They lay side by side before the fire and she watched his pupils return to a more normal size. He reached out gently to stroke her hair. "My beauty," he said softly. "My happiness."
CHAPTER EIGHT
A Second Wedding
When the magic mirror brought news of Angeline's wedding, Felicity visited her family again. Her father and the others were overjoyed to see her still hale and healthy. As before, Felicity had brought a treasure chest of wedding gifts, so that Angeline did not feel any less lucky than Mariela had been. Felicity did not tell them of the transformation that "Aunt Margaret" had undergone, nor did her family ask about the Beast.
"We should be planning your wedding next," Mariela sighed one morning as they prepared to go out.
Felicity only smiled, but Elliot, who had been watching them primp from the doorway, said, "We will be planning your wedding. Father's business has been profitable, and we'll soon be able to repay everything Aunt Margaret gave us, with interest. Then you can come home to stay."
Felicity could only gape at him while Angeline clapped her hands joyfully. Meanwhile, Mariela was eyeing her youngest sister with a skeptical eye. "Come here, Beauty," she said. "Surely we can lace you up a bit tighter." She tugged at the strings of the corset.
Felicity cried out in pain. "Be gentle!"
"Don't be a goose," Mariela said. "You look as if you were with child."
"I am with child," Felicity replied, placing her hands protectively on her belly.
Now it was her siblings whose mouths fell open. Angeline, who had already been laced into a wasp-waisted form, fainted.
"By the Beast?" Elliot asked, shocked out of euphemistic reference to imaginary aunts.
"His name is Caledon," Felicity said.
Elliot let loose a string of words most commonly used by the stevedores on the docks, while Angeline squeaked, "Suppose you have kittens!"
"My child will be as human as Elliot's son," Felicity said.
"You come and go by magic," Elliot said, "so I will not ask how you know of Amir. But you cannot expect Father to take this well."
"Then don't tell him," Felicity pleaded, "at least not until after the wedding." After some argument, she was able to convince her siblings not to worry their aging father, and had pulled out the details of their plan to free her from the Beast.
"But it was never true that Father sold me," she said. "I went of my own free will, and I stayed of my own free will."
Standing in a circle around her, Elliot, Mariela and Angeline only shook their heads, and Felicity saw them exchanging sad looks. She reached behind her to pull at the laces of the dress. "I don't like this color," she said. "I'll wear a different one."
Angeline's wedding came and went, but Felicity's family did not disperse, and even Daniel was there when they gathered in the sitting room. Felicity could see her father gathering himself to make an announcement.
"Dear Father," she said, taking his hands in hers before he could begin. "You are twice lucky, to have made a fortune to leave your sons, and to have found a pleasant home for each of your daughters. You see every day the life you have made for Elliot and Daniel, and for Mariela and Angeline, and soon you must come to visit with me and Aunt Margaret." The merchant nodded throughout this little speech, but his expression soon changed as Felicity continued, "but you must not call him Margaret, of course, for his name is Caledon. You must think of him like your other sons-in-law, and visit us in the spring to meet our first child."
At these last words, the old man grew pale and began to moan. "Oh, my poor little Beauty, we are too late to save you."
Felicity stood, and would have answered indignantly, but she remembered that her father and the rest still thought of Caledon as a fearsome monster. "There's no need to save me, Father, for I am content as I am," she said. "Only promise me that you'll come to visit."
The merchant only closed his eyes and shook his head stubbornly, but Elliot said, "Father, you loved us all so dearly as children; you can't cut yourself off from your grandchildren, no matter what you might think of their second parents."
"Don't bring your bastard into this," the merchant said.
"My son," Elliot said, the color rising in his cheeks, but his father had already turned back to Felicity.
"I promised your mother I would take care of you," he said. "And I have failed." He stood, waving Mariela away when she came to his side, and left the room.
His children looked at each other in silence, and Felicity could not prevent her tears from seeping through.
"You can't go back to Aunt Margaret's," Mariela said. "To be there alone, in your condition!"
"I want to go back, and I have to go back. Even if you tried to keep me, he would come for me."
"Talitha could go with you," Elliot said. "And my son. If he wants to see one grandchild, he'll have to meet them both."
And so, when the merchant finally visited the next year, it was his daughter who swung open the gate, holding his little granddaughter with one arm, and her curly haired nephew by the hand. The silent, sumptuous rooms of the manor filled with children's laughter, and as the invisible fairies wandered off, human servants took their place, until there was nothing left of the enchantment except the cat-eyed master of the house, looking down from a portrait on the wall as his story was told to his grandchildren's grandchildren.
I know this story's true
As I have told it you.
I hid beneath the bed,
And heard all that they said.
I grew up reading huge tomes of fairy and folk tale collections, not all of which had been edited for children. In these stories, princes and rescued maidens slept with a sword between them in the bed to ensure chastity, Sleeping Beauty gave birth to twins before she woke, and a witch's beautiful daughters had tooth-filled vaginas. Now I'm returning to fairy tales and exploring their sexual aspects. Beauty and the Beast is the first in a series; Little Red Riding Hood is up next.
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Nicole Dreadful
November 2012
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Beauty and the Beast (Erotic Fairy Tales) Page 5
