She took a tight little breath, and held it, and turned herself round on her ladder till she was facing the wing beyond which lay the bonfire glade, but the glade itself was hidden by the height of the palace. She climbed a few more rungs and turned again; she hooked her left arm through the ladder and leant against it. She still could not see the glade, and the forest seemed to begin immediately outside the wall. She shivered a little and looked again towards the front gardens, but there was the wild wood pressing against its boundary; it sprang up just behind the wing containing her rooms, as it did behind the wing opposite.
She craned her head to look again over the orchard wing, ignoring the painted roof. There she could see the farther trees in the long grass of the meadow, kindly spreading fruit and nut trees, not the dark menacing trees of the forest; beyond them she could see the wall of the vegetable garden, and a slip of the beds inside, visible beyond the wall, and beyond the far wall, the fields of corn … and beyond that, the horizon beginning to blur with distance, so she could not be sure, but it seemed to her that there too the wood held the outer margin.
There was no sign of human habitation anywhere, no thin wisps of smoke as if from chimneys, no landscape muddled with little boxy shapes that might be farm buildings or houses; nothing but fields and the tangle of close-growing trees. She shivered again and turned a sigh into a reviving gulp of wild air. The breeze was kicking up a little more strongly, perhaps because she was now so high; she found she wished to cling to the ladder with both hands against its pestering.
She turned to face front again to make the clinging easier—still looking carefully round the weather vane—and stared at that far edge of the front gardens, the forest edge. This was also the wing that contained the gates closed against any courtyard entry: the gates that were so profoundly closed Beauty could barely find the cracks between door and frame with her fingertips in daylight, when she was awake and alert and looking for them, where at night, half asleep or half ensorcelled by the magic of this place, her head full of the Beast’s painting and the stories it told, she had thought she had seen an old woman leave a basket … had thought she had seen her walk down the length of the courtyard to be welcomed at the edge of the wild wood by shapes of silver shadow.…
Stop that! Beauty said to herself crossly. Do you expect an enchanted palace to take its place in ordinary human geography, that I should be able to track its location by finding Longchance a morning’s brisk walk away just to the north and east, and Appleborough just visible, because I know where to look, in the northwest?
But the roses, said a little unhappy voice in her mind. If—if you did not see the old woman—if you did not see the unicorns—what about the roses?
Beauty remembered the walk back from the glade last night, carrying or not-carrying, the heavy basket; the crumbly, sweet-smelling stuff in her hands, spreading it carefully round her hopeful bushes, her decision not to go in the glasshouse this morning, to let the magic work.
If anything since Father came back from his journey to the city has happened, she replied to the voice, then that has happened. But her hands, clutching the rung of the ladder, trembled, and she involuntarily looked down, trying to peer through the slope of the glasshouse beneath her ladder, looking for new leaves, for new green stems, even for snippets and hints of flower colours.… But she turned her eyes away again almost at once. I will not look, she said. I have done what I could. I have worked hard, I have done my best, and it is now up to … to … to the magic. It can touch nothing living. But the unicorn had breathed into her face, breathed the breath of a living creature.
Still her heart was heavy, and she tried to find the path through the wood that had led her to the parterre, the grand front facade of the Beast’s palace; but she could not. I should be able to find the double row of beeches, even in the wild wood! she thought. No, no, it is not like that here, just as I cannot see Longchance, though it must be near at hand. It is only the way this place is. And the tears that crept down her face were only the result of the wind.
She turned finally to the weather vane. She was a few rungs from it still, and these she climbed, and sat sideways on the topmost one, so that she would look at it level, the two uprights of the ladder enclosing her and giving her a little protection from the still-freshening wind. She and the weather vane were the two tallest points for as far as she might see, but she was no longer looking out; she was gazing at what she had come to see.
