Beast Read online

  We stare in astonishment at this witchery. I feel myself trembling in Beast’s paw, and when I glimpse his face reflected in the glass pane, I see his tufted jaw hanging open and his eyes full of awe. Slowly, his lips — if such they can be called — begin to curl upward at the corners in his beastly smile, but I am too amazed myself at this moment to mind.

  “Roses,” he breathes, his voice so humbled in wonder, even I can scarcely hear it.

  They must be magical, these scarlet roses in the heart of winter. Yet their beauty is real enough, their lavish color a shock of vitality in the dead white landscape. Beast grips me more firmly as he throws open the door and trots down the grand front steps and into the enchanted garden. He cautiously extends a paw toward a rose on the nearest bush and lightly touches a petal with one padded toe. I brace for the instant when it will all vanish into the air, leaving us in cold white gloom once more. But witchcraft-born though they may be, these roses are all real and alive. Some hidden thorn pricks Beast’s paw, but instead of howling in rage, he merely raises the wounded toe to his mouth, sucking thoughtfully as he turns around and around among his magical roses.

  “Have I done this?” he whispers. “Did my wish make it so?”

  Can it be that some forces of this enchantment are at his command?

  But there are limits to his power. He wishes for companions and receives only contemptuous silence for his answer. But when he wishes away all the broken glass his fury has caused, it’s gone in a twinkling, all of it. Not a speck, not a single tiny crystal remains.

  Beast sleeps in the garden now, breathing in the perfume of a thousand blushing roses that he tends like a proud mother hen. I wonder, do they sweeten his dreams? Do beasts dream?

  The outside world is still frozen, but it’s always warm in the garden. I see it all from my perch, a sill in the middle of one of the glass panels in the entry hall, overlooking the courtyard. He leaves me here when he goes into the garden at dawn, where I can enjoy the beauty of the magical roses all day. He lingers there as long as he can in the afternoon after he wakes, until the hour between sundown and nightfall, when his senses are most keen and his urges become irresistible — the hunting time, when he must feed.

  After dark, I am a small beacon of light in the glass. Then he comes back for me. When the beast in him has been satisfied with the hunt, he carries me with him to dispel the gloom as he prowls the silent rooms of his château: my downstairs chambers with their fine displays of Beaumont possessions; the laundry room, its stone tubs dry and empty; the kitchens. He investigates the servants’ quarters behind the kitchens, including the tiny, airless room where I once shared a lumpy pallet with Charlotte. In the small, private cell that belonged to Madame Montant, we find the little bottle of her sleeping drops still on the bedside table. Beast picks up the bottle, uncorks it, and sniffs at it. “Poppy juice,” he rumbles, and puts it back where it was.

  Across the vast entry hall and into the opposite side of the ground floor, we discover sitting rooms and morning rooms filled with more beautiful items — mahogany chests inlaid with gold, wonderful carpets, Chinese vases — that he himself seems never to have seen before. Has he forgotten them, the way he forgot the garden? Or was Jean-Loup simply too busy to notice them? But now Beast sees everything. By my light.

  I have no notion how many nights we spend in these pursuits. One night is devoted entirely to the portraits of his ancestors that hang above the grand staircase; they rise up the panelled wall opposite the carved railing. It takes hours for him to inspect them, one paw on each gilt frame, his snout pressed up against each dusty surface as he contemplates their faces and stately clothing. These are the only vestiges of humanity left to him, these cold, dead portraits, and he studies them as if trying to remember who they are. Or what he was.

  My view is more detached. I note the long noses and amber eyes of generations of LeNoir men, each more wolfish than the last. Handsome in their way, but cold and cunning. I believe I can trace the introduction of pride and cruelty into the family line — in the flinty gaze of an eye, the uncompromising curl of a lip — and see these traits flourish in succeeding generations.

