Once she arranged the flowers for one of her sisters’ bails. This was ordinarily the housekeeper’s job. Her sisters felt that flower arranging was a pastime for servants or stupid people; Beauty felt that flowers belonged in the garden where they grew. But on the morning of this party the housekeeper had fallen downstairs and sprained her ankle, and was in too much pain to do anything but lie in a darkened room and run the legs off the maid assigned to attend her.
Beauty looked at the poor flowers standing in their buckets of cold water, and at the array of noble vases laid out for them, and began to arrange them, only half aware of what she was about, while her sisters were rushing around the house shouting (in Lionheart’s case) or muttering savagely (in Jeweltongue’s) while they attended to what should have been the housekeeper’s other urgent duties on the day of an important party. Most of Beauty’s mind was occupied with what the night’s events would bring; she would much rather scrub a floor—not that she ever had scrubbed a floor, but she assumed it would be hard, dull, unpleasant work—than attend a ball, which was hard, dull, unpleasant work that didn’t even have a clean floor to show for it afterwards.
Neither Lionheart nor Jeweltongue at best paid much attention to flowers, beyond the fact that one did of course have to have them, as one had place settings for seventy-five and a butler to cherish the wine; but when they came downstairs to have a final look at the front hall and the dining-room, even they were astonished by what Beauty had done.
“My saints!” said Lionheart. “If the conversation flags, we can look at the flowers!”
‘ The conversation will not flag,’’ said Jeweltongue composedly, “but that is not to say that Beauty has not done miracles,” and she patted her sister’s shoulder absently, as one might pat a dog.
“I didn’t know flowers could look like this!” roared Lionheart, and threw up her arms as if challenging an enemy to strike at her, and laughed. “If Miss Fuss-and-Bother could see this, perhaps it would quiet her nerves!” Miss Fuss-and-Bother was the name Lionheart had given to die governess least patient with the frequent necessity of fishing Beauty out of her latest muddy haven in the garden and bringing her indoors and dumping her in the bath. Lionheart had often been obliged to join her there after other, more dangerous adventures of her own.
But that ball was particularly successful, and her sisters teased Beauty that it was on account of her flowers and asked if she was keeping a greenwitch in her cupboard, who could work such charms. Beauty, distressed, tried to prevent any of this from reaching their father’s ears, for he would not have taken even a joke about a greenwitch in their house in good part. The housekeeper, who did hear some of it as she hobbled around the house on a stick, was not pleased and contrived to snub “Miss Beauty” for a fortnight after. (She might also have denuded the garden of flowers in her efforts to have a grander show than Beauty’s for the next party, but the head gardener was more than a match for her.) Beauty stayed out of her way till she had moved her ill will to another target; there was too much temper and spitefulness in the house already, and she thought she might forget her promise to herself never to add to it, and tell the housekeeper what a dreadful old woman she thought her.
Besides, she would probably then have to hire another housekeeper afterwards, and she could think of few things she less wanted to do.
The sisters’ parties, over the course of several seasons, became famous as the finest in the city, as fine as their mother’s had been. Perhaps not quite so grand as the mayor’s, but perhaps more enjoyable; the mayor’s daughters were, after all, rather plain.
Only the ill-natured—especially those whose own parties were slighted in favor of the sisters’—ever suggested that it was the work of any hired magician. Their father’s attitude towards magic was well known. His sudden revulsion of feeling upon his wife’s death had indeed been much talked of; but much more surprising was its result.
It was true that he was the wealthiest merchant in the city, but that was all he was; and if he had long had what seemed, were it not absurd to think so. an almost magical ability to seize what chance he wished when he wished to seize it, well, seers and soothsayers were always going on about how there was no such thing as luck, but that everyone possessed some seeds of magic within themselves, whether or not they ever found them or nursed them into growth. But no mere merchant, even the wealthiest merchant in the biggest city in the country, and whatever the origins of his business luck, should have been able to dislodge any magical practitioner who did not wish to be dislodged; but so it was in this case. Not only were all the magicians, astrologers, and soothsayers who had been members of his wife’s entourage thrown out of his house—which ban was acceptably within his purview—but he saw them driven out of the city.
The sisters were forbidden to have anything to do with magic; the two elder girls still bought small street charms occasionally, and Beauty was good friends with the elderly salamander belonging to the retired sorcerer who lived near them; but none of them would ever hire any practitioner to do a personal spell.
It was no surprise to anyone who paid attention to such matters when Lionheart contracted an engagement with the Duke of Dauntless, who owned six thousand of the finest hunting acres in the entire country, and much else besides. Jeweltongue affianced herself to the Baron of Grandiloquence, who was even wealthier than the Duke, and had a bigger town house. They planned a double wedding; Beauty and the three sisters of the Duke and the four sisters of the Baron should be bridesmaids. It would be the finest wedding of the season, if not the century. Everyone would be there. admiring, envious, and beautifully dressed.
In all the bustle of preparations, no one, not even Beauty, noticed that the old merchant seemed unusually preoccupied.
He had hoped he could put off his business’s ruin till after the wedding. He loved his daughters, but he felt his life had ended with his wife’s death; he had been increasingly unable to concentrate on his business affairs in the years since. His greatest pain as he watched the impending storm approach was the thought that be had not been able to provide a husband for Beauty. It was true that she was not very noticeable in the company of her sisters, hut she should have been able to find a suitable husband among all the young men who flocked to their house to court Lionheart and Jeweltongue.
He thought of hiring a good magician or a sorcerer to throw a few days’ hold over the worst of the wreck, but his antipathy to all things magical since his wife’s death meant not only had he lost all his contacts in the magical professions, but a sudden search now for a powerful practitioner was sure to raise gossip—and suspicion. He was not at all certain he would have been able to find one who would accept such a commission from him anyway. It had occurred to him, as the worst of the dull oppression of grief had lifted from his mind, to be surprised no magical practitioner had tried to win revenge for his turning half a dozen of them out of the city; perhaps they had known it was not necessary, The unnatural strength that had enabled him to perform that feat had taken most of his remaining vitality—and business acumen—with it.