Bryony and Roses (10 page)

There were shoes. They were actually comfortable, which was impressive, since her feet were unfashionably wide and had once been the despair of cobblers.
 
In the last few years, she had taken to wearing men’s boots and shoving a wadded up sock in each toe.
 

Decked out in finery, she left the room and walked to the staircase. The Beast was waiting at the foot.

He was wearing dark green, a kind of open tunic over a robe with large sleeves, but the sash at his waist had a pattern of silver leaves on it.

Bryony the gardener would have stomped down the steps in her usual manner, but Bryony who had once been the daughter of the richest merchant in the land remembered how one descended a staircase.
Fingertips on the bannister, chin up, one hand holding up your gown so that you do not trip over your own clothes and break your neck…

“You do that very well,” said the Beast.

“You never forget some things,” said Bryony. Three deportment teachers had nearly broken themselves training those things into her, and one had actually quit and gone into the seminary afterwards.

The Beast offered her his arm.

She took it, because of all those long-lost deportment teachers, even though his nearness made it hard to breathe. She did not have to touch his fur—that would have been too much, too soon—but his sleeve was warm and velvety, almost like fur itself.

The air did not seem to go deep enough into her lungs. He moved slowly, but she still took two steps for every one of his.
 

He smelled like cloves and fur and something dark and musky. It was the smell of a wild animal, not a tame one.
 

A door opened before them, and then another, and they came to a dining hall so large that the roof was lost in shadow. There was an enormous table with a linen table cloth and glittering silver, and food was packed onto it on gigantic plates and salvers and steaming tureens.

“Oh dear Lord,” said Bryony.

Wrought-iron candlesticks lit the table wherever there was a square inch to spare between dishes.
 
Candlelight gleamed from aspics and sauces, from the curve of apples and grapes and the glistening flank of roasted fowl.
 

“You don’t expect me to eat all this, do you?” she asked the Beast.
 

He shook his head. “Not at all. The house is—err—extravagant.
 
Eat whatever you wish.”

“It won’t go to waste, will it?” asked Bryony, eyeing a roasted peacock on a platter the size of a wagon wheel. “I mean…surely some of this is compostable, at least…”

“Nothing will be wasted,” said the Beast. He released her arm and pulled a chair out for her at the head of the table. His feet made no sound on the floor, but the chair screeked nicely against the tiles, which made Bryony obscurely pleased. It would not be pleasant to be the only thing in an enchanted house that made any kind of sound.

She sat. The Beast took a chair at the corner beside her.

“Oh, thank goodness. I’d hate for you to sit at the other end, and have to yell over the peacock at you.”

The Beast’s eyes crinkled up. “That would be inelegant, yes.” He reached for a bottle. “Do you drink wine?”

“At this point,” said Bryony, “I would drink raw moonshine. It has been a very long day.”

“The house can probably provide raw moonshine, although you would offend its sensibilities.” The Beast poured out a glass.
 

Bryony took a sip. It was dry and sweet and seemed to evaporate off her tongue and through the roof of her mouth.

 
The Beast set the glass down and did not pour out another.
 

“Do you not drink wine?”

He shrugged. “I do. But I cannot drink it from a glass. I would require a dish to lap it from. It is…unsightly.”

“Ah.”
 

A slightly uncomfortable silence fell. Bryony leaned over the table and stabbed a fork into a slice of roasted peacock.
 

 
She had made inroads into the peacock, some peculiar salad with a nutty dressing, and a tureen of mashed potatoes when she finally realized that the Beast wasn’t eating either.

“You’re not eating?”

He shrugged again. “I am a Beast.”

“So does that mean you live on what? Air and sunbeams?”

He wrinkled his snout. “It means that I eat like a beast.”

She sighed. “And I suppose that’s unsightly, too?”

“Very.”
 

“This is going to be a
long
dinner,” said Bryony, taking another gulp of wine.

She made it through another slice of peacock before the silence got to be too much for her. “So. Err. Tell me about yourself. How did you get here?”

The Beast opened his mouth and a wind seemed to rush through the hall, snuffing out many of the candles. In the sudden gloom, his shadow rose up on the wall behind him like a giant.
 

Bryony froze with her hand on the wineglass. A drop of condensation slid down the side and over her fingers, cool as a sigh.

“I cannot say,” he said firmly.

Magic. There is definitely some magic here. He doesn’t want to talk, or something’s stopping him.
 

Bryony cast about for something else. “What do you do to occupy your time?”

He propped his muzzle up on one enormous paw. “I read a great deal. The library is very large. Sometimes I build things.”

“What sort of things?”

“Clockwork, mostly. The house is not good with clocks. The insides confuse it, I think. It makes things that look like clocks, but they run mostly by magic. I tinker with them and try to make them work without magic. Sometimes I make little wind-up things.”

Bryony eyed the size of his—hands? paws?—and wondered what qualified as “little” to a Beast. She was pleased to have found a safe topic, however.
 
“What sort of things?”

He scrabbled his hands across the tablecloth. It was hard to read that enormous face, but she thought he was embarrassed. “Nothing much. A ladybug that walked, once. A bird that chimed. Although when I tried to make another ladybug, it didn’t work, so the first one is in pieces around the room, until I figure out what went wrong.”

Bryony laughed.
 

By the time she had finished a small slice of pie and pushed her plate away, the candles had re-lit themselves.
 
She stifled a yawn against her fingers.
How can I be tired? I slept all afternoon!

“Sorry,” she said.
 

The Beast shook his head. “Don’t be. You may sleep a great deal for a few days. There is something about magic that takes people that way. It should wear off soon.”
 

“Good to know.” She pushed her chair back and stood up.

“Will you marry me?” asked the Beast.

Bryony froze.

