CHAPTER

7

This evening a sapphire-coloured dress lay across her bed, and a sapphire necklace on the blue towels of the washstand; but though the soap, and the bath oil in the great tin bath (enamelled over with roses) drawn up before the fireplace, again smelt of roses, today it did not make her weep, for she had work to do and felt she knew why she was here.

She did not examine this feeling too closely, for she was too grateful for the possession of it, and even less did she examine the conclusions it might lead her to. But for the moment the roses in the glasshouse demanded her attention and care, and that was enough, for a little while, and she had a little space to nurse a little precarious security in. She lay in the bath while twilight turned to dusk, and she felt the aches slide out of her muscles and dissipate in the warm water, till she found herself falling asleep, and then she flew out and whisked herself dry in such a commotion of haste that she half believed herself assisted with extra towels by invisible hands.

The Beast was waiting for her in the long dim dining-hall, and he bowed to her, and said, “Good evening, Beauty,” and she replied, “Good evening, Beast.”

The silence and the shadows pressed round them. He moved to her chair and bowed her into it, poured her two kinds of wine, and took a chair himself a little distance from her. She picked up a glass, touched it to her lips, set it down again untasted, served herself blindly from the nearest plate. She was hungry—she had worked hard since lunch—but the silence was heavy, and the Beast, again dressed all in black, his head bowed so she could not see his eyes, was almost obscured by the gloom and seemed as ominous as all the rest of the silence and shadow. She put her fork to the food on her plate; the click of the tines was too loud in the stillness; she set it down again. She was hungry, and could not eat. She sat motionless for a moment, feeling as if the shadows might seep into her blood, turning her into a shadow like themselves.… Her hand crept to the little embroidered heart tucked into the front of her bodice.

When the gentle plonk came from the darkness at the far end of the long table, Beauty started in her chair, feeling like a deer who knows she is tracked by a hunter. There was another plonk, and then a rustle-rustle-rustle, and Beauty’s heart slowed down to a normal pace, and she began to smile, because it was a friendly, a silly sort of sound. There was a third plonk and then a quick run of tiny thumps.… Whatever it was, it was coming towards this end of the table.

The Beast stirred. “I believe Fourpaws is coming to introduce herself to her new guest,” he said.

She still had to strain to hear his words when he spoke anything beyond common courtesies such as “good evening”; it was like learning to hear articulate speech in a rumble of thunder. “Fourpaws?”

But at that moment a small grey and amber cat appeared from behind one of the wine carafes, tail high, writhing once round the carafe as if that were her entire purpose at this end of the table, so supple and sleek in the dimness that it seemed she would overstep her hind legs and take a second turn round the narrow vessel. But then with a boneless flicker like a scarf coming loose from a lady’s neck, she unwound herself again and became a slim short-bodied cat, with silky fur just enough longer than short to move gently of its own in response to her motion, and to give her a very wonderful tail.

She stood so that Beauty could admire her for a moment, while she looked off into some chosen distance, and then she turned as if to walk straight past the edge of Beauty’s plate. But Beauty was far too charmed by her not to make an effort, and she reached across her plate and offered Fourpaws the tips of her fingers. The fingertips were deemed acceptable, and the base of ears and a small round skull between were presented to be scratched. Beauty scratched. Fourpaws purred. Fourpaws then sat down—at just such a distance that Beauty would be risking the lace on her bodice to the food on her plate if she wished to go on scratching ears, so she stopped.

Fourpaws moved a little towards Beauty and looked at her for the first time, stared at her with vast yellowy-greeny eyes, misleadingly half shut. She curled her tail round her feet—careful not to trail the tip of it in Beauty’s plate—and continued to purr. The purr seemed to reflect off the sides of the bowls and dishes and goblets round her. Beauty picked up her knife and fork again and began to eat.

“It is so very quiet here,” said Beauty between mouthfuls.

The Beast roused himself. “When I was … first here, here as you see it, the silence troubled me very much.”

But you are a sorcerer! You cannot have come here against your will—against your will—as I did.… Beauty was briefly afraid that she had spoken aloud, so painfully had the words pressed up in her throat; but the shadows were tranquil, and Fourpaws was still purring, and after only the merest pause, the Beast continued: “I had forgotten. It was such a long time ago. I have learnt … I have learnt to look at the silence, to listen to the dark. But I was very glad when Fourpaws came. I believe she must be a powerful sorcerer in her own country, which is why I dare not give her any grand name such as she deserves, for fear of disturbing the network of her powers. She comes most evenings and drops a few rolls and bits of cutlery into the darkness, like coins in a wishing well. I am grateful to her.”

