He glanced towards the Beast, who had his back to him, and the merchant was suddenly, unwelcomely shaken by an unmistakable flare of pity, for the Beast stood with his great shoulders and head bowed in a posture unfathomably sorrowful. If he had been a man, and even if that man had threatened his life but a moment before, the merchant would have put a hand on his shoulder. But he was a Beast, and the merchant remained next to his wall. But he wondered … and now, perhaps, he hoped.
The Beast turned back towards the merchant, catching the edge of the sunlight again, halving the bright track that led to the merchant’s feet, and fragments of light glanced off the curves and angles of his face as he turned. The merchant’s breath caught on a sob, and he turned his own face to the wall. He did not dare close his eyes—were not the Beast’s footfalls silent?—but he had, just then, confused by pity and dread and daylight, nearly looked into the Beast’s face.
“Your daughter loves roses, does she?” the Beast said at last. Now that he was no longer roaring, his voice was so deep the merchant had to strain to hear the words. “They grow for her, do they?”
“Oh yes,” said the merchant eagerly, looking at the Beast’s feet. “Everything in the garden grows for her, but the roses most of all. Everyone in the town comments on it.” The merchant raised his eyes just to the Beast’s breast level; his peripheral vision told him the Beast still stood with his shoulders stooped and his head lowered. The merchant was appalled when he heard his own voice saying: “I—I—may I bring you some this summer, to—to replace what I—I stole? Her—her—her wreaths are very much admired.…”
In the silence following his involuntary words, the merchant heard his heart drumming in his ears, and there was a red fog over his vision that was not explained by the crimson carpet. The Beast stood as if considering. “No,” he said at last. “No. I want your daughter.”
The merchant gasped; a great pain seized his breast, and two tears rolled down his face.
“Stand up, man, and catch your pony, and ride home. I could kill you, you know, and it would be my right, for you have stolen my rose. But I am not going to kill you. Go home and tell your daughter to come to me.”
“No—oh no!” cried the merchant. “No—you may as well kill me now, for I will not sacrifice one of my daughters to take my place!”
“Sacrifice?” said the Beast. “I said nothing of killing the girl. She will be safe here, as safe as you were, last night, till you stole my rose. Nothing comes here that is dangerous—save me—and I give you my word she will take no harm of me.”
The merchant, far from standing up, had sunk down, as his knees gave way, and now he bowed down till his forehead nearly touched the floor, and covered his face with his hands.
“Nay, you think a Beast’s word is not to be trusted?” As the Beast strode towards him, the merchant, in a final spasm of terror, struggled again to his feet and spread his hands, thinking to meet his death as bravely as he could, but all he felt was the sleek thickness of the Beast’s fur as he forced his huge clawed hand into the breast of the merchant’s coat. He saw the Beast’s great hand closing tight round the rose’s stem; when he opened it again, the palm had been pierced by one of the thorns, and three drops of blood fell softly to the crimson carpet, making a dark stain like a three-petalled flower or the first unfurling of a rosebud.
“I am a man in this,” said the Beast, staring down at the merchant; the merchant felt that look burning into his scalp. “I keep my promises. By my own blood I swear it.
“I am lonely here—tell your daughter that. She is a kind girl, you say. Just as no fierce creatures come here for fear of me, who am fiercer, so no gentle ones come either. I desire companionship.
“I give you a month; send her to me by then, or, believe this, merchant—I will come and fetch her. Take her this as a token of my oath.” And the Beast bowed down low before the merchant’s amazed eyes, lower than the merchant would have guessed any Beast of such bulk could bow, till his long mane trailed on the carpet and mixed with the crumpled wings of his black gown, and laid the rose at the merchant’s feet.
The Beast sprang up at a bound, turned, and took two steps out of the doorway, turned again, and disappeared. The merchant heard no footfalls, but perhaps that was only because of the ringing in his ears.
He slowly picked up the rose and stood staring at it. As he had fixed his mind on the Beast’s garments a little time before, now he fixed his mind on this rose. It seemed to him he had never seen one so dark, in its centre almost as black as the silhouette of the Beast; but the outer petals were of a redness more perfect and pure than he could remember seeing anywhere in his life, with no hint of blue suggesting purple, no weakening of its depth of colour towards pink; and as most of Beauty’s roses reminded him of silk, so this one reminded him of velvet.
He looked up. He seemed quite alone, and his heartbeat no longer deafened him. He took a cautious step; again his legs would hold him. He turned away from the sunlight, walked back down the corridor, and found his pony trembling in the now-empty alcove where she had spent the night. So glad was she to see him that he led her without fuss back towards the front door and towards the place where they had met the Beast, though he felt her neck under his comforting hand still rigid with fear. He mounted just over the threshold, and they set out on their journey once again.
CHAPTER
5
It was hardly noontime when the merchant saw the tiny track to Rose Cottage winding off to the right of the wider track he was on, which he had found almost at once, as soon as the pony had stepped into the trees at the edge of the Beast’s garden. He was not fully convinced that he was not still held in some dream-state manipulated by the Beast, and he often reached out and touched the branches of trees, when they passed near enough, to reassure himself of their reality—but what, he said to himself despairingly, was not a sorcerer as great as the Beast capable of?
