Rose Daughter (13 page)

The bitterness of her thoughts weighed her down till she had
to stop walking. She looked again at the beech trees and, not waiting for a gap
this time, fought her way through to the nearest and leant against it. turning
her head so that her cheek was against the bark. The Beast is a Beast, even if
he keeps his promises; how could she guess how a Beast thinks, especially one
who is so great a sorcerer? It was foolish to talk of hating him—foolish and
wasteful. What had happened had happened, like anything else might happen, like
a bit of paper giving you a new home when you had none finding its way into
your hand, like a company of the ugliest, worst-tempered plants you’d ever seen
opening their flowers and becoming rose-bushes, the most beautiful, lovable
plants you’ve ever seen. Perhaps it was the Beast’s near presence that made her
own roses grow. Did she not owe him something for that if that were the case?
It was a curious thing, she thought sadly, how one is no longer satisfied with
what one was or had if one has discovered something better. She could not now
happily live without roses, although she had never seen a rose before three
years ago.

She could not stand here forever, and she had best not go on
standing here at all. If the Beast had been watching them, if he was watching
her now, he would see no good reason for her stopping, because there was none.
And she wanted no sorcerous prods to send her more swiftly on her way. Would
the Beast tell her, if she asked, that her father had recovered?

It was clear daylight when she reached the beginning of the
gardens and the white pebble drive. But even Beauty’s young eyes could not see
how far either the clearing or the palace itself extended; the building seemed
to run a very long way in both directions, and a distant dark irregular haze
seemed to suggest lhat the trees pressed up close just beyond its corners.

Beauty walked down the drive, staring at the clipped box and
the stark paths and stone pools, thinking forlornly that there was nothing here
for her. Her eyes burnt with unshed tears, and she walked stiffly, because her
legs were trembling. This will not do at all! she said to herself, a little
frantically. I haven’t—I haven’t even met the Beast yet! But this was the wrong
thing to think of, because then fear and sorrow broke free of their bounds and
seized her.

She turned off the path, and groped her way through the openings
in one of the hedges, and sat down on the edge of a stone pool. The stone was
coo] and hard like any stone, and this served to comfort her a little; she took
a deep sigh and contrived to find some humour in being comforted by the dull
grey coping of an uninteresting round pool. She looked at the statue in her
pool: a blank-faced maiden carrying an um and wearing what would have been
impractical and highly unstable draperies, except for the fact that they were
made of stone. The maiden was not nearly so graceful and attractive as the
statue in the centre of the garden at Rose Cottage.

Beauty turned a little where she sat, to look at the palace
again; it seemed to her very bleak, and she wondered if there was any rose that
would climb tall enough to soften its harsh face. Even the one galumphing over
the rear wall of Rose Cottage (its stems were now appearing on the far side,
and Beauty predicted that in another year or two it would likely be locked in a
battle for precedence with the slightly more subdued one by the front door)
might find this palace too much for it. Then she thought of window-boxes under
all those gigantic, joyless windows, full of cheerful, untidy plants like
pansies and trailing peas and nasturtiums, in the vividest colours possible.
She was by now genuinely smiling.

I wonder where the Beast’s rose garden is, she thought, For
there is no sign of it here.

She stood up and made her way slowly back to the drive and
more slowly yet towards the gaping front door. There were no candles lit today,
and in the bright daylight the open door looked like the mouth of a cave. Or of
a Beast.

She came to within a few steps of the portico, and halted,
and could make herself go no farther. Her heart was beating so quickly she had
to keep swallowing, because it seemed to be leaping up her throat; her head
felt light, and there was something wrong with her vision, as if everything she
looked at were no more than an elaborate mirage. ... She touched Jeweitongue’s
embroidered heart again. The decision was made; she was here; she would not
turn back; she would not even look back over her shoulder... .

She had been standing, staring at the portico and the door beyond
in a kind of half trance. A shadow caught the comer of her eyes, and she spun
round, backing away so quickly that she blundered against the nearest box
hedge; it pricked her sharply even through her skirts. She stumbled, regained
her balance, and stood staring at the Beast.