“As am I,” said Beauty fervently, for she was discovering just how hungry she was. She moved a candlestick nearer and peered into various tureens. She recognised little, although everything smelled superb, which was enough recommendation, but when she turned back to her plate, which had been empty but a moment before, it had been served again for her already. “The chef’s speciality?” she murmured, thinking of grand dinner parties in the city, but she picked her knife and fork up readily and began.

Fourpaws had moved herself again slightly, so that her bright furry figure slightly overlapped the great shadowy bulk of the Beast from Beauty’s point of view. Beauty smiled at her a little wonderingly; Fourpaws’ eyes shut almost completely, with only a thin gleam of green left visible, and her purr deepened.

As soon as Beauty laid her knife and fork down for the last time, she felt exhaustion drop over her, shove down her eyelids, force her head forward upon her breast. “I—I am sorry,” she said faintly. “I am much more tired, suddenly, than I had any idea … If you will excuse me …”

The Beast was on his feet again at once, bowing her towards the door. “Beauty, will you marry me?”

Beauty backed two steps away from the table. Her eyes fell upon Fourpaws, who was still sitting where she had been while Beauty ate; but her eyes were now opened wide, her head tipped up, and she was staring at Beauty with an unnervingly steady gaze. “Oh, no, Beast,” said Beauty to the cat. Fourpaws leapt off the table and disappeared under it.

“Good night, Beauty,” said the Beast very softly.

“Good night, Beast,” said Beauty.

She went slowly up to her rooms, the whispering of her skirts the only sound, and stayed awake only long enough to take her elegant dress off carefully, lay the necklace of sapphires back on the washstand, and climb up the stairs to her bed. She almost didn’t make it to the top; she woke up to find herself with her head resting on the top stair and pulled herself the rest of the way into bed.

She dreamt again of Rose Cottage.

There was a new rug on the floor by the fireplace at the sitting-room end of the downstairs room, and Tea-cosy, looking unusually well brushed, lay on it in her traditional neat curl. There was a new tablecloth, with a bit of lace at its edge, on the old table—Beauty could still see its splinted feet beneath—and the place settings were as mismatched as ever, although none of the cups or plates was chipped.

The old merchant was talking, and the other two were listening—three, counting Tea-cosy’s half-pricked ears—or rather, as Beauty’s dream shimmered into being, her father had just stopped talking. Beauty’s dream-eyes ranged over the familiar scene and picked out its unfamiliar elements, pausing finally on the person sitting in what had been Beauty’s chair. There was a little silence in which Beauty could almost hear the echo of her father’s last words—she had a half notion that he had been reciting poetry—but she did not know for sure.

The strange young man spoke first. “That was very moving, sir. Perhaps—perhaps you would come to one of our meetings?”

“Oh, do, Father!” said Jeweltongue. “I had no idea you were—you were—” She stopped, blushed, and laughed.

Her father looked at her, smiling. “You had no idea the old man had any idea of metre and rhyme, you were going to say? I never used to. It seems to have come on me with moving here, to Longchance and Rose Cottage. I would be honoured to come to your meeting, Mr Whitehand, if you think I will not embarrass you.”

“Embarrass us! Father! Wait till you hear Mrs Oldhouse, whom we name Mrs Words-Without-End, but we cannot bring ourselves to turn her out, not only because she has the biggest drawing-room and serves the best cakes—”

“Thank you,” murmured the young man called White-hand.

Jeweltongue reached towards him and just touched the back of his hand with the tips of her fingers, but Beauty saw the sweet look that passed between them as Jeweltongue continued. “But she is so genuinely kind, and surprisingly has quite a good ear for other people’s work! But we shall put you at the top of the list for your evening, because if she reads first, she may frighten you away.”

“Not before I have eaten some of Mr Whitehand’s cakes, at least,” said her father, and Beauty then remembered where she had seen Mr Whitehand, for he was the baker in Longchance. It occurred to her then that for quite some time, as Jeweltongue divided up the errands when the two of them went into Longchance together, it was never Beauty who went to the baker’s, though they almost always had lardy-cake or crumpets for tea on any day Jeweltongue had been to Longchance. But Beauty had never heard of poetry-reading evenings.

