Beauty and the Beast: Lost in a Book

by Jennifer Donnelly

  No one replied.

  That’s odd, Belle thought, turning to look at them.

  They were right there, standing stock-still. Not one of them had budged since the Beast had left the room. They gazed at the empty doorway as if in a daze.

  “Plumette? Mrs. Potts? Is something wrong?” Belle asked, puzzled by their strange behavior.

  “The master was angry…” Lumiere started.

  “But he didn’t shout,” Plumette finished, amazement in her voice.

  “He didn’t roar,” added Cogsworth.

  “Or break a single thing,” said Mrs. Potts, wonderingly. “It must be because…”

  She glanced at Lumiere, then Cogsworth, looking as if she’d said too much. Her words trailed away.

  “Because of what?” Belle eagerly asked, hoping she might learn something, anything, that would help her understand why she was here.

  But Mrs. Potts disappointed her. She merely said, “Because he has to get back to his work.”

  Frustration gripped Belle. She wanted to press her for more information, but she knew it would get her nowhere. Mrs. Potts was already back at the windows, steaming them clean. This always happened. The servants always found something to do or somewhere to be when she asked the wrong questions.

  Belle felt a crushing loneliness descend on her. The Beast was gone, and the servants had all turned to their tasks. She suddenly missed her father terribly. Thinking about the time they’d discovered the fox in the trap had made her yearn for his company. If only she could talk to him. Even if it was just for an hour. But she knew that was not going to happen. Not now. Not ever.

  Refusing to give in to her feelings of hopelessness, Belle picked up half a dozen books off the floor and looked for a place to put them.

  She reminded herself that she was much better off than she had been a day ago. She had the Beast’s library now. She might be lonely—being a captive in a strange castle where it was always winter could make anyone feel lonely. But she wasn’t alone. She had Shakespeare for company now. Molière. Dante. Rousseau.

  She would find out the truth behind her captivity. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but one day she would.

  And until then, she would take comfort in books.

  Just as she always had.

  “I’VE PUT A CRICK IN MY SPRINGS,” said Cogsworth direly, his hands pressed to the back of his casing. “I fear I shall never chime properly again.”

  It was four o’clock. Dusk was settling over the castle. Belle and her friends had been cleaning for eight hours, with only a short break.

  “An easy chair and a rest by the fire will set you to rights, Mr. Cogsworth,” said Mrs. Potts. “I set out some oil for you, to ease your gears, and fluffed a nice, soft pillow for you.”

  “Dear woman, you are an angel of mercy!” Cogsworth exclaimed. He bent down to pick up a rag off the floor, wincing as he did, then headed for the door.

  “Cogsworth, wait!” Belle said, running to catch up with him.

  He stopped and turned around. “Do not tell me I missed a spot!” he cautioned.

  “May I tell you thank you?” she asked, kneeling down to kiss his cheek.

  Cogsworth smiled. “That you may, my darling girl,” he said, patting her arm.

  “And you, too, Mrs. Potts, Plumette, Lumiere,” Belle added, looking at each of her friends in turn. “It would have taken me a month to do all this work by myself. You were all so kind to help, and it means so much to me.”

  “It was our pleasure,” Lumiere said.

  “Hardly!” grumbled Plumette. She looked around, assessing their work. “But the place does look very nice.”

  Cogsworth, rag in hand, walked stiffly out of the library. Belle could hear his groans carrying up from the stairwell. Plumette and Lumiere trailed after him.

  Mrs. Potts followed, then turned back in the doorway. Her eyes traveled from Belle’s face to her boots and back again. “If you could see yourself, child!” she said, chuckling. “You look as if you’ve been crawling up chimneys all day!”

  Belle laughed. She stuffed the dust rag she was still holding into her skirt pocket.

  “Are you not coming down? I’ve put the kettle on for tea,” Mrs. Potts said.

  “Perhaps in a moment,” Belle said, gazing past Mrs. Potts at a shelf full of books.