It was the profile of a woman, with a great sweep of hair behind her, as if belled out by the wind, and in her hands she held the stem of a rose, whose head pointed away from her; this was the narrow finger Beauty had glimpsed looking up from the ground. The rose was half open and cut so carefully that the smith had let little lines of light peep through where the edges of the petals would curve round the heart of the flower, as the woman’s hair had been cut so that light gleamed through the windblown strands. The woman held the stem against her breast, as if it were growing from her heart.
Beauty reached out and touched it.
There was a great ringing gust of wind from somewhere which nearly knocked her off her precarious perch. In her delight at the weather vane, she had let go with both her hands; the hand that had not reached out to touch the vane was laid flat against the short roof of the cupola. As the wind grasped at her and pulled and shook her, she seized the vane, first with one hand and then the other, and then she was lying facedown over the square pyramidal peak of the glasshouse, her arms wrapped round the base of the vane, her cheek flat against the glass and her forehead against her upper arm, while the wind shrieked and pried at her fingers, levered itself under her body like human hands plucking at a cloth doll, and rattled the heavy ladder where it stood.
The sky darkened, and the wind swelled further, and its shriek became a roar, and she felt the first drops of rain on her back, huge, heavy drops, striking her like stones. She clung where she was, the vane turning this way and that above her head; she felt the vibration through the pole she held. She was weeping now, her sobs lost in the sudden storm; even if the wind died away as abruptly as it had begun, she would not have been able to move, and knowing this, she was even more frightened. And now she could feel the ladder jolting under her hip, with a slow, regular jolt; she supposed the wind would have it off altogether soon.
She must have lost consciousness. The wind’s roar dulled, though she still heard it, and it still shook her where she lay, but not so strongly. But she no longer seemed to be lying down, but sitting, sitting in a straight-backed chair; she was in a small, comfortable room, with a great many other people.… As she looked round, she reordered her labouring thoughts and realised that it was a small room only in comparison to the rooms of the Beast’s palace and crowded only in comparison with their emptiness; there were about twenty people in it, which would have been a small intimate group when the sisters had given parties in the city.
I am dreaming, she thought, as I have dreamt before. And then she saw her father standing at the front of the room, one hand on the mantelpiece, the other holding a little clutch of papers, and he was reading aloud:
“Yours while I live, and yours still, though I die
I sign, and seal this letter with a sigh.…”
The wind hurled itself down the chimney, and a little puff of sparks and ash fell onto the hearth-rug; it flung itself at the windows till they rattled in their frames, and the curtains moved uneasily in the draughts. But the audience never stirred, listening to the reader with all their attention; only Beauty jumped in her chair, feeling the rain beating her down, the wind clawing at her.… She seemed to be at the end of the second row, on the centre aisle. When she started, a cat, which had been lying on the hearth-rug just out of range of any misbehaviour on the part of the fire, sat up and stared at her. This was an orange marmalade cat, with great amber eyes almost the colour of its coat.
“While Reason hesitated, Love obeyed.
No foe withstood him, nor no friends
hip stayed.…”
Beauty had difficulty attending to every word; her hearing was full of wind and rain; she seemed to drop in and out of the story, as the young man faced the cruel father and the wealthy baron to save his true love, and it was the lady herself who, ignored in the ensuing mêlée, slipped between the men, pulled the dagger from its sheath at the baron’s thigh, and, as he turned to shout at her, sweeping his sword round to menace her, ducked, and thrust it between his ribs.
The wind howled like a pack coursing a tiring stag; Beauty could hear nothing else. But the lovers had escaped.
“Their hoofs, so quietly the horses strode, Scarce stirred the pale dust of the moonlit road.”
Everyone applauded. It was a friendly noise, and for a few moments it drowned out the sound of the storm outside. Beauty saw Jeweltongue stand up and go to embrace her father, and then everyone applauded again, and there was Mr Whitehand, the baker, standing up beside the place where Jeweltongue had been sitting, and then everyone was standing up and applauding, except Beauty herself, who seemed to be bound where she sat, and the marmalade cat, still perched on the hearth-rug staring at her.
