Slowly Beauty found the words for her final question: “You said that if I chose that my Beast keep his wealth and influence, we should use it for good and that our names should be spoken in many lands. How will our names be spoken?”
“Ah!” said the voice, and it sounded as light and merry as a little girl’s. “That is the right question. Your names shall be spoken in fear and in dread, for no single human being, nor even the wisest married pair, can see the best way to dispense justice for people beyond their own ken.”
“Then I choose Longchance, and the little goodnesses among the people we know,” said Beauty.
At that moment she opened her eyes, and she saw three unicorns leap into the bonfire glade and turn, as if at bay, and she saw the wild wolves leaping after them. And there was another shock and crash of thunder, but the thunder seemed to crack into a thousand sharp echoes, and each of the echoes was the scream of a falcon or of some great owl.
But the lightning bolt was a bright blue, blue as sky on a summer’s day, and it shattered as it struck, and the fragments whirled up and became blue butterflies. The butterflies converged in great shimmering, radiant clouds, and their wings flickered as they crowded together, and it was as if they were tiny fractured prisms, instead of butterflies, throwing off sparks of all the colours of the rainbow.
But then they became butterflies again, and now there were other colours among them, greens as well as blues, russets and golds and scarlets, and they flew in great billows round the wolves. The wolves recoiled, and shook their heads, and tried to duck under them, or dodge round them, and some of the wolves stood on their hind legs and clawed at them with their forefeet; but the butterflies danced round them, zealous as bees defending their honey from a marauding bear. The wolves could not shake free of them, nor see where the unicorns stood, and so the unicorns drove them from the clearing, smacking them with the sides of their resplendent horns as a fencing-master might smack an inattentive pupil with the side of his sword, pricking them occasionally as a cowherd might prod his cows, but now prancing and bouncing as if this were no more than a game, and so drove the wolves from the clearing, trailing blue and green and russet and gold ribbons of butterflies.
“Quickly,” gasped Beauty, and tugged at the Beast, but he sat up slowly and groggily, moving like one who has long been ill. They would dash through the carriage-way, Beauty thought, run for the glasshouse; she did not believe any wolves would dare cross that threshold. But as she thought this, more wolves leapt into the clearing, but they came from the carriage-way, and Beauty’s hands froze on the Beast’s shoulder, as she stooped beside him, trying to steady his attempts to rise to his feet.
There was a brief soundless whirr just past her face, and a soft plop against her bent thighs. “Oh, bat, bat, do you know where we can go?” she said, and knelt, to give it a lap. The bat folded its wings together and made a funny awkward hop-hop-hop, and then it was in the air, and she looked up, and there were many bats, more and more bats, streaming through the trees like wind, and she saw which way they flew. The Beast was on his feet at last, and she held his arm, felt him sway and check himself, sway and check again. “This way,” she said, and drew him gently after her.
There were so many bats now, they surged past them like a river of darkness, and she could no longer see the wolves or the unicorns or the trees round the clearing. And then there was a smell of earth in her nostrils, and she put out her free hand, and felt the crumbly earth wall of the tunnel, and put her hand over her head, but could find no tree roots. It is very kind that they should make the corridor this time tall enough for the Beast to walk comfortably upright, she thought, and put her hand out to the side again so she could guide them by touching the wall. But the wall was no longer there, and the smell of earth was mixed with the smell of roses, and she could tell by the movement of air that they were no longer in a tunnel.
There was a faint light like the beginning of dawn round them, and they were standing in the middle of the crosspath in the centre of the glasshouse, and the little wild pansies Beauty had planted there spilt over the corners of the beds at their feet, and the roses bloomed everywhere round them, silhouetted in the faint light, and the white roses were shimmers in the gloom.
They waited, listening, clinging to each other. There was the faint, angry baying of a fading storm—or of a pack of wolves whose prey has eluded it, mixed with the occasional hoarse cry of a hunting bird that has missed its strike. But there was some other noise with it, a noise Beauty could not identify, a noise as relentless as wind and rain, as if feet as numerous as raindrops were marching towards them.