“To be fair,” Jeweltongue went on, “she tells excellent stories—when she doesn’t try to put them into verse first. She learnt them from her father, who was a scholar, but his real love was collecting folk-tales.…”

Beauty woke to a soft shushing sound. It was a gentle sound, and her first thought was that there was water running somewhere nearby, and she wondered if she had missed seeing some fountain, perhaps in the inner courtyard, perhaps invisible behind the glasshouse. But the rhythm of the shush was wrong for water, she eventually decided, still half in her dream and wondering about the young man and the new hearth-rug and wishing to hear her father’s poems—and telling herself it was all only a dream again, just as last night.

She eventually decided that it could not be water. It sounded like something flying.

She opened her eyes. After a moment of reorienting herself, she picked out the small shadow hurtling back and forth across her room which went with the shushing sound. It flew very near each wall and then wheeled away as if panic-stricken. It disappeared, while she watched, into the other rooms through the wide doorless archway, and the shushing died away; but then it came streaking back into the bedroom, straight towards the clear glass of the closed balcony doors.

Beauty, still too sleep-dazed to make an attempt at scaring it onto a safer course, held her breath for the inevitable collision, but it swerved away at the last minute and raced towards her bed. It flew straight under the canopy towards the wall, did another of its last-minute, violent changes of direction before it struck, flew back towards the bed, and collapsed on the counterpane.

When Beauty first saw the small flying figure, she guessed it was a bird, trapped somehow indoors, having fallen down a chimney, or mistakenly crept in through a half-open window. But she had caught a glimpse of furry body and naked wing as it swept just in front of her and was now expecting what she found lying panting in her lap. It was a bat.

Beauty had rescued members of most of the commoner animal species in her life, including a few bats. The last one had been in much worse case than this one, terrified by the housemaid’s screaming, beating itself pathetically against a corner of the attic where it had fled. Beauty had trapped it finally by ordering the housemaid to Go away and, when it flopped to the floor half stunned, put a wastebasket over it.

After a few days of hanging upside down in Beauty’s dressing-room (which she kept locked for the duration, for fear of housemaids, and entering it herself only long enough to change the water in the water-dish and to release the fat house-flies she patiently collected in jars), she ordered the dogcart one evening, drove herself to the outskirts of town, and released it.

She’d heard it whirr just a moment, as it had leapt out of her restraining hands and the scarf she had wrapped it in, and had wanted to believe that the perfectly silent shadow, which had then swept low twice over her head—nowhere near enough to risk any danger of becoming tangled in her hair, because as any sensible person knows, bats only lose their sense of distance and direction under such duress as being screamed at by housemaids—had been it saying thank-you, before it went off to find its friends and family. She hoped it had not, during its convalescence, developed such a taste for house-flies that it would ever risk any more attics.

This one was not quite the length of the palm of her hand. She could feel the quiver of its body through the counterpane as it tried to catch its breath, and could see into its open mouth, the delicate pink tongue, smaller than the first leaf of heartsease to open in spring, and the teeth, finer than embroidery needles. Its dark brown fur looked soft as velvet; its wide pricked ears and half-folded wings were only a shade or two paler than its fur. It stared straight at her with its bright black eyes, and lay in her lap, and panted.

“Well,” said Beauty, after a moment. “I have never heard of a tame bat. I suppose you were merely confused, but you are very confused indeed, to be lying in my lap like that and staring at me as if I were a legendary saviour of lost bats whom you have recognised in your extremity. What reputation I had of such is years and miles behind me, little one. The bats at Rose Cottage had—have—the good sense to stay in the garden.… Which is to say, I suppose I need something to muffle you with, so you cannot bite me with all those tiny piercing teeth. Not that I would blame you, mind, but I get quite enough of that sort of thing dealing with roses.…” She reached slowly behind her, so as not to frighten her visitor further, and began awkwardly to work her top pillow out of its pillow slip.

The bat lay where it had fallen, but it had folded its wings neatly against its body, and closed its mouth, and now looked perfectly content. “If I didn’t know that you are supposed to hang upside down—or at least creep into narrow cracks—I would expect you to curl up now, like a very small Tea-cosy, and have a nap. Saints! This is a maddening activity when I cannot see what I am doing!”

But the pillowslip came free at last, and she wrapped it softly round her hands and picked up the bat, keeping its wings closed against its body. It did not even tremble, but it did turn its head a little so it could go on looking at her.

