“I-! I'm so terribly sorry. I didn't think to look at the time. I, um, apologise profusely-”
“Calm down. You can only see a spot of ankle. Honestly, you'd think I was naked.”
“Sorry, I'm just not used to seeing a lady in her undergarments-”
“Well, you may have to get used to it if I am to be stuck here.” We were a close family, both in terms of affection and space. We barely dressed up for the neighbours, let alone each other. How did this creature ever manage to undress me if he's so shocked but the slightest hint of skin? “Now, what's so urgent?”
“I wanted to show you...” the Beast's eyes drift round unconsciously. “I'm sorry, would you mind getting dressed?”
I groan, and close the door in his face.
“Is that a no?”
“That's a 'give me a minute'.” It doesn't take long to wriggle into my dress and pull on my boots. I don't trouble myself with brushing my hair.
“Ready,” I say, appearing in the hall.
“Excellent!” he exclaims, making a motion a bit like a jump. “This way!”
He tears off down the corridor, half on all fours. It appears, in his excitement, he's forgotten to act human. He skitters about like an excited puppy.
“Come on!”
He reaches the end of the hallway and stops at a full length window, pulling at the curtains. Bright, white light pools across the floor.
“Look, look!”
At first, I wonder what he's pointing at. The gardens look just as colourless as ever. Then, suddenly, it becomes abundantly clear. The gardens are covered in a thick carpet of white.
“Snow,” I say, a little disappointedly.
The Beast dances from one foot to another, his tail wagging. “Winter, Rose! Winter!”
“I can see that.”
“Don't you know what this means?”
“No.”
“We haven't had a season here for years. Years! And now you're here and-” he stops suddenly, looking like he's said something he shouldn't.
“And?”
“AND THERE'S SNOW.”
“Great.”
“I'm going out in it.”
“I'm not.”
He stops for a second and I expect to see big, hurt, puppy-dog eyes. Instead, he simply shrugs.
“Suit yourself,” he says, and whizzes off.
I eat my breakfast alone and then head upstairs to read in the window seat. For some reason, I find myself feeling a little grumpy at the Beast for racing off and leaving me here. I know this is bitterly unfair of me, since I spent several days pretending he didn't exist, so then I grow angry at my own sense of injustice.
I don't know why I'm annoyed. I like solitude.
Although, I'm learning there's a difference between being alone and being lonely. I like being alone, having space to myself, time to think, room to sit however I like, be utterly me. But other people have never been far away, rarely out of earshot, and I was usually accompanied by an animal of some sort no matter where I was.
I have two dogs at home. Fifine and Azor, both large spaniels. Azor is mostly Freed's dog now- his stalwart hunting companion, brave and true, loyal to a fault. Fifine was my Mama's favourite, and after she died, Fifine seemed to re-direct her lost love at her remaining babies, especially Beau. She refused to sleep downstairs in the kitchen. For almost all of Beau's infancy, she slept beside his cradle. It was only once he started to walk that she would sometimes sleep in our room. She was the sweetest, most gentlest of creatures.
Why am I speaking of her in the past tense? Fifine still is sweet and gentle... she's just not here.
I turn my gaze to the outside. I can just about see the Beast, frolicking in the snow just like one of the dogs, a black speck amongst the white. I can imagine him with his tongue hanging out.
“Beast” is such a silly name for him, all of a sudden. He has no more fang or claw than a puppy.
“Oh, all right,” I say to no one in particular, and reach over to grab my boots.
I certainly haven't missed the cold, although the crisp white snow is surprisingly pleasant. There wasn't a drop of virgin snow left in the village. I pull on my gloves as I walk, hugging my hood close to my head.
The Beast doesn't look up when I arrive. He appears to be trying to pile up the snow.
“Hello!” he says. “I'm building a snow man!”
I stare sceptically at the pile. “Do you even know what a man looks like?”
The Beast stops, ever-so-slightly. “I've seen pictures.”