  One LeNoir has had himself painted before a landscape with a keep of honey-colored stone in the background; this must be the original fortress upon which Château Beaumont has risen. Another portrait shows a stately, long-nosed gentleman with a severe expression identified by the small plaque on the frame as Auguste Henri LeNoir de Beaumont. Beside him hangs the portrait of a wraith-pale lady swaddled to the chin in minutely rendered lace, identified as Anne-Marie Villeneuve LeNoir de Beaumont. She must be the grandmother whose family estate Jean-Loup found so alluring.

  Beast has moved on to the next two portraits. They hang above the first bend in the staircase, portraits of another man and another woman. The man is long-nosed and sandy-haired, but with dark eyes as hard and brittle as the shards of glass we once left glittering on the ballroom floor. Yet I recognize the cruel set of his handsome mouth, the challenging angle of his chin. He is dressed in fancy silver-colored armor painted to look so clean and shiny, I expect to see my flickering light reflected in its surface. He holds his helmet with its pointed visor tucked into one arm. The Beaumont device is displayed on his breastplate, a Beast Rampant above a row of spearheads. As I peer into that expression of self-satisfaction, it is Jean-Loup’s face that comes to mind. This must be his father. I read the small plaque: Rene Auguste LeNoir de Beaumont.

  Beast regards the portrait for a long time through narrowed eyes, whuffling at the surface with his snout as if trying to pick up its human scent. But there is something more to his attention than there was when he inspected the other portraits. Perhaps he is moved by the image of the father to whose memory Jean-Loup was so devoted, whose honor he was so determined to uphold at any cost. Perhaps he is ashamed to appear before his illustrious sire in his present grotesque form. He shifts his head from side to side, studying the flat surface from every angle, pawing wistfully at the portrait as if trying to coax some response from the cold paint.

  At last, he moves on to the woman’s portrait. She is not at all like the others. Her features are soft and expressive, full of life. Sprightly ringlets of dark reddish hair frame her pale face, and her mouth seems poised to suppress a giggle. Her expression is so happy, I don’t recognize her at first, and when I do, I very nearly shudder myself right out of Beast’s paw.

  She is the sobbing woman I saw in that secret room! The one who knew my name. The one who asked for my help. She’s had herself painted on the porch with a view of the luscious gardens behind her, not surrounded by fine, expensive trinkets, like so many of the other portraits. I would gasp, if I could, as I see the silhouette of a humble rocking chair made of bent twigs on the porch behind her.

  Beast’s paw is warm, but I am suddenly cold. I’d convinced myself it was all nonsense, cobbled together from careless prattle and foolishness. But now I see the sorrowing woman is real, or once was. How could I have had such a vision? I had never seen this portrait inside the stairwell back then. The wonder of it haunts me far more than all the other enchantments that have occurred in this place.

  Calming myself, I study her face in oils, a warm, friendly face, without the LeNoir arrogance, although the little plaque identifies her as Christine DuVal LeNoir. She must be Jean-Loup’s mother. Her eyes are as brown and sparkling as ale, shot with gold, even in this painted copy.

  I remember how frightening it felt to have the full tragedy of those eyes, swimming in tears, turned upon me.

  Won’t you help us, Lucie?

  What did she mean? What does she want?

  But Beast knows nothing of this. He ponders the portrait in the glow that I cast. There is no snuffling or pawing of the painting this time. He only gazes at it in thoughtful silence.

  At length, he moves on to the last painting, on the wall directly above the landing. It’s a portrait of the most recent chevalier, Jean-Loup, elegantly clothed in all his wine
-red and gold finery, standing with one hand resting on the hilt of his sword, with his favorite hound sitting up in sleek attention at his feet. The present Château Beaumont is painted in the distance, much grander than the plain stone keep we saw in an earlier portrait. The chevalier’s handsome mouth is set in proud disdain. The painter has captured nature perfectly, down to the frank and predatory eyes that dominate the picture.

  It hadn’t occurred to me until this moment how different Beast’s eyes are from Jean-Loup’s. Jean-Loup had his father’s eyes, dark and flinty, glinting like a sword. But Beast’s eyes are warm, like his mother’s.

