Bryony and Roses Page 7

  “Certainly,” she said, setting down the shovel. “There may be an even better place to escape from.”

  “This way, then,” he said.

  She took a few steps toward him, and found herself reluctant to get any closer. Certainly the last few feet would make no difference in how dangerous he was. He could take two strides and twist her head off, probably before she knew he’d moved.

  It was simply that he was so very large, and there was an aura around him like the air before a thunderstorm. Bryony felt that her lungs were working harder to breathe the air around him, and was grateful when he began walking and she could fall back a pace without being obvious.

  “How are your rooms?” asked the Beast.

  “Oh,” said Bryony. Dreadful, she thought. “Very…err…pink. And grand. But mostly pink.”

  “You don’t like pink?”

  “I shouldn’t think anyone likes pink as much as that room does,” said Bryony. “I’ve seen color-themed rooms before. There was a friend of my father’s who had a suite done entirely in cloth-of-gold, but it wasn’t quite so…so…” She waved her hands, unable to come up with a description that did not involve uteruses, and that was not a conversation she wished to start with the Beast.

  “Your father had very wealthy friends, then,” said the Beast. “For a gardener of Lostfarthing.”

  Bryony froze. The Beast stopped walking and turned his head toward her.

  “You are looking at me,” he said, “with eyes like an animal in a trap. It does not suit you, so we will assume that cloth-of-gold is found in every front parlor in Lostfarthing and there is nothing extraordinary about it. If the pink troubles you, you need only ask the house to change it. I expect that it would be willing to compromise.”

  “Compromise,” said Bryony, finding her voice with difficulty. “Mauve? Or lavender, perhaps?” She shrugged. “I shall try to drag some other colors in, and perhaps it will mute the pink somewhat. I don’t want to hurt its feelings.”

  As soon as she said it, she thought that this was a foolish thing to say. Did an enchanted house even have feelings? But the Beast nodded gravely.

  “It is wise not to hurt the house’s feelings.”

  For a moment the silence around them seemed to sharpen. When she looked up at the house, she half-expected to see it bent toward them, listening.

  The moment passed. They came around the back of the house. More lawn, more hedges. Off in the distance, marking the lines of an old carriageway, were rows of chestnut trees.

  They had nearly reached the carriageway when Bryony, who could see to the far wall by now, said “No vegetable garden.”

  “No,” said Beast.

  “What do you eat?”

  The Beast shrugged. “The house creates the food, as it created your shovel.”

  Bryony shivered, remembering the bacon and the grapes. “And that…works? You don’t starve? It’s real?”

  The Beast nodded. “The things it creates are real enough. If you take your shovel outside the gate, it will still be a shovel. The coins that I gave you for your sisters are not fairy gold, and will not melt away.”

  “Magic,” said Bryony, who hadn’t even thought to worry about the coins.

  “Yes.” The Beast spread his hands. “But if you grow a plant to eat—a tomato, or a lettuce or even a rutabaga—”

  “Ha.”

  “—it is made of sun and earth and water. The house is much the same way. In fact—”

  The listening silence settled upon them again, a silence so thick that Bryony could hear her heart beating in her ears.

  The Beast snapped his mouth shut. She heard the click of teeth, and the rustle as he shifted from foot to foot.

  It’s his fur against his clothing. That’s the sound. And that other sound is me running my hands over my trousers, and that’s the calluses catching on the fabric, and I’d scuffle my feet in the grass but I don’t think I’d hear it because the grass is part of this place and I think it’s listening to us talk.

  I don’t like this.

  It faded again, more slowly this time.

  “Forgive me,” said the Beast. “There are things I should not speak of. I do not mean to alarm you.”

  “I’m not alarmed,” snapped Bryony. “Troubled and homesick and more than a little angry at being kidnapped—but not alarmed.”

  “Good,” said the Beast. “Hold on to that for as long as you can.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  He left her at the front gate. “I shall see you at dinner,” he said, and bowed, then turned and strode away.

