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

by Liz Braswell

  “Good morning!” Belle called cheerily.

  Nothing.

  Confused, she looked around the room. There, in the cabinet, was the unmistakable Mrs. Potts. She was the only large white teapot with a pink-and-purple lid. Her porcelain was shiny and utterly unmoving.

  Stacked next to her were all the little teacups, all but Chip, who was next to her. Like someone had placed him safely next to his mother.

  “Mrs. Potts?” Belle called softly. She rapped on the glass with a gentle knuckle. “Hello?”

  No response.

  Belle backed away into the middle of the kitchen. She spun slowly, looking all around her. It was a normal, quiet kitchen, waiting for a human to come in and breathe life into it.

  Belle ran a hand through her hair, panicking. Was she still asleep?

  Was she finally awake?

  Was she just some poor mad girl lost in a deserted castle, imagining teapots who talked and candelabra who flirted? If she ran back upstairs to “talk” to the wardrobe, what would she be confronted with? Wood and dust?

  The softest sigh came from the cabinet.

  Belle almost sobbed in relief when Mrs. Potts shook herself slowly, throwing off the last remnants of paralysis.

  I’m not mad. That’s something.

  It was strange to think of a kitchen literally brightening—but that is what it did. The oven glowed more orange, all of the chairs straightened to full attention, and sconces around the edges of the room lit themselves.

  Mrs. Potts spied Belle and hopped down from the cabinet anxiously.

  “Oooh my word, I’ve not overslept a day in all my years here!” she cried. “Get the kettle on! Lord, it’s cold! My dear, I am so sorry! We’ll get you something fresh and hot in a moment!” She descended to the table and spun around, directing Chip and the creamer and a small plate of muffins and a silver dome to arrange themselves on a tray. “A beautiful day it is—I’ll bet the sun melts all the snow before noon. But we’ll just pour you some hot chocolate to take the morning chill off!”

  “Thank you. I love hot chocolate. I almost never get it.”

  “I love chocolate, too!” Chip chimed in. “I can feel it in my cup,” he added confidentially.

  He was so cute and…chipper. But Belle couldn’t help thinking, with a shudder, how there was a real little boy under the porcelain.

  “How old were you when…all this happened?”

  “Five!” Chip said proudly. He puffed himself out.

  A little brass pot hopped itself off the stove and carefully onto the table. The cup stood very still, trying to be a serious big boy at his task while creamy, peppery hot chocolate was poured into him.

  “Nicely done,” Belle said, picking him up. She took a tiny sip and he giggled. Then she grabbed a couple of muffins. “I hate to eat and run but I want to get back to the library and do some more research. I don’t suppose you know the name of the Enchantress who laid the curse on you…My, er, mother?”

  Mrs. Potts shook her spout mournfully. “What a terrible thing, not to know the name of your own mother! But I’m afraid I don’t, either. I’ll tell you, though, I’m fairly certain Mr. Potts did. He said some things…dropped some hints…But by that time, it wasn’t safe to have friends who were charmantes, certainly not if you lived at the castle. She was known to other folks here, though…you could try asking them. She came to see the king and queen three times, altogether. Magic always comes in threes.”

  “What?” Belle leaned forward. “Why? Why did she come so often?”

  “Well, the last time it was to curse us all,” the teapot said with a dry laugh. “The time before that it was because the king and queen had summoned her, to beg her to help with the plague.”

  “Did she?” Belle asked breathlessly.

  “No,” Mrs. Potts said with a sigh. “I’m not even sure if she could. Anyway, she told them no and stormed out, the way Lumière tells it.”

  Belle felt like she had been hit in the stomach. After accusing the Beast’s parents of being heartless…Her own mother refused to heal the sick.

  “Why did she visit the first time?”

  “It was to bless the baby…the Prince, the Beast. On his birthday. Like they used to do in the old days. Ooh, I wish I’d seen that!”

