I would gasp if I could. It’s a plain gold ring, decorated with a tiny red heart. She was wearing it the day I saw her in the mirror downstairs.
Beast closes his paw gently around the ring. He eases the book back onto the table, catches up the long, thin red loop of the ribbon, and somehow manages to pull it entirely over his head, stretching it over his horns and muzzle; it must be enchanted, to stretch so far. He paws up long tendrils of his shaggy mane until the ring dangles in the thick fur of his chest.
He reaches behind him for the wooden chair, lowers his bulk into it with no little care, shifts his tufted tail about to find a comfortable position, then draws himself up to the table and turns again to the open book. Nothing disturbs the silence for a while as he bows his huge head over the little book in the halo of light cast from my flames.
Suddenly, with a deep, rumbling groan, he rises again.
“Love verses!” he cries, sweeping the book to the carpet. “What use are they to me?” And he charges across the room to the stairway and gallops down the stairs paws-first. Below, I hear the enchanted door slam shut behind him.
I am too high up now to hear Beast in the rooms below. I wonder if he’s abandoned the chateau altogether.
Sunlight makes the stained glass brilliant in the high round window. Its colored figures dance on the carpet and the spines of the books as the sun moves across the sky. Sometimes their images fall on me, and my surface reflects dragon green or princess blue. I have an eternity to contemplate the colored glass, to wonder at its composition. A castle, a princess, and a dragon — all the elements of a fairy story. But where is the prince? Should there not be a prince to slay the dragon? That is how the old tales always go.
This is a room unlike any other in the chateau, a place for dreaming, apart from the world. Did Jean-Loup’s mother come here to dream? Is this where her soul was nurtured, where her spirit soared?
And no sooner do I think these thoughts than I see her shimmering before me again. She kneels on the carpet in the pool of colored light thrown by the window. She wears the golden ring with the tiny heart, twisting it on her finger in quiet distress. Tears gleam on her cheeks, but they are shed silently as her gaze rises to the colored glass.
“Oh, my sweet child, what have I done?” Her tremulous voice seems to address the images in the colored glass. “How I have wronged you!”
This is no dream; I do not sleep. Is she here in fact, in some unholy reality between heaven and the grave? And what wrongs can she have done? Is Jean-Loup’s transformation into Beast partly in payment for her sins, whatever they may have been? But it was Mère Sophie who created Beast. I was there. I saw it all.
She lowers her head onto her clasped hands for a moment, then lifts her face again, turning toward the writing table. Her brown eyes come up to rest on me, warm and full of feeling.
“Don’t hate him, Lucie,” she whispers to me. I am chilled to my silver marrow. How can she still recognize me as I am now? Why does she pursue me?
“He was so good and loving once, never a cross word for anyone. Before . . .” She shakes her head sadly, but her gaze does not leave me, her expression earnest. “You were so kind once, to another girl, a stranger,” she murmurs. “Please, show him your kindness. Help him.”
Help him? Me, help Jean-Loup? Never, not in this world or the next, no matter how pitifully his mother pleads for him! He stole my kindness from me, her son, as he stole so much else. She is some phantom, some fairy sent to drive me from my purpose, but I am unrelenting. Jean-Loup will get no help from me.
And even as these thoughts cross my mind, the vision evaporates before me, leaving me in peace once more.
After a few more circuits of the sun through the colored window, I hear the tread of agitated hooves as Beast races up the stairs. Newly resolved, I look forward to his next storm of helpless fury or complaint.
But when Beast’s head emerges above the stairwell, his brown eyes are bright and eager. His mouth is open and curving upward in his animal smile, a smile of wonder. What has he found to be so happy about?
But I find out as soon as he clambers up into the room and hurries over to where I still stand on the shelf above the writing table. He shows me a rose cradled in his paw, red and ripe and dewy, its petals just beginning to unfurl. He holds it up before me.
“Look!” He pants, his breath so warm, so near, that it mists my polished surface.
Beast turns the rose slowly, eagerly before me, as if he needs my reflection to reassure him that his own senses have not lied. The rose exists.
“It’s the first to bloom since the magic roses dropped their petals,” he whispers in awe. “See how it grows! It lives!”
I can’t imagine Jean-Loup ever sparing a single thought for a mere flower. But Beast’s eyes are soft and adoring, gazing at the thing he has coaxed into life. No mother could be any more besotted with her newborn. He gently turns the new rose over and over in his palm by its short green stem. With every turn, it releases more of its sweet perfume into the air until the room itself seems to brighten, as if the sun has come out from behind the clouds.
Abruptly Beast stops his swoony reverie and frowns down at the rose. His gaze hurries all around the room, but he doesn’t see whatever it is he seeks. Cupping his rose in both paws, he turns and disappears into the passage.
No sound from below tells me where Beast goes or what he does. I am left alone again to ponder the pale sun’s progress through the colored glass. But the scent of the new rose lingers in the room like a faint memory. It’s not the heady, musky scent of the magic roses. It’s lighter somehow but no less pleasing. It’s the fragrance of rain and sun and air and earth, of living things. And something else, I think. The impudent sweetness of something beloved.
Jean-Loup could never love anything. But what of Beast? He must love his roses to have brought them so patiently back to life.
Before I can ponder this any further, I hear the tread of hooves on the stairs again. Beast rises into the room, his brown eyes beaming. He carries his rose in a plain, slender glass vase he must have found in the kitchen and filled with water from the well. He brings it over and places the vase on the surface of the writing table, in my pool of warm light, then stoops to pick up the fallen book of sonnets that he dashed to the ground the last time he was here. He gently shakes the pages out straight, closes the small book, and lays it next to the rose vase, nudging it a little with his paw to the most pleasing angle. When that is done, he resettles the chair to the writing table, slightly drawn back, as if someone reading the book and enjoying the rose has wandered off for only a moment, but will soon return.
I reckon time by the rose, watch its heavy petals uncurl and begin to spread open. Rainbows dance in the glass vase as the tinted sunlight touches it through the round window — dragon green, princess blue. Night shrouds the room in darkness, but for my persistent flame. I see no more visions of Jean-Loup’s mother.