I consider his offer with the suspicion it deserves. I am not here to make him feel his loneliness any less, and yet I am eager enough to be out of these rooms. My purpose here is to witness his further humiliation, and I can’t do so if I’m left on my own up here. So I make up my mind before he can abandon me again — which he certainly will if I do not find some way to agree to his plan.
Rage alone has fueled me thus far; my flames feed on it. But I wonder if I have other thoughts, other feelings, that might be as powerful; thoughts and feelings are the only parts of myself that still live inside this silver form. So I take a moment to center my thoughts on serenity for a change. Nothing can hurt me anymore. I am invulnerable. And for that moment, I feel my flames flickering lower on their wicks, although I cannot see them.
But Beast can. He visibly starts, sending a shiver through his unruly mane, to see all three of my flames dimming together. “By God’s life, you heard me,” he whispers, staring at me; were he not a beast, I could almost swear his mouth is forming into a kind of smile. He hesitates another moment, then makes a mock courtly bow, ridiculous in such an ungainly creature, and slowly extends a paw toward me. And, as I spew no more hot wax at him, he dares to lift me again, very gingerly, and we leave this cursed place at last.
What am I to make of this puzzling creature? Jean-Loup would never ask permission before doing whatever he pleased. Perhaps Beast’s mind can no longer grasp the horror of that transformation. I am here to remind him, of course, but I resolve to bide my time and keep him under observation while I try to understand this mysterious new turn of events.
He carries me back to the staircase and down to the entry hall. My flame makes the shadows dance in the gloom, the only sign of life. Beast is less clumsy in his beastly shape than he was before, walking upright on his sturdy haunches. At the bottom of the stairs, he steadies himself on his hind hooves and glances about the hall.
“This place has become my mausoleum,” he says, and begins to carry me slowly around the hall, tipping me toward doorways and into corners, as if to see for myself that gloom and loneliness fester in every shadow. “There is nothing to do, nothing to see,” he tells me. “No one ever comes here. There is nothing at all to interrupt the days.”
He can’t expect me to respond, so he merely sighs and carries me into the front of the hall, across the black-and-white checkered tiles, to the grand glass panels overlooking the courtyard. The once-glorious flower beds are choked with desolation. Blooms have dropped, stalks withered, and unpruned limbs have become mazes of knotted grey bramble, all frosted with snow. It’s a dreary sight, without warmth or color, without hope.
Beast frowns out the window at this ruin. “This was a garden once,” he murmurs. “It must have been so beautiful.” He shakes his great head. “Oh, if only I had the power to make it so again.”
Out in the courtyard, the flower beds begin to tremble, as if in the grip of an ague. Snow seems to dance in the beds, and frost and ice are shaken off the bramble. Tiny pinpoints of spring green erupt along the grey limbs, forming into tiny leaves that grow as we gaze. The leaves unfurl, and we see clusters of red growing instantly into buds. In less than a blink, they mature into roses of voluptuous velvety red, and suddenly all the flower beds on either side of the central drive are a riot of red and green. We stand transfixed as new branches burst out of old bushes, and layer after layer of blooming branches rise up and up until the thicket of roses is as dense as the wood and higher than the stone wall that contains the courtyard.
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 chateau: 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.