés’ houses. Lionheart and Jeweltongue each
replied with one cold line written in her own firm hand; neither kept her
messenger waiting,
By the end of that day Lionheart and Jeweltongue and Beauty
and their father were alone in their great house; not a servant remained to
them, and many had stolen valuable fittings and furniture as well, guessing
correctly that their ruined masters would not be able to order them returned,
nor punish them for theft.
As the twilight lengthened in their silent sitting-room,
Jeweltongue at last stood up from her chair and began to light the lamps;
Lionheart stirred in her comer and went downstairs to the kitchens. Beauty
remained where she was, charring her father’s cold hands and fearing what the
expression on his face might mean. Later she ate what Lion-heart put in front
of her, without noticing what it was, and fed their father with a spoon, as if
he were a child. Jeweltongue settled down with the housekeeper’s book and began
to study it, making the occasional note.
For the first few days they did only small, immediate
things. Lionheart took over the kitchens and cooking; Jeweltongue took over the
housekeeping. Beauty began going through the boxes of papers that had been
delivered from what had been her father’s office and dumped in a comer of one
of the drawing-rooms.
Lionheart could be heard two floors away from the kitchens,
cursing and flinging things about, wielding knives and mallets like swords and
lances. Jeweltongue rarely spoke aloud, but she swept floors and beat the
laundry as pitilessly as she had ever told off an underhousemaid for not
blacking a grate sufficiently or a footman waiting at table for having a spot
on his shirtfront.
Beauty read their father’s correspondence, trying to
discover the real state of their affairs and some gleam of guidance as to what
they must do next. She wrote out necessary replies, while her father mumbled
and moaned and rocked in his chair, and she held his trembling hand around the
pen that he might write his signature when she had finished.
Even the garden could not soothe Beauty during that time.
She went out into it occasionally, as she might have reached for a shawl if she
were cold; but she would find herself standing nowhere she could remember
going, staring blindly at whatever was before her, her thoughts spinning and
spinning and spinning until she was dizzy with them. There were now no
gardeners to hide from, but any relief she might have found in that was
overbalanced by seeing how quickly the garden began to look shabby and neglected.
She didn’t much mind the indoors beginning to look shabby and neglected;
furniture doesn’t notice being dusty, corners don’t notice cobwebs, cushions
don’t notice being unplumped. She. told herself that plants didn’t mind going
undeadheaded and unpruned—and the weeds, of course, were much happier than
they’d ever been before. But the plants in the garden were her friends; the
house was just a building full of objects.
She had little appetite and barely noticed as Lionheart’s lumpen
messes began to evolve into recognizable dishes. She had never taken a great
deal of interest in her own appearance and had minded the least of the three of
them when they put their fine clothes away, for they had agreed among
themselves that all their good things should go towards assuaging their
father’s creditors. She did not notice that Jeweltongue had an immediate gift
for invisible darns, for making a bodice out of an old counterpane, a skirt of
older curtains, and collar and cuff’s of worn linen napkins with the stained
bits cut out, and finishing with a pretty dress it was no penance to wear.