As Old As Time: A Twisted Tale (Twisted Tale, A)

by Liz Braswell

  “No,” Belle protested.

  “Ma chérie,” Lumière said gently, “really? Don’t you think if we wanted to poison you, we could have done it earlier?”

  Through the thick muddle in her head, Belle could see the logic in this. She could also see how ridiculously she was behaving—a hysterical girl among the closest things she had to friends at the moment.

  She took the cup and drained it in one draught.

  “Easy, mon petit chou,” the little candelabrum laughed.

  She didn’t even cough or choke. The fiery warmth hit her stomach in an explosion of comfort.

  Calmness returned to her eventually…the ticktock of Cogsworth’s face helped slow her own heartbeats. Sleep came back, to claim what it had been denied.

  “Don’t leave!” she whispered before she finally succumbed, begging—someone.

  Maybe even the Beast.

  The study had no windows to let in morning light—or to reveal the creepy, bony netting that was taking over the outer castle walls.

  The fire was banked low, emitting a steady orange glow. All the shadows were calm.

  Someone had thrown a—silk?—duvet over Belle and carefully put a down pillow under her head. She was, despite everything that had happened, ridiculously comfy, warm, and sleepy. Safe.

  Somehow her soul knew that it was day—that all of the demons and nightmares had been banished back to where they came from for the next twelve hours and there was nothing to be afraid of.

  She pulled her foot around to take a look at the injury.

  It was still there.

  Everything was real.

  Belle sighed.

  She had read too many romantic novels of a dark and dreary bent to really be surprised—The Castle of Otranto was one of her favorite English reads. For all intents and purposes, she was the overwrought, terrified heroine wandering around a cursed castle at night, seeing things in the shadows, jumping at noises.

  Plus she could not, even in her most imaginative moments, have come up with the idea of an ivy statue that sneakily followed her when she wasn’t looking.

  She rubbed her hands over her face. Was her mother dead? Was she haunting this castle? Was it somehow filled with her soul or her memories?

  The scenes shown in the shards weren’t just happy, archetypal mother-daughter moments she could draw from any well-written book; the two fought in some instances and they did nothing in others. Although details were hazy in the tiny visions, Belle could see her mother frowning and her hair was askew. Imperfect.

  And what about that other home? The tiny apartment, the one she didn’t remember, somewhere in the town below? There was no doubt that these were fragments of real memories she no longer had.

  So what had happened to them?

  Belle rose and went over to the fire and took the poker. She knelt before it like a supplicant and began prodding the coals lightly—not out of any real need for more heat as much as for something to do.

  Moodily, she felt little wisps of thought try to sneak into her consciousness. Irritating ones. Ones she had dismissed long ago.

  Why didn’t she have a mother, all those years? Where did she go?

  And: maybe, just maybe, she would really have actually liked to have a mother. Just a little bit.

  There should have been no perceived difference between a father brushing her hair and a mother.

  And yet there was.

  “Good morning, dearie.” Mrs. Potts came waltzing in, steamy and bubbly. Behind her Cogsworth himself was pushing a rolling cart of breakfast things: chocolate, pastries, the smell of rich, fatty bacon, a bowl of warm compote.

  “Ooh, what are you doing there, in the ashes?” she clucked. “That’s James’s job! Get up, you’ll ruin your pretty slip!”

  Belle wondered how they had known she was awake. Was something in the room secretly alive, transmitting the message along the house somehow, like telepathy? Or was it a purely natural instinct of good servants?

  Either way, she would have liked a few more minutes to herself.

  Although the bacon did smell delicious.

  “Here are your clothes,” a dustmaid said, dancing in on her feathery skirts. She carried Belle’s pinafore and apron, all cleaned and pressed. “The…wardrobe thought you would like them.”

  “Thank you,” Belle said politely. “Sorry about last night…”

  “Oh pish,” Mrs. Potts said, turning her head. “First night in an enchanted castle! Who could blame you?”

  Belle regarded the three little objects looking expectantly up at her and realized she wasn’t awake or chipper enough to deal with them.

  “I…think I’d like to get dressed now,” she said delicately.

  “Of course!” Cogsworth said, flustered. He practically tripped over himself bowing and leaving backwards.

  “Let us know if you need anything, dearie.” Mrs. Potts used her spout to indicate for the maid to leave as well.

  When the door closed behind them, Belle sighed. An eternity of that? Is it worth bacon? She had read about how servants and general entourage members fought amongst themselves for the privilege of handing the Queen of France her underwear in the morning—while the queen herself remained shivering, waiting, in her bed.

  Belle slipped the rest of her clothes on quickly, unsure when the next interruption would be.

  She had just poured her chocolate and begun to nibble a croissant when there was a faint—but animal; fleshy—knock at the door, and it opened an inch.

  “Can I…come in?” the Beast asked softly.

  “You may.”

  She was surprised by the relief she felt that it was him. There was nothing normal about him, or this situation—or particularly pleasing about being thrown in a room and told she was a prisoner—but there was, ironically, something slightly more human about the Beast than his servants.

  “You…all right?” he asked gruffly, looking around, as if asking the question embarrassed him.

