CHAPTER

10

She was not sure when the dream began. She remembered walking down the long vortex of stairs, keeping her eyes on the next tread, and the next, as her feet stepped down, and down, and she remembered how the darkness seemed to rise towards her as she neared the bottom, till when she stood on the floor again, she could see no more than she had at the top, before the Beast had opened the door that let in the starlight, though it had not been dark at the bottom of the stairs when the Beast had been with her. She stood for a moment, her heart again beating in her ears, and this time the Beast did not stand near her; but then a door opened in front of her, and the twinkle of candlelight beckoned to her from the darkness, although the little light seemed to struggle, as if with some fog or miasma.

She did not remember how long she walked through corridors, familiar and unfamiliar—a little familiar, a little less familiar—till she came again to the chamber of the star, eerily lit by its sky dome, and she walked through her rooms, and rather than at once undressing and climbing into her bed, she went to stand upon the balcony. The spider-web glistened in its corner like hoarfrost.

As she stood, leaning against the railing, her mind and heart still spinning with the images of the Beast’s painting, she looked idly out into the starlit courtyard. And she saw a bent old woman carrying a basket walk slowly round the corner of the glasshouse, as if she came from the carriage-way where the wild wood lay, and she walked slowly down the wing of the palace where the closed gates were hidden. Beauty could not see the gates from where she stood, but the old woman set the basket she carried down, in front of where they might be. And then she turned and walked slowly away again.

And now Beauty knew she dreamt, for she saw the old woman turn the far corner of the glasshouse and walk through the carriage-way into the wild wood, and Beauty watched her till her shadow emerged from the darkness of the tunnel to lie briefly against the starlit ground of the bonfire clearing. Beauty could only just make out what she was now seeing, and she thought she saw silver shapes, like four-legged beasts, come out of the woods round the glade and touch the woman with their long slender noses. But this was very far away, and the trees threw confusing shadows, and it was over very quickly, as the woman disappeared beyond the narrow opening of the archway.

But when Beauty turned to run downstairs and into the courtyard, to see what was in the old woman’s basket, she found herself turning over in bed, with the sunlight streaming onto the glowing carpet, and Fourpaws purring on the pillow, and breakfast on the table, and the deep wild scent of the crimson rose tangled in her hair.

Her first impulse was to rush downstairs in her nightgown and look for the basket even now, knowing it was too late, even knowing that what she remembered must be a dream. At least, she thought, as she threw back the bedclothes, she could look for any sign that those barred and inimical gates had opened recently.

She paused at the top of the bed stairs. There was something very odd about the carpet this morning. She thought back to the morning before last. More hedgehogs? Many more hedgehogs? Positively a lake of hedgehogs? No. This—these were not hedgehogs.

There was a low forlorn croak from one corner of the room and a following gruff murmur that ran all round the floor. “Oh, my lords and ladies,” said Beauty. Frogs? The shore of the lake round the bed stairs rippled and shifted a little. No—toads. Hundreds of toads.

Fourpaws, still purring, went daintily down the stairs, and leapt to the floor. Toads scattered before her, pressing themselves under furniture and into walls. She sat down, looked up at Beauty still paralysed at the edge of the bed, waited for the duration of three tail-lashings, and then stood up again and began to walk towards the opposite wall.

Toads hurtled out of her way, tumbling over one another, making small distressed grunting sounds and a great deal of scrabbling with their small slapping feet. “Oh, stop!” said Beauty. “Please. I’m not really afraid of them—really I’m not—not poor toads—it’s just—it’s just there are so many of them.”

Fourpaws sat down again and began washing a front foot. The toads quieted, and there was the gentle flickering light of many blinking yellow and coppery eyes from ankle level all round the room and in clumps round the legs of furniture.

Beauty came down the stairs and stepped very softly in the toad-free space in the centre of the carpet. Nothing moved, except Fourpaws beginning on the other front foot. “Well,” said Beauty, only a little shakily, “there are too many of you to carry in my skirt, and frankly, my pets, I don’t wish to handle you, for my sake as well as yours; but how am I to convince you that I will lead you to a wonderful garden full of—of—well, you’ll have to ask the hedgehogs what it’s full of, but I’m sure you will like it. That is, you will like it if I can get you there.”

