Beast Read online

  This is no dream; I do not sleep. Is she here in fact, in some unholy reality between heaven and the grave? And what wrongs can she have done? Is Jean-Loup’s transformation into Beast partly in payment for her sins, whatever they may have been? But it was Mère Sophie who created Beast. I was there. I saw it all.

  She lowers her head onto her clasped hands for a moment, then lifts her face again, turning toward the writing table. Her brown eyes come up to rest on me, warm and full of feeling.

  “Don’t hate him, Lucie,” she whispers to me. I am chilled to my silver marrow. How can she still recognize me as I am now? Why does she pursue me?

  “He was so good and loving once, never a cross word for anyone. Before . . .” She shakes her head sadly, but her gaze does not leave me, her expression earnest. “You were so kind once, to another girl, a stranger,” she murmurs. “Please, show him your kindness. Help him.”

  Help him? Me, help Jean-Loup? Never, not in this world or the next, no matter how pitifully his mother pleads for him! He stole my kindness from me, her son, as he stole so much else. She is some phantom, some fairy sent to drive me from my purpose, but I am unrelenting. Jean-Loup will get no help from me.

  And even as these thoughts cross my mind, the vision evaporates before me, leaving me in peace once more.

  After a few more circuits of the sun through the colored window, I hear the tread of agitated hooves as Beast races up the stairs. Newly resolved, I look forward to his next storm of helpless fury or complaint.

  But when Beast’s head emerges above the stairwell, his brown eyes are bright and eager. His mouth is open and curving upward in his animal smile, a smile of wonder. What has he found to be so happy about?

  But I find out as soon as he clambers up into the room and hurries over to where I still stand on the shelf above the writing table. He shows me a rose cradled in his paw, red and ripe and dewy, its petals just beginning to unfurl. He holds it up before me.

  “Look!” He pants, his breath so warm, so near, that it mists my polished surface.

  Beast turns the rose slowly, eagerly before me, as if he needs my reflection to reassure him that his own senses have not lied. The rose exists.

  “It’s the first to bloom since the magic roses dropped their petals,” he whispers in awe. “See how it grows! It lives!”

  I can’t imagine Jean-Loup ever sparing a single thought for a mere flower. But Beast’s eyes are soft and adoring, gazing at the thing he has coaxed into life. No mother could be any more besotted with her newborn. He gently turns the new rose over and over in his palm by its short green stem. With every turn, it releases more of its sweet perfume into the air until the room itself seems to brighten, as if the sun has come out from behind the clouds.

  Abruptly Beast stops his swoony reverie and frowns down at the rose. His gaze hurries all around the room, but he doesn’t see whatever it is he seeks. Cupping his rose in both paws, he turns and disappears into the passage.

  No sound from below tells me where Beast goes or what he does. I am left alone again to ponder the pale sun’s progress through the colored glass. But the scent of the new rose lingers in the room like a faint memory. It’s not the heady, musky scent of the magic roses. It’s lighter somehow but no less pleasing. It’s the fragrance of rain and sun and air and earth, of living things. And something else, I think. The impudent sweetness of something beloved.

  Jean-Loup could never love anything. But what of Beast? He must love his roses to have brought them so patiently back to life.

  Before I can ponder this any further, I hear the tread of hooves on the stairs again. Beast rises into the room, his brown eyes beaming. He carries his rose in a plain, slender glass vase he must have found in the kitchen and filled with water from the well. He brings it over and places the vase on the surface of the writing table, in my pool of warm light, then stoops to pick up the fallen book of sonnets that he dashed to the ground the last time he was here. He gently shakes the pages out straight, closes the small book, and lays it next to the rose vase, nudging it a little with his paw to the most pleasing angle. When that is done, he resettles the chair to the writing table, slightly drawn back, as if someone reading the book and enjoying the rose has wandered off for only a moment, but will soon return.

  I reckon time by the rose, watch its heavy petals uncurl and begin to spread open. Rainbows dance in the glass vase as the tinted sunlight touches it through the round window — dragon green, princess blue. Night shrouds the room in darkness, but for my persistent flame. I see no more visions of Jean-Loup’s mother.