She was less lucky than her father, who had never looked the
Beast clearly in the face. The old merchant had had some little warning of the
Beast’s approach by hearing him roar before he appeared and was therefore
already frightened enough to have difficulty looking at the threat directly;
and the Beast had remained, throughout that interview, with his back to the
daylight. Beauty had had the warning of her father’s experience, but it was the
wrong sort of warning, or she had taken the wrong warning from it. She had
thought only that this Beast was a very iarge, strong, and therefore dangerous
Beast, who was the more terrifying because he walked and dressed and spoke like
a man.

Had she had the opportunity to choose, she would still have
chosen to look immediately into the Beast’s face upon meeting, to have the
worst borne and past at once. But the worst borne is not necessarily past and
over with thereby. The worst of fighting a dragon is being caught in its fire,
but you do not survive dragon encounters by commanding your muscles to
withstand dragon fire, because you and they cannot. You survive by avoiding
being burnt. Beauty knew no better than to wish to marshal her forces before
she met the Beast, though that marshalling would not have saved her. As it was,
she was surprised into looking into the Beast’s face.

The contrasts she found there were too great: wisdom and despair,
power and weakness, man and animal. These made him far more terrible than any
hungry lion, any half-tamed hydra, any angry sorcerer, terrible as something
that should not exist is terrible, because to recognise that it does exist
shakes that faith in the foundations of the natural world which human beings
must have to bear the burden of their rationality.

Later Beauty thought of a metaphor to explain the shock of
that first sight of the Beast: She felt as if she were melting, like ice in
sun. Water is perhaps a kind of ice, but it is not ice, it is water.
Whatever—whoever—she was, it was being transformed implacably into something
else;
she
was being undone, unmade, annihilated. .,. But that unravelling
thought—which she would later put the words to of ice burning in the heat of
the sun—made her drowning mind throw up a memory of those last days in the
city. And she remembered staring into the eyes of the salamander, into those
two pits of fire whose dangerous heat she had felt, and she heard the
salamander’s dry, scratchy voice saying,
I give you a small serenity.

With her last conscious strength, she cupped her hands and
immediately felt the warmth between the palms, as if she held a small sun; and
then the heat surged up her arms and into her body, reaching into every niche
and cranny, till it had reshaped her flesh into her own precise, familiar,
individual contours, and she was neither water nor ice nor unmaking but again
herself. And she opened her mouth and gasped for air, for since she had raised
her eyes to the Beast’s eyes, she had not breathed.

All of this took no more than a minute, as clocks understand
lime.

She lowered her eyes then, and wishing to regain her composure
and not wishing to appear rude, she dropped a curtsy, as she would have done to
a great lord of the city, keeping her eyes upon the ground; but the graceful
dip of her curtsy was hampered by the box hedge. She could not quite bring
herself to step away from it, for any step forward would take her nearer the
Beast.

“You need not curtsy to me,” said the Beast. “I am the
Beast, and you will call me that, please. Can you not bear to look at me?”

She looked up at once, pierced to the heart by the sorrow in
his voice and knowing, from the question and the sorrow together, that he had
no notion of what had just happened to her, nor why. From that she pitied him
so greatly that she cupped her hands again to hold a little of the salamander’s
heat, not for serenity but for the warmth of friendship. But as she felt the
heat again running through her, she knew at once it bore a different quality.
It had been a welcome invader the first time, only moments before; but already
it had become a constituent of her blood, intrinsic to the marrow of her bones,
and she heard again the salamander’s last words to her:
Trust me.
At
that moment she knew that this Beast would not have sent such misery as her
father’s illness to harry or to punish, knew too that the Beast would keep his
promise to her, and to herself she made another promise to him, but of that promise
she did not yet herself know.
Trust me
sang in her blood, and she could
look in the Beast’s face and see only that he looked at her hopefully.