She stood still a moment longer and then sidled towards the chair next to the hearth, where her dressing-gown lay. There was a flurry of toads from that end of the room. She picked up her dressing-gown very softly and eased herself into it. “On the whole, I think I would rather try to shift you first. I don’t fancy breakfast by the light of toad blinks.” She paused and added under her breath, “Thank the kind fates that only one spider was enough.”

She walked towards the doorway, paused, and looked back. “This way,” she said, not knowing what else to do. Several toads hopped out from under her bed and stopped again. Several from the far corner between the bed and the hearth joined them. Toad eddies drifted out from under the wardrobe and the gilt console tables and pooled near the centre of the room, in front of the breakfast table. Fourpaws stopped washing to watch.

Beauty turned and walked to the door that led into the chamber of the star; as the door swung open, she turned round. There was an army of toads following her, ochre-coloured companies, low brown regiments, yellowy-green battalions, and last of all came Fourpaws, tail high, the tip just switching back and forth, eyes huge and fascinated.

She led them all into the chamber of the star; but the noise their flapping feet made, and the little tapping echoes that ran up into the dome, obviously upset them, and she went on as quickly as she could through the door that opened onto another corridor. The corridor made itself short for them, and it was not long before she saw the courtyard door opening onto sunlight. She paused again on this threshold and addressed her army: “Now you must be brave, because you won’t like this bit. It is still quite early, and the sunlight will not be too strong for you, but I am sure you will find it unpleasant, and the pebbles will scratch your bellies. But it will be over quickly—I hope—and then there will be lovely grass for you, and dirt, and an orchard, and a garden.”

The toads blinked at her. She turned and walked out into the morning light; and the rustling noise behind her told her that the toads were following, flapping and pattering through the stones. She was so preoccupied with how far they might have to walk that it took her a little while to notice that the rustling noises had increased and somewhat changed their note; and that there was now a humming in the air as well.

She had gone instinctively to her glasshouse and put her hand on it, and as she had done once before, she ran her fingers along it as she walked next to it. And the rustlings increased, and the humming grew louder, and as she came to the corner of the glasshouse, she heaved a great sigh of relief, and turned, and saw the tunnel into the orchard only a short distance farther. At that moment it registered with her that she had been hearing a humming noise for some time, and she looked up, and there was a cloud of bumblebees, hovering in the air, as if they were waiting for her and the toads.

“Oh!” she said. Their black and yellow backs gleamed bright as armour in the sunlight. “Oh, how I wish I could let you all into the glasshouse! Perhaps the trouble began because the roses are lonely! But you, you bees, you must have been here all along, or how does the fruit grow in the Beast’s orchard? How does the corn swell in the fields? But why has he not seen you? Why have I never seen nor heard you till now?”

As she said this, the bumblebee swarm rushed upwards, trailing a long tail of single bees behind it, and whizzed along the slope of the glasshouse as if seeking a way in. There were one or two left behind, buzzing disconcertedly and making little zigzag lines in the air as if wondering where the others had gone. One of them very near her bumbled against a pane of the glasshouse, near a strut.

And disappeared.

As it disappeared, Beauty’s hand, which was resting gently against the next strut supporting the next pane of glass, felt a sudden faint draught of air, and her third and little fingers, which had been touching the pane of glass inside the frame, were resting on nothing at all. She snatched her hand away as she saw the bumblebee disappear, looked at what should have been a pane of glass, and was just reaching out to touch it timidly, because the glasshouse panes were always so shining clear that but for their reflective sparkle it was hard to say if they were there or not, when she heard the bee cloud returning.

There were too many things to attend to at once. She looked up at the windstorm sound of the bees, her hand hesitating just before touching the pane of glass that should be there; the bumblebees stopped politely before they flew into her face; and she saw the bumblebee which had disappeared reappear from behind the strut … where it had flown in, and out, of a glasshouse pane.

Beauty touched the glass. It was there, and solid. She touched the pane that the bumblebee had flown through. It was there, and solid.

