Ihere was a priming-knife and a small handsaw lying on top of the water-butt inside the door to the glasshouse. She spent most of the morning studying stems and bushes and cut very little. After a while she said, “Gloves. May I please have a good stout pair of gloves?” And turned round and discovered just such a pair of gloves lying at the foot of the water-butt, where she might have overlooked them when she first came in. “Ladder?” she said next, after another little while. “What I would like best is a ladder light enough that I can—that I can handle it on my own,” she added, for she was remembering that the last time she had had much to do with a ladder she had had Lionheart there to help her wrestle the great awkward object to where they needed it.
There was a ladder behind the door. “Thank you,” she said, “but I don’t believe I could have missed that, you know,” she added to the listening silence; but she kept her eyes on the ladder.
At noon she stopped, and rubbed her forehead, and went in search of lunch, and there was lunch on the table by her balcony. She still was not at all certain how she got from her rooms to the glasshouse or back again; the corridor never seemed quite the same corridor, and the dislocating turns seemed to come at different stages of the journey, and the sun came through windows where the walls should have been internal, and even at noon there were far too many shadows everywhere. She was also beginning to feel that the portrait of the handsome but haughty lady just beyond the door from the chamber of the star was not just one haughty lady but several, sisters perhaps, even cousins, in a family where the likeness is strongly marked; but that did not seem plausible either, for no such grand family would allow all its women to be painted wearing nearly identical dresses, with their arms al! bent with no perceptible kindness round the same sort of browny-fawn lapdog.
The table by the door into the courtyard had reverted to square, and the slope-shouldered clock now had a shepherd, more suitably attired for his occupation, keeping company with the gambolling lambs.
But she did not care, so long as the magic she needed went on working and allowed her to go where she needed to go and do what she needed to do. And there were few shadows in the glasshouse, and the ones there were laid honestly, by stems and leaves and the house’s own glittering framework—and her ladder.
In the afternoon she took her first experimental cuts, beginning with the climbers, and she was rejoiced to find, as she cut cautiously back and back, living wood in each. She nicked dormant buds in gnarled old branches with green hearts and said, “Grow, you. Grow.”
She stopped for tea and a shoulder-easing stretch in the afternoon, and then she spent the last of the lengthening spring twilight marking out her seedbed, peeling her rosehips, and punching rows of tiny finger-sized holes to bury the seeds themselves in. “Grow, you,” she whispered, and went indoors.
Chapter 7
1 his evening a sapphire-coloured dress lay across her bed, and a sapphire necklace on the blue towels of the washstand; but though the soap, and the bath oil in the great tin bath (enamelled over with roses) drawn up before the fireplace, again smelt of roses, today it did not make her weep, for she had work to do and felt she knew why she was here.
She did not examine this feeling too closely, for she was too grateful for the possession of it. and even less did she examine the conclusions it might lead her to. But for the moment the roses in the glasshouse demanded her attention and care, and that was enough, for a little while, and she had a little space to nurse a little precarious security in. She lay in the bath while twilight turned to dusk, and she felt the aches slide out of her muscles and dissipate in the warm water, till she found herself falling asleep, and then she flew out and whisked herself dry in such a commotion of haste that she half believed herself assisted with extra towels by invisible hands.
The Beast was waiting for her in the long dim dining-hall, and he bowed to her, and said, “Good evening, Beauty.” and she replied, “Good evening, Beast.”
The silence and the shadows pressed round them. He moved to her chair and bowed her into it, poured her two kinds of wine, and took a chair himself a little distance from her. She picked up a glass, touched it to her lips, set it down again untasted, served herself blindly from the nearest plate. She was hungry—she had worked hard since lunch—but the silence was heavy, and the Beast, again dressed all in black, his head bowed so she could not see his eyes, was almost obscured by the gloom and seemed as ominous as all the rest of the silence and shadow. She put her fork to the food on her plate; the click of the tines was too loud in the stillness; she set it down again. She was hungry, and could not eat. She sat motionless for a moment, feeling as if the shadows might seep into her blood, turning her into a shadow like themselves.... Her hand crept to the tittle embroidered heart tucked into the front of her bodice.
When the gentle plonk came from the darkness at the far end of the long table. Beauty started in her chair, feeling like a deer who knows she is tracked by a hunter. There was another plonk, and then a rustle-rustle-rustle, and Beauty’s heart slowed down to a normal pace, and she began to smile, because it was a friendly, a silly sort of sound. There was a third plonk and then a quick run of tiny thumps... . Whatever it was, it was coming towards this end of the table.
The Beast stirred, “I believe Fourpaws is coming to introduce herself to her new guest,” he said.
She still had to strain to hear his words when he spoke anything beyond common courtesies such as “good evening”; it was like learning to hear articulate speech in a rumble of thunder. “Fourpaws?”
But at that moment a small grey and amber cat appeared from behind one of the wine carafes, tail high, writhing once round the carafe as if that were her entire purpose at this end of the table, so supple and sleek in the dimness that it seemed she would overstep her hind legs and take a second turn round the narrow vessel. But then with a boneless flicker like a scarf coming loose from a lady’s neck, she unwound herself again and became a slim short-bodied cat, with silky fur just enough longer than short to move gently of its own in response to her motion, and Lo give her a very wonderful tail.
She stood so that Beauty could admire her for a moment, while she looked off into some chosen distance, and then she turned as if to walk straight past the edge of Beauty’s plate. But Beauty was far too charmed by her not to make an effort, and she reached across her plate and offered Four-paws the tips of her fingers. The fingertips were deemed acceptable, and the base of ears and a small round skull between were presented to be scratched. Beauty scratched, Fourpaws purred. Fourpaws then sat down—at jusl such a distance that Beauty would be risking the lace on her bodice to the food on her plate if she wished to go on scratching ears, so she stopped.