  Dinner. Well. I suppose it’s possible that he’s waiting to eat me in a more civilized fashion, but this seems a terribly roundabout way to do it.

  Bryony picked up another plant and trudged with it over to the garden. Her earlier enthusiasm had drained away. Now she just felt like an ant crossing the endless lawn, with the strange house hunched over her, listening.

  She had moved a half-dozen plants and was starting to sweat when it occurred to her to ask House for a wheelbarrow.

  After that strange silence earlier, she wasn’t entirely sure that she wanted to ask House for anything, but still, it made all the food, and if she had to live on the proceeds of her garden, it was going to be a week before she even had a handful of sprouts.

  Best get used to it.

  “House,” she said, closing her eyes, “may I have a wheelbarrow please?”

  When she opened them, at first she didn’t see a wheelbarrow. It’s mad at me, she thought, feeling oddly guilty. The house might be very strange, but it had seemed so eager with the dress, perhaps she had offended it in some fashion.

  Then she turned around and there it was, a bright red wheelbarrow.

  “Thank you, House,” she said, nodding her head toward the manor, where dozens of windows watched her like eyes. “This is perfect.” She picked up the handles and grinned involuntarily as her arms dropped into the correct position. “And you have even noticed that I am rather short. That is very kind of you.”

  “At home,” she continued, talking to the house, because there was clearly someone there listening, “at home my wheelbarrow is made for someone taller. My sister Holly can use it just fine, but I am always having to keep my arms crooked up to keep it from dragging, and it’s not very comfortable.”

  She filled two wheelbarrow loads with her plants and pushed them to her corner. Spread out, even with the promise of seeds to come, they seemed very widely spaced. “Well, you’ll have plenty of room to grow,” she told them. “Tomorrow I will start digging, and perhaps House can find me some mulch.”

  She peeled her gloves off and stuffed them in her back pocket, patted the wheelbarrow absently, as she would Fumblefoot, and began the long trudge to the house and her room.

  On the landing above the stairs, she paused at a lovely celadon urn. It would have been even better with something growing in it—stonecrop, perhaps, or a tumble of pansies—but it was very graceful, and most importantly, not pink.

  Hmm.

  “House,” she said aloud, “this is quite a lovely urn. Would it be okay if I took it to my room?”

  She raised her eyes to the ceiling, listening. There were no strange rumbles or heavy silences. Apparently House did not object.

  When she lowered her eyes, the urn was gone.

  “Oh. Err. I could have moved it myself, but…thank you?”

  Bryony went to her room, saw the door opening before she even touched it, and went inside. The urn was now proudly displayed by the window, with a spray of feathery pink grass in it.

  Compromise. This is a compromise.

  She peeled off her sweaty clothes and laid them across the bed. “Um. House, do you think you could have these cleaned? Do you do that? I’d be grateful.” She turned to the basin to lave water over her arms, and when she turned back, the clothes were gone.

  I just hope it gives them back afterwards.

  House had left a robe hanging by the washst
and. There was a tray on the table by the window with a bunch of grapes, some cheese, and a small loaf of bread. Bryony pulled on the robe and investigated the tray.

  Well…I suppose I have to eat the food sometime. And it’s not like I didn’t already eat the bacon and the eggs, and they didn’t kill me…

  She popped a grape off the stem and ate it.

  Nothing horrible happened. It tasted like a grape.

  The second one also tasted like a grape, as did the third. The bread was still warm. (Presumably if you were conjuring bread out of thin air, it wasn’t much more work to make it taste fresh from the oven.) The cheese was perfectly good cheese.

  Bryony made short work of the lunch. Feeling exhausted—it has already been an extraordinarily long day, and surely it cannot be much past noon—she lay down on the big pink bed and fell instantly asleep.

  When she woke, it was growing dark outside the window.

  “Good lord,” she said, sitting up, “did I sleep that long? Was I that tired?”