  “How…confusing,” Belle said, trying to wrap her head around the idea of her mother blessing a prince she would eventually curse.

  “Well, the king and queen didn’t let her. They said it was archaic or some such. But it was more like thickheaded, if you ask me,” the teapot said with a wet snort. “You can be all modern this and anti-magic that but if an enchantress offers you a free blessing on your child, you’re a damn fool not to take it! That’s what I think, anyway.”

  Didn’t let her…

  Belle felt something like a headache start to come on. A few days ago, she’d had no mother. Now she had a very complicated one. It was like finding out the country you live in is actually on the moon, and beholden to an entirely different set of laws and procedures.

  No…Belle corrected herself. It was more than that. The mother that Belle imagined she had wasn’t a tenth of the mother she actually turned out to be.

  How could Belle, a lonely little bookworm of a country girl, ever have come from someone so great that she meted out curses and blessings like candy and then took over an entire castle with her presence?

  It didn’t seem possible. It almost seemed like a mistake.

  Well, she told herself bravely, I may not have her magic power, but if I am indeed half of my mother, then I have her willpower and cunning, too. I am more up to this than any other creature in this world.

  …Right?

  “Thank you,” she said aloud to Mrs. Potts before leaving.

  As Belle went up the stairs to the dining room, she took a bite out of a muffin. It was still warm and moist inside, practically dissolving on her tongue. There was a delicate aftertaste of lemon and vanilla. She quickly finished the rest of it and ate the next one immediately, telling herself it was to get it all gone before entering the snack-free library.

  Chip giggled as she sipped from him and tried not to wiggle too much. The hot chocolate was very hot.

  Belle threw open the library doors dramatically so she could pretend it was the first time again. There were so many other books she could read on this cozy winter day. Almost too many. She narrowed her eyes and looked at it the way her father would: with a view to improvements. Rather than ladders here and there, he would have a wheeled cart probably, with some sort of chute or pulley system to allow the lifting up and bringing down of books as gently as possible—and a greater number than one person could normally carry. Or maybe a lens on wheels on a rail above the books, so you could look from the comfort of the floor quickly to see if a folio you needed was up there…

  Suddenly, she noticed the Beast at the far end of the room, hunched over a book, frowning at it like he had been there for hours.

  Belle tiptoed quietly down the main aisle toward him. He had a claw out and was moving it slowly across a line of text, frowning. Around him she saw some of the results of frustration: there were more than a few priceless, ancient record books shredded beyond recognition and little piles of what looked like future mouse nests.

  “Beast…?” she asked in wonder.

  “I’m…trying to make a time line. I went through one book already. Pretty thoroughly, I think. Noted all the references to someone who sounded like your mother.” He held up a piece of paper that had so many holes in it that Belle was reminded of the constellation maps you put in front of lanterns to make the little stars glow. There were one or two giant names scrawled at the top before the pen devolved into meaningless loops and scribbles.

  “I haven’t written….in a while….” The look on his face was such a mix of desperation, eagerness, and forlorness that Belle felt her heart break a little. She took the paper from him and looked at it closely.

  “That’s great,” she said. “That�
�s just what we need.”

  The Beast took a deep breath. “I…My parents…”

  “I am so sorry,” Belle said, putting the paper down and taking his paws in her hands. The Beast looked at them, and her, in surprise. “I didn’t know. I had no idea you lost your mother and father to the fever when you were a child. I was a cad and a lout for what I said.”

  The Beast opened his mouth to say something.

  “Thank you,” eventually came out.

  “I’m…also sorry. I can’t always control my rage,” he continued haltingly, flexing his paws, trying to find the right words. “It was…bad last night. My mind went black. I don’t remember what happened after I ran from the dining room….It’s completely blank. I woke up in a corner of the basement with feathers on my muzzle.”

  Belle tried not to withdraw her hands immediately in horror, but to do it slowly, like she was intending to anyway. What on earth had those claws touched? What had they done?

  “That’s never happened before,” the Beast said, not even noticing.

