Authors: Robin McKinley
The buffet to the sense of sight was so powerful that for 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....
She took a tight little breath, and held it, and turned
herself round on her ladder till she was facing the wing beyond which lay the
bonfire glade, but the glade itself was hidden by the height of the palace. She
climbed a few more rungs and turned again: she hooked her left arm through the
ladder and leant against it. She still could not see the glade, and the forest
seemed to begin immediately outside the wall. She shivered a little and looked
again towards the front gardens, but there was the wild wood pressing against
its boundary; it sprang up just behind the wing containing her rooms, as it did
behind the wing opposite.
She craned her head to look again over the orchard wing, ignoring
the painted roof. There she could see the farther trees in the long grass of
the meadow, kindly spreading fruit and nut trees, not the dark menacing trees
of the forest; beyond them she could see the wall of the vegetable garden, and
a slip of the beds inside, visible beyond the wall, and beyond the far wall,
the fields of corn . .. and beyond that, the horizon beginning to blur with
distance, so she could not be sure, but it seemed to her that there too the
wood held the outer margin.
There was no sign of human habitation anywhere, no thin
wisps of smoke as if from chimneys, no landscape muddled with little boxy
shapes that might be farm buildings or houses; nothing but fields and the
tangle of close-growing trees. She shivered again and turned a sigh into a
reviving gulp of wild air. The breeze was kicking up a little more strongly,
perhaps because she was now so high; she found she wished to cling to the
ladder with both hands against its pestering.
She turned to face front again to make the clinging
easier—still looking carefully round the weather vane—and stared at that far
edge of the front gardens, the forest edge. This was also the wing that
contained the gates closed against any courtyard entry: the gales that were so
profoundly closed Beauty could barely find the cracks between door and frame with
her fingertips in daylight, when she was awake and alert and looking for them,
where at night, half asleep or half ensorcelled by the magic of this place, her
head full of the Beast’s painting and the stories it told, she had thought she
had seen an old woman leave a basket. .. had thought she had seen her walk down
the length of the courtyard to be welcomed at the edge of the wild wood by
shapes of silver shadow..,.
Stop that! Beauty said to herself crossly. Do you expect an
enchanted palace to take its place in ordinary human geography, that I should
be able to track its location by finding Longchance a morning’s brisk walk away
just to the north and east, and Appleborough just visible, because I know where
to look, in the northwest?
But the roses, said a little unhappy voice in her mind.
If—if you did not see the old woman—if you did not see the unicorns—what about
the roses?
Beauty remembered the walk back from the glade last night,
carrying or not-carrying, the heavy basket; the crumbly, sweet-smelling stuff
in her hands, spreading it carefully round her hopeful bushes, her decision not
to go in the glasshouse this morning, to let the magic work.
If anything since Father came back from his journey to the
city has happened, she replied to the voice, then that has happened. But her
hands, clutching the rung of the ladder, trembled, and she involuntarily looked
down, trying to peer through the slope of the glasshouse beneath her ladder,
looking for new leaves, for new green stems, even for snippets and hints of
flower colours. .. . But she turned her eyes away again almost at once. I will
not look, she said. I have done what I could. I have worked hard, I have done
my best, and it is now up to ... to ... to the magic.
it
can touch nothing living.
But
the unicorn had breathed into her face, breathed the breath of a living
creature.
Still her heart was heavy, and she tried to find the path
through the wood that had led her to the parterre, the grand front facade of
the Beast’s palace; but she could not. 1 should be able to find the double row
of beeches, even in the wild wood! she thought. No. no, it is not like that
here, just as I cannot see Longchance, though it must be near at hand. It is
only the way this place is. And the tears that crept down her face were only
the result of the wind.
She turned finally to the weather vane. She was a few rungs
from it still, and these she climbed, and sat sideways on the topmost one, so
that she would look at it level, the two uprights of the ladder enclosing her
and giving her a little protection from the still-freshening wind. She and the
weather vane were the two tallest points for as far as she might see, but she
was no longer looking out; she was gazing at what she had come to see.
It was the profile of a woman, with a great sweep of hair behind
her, as if belled out by the wind, and in her hands she held the stem of a
rose, whose head pointed away from her; this was the narrow finger Beauty had
glimpsed looking up from the ground. The rose was half open and cut so carefully
that the smith had let little tines of light peep through where the edges of
the petals would curve round the heart of the flower, as the woman’s hair had
been cut so that light gleamed through the windblown strands. The woman held
the stem against her breast, as if it were growing from her heart.
Beauty reached out and touched it.
There was a great ringing gust of wind from somewhere which
nearly knocked her off her precarious perch. In her delight at the weather
vane, she had let go with both her hands: the hand that had not reached out to
touch the vane was laid flat against the short roof of the cupola. As the wind
grasped at her and pulled and shook her, she seized the vane, first with one
hand and then the other, and then she was lying facedown over the square
pyramidal peak of the glasshouse, her arms wrapped round the base of the vane,
her cheek flat against the glass and her forehead against her upper arm, while
the wind shrieked and pried at her fingers, levered itself under her body like
human hands plucking at a cloth doll, and rattled the heavy ladder where it
stood.
The sky darkened, and the wind swelled further, and its
shriek became a roar, and she felt the first drops of rain on her back, huge,
heavy drops, striking her like stones. She clung where she was, the vane
turning this way and that above her head; she felt the vibration through the
pole she held. She was weeping now, her sobs lost in the sudden storm; even if
the wind died away as abruptly as it had begun, she would not have been able to
move, and knowing this, she was even more frightened. And now she could feel
the ladder jolting under her hip. with a slow, regular jolt; she supposed the
wind would have it off altogether soon.
