She was aware that he was walking slowly to allow for both her height and her elegant burden of skirts—thank fate my shoes are more reasonable tonight, she thought—but still they made their way swiftly through what seemed to her a maze of corridors and then up a grand swirl of stairs. Magnificent furnishings demanded her attention on every side, but she turned her gaze resolutely away from them, preferring to stare at the fine black needlework on the Beast’s sleeve, glimpsed and revealed as they walked through clouds of candlelight and into pools of darkness.
She was tired of looking up at portraits that stared down scornfully at her. She was tired of ormolu cabinets and chi-noiserie cupboards that when she first looked bore sprays of leaves and flowers which when she looked again were deer or birds; tired of divans that had eight legs and were covered with brocade but between blink and blink had six legs and were covered with watered silk. She moved her ringers to lie lightly on a ridge of braid on the Beast’s sleeve; it was the same ridge in or out of candlelight. The rich scent of the crimson rose embraced her.
But as they paced up the stairs, she looked up, for the ceiling was now very far away, and she wondered if she was seeing to the roof of the palace. It seemed much higher than the cupola on her glasshouse, and this puzzled her, and before she could remember not to let anything she seemed to see in this palace puzzle her, her eyes were caught by the painted pattern on the ceiling, which seemed to be of pink and gold—and auburn brown and ebony black, aquamarine blue and willow leaf green—and perhaps had people worked into it, or perhaps only rounded shapes that might be limbs and draperies, but certainly it seemed to reflect the swirling of the staircase—except that it did not, and the spiral over—
head began to turn quickly, too quickly, and she lost her sense of where her feet were, and she stumbled because she could not raise her feet fast enough, and she tripped over the risers.
The Beast stooped and picked her up as easily as she might have picked up Fourpaws and continued up the stairs. “Pardon me, please,” he said. “Close your eyes, and hold on to me because I am only . . . what I am. And forgive me. for I should have warned you. I went up this stair on all fours more than once before I learnt not to look up. This house—this place—has a strange relationship with the earth it stands upon. If you want to look round you, stop. When you walk, look only where you are walking. And in particular, do not took at the ceiling when you climb a turning stair, and do not look out any windows when you are walking past them. I—I should have said these things to you before; I have never had occasion to explain to—” He stopped. “I do not think the contents of any of the rooms will make you dizzy if you stand still to look at them. They mostly only, er ...”
“Change their clothing,” said Beauty, and the Beast gave a low rumble of laugh.
“Yes,” he said. “And please forgive me also for treating you so—’
“Lightly,” suggested Beauty, and was gratified by another quick growly laugh.
“—disrespectfully,” continued the Beast. “But I have also learnt that it is better not to—not lo acknowledge when something here has had the better of you, if you need not.”
And at that he reached the top of the stairs, and took two steps into the darkness there, and set her gently down on her feet. Involuntarily she leant against him, listening to the slow thump of his heart, hearing her own heart pattering frantically in her ears in counterpoint as she stirred and put herself away from him, feeling with her hands for the wall. “It is so dark!” she said,
“Yes,” said the Beast’s voice, and it seemed to come from all round her, as if he still held her in his arms, or as if he had swallowed her up, like an ogre in a nursery tale.
“This hall is always dark; I do not know why. I do not know why this great staircase leads you to something you are not permitted to see; I can tell you that candles will not stay kindled here, though the air is sweet to breathe. But this is the shortest way to the roof. I told you that any stair up will lead you to the roof eventually; it will, but sometimes it is a tedious process. And it is the sky we want.”
He leant past her and threw open a door. Starlight flowed in round them, lighting up her pale hands, which she still held out in front of her against the dark of the hallway, playing in the carved surfaces of the cameo rings on her fingers and tweaking glints and gleams from the lace overlay of her skirt. The Beast was a darkness the starlight could not leaven.
She turned, went up a narrow half Might of stairs, and ducked through a low opening. She was on the roof, surrounded by sky, “Directly before you,” said the Beast, and she could hear him stooping behind her, so that when he pointed over her shoulder, his arm was low enough for her eyes to follow, “is the Horse and Chariot. There”—his arm moved a little—“is the Ewer, and there”—only his finger moved—“the Throne.”
“And there,” she said dreamily, “is the Peacock, and the Tinker—how clear his pack is, 1 have never seen it so clear—and the Sailing Ship.”
“Then you are a student of the skies as well,” said the Beast.
She laughed, turning to him. “Oh, no—I have told you nearly as many as I know. Our governesses taught us a little—a very little—a very little of anything, I fear, but the night sky was not their fault, for we lived in the centre of a city, where the gas-tamps were lit all night, and in weather fine enough to stand outdoors with your governess, there was probably also a party going on in some house nearby, with its grounds lit as bright as day. Please tell me more. I have never seen so many stars, so much sky. At home”—she faltered—“at... outside Longchance, where I lived with my sisters, although there are no gas-lamps, there are trees. I know no stars that stay low to the horizon, and the turning of the seasons always confuses me.”
And so he told her more, and sometimes, with the name of some star shape, he told her the story that went with it. She knew the story of the Peacock, who was so proud of his tail that he was willing to be hung in the sky instead of marrying his true love, and how his true love, both sad and angry, asked that peahens, at least, might be spared having tails so grand that conceit might make them forget necessary things, like looking for supper and raising children.
But she did not know the story that the Tinker was not a tinker at all, but a brave soldier who, having stolen the Brand of War, carried it in his pack till he could come up to die Ewer, which contained the Water of Life, where he could quench it forever. But the Ewer always went before him, and he chased her round and round the earth, because she knew that humanity could not be freed of its burden so easily and, for love of the Tinker, could not bear him to know his courage was in vain. Beauty had never seen the Three Deer, who dipped back and forth above and below the horizon, ever seeking to escape the Tiger, who ran after them; nor the Queen of the Heavenly Mountain, whose reaim touched both the earth and the sky, and if you were the right sort of hero and knew exactly the right path, you might visit her, and she would show you the earth constellations spread out at your feet and tell you the stories they held.