The Prince's Slave

by P. J. Fox

  “You really didn’t know you were missing?”

  “Well of course I knew—know. I’m self aware, I’m not a carrot.”

  “I meant—that people were looking for you. You didn’t google yourself?”

  “I’m sort of off the internet.”

  “What century are you living in?”

  “Sometimes I wonder.” Belle’s laugh had a humorless ring.

  They walked along in silence for awhile.

  “Well, I guess that makes sense,” Charlotte said. “Disney characters don’t belong in the real world.”

  “But they do!” Belle stopped, turning. “They do! Don’t you see that? What’s so impractical, what’s so inherently wrong, about happily ever after? Why shouldn’t life be happily ever after? Why does life have to be so hard, so miserable? Why is misery somehow more legitimate—in your eyes, in my mother’s in everyone’s?”

  “Please don’t lump me in with your mother.”

  “Then stop acting like her! What’s wrong—tell me honestly, what’s wrong with embracing happily ever after, even if it means accepting certain changes into your world?”

  Was change really that wrong? Didn’t everyone tell you to change, all the time? To change your hair, change your weight, change your life by making millions of dollars, change this, change that…until the change was something they didn’t approve of? And then, suddenly, you should’ve stayed home and knitted.

  “Right.” Charlotte sounded bitter. “Change for your man.”

  “What?”

  “Ariel, your apparent hero, changed into a different species. Or are you taking a page, more, from your namesake? She, much like you, appears to have confused Stockholm Syndrome with love.” Charlotte shook her head. “I swear, Disney is ruining girls’ lives and you’re proof. Living in the castle, with the beast, determined to love him better.” She snorted. “Every girls’ fantasy, right?”

  They kept walking.

  Finally, Belle spoke. “Ariel wanted more before she met Eric.”

  A toad hopped across their path, and stopped. The entire castle was awash with toads. Belle wondered if this happened every spring, and supposed she’d find out.

  “She wanted to be human—to be where the people were. That dream had nothing to do with Eric. Or any man. Meeting Eric just gave…form to her dreams.”

  Charlotte sighed. “You just didn’t…strike me as the running away type.”

  “Nobody ever really knew me. Including you.”

  Charlotte turned. “Did—do you really think that?”

  Belle didn’t want to hurt her former friend, but at the same time she had to tell the truth. “Charlotte, you were too busy trying to fix me to be my friend. When you looked at me you saw a dowdy, no fun girl from the sticks whom you could mold. Teen movie-style.”

  “God.” Charlotte shook her head, but this time at herself. “Was I really that bad of a friend?”

  “You never asked me what I thought about anything. I’m not sure it occurred to you that I did think. That I’d made the choices I’d made, not because I was too backward to realize that other choices were available but because that was what I wanted.”

  “I did you a disservice.”

  Belle didn’t respond.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “All my life, I was told what to think. Ash was the first person who only wanted to listen. So yes. When he wanted to take me I let him. And when I got here, I stayed.”

  “But—”

  “Answer me this, Charlotte: why is it more noble to decide, based on some arbitrary set of standards, that suffering is better? Who made these rules that we all live by and who decided, without consulting me, that I needed to follow them? That my choices, that my relationship, are somehow less because they don’t conform?”

  “I guess…you make a good point.” Charlotte sounded defeated.

  “I’ve chosen this. This life. This man.”

  “And you don’t want to go back to school? Have a career?”

  “I want what I have.”

  “You want it—or you’ve convinced yourself to want it?”

  “This isn’t Stockholm Syndrome, Charlotte.”

  “Okay.” The gravel crunched under their boots. “Convince me.”

  “The mind and heart aren’t as simple as we’d like to believe. Did you know that, in fact, in the original case that spawned the term Stockholm Syndrome, the robbers’ captives actually continued to support them after the fact? And paid for their defense?

  “How we meet people isn’t always dispositive of what the relationship will become. I mean, how many battered women have described the halcyon first days of their relationships with their abusers? Men who, to borrow an oft-used term, did everything right? Who appeared perfect? And again—perfect according to what standard? In this case, perfect is also dictated by the movies. But a relationship shouldn’t be judged by how well it conforms to either dreams or nightmares, but how it makes the people in it feel.

  “And as for my namesake…she knows exactly what she’s getting into, from the beginning. She knows she’s the Beast’s hostage, and she’s under no illusions that she can ‘love him better.’ She’s not trying to love him better—she’s not trying to love him at all! Only to get along. She’s kind to him, because she’s a naturally compassionate person. That’s all. She’s not trying to manipulate him into treating her a certain way; she doesn’t fear for her life, or believe that her survival depends on placating him.”

  “And you didn’t—don’t—believe that about Ash?”

  “That he’s going to kill me? God, no!”

  “Oh.”

  “I relate to the other Belle,” she continued, “because she’s like me: and in more ways than just sharing my name. She, too, is a nerd. Because she likes to read, and think, more than go dancing, people think she’s touched. They want to change her. With the Beast, she feels…free to be herself.”

  “Ash is—”

  “Ash isn’t a criminal.”

  “You just know that.”

