Authors: Robin McKinley
She watered her cuttings. “You are striking, are you not?”
she said to them briskly, like a governess addressing her students. “You are
sending out little white rootlets in all directions, and soon you will prove it
to me by producing your first leaf buds. I want you blooming by the end of this
season, do you hear me? You shrubs, at least. You climbers, perhaps I will give
you till next year.”
She heard her own voice saying it—by the end of this season,
next year—and she stopped where she stood, and the water from the watering-can
she carried wavered and stopped too. She looked up towards the cupola several
storeys over her head, and her mind went blank, and she felt panic stir in its
lair, open its eyes.... She opened her mouth and began to sing the first thing
that came into her head: “And from her heart grew a red, red rose, and from his
heart a briar.. . .”
She worked all that morning as hard as she had worked the
day before. She worked to keep her memories at bay and to keep panic asleep in
its den. And as she worked, she sang: “A knightly dance in the grove they
tread, with torches and garlands of roses red.” She worked until her back and
shoulders ached and sweal ran down between her breasts and her shoulder blades,
and it was as well for her that she was wearing long canvas sleeves and overskirt,
for she would not have noticed if the thorns had cut her, if her pruning-knife
or her hand rake had slipped. She worked because there were new memories that
troubled her now, not only memories of the sisters and father she missed but
memories of kindness and ... memories of the Beast.
“She had not pulled a rose, a rose, a rose but barely one,
when up there starts...” Beauty faltered in her singing, and her stomach took
advantage of the break in her concentration and told her loudly that it was
lunchtimc.
She stopped and looked round almost blankly. The rose beds
were now all splendidly tidy. She had pruned away almost as much dead wood as
she had the day before; there was tying and staking yet to be done, but the
elegant shapes of the bushes themselves were now cleanly revealed. There were
rows of little hillocks of leaves down all the paths, and the rather bigger
hill she’d automatically collected near the door (though she supposed the magic
would once again transport it all for her to the mouth of the carriage tunnel to
her bonfire glen) had four little collapsed-entry leaf-falls on one side of its
circumference. “Oh dear,” said Beauty guiltily. “I’d forgotten all about you.”
She put her hand on the glasshouse door and thought. She was
a gardener, and she disliked the idea of putting four perfectly good slug—and
insect-eating hedgehogs into a wild wood—wasting them, to her miiid. She went
outdoors and looked up, stretching her back and shoulders as she did so; the
jacket and the overskirt were protecting her skin admirably, but they could do
nothing for the ache in her muscles, or for the weariness of the hand that held
the pnming-knife. It was still earty enough in the year that the sun, while
warm, was not yet oppressive. She wondered how hot the glasshouse became in
high summer; was temperature regulation within the magic’s purview? Or was the
excellent system of vents and of windows that opened and panes that unlatched,
and lacy screens that roiled down, and the handles and levers to work them,
invisible till there was need for it? Maybe it was merely hidden from her dull
eyes amidst al! the gorgeous tomfoolery of the glasshouse’s design.
She looked up at the weather vane she could barely see and
wondered again what it was; she could just make out a bulk of shape to one
side, a narrower finger of something on the other.
Just where did the food she ate come from? Conjured out of
the air from dust motes? There were hardly even dust motes in the Beast’s
palace; the sunbeam that woke her in the mornings was washed clean. But even
sorcerers had to negotiate with ordinary merchants for some things; she knew
her father’s story about the hydra who answered the front door. Her friend the
salamander preferred real flies to the magical banquets his master laid out on
grand occasions.
Beauty thought of the fourth side of the courtyard she stood
in, which she had not yet explored. There were doors on each of the other
three, even if one only led fat least, led her) to her rooms, and one was
sealed shut. Her curiosity rearoused by the mysterious weather vane, her
conscience pricked by hedgehogs, and her memory disturbed by dreams, she de—
cided that lunch could wait a few more minutes. She would
have a look first al the fourth side of the courtyard.
She walked along the glasshouse wall instead of nearer the
palace, half thinking that she should begin looking for vents or vent openings;
she was a little worried lhat just as the glasshouse door opened hy putting
your hand on the handle and turning it, like all the other doors she had known
except the ones in the Beast’s palace, and as she had taken on the dying roses
as her special care, so perhaps the glasshouse cooling system might be her
practical responsibility too.