She groped her way out of bed and down the stairs till she stood on the floor, the bat held gently in front of her. “Now, what do I do with you? I cannot lock you in the water-closet, as it is the only one I know where to find in all this mazy hulk of a palace; I would have something to say to the architect about that, if I met him!

“My old dressing-room, where I used to put your sort of visitor, was quite a narrow closet, with one tiny window easily blocked off, and I never used it anyway, even bat-free. But these rooms are full of sunlight, and you know, none of your brethren that I have met have understood about keeping the carpets clean, and so I need to, er, leave you somewhere I can spread something, er, bat-proof beneath you—”

She thought of the bolt of poachers’ jackets material the sisters had found in the housekeeper’s room, and two tears dropped to the breast of her nightgown; but her voice was as steady as ever. “What we need, I feel, is—is an empty wardrobe or even a secret room. I would like that. I would like a secret room.” She spoke half-idly. She had learnt the use of speaking quietly to all rescued animals; even the wild ones seemed to find such noises soothing, and she also wished to fling herself away as quickly as possible from the sudden memory of her sisters.

She began to walk slowly away from her balcony, and when she came to the room hung with the tapestries of a garden in all four seasons, she paused. There came to her there some strange breath of air, some movement just seen at the corner of her eye. She turned her head; the edge of the nearer summer tapestry stirred. She looked down at her bat; her bat still looked at her and lay calmly in her grasp. She shifted it, very slowly, in case it should protest after all, into the crook of one elbow, where it settled, snug and tranquil as a tired kitten. Now she had one hand free and could lift the edge of the tapestry—and push open the crack of door revealed there.

There was a good smell in that darkness, of rich earth and of … peace, of the sort of peace she had been used to find in her garden, and she sighed. “There, little one. This should do for you—I hope. And I will come and let you out again just as soon as it is dusk.”

She raised the tapestry a little farther, so that she could duck under it, as she was unwilling to leave any creature somewhere she had made no attempt to investigate herself first, and found that she was standing in what appeared to be an underground chamber.

If she turned to look behind her, she could see the daylight shining across the rosy carpet of her rooms, could see it winking off the corners of furniture and strips of hangings visible to her through the half-open door; but if she turned inwards again, she saw only rough shadows, dimming quickly to blackness, the shapes of earth and stone only varied by what looked very much like the roots of plants.

She raised her hand to feel over her head, having the sense of little trailing things touching her softly, and fearing spiders, as even she was a little hesitant about spiders; and found instead a great net of what felt like tree roots, if she could imagine what tree roots might feel like from underneath. The trailing things were root hairs. Could anything but root hairs look so like root hairs?

“But we are two storeys above the ground,” she said, bewildered, and turned again to look at the sunlight lying on her carpet. She lifted her gaze to the hinges of the door; it seemed to be pegged straight into the rock, and the frame to be made of some impossible mix of stone fragments and woven roots, impossible, but strangely beautiful, as the veining of marble is beautiful.

“Well,” she said to the bat, “I guess I do not have to worry about protecting the floor here—wherever here is. And there are lovely, er, tree roots for you to hang from, should you wish to hang, and—and bat droppings are excellent fertilizer. I will need fertilizer for my roses as soon as I finish pruning them. I should wish to find a whole colony of you here, I suppose, but—I don’t quite think I do. The results might be a bit … complex. Good-bye, then, till this evening.”

She laid her tiny parcel down in a little hollow in the earth between two roots, loosened the pillow slip so that it could crawl out when it chose, and stepped back, under the summer tapestry, and onto a carpet covered with roses. She closed the door, which from this side was panelled with plain wood, to match the panelling of the wall (plain but for the occasional carving of a rose), and went, very thoughtfully, to eat her breakfast.

She found her gloves with the pruning-knife and the saw on the water-butt in the glasshouse this morning. “Today we will be bold,” she announced, and she was. She cut and lopped and hacked and sawed, and then she stopped long enough to water her cuttings and check her seedbed, and then her stomach told her it was lunchtime, and she went back to her bedroom balcony, and lunch was waiting for her.

When she returned to the glasshouse after lunch, she looked at the scatter of rubbish she had produced and said, “I need somewhere to build a bonfire.”

She left the glasshouse again and stood in front of its door, looking down the side of the palace away from her balcony. The bulk of the glasshouse prevented her from seeing very far, but she knew there was nothing, between the door to the glasshouse and the door (if it was the same door) she used to enter the palace and return to her rooms, that would do for a bonfire.