  She washed her face in the basin. The water was still warm and perfectly clean, as if invisible maids had been flitting about while she slept.

  Perhaps they are. If there are servants here, they are invisible, assuming they’re anything so separate as servants, and not…err…tendrils of House.

  This was a somewhat uncomfortable mental image.

  When she turned, the green-striped dress was arrayed across the bed in all its excessive glory.

  Bryony sighed. She had never much liked dressing up in the old days, not like Iris, who would have worn ball-gowns to breakfast given the chance. Still, this was what the house, and presumably the Beast, expected her to wear.

  There were underthings hidden under the dress. She pulled them on, glad that they all hooked up the front. She was growing used to House’s habit of making things appear, but the thought of having magic hands touch her, even just to lace up a corset or do up a row of buttons, made her skin crawl a little.

  She imagined that it would feel like a centipede wiggling over her arm. She hoped that House didn’t see her shudder.

  It is not wise to hurt the house’s feelings.

  The dress went on easily enough. She had to do one little sideways shimmy to get a snap fastened at a particular spot on her back, but the old skills came back to her easily. They had had a maid in the capital, but she had spent most of her time either helping Iris or trying to make Holly more presentable and less pink. Bryony had learned to fend for herself.

  She put on the bracelets and the horse-collar necklace, but drew the line there. “You’ll tear my earlobes off with those things,” she said, waving to a pair of emerald earrings the size of a trowel blade, “and I am not going to wear a tiara. Tiaras are for princesses and little girls pretending to be princesses. I was a merchant’s daughter, not a princess. The only princess I ever met was nearly forty and had a squint.”

  When she glanced back at the bed, the tiara was gone. The bed had straightened itself, pulling the sheets and blanket tight. The pillows had been plumped. Bryony wondered if she would have actually seen it happen, if she’d been looking.

  Is it better to see it happen, or to catch it out of the corner of your eye?

  I have no idea. I suppose I’ll probably have an opinion in a week or two, though, if House keeps straightening itself when I’m not looking.

  There were shoes. They were actually comfortable, which was impressive, since her feet were unfashionably wide and had once been the despair of cobblers. In the last few years, she had taken to wearing men’s boots and shoving a wadded up sock in each toe.

  Decked out in finery, she left the room and walked to the staircase. The Beast was waiting at the foot.

  He was wearing dark green, a kind of open tunic over a robe with large sleeves, but the sash at his waist had a pattern of silver leaves on it.

  Bryony the gardener would have stomped down the steps in her usual manner, but Bryony who had once been the daughter of the richest merchant in the land remembered how one descended a staircase. Fingertips on the bannister, chin up, one hand holding up your gown so that you do not trip over your own clothes and break your neck…

  “You do that very well,” said the Beast.

  “You never forget some things,” said Bryony. Three deportment teachers had nearly broken themselves training those things into her, and one had actually quit and gone into the seminary afterwards.

  The Beast offered her his arm.

  She took it, because of all those long-lost deportment teachers, even though his nearness made it hard to breathe. She did not have to touch his fur—that would have been too much, too soon—but his sleeve was warm and velvety, almost like fur itself.

  The air did not seem to go deep enough into her lungs. He moved slowly, but she still took two steps for every one of his.

  He smelled like cloves and fur and something dark and musky. It was the smell of a wild animal, not a tame one.

  A door opened before them, and then another, and they came to a dining hall so large that the roof was lost in shadow. There was an enormous table with a linen table cloth and glittering silver, and food was packed onto it on gigantic plates and salvers and steaming tureens.

  “Oh dear Lord,” said Bryony.

  Wrought-iron candlesticks lit the table wherever there was a square inch to spare between dishes. Candlelight gleamed from aspics and sauces, from the curve of apples and grapes and the glistening flank of roasted fowl.

  “You don’t expect me to eat all this, do you?” she asked the Beast.