“I’m sorry,” she said, when she could talk again, “I think I may have misheard you.”

“I said ‘Will you marry me?’”

She stared at him.

“It’s a simple enough question,” said the Beast testily. “You can say no if you like. I rather expect you to. I’m not going to kill and eat you if you—are you
laughing?”

Bryony sank back down in her chair, shaking with hysterical laughter.
 

It had always been her besetting sin. Here she was in an enchanted castle with a monster and magic at every corner, her father dead and her family’s money gone, a sister who was going to have to marry the weaver’s son, and
now
, finally, someone offered to marry her?
 

What she could see of the Beast’s expression was so nonplussed that she only laughed harder.
 

God, she had been the despair of so many lady’s maids! All those ridiculous balls and all those poor women trying to make her look presentable in hopes of teasing out an offer of marriage from some scion of a great house. “Now Miss Bryony, stand up straight and don’t slouch.” All those pumice stones trying to whittle away at her big, bony hands, outsized compared to the rest of her, all those paints and powders trying to make her jaw less square and her nose less beaky. “Now Miss Bryony, don’t rub your eyes or you’ll smear your makeup!”

All that effort wasted trying to catch the master of a great house, and now that she had no money and no prospects, she had the master of the greatest manor house she had ever seen asking to marry her?
 

And he can’t possibly care that I’m not pretty, because he’s some kind of boar-bear-monster thing!

She slid down in the chair and thumped on the arm and didn’t stop until her bladder threatened to mutiny.
 

“Water closet,” she gasped, half-crawling out of the chair. A door opened out of the wall. She wasn’t sure if there had been a door there before or if House had made one, and she didn’t care. She sprinted for it.
 

When she emerged, trying to settle the ruffled skirt again, the Beast was standing behind his chair.
 

“Feeling better?” he asked.
 

“Much,” she said. It was true. Something had unknotted while laughing. If she was going to be trapped in an enchanted castle, at least she would be trapped with her sense of humor intact.
 

“If it is all the same to you, Beast,” said Bryony, inclining her head as if she were still that long-ago girl, “I would prefer
not
to marry you.”

“I can hardly say that I am surprised,” he said dryly. “I did not expect to be laughed at quite so enthusiastically, however.”

“Oh, well, that.” She waved a hand. “That wasn’t at
you.
That was at my father and a great many well-meaning maids and a little bit at myself.”

“Then I shall take no offense,” said the Beast. “May I escort you to your room?”

“I don’t know. Seems rather forward of you, doesn’t it?”

One lip curled up in a toothy grin. “The foot of the stairs, then? I should not wish to cause any
talk.”
 

“Heaven forbid.” She took his arm. Her lungs immediately seemed shallower, but after such a good laugh, she was willing to put up with it as far as the staircase.
 

When they reached the foot of the stairs, the Beast released her arm and bowed to her. She curtsied—the full skirts made doing so a rather silly pleasure—and ran up the steps.
 

“Good night, Bryony,” called the Beast.
 

“Good night, Beast,” said Bryony.
 

Bryony woke in the night and knew that there were things outside the window.

She kept her eyes squeezed tightly shut, not wanting to give herself away. With the bed-curtains open, it was only the shadows that concealed her. Her blanket was pulled up over one shoulder. If she rolled over, pretending to still be asleep, could she pull it over her head?

She was aware, even as she thought these things, that she was not being rational. If there were truly things outside her window, and not just childhood monsters hiding in the dark, then a blanket over her head would be no defense at all.
 

Was there something there? Was this just a night terror?

They’re there. They’re real. I’m sure of it.
 

Had it been a sound that had woken her? Something tapping on the glass?

If she opened her eyes and looked to the window, would she see a pale face pressed against it, watching her?

Bryony had spent most of her life jumping into bed to avoid things grabbing her ankles, even when she was supposed to be grown up and well past that stage. A succession of nurses looking under the bed when she was a child hadn’t helped. She always pictured some shadowy thing pressed against the underside of the mattress, spread-eagled and thin so that a glance under the bedskirts did not reveal it.
 

Later on, when she took her courage in her hands to look herself, she still wasn’t quite convinced. Bare floorboards and dust bunnies were all well and good, but perhaps it was listening for her and hiding behind the headboard when she checked. Then when she stood up, it would flow back down under the bed and wait.
 

It was an old familiar terror, and Bryony was used to it. This, however…this was something else again.
 

Something was there. Something unknown but real.
 

Bryony opened her eyes a slit. Dread lay like a knot of roots in her belly.

She dragged her gaze from the bed-curtains to the window. She could barely see and she didn’t dare open her eyes any wider.
 

Something white flashed on the other side of the glass.

It’s the birch, it’s only the branches, that’s why it looks so long and pale and twisty, those aren’t fingers, it’s only the birch, the birch, only the birch—

Part of her knew that it had to be the birch tree. Another, rather larger part was sure that it wasn’t.
 

I can roll off the bed. I’ll roll to the side, and…be at the mercy of whatever is lurking underneath.
 

Shut up shut up there’s nothing under the bed there’s never anything under the bed you’re not a child why aren’t you over this?

Something tapped, very quietly, against the window.
 

It’s only the branches there’s nothing there branches tap sometimes…

Could it open the window? Would House let it in?

Was it part of the magic of this place?
 

Had the Beast, for all his talk, brought her here as a sacrifice for the things outside the window?

There’s nothing outside the window. It’s only a tree. If you can’t open your eyes all the way and look and stop scaring yourself silly, you had better pull the blankets over your head and try to go back to sleep.
 

Feeling as if she were nine years old again, Bryony burrowed down into the blankets, trying to make it look as if she were asleep and getting comfortable. You couldn’t look as if you were awake, that was one of the rules. Monsters couldn’t get you while you were asleep.