There was a faint scuttling noise behind her, and her dazed mind flew to the easier recourse of remembering her toads, growing too hot in the sunlight, and worrying about their comfort. She began walking away from the glasshouse, taking the shortest route to the tunnel to the orchard. But her astonishment-heightened senses now reminded her that the susurration of the toad army had changed, and she turned to look, expecting … something. And so she was no more astonished than she already was when she saw the grass-snakes, and the slow-worms, and the red mist of ladybirds, so thick it threw a dappled shadow on the backs of the toads, and which made no sound at all. And as she looked, she saw the crickets creeping out, as it seemed, from among the white pebbles of the courtyard, as if they had been sleeping in hollows beneath. They paused, as if surprised by the sunlight, and then they sprang into the air, as if to hurry to catch up with the toads, and the snakes, and the slow-worms, and the ladybirds, and the bees; and then there was not merely the faint clicking of their legs against the small stones, but the soft tink-tink-tink as the ones with imperfect aim bounced off the wall of the glasshouse as they leapt.

“Perhaps the—the badgers, and foxes, and deer, and rabbits and hares, and mice and voles and weasels and stoats and squirrels, perhaps they are waiting for us. And the birds. I do so hope the birds come back!”

Beauty led her ever-increasing menagerie into the orchard and on towards the walled garden, and the grass stems rattled almost as loudly as spears as it followed her. She did not quite dare to stop again, but she walked sideways for a few steps to look behind her, and she could no longer see her creatures, but the grasses tossed and rippled like a sea cut by a fleet of ships. She turned to face front again just as there was a small streaking explosion like the path of a cannonball to one side of her, and something landed with a heavy thump on her shoulder.

“Oh!” said Beauty, recognizing the bushed-out tail in her eye as belonging to Fourpaws. “I wondered what had become of you.” Even a cat has some difficulty riding on the shoulder of someone wading through tall grass, and Beauty put up a hand to steady her and did not protest the faint prick of several sets of claws through the thick collar of her dressing-gown. “A few too many of them even for you, eh?” said Beauty, and added hastily, mindful of Fourpaws’ dignity, “I am myself very grateful for your company—someone else with warm blood and breath—even if your tail is still in my eye.”

When she came to the walled garden, she threw open the gate and stood aside, and she looked back as well and saw little threads of bobbing grass stems leading off in all directions from the main body of her army, assuring her that everyone was seeking the sort of landscape it liked best. “There’s water at the bottom of the slope,” she called softly. “But you probably knew that already.”

When there was a lull in the flow of creatures over the threshold, she went in and opened the gate on the far side of the garden, into the fields of corn. She paused again to stroke the barley and wheat-awns, and as she paused, she looked round, and her eye was caught by a yellow and white butterfly. It whirled up in a warm draught, and she saw more coloured flickers; there were half a dozen deepest ruddy gold and peacock blue and green butterflies sunning their wings on a narrow mossy ledge in the garden wall.

At that moment she felt a gentle shove against her foot. She looked down, and there was a hedgehog, looking up at her; it was much larger than any of the four she had brought to the garden in her skirt. “The slugs and snails, and borers and beetles, they’re back too, are they? You would not be so shiny and plump else.”

She went back thoughtfully through the garden, and now, when she looked, she could see holes and spots on some of the stems and leaves, and once she saw a snail hastening across the path in front of her, its shining neck stretched its fullest length, its tail streaming behind it; she could only see that it was moving at all by the tangential observation that it was now nearer the side of the path it was aiming at than it had been when she first saw it. She also heard the crickets singing, and swirls of butterflies were gleaming over the heads of the ruby chard, and she had to wave her free hand at a little puff of gnats she walked through.

Surely, if all this were happening, she would find a way to save her Beast’s roses? It is the heart of this place, and it is dying.

Fourpaws leapt down when they reentered the orchard, but she stayed close at Beauty’s heels all the way back to the palace and upstairs to the breakfast table laid in front of Beauty’s balcony. Beauty set a bowl of bread and milk on the floor for Fourpaws and poured herself her first cup of tea. “When the bluebottles are buzzing repellently in all the corners where one can’t get at them, and the mice are chewing holes in the wainscoting and leaving nasty little pellets in the pantry, and the wood borers are eating the furniture and leaving ominous little heaps of dust about, will the tea stew, too, like ordinary tea, instead of tasting fresh-brewed when it has sat half the morning, as this does?” she said; but her eyes were on the pyrotechnics of her glasshouse in the sunlight.

Fourpaws finished her bread and milk and mewed for more. “You’re going to have to start catching mice, you know,” said Beauty, setting down a fresh bowl. “Instead of shadows. I would have thought you might prefer mice.” But when Fourpaws finished the second bowl and mewed for a third, Beauty looked at her in surprise. “Someone your size can’t possibly need a third bowl of bread and milk,” she said. Fourpaws looked at her enigmatically and, holding her gaze, reached out with one imperious forepaw and patted the empty bowl. Beauty laughed. “Very well. But this is your last. Absolutely.”