  He spoke through a mouth so large he could have opened it wide and scooped her up and bitten her in half or swallowed her whole. He could snap off her head with his tusks. But he was hunched over and the hump on his back was more pronounced. His eyes, light blue and out of place among the darker colors of his body, were wide and covered with a wet film.

  “I’ll bet it’s the curse,” Belle said glumly. “You’re becoming even more of a beast. And it’s all my fault.”

  The Beast gave her a very wan smile. “And your mother’s.”

  “Right.” Belle slumped down next to him. “Parents.”

  The Beast, almost unthinkingly, put his paw on her hand and squeezed. Like he was comforting her. She leaned into him and he adjusted, putting his arm around her shoulders.

  “They’re out there,” he said quietly after a moment.

  Belle looked around the library before she could stop herself.

  “I’m sorry…?”

  “My parents are out there,” he jerked his chin gently toward the window. A strangely human gesture for such a giant chin. “I…visit them. Sometimes.”

  “Show me,” Belle suggested gently.

  Before they entered the bailey, they stopped at a cloakroom. The Beast was still wearing his fancy pants from dinner the night before but had divested himself of the shirt at some point. He swirled his old giant and ragged cape around his shoulders and fumbled at the golden clasp. But he didn’t lose his temper as immediately as Belle thought he would; apparently doing this one thing properly without destroying it was important to him for some reason.

  Nevertheless, she reached up and firmly did it for him. He didn’t say anything, although there was a lopsided half-smile on his sad face.

  She lightly swung an old cloak around own her shoulders and tied it under her neck in a movement so graceful the Beast couldn’t help staring.

  Then he pushed the door and went out.

  Belle followed, then stumbled over the threshold. Dizzy and confused, she looked to the Beast. He grimly pointed at little piles of dirt that had somehow gotten scuffed up around the door and the base of the walls.

  At first Belle thought of moles or other pesty rodents, but it was winter—they would have been asleep or at least unable to dig through the frozen ground.

  With a skipped heartbeat, she suddenly realized what the cause of the disturbance was.

  The castle was sinking.

  It was being pulled down into the ground by the webs that coated the castle like white fungus and now cut them off from the rest of the world. Earth would swallow the castle whole—like it had never been there at all. The curse would make certain that the kingdom would be entirely forgotten.

  Belle shivered and met the Beast’s eyes, knowing that he had come to the same conclusion. Neither said a word.

  She took a deep, cleansing breath, adjusted her cloak, and turned away from the castle to face the outside world instead.

  Belle was dazzled.

  It wasn’t sunny anymore but still very bright, with festoons of brilliant clouds arching overhead. A light snow covered everything—the kind that was so friable and delicately balanced that it would be gone with the first warm breeze. But for now the landscape was iced in white, and white flakes were still falling from a white sky. Compared to the eternal gloom of the castle, it was positively blinding.

  Even the sickly, bone-white webbing that now cloaked statues and bushes in its strangling tendrils shone with an ugly pale radiance.

  The Beast began to walk and Belle followed…stepping in giant claw-shaped tracks. Her feet barely made it up to the middle of his prints.

  He turned left before he led her through what might, in some ancient year, have been a courtyard filled with defensive spikes during wartime or sheep and merchants during peace, but was now a slightly overgrown strolling garden, thin and tight under the coldness of the season.

  It was extremely beautiful in a shabby, overgrown sort of way. Those who followed fads—and not the actual philosophy of thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau—would have approved wholeheartedly of the “return to natural state” the garden was taking. Belle couldn’t help smiling at the thought of either the Beast or the frustrated gardener being interested in the whims and trends of Parisian gardens.

  Vines had begun to creep up everything. Birds had taken over in a way Belle was pretty sure they wouldn’t when more people were in the castle. Woodpeckers loudly attacked bugs in diseased trees and made their signature swooping flight paths over her head. Doves boldly congregated in twos and threes on the ground, looking for seed, unthreatened by cat or dog.