She must have lost consciousness. The wind’s roar dulled,
though she still heard it, and it still shook her where she lay, but not so
strongly. But she no longer seemed to be lying down, but sitting, sitting in a
straight-backed chair; she was in a small, comfortable room, with a great many
other people.... As she looked round, she reordered her labouring thoughts and
realised that it was a small room only in comparison to the rooms of the
Beast’s palace and crowded only in comparison with their emptiness; there were
about twenty people in it, which would have been a small intimate group when
the sisters had given parties in the city.
I am dreaming, she thought, as 1 have dreamt before. And
then she saw her father standing at the front of the room, one hand on the
mantelpiece, the other holding a little clutch of papers, and he was reading
aloud:
“Yours while I live, and yours still, though I die T
sign, and seal this letter with a sigh.
...”
The wind hurled itself down the chimney, and a little puff
of sparks and ash fell onto the hearth-rug; it flung itself at the windows till
they rattled in their frames, and the curtains moved uneasily in the draughts. But
the audience never stirred, listening to the reader with all their attention;
only Beauty jumped in her chair, feeling the rain beating her down, the wind
clawing at her.. .. She seemed to be at the end of the second row, on the
centre aisle. When she started. a cat, which had been lying on the hearth-rug
just out of range of any misbehaviour on the part of the fire, sat up and
stared at her. This was an orange marmalade cat, with great amber eyes almost
the colour of its coat.
“While Reason hesitated, Love obeyed. No foe withstood
him, nor no friendship stayed.
...”
Beauty had difficulty attending to every word; her hearing
was full of wind and rain; she seemed to drop in and out of the story, as the
young man faced the cruel father and the wealthy baron to save his true love,
and it was the lady herself who, ignored in the ensuing melee, slipped between
the men, pulled the dagger from its sheath at the baron’s thigh, and, as he
turned to shout at her, sweeping his sword round to menace her, ducked, and
thrust it between his ribs. The wind howled tike a pack coursing a tiring stag;
Beauty could hear nothing else. But the lovers had escaped.
“
Their hoofs, so quietly the horses strode, Scarce
stirred the pale dust of the moonlit road.’
’
Everyone applauded. It was a friendly noise, and for a few
moments it drowned out the sound of the storm outside. Beauty saw Jeweltongue
stand up and go to embrace her father, and then everyone applauded again, and
there was Mr Whitehand, the baker, standing up beside the place where
Jeweltongue had been sitting, and then everyone was standing up and applauding,
except Beauty herself, who seemed to be bound where she sat, and the marmalade
cat, still perched on the hearth-rug staring at her.
The applause tapered off but was replaced by excited conversation.
Beauty could follow little of it—there was an animated discussion going on to
one side of her about what sort of dagger the bad baron was likely to have been
carrying in an exposed thigh sheath—but she thought she recognised the woman
who was their hostess by her proprietorial manner; and by the dazed but
good-humoured look of those listening to her, and the size of her parlour, she
guessed this was Mrs Oldhouse, the woman Jeweltongue had described as Mrs
Words-Without-End.
There was a lull, and Beauty heard a single voice clearly:
Mrs Words-Without-End was saying that there was a small supper laid out in the
next room. As she turned to indicate the way, her glance fell on her marmalade
cat. “Oh!” she said. “Our ghost must have joined us; how very interesting;
usually she is very shy. It must be the weather; it makes me feel quite odd
myself. How the wind bays! Did anyone sit on the end chair of the second row?”
There was a general negative murmur.
“Well Becky,” said Mrs Words-Without-End to the cat, “do try
to make her feel at home, since you are the only one who can see her this
evening, and I cannot believe your unwinking stare is the best way to go about
it.” There was a blast of wind that Beauty felt might almost drive the rain
through her skin; Mrs Words-Without-End gave a little “Oh!” and clutched
distractedly at her collar, fidgeting with a brooch and the lace spilling round
it.
“Supper can wait a little,” suggested someone behind Beauty.
“It’s the perfect night for a ghost story,” someone else
said cajolingly.
“Yes—yes, I suppose it is,” said Mrs Words-Without-End,
still fidgeting and looking at the rain sluicing down the nearest window. “It
is a very romantic story . , , although I daresay it may have improved over
time and telling. My grandmother said this happened before her grandmother’s
grandmother’s time, when there were still greenwitches living all about here,
and at least one sorcerer. Well, you all know that part of the story, do you
not? There are a good many versions of it about, and many of them do not agree
about what the—the definition of the problem was, but they ail agree that the
beginning of it was a sorcerer.
“So many problems do start with a sorcerer. My grandmother
said that this one was even more vain, and unfortunately more powerful, than
usual, and he grew very jealous of a certain young man who also lived in this
neighbourhood and who was himself a very great—a very great philosopher. That
is, that is what he chose to call himself, a philosopher, although in fact he
too was a sorcerer, but a very unlikely one. Do you remember that my father
collected folk-tales? He was particularly interested in this one, because it
was in his own family. My grandmother told me the story, but it was my father
who told me that he had never read nor heard of any other sorcerer who did not
care for magic in itself at all, who declared—as this sorcerer who called
himself a philosopher did—that it was a false discipline which led only to
disaster.”