Beauty was dressing by the time Fourpaws finished her third breakfast, but between the time Beauty dropped her shirt over her head and the time she could see again and was smoothing her hair back, the cat had disappeared. When she had finished brushing and tying up her hair, and lacing her boots, and patting her pockets to check that everything she needed was still there, and had paused to drink a last cup of tea, she realized that through the minor bustle of getting ready for the day (what remained of the day, she thought), she had been hearing furtive noises coming from under her bed. She knelt and lifted the edge of the long curtain. “You aren’t tormenting any lost toads, are you?”

Fourpaws sat up and looked at her indignantly. There was just room for a small cat to sit up to her full height under Beauty’s bed. Then she threw herself down and rolled over on her back, curving her forepaws invitingly; but Beauty looked at her face and her lashing tail and rather thought she had the mien of a cat who was planning on seizing an arm and disembowelling it with her hind feet while she bit its head off. “I think not,” said Beauty.

Fourpaws dropped over onto her side and half lidded her eyes, but the tail was still lashing. “I have no idea what you’re up to,” said Beauty, “but I will leave you to it.” She dropped the curtain hem and rose to her feet.

She knew it was a vain gesture. But once she was out of doors, she could not resist walking down the second side of the palace wall, and looking for the closed gates, and, having found them, looking for any trace of—of anything, any disturbance, any mark of any sort of visitor, but no trace did she find. The pebbles were as flawlessly raked as ever, the grey-white wall as spotless, the doors as perfectly barred.

She walked the rest of that wall, and through the carriageway in the crosswall, and stood at the mouth of the tunnel and peered out. The trees looked as if they went on a very long way, but perhaps they did not. Perhaps there was a clearing just behind the first rank, where milk-white cows grazed, where an old woman made butter and cheese to bring to the poor imprisoned Beast and his guest.…

She sighed deeply, squared her shoulders, and walked into the glen. When she arrived at its edge, she took a bit of gardening string from her pocket and tied it round the trunk of a slender tree that stood opposite the carriage-way, and then she began working her way through the trees beyond, letting the string trail through her fingers behind her. If the old woman came here often, there should be a path, but perhaps the path was magic too, and only appeared on clear nights when the old woman wanted it.

She could find no glade where cows, milk-white or otherwise, grazed, nor any small secret huts where old women might churn their butter and draw off their whey and leave their cheeses to ripen. She followed her string back to the clearing, tied it to another tree, and set out in a slightly different direction, twice that morning and three times in the afternoon. She found nothing and gained only filthy bramble-scratched hands and smudges on her skirt where she had tripped and fallen, and crumbly leaves and sapsticky twigs in her hair and down her collar.

As the sun sank towards twilight, she gave it up, rolled her string into its ball for the last time, and went slowly through the carriage-way and into the courtyard. Slowly she entered her glasshouse for the first time that day, to water her cuttings and her seedbed, but she entered sadly and neither sang nor looked round her as she went about her tasks.

When she said good night to the one blooming rose-bush, she felt like asking it to forgive her. She did not, not because it was a foolish thing to say to a rose-bush but because she felt she could not bear it if the bush seized magic enough to give itself a voice for three words and forgave her as she asked.

Her bath towels this evening were as golden as the sunset on the glasshouse panes, and her dress was as golden as the towels, and her necklace was of great warm rough amber, strung with garnets so dark they looked nearly black till they caught the light and flared deepest crimson, like the heart of a rose.

Her mood lifted a little when she saw the Beast waiting for her, and she made an effort at the conversation over dinner, telling stories of her childhood in the city, of her governesses, of her sisters, of her garden. But when she touched the embroidered heart, as she inevitably did when she spoke her sisters’ names, she did so abstractedly, for her mind was on the old woman and on her roses, the Beast’s roses, which must be fed or die.

But she did notice that when she fell silent, the Beast offered no tales of his childhood in response to her own.

“Fourpaws does not join us this evening,” she said at last, as she sliced a pear; candlelight winked off the blade of her knife and warmed its ivory handle almost to the gold of her sleeve.