  “Yes. Thank you. I hope this doesn’t happen every night of my eternal incarceration here. Chocolate?” she offered primly.

  “No.”

  The Beast didn’t seem to be able to stay still for very long. He went over and sat in his chair, twisting this way and that in it, looking at the fire, and then got up again.

  “I want to go out and hunt,” he finally admitted. “I can’t.”

  Belle felt her stomach rise. But whatever thoughts she had about the Beast’s more beastly habits were swept aside by what he said next.

  “All the gates are blocked now. There’s no way off the grounds.”

  Trapped!

  Belle felt her heart begin to race in an ugly, stuttering tattoo. Her decision to bring the Beast back home had sealed her own fate as well. Forever.

  Belle swallowed and tried to calm herself. Panicking wouldn’t solve anything. She sat carefully back down on the divan—the duvet neatly folded next to her. “I saw some strange things last night,” she said.

  The Beast didn’t say anything; he just raised an eyebrow.

  “I think…if I didn’t know better, I would think that my mother is trying to reach me somehow. I don’t know if she’s dead or living—but something from her is trying to contact me. Warn me. Through this curse, or through…something else. She said something about being betrayed. And that I should stay away from the dark.”

  The Beast visibly brightened despite the creepiness of her words. “You think she might still be alive?”

  “Before last night, I never thought she was dead. I thought she just left us,” Belle admitted, realizing it was true as she said the words. How easy it would have been for everyone to simply have told her that her mother had died! Sad but simple and done. Poor little orphan girl with no mother. The townspeople would have pitied her and she never would have questioned it.

  “I think we lived here,” Belle said slowly. “In this kingdom. When I was a baby. I saw it in the mirror upstairs, the broken one. And I know we moved to
the village when I was young, so that…makes sense.”

  The Beast continued to look at her. “So?”

  “So…I have to believe that a powerful enchantress who lays curses and deals with magic roses and mirrors was probably pretty well known in this…strange…kingdom, if she was from here. Lived here. If we could find out more about her, maybe it would help. Maybe she cursed you because she was betrayed by someone? Maybe if we figure it out, we can put her soul to rest, or something? If only there was someone else we could talk to, or maybe search my old house…Except that we’re trapped in here….”

  She slammed her hand down on the cart in frustration, causing the things on it to rattle and clink. The Beast’s eyes widened and he seemed to draw back a little.

  “How can we figure out anything without any ability to…research anything?”

  The Beast frowned: she could practically see the cogs turning in his gigantic furry head.

  “A…book?” he finally said, hesitantly.

  Belle blinked.

  “A book about people in this kingdom. A history.” The beast grew excited as he spoke. “Maybe stories? Maybe…records?”

  “Sure. But where would we find these books?”

  “In the library,” he said with a shrug, pointing over his shoulder. It was such a casual, human gesture that it took Belle aback.

  And then she registered his words.

  “Library,” she said slowly, remembering what Lumière and Cogsworth had said while trying to lure her away from the forbidden West Wing.

  “You have a library!”

  “Oh. Mon. Dieu.”

  Belle didn’t make it past the doorway.

  At least not immediately.

  The Beast stood to the side, having chivalrously pushed the doors open for her, holding Lumière above her head to light the way. They both looked perplexed as she just hung there, not going in.

  The far end of the library looked like it was miles away. Furnishing it was a huge fireplace, overstuffed velvet reading chairs, colorful landscape paintings, and squat little tables upon which to lay out the really big volumes.

  And the distance between that and the door where Belle stood was…filled…with…books.

  From floor to the incredibly high ceiling, books.

  Three stories of books.

  Golden balconies and delicate stairways that allowed readers to climb to the higher levels of books. Belle stopped trying to count the number of shelves after twenty.

  Unlike the rest of the castle, which was dark and foreboding, this room was all bright: pearly inlaid stone on the floor, white and gold plaster on the walls, silvered ceilings that reflected the dim light let in by tall, narrow windows. Behind their heavy curtains were benches that allowed readers to hide away from the rest of the world with their finds.

  “OH MY GOD!”

  Belle finally fell into the room and began to spin dizzily, overwhelmed.

  “This is like…this is like…I don’t know what this is like! A university! A library in Paris! A…”

  The Beast shuffled in on his inadequate legs, looking around the room as if for the first time.

  “A library in a castle?” he offered.

  Belle stared at him, trying to figure out if he was teasing her. His face was as beast-y and unreadable as ever—but were his eyes dancing, just a little?

  “Forget your magic mirror,” she decided to say. “If I lived here, I would spend my whole life in here, reading.”

  “They’re just…books….”

  He carefully lit the candelabra at the front and placed Lumière on the floor, dismissing him.

  “Just books? That’s like saying Alexandria is just a library.” She ran over to the closest shelf and tilted her head, reading titles. “You don’t understand. I don’t understand how you don’t understand. Look—here’s an ancient text in Greek about astronomy…and next to it is everything Galileo Galilei ever wrote!! This whole section is about the stars and planets and the entire universe!”

  The Beast stood, looking slightly embarrassed, scratching the back of his neck with his hand.