Perhaps it was studying the shining ridged whorls and scintillant
beams and bars—sometimes it was as though they ran up and down for no other
reason than to give her pleasure, for she could often make no sense of them architecturally;
but she found herself laughing as she looked—that made the time pass so
quickly. Almost before she thought of it, she was already rounding the corner
of the glasshouse and looking down that fourth side. And there was another open
archway, like the one to the wild wood. She went towards it eagerly, teasing
herself with ideas of what might lie beyond in the few moments before she could
see for herself.
The tunnel felt shorter, perhaps because it was so much
brighter. This one did not debouch upon a wild wood; here was an orchard.
It was the wrong time of year for apples and pears—and plums
and peaches and apricots—but they were mere all the same. She plucked a peach
and bit into it, cupping her free hand under her chin for the juice she knew
would run down it; when she finished the peach, she lapped the little pool of
juice from her palm and then knelt and wiped her hands on the grass and her
face on a reasonably clean corner of her skirt. It wasn’t lunch, but it would
keep her a little longer while she explored.
She didn’t see him al first; she saw only another huge old
tree at a little distance; his back was to her, and the near black of his hair
blended into the unrelieved black of his clothing, and both into their
background. Then he turned without seeing her and pulled an apple off the tree
he stood next to and ate it, neatly, in two biles, core and all. /
am a
Beast; I cannot eat like a man.
She thought of the peach juke running down
her chin, but she waited till his hands had dropped to his sides again before
she stepped forward.
He saw her but made no move towards her, and so she hesitated,
uncertain of her welcome. “It is a lovely day for a picnic,” she said, but her
voice betrayed her, and
picnic
wavered, ending like a question.
He still said nothing, so she turned to go. “If you are
enjoying my orchard, stay,” he said.
“I do not wish to disturb you,” she said.
He shook his shaggy head. “You do not—” he began, and
stopped. “I would be glad of your company,” he said.
She came to stand next to him, and then, uncertain again,
stepped away, leant against a tree. “You must be very fond of fruit, to have so
magnificent an orchard,” she said.
He gave a rumble that might have been a laugh. “The magic
consents to feed me, to keep me alive,” he said.
“Fruit?” she said, astonished. “You—” Her mind flew back
over her meals in the Beast’s palace. “There is no meat on your table.”
The Beast nodded. “1 am a Beast, and other beasts fear me.
They cannot live here in pcaee because of my presence, and I cannot give them a
merciful death. I sent them away, long ago. No beast—no other beast—comes here
now but Fourpaws.”
And a few hundred butterflies, a bat, and four hedgehogs,
thought Beauty, and ask me again tomorrow morning. But she did not interrupt,
“Fruit sustains me,” continued the Beast. “When I was first
here, the orchard fruited in the autumn, as orchards do; and sometimes in early
summer, no matter how careful I had been about storing my previous year’s crop,
before the next harvest, I grew very hungry. I ate grass, but it did not agree
with me. Over the years the trees have carried their fruit earlier and
earlier—and longer and longer.
“I told you last night that the magic here can touch noth—
ing living. Within the walls of the courtyard, it is master;
outside those walls it... may ask. The front garden answered and obeyed. But
here, in this orchard... It is the trees who have chosen to carry their fruit
early and late; it is not magic that compels them.”
Beauty knew what he was about to say before he said it, and
she had her mouth open to protest almost before he spoke: “But my poor roses—
“The glasshouse is different,” said Beauty almost angrily.
“The glasshouse is not like the rest of the palace. It doesn’t change. It isn’t
one thing one minute and something else the next. It is itself.”
“It is the heart of this place,” said me Beast, “and it is
dying.”
Beauty put her hands over her ears, as if she would not hear
him. “No.
No.
There is something wrong there, but we are putting it
right, the roses and I. I do not know what it is that has gone wrong. I think
it is only that it has been neglected for too long. Neither you nor the magic
can tend it, but I can. It will not die. It
will not.