“She cannot come every night,” said the Beast, “or we would cease to hope for her appearance; I learnt that long ago.”

Beauty laid her knife down and took hold of her courage and said, “Why sat you alone in this dark hall, for all those nights, when you will not eat with knife and plate?”

There was a silence, and Beauty looked at her neatly sliced pear but did not move to pick up any bit of it. She folded her hands tightly in her lap and willed herself not to take her words back. She did not fear his anger, and she did fear to do him hurt; but it seemed to her that he held too much to himself as a burden and that if he had chosen—had demanded—had ensorcelled her to be his companion, she would do the best for him that she could. And so, while she waited for his answer, she thought again of the glasshouse, and the roses there, and the old woman, and the silver beasts in the wild wood, and did not offer to withdraw her question.

At last he spoke, and each word was like a boulder brought up from the bottom of a mine. “When the change first … came upon me, I … I lost what humanity remained to me … for a time. I still cannot … remember that time clearly. When I had learnt to … walk like a man again, and had … found … clothes that would cover me as I now was, and discovered that I could still speak … so that a man or woman might understand me, I … still wished some daily ritual of humanity to remind me of … what I had been and what I no longer was. And I chose … to sit in this dining-hall, though I cannot … wield knife and fork like a man. There might have been other rituals that would have done. This is the one which first … suited me, and … I have looked no further.”

When the change first came upon me… If his words were boulders, they weighed her down too. Beauty leant towards him, so that she could lay her hand on the back of his nearer hand. Her hand and fingers together could not reach the full width of his palm, and when, after a moment, his other hand was laid over hers, it covered her wrist as well.

He released her and sat back. She ate her pear, and then picked up a nutcracker in the shape of a dragon, and began cracking nuts. “I guess you have not yet solved your dilemma,” said the Beast.

“Oh dear,” she said, fishing out a walnut half with a nut pick on whose end crouched a tiny silver griffin. “Is it so obvious? I have tried—”

“I have learnt your moods, a little,” said the Beast. “I see you are preoccupied.”

“I fear I am,” she admitted, “but—if you didn’t mind—a walk on the roof would be the pleasantest of distractions.”

“I would be honoured,” said the Beast, and this evening, as they walked up the whirlpool stairs together, Beauty kept her eyes firmly down and on the Beast’s black shoes and her soft gold slippers, coruscating with tiny gems. And when she left him, much later, on the roof, and he said to her, gravely, “Beauty, will you marry me?” she answered as she had the night before, “Good night, Beast,” only this time she did not shiver.

She kept her forearms crossed against her body as she hurried back to her room and pinched herself every few steps, saying aloud, “I am awake; I am still awake.” When she reached her rooms, she took off her dinner dress but put her day clothes back on. She almost thought her nightgown flapped its sleeves in protest; there was some pale flicker caught at the edge of her sight, where it always lay over the back of a chair by the fire, so it would be warm when she put it on. She turned sharply to look at it, but it only lay limply over its chair, as a nightgown should.

“Basket,” she said. “I need a basket, and I’m afraid I need it now, please. And a trowel. A wide one. I should have asked before, but I hadn’t thought of it yet.” She turned round looking, but there was no basket. “Never mind what I need it for,” she said. “The Beast did say you would provide anything in your power. I don’t believe you can’t find me a basket.” But there was still no basket.

“Well,” she said, and picked up a candle, kindled it at the edge of the fire, and began walking through her rooms, peering into dark corners. She found the basket at last, tucked behind a small ebony table, inlaid with hammered silver, which sparkled like snow in the candlelight. The glitter was such that she almost didn’t see the basket. The trowel lay in its bottom.

“That was not good-natured of you,” she said, “but I still thank you for the basket.” She returned to her balcony, a little anxiously, for she was not sure how much time had passed. She saw nothing and had to hope she had missed nothing.

She went quickly to the chamber of the star, but no door opened for her. She counted the doors: twelve. No, ten. No—eleven. Eleven? Can you make a star of eleven points? “Stop that,” she said. “Or I’ll make a rope out of the sheets on my bed and climb over the balcony.” A door opened. “And no nonsense about where this corridor goes,” she said. The door closed, and another one opened. She walked through it, and it closed behind her, but the corridor was dark. She was still carrying her candle from her basket search, and so she held it up before her in a hand that trembled only a little; fiercely she recalled her dream to her mind.… But there was the door into the courtyard. It was a little open; she could see a crack of starlight round it.

