Opring advanced. Beauty and Lionheart were relieved to find that their awkward carpentry and inexperienced mends were holding firm and that, so far as they could tell, there was nothing terribly wrong with their little house. They hoped the thatch would keep the rain oul one more year; perhaps next spring, somehow, they could find the money to have it redone. Meanwhile, their father slept in a truckle-bed by the warm banked kitchen fire downstairs, and the three sisters rigged a patchwork canopy—Jeweltongue took time out from making shirts to put together scraps from her mending basket—over the mattress they shared in the loft, so that the pattering rain of little many-1 egged creatures falling out of the thatch did not trouble them as they slept.
Beauty began to have strange, vivid dreams unlike any she had had before. Sometimes she saw great lordly rooms like those of a palace, though of nowhere she had ever herself been; sometimes she saw wild landscape, most often in moon—and starlight. Sometimes she saw her family: Jeweltongue speaking to a young man wearing a long apron, his hands covered with flour; Lionheart, with her hair cropped off so short that the back of her neck was bare, rubbing the ears of a horse whose nose was buried in her breast, while a man with a kind earnest face stood leaning against the horse’s shoulder; her father, in a fine coat, reading aloud from pages he held in his hands, to an attentive audience.
And then one night her old dream came back. She had not had it in so long—and her life had changed so much meanwhile—she had almost forgotten it; or rather, when she remembered it, which she occasionally did. she thought of it as a part of her old life, gone forever. Its return was as abrupt and terrifying as a blow from a friend, and Beauty gave a convulsive lurch in bed, and a half-muffled shriek. and sat up as if she were throwing herself out of deep water.
“Oh, help!” said Jeweltongue, who lay next to her and was awakened by Beauty’s violence. “My dear, whatever is the matter?” She sat up too, and put an arm round Beauty. rubbing her own eyes with her other hand. Beauty said nothing, and Jeweltongue began to pat her sister’s arm and back in a desire to comfort them both. Beauty turned jerkily and put her head on her sister’s shoulder. “Was it a bad dream?’’ said Jeweltongue.
“Yes,” said Beauty. “Yes. It is a very old dream—I’ve had it all my life—I thought it had gone—that I had left it behind in the city.”
“All your life?” said Jeweltoague slowly. “You have had this nightmare all your life and I never knew? I—”
But Beauty put her hand over her sister’s mouth and said, “Hush. We were different people in the city. It doesn’t matter now.”
Jewekongue kissed her sister’s hand and then curled her own fingers tightly round it and held it in her lap. “1 swear you must he the nicest person ever bom. If I didn’t love you, I would hate you for it, I think.”
“Now you know how I fee! the six hundred and twelfth time in a row you’re right about something,” said Lionheart sleepily from Jeweltongue’s other side. “What is happening?” she said through an audible yawn, “It’s still dark. It’s not morning already, is it, and 1 have forgotten to open my eyes?”
“No,” said Jeweltongue. “Beauty’s had a nightmare,”
“Nightmares are hell,” said Lionheart feelingly. “I used to have them—” She stopped abruptly. “Not so much anymore,” she said, “except some nights, when the beetle and spider rain is bad, I start dreaming the thatch is leaking.”
“I’m all right now.” said Beauty.
“No, you’re not,” said Jeweltongue. “I can still feel your heart shaking your whole body. Whatever is your nightmare about? Can you tell us?’’
Beauty tried to laugh. “It sounds so silly. I’m walking down a dark corridor, with no doors or windows anywhere, and there’s a monster waiting for me at the far end. I can’t see it, but I know it’s there. It’s—it’s ... I suppose it’s just that I haven’t had it in so long. But it seems so—so much stronger than it used to. I mean ... you always feel like you’re in a nightmare when you’re having it, don’t you? Or it wouldn’t be a nightmare. But tonight.. .just now, I was there.’’’
There was a Jittle silence, and then Lionheart sat up as if to climb out of bed but stopped with one foot touching the floor. “If Jeweltongue would remove herself so that she is no longer sitting on my nightgown, I will go brew us some chamomile tea. It’s good for almost everything; it should be good for nightmares too. You stay here so we don’t disturb Father.1’
After that first time the dream came back often, but Beauty did not wake her sisters again. She grew accustomed—she forced herself to grow accustomed—to the feeling that she was there, that the only difference between her waking life and her life in the dream was that in the dream she did not know where she was.
She looked for details in her waking life that she would not be able to match in the dream, in some hope that such small exact trifles would orient her so firmly to the world of Rose Cottage and Longchance that the dream would distress her less when she found herself once again in that great dark not-quite-empty place, but this did not turn out as she wished. If she examined the wood grain in the walls of Rose Cottage one day, the next night she dreamed of examining the wallpaper in the corridor in the flickering light of the candles. If she touched the wall in reaction to the uncertainty of what she could see, or guessed she saw, she felt the slight roughness of the paper itself, the seams where the lengths met, and the slickness where the paint had been drawn on over the stencil.
She found that her dream had changed in another way. She had begun to pity the monster she approached.
She feared him no less for this: she did not even know why she felt pity and grew angry with herself for it. She would rush along the endless shadowy corridor with her head bowed and her amis crossed across her breast, feeling grief and pity and raging at herself, Why do I feel sorry for a monster who is going to eat me as soon as seen, like the Minotaur with his maidens? When she woke, she remembered how, when she was still only a child, she had realised that she did not seek to escape, but to come to the end of the corridor and get it over with—whatever it was going to be. And she remembered how sick and dizzy and helpless and wild—almost mad—that realisation had made her feel. It’s only a dream, she had said to herself then, and she repeated it now, silently, in the peaceful darkness of Rose