“But what if the brat does decide to court you? I can tell you the other stable lads think he’s smitten. They all want to tell me about it—my friends to warn me, my enemies to gloat about the trouble it will cause.”
“The son of the squire court a dressmaker?” Jeweltongue’s tone was sharp as needles. “‘But you have such beautiful manners, my dear,’” she said in a cruel imitation of Miss Trueword’s fluting voice. “A dressmaker who is so busy saving up to have the thatch replaced on the hut she lives in that she had to keep her hand over the hasty dam on her only half-decent skirt all the evening that the squire’s brainless sister had invited her to supper, which she had been brainless enough to accept.”
She put her hands up suddenly and covered her face, and her voice through her fingers was muffled. “Oh, Lionheart, what came over me? Miss Trueword is kind and meant to be kind to me, and she genuinely likes my work. I do not believe it is just her vanity; she jokes that she has a figure like a lathe and does not expect me to deck her out in frills like a schoolroom miss. What need has she to be so clever she could cut herself on it? That has always been my great gift. I—I think she just invited me home to meet her family because she likes me, and the young ladies like me, and to the extent that that amiable animated bolster the squire mar—
ried can stir herself to likes and dislikes, Mrs Trueword likes me, and there is not—there is not much society here, is there? The Oldhouses, and the Cunningmans, and the Took-somes, and only the Oldhouses are ... nice to have around. It was not at all a grand supper. ... Perhaps the darn in my skirt did not matter.
“Lionheart, do you know, it was because I knew I should not be there that I was so bright, so witty, that I talked too much? I wished to draw attention away from the holes in my skirt... the holes in my fingers ... draw attention away from the fact that I am a dressmaker.”
There was a little silence as the two sisters looked at each other. “A very fine dressmaker,” said Lionheart. “I hated your salons, have I ever told you? Full of people being vicious to each other and using six-syllable words to do it with. Your dresses are beautiful. Jeweltongue, love, it’s not that he’s the squire’s son—which I admit is a little awkward—but you’re wrong about old Squire Trueword. The real problem about Master Jack is that he’s a coxcomb and a coward. If you want to charm someone, cast your eye over the second son, Aubrey. I grant you he is neither so tall nor so handsome—nor will he have any money—but he is a good man, and kind, and—and—”
Jeweltongue’s real laugh rang out, and as Beauty awoke, she just heard her sister say, “What you mean is that you approve of his eye for a horse—”
“It was only a dream,” Beauty whispered to herself, “only a dream,” she insisted, even as she could not help looking eagerly around her new, strange, overglamorous bedroom for a glimpse of her sisters. Jeweitongue’s laugh still sounded in her ears; they must be here, with her. close to her. they must... She squeezed the little heart between her palms till her finger joints hurt.
“Oh, I wish I knew what was happening! But I’ve only been gone a day. It was just a dream.’’
There was breakfast on a table in front of the balcony as she sat up, shaking herself free of the final shreds of her dream; the smelt of food awoke her thoroughly. She had been too distressed yesterday to be hungry; today that dis—
tress on top of two days’ unsatisfied hunger made her feel a little ill. She slid out of bed, forgetting the stairs and landing with a bone-jarring thump on the floor. She put a hand to the bed-curtains to steady herself. “That is one way of driving sleep off,” she murmured, “but I think I prefer gentler means.’*
The tea on the breakfast tray was particularly fine; the third cup was as excellent as the first—enchanted leaves don’t stew. She held up the embroidered heart as she drank that third cup, turning it so that Lionheart’s hair caught the light, listening to the silence.
She was grateful there was no rose in a silver vase on the table.
She had been too tired the night before to notice that the nightgown she put on was not her own. She looked at it now and admired its fineness, and the roses embroidered round the bands of the collar and cuffs. It was precisely as long as and no longer than she could walk in without treading on the hem. There was a new bodice and skirt hanging over the back of the chair drawn up near the washstand, which was once again full of warm water, when she turned away from the breakfast table. She looked at them thoughtfully while she washed.
“These are a bit loo good lor the sort of work I have in mind today,” she said to the air, “although I thank you very much. And I know that you are much too polite and—and kind to have thrown my shabby old things out, because I would be so unhappy without them, so I assume I will find them beautifully pressed and hanging up in the wardrobe—with all the other things, including rny nightgown, that I see have disappeared, with my knapsack, from under the bed.”
She said this in just the tone she would have used in speaking to a miserable dog, or any of her other rescued animals, who was refusing to eat. “Now, my sweet, I know you are a good dog, and good dogs always do what they are told when it is for their good, and I know the things you have been told recently have not been for your good, but you must understand that is all over now. And here is your supper, and you will of course eat it, you good dog.” And the dog would. Beauty went to the hanging cupboard and opened the doors, and there were all her few clothes, hanging up lugubriously in one comer, as if separated carefully from the other, much grander things in the rest of the wardrobe, and they looked self-conscious, if clothes can look self-conscious, and Beauty laughed.
But when she took down her skirt and shirt, there was a sudden flurry of movement, and a wild wave of butterflies blew out at her. as if from the folds of her dull patched clothing, and she cried out in surprise and pleasure. For a moment the butterflies seemed to fill the room, even that great high ornamented room, with colours and textures al! the more glorious for being alive, blues and greens and russets and golds, and then they swirled up like a small whirlwind and rushed out the open doors, over the balcony, and away.
She ran to watch them go and saw them briefly twinkling against the dizzy whiteness of the palace and the dazzle of the glasshouse, and then they disappeared round a comer, and she saw them no more. She dressed slowly; but she was smiling, and when she touched the embroidered heart she wore, she touched it softly, without so piercing a sense of sorrow. And when she stepped into the chamber of the star, she deliberately did not count the number of doors and ignored the glare of the haughty lady in the portrait just beyond the one that opened.