  I’ve forgotten the number of days, but it is evening outside, and the rose is a sunburst of red above its vase when Beast returns. He gazes fondly at the rose and sniffs the air for its scent as if to assure himself of its continued life. And then he turns away, his paws locked behind his back, creasing the rows of feathers, as he assumes a studious pose and gazes around at the shelves of books. Finally, he returns to the writing table, seats himself on the chair on his haunches, his furred and feathered upper body held erect, and takes up the little book again. He reads until dawn warms the colors in the window, and then he disappears again.

  The next night, when that book is finished, Beast prowls the shelves with brow furrowed, paws behind his back like the most doleful of philosophers, until he finds another, and the next night, another. This goes on for several more nights. When his prize rose finally exhausts its span of life and crumples, he replaces it with a fresh one and goes back to his reading. He can’t get much pleasure from it; his expression is always melancholy. But still he comes, night after night. It’s another kind of feeding.

  This night, halfway through his latest volume, he suddenly shoves it aside and sighs again, a great, rumbling outrush of breath. He rests his face in his paws for a few moments, then raises his head with an air of resolution and reaches into a cubbyhole below me. He withdraws a quill pen and inkstand, and from another niche extracts a sheet of parchment.

  I observe in fascination as he withdraws the stopper from the inkwell with his bared front teeth, drops it to the tabletop, and noses it aside. He wrestles the pen out of its slot in the stand, traps it between his paws, and nudges it upright with his snout. After steadying the quill with his mouth, he settles the shaft snugly between the first and second toes of his paw, lifts the pen, and dips its nib in the inkwell. For a long while, he does nothing more, poised with the pen dripping in his clumsy paw, but never applying pen to paper. He gazes abstractly out into the empty air. Then his gaze falls more tenderly on the rose. At last, he scratches out a few words. Then, tentatively, a few more. I can’t make out the words from this angle, and his awkward scrawl is barely readable in any case, but the words are shaped like verses on the page.

  Poetry? Can Beast be writing poetry? Oh, it is too delicious — love sonnets from the beast! Has he been so long out of the society of women, he must channel his yearning into verse? But verses must be poor substitute indeed for the caresses of a live woman. How Jean-Loup would laugh!

  And my own mirth suddenly curdles within me, to think that I might share any impulse at all with Jean-Loup.

  Beast pauses over his work, draws an inky slash across a word here, and scribbles a few corrections there. I see his mouth working silently as he holds up the paper to read what he’s written. He frowns, sighs, and shakes his shaggy head.

  “Moonstruck puppy,” he mutters to himself. Something like an ironic smile plays across his expression. “‘Puppy,’ there’s a fine jest. Would that I were anything so adorable as a puppy.” He glances up at me, at his reflection in my polished surface. “Moonstruck gargoyle, more like.”

  He shifts his gaze away from the image of himself to me. “What is it about this place that makes me want to tell my feelings?” he murmurs, tilting his head to one side. “Like a human. Like a man.” He glances at the quill still stuck between his toes and sighs. “All I lack is the skill. And the wit.” With another wry glance at me, he plucks the quil
l from the grip of his paw with his mouth and drops it on the desk.

  “But I find I am not suited to poetry,” Beast rumbles on, rising from his chair with a sigh. “Out of doors, beyond these walls, I never think of such things. Outside, in the park, working in my rose garden, I grow stronger and faster every day. Everything is sharper, clearer, more . . . pure.”

  He turns about, his gold-flecked eyes full of wonder.

  “Every day, I see things that fill me with wonder: a spiderweb drooping with pearls in the rain; the majestic circling of a hawk in the winter sky. I can hear the sigh of a snowdrift or the bustle of creatures tunneling underground, their tiny claws sifting through the soft dirt. When I water my roses, I can hear the water singing its way down into the earth. And the way the world reeks — the brassy stench of a coming storm, the sweet decay of rotting leaves, sharp, spicy pine. I can track an animal in the wood from leagues away. And when I feed, the smell of blood is maddening and irresistible . . .”

