Jewel tongue loosed her hand from Lionheart’s and reached into a pocket in her apron. “This is for you,” she said to Beauty. She held out a tiny embroidered heart on a silk rope. “It’s to—to—I don’t know. It’s not to remember us by, because I know you’ll remember us, but it’s to have something to hold in your hand when you think of us. I—I only thought of it myself a few nights ago; you know it’s been so hard to think clearly about anything since Father returned.... I would have made you a rose, but I didn’t think I could do one well enough in so short a time; hearts I can do in my sleep. As I think I did this one. And—I’ve used some of Lionheart’s hair. You remember you picked up the bits after you finished cutting it, and put them in the old sugar bowl on the mantel? So you have both of us, Lionheart and me. Here. Take it.”
Beauty released both hands to take the silk rope and set it round her neck, and then the three sisters embraced, till Beauty broke away and went running down the track, her tears cold on her face in the early-morning breeze, and the desolate howl of Teacosy in her ears.
When she came to the end of the little track that led to Rose Cottage and set her feet upon the wider way that came up from the city and wound past Longchance on its way to its end in the wild mountains of the east, she closed her eyes and turned in a circle three times clockwise, and then she walked three steps forward, holding her hand in front of her face just in case she walked into a tree, though she was quite certain she would not. After three steps she opened her eyes and found herself on a track only a little bigger than the one that led off the main way to Rose Cottage, but it was a track she was quite sure she had never seen before. The wood on either side of her beyond the track looked older and wilder than thai around Rose Cottage. The tangle here told her that there would be no frequent glimpses of farmland beyond, as there were everywhere near Long-chance, where the undergrowth was regularly cleared and the old trees were felled for firewood and building.
Furthermore, running on either side of her, at just a little distance, as if the track had once been broader, were two rows of beech trees, as if lining a drive. She had seen few beeches since they had left the city, and she had missed them. She left the track for a moment when there was a tittle suggestion of a gap in the low scrub and put her hands on a beech tree. The fee! of the smooth familiar bark gave her courage. She touched Jeweltongue’s little embroidered heart and returned to the path.
She wondered if her father had awakened yet, if he had missed her, if Jeweltongue would tel! him she was only out in the garden, if Teacosy’s wretchedness would give them alt away immediately. She wondered if she had been right to guess that her father would not mend till she left—and that he would mend when she did. Had the Beast sent his illness? Did he watch them from his palace? What a sorcerer could and could not do could never quite be relied on—not even always by the sorcerer. She could hate him—easily she could hate him—for the misery of it if he had sent it. If he kept his promises like a man, did he suppose that they, mere humans as they were, would keep theirs any less? The price was high for one stolen rose, but they would pay it. If he had sent her father’s illness to beat them into acquiescence, she would hate him for it.
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.