  Mrs. Potts smiled. “I quite understand. Tea and biscuits aren’t as tempting as stories, not for a bookworm. Do come down for some dinner, though, child. The master’s eating in his study tonight, so dinner will only be a simple affair, but we’ll fix you something nourishing. You need a good meal after all the work you’ve done.”

  Belle promised she would, and Mrs. Potts went downstairs to join the others. As soon as she was gone, Belle turned and looked at the library. Her library. The floorboards had been polished to a deep shine. A fire was burning in the hearth. Every single inch of shelving had been dusted. The cobwebs were gone. The windows were gleaming.

  She picked up a candlestick and walked along a wall of towering bookcases, running her fingers over spines, eyeing titles, feeling as if she were the richest person in the world.

  When she came to the end of the row, she saw the window seat. A book lay open on its thick velvet cushion—a book on pirates.

  “Chip,” Belle said, shaking her head.

  She put her candle down, picked the book up, and put it away. As she did, her eyes fell upon a narrow wooden door tucked between two tall bookcases catty-corner from the window seat.

  It was slightly ajar.

  Belle hadn’t cleaned whatever was on the other side. She’d been so busy at the front of the library, she hadn’t even seen the door. Had anyone else?

  “Crumbs,” she sighed. “Don’t tell me we missed an entire room.”

  Holding her candle out in front of her, Belle walked to the door. She grasped the knob, and as she did—a sense of dread, heavy and chilling as winter fog, descended on her. She felt her body go cold and quickly drew her hand away.

  “Stop it, you goose,” she said aloud, annoyed by her silly behavior. “Get hold of yourself.”

  Pushing the door open, she stepped into a small, dark room. It was even dustier than the rest of the library had been. Shining her candle around it, she saw that there was nothing sinister in the room at all—only a desk upon which lay quills, an empty inkpot, a dried-up pot of glue, paper, cloth, and a thick ledger with the word ACQUISITIONS written on it.

  The room had obviously been used to catalog new books and repair old ones. Perhaps the castle had had its own librarian once. Belle smiled to think that she was a librarian now. She vowed to keep a well-organized, tidy library—one that would make Pere Robert proud.

  She opened the ancient ledger. Its last entry, written in a neat, precise hand, described a first edition of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, purchased from a bookseller in Venice for a princely sum.

  Belle’s heart quickened at the thought of holding such a precious, priceless book in her hand, but Dante would have to wait until tomorrow. She was too tired to even open a book right now, much less hunt for one.

  She closed the ledger, and as she did, a ghostly wail rose behind her. She spun around, gasping with fright, but soon saw the cause. The room’s only window was slightly open, and the winter wind was whistling through. A coating of snow had blown onto the sill.

  Belle shivered. She put her candle down and closed the window. The idea of sitting by a cheerful fire in the kitchen with a cup of tea and her friends for company suddenly seemed quite appealing. She picked up her candle and was just about to leave the workroom when something else caught her eye—a heavy black book resting on a table to the left of the window.

  “That’s strange. Why aren’t you shelved?” she wondered aloud, walking over to it.

  The book’s leather binding was oddly free of dust. Had someone come in here to read it? Had the Beast left it out for her?

  She looked at the floor, but the only footprints in the dust were her own. Frownin
g, she bent down to the book. Its title was stamped on the cover in gold.

  “‘Nevermore,’” she read aloud. Intrigued, she picked it up.

  The book was warm. Belle felt a faint pulsing as she touched it. As if it had a heartbeat. As if it were alive. Startled, she dropped it.

  It landed on the table with a loud thump.

  Then it snapped upright.

  BELLE TOOK A STEP BACK. She was used to objects that talked and moved now, but she hadn’t expected the book to be one of them.

  The Beast had warned her that the library contained a few enchanted books, and that some of them tended to be unruly. Was this one? What was it going to do?

  “I-I’m sorry I disturbed you,” Belle said hesitantly. “I didn’t mean to.”

  The book didn’t respond to her apology. Instead, it moved to the edge of the table, walking on its bottom corners, and jumped down.

  Belle moved farther away, but as she did, her heel caught in the rug. She lost her balance and fell on the floor with a hard, jarring thud.