The applause tapered off but was replaced by excited conversation. Beauty could follow little of it—there was an animated discussion going on to one side of her about what sort of dagger the bad baron was likely to have been carrying in an exposed thigh sheath—but she thought she recognised the woman who was their hostess by her proprietorial manner; and by the dazed but good-humoured look of those listening to her, and the size of her parlour, she guessed this was Mrs Oldhouse, the woman Jeweltongue had described as Mrs Words-Without-End.
There was a lull, and Beauty heard a single voice clearly: Mrs Words-Without-End was saying that there was a small supper laid out in the next room. As she turned to indicate the way, her glance fell on her marmalade cat. “Oh!” she said. “Our ghost must have joined us; how very interesting; usually she is very shy. It must be the weather; it makes me feel quite odd myself. How the wind bays! Did anyone sit on the end chair of the second row?”
There was a general negative murmur.
“Well Becky,” said Mrs Words-Without-End to the cat, “do try to make her feel at home, since you are the only one who can see her this evening, and I cannot believe your unwinking stare is the best way to go about it.” There was a blast of wind that Beauty felt might almost drive the rain through her skin; Mrs Words-Without-End gave a little “Oh!” and clutched distractedly at her collar, fidgeting with a brooch and the lace spilling round it.
“Supper can wait a little,” suggested someone behind Beauty.
“It’s the perfect night for a ghost story,” someone else said cajolingly.
“Yes—yes, I suppose it is,” said Mrs Words-Without-End, still fidgeting and looking at the rain sluicing down the nearest window. “It is a very romantic story … although I daresay it may have improved over time and telling. My grandmother said this happened before her grandmother’s grandmother’s time, when there were still greenwitches living all about here, and at least one sorcerer. Well, you all know that part of the story, do you not? There are a good many versions of it about, and many of them do not agree about what the—the definition of the problem was, but they all agree that the beginning of it was a sorcerer.
“So many problems do start with a sorcerer. My grandmother said that this one was even more vain, and unfortunately more powerful, than usual, and he grew very jealous of a certain young man who also lived in this neighbourhood and who was himself a very great—a very great philosopher. That is, that is what he chose to call himself, a philosopher, although in fact he too was a sorcerer, but a very unlikely one. Do you remember that my father collected folk-tales? He was particularly interested in this one, because it was in his own family. My grandmother told me the story, but it was my father who told me that he had never read nor heard of any other sorcerer who did not care for magic in itself at all, who declared—as this sorcerer who called himself a philosopher did—that it was a false discipline which led only to disaster.”
Mrs Words-Without-End’s voice had steadied and grown stronger as she went on with her tale, but she still stared at the rain. “Well! The sorcerer wasn’t having any of that from some young upstart, especially a young upstart who was far too admired by people who should be admiring the sorcerer—the sorcerer who gloried in his sorcery—and so the sorcerer began to plague the young man’s days, in little ways to begin. But the young philosopher was such a scholar that he barely noticed, and this made the sorcerer mad with rage, because he hated above all things to be overlooked, and he hated the idea that he would have to exert himself over this dreadful young man, instead of throwing off a few tricks carelessly, as one might set a few mouse-traps. This was worse than being told that magic was a false discipline.
“Now, the philosopher’s servants were quite aware that the sorcerer was to blame for a variety of the little things that had gone persistently wrong in their household of late and began to talk among themselves as to what they might do about it, because an angry sorcerer would shortly make all their lives a misery, if indeed he left them their lives, which he might not, because angry, vain sorcerers are capable of almost anything.
“They decided to ask a greenwitch for advice. A greenwitch of course hasn’t nearly the power of a sorcerer, but a good one is often very wise or at least very clever, and this one was a good one, and she liked the young philosopher herself, because he loved roses, just as she did.