This time it was he who looked away first. “If you will
follow me, I will show you to your rooms,” he said.

“I—I would rather see your garden. I—I mean, your
flower-garden,” she said almost shyly, and hesitating to mention roses. She
look one, two, three tiny steps away from the box hedge. The Beast was so
large! And it would be easier to be near him outdoors, in these first few
minutes of—of—in her first attempts to adjust to—to—She did not think she could
bear to look at the rooms she was now to live in, that did not have her sisters
in them. Roses might comfort her, a little. Or if they could not, nothing
could. ., .

She shook herself free of that thought quickly and allowed instead
her gardener’s passion to be drawn by die prospect of roses which bloomed so
far out of their season as the one diat had decorated their father’s breakfast
table, the one which still stood in the window of—No! She would not let herself
think of it. Roses; she was thinking of roses, of what a great sorcerer indeed
the Beast must be, to have roses blooming in winter.

She might have been frightened of the Beast’s silence if she
had not been so absorbed by her thoughts, in not thinking the thoughts that
most pressed on and plucked at her. She came to herself and noticed his silence
and wondered if she had offended him, and a small cold prickle of fear touched
her. But then he said: “You will see... what remains of my garden.” He looked
out over the box hedges, the paths, and the stone pools, and she thought that
they brought him no pleasure; this was not what he thought of when he thought
of his garden. “Later.”

He led her into his great house, and Beauty followed
timidly, keeping not too near to him, but not—she hoped—too far away.
Everything was silent, except when Beauty brushed her hand against a curtain,
or a dangling crystal drop from a low sconce—just to hear the sound. The carpet
was deep, and neither her footsteps nor the Beast’s made any noise at all; nor
did he make any further attempt at conversation, and she could think of nothing
she wished to say to him.

But there was still—wasn’t there?—some odd quality to this silence,
a heaviness, as if the air itself were denser here than usual, that it did not
carry sound as ordinary air did, that it required a slightly greater effort
than usual to walk through. Was this what a sorcerer’s house always felt like?
She had never been invited indoors at the house of the salamander’s master, but
he had also been retired, so perhaps that would still have told her nothing.
There had been no sense of oppression—of
otherness
—in his front garden,
except by what the salamander provided in its own self, and that was all she
knew. There was an almost liquid quality to this air, to this unknown ether
coiling among the solid objects, herself and the Beast among them. She waved
her arm in front of her and fancied that she saw liny, ghostly ripples of
turbulence, like the surface of a troubled pond, following the motion.

But even this occupied only part of her attention. She was
so astonished by everything she saw that this oppression—whatever caused it—was
not as great as that simpler oppression of spirits she had anticipated when she
had followed the Beast indoors. She knew that her weariness of soul and body,
after what had already happened to her both today and all the days since her
father had relumed from his disastrous journey, made her more susceptible to
intimidation, but knowing this, she was still oppressed and intimidated and had
little power of resistance.

This indoors was so unlike what she had left, so unlike even
the very grand house they had had, long ago, in the city when they had been
wealthy. It seemed to her that this house was as much grander than their city
house as their city house was to Rose Cottage, and it was Rose Cottage that she
loved, far more than she had ever loved anything in the city. And the walls
were so high and wide, the ceilings so distant that the Beast seemed no larger
than an ordinary man, in such a setting, but Beauty felt no bigger than a
beetle, creeping after him.

At last they came to an enormous circular room, with an eight-pointed
star inlaid upon the floor, and eight doorways leading out of it, and sunlight
through a dome overhead, the dome ringed with an inlay that matched the star.
Even here the Beast’s footfalls made no sound, but Beauty’s more ordinary shoes
made a soft tapping on the smooth bare floor. The Beast strode across the star
without hesitation, the wings of his gown laying flying shadows over the
sparkling tiles, and threw open one of the doors. “I will leave you now,” he
said. “If there is anything you need, say it aloud, and if it is within this
house’s power—or mine—it will be brought to you at once.’’ He turned to go the
way they had come.