She stepped softly outside, and there was the old woman, already moving back towards the carriage-way, having left her basket at the palace doors. Beauty had been much longer in the corridor than she guessed. She flew after her, trying to make her feet strike the treacherous courtyard pebbles as quietly as the Beast always walked. The old woman did not look round, but perhaps it was only because she was old and deaf.

She disappeared into the shadows of the carriage-way so completely that Beauty, pausing at the tunnel’s edge for fear of being seen by the waiting silver beasts, thought suddenly that perhaps she had imagined her, that she had seen no old woman at all. Frightened and bewildered, she looked back over her shoulder; the basket by the doors was gone. She let her breath out on a sob—“Oh”—and moved forward again, and the old woman was on the far side of the bonfire clearing, about to disappear finally among the trees, but one of the milky-pale creatures that followed her turned its head at the sound of her sob and looked straight into Beauty’s eyes.

She might not have noticed if it had not turned its head. Its haunches were too round for a deer, its legs too long and slender for a horse, and the curling tail was like nothing she had ever seen, for it looked more like a waterfall than anything so solid and rooted as individual hairs, but it was still a tail. It turned its head to look at her, and so she saw, shimmering in the starlight, the long pearly horn that rose from its forehead.

She looked, blinked, and they were gone—old woman and unicorns. Gone as if they had never been; gone as the old woman’s basket at the palace doors was gone; gone without sound. The light of the stars still flooded the bonfire clearing, poured silver and glinting over the remains of Beauty’s bonfires, over the tiny-tempest piles of last year’s leaves, over the scatterings of stones, over the patches of earth seen among the rest. Over queerly gleaming golden heaps of …

Beauty emerged from the carriage-way in a daze and stooped at the first golden pile, took out her trowel, and … began to laugh. “Oh dear!” she said. “This is not the way a maiden is supposed to meet a unicorn. It should be a romantic and glamorous meeting … but if I had not needed what I need, I would not have been so interested in strange silvery creatures that met mysterious old women at the edges of wild woods, certainly not interested enough to dare to follow them here, in the middle of the night, in this … this place.” Her laughter stopped. “But then again … what would either the unicorn or I have done after it laid its head in my lap?”

She looked at her hands, dim in the starlight, at their short, broken nails and roughened skin. Her memory provided other details: the blotches of ingrained dirt, the thorn scabs and scars, the yellowy-grey streaks of bruising across the back of one hand where she’d pulled a ligament in her forefinger. “I wonder—I wonder, then, is it only that it is unicorn milk and butter and cheese? None of my dreams are my own—none of the animals—not even the spider—they all—they only—they come to a maiden who has drunk the milk of a unicorn? Is that all that matters?” she whispered, as if the Numen might hear and answer her. “This is a story like any nursery tale of magic? Where any maiden will do, any—any—monster, any hero, so long as they meet the right mysterious old women and discover the right enchanted doors during the right haunted midnights.…”

For a moment she felt as if some hidden spell had reached out and gripped her and turned her to stone. She felt that while her body was held motionless, she was falling away from herself, into some deep chasm. With a tremendous effort she opened her eyes again and spoke aloud, although her voice was not quite steady. “Well, I cannot know that, can I? I can only do what I can do—what I can guess to try—because I am the one who is here. I am the one who is here. Perhaps it will make a good nursery tale someday.”

She let her trowel fall into her lap and cupped her poor hands together, and the quick soft liquid rush of the salamander’s heat comforted her. But there was a juddering or a tingling to the warmth that sank through her skin and ran through the rest of her body—like the pinprick thumping of numberless tiny impatient feet. She knew the rhythm of those steps; they were the steps of someone going back to Check she’d latched the chicken-house gate, when she knew perfectly well that she had, or those of a nursemaid going to fetch the third clean handkerchief in as many minutes, trying to send her small charge to a party clean and combed and well dressed. “I am sorry, my friend,” she said to the salamander in her mind. “I suppose I am rather like a chicken or a small child—to a salamander.” There was a little extra thrill of heat between her palms—the nursemaid saying, You had better not lose this one—and then it was gone.

She rose to her feet again, laying down her basket and dropping her trowel, and moved towards the edge of the clearing. She put her hand on a convenient tree and paused, because she did not wish to lose herself in the wood, but she leant beyond her tree, peering into the tangled black wilderness where the starlight could not reach.