“The greenwitch might have done what she did out of friendship’s sake only, but there were other things about the sorcerer which disturbed her. The first one was merely—what was he doing here at all? Sorcerers—even sorcerers—have a place—something like a place—in a city or at a mayor’s or general’s elbow, but there is nothing for them in a small town in the middle of nowhere, unless the sorcerer has a fancy to enslave the inhabitants without any interference from someone who might be able to stop him. And the second one had to do with her friend the philosopher. She had an idea that he was pursuing some course of study that an ordinary sorcerer might find very valuable, did he find out about it, and she was very much afraid that this sorcerer would find out about it and that her friend would be able to do nothing to stop him exploiting it, any more than a country scholar could stop an army from using his notes on the forging of steel for hoes and rakes on the forging of swords and cannon.
“And so, when her friend’s servants came to her with their story, she was almost ready for them.
“I have told you the sorcerer was very vain. One of the ways he was vain was that he thought himself very handsome—which he was—and that he was irresistible to women, which he was not, because women surprisingly often have minds of their own, and besides, sorcerers are a bit scary for lovers, aren’t they? You never know when one might tire of you and turn you into a fish-pond, or a toasting-fork, or something. So the sorcerer often found himself short of mistresses since, like many vain men, he grew bored with everyone but himself rather quickly.
“The greenwitch outdid herself. She made a woman—a simulacrum, of course, not a real woman—she made her out of”—and here, for the first time, Mrs Words-Without-End hesitated—“rose-petals. She was of course very beautiful—the simulacrum, I mean. She had to be, because the sorcerer would only look at her if she were beautiful, but she was beautiful in a way that was … not human, because she was not human, of course, but that made her beauty unique. The sorcerer enjoyed possessing unique things.…” Mrs Words-Without-End’s voice sank. “It is only an old tale, and I’m a foolish old woman to be repeating it.”
“No go on,” came several voices, and after a pause Mrs Words-Without-End continued: “Well, at first all was well. The sorcerer fell passionately in love with the simulacrum, and the simulacrum declared she was bored in the country and wished to live in the city, and such was the binding that the greenwitch … somehow … laid on her that he agreed to the change, and indeed, he did very w
ell in the city, which was full of people eager to be impressed by him, even if he did sometimes have to share them with other sorcerers.
“But the simulacrum, the poor simulacrum … The greenwitch had put no end to the spell; she could not, for she was doing something she could not do, and it had done itself. She was not human, the simulacrum, so she could not love and hate and wonder and worry as humans can, but she had lived for a long time with the sorcerer and had come to see that as human beings went, he was not a good one; and she grew lonely without understanding what loneliness was. The sorcerer had had many mistresses since they came to the city, of course, because that was the sort of man he was, but he retained a sort of fondness for the simulacrum and never turned her into a fish-pond or a toasting-fork, but gave her fine rooms, and clothing, and jewels, and maid-servants, and everything he felt a woman should want, and left her alone.
“But one day he came into her rooms without warning, after he had not visited her for years, and he found her weeping for loneliness. He had never seen her weep. But she was not weeping tears; she was weeping rose-petals.
“He was a sorcerer; if he had not been blinded by her beauty and his vanity, he might have seen what she was long ago. As it was, he suddenly understood everything, and then his rage was … beyond anything.
“Her he blasted where she sat, and there was no woman-shape there anymore, but only a pile of rose-petals. It was enough that he destroy her; he knew the trick played was none of hers. He struck her, and he left. He left the city and went north, where he had a vengeance to pay.”
Mrs Words-Without-End paused again, and again eager voices urged her on: “This is a tremendous story! Why have we never heard it before? You have been holding out on us! Go on, go on!” But when Mrs Words-Without-End took up her story again, she spoke very quickly, as if she wished to be done with it.
“The simulacrum was not dead, for she had never been alive, except as petals on a rose-bush. And the petals she became were just as fresh as the petals the greenwitch had gathered many years ago to work her spell. Rose-petals do not necessarily die when they fall from their flower; they may lie dreaming in the sunlight for days and days. These particular petals had been a woman—or something like a woman—for very many years, and the dreams they had, lying in beautiful rooms in a grand house in a city, were quite different from the dreams they might have had, had they fallen off their rose-bush in the greenwitch’s garden and lain there in the summer sun, and wind, and rain.