Hastily she picked up the soap. It was very fine, smooth soap and made her aware, as she had not been aware for many months, of her rough gardener’s hands, and it smelt of roses. Her tears began to flow again, so she set the soap down and made do with the warm water. Then she returned to the balcony.
From where she stood, the palace ran round at Least three sides of an immense courtyard. She could see only partway along the long faces to either side of her and could not see at al! where the fourth side should run, or whether it was open or not, because her view was blocked by a glasshouse.
The glasshouse was itself big enough to be a palace, and it glittered so tempestuously in the sun she had to find a patch in its own shade for her eyes to rest upon. It was very beautiful, tier upon graceful tier of it rising up in a shining silvery network of curves and straight lines, each join and crossing the excuse for some curlicue or detail, the cavalcades of panes teased into fantastic whorls and swoops of design no glass should have been capable of. Merely looking at it seemed an adventure, as if the onlooker’s gaze immediately became a part of the enchanted ray which held the whole dazzling, flaring, flaunting array together.
Beauty found that she was holding her breath—in delight; and when she expelled it, a laugh came with it. The glasshouse was joyous, exuberant, absurd; immediately she loved it. It was her first friend, here in the Beast’s gigantic palace, sunken in its viscous silence.
At the very top of the glasshouse—she blinked against the glare—was a small round cupola and what she guessed was a weather vane, although she could not identify its shape, but she thought she saw it move. The palace was three immense storeys tall, but the glasshouse was taller yet.
She had turned and was making her way quickly back through the long swirl of rose-covered rooms before the idea had finished forming in her mind: There is the Beast’s garden.
Chapter 6
She half ran out upon the round chamber with the star in its floor. She stood in the centre, turning round and round, with the sun pouring down on her, and her feet playing hide-and-seek with the coloured tiles in the centre of the star. ‘‘Oh! I shall never find my way! How do I go to the glasshouse?” She had spoken aloud only in her private dismay, and had only just noticed that there were len doors instead of eight, and had begun to tell herself she must have miscounted the first time when one door swung slowly open. She fled through it before she had time to change her mind, before she had time to be frightened again or to weep for loneliness. The garden would comfort her.
She had only the briefest impression of a portrait of a dauntingly grand lady in an extravagantly furbelowed frame, hanging on the first turn of the corridor beyond the door, before she rushed past it. She was remembering the glasshouses in their garden in the city, which were paltry things compared to this one, nor could they convince their summer flowers to bloom quite all year round—not even the mayor’s great glasshouse could do that, with its hot-water pipes, which ran beneath all its benches and floors, and its shifts of human stokers, working night and day, to keep the boiler up to temperature—and the winters there were much milder than in the environs of Longchance and Appleborough. Perhaps this glasshouse was the answer to the question of how the Beast had had a rose with which to ensnare her father. ... She jerked her thought free of that grim verb ensnare. But perhaps it was only a glasshouse, and not sorcery, thai was the answer to her question.
Unexpectedly she found herself remembering something Mrs Greendown had said to her: Roses are far love. Not silly sweethearts’ love but the love that makes you and keeps you whole, love that gets you through the worst your life ‘II give you and that pours out of you when you’re given the best instead.... There aren ‘t many roses around anymore because they need more love than people have to give ‘em. to make ‘em flower, and the only thing that’ll stand in for love is magic, though it ain ‘t as good, and von have to have a lot of magic, like a sorcerer. ...
But the Beast was a sorcerer, wasn’t he? Of course. He must be.
The corridor twisted and twisted again, and the sunlight came through windows in what seemed any number of wrong directions, and she began to wonder at the decisiveness of her feet, so briskly stepping along, nearly scampering, like Teacosy after a thrown stick... . But then the world straightened out, with a lurch she seemed almost to feel, and there was a door to the outside, which opened for her, and she stepped through it and was in the courtyard she had seen from her balcony, and the glasshouse was in front of her.
She approached it slowly after all. It was very splendid and very, very large, and she felt very small, and shy, and shabby—“Well, I am very small and shabby,” she said aloud. “But at least my face and hands are clean.” And she held up her clean hands like a token for entry. “No, that is the wrong magic to enter even a magic garden,” she said, and looked up at the glasshouse towering over her, and all its gorgeous festoonery seemed to be smiling down at her, and again she laughed, both for the smiling and for the ridiculousness of the notion.
“Here,” she said, and reached inside the breast of her shirt with one hand, and drew out a small wrapped bundle of the cuttings she had brought, and with her other hand reached into her pocket and drew out a handful of rose-hips. She stepped forward again, holding her gifts to her body, hut when she catnc Lo the glasshouse door, she held them out, as if beseechingly.
And then she laughed yet again, but a tiny, breathless snort of a laugh, a laugh at her own absurdity, tucked her rose-hips and her cuttings back inside her clothing, set her hand upon the glasshouse door, and stepped inside.
She had been able to see little of what might lie inside the glasshouse from her balcony because the sun was so bright; she had had some impression of shadows cast, but she was unprepared for what she found. The glasshouse’s vastness was entirely filled with rose-bushes. The tall walls were woven over with climbers, and the great square centre of the house was divided into quarters, and each quarter was a rose-bed stuffed with shrub roses.
But they were all dead, or dying.
Beauty walked slowly round the edges of the great centre beds, looking to either side of her, looking up, looking down. Occasionally some great skeletal bush had managed to throw up a spindling new shoot bearing a few leaves; she saw no leaves on the climbers, only naked stems, many of them as big around as her wrists. She had thought when she first saw the thorn-bushes massed round the statue in the garden of Rose Cottage that they were dead; but she had not known what sleeping rose-bushes look like. She knew now. The Beast’s roses were dying.