Sighing, I kneel beside the pathetic attempt and try to shape the base. “Roll a large snowball,” I instruct.
“A ball?”
“Yes.”
It takes a little while, but eventually, our man begins to take shape. The Beast struggles with the defter jobs, so he rolls up the snow and I pat it into place. Finding branches for the arms is easy enough -he snaps them off a nearby tree with astonishing ease- and I dig into the path to find stones for the buttons and eyes. Coal would be best, but I haven't seen any here.
“This doesn't look like a man,” says the Beast.
“It looks like a snowman. What were you trying make, a marble sculpture?”
“Something like that,” he admits, a little forlornly.
I untie my scarf and loop it round the snowman's neck.
“No,” says the Beast, unravelling it and handing it back. “Use mine.”
“Won't you get cold?”
He fixes me with a quizzical look. “I'm covered in fur.”
“Then why wear a scarf in the first place?”
“Because that's what people do when they go out in the cold.”
“But...” I almost say you're not people but, while true, that's not what I mean. What I mean is, why dress up for other people's sake? Why pretend to be what you're not? “Why do you care what people do?” I ask instead.
“It has come to my attention that most people care what other people do.”
“You're not most people.”
He cocks his head thoughtfully. “Apparently neither are you.”
I'm not sure why he thinks this after only a few days, but I almost find myself smiling. He's the first person to say it without any kind of disdain. “Rose is very... different.” People would say to Nanny, usually when complimenting my siblings. They didn't mean it in a nice way. They meant strange. Not like us. I didn't much care for their opinion, but it is never nice to know you don't belong.
“What makes you say that?” I ask, curiously.
“You don't like what other people like,” he says, matter-of-factly. “You don't seem concerned about fitting in.”
“Actually, that's not entirely true. It's nice to fit in. I just don't think it's worth being someone else to do it. If you have to pretend to be somebody else to feel like you belong... you don't really.”
“Where did you read that?”
“That one I learned myself.”
It's getting close to lunch time. My stomach rumbles loudly. “Will you eat with me?” I ask.
At first, he looks like he's going to refuse. He opens his mouth, splutters a few sounds, and then swallows them. He nods quietly, and moves aside to gesture towards the castle. We walk back together.
“Have you got a mate back home?” he asks, quite out of the blue.
“I'm sorry?” Now it is my turn to splutter.
“You know, a sweetheart, a lover. The last visitor here had a fiancé... I felt exceptionally bad about that.”
My heart stills a little. He just wants to know who is missing me.
“I have a Papa, a Nanny, two brothers and two sisters,” I tell him. “No young gentleman callers. Not unless...”
He raises a large, bushy eyebrow.
“Well...” I think of James Saintclair, my old friend, who everyone thinks is a little something more than that. I haven't told anyone anyone yet, not even Honour, but a few weeks ago, at the Winter Party at the mayor's house, I kissed him.
>
He found me reading in a little nook in the hallway. I hadn't meant to be rude; I just scuttled away for a few moments of quiet, when I'd found a stray book lying on a chaise. I hadn't been able to resist. James found me after a few minutes, sat down beside me, asked what was going on in the story.
James had never minded my curious reading habits. He was always very polite about it, asking me what was happening, what I liked about the book, etc. But I could always tell his questions were a little forced. He was just being kind. James was not exactly a wordy person, really, lovely though he was.
Is.
Anyway, James had found me there just as I was getting to a good bit. A romance scene. I had probably had a bit too much wine that night, and I suddenly found myself desperately wanting to know what it was like to be kissed.
So I kissed him.
It was very nice. Gentle. Brief. Warm.
But there wasn't anything special about it. It was not the kiss that the hero and heroine of the story were about to experience.
I had asked Mama, many years ago, if the kinds of kisses in books actually existed.
“You know, the earth-changing, magical, firework-causing kind.”
Mama smiled at me warmly, and stroked my hair. “Only if you kiss the right person, at the right moment.”