I will not let
it,” She took her hands away from her ears and took a deep breath. A little
breeze curled round her warm face and patted her cheeks, bringing with it a
whiff of a deep-scented rose. Her hands were shaking. “There is cheese on your
table—and butter,” she said abruptly, remembering,
“Yes,” said the Beast. “There is cheese and butter.”‘
“But—” She looked at him, and he looked at her; but it came
to her that she was [earning to read his face, and she knew he would answer no
questions about the cheese and the butter. But even after she realised this,
she went on looking at him, and lie at her. The little breeze swerved round her
and blew the heavy mane off the Beast’s forehead. It was only the strangeness
of what he is, she thought. It is as if you looked at a—a hedgehog and expected
it to be a rabbit, or looked at a cat while anticipating a phoenix. I wonder
what the hydra thought of the first human being it ever saw, and whether it
liked answering a front door that always opened on creatures with only one
head.
She looked away. “And bread.” She thought of Lion-heart and
added hastily, “And vegetables.”
“Vegetables,” agreed the Beast, without enthusiasm. “They
are all grass, as far as 1 am concerned, but the vegetable garden is that way.
if you are interested,”
She laughed at him then, because he sounded like a small boy,
not like a very large grown-up Beast with a voice so deep it made the hair on
die back of your neck stir when you heard it. “But vegetables are good for
you,” she said, and added caressingly, “They make you grow up big and strong.”
He smiled, showing a great many teeth. “You see why 1 wish
to eat no more vegetables. But I am sure the magic is glad of someone to cook
and bake for more capable of being pleased than I.”
Beauly thought of the five slices of toast she had eaten
that morning, and the half pot of marmalade. She had been very hungry, after no
supper the night before. “You speak of—of it—as if it were a person.”
“I think of it as such. Or”—he hesitated—“as much of a
person as I am. 1 think—I sometimes think—we are both a bit bewildered by our
circumstances. But as with this orchard, we have grown into each other’s ways,
over the years.”
You speak and you move, and the echo in your voice says that
you know yourself to be trapped here. As if you and—and the magic are both
trapped. But the trees carry their fruit for you, and you sent the other beasts
away, that they might not be unhappy. “You have been here a very long time,”
she said tentatively.
“Yes. I have been here a very long time. And you have been
standing talking to me a very long time. Go eat your lunch. Even magic can’t
keep it hot forever.”
Dismissed, she ran off, wishing she dared invite him to accompany
her, aware of his gaze on her back, watching her go. wondering if he would
still be there by the time she returned after lunch, to smuggle a few hedgehogs
into the vegetable garden. He had sent all the other beasts away, long ago. But
the trees had learnt to listen to him, and now the beasts were returning.
She was both disappointed and relieved that she did not see
the Beast later, with her skirt full of hedgehogs. She made her way as swiftly
as she could through the long pathless grass in the orchard, keeping the
courtyard archway behind her; her burden made her a little slow and cautious,
both for her sake and for her passengers’, and a little clumsy; nor could she
entirely resist the temptation to look round her, even at the risk of losing
her footing or straying from the shortest route. The grass was spangled with
wild-flowers, and she saw tall bulrushes a little way off, at the bottom of a
gradual slope, suggesting water, but it was too far away for a diversion.
It was not too long before there rose up before her another
sort of wall, an old brick wall, such as might contain an old garden. There was
a wrought-iron gate in the wall, and the glimpse she had through it gave her a
little warning, but still the garden was a surprise. “Oh! This is how The
glasshouse should look!” The words burst out of her. She knelt, to let the
hedgehogs roll off her lap, but she was looking round her all the time.
The paths that ran away from her in three directions were
wide enough to walk along—and to let sunlight in—but no wider, and in some
places the great vegetable forest leant over them, and in other places it
sprawled across plots the size of banqueting halls. The rhubarb were tall as
trees, the runner bean vines taller than giants; the red-stemmed chard,
brilliant as rubies in the afternoon sun, grew as high as her waist, though the
leaves were still a fresh young green; and the cabbages, some of them so big
around she could not have circled them with her arms, bore extravagant frills
as elaborate as ball gowns and as exquisitely coloured; and there were melons
nearly the size of Rose Cottage. Did the Beast eat melons? she thought. I must
ask. And figs—for there were fig trees espaliered against the walls, looking as
if they needed the support of the wires to hold up their splendid weight of
fruit.