But then Beauty was running towards him; she had seen him from where she had been in the garden, and she flew to him, and half dragged him off the pony, and embraced him, laughing, and crying Jeweltongue and Lionheart’s names. It wasn’t till all three sisters—and Tea-cosy—were there, hugging and patting him and saying (or barking) how glad they were to see him (under the astonished gaze of Lydia, who stopped eating to watch), how relieved they were to have him home with them again, that it came to them he was not rejoicing with them.
“Father, what is it?” said Lionheart.
He shook his head. “Let me sit down—let us all sit down, and I will tell you. Beauty—this is for you.” And he took the rose from the breast of his coat. It should have been crushed and wilting after several hours in a pocket, but it was not; it was still a perfectly scrolled, half-open goblet-shaped bud of richest red, poised delicately on a long stem armed with the fiercest thorns.
“Oh! What a beauty!” said Beauty. “I have none of that colour. I wonder if it would strike if I cut the stem?”
Lionheart had turned to the pony. “That’s a good little beast,” she said, not noticing how her father shivered at the word beast. “Is she your profit from the city? You could have done much worse.”
Jeweltongue was rubbing one of her father’s lapels between her fingers. “That is the most elegant cloth. I wish I had some of that. Perhaps I can ask the traders to look out for some for me when they come through again. Father, you must tell me where you found it. Master Jack would buy a coat of that faster than his sisters order dresses.”
“Father, you have pricked yourself,” said Beauty. “There is blood on the stem.”
And then the old merchant shuddered so terribly that he nearly fell down, and the sisters forgot everything in their anxiety for him.
He seemed to them to be feverish, and so they drew out his bed, and pulled off his boots, and tucked him up with blankets and propped him with pillows, and fed him soup, and told him not to talk but just to rest. He wanted to resist them, but he found he had no strength to resist, so he dr
ank the soup and lay back, murmuring, “I will lie here just a little while, and then I will tell you,” but as he said, “I will tell you,” his face relaxed, and he was asleep.
Once or twice that day he woke and said aloud in distress, “I must tell you—I must tell you,” and each time one of the sisters went and sat beside him, and took his hand, and said, “Yes, yes, of course you will tell us, but wait a little till you’re feeling stronger. You have had a very long journey, and you are weary.”
Beauty dreamt the dream that night, but the endless corridor was lined with rose-bushes, and while she could see no roses, their scent was heavy upon the air. But this time the perfume gave her no comfort, and the long thorny branches tore at her as she tried to walk past them, and one caught her cheek. With the sharp suddenness of the pain she almost cried out, only just stopping herself by biting her lips, and when she touched her face, there was blood upon her fingertips. When she woke, she found blood on her pillow; she had bitten her lip in her sleep, and three drops had fallen on the pillow slip, making a shape like a three-petalled flower or a rose-bud just unfurling.
The old merchant slept all the rest of the next day, and that night, and the day following, waking seldom, though sleeping restlessly, and Beauty and Jeweltongue went about their ordinary tasks with heavy hearts and distracted minds, wondering what their father would tell them and wishing both that he might sleep a little longer so they need not hear it quite yet, and that he might wake soon and let them know the worst. Lionheart, much valued as she now was by her employers, had asked and been granted special leave to come home every evening while her father was so ill, at least till she had some notion of whether he grew sicker or would mend. She left before dawn and came home after dark, riding her father’s pony, whom she had named Daffodil, and she was tired and short of sleep, but so were all three sisters, for worry.
On the third evening, at last, the old merchant’s head cleared, and he called his daughters to him, that he might tell them his story, and he told them all of it, sparing himself nothing. He finished by saying, “I do not wish to lie to you now. But there is no question of Beauty taking my place. As soon as I am strong enough again to walk that far, I will return to the Beast’s palace. And then the Beast can deal with me as he sees fit. But I am glad to have had the chance to see you all, my dears, my dearer-than-dears, this final time, to tell you how much I love you and to say goodbye.”
Beauty had sat cold and motionless through the last of her father’s story, and at these words the tears ran down her cheeks and dropped into her lap. “Ah! That I should have asked you for a rose! I was selfish in my little, little sorrow—and it is I who will take up the fate I have earned. Father, I am going to the Beast’s palace.”
He would not hear of it; but she would hear of nothing else, and they argued. Beauty, always the gentle one, the peace-maker, was roused to fury at last; she crossed her arms tightly over her stomach as if she were holding herself together and roared like Lionheart—or like the Beast. But the old man’s strength came back to him twice over in this, and for a little while he was again the man he had been just after the death of his wife, wild with the strength of grief and loss. And so the old merchant and his youngest daughter shouted at each other till Tea-cosy fled the house and hid in the now-crowded shed with the goat, the chickens, and the pony, Daffodil.
But Jeweltongue and Lionheart, after a little thought, came in on Beauty’s side, saying, “He says she will take no harm of him, and he declared he would kill you!”
“I am old, and the little left remaining of my life is worthless; you love me, but that is all. The three of you will do well enough without me.”