They looked round them, and near the door to the glasshouse there was a shape, like that of a bent old woman, except that the pale light shone through her, and she glowed like the horn of a unicorn, and Beauty heard the Beast give a little grunt of surprise and delight, and she thought there was a name in it, but she could not hear what it was. Her attention was caught then by other lucent shapes, standing on the square path that led round the inside of the glasshouse, and these were the unicorns themselves, waiting, watching, poised and alert, lustrous as pearls.
And standing near the rear of the glasshouse were two other Beasts, looking much like her own Beast, huge and shaggy and kind, but as much bigger than her Beast as her Beast was bigger than she. Nor were they terrifying to look upon, but were shaped into a wholeness, a unity, a clarity, and a tranquillity that no mortal creature may possess, and Beauty felt a strange, shivery joy at being so fortunate as to see them with her own eyes. Behind them, instead of the fourth wall of the glasshouse, there seemed to stand the facade of some immense dark fortress.
The sound of the approaching footsteps grew nearer, and Beauty thought calmly: I cannot bear any more. I cannot. She turned her face against the Beast’s body and closed her eyes, but she saw them anyway, the massed sorcerous army, the winged bulls, the manticores and chimeras, the sphinxes, not the small semidomesticated ones of her childhood, but the great wild ones, big as the bulls they marched alongside, who, like the bronze-winged harpies that raged overhead, had wicked human faces, and hair of hissing asps; the stony-eyed basilisks, the loathly worms, the cerberi, the wyverns, like vast, deadly versions of her mother’s pet dragon; and many more creatures she could not, or would not, name.
She had pressed herself against the Beast, and the little embroidered heart made a tiny hole just beneath her breast-bone, guarded by her lower ribs. With every breath it seemed to dig itself a little deeper. And she lay against her beloved’s heart and … began to feel angry. We have come through so much, she thought. Is it for nothing after all? I want to attend my sisters’ wedding, I want to attend my wedding. If all the hordes of sorcery are here gathered to grind us to nothing, is this the way we shall be denied the small homely pleasures we desire, that we have earned? And she remembered a dry sorcerous little voice once saying to her: I give you a small serenity.…
She shook herself free of the Beast so quickly he had no time to react, shook herself free so quickly indeed that her one hand did not unclench itself in time and carried a little of the remains of the Beast’s black shirt away with her, and ran to the door of the glasshouse. She ran at such speed that she had the sensation of running through the shining figure of the old woman. She threw the door open and stood there, facing not the palace but all the worst-omened creatures of the inner and outer worlds, and she clutched the rag of shirt in one hand and her embroidered heart in the other and shook her fists over her head and shouted: “Go away! Can you not see you have already lost? There is nothing for you here!”
There was another clap of thunder as if all the thunder in the ether between the worlds had clapped itself at once, and Beauty had a dazzling glimpse of what had been the sorcerous army rolling about on the ground in confusion and sorting itself out into baffled hedgehogs and bewildered toads, confused spiders, flustered crickets, bumbling bees, disoriented ladybirds and muddled grass-snakes, and hosts of other ordinary an
d innocent creatures.
And the air all round her was full of birdsong.
She heard the laughter of the old woman behind her and heard her voice for the last time, saying, “To think you told poor Mrs Greendown that there was no magic in your family! Bless you, my dear, and your Beast, and bless Rose Cottage, for it is yours now. I am happy with my moon-and starlight friends, and my cows, and my wild wood, and besides, I am too old now to make any more changes.…”
And then Beauty lost consciousness and knew no more.
She woke to gentle hands putting cool cloths on her forehead, and she opened her eyes and smiled. It was Jeweltongue who bent over her and stroked her forehead, but there was someone else sitting at her side and holding one of her hands, with Tea-cosy in his lap, looking there as small as a day-old puppy.