  He pauses in the middle of this sudden cloudburst of words, the most I have ever yet heard from him, but then plunges ahead.

  “And my roses! There is nothing on earth sweeter than my roses. They are the best of nature, blessedly free from the taint of . . . human folly.” He gives his head one more little shake that ripples through his long, tawny mane. “In my garden, buoyed up by the fragrance of my roses, I feel I have the courage to do anything. Bear anything. Outside these walls, it’s almost possible to feel that I . . . belong in this body. As horrible as it is. That there might yet be a place for me somewhere in the world.”

  Beast has a surer grasp of poetry than he knows, in speech at least, if not on paper. I know I ought to feel outrage that Jean-Loup is learning to content himself in any way with his new monstrosity. But, in truth, I am more amazed than angry to find Beast so awed by common things that Jean-Loup held in such disdain, or never even noticed.

  “And yet, I am compelled to keep coming back here, to this library, to the world of ideas, the world of men.” Beast sighs again. “Beneath this face, this fur, I think human thoughts. I have human feelings. I am gifted with speech, like a man, and cursed to desire the fellowship of other men.”

  If only Beast knew how useless those old companions were. Which of them has come back out of concern for the chevalier? They were ready enough to jest and laugh and sing at his table, so long as he provided food and wine and sport enough, but where are they now?

  Beast picks up his discarded page of verses and casts his haunted gaze over it one more time. “But that was Jean-Loup’s world. His life. Not mine.”

  And without rancor, without rage, he lifts his paper and burns it to ashes in my flame.

  Beast carries me out of the library at dawn, but my thoughts are in such turmoil, I scarcely notice. What does he mean, Jean-Loup’s life is not his? Are they not one and the same?

  Yet, even I must admit, I can find no trace of Jean-Loup in Beast’s behavior, as doggedly as I search, not since the night he shut me up in the attic cupboard. I can’t believe Mère Sophie’s spell would have erased Jean-Loup’s memory on purpose, for what use is my revenge if he no longer knows what he’s lost? It seems far more likely that he only pretends not to be Jean-Loup now, but why indulge in such an elaborate charade? What on earth would be the point? Not for my benefit. I’m scarcely a maiden. I’m not even human; my touch scorches and burns. I can’t be tricked into releasing Jean-Loup from his curse. He has nothing at all to gain by pretending to me.

  I am still chewing on these thoughts when Beast sets me in my old place on the windowsill overlooking the courtyard. This is the first time I’ve seen his new crop of roses in full bloom. He’s planted emerald-green moss to carpet the rose beds, between the bushes, and it looks beautiful. The melancholy lingering in his eyes from last night evaporates when he gazes out at them. His glance shifts hesitantly to me. “Perhaps you might like to see them, too?” he suggests.

  Beast senses more life in me than Jean-Loup ever noticed when I was human. Surprised by this unexpected kindness, I feel my flames fluttering all together for a moment — a brief little glimmer of gratitude. Beast smiles cautiously back at me.

  Certainly, nothing is more beautiful to see than his roses. How they tower above the stone wall enclosing them! The buds are the size of lemons, the open blooms like red sunflowers.

  In the time I have been upstairs, Beast has carted away the sheltering hay bales and trained the center bushes up on stakes to form an elegant arch over the drive from the gilded gate all the way up to the front steps. His roses must be visible all the way to the town. I recall my first glimpse of the château from the tavern at the inn, shining like gold on the crest of the green hill. What must it look like now, bursting with red roses in the late-winter landscape?

  In another moment, the sun has drawn Beast outside. Indeed, he’s in such a hurry to get to his garden, launching himself downstairs at a gallop, paws-first, that he misses his footing on the dew-slicked steps. I see his body stretch out in midair for an instant, paws flailing for balance, as he plunges helplessly forward. And then, impossibly, the feathers down his back spread apart into two giant sail-like spans that catch the air for a heartbeat until Beast can get his hooves under him again.

  For that one moment, he is flying.