  Belle grabbed a book and ran over to him, shoving it in his face. “Up until this man, Copernicus, everyone thought the entire universe rotated around the earth—that we were the center of it all.” She flipped open to a page that had an engraving of planets and their paths, little callouts to their names and the length of their orbits. “Thanks to men like him and Tycho Brahe and Kepler, we now know nothing revolves around the earth—except the moon.”

  “Books can tell you all that?” the Beast asked, taking the book from her and frowning at the words.

  “Books can tell you almost everything that mankind knows. Or imagines,” she added after a moment.

  “I don’t think I could have grown up in the small village I’m from without books. Life is…was…um…small there. Provincial. The same old people, the same old gossip, the same food…always the same…Reading books let me realize there was a world beyond the river, beyond the people who made fun of me and my father. There were scientists, and writers, and explorers, and all sorts of fascinating people out there…somewhere…leading interesting lives…

  “You had a magic mirror that let you see life outside your tiny world. Your castle. I had books. Reading them is like traveling to other places. Being other people. Living other lives. It made life far less…sad and lonely for me.”

  The Beast flipped through the pages of his book and frowned suspiciously.

  “My tutor read to me sometimes,” he admitted, squinting at a sentence in his book. “Never liked reading. Rather go hunting or ride my horse. I didn’t know…I didn’t know they could do these other things.”

  Then he looked at her with a strange expression.

  “You were sad and lonely?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Belle said, suddenly feeling shy as she put the book back on the shelf.

  He was still looking at her, puzzled, as if trying to draw out of her body some secret of her existence.

  “Are we here to find my mother and your enchantress or what?” She put on her most serious frowny face and ran a finger along the line of books. They were dusty, but not overwhelmingly so. The little animated creatures must have taken spins through there occasionally on their cleaning rounds, dreaming of a day when someone who actually cared about books came in….

  She wondered if there were any enchanted books. Now that would be really exciting! And also useful, since she couldn’t quite figure out how anything was organized. There weren’t any headings over any of the shelves, and she didn’t have Monsieur Lévi to guide her.

  “I can’t find anything here!” the Beast complained after only a minute or two, echoing her own thoughts. She couldn’t see him but the sneeze he emitted caused all the shelves to shudder, as well as the ladder she was standing on.

  “Well, let’s see….Where would history be…” Belle said, thinking. “Like…ancient kings lists, or chronicles of battles, or a history of land division, or maybe something from the church? Sometimes they record things others don’t.”

  “There’s nothing like that. Just a whole section on po-pul-ation cen-si.”

  Belle waited.

  The Beast was silent for a moment.

  “Oh,” he finally said. “Guess I found it.”

  Ten minutes later they were in front of the cozy library fire. Lumière had come in at the pull of a bell and, with the help of a crusty poker, lit and fanned it for them. Snacks were not allowed—that was a law older than the Beast’s parents—but a kettle was wheeled in at Mrs. Potts’s insistence, and, at Lumière’s, a flagon of spiced wine.

  Piles of giant ancient books lay around them; the Beast might not have been a fast reader but he was certainly a strong one, carrying shifting stacks of records that spanned hundreds of pages in one trip.

  They were quiet for a little while, companionably flipping through their finds. Belle looked up now and then, amazed at the sight of a monster so bizarre and
huge and dangerous-looking bent over a book, running a claw along a sentence as he read it, mouthing the words. She tried not to giggle at the image of him wearing a pince-nez.

  And the Beast really tried.

  He tried every possible sitting position in his chair, including almost upside down, with his legs hanging off the headrest. He took many, many breaks for tea. And then he would yawn and declare it was time for a stretch, or some exercise, or that he smelled a rat and was going to chase it down.

  Or his foot began to tap, and then his ear began to shake, and then he even began to hum an annoying little tune, looking around the room, anywhere except at the book in front of him.

  “Beast,” Belle finally said with a gentle admonishment.

  “Sorry,” he answered, chagrined.

  Belle had to admit her own book was astonishingly boring: Tracts of Farmable Land and Tithing to the Church from 1623 to Present. But she chose the less interesting ones on purpose. She had given the Beast Oral Traditions of the Principality as Recorded by an Interested Vicar. Surely there was a story or folktale in there that would help them—and keep him interested.

  Non.

  “Why did you never look for your mother before?” the Beast asked after less than a minute.

  Belle blew the annoying little strand of hair out of her face. “Didn’t have a reason to. She left when I was a baby. Or very young. It’s always just been Papa and me, and that’s been just fine.”

  But the words sounded rehearsed and tired, even to herself. The revelations of the night and the mirror put a very different spin on things and woke up questions she thought were long since buried and dead.

  Like: didn’t her mother love her?

  Of course she did. In fact, from the visions it seemed as if Belle’s was a very loving mother, if at times impatient.

  So why did she leave? Was life in a tiny rural village too much for a great enchantress? Was she this big, glamorous, powerful woman who had other places to be—spells to cast, curses to distribute?

  Did she long to go find adventure elsewhere, the way Belle did?

  The Beast was leaning forward now like an attentive dog, eyes wide, watching the thoughts she was having drift to the surface of her face, waiting for her to say something.