“Your exits and entrances are so dramatic,” said Jeweltongue composedly. “This time you brought with you the most exquisite small glasshouse—it looks as if it were entirely made of spun sugar—although it has rather disrupted the centre of the garden, where it has chosen to root itself. But it will make the most enchanting—if I dare use that term?—wedding pavilion, next week.”
Then she looked at the person who sat at Beauty’s side and said, “I shall have my work cut out for me, finishing your wedding-suit in time. I do not think I have a tape that will reach round you. Fortunately I’ve almost finished with Beauty’s dress; we have rather been expecting you, if you want to know. Call me if you need help keeping her lying down. I am sure she should not get up today, but as you may have noticed, she is a bit impetuous and wilful. And I suspect you of being overindulgent.” And she left them.
They were upstairs in Rose Cottage, and he sat next to her on the floor by the wide lumpy mattress. By her feet lay Fourpaws, her eyes half lidded and a half-grown black kitten playing with her tail. “The first thing I will do is build you a bed frame,” he said. “It is one of the drawbacks of living too deep-sunk in magic, that the homely tasks are all taken away from you.”
“Dishwashing,” said Beauty. “I should be glad of never doing the washing-up again.”
“Then I shall do it,” he replied. “But my second task will be to restuff that mattress.”
“No,” said Beauty. “The first thing you will do is marry me, and the second thing you will do is come with me to Longchance, where we shall scour the town for painting things, for you shall not waste any more of your time on roofs, and if Longchance does not have what we want, we will go directly to Appleborough, and if Appleborough does not have what we want, then we will mount an expedition and go on a quest, and perhaps we will find the Queen of the Heavenly Mountain too. Everything else can wait a little.” She sat up gingerly. “How did we come here?”
“I carried you the last way, but it was not far. When my head stopped spinning on my shoulders, and my eyes cleared of the stars that whirled round and round in them, I found us at the beginning of a little track leading through the woods from the main way, and I thought we must be there for a reason. So I picked you up and carried you here, and I understand there is to be a wedding here in a few days and that there are more people about than there generally are in preparation for it.
“But everyone rushed up to me as if we were what they were waiting for—your sisters call me Mr Beast—and welcomed me, even your father. Then I carried you up here—after I have finished with the bed frame and the mattress, I will build a set of proper stairs—to be out of the bustle below. Not, you know, that I am entirely clear about where here is, but I am sure you will tell me in time.”
“This is Rose Cottage, of course,” said Beauty, “where my family and I moved from the city, when our father’s business failed and we were too poor to do anything else. Here Jeweltongue learnt to sew dresses that made people happy to wear them, and Lionheart learnt the language of horses and how to speak to them instead of merely to rule them, and I learnt to grow roses. And one sister and our father are going to live with her husband, the baker, because they do not love the country so much as they love the town, and my other sister is going to live with her husband, the horse-coper, who is also the squire’s second son, and I hope we are going to live here with lots and lots and lots of roses.”
Beauty fell silent, looking at him, and her mind and heart were so full of love for him she could at first think of nothing else. But then she remembered the first time she had looked into his face and remembered how she had needed the salamander’s gift to do so, and she wondered where that terribleness had gone. Perhaps it had dropped away when he had stood once again in his glasshouse and seen his roses blooming; perhaps it had been torn from him with his fine, sombre clothing—he was presently awkwardly wrapped in a spare quilt, which made a kind of half stole over his shoulders, and it was radiant with pinks and crimsons and purples and sunset colours, for Jeweltongue had made it from bits left over from the Trueword women’s frocks, and the bright colours woke unexpected ruddy highlights in the Beast’s dark hair. Perhaps, said a tiny, almost inaudible voice in the very back of Beauty’s mind, perhaps it left forever when you told him you loved him and wished to marry him.
But then she remembered something else she had done, and her heart smote her. “I—I had to choose for both of us—where I found you, in the bonfire glade. I—I tried to make the best choice I could. Did I—can you—are you unhappy with it?”
Her beloved shook his head. “I am content past my ability to describe. But …” And he hesitated.