  I expect Beast to claw the canvas apart as furiously as we smashed the mirrors. But instead, he simply regards the image, without any kind of expression at all. His eyes lower to the little plaque on the bottom of the frame. “Jean-Loup,” he murmurs.

  Then he turns away and carries me to the bottom of the staircase, out across the entry hall, and into the warren of shadowy passages behind the grand rooms. We follow a passage that ends abruptly at a little door with a curved iron handle. I shudder again to recognize it. The door opens for Beast, and he stands in the doorway, holding me high, but this time there is no ghostly vision in the glass above the hearth. A neat little bed, plainly dressed, occupies one corner, a modest cupboard in another. The rocking chair I remember still sits in the center of the room, unmoving, the same one I saw rendered in paint a moment ago.

  Why have we come here? I know this room has something to do with Jean-Loup’s mother — we were just looking at her portrait. This is where I first saw her. But Beast only gazes in silence for another long moment. Then he turns and carries me out of the room, closing the door on whatever memories may lurk there.

  The next night, we inspect the rooms on the second floor with renewed fervor, relics of a life he seems to have forgotten he had. No object escapes his scrutiny. Once again, it’s as if he is seeing everything for the first time.

  What is he thinking when he sees these things, touches them, sniffs at them, caresses them with his padded paws? He no longer confides in me. Perhaps speech is becoming distant and strange to him. Or perhaps whatever he feels can’t be contained in words.

  I am standing in my window one afternoon when I hear a soft keening that works itself up into an angry rumbling and at last explodes into a full howl, tinged with enough pain to set me on edge. I would jump if I had the means, to hear such a cry. It rattles the windowpane beside my sill, and I am rattled, too.

  It came from the rose garden. Two rows down from the front steps, where the end of a bed meets the driveway, Beast hovers beside the last bush in the row, pawing at the ground. He straightens again with another beastly wail, part outrage, part despair, holding aloft what he has found as if to plead his case before the judgment of God. With one paw, he grasps the dry stick of a spent rose blossom, the round hip open, its leaves spiky, bereft of petals. In the palm of his other paw I see a little mound of forlorn red petals, already turning crisp in the chilly air.

  “Bring it back!” roars Beast. “Make it live!”

  But there is no answer from the forces of magic that govern us, nor indeed from God. Beast’s roses may be magic-born, but their life span is not eternal, so it seems. Once born, like all natural things, they are destined to die.

  Beast falls to his haunches again and turns back to the bush from which he has plucked the withered stalk. He sets the dry stalk and the petals carefully down in the gravel track outside the rose bed, then begins to dig with his claws in the dirt beneath the bush. When he has made a ragged hole, he places the remains of the rose inside and covers it with a sprinkling of its petals, then shoves the little mound of dirt he’s dug out back in over it all, patting the surface of the dirt into place with his paws. I expect him to mumble a few words over the grave like a priest, but Beast says nothing, only hunches there, staring at the dirt. Then he turns an accusing glance on the rosebush itself, as if it has betrayed him. He thrusts his head forward and sniffs and snuffles all around it, trying to learn its secrets the way he tried to draw some sort of understanding from his family portraits and the grand furnishings in his rooms. Indeed, he seems to take some comfort from the scent of the roses still in full bloom, breathing in their fragrance, reassuring himself. At last he cradles two voluptuous blooms in his upturned paws.

  “Do not leave me,” he begs of them as if they were companions. Indeed, they are the only companions he has left. Besides me.

  Yet, while I expect to feel joy to see him so utterly alone, to hear his pathetic pleading, I am suddenly reminded how solitary my own existence has become.

  He pries himself away at dusk to hunt and feed, but he does not drag himself up the steps to me afterward. Instead he comes back to the rose garden, to the errant bush that lost its bloom. On all fours he lumbers around and around its trunk, his deep chest low above his busy paws. When he has worn down a kind of track in the dirt surrounding the bush — the dirt must be dry as dust or it would not take him so long; soft, moist soil would give way more easily — he heaves himself into it, curling his massive body around the bush. And he sleeps, among the rest of his living companions.