My kiss with James was not like that.
“I kissed a friend of mine a few weeks ago,” I tell the Beast, “but he isn't my sweetheart.”
“Oh,” he stops walking for a moment, and then quickly catches up. “Not a good kiss?”
“Not enough fireworks,” I conclude, and then smiling, I run on ahead.
The evening passes more quickly than any of my others. The Beast eats both lunch and dinner with me, gnawing as carefully as he can manage at a chicken bone and trying to take smallish mouthfuls. I find the sight almost comical.
Since arriving at the castle, I've had a lot of plain meals, never much in the mood for anything else. Tonight, I pray for something different, and am rewarded with a strange, softly-spiced lamb stew. There is some kind of tangy, orange fruit in it that I have never tasted before. It's sweet and tender.
After lunch, we retire to the library. I uncover an old favourite of mine, about a young noble girl who gets shipwrecked on a desert island with no one but a resourceful cabin boy for company. She has to fend off pirates and monsters, overcome her own prejudices, befriend the natives, and, naturally, falls in love with the cabin boy. Unfortunately, just as they're about to confess their love, they are rescued by her uncle and realise that the world they come from won't allow them to be together.
I've just reached the part where Evelyn has her first run-in with the pirates and manages to fell one with a frying pan before being rescued by Jean, when the clock chimes ten. It is getting late. We say our goodbyes and go to bed.
Tonight is the first night I cannot hear the clock ticking, and I fall into a soft and dreamless sleep.
For the next few days, we exist in a similar fashion. Each morning, we meet in the dining hall, breakfast, play in the grounds, lunch, and usually retire to library for the afternoon. We only spend a few hours apart each day. He offers me a tour of the castle, but I prefer to wander on my own. Although he tells me he has spent his whole life here, he does not seem to know much about the place- or know much he can tell me.
It takes a good two days to visit most of the rooms in the castle -except the one forbidden to me, of course, and the Beast's- but even then I am sure I've missed a few. There is an endless supply of hallways, corridors, stairs, chambers, suites, turrets, balconies and battlements. There is such an eclectic style too. Although most of the castle has a fey kind of wildness to it, there are traditionally gaudy chambers, pieces of gilded furniture, rooms draped in patterned wallpaper with an over-abundance of faux flowers and gold chandeliers. It is as if someone has picked up different parts of history and blended them together.
There is little in the castle that reveals its history to me. The rooms look as if everyone simply got up one morning and swept off without a word. The beds are made, but there are clothes in the closets, books on side-tables, the occasional hairbrush on a dresser.
Somebody, or something, is cleaning them. Layers of dust are slowly being pulled away, the screens of cobwebs disappointing. Little by little, the place is brightening.
While the library remains my favourite place, on the ground floor there is a delightful round chamber housing every kind of instrument imaginable. I try the harp and the piano -always my favourites- and determine I am definitely in need of practise. I add it to my list of things to do, and think of taking up the violin as well. The room next to it is a far more sorry sight- an empty menagerie. Beautiful, empty cages, perches and tanks decorate the room, devoid of any occupants.
There is not a single living thing I have seen, other than... him. Only occasionally will I think I see the flicker of an insect in the corner of my eye, but it always turns out to be nothing, except, perhaps, the magic of the castle made visible, for one, ephemeral second.
On the third floor I discover a glorious bathroom, with a pool so deep I can swim in it, and the tallest turret has glass walls, so you can see all around you. There's a chamber full of only mirrors, and endless galleries of endless portraits. My personal favourite, next to the library, is a little roof garden, accessible only by a narrow, winding staircase. There is little there, of course -bare pots, little statuettes, a bench- but I can see what it must have been like, before. The thorns of the rosebushes remain, tumbling over the walls and roofs. It must have been magnificent in summer. There is a little fountain there, too, still trickling away, and the bottom of the pool is painted gold, which casts a pretty glow across the stones.
I am starting to see a beauty in this place. It is a pretty pen I have found myself.