This area of the inner courtyard was covered with gravel, gravel just coarse enough not to take footprints, but fine enough that it was smooth and easy to walk on. It was also the same eye-confusing glittery grey-white as the palace and the front drive. Studying it now, Beauty teased herself with the notion that if she narrowed her eyes to take in none of the details of where pebbles became walls, she might walk straight to the end of the courtyard and up the wall without noticing, like an ant or beetle.… She looked up, blinking, at the bright sky. The scale was about right, she thought. If Rose Cottage is the right size for human beings, then here I am an ant or a beetle. A small beetle. Probably an ant. Even if my feet cannot carry me up walls. How confusing, when one came to walk on the ceiling, to be abruptly blinded by one’s skirts.…

In any event, there was nowhere here to light a bonfire; it would make a dreadful mess of the whiteness, and even magical invisible rakers and polishers might resent the effort to remove the ashes and the heat-sealed stains and the bits that wouldn’t burn no matter how often you poked them back into the hottest heart of the fire. And she didn’t want to annoy—any more than she could help—whoever was responsible here … the Beast? She was beginning to wonder. She remembered his words last night: When I was first here … I had forgotten … I was very glad when Fourpaws came.

She had never seen any sorcerer who had chosen not to appear human, though she had heard tales of them; her friend the salamander had met one who looked like a centaur. His familiar pretended to be a lion, and while I knew he was not, still, he kept me busy enough with his great paws and his sense of humour that I could never look long enough at either him or his master to see who—or what—he really was, the salamander had said, laughing his rustling laugh. My master was vexed with me, but I told him he should have made me appear to be a panther.

Beauty thought of the salamander’s gift to her—and of her first sight of the Beast. Can you not bear to look at me? he had said. Most sorcerers enjoyed making the sort of first impression that would give them the upper hand in any dealings to come; but that first sight had almost … and the Beast had taken no advantage as he certainly … And then Beauty remembered the story of a sorcerer who looked like the Phoenix, and who had married a human princess because her hair, he said, was the colour of the fire of his birth.

I am no princess, she said to herself.

She turned away from the familiar end of the palace courtyard and began to walk towards the end she could not see. She went on a long way, a very long way, and the way disconcertingly seemed to adjust itself somehow as she walked, like the corridor from the chamber of the star to the door into the courtyard. The sense of mortar and stone fluidly running into and out of each other, like a cat standing up and stretching or curling up into a cat cushion, was much more unsettling out of doors in sunlight.

She glanced to her right; if the palace was adjusting, then so must be her darling glasshouse. She was sure it was not this big from the inside—unless the other end of the palace was horseshoe-shaped, and she was going clear round it and would eventually find herself at the opposite corner of the one square-ended wall that held her balcony. But the glasshouse itself had corners—at least from the inside—and she had not passed any, and she was not willing to suppose that her glasshouse was anything other than what she saw—that it would pretend to be a panther when it was a salamander.

She stopped once and looked up, reassuring herself that the sky, at least, even here, looked as it had from her garden at Rose Cottage or from the city. But how was she to know that? The sky was blue, or it was grey, and it was full of clouds, or it was not, and the walls of the palace blocked too much of it. There was no horizon; it was like standing in the bottom of an immense well. Or of a trap. The sky was too far away to be of much comfort.

Once she paused because her eye was caught by some variation in the wall of the palace, a break in the tall ranks of windows. She peered at the gap, unsure of what she saw as she would be of shapes found in clouds or fish swimming in a dappled pond; were they there or not? But she held her ground and stared and at last could say: Here was an archway, but barred by solid gates, fitting so perfectly into both the wall itself and the plain formal architecture of the rest of the facade that they were difficult to see unless searched for—and she would not have searched had she not wondered (and been grateful for the distraction) at a stretch of wall that had gone on too long without a window in it.

She stepped up close and laid her hand on the crack between the left-hand door and the wall; closing her eyes, she could barely find it with her fingertips and could sense no difference between the texture of the wall and that of the door. Opening her eyes, she was redazzled by the surface shimmer and lost both doors entirely; it was not till she stepped back and looked again that she could pick out the thin line of the arch, silver as fish scales.

It was all so silent! There was the scuff of her shoes in the fine gravel, and the occasional whisper of wind, and that was all. Not even any birds sang. But what was there for birds here, in this bleak stone wasteland?