  Beast is no less astonished than I am. After landing on the gravel track, he rises up on his hooves, his great shaggy head twisting backward as far as it will go, muzzle snuffling at the feathers that carpet his shoulders, under his mane. He reaches one paw back, grooming at the feathers with his claws, then straightens his posture a little more, poised on his hooves, and gives his shoulders a mighty shake. But the wings do not rise again; the feathers have all resettled themselves back into their dormant position. He is quiet for some time, pondering. Then he slowly turns his head back to look up at me, my light burning still in the window. His witness.

  Beast retrieves me every evening after he has hunted and fed, and we make our nightly progress to the library. His touch is tender in a way it never was when his hands were human. He composes no more verses but still browses among the books. Sometimes he sprawls across the carpet as he reads or stretches his huge bulk in the armchair, his hooves propped up on the padded footstool. It’s a curiously human posture, almost grotesquely so, yet it seems to suit him. His wings do not stir again; the rows of feathers down his back are just another mismatched body part, like his fur and mane and hooves, to be managed as best they can.

  Tonight, when Beast takes me up to the library, he is also carrying a large leather pouch bound with a dark ribbon that he found in Jean-Loup’s study downstairs, the room in which the chevalier once condemned his secretary to the stocks. When he folds the pouch open on the writing table, under my light, I see that it contains scores of papers, some loose, others bound in small ledger books; they are mostly marked with columns of figures, but there are other lengthier notations as well, in a neat, crimped hand that must be Monsieur Treville’s. Beast is entirely absorbed in reading through the papers for a long while, his expression growing ever darker until he is scowling down at them. What can it matter now if the chevalier’s accounts are out of order? But Beast finds them so disturbing that, at last, with an angry groan, he shoves aside pouch, papers, and all.

  “What poor use Jean-Loup made of his life,” Beast grumbles. “What did he need with more wealth, titles, and possessions?” He glances again at the pile of papers. “Fruitless lawsuits, crippling taxes, selfish extravagances,” he mutters, shaking his head. “And what is there now to show for it? This empty house, these lonely grounds.”

  He rises to his hooves, catches me up, and sets me on a higher bookshelf nearby, as if to deny my illumination to the papers and the grim evidence they contain. He sinks down to the chair again, but he is still agitated.

  “The Villeneuve estate,” he goes on glumly. “What good was it? Was there not honor enough in this property, this house, this lineage? And never a thought spared for the welfa
re of the seigneurie or the dependents who labored for him. He did not value these things, or his affairs would not be such — such a testament to arrogance and cruelty.”

  It amazes me to hear these words in Beast’s mouth, but it angers me, too, to think he would try to deny any part in Jean-Loup’s crimes. I feel my flames burning hotter.

  Beast glances again at the papers, shaking his head in disgust. “What a mess he made of everything,” he mutters.

  I suppose you could have done better.

  Beast freezes to the spot for an instant, staring at me, ears pricked up, his tufted jaw dropping open an inch or two. Then he clambers up to peer at me more intently, his expression wonderstruck, his dark eyes aglow in my flame. “I heard that,” he says, his voice hushed. “I am not dreaming. That was you! You can . . .”

  Yes, I can, I agree, shaping my thoughts with care, the ones I wish to share with him. Never have I felt so moved to communicate with him, not since the day I urged him to water his roses. When it’s important enough.

  Beast peels his gaze off me for an instant to glance at the tabletop crowded with Jean-Loup’s papers, and then his eyes rise again to me.

  “I could scarcely have done any worse,” he huffs, shaking his head, “if I had been here. But . . .”

  Then a new thought takes hold of him; I can see it in his widening eyes.

  “Were you here?” Then he frowns at me. “You weren’t him, were you?”

  My flames shoot up so suddenly in outrage that Beast actually backs away a step, but his expression looks relieved.

  “Then who were . . .” He pauses, reconsiders. “Who are you?”

  I was called Lucie.

  If my name is familiar to him for any reason, he gives no indication, only continues to hover there, afraid to move, lest the fragile connection between us should burst like a bubble of soap.

  “And you lived here? At the château? Were you mistress of this place?”