Chapter Five: The Face in the Ice
A few days later, I wake up to an excited rapping at the door. I mumble something, pull myself out of bed, and pull on a dressing-gown as I shuffle towards it. The Beast grins at me, holding up a pair of skates in his hands.
“Here,” he says. “I found these for you. They should be about your size.”
“What about you?” I ask.
“Oh, I really don’t think they’ll fit.”
An embarrassing snort of laughter escapes me. Beast looks like a cat does when it’s just sneezed, a great big face of fluff and shock. Then he grins too, and I stop.
“Sorry,” I say.
“By all means, laugh.” His cheeks puff out, and he chews his lip.
“What?” I say, with narrowed eyes.
“Who would have thought,” he sniggers, “that such a little snort could sound so sweet.”
“I do not snort!” I return, “Pigs snort, ladies-”
“Oh, that was a snort, but don’t worry, it was a very ladylike one.”
“My nanny would be so pleased… and I don’t snort!”
“Do.”
“Don’t.” I punch him in the arm, which probably hurts me more than it does him. He is as hard as a rock. This doesn't help prove my point, but it makes me feel better. He looks at me for a moment, as though I've just done something odd.
“Sorry,” I say, “I shouldn't have punched you. That was mean.”
“No,” he says slowly, “That's not it... it's not like you can hurt me.”
There is something else, I sense, but I can't think what. I seize the skates from his hands. “Shall we?”
I have never skated before. In the village, there was no water flat enough to skate on, not even in the harshest of winters. I touch the surface tentatively with the flat of my hand. It does not move. He, meanwhile, moves straight passed and glides onto the frozen lake with clumsy grace.
“Are you sure it's safe?” I ask gingerly. I have always had a fear of deep water, but this looks as solid as rock. It is difficult to imagine it is anything else, that anything lurks beneath the surface.
He stops spinning around for a second
to answer me. “Mostly,” he says, beaming foolishly. “Don't worry, if you fall in, I'll drag you out.”
“What if you fall in?”
“Then it's going to be a very lonely 170 days for you.”
“That's not funny.”
“You're right. Whoever shall make you laugh if I'm not here to amuse you?”
“Still not funny."
Laughing, he slides back out, moving from four feet to two with ease.
170 days.
He is counting, and not for the same reason I am. He is counting, because, after those days, he is going to be alone again.
Not for the first time, I find that feeling of sympathy surging inside me. But it's more than that, this time. I do not want him to be alone. It feels so much more unfair than it did a felt days ago, the little puddle of sympathy swelling into a pond.
I look out at the vast, frozen lake in front of me. Will it be this large by day 170? I pray for it to freeze inside me. I don't want to feel it any more.
“Rose? Are you coming?”
I watch him twirling about ridiculously. I suppose if it can take his weight, it can take mine.
I slide both feet onto the ice. They immediately go in different directions and I skid to my knees with a shriek. He tries not to laugh as he glides back over.
“Are you all right?”
“Fine, fine...” I try to pull myself up, but it’s difficult on the ice. Beast is holding out a hand, but timidly, as if he isn't sure he should offer it, or doesn't want to.
I remember how I tensed before when he caught me, and am determined never to do so again.
I take his hand and haul myself up, grabbing hold of both of his arms to steady myself. He is solid and incredibly sturdy, more an oak in the ground, not an animal on ice. I realise he has filed down the frightening talons he brandished before.
“All right?” he asks again.
“Better.”
“I'd give you some instruction, but I'm unfamiliar with skates.”
“It's fine. I'm sure I'll get the hang of it.”
For the better part of an hour, I experiment with my footwork, staying close to the banks so I can fall into the soft snow if I feel unsteady. Which I do, a lot. He hovers nearby to begin with, trying to catch me when I topple over. I make a bit of a game of it, sliding some distance and then launching into the bank when I feel a fall coming on.
The Rose and the Thorn Page 5