She went on; how long she did not know. She began to feel tired and discouraged and, without meaning to, swerved in her course till she could reach out and touch the glasshouse. She trailed her fingers idly over the width of one pane, bumped over the tiny ridge of its connecting frame, onto another pane.… But then, suddenly, there was a corner of the courtyard after all, and another wall running at right angles to it, and her glasshouse produced a corner of its own to keep parallel pace with it. And very soon after she turned the corner, she found a great dark tunnel running through the palace, like a carriage-way, though she saw nothing to suggest the presence of stables, and the curve of its arch was much the same shape as the nearly invisible doors she had found in the last wall.

She walked through the tunnel, shivering a little, for it was surprisingly cold in its shadow, and the tunnel was surprisingly long. I should stop being surprised by things being very long, she said to herself. When she came out the other side at last, she found herself in a wild wood and halted in astonishment. She took a few cautious steps forward and then whirled to look back through the carriage-way and was reassured by the glint of the glasshouse she could see on the far side.

She remembered her glimpses of something that might have been wild wood at the edges of the formal gardens fronting the palace, but such wilderness still seemed so unlikely a neighbour for a palace. But then, she reminded herself, this was a sorcerer’s palace, and sorcerers could surround their palaces with anything they liked. There was a story of one, known to dislike visitors, who had surrounded his with the end of the world. (Whether it was the real end or not was moot; you disappeared into it just the same.)

But the only magic she knew that still connected her to Rose Cottage and her family was on the other side of the dark carriage-way. She did not want to wander into any wild woods and not be able to find her way back.

But here was a splendid site for a bonfire.

The old branches and other bits and pieces had been tidily swept together and were waiting for her—just inside the carriage tunnel, just within the edge of its shadow, at the mouth that led to the wild wood. Beauty shivered again, thinking that the magic ended there for certain, or that if this wood was magic too, then it belonged to some other sorcerer than the one who ruled the Beast’s palace. She would much rather that it was merely a wild wood and not magic at all, but this was not something she was likely to learn—at least not until it was too late, when she found herself dangling from the roc’s claws or cornered by the wild boar, and even then who was to say the wild boar wasn’t a familiar in disguise? Oh dear.

She dragged the branches clear of the tunnel and into the middle of the ragged little clearing among the trees, and then she muttered, “Knife, candle, tinder-box, besom,” and went back to an especially deep shadow near the far end of the tunnel, where she might not have seen them till she was looking for them. She swept her bonfire into a rough hummock, and while it took a little while for the candle flame to catch the old leaves and twig shreds she’d made with her knife, the branches were all dry and brown-hearted and burned very satisfactorily once they were going.

Beauty stood and watched for a little time, waving away sparks and wiping smuts put of her eyelashes, turning occasionally to look again at the winking glasshouse, to make sure it was there, and sweeping the edges towards the centre of the fire again as it tumbled apart. One did not leave a bonfire till one was sure of its burning down quietly, even in a wild wood—perhaps especially in a wild wood.

She went back to the glasshouse, walking near it down the length of the palace wing, reaching out to touch it occasionally—it was a much shorter journey on the return, she was sure; she was almost sure—and tidied up, or pretended to tidy up, since most of it had been done for her already. “Tomorrow, please, may I have a small rake that I can use among the rosebushes and a bag or a basket to collect leaves in? And if you would be kind enough to leave the besom somewhere I can find it again.”

She addressed the water-butt for lack of a better choice and a dislike for looking up. She tended to feel that magic must descend, and she did not want to see it happening. Furthermore, the water-butt was so straightforward a thing to find in a glasshouse. And almost as comforting as a cat in an immense shadowy dining-hall.

By the time she went back to her room, twilight was falling again. There was the tall rose-enamelled bath waiting for her, its water steaming, drawn up by the fireplace. The sapphire towels had been replaced by amethyst ones. She shook them out very carefully so as not to drop the amethyst necklace, ring, and earrings in the bath. She took off her clothes thankfully and stepped into the water; it was perfumed slightly with roses. But as she sat down, and her arms touched the water, she hissed in sudden pain, for they were covered with thorn scratches. A few thorns had stabbed through her skirt and heavy stockings, and her legs throbbed in short, fiery lines, but the hot water quickly soothed them; her arms were so sore it took her several minutes to slip them under water.

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 washstand, 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 fingers round it and pulled, calling softly, “Bat! Bat! Are you there? It is nighttime again, and if you fly straight out from my balcony 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 blink, 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 I 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.