When she stepped out of the bath again, she patted her poor arms very tenderly with the towels and found that the lavender-blue dress laid on the bed for her tonight had slashed sleeves, the material meeting only at the shoulders and wrists and belling out between in a great silken wave. “Thank you,” she said aloud. “How glad I am this is not the grand dinner-party this dress is suited to. however; a rose-gardener’s battle scars might be embarrassing to explain.”
It was nearly full dark now. She had closed the balcony doors while she had her bath; now she opened them again and stood looking out. The headachy glitter of the stone palace and courtyard were quieted by darkness; she surprised herself by drawing a deep breath and feeling at peace, One hand crept to the breast of her dress, where the embroidered heart lay hidden beneath silk and amethysts.
She turned back into her rooms again, leaving the doors wide, and went into the next room, where the four seasons tapestries hung, and lifted a corner of the right-hand summer one and felt for a door frame. She had not wanted to light any candles, and in this inner room there was very little daylight left, merely shadows of varying degrees of blackness. (She had blown out the candles that stood round the bath and the washsland, muttering Stay, as one might to a well-meaning but slightly larky dog.) She found the door edge, and ran her hand down till she found a little concavity in the wall, and pressed it, and the lock uttered a muffled clink, and the door slid open an inch.
She curled her ringers round it and pulled, calling softly, “Bat! Bat! Are you there? It is nighttime again, and if you fly straight out from my halcony windows, you will soon come to a wild wood which I think should suit you very well.”
She heard nothing, but felt a soft puff of air and, between blink and btink, thought she saw a small moving shadow. She turned round to follow it, hoping to see a little dark body fly out the balcony, but saw nothing, and tried not to feel sad. “It was only a little bat, and 1 meant to set it free,” but it did not work; she was sad, and her sense of peace was gone, and she was lonely again.
But then something caught the corner of her eye, out beyond the balcony, some small moving shape darker than the falling night, but it was too quick for her, and by the time she thought she saw it it had vanished again. But then the flicker of darkness reappeared, curving round the corner of the balcony doors and flying straight at her. She was too astonished to duck, even had she had time to tell her muscles to do so, and the soft puff of air was not air only—she was quite sure—but the tiniest brush of soft fur against her cheek.
The shadow raced back out through the doors but remained near the balcony for a moment, bobbing and zigzagging, as if making sure that her slow, ill-adapted eyes could see it, and then shot away, and she did not see it again. She closed the doors slowly, smiling, and went down to dinner.
Chapter 8
k5he went gaily through Lhe door from her rooms into the chamber of the star, but her eye betrayed her there, rushing into a count round the circumference before she could cancel the impulse. There were twelve doors.
Having counted once, she courted again, and a third lime, counterclockwise for a change, beginning each count with the door to her rooms where she still stood, and there were always twelve doors. And, while she did not want to notice, she also noticed that the shape of the star-points themselves had altered, and the colours of the enamelling, and her memory told her, although she tried not to listen, that this was not the first time her eye had marked this inconstancy. A little of her gaiety drained away from her, and she went pensively through the door that opened for her, not quite opposite her rooms’ door.
She had not seen the Beast all day. If she was again to dress for dinner, she must be about to see him now. She put out of her mind the dreadful question he had asked her at the end of the last two evenings. She wanted to see him—yes, she positively wanted to see him; she wanted to talk to him. She wanted him to talk to her. Talking to bats and rose-bushes was not the same as talking to someone who
:ouid talk back. She wanted someone to speak to her using luman words—if not a human voice. She would not think )f her sisters; she would not. She would think of him; she vould think pleasantly of the Beast, of—of her companion, he Beast.
Almost she put out of her mind the size of him. the ease vilh which he walked through the shadows of his palace, he silence of his footfalls, the terrible irreconcilabilities of us face. She touched the embroidered heart Jeweltongue lad given her and. surreptitiously, as if there might be some->ne watching her, cupped her hands momentarily to feel the ialamander’s heat. It rolled against her palms, wanning her :old fingers. There was nothing to be frightened of. The 3east had given his word, and she believed him. And she vas going to make him happy; she was going to bring his osc-bushes to life—and then she could go home. He would elease her, as she had released the bat and the butterflies. is would release her to go home again, home to her sisters, icr father, home to Rose Cottage, home to her garden.
A thought pulled itself from nowhere in the back of her nind and formed itself into a terrible solidity before she mild stop it. She flinched away from it, but it was too late, t was a thought she had often suppressed in the last year md a half, but here, in the Beast’s palace, where she was listracted and dismayed by too many things, it had broken ree of her prohibition.
What was the curse on three sisters living at Rose Cot-age?
She had held to her decision not to ask for more details—lor to make any reference to the little Mrs Greendown had old her of it to her family. Nor had Jeweltongue nor Lion-icart ever mentioned any disturbing hint of such a tale to ier.
Had Beauty’s hopeful guess been correct, that Long-hanccrs, accustomed to their long-standing loss of rnagic nd again disappointed of a greenwitch—and secure in the nowlcdge of only two sisters living at Rose Cottage—had een content to let the tale lie silent? Could Jeweltongue, /ho had developed almost as great a gift for gossip as she had for sewing, really never have heard anything of it? Or did she have the same fears of it—and had she made the same decision about it—that Beauty had?
A curse must be a very dreadful thing, but it was unknown, a bogey in the dark, as insubstantial as a bad dream. Her bad dream never had done anything to her. then, had it’.’ It was just a bad dream. But her sisters’ happiness was as near to her as her own heart, and as precious. They were happy at Rose Cottage—happy as they had not been when they lived in the city and were great and grand.