She felt almost as if there were gentle fingers rubbing her neck softly, then just touching her temple, to turn her face to look in the right direction.… The fingers were gone, if they had ever been, but there was a meadow before her—though the trunk of the tree was still beneath her own hand—and animals grazed there: ponies, horses, cows, and sheep. The meadow was large, larger than she saw at first, for it was dotted with clumps of trees, and she could see narrow bridges of grass through greater stands and thickets that led into other meadows.

She did not see the old woman for a little while, for she was hidden behind the flank of the cow she was milking. She heard her singing first, but since it was a song she often sang herself, she thought she was only hearing its echo in her own mind: “And from her heart grew a red, red rose, and from his heart a briar.”

The old woman stood up, her head appearing above the fawn-coloured back of the cow, and as she rounded its tail and the rest of her came into Beauty’s view, Beauty saw the pail of milk in one hand and the stool in the other. She walked carefully to the next cow, sat down on the stool, and again began to milk and to sing; she had the voice of a young girl, sweet and joyous.

Now Beauty could see the entire process: the old woman’s head half buried in the cow’s flank, the slight movement of each wrist in turn, the faint quick twinkle of the streams of milk. It was only then that Beauty began to see what she had assumed to be piles of earth or stones in the long flowery grass were small leggy sleeping heaps of calves and lambs and foals. Two lambs lay on top of their dozing mother not far from Beauty’s tree, looking very like the cow-parsley they lay among.

Beauty still stood in starlight, but she looked onto a morning scene and felt the sleepy summer heat of it against her face and against the hand on the cool trunk of the tree. She did not think her feet could be made to move, out of the starlight and into some strange dawn, but there was a great peace held in this meadow, like water in a lake. She wished she had a goblet, or a ewer, and might dip it up, like lake water; she could smell it where she stood, a fresh morning smell, mixed in with the warm smells of grass and grazing animals. She stretched her other hand out and felt something—something—something just brush against her fingertips that was neither sunlight, nor starlight, nor grass, nor tree. She closed her eyes to concentrate, and the sensation became just the tiniest bit like velvet, just the tiniest bit like someone’s breath, just the tiniest bit like whiskers. She opened her eyes.

It was a unicorn, of course. She was expecting that. Its eyes were deepest gold-brown-green-blue and held her own. What she was not expecting … she could see the meadow through the rest of it. As it bowed its head to settle its muzzle more snugly into her hand—carefully, for its luminous horn stretched past her shoulder—she saw it as she might see leaf shadows moving across the meadow, except that these shadows were dappled silver-white, instead of dappled dark, and the shape of them was not scattered, like tossing leaves on wind-struck branches, but formed quite clearly the long beautiful head, the graceful neck, the wide-chested body, the silken mane and curling tail, the exquisitely slender legs of the unicorn. If it were not for the eyes and the faint whiskery velvet against her hand, she might have thought it was not there at all.

In the back of her mind—in the part of her brain and body still in the bonfire clearing in the middle of the night—a voice said, What makes you think you are seeing anything but the shadows cast by your own fancies? The meadow, the old woman, all the grazing beasts and their little ones, the serenity, tangible as a warm bath smelling of roses at the end of a long weary day, all this you think you see is because you live alone in a huge haunted palace with a huge haunted Beast, whose secrets you cannot guess. All you see is only because you miss Rose Cottage, you miss your sisters, your father.

What makes you think any of it is there?

And the silver-dappled shape before her shivered like smoke, like cloud beginning to uncurl itself into some further metamorphosis of the imagination; perhaps it would become a lion, a sphinx, a rose-bush.…

But a tiny singing voice in another part of her mind answered: I know it is all, all there, all as I see it. And the unicorn raised its nose from her hand and breathed its warm breath into her face, a breath smelling of roses, but light and gay and fresh, as exhilarating as spring after winter, but with a faint sweet tang a little like the smell of apples after rain. The currents of air touched her skin like rose-petals; it breathed into her face and vanished.