  He shook his head. “Not at all. The house is—err—extravagant. Eat whatever you wish.”

  “It won’t go to waste, will it?” asked Bryony, eyeing a roasted peacock on a platter the size of a wagon wheel. “I mean…surely some of this is compostable, at least…”

  “Nothing will be wasted,” said the Beast. He released her arm and pulled a chair out for her at the head of the table. His feet made no sound on the floor, but the chair screeked nicely against the tiles, which made Bryony obscurely pleased. It would not be pleasant to be the only thing in an enchanted house that made any kind of sound.

  She sat. The Beast took a chair at the corner beside her.

  “Oh, thank goodness. I’d hate for you to sit at the other end, and have to yell over the peacock at you.”

  The Beast’s eyes crinkled up. “That would be inelegant, yes.” He reached for a bottle. “Do you drink wine?”

  “At this point,” said Bryony, “I would drink raw moonshine. It has been a very long day.”

  “The house can probably provide raw moonshine, although you would offend its sensibilities.” The Beast poured out a glass.

  Bryony took a sip. It was dry and sweet and seemed to evaporate off her tongue and through the roof of her mouth.

  The Beast set the glass down and did not pour out another.

  “Do you not drink wine?”

  He shrugged. “I do. But I cannot drink it from a glass. I would require a dish to lap it from. It is…unsightly.”

  “Ah.”

  A slightly uncomfortable silence fell. Bryony leaned over the table and stabbed a fork into a slice of roasted peacock.

  She had made inroads into the peacock, some peculiar salad with a nutty dressing, and a tureen of mashed potatoes when she finally realized that the Beast wasn’t eating either.

  “You’re not eating?”

  He shrugged again. “I am a Beast.”

  “So does that mean you live on what? Air and sunbeams?”

  He wrinkled his snout. “It means that I eat like a beast.”

  She sighed. “And I suppose that’s unsightly, too?”

  “Very.”

  “This is going to be a long dinner,” said Bryony, taking another gulp of wine.

  She made it through another slice of peacock before the silence got to be too much for her. “So. Err. Tell me about yourself. How did you get here?”

  The Beast opened his mouth and a win
d seemed to rush through the hall, snuffing out many of the candles. In the sudden gloom, his shadow rose up on the wall behind him like a giant.

  Bryony froze with her hand on the wineglass. A drop of condensation slid down the side and over her fingers, cool as a sigh.

  “I cannot say,” he said firmly.

  Magic. There is definitely some magic here. He doesn’t want to talk, or something’s stopping him.

  Bryony cast about for something else. “What do you do to occupy your time?”

  He propped his muzzle up on one enormous paw. “I read a great deal. The library is very large. Sometimes I build things.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Clockwork, mostly. The house is not good with clocks. The insides confuse it, I think. It makes things that look like clocks, but they run mostly by magic. I tinker with them and try to make them work without magic. Sometimes I make little wind-up things.”

  Bryony eyed the size of his—hands? paws?—and wondered what qualified as “little” to a Beast. She was pleased to have found a safe topic, however. “What sort of things?”

  He scrabbled his hands across the tablecloth. It was hard to read that enormous face, but she thought he was embarrassed. “Nothing much. A ladybug that walked, once. A bird that chimed. Although when I tried to make another ladybug, it didn’t work, so the first one is in pieces around the room, until I figure out what went wrong.”

  Bryony laughed.

  By the time she had finished a small slice of pie and pushed her plate away, the candles had re-lit themselves. She stifled a yawn against her fingers. How can I be tired? I slept all afternoon!

  “Sorry,” she said.

  The Beast shook his head. “Don’t be. You may sleep a great deal for a few days. There is something about magic that takes people that way. It should wear off soon.”

  “Good to know.” She pushed her chair back and stood up.

  “Will you marry me?” asked the Beast.

  Bryony froze.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, when she could talk again, “I think I may have misheard you.”

  “I said ‘Will you marry me?’”