  For a few seconds, she thought it was her new perspective that made Nevermore look bigger than it had.

  But as her head cleared, she saw that she was wrong.

  The book was growing.

  AS BELLE WATCHED, saucer-eyed, Nevermore expanded.

  Taller and taller it grew, until it towered over her. When it was nearly touching the ceiling, it stopped growing, and then its front cover swung open, ever so slightly, and sounds spilled out of it: a woman’s laughter, a man’s shout, horses whinnying, music, glasses clinking.

  Belle didn’t know whether to feel scared or thrilled. And then she saw something—something spidery and black crouching in the shadow between Nevermore’s cover and its pages. It darted out of the book and crawled up a wall. Another scurried up the side of the desk. A third jumped onto a bookshelf.

  Belle, still sitting on the floor, scuttled backward, away from the creatures. What are they? she wondered warily. Bugs? Mice?

  The cover opened wider and more of the creatures crawled out. Belle scrambled to her feet, ready to stamp them away if they came close.

  But then one did, and Belle’s wariness turned to wonder as she saw what it was. Not an insect or a rodent, but a word.

  She knelt down and put her hand on the floor, palm up. EAGER jumped onto it. OAF ran over her toes. CERTAIN chased DUBIOUS around the room. PRECIOUS and EXQUISITE shoved each other.

  The room was filling up with words. They spilled out of the book like water tumbling down a streambed. They curled around her ankles and tugged on the hem of her skirt.

  Belle put EAGER down. As she did, Nevermore’s cover creaked all the way open. Its pages started turning, slowly at first, then faster, blowing Belle’s hair back, plastering her skirts to her legs. Then they abruptly stopped. And the book remained open to a page with only five words on it: THE COUNTESS GIVES A PARTY.

  That page slowly turned, and Belle caught her breath, astonished by what she saw.

  There were no words on the paper, just a picture that took up the entire page. As Belle looked at it, the picture came to life. Dancers whirled. An orchestra played. Belle smelled perfume, wine, and roses.

  People, she thought. A longing as deep as hunger filled her as she realized how much she missed human faces, laughter, and conversation.

  She walked up to the page and touched it. It rippled and sparkled under her fingers like the surface of a sun-dappled pond. Mesmerized, she pushed her arm into it all the way up to her elbow, then pulled it back out. Droplets of silvery light clung to her skin like melted candlewax, then hardened in the air. When she shook them off, they landed on the wooden floor, sparkling like diamonds.

  “What are you?” she murmured to the book.

  As if answering her, the page rippled again. The book seemed to be beckoning to her. She’d put her arm into the silver with no ill effect….What if she stepped into the book? Was that even possible?

  Belle’s heartbeat quickened with excitement at the thought of walking into Nevermore’s pages and finding out where the laughter and music were coming from, but something held her back. What was inside those pages? What if she didn’t like it there? How would she get back?

  She remembered what the Beast had told her about the enchanted books. Most are harmless, but one or two…can be a little unruly.

  If I can handle the Beast, I can handle unruly, she thought.

  Then she took a deep breath.

  And stepped into the story.

  “MADEMOISELLE! LOOK OUT!” a voice cried.

  Belle turned around. Her heart lurched. She screamed.

  A carriage drawn by four enormous gray horses was bearing down on her out of the darkness. She leapt out of the way, flattening herself against a prickly hedge. The carriage flew past her and disappeared.

  Shaking with fright, Belle pressed a hand to her chest. Had the driver called out a split second later, she would’ve been trampled.

  “Where am I?” she whispered, looking all around.

  Nevermore stood upright, only a few paces away, its pages shimmering. But the library’s workroom was gone.

  “The book must be some sort of portal,” Belle reasoned. “A doorway from the library to here. Wherever here is.”

  It was nighttime, and as Belle’s eyes adjusted, she saw that she was standing in a graveled drive. Candles flickered in lanterns lining its edges. The drive appeared to cut through a vast estate, its grounds dotted by huge, leafy oaks, yew trees, rosebushes, and shrubs cut in the shape of animals.