  I keep my vigil in the window throughout the night. My flame glows in the glass pane before me while the garden beyond sleeps in darkness. Sunrise is scarcely more than a white smudge above the stark winter landscape out beyond the château walls. But there is light enough to see the state of the garden. Beast still lies mounded up around the base of the rosebush, but his tawny fur is dappled with the red petals of dying roses. Indeed, every bush in every raised bed in the garden has dropped a litter of spent petals. Thousands and thousands of them cover the ground like splattered blood.

  I brace myself for Beast’s reaction when he wakes and sees it. He leaps up, shaking off his dusting of petals, and stares all around the garden, but the cry that erupts out of him is not the angry bellowing I expect, but a slow, steady keen of mourning. It’s as if he grieves for the roses themselves.

  Of course, there are means for keeping flowers alive that have nothing to do with magic. But Jean-Loup knew nothing of husbandry and cared less; he had servants and gardeners and groundskeepers for that. He took his pleasure freely from his garden, as he took it elsewhere, with no thought of how it came to exist or what it cost to maintain. It belonged to him; it was his due.

  Beast can only stare helplessly all about him at the litter of petals, his massive head hung with grief. It angers me that he will let his beautiful garden die off again out of ignorance. He can’t know how simple the solution is. Any peasant child who has ever had charge of a vegetable patch knows it. Even I know it, cold and inhuman as I am. Nothing alive can survive without water.

  Water. The word echoes inside my silver being. Water.

  I focus all my thoughts upon it. Water, you great shaggy-brained fool. Water!

  Out in the garden, Beast stops turning around. He frowns at the dirt beneath the nearest bush and probes it delicately with one hoof. He squats on his haunches and pats the earth with his paws. Frowning again, he pats under the next bush. Even from here I can see how hard and caked the dirt in the rose beds has become, its surface split by parched gullies. At last Beast scrambles up to his hind feet and sprints away out of my sight to the track between the château and the east wing that leads to the stables and the well.

  Soon enough, I hear the far-off commotion of his rooting around in the stables — tools swept aside; hay bales knocked about. Later, I hear the clank of iron handles against wood, the distant smack of wood against stone, and the sloshing of water. At length, he hustles back into my vision from the gap in the east wing, his paws clasping the handles of the two buckets he’s found, the buckets so full of water they drip a wet trail behind him with every step.

  Can he have heard me somehow? And why should I wish to help him, in any case? My happiness depends on his complete despair. But I enjoy the roses, too. It is not only Beast who will suffer without them, and he has the means of do
ing something about it, as I do not. Let him labor for my benefit for a change.

  He carries them to the first row of rose beds, sets one down, and splashes half the contents of the other over the first bush. The ground beneath is so dry, the water puddles up on top of it.

  He pauses, one bucket still grasped in his paw. He puts out one hoof and stamps lightly at the ground, then kicks at it. He sets down the bucket, crouches low, and begins to rake at the dirt with his claws. His first effort all but uncovers the root of the bush; he has to shove dirt back into the deep cavity he’s made. But he’s begun to understand the principle of the thing, clawing at the dirt more gingerly to break up the clods, then pouring out the water slowly, letting it seep through the broken dirt to the roots below.

  I watch in fascination, trying to imagine any circumstance in which Jean-Loup would allow his fine, smooth hands to touch the raw wood of a bucket, let alone common dirt. But Beast doesn’t seem to mind his dirty paws, nor does he mind it when the mud he’s creating cakes his claws and sticks in wet clumps between his toes. He’s too absorbed in his task to even notice.

  But after tending only three bushes, his buckets are dry again. He trots off with the empty buckets, brings them back full, and sets to raking more dirt and watering the next two bushes in the row. Then he catches up the empty buckets and carries them off to bring them back full of water once again.