She eventually decided that it could not be water. It sounded like something flying.
She opened her eyes. After a moment of reorienting herself, she picked out the small shadow hurtling back and forth across her room which went with the shushing sound. It flew very near each wall and ihen wheeled away as if panic-stricken. It disappeared, while she watched, into the other rooms through the wide doorless archway, and the shushing died away, but then it came streaking back into the bedroom, straight towards the clear glass of the closed balcony doors.
Beauty, still too sleep-dazed to make an attempt at scaring it onto a safer course, held her breath for the inevitable col—
lision, but it swerved away at the last minute and raced towards her bed. It flew straight under the canopy towards the wall, did another of its last-minute, violent changes of direction before it struck, flew back towards the bed, and collapsed on the counterpane.
When Beauty first saw the small flying figure, she guessed it was a bird, trapped somehow indoors, having fallen down a chimney, or mistakenly crept in through a half-open window. But she had caught a glimpse of furry body and naked wing as it swept just in front of her and was now expecting what she found lying panting in her lap. It was a bat.
Beauty had rescued members of most of the commoner animal species in her life, including a few bats. The last one had been in much worse case than this one, terrified by the housemaid’s screaming, beating itself pathetically against a corner of Ihc attic where it had fled. Beauty had trapped it finally by ordering the housemaid to Go away and, when it flopped to the floor half stunned, put a wastebasket over it.
After a few days of hanging upside down in Beauty’s dressing-room (which she kept locked for the duration, for fear of housemaids, and entering it herself only long enough to change the water in the water-dish and to release the fat house-flies she patiently coilccicd in jars), she ordered the dogcart one evening, drove herself to the outskirts of town, and released it.
She’d heard it whirr just a moment, as it had leapt out of her restraining hands and the scarf she had wrapped it in, and had wanted to believe that the perfectly silent shadow, which had then swept low twice over her head—nowhere near enough to risk any danger of becoming tangled in her hair, because as any sensible person knows, bats only lose their sense of distance and direction under such duress as being screamed at by housemaids—had been it saying thank-you, before it went off to find its friends and family. She hoped it had not, during its convalescence, developed such a taste for house-flies that it would ever risk any more attics.
This one was not quite the length of the palm of her hand. She could feel the quiver of its body through the counter—
pane as it tried to catch its breath, and could see into its open mouth, the delicate pink tongue, smaller than the first ieaf of heartsease to open in spring, and the teeth, finer than embroidery needles. Its dark brown fur looked soft as velvet; its wide pricked ears and half-folded wings were only a shade or two paler than its fur. It stared straight at her with its bright black eyes, and lay in her lap, and panted.
“Well,” said Beauty, after a moment. “I have never heard of a tame bat. I suppose you were merely confused. but you are very contused indeed, to be lying in my lap like that and staring at me as if 1 were a legendary saviour of lost bats whom you have recognised in your extremity. What reputation I had of such is years and miles behind me, little one. The bats at Rose Cottage had—have—the good sense to stay in the garden... . Which is to say, I suppose I need something to muffle you with, so you cannot bite me with all those tiny piercing teeth. Not that I would blame you, mind, but I get quite enough of that sort of thing dealing with roses, ...” She reached slowly behind her, so as not to frighten her visitor further, and began awkwardly to work her top pillow out of its pillow slip.
The bat lay where it had fallen, but it had folded its wings neatly against its body, and closed its mouth, and now looked perfectly content. “If I didn’t know that you are supposed to hang upside down—or at least creep into narrow cracks—I would expect you to curl up now, like a very small Teacosy, and have a nap. Saints! This is a maddening activity when I cannot see what I am doing!”
But the pillowslip came free at last, and she wrapped it softly round her hands and picked up the bat, keeping its wings closed against its body. It did not even tremble, but it did turn its head a little so it could go on looking at her.
She groped her way out of bed and down the stairs till she stood on the floor, the bat held gently in front of her. “Now. what do I do with you? I cannot lock you in the water-closet, as it is the only one I know where to find in all this mazy hulk of a palace; I would have something to say to the architect about that, if I met him!
“My old dressing-room, where I used lo put your sort of visitor, was quite a narrow closet, with one tiny window easily blocked off, and I never used it anyway, even bat-frcc. But these rooms are full of sunlight, and you know, none of your brethren that I have met have understood about keeping the carpels clean, and so I need to. er, leave you somewhere J can spread something, er, bat-proof beneath you—’’
She thought of the boll of poachers” jackets material the sisters had found in the housekeeper’s room, and two tears dropped to the breast of her nightgown; but her voice was as steady as ever. “What we need, I feel, is—is an empty wardrobe or even a secret room, I would like that. I would like a secret room.” She spoke half-idly. She had learnt the use of speaking quietly to all rescued animals; even the wild ones seemed to find such noises soothing, and she also wished to fling herself away as quickly as possible from the sudden memory of her sisters.
She began to walk slowly away from her balcony, and when she came to the room hung with the tapestries of a garden in all four seasons, she paused. There came to her there some strange breath of air, some movement just seen at the corner of her eye. She turned her head; the edge of the nearer summer tapestry stirred. She looked down at her bat; her bat still looked at her and lay calmly in her grasp. She shifted it, very slowly, in case it should protest after all, into the crook of one elbow, where it settled, snug and tranquil as a tired kitten. Now she had one hand free and could lift the edge of the tapestry—and push open the crack of door revealed there.
There was a good smell in that darkness, of rich earth and of.. . peace, of the sort of peace she had been used to find in her garden, and she sighed. “There, little one. This should do for you—1 hope. And I will come and let you out again just as soon as it is dusk.”