How can I disbelieve the evidence of my own eyes? I saw the chevalier transformed into Beast! And yet, I have never sensed any of the chevalier’s crafty slyness in Beast’s words — or his actions — not since the night he shut me up in the attic cupboard. Jean-Loup has disappeared, with his cruelty and his handsome face and his fear of spiders. Beast is someone entirely different. How can such a thing be possible? But magic is alive in this chateau — no one knows it better than I — and magic obeys its own rules.
Beast, meanwhile, is pleased to have me at eye level again, sitting in the chair opposite me. He wants to ask me more questions, but I am intent on my own.
Beast, when did you come here?
He eyes me thoughtfully for a moment. “I don’t know exactly. It was cold; that’s the first thing I remember. I woke up out in the park, shivering under a bush. I wandered around the grounds for days before I dared set foot inside the chateau. I was certain that such a grand place must be full of people, but I never saw anyone go in or come out — not even to chase me off when I grew bold enough to enter the yard or cross the moat. At last I found my courage and came inside.”
He sighs, thinking back. “But there was no one here. I poked my head into every room but could never find another living soul. One day, I worked up the nerve to climb up to the attic because I felt so strongly that there was somebody up there.” He tilts his head slightly and raises one shaggy brow at me. “That is when I found you.”
But how could you know I was alive?
“I don’t know that, either, but I sensed it. It was not as if you were . . . speaking to me, as you are now.” A brief smile plays across his face. “I never dared hope for that! But I felt the presence of an intelligence, a personality so nearby.”
He shakes his head a little, unable to offer any more explanation.
“And what about you, Lucie?” he goes on more eagerly. “Tell me how you came to be here.”
Fair enough, I suppose. I’m not the only one with questions.
There is little enough to tell. I come from a very small, very poor village. You won’t have heard of it. My mother worked the landlord’s fields.
“And your father?”
Cold in his grave these many years.
“Oh, I am sorry.” Beast pauses out of respect, but he’s anxious for our conversation to continue. “What was he like?”
He was poor. And good, and very, very kind.
Under Beast’s sympathetic gaze, I permit myself to think back to my girlhood, before my stepfather ruled our lives and my mother’s affections.
He worked in the stables of the alehouse in our village. Travelers on pilgrimage or off to the university stopped there to change their horses. I can barely remember. It all seems so long ago now. All day he would listen to their talk. He lapped it up like — like their mounts drank from his trough.
Beast lets out a soft whuffle of laughter.
That was why I wanted —
My thoughts come to an abrupt halt.
“What did you want?” Beast asks. “What did the stabler’s daughter dream of?”
I haven’t thought of this in years. My father’s stories were so exciting. I wanted to be a scholar, too. My father even found a learned woman in our village to teach me my letters. I wanted to learn things and be useful to people in some way.
Beast considers this. “And yet, you came here.”
It takes a moment to compose my thoughts. My father died of a fever. My mother found another husband, with his own plot to work on the landlord’s property and his own brood to raise.
I don’t like to think about my stepfather, his oily glances, the rights he thought he could claim over me. My mother kept me safe from him the only way she could.
So my mother sent me into service. She thought I would be better off here. She couldn’t have known . . .
Beast’s dark eyes are more alert than I would like, his muzzle slightly raised.
“Known what?” he asks very softly. “What happened to you here, Lucie? Why are you here all alone?”
I don’t know if I dare reveal my secret to Beast. What would he think of me if he knew?
“It’s painful for you,” Beast says gently. “I’m sorry. I don’t need to know.”
But his dark eyes are so full of concern, his manner so gentle, I have a wild impulse to risk his opinion of me to be rid of the burden of my shame. “But — perhaps I can help in some way,” Beast suggests. “Do something for you.”
I muster my resolve. Doesn’t Beast deserve the truth?
There’s nothing you can do. It’s already been done.
Beast’s expression darkens. His face is very close, his eyes as sharp as stars. “Somebody hurt you,” he whispers. His thick, tawny brows lower as if he’s peering into my soul. “Jean-Loup.”
And so, I begin to tell my tale, my thoughts halting at first. But the more I tell, the more I begin to feel a kind of relief to let it out at last. This is what my newfound voice is for. I’ve never had anyone to tell my story to; Mère Sophie already seemed to know about it in her witchy way. And the more I reveal, the more outrage I see kindling in Beast’s eyes.
As my tale ends, he impulsively reaches out a paw but stops far short of touching me. His paw drops again into his lap, and he sits farther back in his chair, as if to make room for the horror that’s burst into the room between us as ferociously as the storm outside.
“Monster,” Beast rumbles at last, his voice low but fierce. “What a monster he was! I am so sorry, Lucie,” he goes on, shaking his great head. “You deserve justice for what was done to you.”
Justice has been done. Jean-Loup is gone.
“But you’ve lost your human form. How can that be just? You’re not the one who should be punished.”
But this was my choice, I insist.
He looks surprised.
To be free of my weak human body, so easily hurt. I became what I am out of vigilance, to witness Jean-Loup’s downfall.
Beast peers at me, puzzled, trying to piece it all together. “But if Jean-Loup is gone, why are you still enchanted?”
To see that he will never return, I realize now — a far greater purpose than I had before, when watching him suffer was my only goal.
But before I can form these jumbled thoughts into an answer for Beast, a sudden volley of hailstones crashes against the high round window, like an alarm, a warning, making Beast jump. The howling of the wind seems to triple in strength and violence. Beast clambers out of his seat, scenting the air, his ears straining upward. Some mischief is afoot, but there are no other windows to see out of up here.
He pivots about to stare again at me. “Something is out there!”
I don’t ask how he knows; I feel something, too, and his senses are far more acute than mine.
“We must see what it is,” Beast exclaims, and springs for the desk. He grasps me again in his paw, and we head for the stairwell as the storm shrieks outside.
We racket down the little wooden staircase and into the attic corridor. We cross to one of the front-facing rooms, and Beast shoves aside the abandoned furnishings to get to the window that overlooks the courtyard. The rain is pelting down now, and deep explosions of thunder rattle the glass. Lightning illuminates the courtyard, and we see a shape, a figure out on the bridge that crosses the moat, beyond the gate. It cowers in the feeble shelter of the low stone wall of the bridge. A few paces away, a horse stands snorting and pawing, tossing its mane in alarm, but keeping close to its master. A human. A man.
Beast is all aquiver with eagerness, paw and snout pressed to the glass, watching. How long has it been since a human was in the chateau? Three months? More? It was autumn when I visited Mère Sophie, and we’ve already weathered the worst of the winter snows.
By flashes of lightning, we see the man creep almost all the way across the bridge, but the stone wall around the courtyard prevents him going any farther, its gilded iron gate firmly latched. He casts about in desperation for any other form of shelter as his horse jitters and whickers behind him.