Finally, after months had passed, with their succession of identical days and nights — Beauty’s distracted engagement in idle embroidery, dinners at which there was nothing to say — the beast told her to go home again. He sank massively to his knees before her, like an elk shot full of arrows, and said he’d been wrong to keep her with him, he’d been subject to some fantasy about love’s power, but really, what had he been thinking? Had he actually believed that a pretty girl, come to him against her will, could love a monster? He’d been duped, it seemed, by stories he’d heard about girls who loved misshapen and appalling creatures. He had not thought to wonder what might be wrong, in such cases, with the girls themselves.
Beauty could not find a way to tell him that, had he been less mannerly, had he offered her a more potent aspect of threat, it might have worked. She wondered to herself why so many men seemed to think meekness was what won women’s hearts.
But she and the beast had developed no habits of candor, and it was too late, by then, to start. She accepted the beast’s offer, and fled. She was sorry about forsaking him, but could not bring herself to embrace such a maidenly future, bored, unchallenged, sequestered in a castle — however accommodating it might be, however prone to the lighting of fires and the laying out of meals — that offered by way of companionship only a monster obsessed with contemplating his own sins. She fled because life in the beast’s castle was more comfortable but not, in its deepest heart, substantially different from the life she’d lived at home.
When she returned to her village, however, she was surprised to find that she experienced no sense of going home. She was happy, happy enough, to see her father and sisters again, but her father was still the man who hadn’t followed her to the beast’s castle and done battle for her. Her sisters had married the men they were destined to marry — a brick mason and an ironmonger, sturdily prosaic men who performed their jobs with neither complaint nor ardor, who liked their dinners served promptly at six, and who stumbled home late from the pubs to set about begetting still more children. Beauty’s middle sister had two babies already; the youngest was suckling her first, with a second on the way.
What was most surprising, though, was the fact that Beauty seemed to have developed a reputation while she’d been away.
Although the true story of her time with the beast did not get around, no one believed her father’s version, about her sudden departure for a convent. The villagers agreed that she’d been misbehaving in a remote and foreign place, and that, once some duke or earl had tired of her, or she’d grown too familiar to be the pick of the bawdy house, she was deluded enough to think she could simply come back, as if nothing had happened. Now that Beauty was home again, even the pick of the still-unmarried men (the baker prone to unpredictable spasms of rage, the rabbit-keeper with the squint and the tic) — even those sad specimens — were reluctant about a girl with a past that clearly required a cover-up.
Eventually, late one night (explanations would have been awkward), Beauty slipped away, mounted the horse, and rode back to the beast’s castle. At least she was wanted there. At least she was loved. At least the beast saw no reason for her to be ashamed.
The castle, however, when she arrived, was dark and empty. Its massive doors swung open easily enough, but the candlesticks on the walls did not light themselves as she moved down the hallways. The cherub faces in the molding were merely carved, unliving wood.
She found the beast in the garden, which had turned weedy and rank, its hedges throwing out branches like panicky, irrational thoughts. The fountain, gone dry, was etched all over with hairline cracks.
There, on the paving stones before the arid fountain, lay the beast.
Beauty knelt beside him. Although he was too far gone to speak, she could still see a flicker in his yellow eyes.
She lifted, with effort, one of his paws in her small hands. She told him quietly, as if it were a secret, that she’d realized she loved him only by being parted from him. She wasn’t lying; she wasn’t exactly lying. She did love him, in a way. She pitied him, she pitied herself, she grieved for both of them — souls who seemed to have gotten so easily and accidentally lost.
And if he could be healed, if he might be brought back from death’s brink …
She loved the image of herself turning proudly from the low lot of village men who’d deign to have her; she loved the idea of saying no to the baker and the rabbit-keeper and the filmy-eyed old widower whose once-respectable house was going slant on its foundation, shedding shingles into the town square.
She would be the bride of a beast. She would live in his castle. She would care nothing for the whispers of biddies and gossips.
She said softly, into the beast’s furry ear, which was bigger than a catcher’s mitt, that if he could revive himself, if he could manage to rise again, she’d marry him.
The results were instantaneous.
The beast leapt up with a lion’s fervor. Behind him, the fountain spurted water again.
Beauty stepped back. The beast looked adoringly at her. He looked at her with a thankfulness that was marvelous and, somehow, dreadful to see.
In less than a moment, the beast’s hide split open like a chrysalis. The claws and fangs fell away. The feral reek evaporated.
And here he is.
He’s stunning. He’s sturdy, square-faced, snapping with muscle.
The prince stands among the snarls of shed fur, the claws that litter the paving stones. He looks down in amazement at his restored body. He flexes his human hands, tests the athletic springiness of legs that are no longer taloned haunches.
The spell has been broken. Did Beauty suspect it, all along? She’ll enjoy the idea that she’d intuited it, that she was a girl who could ferret out the workings of enchantment, but she’ll never be sure.
She waits breathlessly, ecstatically, for the newly summoned prince to take her in his arms. But first he has to check his reflection in the water, which is already rippling in the revived fountain.
It’s worked. He’s managed it. He’s seduced a lovely woman into pledging her troth to a soul that’s been concealed — to everyone but her — by disfigurement.
Beauty’s pale bosom heaves with anticipation.
The prince turns slowly from his own reflection, shows her a lascivious, bestial smile; a rapacious and devouring smile. Although his face is impeccably handsome, something about it is not quite right. The eyes remain feral. The mouth seems capable, still, of tearing out the throat of a deer. He could almost be the beast’s younger, handsomer (much handsomer) brother, as if his parents had produced a deformed child and then a beautiful, perfectly proportioned one.
Beauty begins, suddenly, to wonder. Is it possible that the beast-spell was meant, long ago, as protection? Had the prince been locked into a monster’s guise for decipherable reasons?
She backs away. Grinning victoriously, emitting a low growl of triumph, he advances.
HER HAIR
After the witch caught on …
after she cut off Rapunzel’s hair …
after the prince fell from the tower onto the thornbush, which pricked out his eyes …
He wandered the world searching for her, astride his horse. He took no one with him other than the horse.