But her eyes had adjusted now, and she saw the old woman, moving very carefully indeed with a full pail, walking towards the edge of one of the bigger stands of trees, and in the dark shadows under their branches, she saw the silver shadows. The old woman turned, just before she entered the dark-and-silver shadows, and, framed by them, looked towards where Beauty stood, as if she knew someone watched there. She was too far away for Beauty to see her plainly, but Beauty thought she had the face of a friend, and she was strangely reassured by that brief indistinct glimpse of the old woman’s face, as if some memory of long-ago comfort had been stirred. Then the old woman turned away again, and the silver shadows parted to let her through.

Beauty knew that was all. She dropped her head, and her hand from the trunk of the tree, and there were the wild woods close round her again, and the only light was from the stars, and the air was chill. She took the few steps back to her basket dully, but as she stooped again beside it, it was already full, full of the darkest, sweetest, richest compost she could imagine; and her unused trowel lay beside it, its clean blade winking in the starlight. She scooped up a handful of her basket’s contents and crumbled it between her fingers; it smelt of earth and kept promises. There was still a wink of gold in it, like no ordinary farmyard fertilizer, telling her where it had come from, but it was as if two seasons of weather and earthworms had already sieved and stirred and transformed it into something she and her rosebushes loved much better than gold. She could almost hear it sing: And from her heart a red, red rose.…

“I will never be able to shift the basket,” she murmured. “It must weigh more than I do.” She put the unused trowel in her pocket. Then she took a deep breath, and put her hand under the peak of the basket handle, and stood up. The basket came up too, as lightly as if it were empty.

She walked slowly through the bonfire glade, the carriage-way, and went at once to her glasshouse, and ran her free hand along its framed panes—slide-bump-slide-bump—as she walked between it and the palace wall, because her glasshouse would not change its length to dismay her. But she went on putting each foot down very carefully and breathing very gently and regularly, for she was still half afraid that the midnight magic that was carrying the basket for her would take fright at her mortal presence so near it and run off.

When she came to the glasshouse door, she went in at once and set the basket down with a happy sigh. The starlight seemed brighter in here than it did in the courtyard, despite the white reflecting walls of the palace and the pale stones underfoot, despite the black stems of the roses and the wild labyrinthine structure of the glasshouse itself, whose shadows fell on her like lace. She walked round her rose-beds, dropping a handful of her beautiful compost at the foot of every rose-bush. She smoothed it with her other hand, so that it formed a little ring at the base of each. After each handful she returned to the basket for the next; her trowel remained in her pocket, nor did she touch the hand fork lying on the water-butt. The last handful went to the dark red rose blooming in the corner. The basket of compost went just around, one handful for each, not a thimbleful was left; but that last handful was just as full as the first. There was no room in her heart and mind for words, even for a song; she was brimming over with joy.

She went slowly, baffled by happiness, upstairs to her room, where a bath awaited her; reproachfully, she thought, as her filthy skirt was very nearly whisked out of her hands as she pulled it off. “Now, you stop that,” she said, lightheaded and blithe. “What am I for if not to rescue the Beast’s roses?”

But there was a sudden frantic shimmer in the air as she spoke, as if something almost became visible, and the breath caught in her throat; she opened her eyes very wide and stared straight at it—tried to stare at it—and then screwed her eyes up to stare again, but whatever the something was, was gone.

She shook her head to clear the dizziness, and then lay down in the bath and closed her eyes. When, a little later, she put her hands on its rim, to rearrange her position, she knocked into something with her elbow, opened her eyes, and discovered a tray sitting over the bath, with a little round loaf, a little round cheese, a pot of jam, and a pot of mint tisane upon it. But it reminded her of one of Jeweltongue’s peace offerings, and she did not know whether to laugh or cry. Crying won, and her joy was all gone away in a rush, like bathwater down a drain, and even meeting unicorns was nothing in comparison to the absence of her sisters.

“It will all come right soon,” she said to herself. “Soon. The roses will grow again, and then I will be able to go home.” But this did not comfort her either, and she wept harder than ever, till she frightened herself with the violence of her weeping, and stood up out of the bath, and wrapped herself in several towels, and went to kneel by the little fire. Its heat on her face dried her tears at last, and she returned to the forlorn tray laid across the bath, and lifted it with her own hands, and set it down by the fire.

She began to eat, realised how hungry she was, and ate it all, wiping the last smear of jam from the bottom of its pot with her finger, because the jam spoon wasn’t thorough enough. She was by then only just awake enough to remember to divest herself of her towels and put on her nightgown before she crept up the stairs to her bed.