  “I just know that. And I wouldn’t care, even if he were.”

  “That’s ludicrous.”

  “No it isn’t.” Belle met Charlotte’s gaze. “You’d understand, if you knew what it was like to trust somebody.”

  “You trust him?”

  “The Beast is told, his whole life, that he’s a monster. Ash has been told, his whole life, that he’s a monster. And so maybe, after awhile, they both started acting like monsters. But the Beast wasn’t—that’s the whole point of the story. He’s a decent man crippled by self-doubt and, if you ask me, bad parenting. Which, Ash…you don’t know him, Charlotte. If you did, then you’d know that he’s not capable of the things you claim. He’s the one who taught me that I didn’t have to fit into society’s narrow definition of what women are good for. That I could be, and do, whatever I wanted; that I didn’t need a degree, or a certain career, or my mother’s approval to validate me.”

  They’d almost reached the gatehouse. Belle stopped. The two women looked at each other for a long time.

  “I should go,” Charlotte said.

  “You can stay,” Belle offered. “For lunch. Or tea, I suppose now.”

  “No, I…don’t think that would be a good idea.”

  “Oh.”

  Charlotte glanced at the gatehouse. There were two guards inside, watching them. Belle had become familiar with all of the guards and knew them on sight, if not always by name. She raised her hand in a wave, letting them know that she was alright.

  When Charlotte turned back to Belle, her expression was difficult to interpret.

  “I respect your decision to stay here,” she said. “Even if I don’t understand it. Will probably never understand it. But you and I…are like the fox and the hound.”

  On different paths. Belle understood what she meant. She nodded.

  “I don’t think…I wish you well. I honestly do. But I don’t think I should come back.”

&nbs
p; Belle nodded again. That was probably for the best. From Charlotte’s perspective it was Belle who’d ended their friendship, choosing to travel a path that Charlotte couldn’t follow. But Belle knew that it was Charlotte, not she, who had the problem. Charlotte’s was a world of absolutes. She didn’t want a friend, couldn’t handle a friend, whose very existence challenged the bright line rules she’d come to depend on for so much. Belle was too different. But, then again, she always had been. Charlotte had only recently noticed what had, in truth, been there all along. For anyone who chose to look.

  “Goodbye,” Belle said.

  She didn’t realize, when she uttered the word, how soon she’d be seeing Charlotte again.

  EIGHTY-NINE

  She walked back alone.

  The wind had started to pick up and the temperature was dropping. Spring might be on its way, but it was still more of an idea than an actual, present thing. Once in awhile, as she had earlier, she captured a brief, fleeting sense of what spring might be like in these mountains. Spring, and then summer. But right now, all she felt was cold.

  No one was waiting for her at the door and indeed the house felt empty. For one fleeting second, Belle was certain that the house was empty; that everyone else had somehow been spirited off while she’d talked with Charlotte and she, like Rip Van Winkle, had returned to a world out of time. A world where her home, this castle, had long since been abandoned.

  Then, far off, she heard the tinkle of breaking glass and a shouted oath.

  Completely irrational relief spread through her.

  Still, she couldn’t find Ash. He wasn’t in his office and he wasn’t in the bedroom. He wasn’t in the gym, running on the treadmill, and he wasn’t outside sparring with Alec. He wasn’t in the kitchen, either, and the fact that she’d looked there at all was what made Belle realize that she was well and truly desperate. She wasn’t sure that Ash knew where the kitchen was. Had he ever so much as made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? When she found him, she determined to ask him.

  If she found him.

  Where the devil had he gone?

  That sense of nagging worry returned.

  Had he…no, he couldn’t have just left, she reasoned. In the span of an hour? He would have had to drive past her and she was sure she’d have noticed that. Unless of course he’d taken the service entrance; that curved around behind the kitchen gardens and accessed the main road about a mile further down.

  Maybe he was with another woman.

  She’d almost reached the point where she was willing to swallow her pride, walk over to that wing of the castle and find out, just to verify that he was okay, when on a whim she pushed open the door to the upstairs library. The smaller of the castle’s two libraries had been reserved, originally, for the lord’s private collection. Which wasn’t such an unusual arrangement, in and of itself. The original lord of this castle was reputed to have wanted his own books separate as many of them…weren’t for innocent eyes.

  He’d been a practitioner of the occult.

  How fitting that she and Ash lived in a castle once presided over by a necromancer.

  She stepped into the gloom-filled room. She could easily picture someone sitting here, in one of the wing-back chairs or perhaps at the scarred and pitted map table, reading about how to raise the dead. So it took her a minute to realize that what she was seeing wasn’t a vision but a real person. Flesh and blood and firmly of this dimension.

  Ash, sitting alone in the chair before the fireplace. No fire had been laid, and the hearth was long cold.

  She stopped, waiting. Why was he here?

  He looked up. His eyes widened fractionally.

  She took a step toward him. The room was a wash of shadows, which made things hard to see. He didn’t resolve fully until she was almost in front of him and, looking down, her eyes widened.