  They passed under an arbor and into what at one time must have been an extremely elegant jewel box rose garden. Belle caught her breath. It wasn’t huge, as she imagined the ones at Versailles and Rome were, but what it lacked in width and depth it made up for in narrow, winding paths and bushes so cleverly interplanted it looked like a maze of roses that went on forever.

  Climbing roses made thick walls above prim cutting roses, beach roses lapped at the bases of stone urns that held prize miniature roses. There were no other types of plants at all, except for a surprising number of weeds—and the ivy again, creeping along the stone walkways, taking over from below.

  Belle looked around nervously for gaps in the topiary…for brown, bare strips from which the more ambulatory ivy had come. But everything seemed to be…normal.

  Unlike in Belle’s mother’s garden, it looked like winter had killed most of the flowers. They certainly hadn’t been deadheaded properly and, to Belle’s experienced eye, it had been this way for a number of years, with canes not pruned and branches growing weak and heavy from their spent blooms and nutritionally costly rose hips.

  Normally Belle would have reached over and casually broken off one of the unbelievably bright pink fruits and popped it in her mouth. Sour it might have been, but also a welcome burst of vitamins and memory of the summer sun. Hidden on a back shelf in their cottage Maurice still kept a stash of her mother’s rose hip tea. He never drank it, but once in a great while she caught him holding a silken bag to his nose and inhaling its aging perfume.

  The whole place made Belle sad. Not bad sad. Just nostalgic and a little weepy for things that were lost or that she had never had.

  Like a mother.

  Would her mother have taken her into the rose garden and taught her all of the names, would she have plucked a blossom and placed it in her daughter’s hair? Would she have made rose hip tea for her daughter?

  Would she have made raspberry leaf tea for Belle when she first began to have her monthly blood? So that thirteen-year-old me wouldn’t have had to research the possible balms and soothing medicines for it by myself?

  She crunched some brittle snow under her heel extra angrily with that thought.

  The Beast continued to quietly crunch his way forward through the snow. She couldn’t tell if he was affected by the rose garden; he didn’t s
eem any more or less melancholy than he normally did—when he wasn’t in one of his rages. He hunched over in that way that very strongly indicated that moving upright on two feet was not only uncomfortable and unnatural for him, but at times downright painful.

  Belle hurried to catch up and then immediately stopped when she saw where they were: a tiny ancient cemetery.

  It was one of the most beautiful ones she had ever seen. A modern wrought iron fence, whose sharp points were leafed with gold, surrounded the small patch of land. Only the kings and queens of the castle were buried here, along with the heartbreaking bodies of some royal babies and children who had never made it long enough to inherit the throne.

  In front were the two most recent stones. They were beautifully carved marble, still fresh and icy-looking. Ornate designs of skulls and crosses and roses decorated the rounded tops of the stones and their inscriptions were carved in beautifully flowing script.

  Here lie the king and queen of the castle, taken before their time.

  The Beast had squatted down on his haunches to regard them more closely. He took his giant paw to brush off the little snow that had accumulated on the tops of the graves.

  Belle knelt down next to him and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “I was ten when they died,” he said softly. “I didn’t understand. They had done all these things—quarantined the kingdom, sealed us up in the castle, made us drink all of these disgusting tonics…” He chuckled slightly at the last memory. “I hated them—they made me almost throw up. No one else in the castle died, but nothing worked for my parents. From fever to death in less than three days. I wasn’t allowed to touch them, I was barely allowed to see them. I never had a chance to say good-bye.”

  Belle was suddenly reminded of the Beast’s change of heart when she was weeping, when he sent her father away. I didn’t even get a chance to say good-bye. No wonder that had moved him.

  “I was the last of the line…everyone wanted to keep me safe. Away from them and their sickness,” the Beast said mournfully. “But I would have traded my life for one more embrace from my mother, a final word from my father. Without them, I didn’t want to…live.”