He draws a breath — and pauses. He angles the point a little higher, toward his throat, lifts his tufted chin, and closes his eyes.
But his resolution fails him again. Try as he might, with all the best intentions he can muster, he can’t plunge the weapon home, cannot deprive himself of his life, however wretched it’s become. At last, with a howl, he casts the bloody shard back into the rubble in disgust. Relief wells up inside me, and no little glee, to witness his cowardice.
Then his gaze falls back on me, my light still sparkling in the broken glass. His dark eyes narrow. “You shall mock me no more, Little Candle!”
He scoops me up again and picks his way across the room, hooves crunching the splintered glass until he reaches a dark passageway and a small door in a far corner. It opens into another of the turret staircases. We climb the spiraling stone steps to the topmost floor of the chateau, its rooms long unused. We come out into a narrow passage and turn off into another longer one, the gloom too deep and our pace too quick for my light to illuminate much. He has no need to see by my light, I am sure; his beast’s eyes sharpen in the dark. He must have some other purpose in bringing me here.
We arrive at last in a large room under steep, slanting roof beams, dark and dusty with neglect. I see chests and pieces of furniture stacked here and there, some of them nursery things, all items for which Jean-Loup, the bachelor chevalier, had no use. An old cupboard stands in one corner, turned sideways toward an arched window through which nothing can now be seen but black night. The beast who was Jean-Loup yanks open the cupboard door and thrusts me inside, setting me on a shelf tall enough to accommodate my tapers. There is no other object on this shelf; my flame illuminates nothing. For the first time since my transformation, I feel anxiety as he begins to shut the door on me. How will I enjoy my revenge if I can’t witness his misery? And perhaps he hears something of my thoughts somehow, or simply guesses them, because I see a wicked smile kindle in his cold eyes.
“You are so eager to watch me suffer? I will give you better than that, Little Candle,” he growls. “You shall suffer with me. Shine as bright as you like, but see me no more.”
And I am shut up in empty darkness.
I should have known he would find a new way to be cruel to me, even in my present form. Time has no meaning for me. I can’t feel its passage as I once did; I no longer feel hunger or weariness. But I notice subtle changes in the nothingness within this cupboard. A strip of morning daylight alerts me that the cupboard doors are ajar; the impact when he slammed the one shut must have loosened the other. There is a space through which I can peer, and beyond it a mullioned glass windowpane.
Daylight comes and goes many more times, and the unlatched cupboard door sags open a little wider, so I can resolve what it is I see. The window looks out over the courtyard, its flower beds beginning to run ragged, the blooms all gone, the stalks unpruned. This room I am in is near a corner of the chateau, and another wing juts out nearby, framing the courtyard below. From where I perch, I can look into a broad bay window, one floor down in the adjoining wing. It is always dark inside, and I can never see what lies within. But tonight, as the full moon rises, it casts its curious beam through the glass to illuminate what’s inside.
Visible now within the bay window is a beautiful sunken bathing tub inlaid with Moorish tiles — deep blues, rich greens, purple, and turquoise, like a small private ocean. A half-drawn curtain separates it from the larger room within, and as I peer beyond the curtain, I glimpse an ebony bedpost. His bedchamber. His private bath.
The curtain is pulled all the way back, and he is standing in his room. He surveys the bathtub for a long time, and finally turns and lumbers away to the fireplace at the opposite end of the room. I can just glimpse his feathered back as he crouches before his hearth, working intently at something. At last I see the flickering of firelight in the hearth; by some miracle, he has managed flint and tinderbox with his clumsy paws. When he’s satisfied that the fire has caught, he turns and gallops away; I hear his heavy footfalls echoing in one of the stairwells below.
He hauls the buckets of water up himself, with no servants left to help him. My hands are fit only for holding candles in this dark place where light is banished. He wants the fire not for light, but to heat his bathwater, and I marvel at his determination to savor what must be the only pleasure left him — even as I gloat over all the pleasures he has lost. First he brings up the cauldron from the kitchen and sets it on his fireplace grate. Then he hauls up the water, two buckets at a time, slowly filling the cauldron. Whenever it gets too full, he bails hot water out of the cauldron and carries it over to the bathtub by the bucketful, then races downstairs for more water to feed the cauldron.
At long last, the tub is full and steaming, and he stands above it. It’s a terrible sight, all of his animal parts joined together — huge horned head above massive shoulders and a broad chest matted with motley fur. His trunk is pelted with long, tangled hair. From this angle, only a few ruffled edges of the useless feathers that cover his back are visible, silhouetted in the firelight, but I can see the curly fur that covers his broad haunches, from which his thick hind legs emerge above heavy cleft hooves. His muscled shoulders and heavy paws provide power, his hindquarters speed, but surely his patchwork parts were never meant to be joined to the same creature. He is breathtaking in his hideousness.
He clambers over the side of the tub and slides into the water on his back, like a man, deeper and deeper, until nothing is left above but his hairy paws covering his face, lest he glimpse his awful reflection rippling on the surface of the water. A straw-colored forelock looks soft, almost boyish, as it spills over his paws. But something odd happens when at last he dares to lift his head.
From my high perch, I swear I can see his former body, his human body, shimmering beneath the surface of the water. Illuminated in the silver moonlight, it’s as well-formed as when he was human — broad chest and shoulders unobscured by fur, tapering waist, narrow hips, long human legs. Naked and poignant, the image floats like a dream, a memory, under the water. His great head jerks when he glances into the water and sees it. But when he hastily raises a dripping leg out of the water into the air, it’s still coated in animal fur with a hoof on the end. The vision is only an illusion of water and moonlight or a trick of Mère Sophie’s or some last, lingering memory of Jean-Loup, haunting his rooms. And I hear his voice begin to rise, not roaring like an animal this time, but sobbing like a man who has lost everything. His elegant tiled bath provides no refuge; moonlight, water, and all of nature mocks him, even here.
I would smile, if I could, that my revenge has borne such fruit.
There must no longer be any comfort for him in civilized pursuits. He goes no more into his private apartments; his fine clothing, his wineskin, and his crossbow and arrows all lie untouched. I sometimes hear him prowling about the rooms at night, his movements quiet and stealthy, no more banging and crashing about. By day, he seems to disappear, for I never hear nor see him. Curled up in some dark corner, I suppose, hiding from the light.