“But what?” said Beauty, fearing the answer.
“But … the husband you would have had, had you made the other choice, would have been handsome—as handsome as you are beautiful. I do not know if—”
But Beauty was laughing and would not hear what he might have said. She put her hands over his mouth and, when he had stopped trying to speak through them, took them away only to kiss him. “I would not change a—a hair on your head, except possibly to plait a few of them together, so as not wholly to obscure the collar and front of the wedding-suit Jeweltongue designs. But I—I think I will choose to believe that you would miss being able to see in the dark, and to be careless of the weather, and to walk as silently as sunlight. Because I love my Beast, and I would miss him very much if he went away from me and left me with some handsome stranger.”
“Then everything is exactly as it should be,” said the Beast.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
My first novel was called Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast. It was published almost twenty years ago.
Beauty and the Beast has been my favourite fairy-tale since I was a little girl, but I wrote Beauty almost by accident, because the story I was trying to write was too difficult for me. Beauty was just a sort of writing exercise—at first. I very nearly didn’t have the nerve to send it to a publisher when I was done. Everyone knows the fairy-tale, I thought. Everyone knows how it ends; no one—certainly no publisher—will care.
But a publisher did take it, and a lot of people have told me they like it. And that was that. Of course I wasn’t going to tell Beauty and the Beast again, even if it was my favourite fairy-tale. Even if it has been retold hundreds of times by different storytellers, in different cultures and different centuries. Even though I knew it had resonances as deep as human nature, as the best fairy-and folk-tales do, including a lot that I couldn’t reach, though I could feel they were there.
Five years ago I moved to England to marry the writer Peter Dickinson. I was happy in Maine, where I had been living, with my typewriter, one whippet, and several thousand books, in my little lilac-covered cottage on the coast. And then I found myself three thousand miles away, in another country, living in an enormous, ramshackle house surrounded by flower-beds and covered in wisteria and clematis and ancient climbing roses whose names no one remembered.
Gardening in Maine is an epic struggle, where you can have frosts as late as June and as early as August, where a spade thrust anywhere in the so-called soil will hit granite
bedrock a few inches down and rattle your teeth in your skull, and where roses are called annuals only half-jokingly. In England garden-visiting is the top item on the list of tourist attractions—before any of the cathedrals or any of the museums, before Stonehenge or the Tower of London. I didn’t plan to become a gardener, but I don’t think I could help it. Peter says that the disease had obviously been lying dormant in my blood, and southern England and a gardening husband have been a most effective catalyst.
It occurred to me, now and then, as I planted more rosebushes—because while I am a passionate gardener, I am a rose fanatic—that it’s almost a pity I’d said all I had to say about Beauty and the Beast. There was so much about roses I’d left out, because I didn’t know any better.
Last winter I sold my house in Maine. I still loved it, even though I knew I would never live there again, and I knew it would be a tremendous wrench to cut myself loose from that last major attachment of owning property in the country where I was born. I was not expecting, when Peter and I returned to Maine to close up, sign papers, and say good-bye, that everything I have missed about life in America as an American—which I had ordered myself to ignore while I put down roots over here—would rush out of hiding and start hammering me flat, like some of Tolkien’s dwarves having a go at a recalcitrant bit of gold leaf. It wasn’t just a wrench; it felt like being drawn and quartered.
We came home to southern England in a late, bleak, cold spring, and I sat at my desk and stared into space, feeling as if I were barely convalescent after a long illness.
A friend of mine who runs an art gallery in SoHo (New York, not London) asked me if I would consider writing him a short-story version of Beauty and the Beast for one of his artists to illustrate. I said no, I can’t; I’ve said all I have to say about that story.
But as I sat at my typewriter—or looked over my shoulder at the black clouds and sleet—I didn’t feel up to anything too demanding, like the novel I was supposed to be working on. I thought, I’ll have a go at this short story. Something might come of it. I can do a little more with roses; that’ll be fun.
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