  He looked haggard. Like he hadn’t slept in a month. There were dark circles under his eyes, which looked bloodshot. She wondered, briefly, how much he’d had to drink but when he met her gaze his eyes were clear.

  He’d rolled up his shirtsleeves but with none of his usual care and his shirt itself looked slept in. If she hadn’t seen him shower and dress just that morning, she’d have thought he’d been in this room for a week.

  She wondered if she should offer to get him something.

  Wondered what could possibly have happened in the hour she’d been gone. Had he received some kind of horrible news? God forbid, had someone died?

  “What,” he asked, his voice flat. “Did you forget something?”

  “What are you talking about?” Belle stared at him, stymied.

  When he didn’t respond, she sat down on the hearth bench. She wished that someone would come in to light a fire. Or at least turn up the heat.

  He turned his head slightly and looked at her, as if seeing her for the first time. Really seeing her. He blinked. And then…it was so strange, the change that came over him. It was like watching someone come alive.

  He sat up slightly.

  “Are you…alright?” she ventured.

  “You didn’t—you didn’t leave?”

  “What do you mean, leave?”

  “I thought you’d left.” His tone was very quiet.

  Left? As in, permanently? “You told me to go, so I went. I was upset and you were upset and I just wanted some fresh air. Thought it would be best, you know…take a time out. There was no sense in just sitting there, yelling at each other, like those Muppets in the opera box who complain about being bolted to the floor. But then, the funniest thing was that, about a quarter of a mile down the road, I ran into….”

  She trailed off.

  “You said you didn’t want to be here. With me.”

  “No,” she said patiently, “not with you. I said I didn’t want to be in this castle forever. I’d like to be somewhere else with you. Like perhaps Paris. Or, indeed, London. You do have a house there, and friends. And from what I can tell you can work anywhere so I just—I mean, I’m sorry, I’m stir crazy!”

  “With me?”

  “Yes, with you.” She studied him. “You mean you thought…that I….”

  He nodded, the merest movement of his head.

  “So you came in here.”

  “I was seriously considering throwing myself out the window. But then you came back.”

  “I’m glad I did.”

  They shared the silence for a long time.

  For most of that time, Belle was too stunned to speak. What if—God forbid—what if he had done something? And she’d been outside, lecturing Charlotte? She’d had no idea that he was this upset. Or that he’d thought that—that she’d left. That she meant permanently. She didn’t understand how an otherwise innocuous conversation had escalated into this. How two people who understood each other so well could also not understand each other. At all. How…the thought of what might have happened made her shiver. She couldn’t even bear to think about…about….

  “Belle,” he asked slowly, “do you…care for me?”

  She loved him, but she couldn’t tell him that. Not yet. Not when he hadn’t revealed his feelings for her. That he needed her, yes. She knew that. But need and love weren’t the same thing. Codependency and love weren’t the same thing. Growing up with Owen and Donna Wainwright had taught her that.

  But God, she wanted to tell him. She did. Instead, all she said was, “yes.”

  So much. So much. There weren’t the words. Even I love you wasn’t enough to encompass all her feelings. To explain how he’d transformed her life. How he’d transformed her. What she owed him in that regard and what she dreamed of giving him in return.

  He was everything to her.

  But what if—what if he didn’t feel the same?

  “We appear to be talking at cross purposes,” he said, regaining some of his usual cool control.

  “I guess.” She shook her head. “You were the one who suggested a show. But then, when I tried to talk to you about it…I
couldn’t understand why you were so upset.”

  “The source of my confusion lay—lies—in the fact that I was attempting to please you by offering you something I thought you’d like. That being, such help as I can muster in terms of contacts, and such. So you can gain some of the respect that you so obviously deserve. You’re an exceptionally talented artist, Belle.”

  She smiled slightly. She didn’t think she was, but it was nice to hear him say so.

  “And yet you responded with such…venom.”

  “The truth,” she admitted, “is that I’ve been upset about this for awhile. I mean—not my art. Feeling stir crazy. I just…want to get out, is all.”

  “I wish you’d told me.”

  She shrugged. “I thought it seemed obvious.”

  “The last several times I tried to take you anywhere,” he replied, with a touch of asperity, “things didn’t end well. You objected strenuously, as I recall. Accusing me of perpetrating a sham. If, indeed, your views have changed in this regard then I assure you, I am deliriously happy.” Ash said deliriously happy like he was discussing some new and exotic disease. “But alas, as my psychic powers have never fully developed, I have no means of knowing unless you tell me.”

  There, he had a point.

  “I just wanted to go out for lunch,” she said in a small voice.

  “Then,” Ash replied, “I would like to take you out to lunch. That ship has sailed for today, unfortunately, but I had actually been planning on asking you if you wanted to accompany me on a picnic tomorrow. I’m given to believe that the weather will be pleasant enough.” His lips quirked into a small smile. “I hadn’t asked yet, because I was mentally girding my loins for the experience.”

  “I’m not that bad!”

  “No,” he said, quite seriously. “You’re perfect.”

  She got up and, removing the last of the space between them, sat down and curled up in his lap. She leaned her head against his chest and, after a moment, he put his arm around her. She could hear his heart beating, slow and steady.