  Still trembling, Belle looked to her left and saw a pair of tall iron gates, open to let carriages through. A coat of arms was emblazoned on them. It showed two crossed scythes with a motto printed underneath them: OMNIA VINCO.

  Belle had learned a bit of Latin at her village’s tiny library. “‘I conquer all,’” she read aloud. The property must belong to a general, admiral, or powerful nobleman, she thought.

  The gates were anchored to high stone pillars. Thick walls sloped off from them, and statues stood atop them: one of Hades, god of the underworld, the other of Persephone, his wife. Outside the gates lay a vast, inky darkness.

  Belle looked to her right, down the long drive, and saw a golden light shining through the trees.

  Just then another carriage approached, this one drawn by four high-stepping white horses. Belle, standing safely out of the way now, watched as it, too, sped down the drive.

  She cast an uncertain glance at the enchanted book, trying to decide what to do. Part of her wanted to step right back through its pages to the security of the Beast’s castle, but another, more adventurous part wanted to find out where those carriages were going and what was giving off that golden light.

  The adventurous part won out, as it usually did, and Belle set off down the drive at a brisk pace. It curved and dipped as it wound through the estate, leading Belle past heavily wooded patches, ponds and streams, thickets and brambles. There were times when she lost sight of the light altogether and wondered what she’d gotten herself into, but she stayed on the drive and doggedly kept walking. A good quarter hour after she started out, she emerged from a copse of slender birch trees and stopped dead, amazed.

  Before her stood an immense château, a breathtaking Baroque confection, ablaze with candlelight.

  Painted carriages had pulled up to its sweeping staircase—the drivers straight-backed, the horses tossing their heads. The people alighting from them were the most dazzling creatures Belle had ever seen. Their faces were powdered; their lips rouged. Some wore tiny fabric beauty marks on their cheeks. Women wore gowns in all the colors of a summer garden, and men sported silk frock coats and matching breeches. Gemstone buttons winked from their waistcoats.

  Footmen in livery announced the arrival of royalty and foreign dignitaries. Belle watched, wide-eyed, as a Japanese princess, the shah of Persia, a Russian count, and an ambassador from England ascended the stairs.

  They all looked so exotic and fasc
inating, and Belle yearned to speak with them, to hear about their lives and learn about their countries. Until she’d journeyed to the Beast’s castle, Belle had never been out of Villeneuve. Kyoto, Shiraz, St. Petersburg, London—how incredibly exotic those faraway cities were compared with her dull, tiny village.

  With a quick glance around to make sure no one was watching her, Belle scurried closer. She had no right to enter these premises, but she couldn’t help herself. She wanted to drink in every glittering detail. As she hugged the edge of the drive, trying to stay in the shadows, she heard people call out greetings to one another and saw men bow to women and kiss their hands.

  Captivated, she moved closer still. A row of cherry trees fanned out from either side of the mansion’s steps. Belle darted to the one closest to the house, hiding under the lacy branches. She wrapped her arms around the tree’s slender trunk and pressed her cheek against it, aching to join all the beautiful people. But she knew it was a ridiculous wish.

  “What a contrast I’d make to the elegant company,” she said ruefully, looking down at her clothing. “In my filthy dress, with my dusty…”

  Boots, she was about to say, but the word died in her throat.

  Suddenly, her blue work dress was gone. In its place was a shimmering silk ball gown.

  BELLE RELEASED THE CHERRY TREE. She looked around wildly.

  “How…how did this happen?” she stammered.

  Stunned, she touched her dress to make sure it was real. The silk rustled under her hands. She looked at her feet. Her leather boots had been replaced by delicate satin slippers. Her hands went to her hair. It was styled high up on her head. They fluttered to her neck. A cluster of jewels rested against her collarbones.

  “Sapphires,” she said, looking down at them. “I’m wearing sapphires.”

  No one in Villeneuve owned one sapphire, never mind the flawless dozens set in the exquisite necklace.

  The sudden transformation was dizzying. Belle squeezed her eyes shut and counted to ten, certain that when she opened them, she would be wearing her old blue dress again. But no.