But that all three of his daughters should range themselves against him was too much for him after all, for he was older now, and the winter had gone very hardly with him, and he had been near the end of what remained of his bodily strength before the blizzard and the meeting with the Beast. His fever came on him again, and he lay half senseless for many days, rousing himself occasionally to forbid Beauty to leave him, although he seemed to have forgotten where she was going. The sisters took a little of what remained of their thatching money—for they had come through the lean winter just past with a little to spare, partly on account of having one less mouth to feed in their father’s absence—and paid the local leech for a tonic, but it had no effect.
“I do not think he will mend till I am gone,” said Beauty at last, a fortnight after their father had come home with his dreadful news. But then her sisters clung to her, and Jeweltongue wept openly, and even Lionheart’s face was wet, although she had twisted her expression into her most ferocious scowl.
“I will—I will surely be able to visit,” Beauty said, weeping with them. “This palace must be close at hand—as Father has described it. Or he is so great a sorcerer as to make it seem so, and I do not care the truth of it. I am a quick walker—I will find a way to come here sometime and tell you how I get on. It will—perhaps I will be like Lionheart, who comes home every seven days. I will—I will weed the garden, while Lionheart bakes bread. Remember, he has—he has promised no harm to me. And—can a Beast who loves roses so much be so very terrible?”
Her eyes turned again to the red rose in the vase on the windowsill. It had opened slowly and was now a huge flat cupful of darkest red petals, and its perfume filled the little house. As its colour was like none of her roses, so was its perfume different from them also; this was a deeper, richer, wilder smell, and it seemed almost to follow her round during the day, so that it was in her mouth when she cleaned out the shed or weeded the farthest row in her vegetable garden. And it came to her every night, in the dream, where the rose-bushes now grew thicker and thicker, till they crossed the corridor and tangled with the bushes on the other side, and she could only force her way through them more and more slowly, wrapping her hands awkwardly in her skirts as she handled the dangerous stems. And yet, in her dream, it never occurred to her not to go on; it did not even occur to her to look behind her and see if the way back was clear.
Beauty had cut two bits off the long stem of the dark red rose and thrust them into her cuttings bed, and she spoke to them every day, saying, “Please shoot for me, for my sisters and my father, so that they may think of me when they see you bloom,” for she in truth did not believe, in her heart of hearts, that the Beast would keep his promise. But it was equally clear to her that this was her fate, that she had called its name and it had come to her, and she could do nothing now but own it.
And so it was less than three weeks since the old merchant’s return when Beauty packed up the few things she had chosen to take with her and set out. But she had thought often and long about her father’s story: how the Beast had been roused by the theft of the rose, how he had dwindled and looked sad, how he had taken particular interest in the daughter who believed her roses were her friends. And so she took one more thing with her, secretly, tucked away in her clothing.
She embraced her sisters on the doorstep in the early morning. Their father had had a bad night, and Jeweltongue had sat up with him. There were hollows under her eyes and heavy lines around her mouth, where there had never been lines before. Lionheart looked little better, for her late-and-early hours were telling even on her strength. The three of them spoke quietly, for their father was finally asleep, and they hoped that he would not learn that Beauty was gone till it was too late to stop or to follow her.
Tea-cosy, aware that something had gone wrong with the old merchant’s homecoming, had been shadowing each sister in turn so closely that whoever was chosen for that hour could not move without tripping over her. In the last few days she had apparently decided that the wrongness threatened Beauty most and never left her side, generally creeping up the loft ladder during the night to sleep on her feet and having to be carried down in the mornings. She was now leaning against Beauty’s shins so heavily she felt like a boulder instead of a small dog, except that boulders don’t tremble.
“I
cannot think the Beast’s palace can be found unless he chooses it be found; surely Father will understand that searching is useless.…” Beauty’s voice trailed away. “Do not forget to water my cuttings bed every day; twice a day, if the summer grows hot.…” Again her voice faltered. It was difficult to think of what needed to be said when there was so much and so little to choose from. Finally she stood silent, gripping her sisters’ hands, smelling the warm human smell of them, the scent of each as precise and individual as the shape of her face, and she was terribly aware that she was going to a place where there would be no hands to grasp nor arms to embrace her, and no friendly human smells.
Jeweltongue loosed her hand from Lionheart’s and reached into a pocket in her apron. “This is for you,” she said to Beauty. She held out a tiny embroidered heart on a silk rope. “It’s to—to—I don’t know. It’s not to remember us by, because I know you’ll remember us, but it’s to have something to hold in your hand when you think of us. I—I only thought of it myself a few nights ago; you know it’s been so hard to think clearly about anything since Father returned.… I would have made you a rose, but I didn’t think I could do one well enough in so short a time; hearts I can do in my sleep. As I think I did this one. And—I’ve used some of Lionheart’s hair. You remember you picked up the bits after you finished cutting it, and put them in the old sugar bowl on the mantel? So you have both of us, Lionheart and me. Here. Take it.”
Beauty released both hands to take the silk rope and set it round her neck, and then the three sisters embraced, till Beauty broke away and went running down the track, her tears cold on her face in the early-morning breeze, and the desolate howl of Tea-cosy in her ears.
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