“Fruit?” she said, astonished. “You—” Her mind flew back over her meals in the Beast’s palace. “There is no meat on your table.”
The Beast nodded. “1 am a Beast, and other beasts fear me. They cannot live here in pcaee because of my presence, and I cannot give them a merciful death. I sent them away, long ago. No beast—no other beast—comes here now but Fourpaws.”
And a few hundred butterflies, a bat, and four hedgehogs, thought Beauty, and ask me again tomorrow morning. But she did not interrupt,
“Fruit sustains me,” continued the Beast. “When I was first here, the orchard fruited in the autumn, as orchards do; and sometimes in early summer, no matter how careful I had been about storing my previous year’s crop, before the next harvest, I grew very hungry. I ate grass, but it did not agree with me. Over the years the trees have carried their fruit earlier and earlier—and longer and longer.
“I told you last night that the magic here can touch noth—
ing living. Within the walls of the courtyard, it is master; outside those walls it... may ask. The front garden answered and obeyed. But here, in this orchard... It is the trees who have chosen to carry their fruit early and late; it is not magic that compels them.”
Beauty knew what he was about to say before he said it, and she had her mouth open to protest almost before he spoke: “But my poor roses—
“The glasshouse is different,” said Beauty almost angrily. “The glasshouse is not like the rest of the palace. It doesn’t change. It isn’t one thing one minute and something else the next. It is itself.”
“It is the heart of this place,” said me Beast, “and it is dying.”
Beauty put her hands over her ears, as if she would not hear him. “No. No. There is something wrong there, but we are putting it right, the roses and I. I do not know what it is that has gone wrong. I think it is only that it has been neglected for too long. Neither you nor the magic can tend it, but I can. It will not die. It will not. I will not let it,” She took her hands away from her ears and took a deep breath. A little breeze curled round her warm face and patted her cheeks, bringing with it a whiff of a deep-scented rose. Her hands were shaking. “There is cheese on your table—and butter,” she said abruptly, remembering,
“Yes,” said the Beast. “There is cheese and butter.”‘
“But—” She looked at him, and he looked at her; but it came to her that she was [earning to read his face, and she knew he would answer no questions about the cheese and the butter. But even after she realised this, she went on looking at him, and lie at her. The little breeze swerved round her and blew the heavy mane off the Beast’s forehead. It was only the strangeness of what he is, she thought. It is as if you looked at a—a hedgehog and expected it to be a rabbit, or looked at a cat while anticipating a phoenix. I wonder what the hydra thought of the first human being it ever saw, and whether it liked answering a front door that always opened on creatures with only one head.
She looked away. “And bread.” She thought of Lion-heart and added hastily, “And vegetables.”
“Vegetables,” agreed the Beast, without enthusiasm. “They are all grass, as far as 1 am concerned, but the vegetable garden is that way. if you are interested,”
She laughed at him then, because he sounded like a small boy, not like a very large grown-up Beast with a voice so deep it made the hair on die back of your neck stir when you heard it. “But vegetables are good for you,” she said, and added caressingly, “They make you grow up big and strong.”
He smiled, showing a great many teeth. “You see why 1 wish to eat no more vegetables. But I am sure the magic is glad of someone to cook and bake for more capable of being pleased than I.”
Beauly thought of the five slices of toast she had eaten that morning, and the half pot of marmalade. She had been very hungry, after no supper the night before. “You speak of—of it—as if it were a person.”
“I think of it as such. Or”—he hesitated—“as much of a person as I am. 1 think—I sometimes think—we are both a bit bewildered by our circumstances. But as with this orchard, we have grown into each other’s ways, over the years.”
You speak and you move, and the echo in your voice says that you know yourself to be trapped here. As if you and—and the magic are both trapped. But the trees carry their fruit for you, and you sent the other beasts away, that they might not be unhappy. “You have been here a very long time,” she said tentatively.
“Yes. I have been here a very long time. And you have been standing talking to me a very long time. Go eat your lunch. Even magic can’t keep it hot forever.”
Dismissed, she ran off, wishing she dared invite him to accompany her, aware of his gaze on her back, watching her go. wondering if he would still be there by the time she returned after lunch, to smuggle a few hedgehogs into the vegetable garden. He had sent all the other beasts away, long ago. But the trees had learnt to listen to him, and now the beasts were returning.
She was both disappointed and relieved that she did not see the Beast later, with her skirt full of hedgehogs. She made her way as swiftly as she could through the long pathless grass in the orchard, keeping the courtyard archway behind her; her burden made her a little slow and cautious, both for her sake and for her passengers’, and a little clumsy; nor could she entirely resist the temptation to look round her, even at the risk of losing her footing or straying from the shortest route. The grass was spangled with wild-flowers, and she saw tall bulrushes a little way off, at the bottom of a gradual slope, suggesting water, but it was too far away for a diversion.
It was not too long before there rose up before her another sort of wall, an old brick wall, such as might contain an old garden. There was a wrought-iron gate in the wall, and the glimpse she had through it gave her a little warning, but still the garden was a surprise. “Oh! This is how The glasshouse should look!” The words burst out of her. She knelt, to let the hedgehogs roll off her lap, but she was looking round her all the time.
The paths that ran away from her in three directions were wide enough to walk along—and to let sunlight in—but no wider, and in some places the great vegetable forest leant over them, and in other places it sprawled across plots the size of banqueting halls. The rhubarb were tall as trees, the runner bean vines taller than giants; the red-stemmed chard, brilliant as rubies in the afternoon sun, grew as high as her waist, though the leaves were still a fresh young green; and the cabbages, some of them so big around she could not have circled them with her arms, bore extravagant frills as elaborate as ball gowns and as exquisitely coloured; and there were melons nearly the size of Rose Cottage. Did the Beast eat melons? she thought. I must ask. And figs—for there were fig trees espaliered against the walls, looking as if they needed the support of the wires to hold up their splendid weight of fruit.