Once Upon A Time (6) Belle, page 14
part #6 of Once Upon A Time Series
“Do you not?” the Beast asked quietly.
But by now I was weeping too hard to speak.
“Very well, then, Annabelle Evangeline Delaurier,” he said. “I will not hold you here against your will. I will let you go.”
I staggered to my feet. “Wait,” I said, frantically wiping tears from my face with the backs of my hands. “Don’t go like that, I…I don’t understand why you’re doing this.
I haven’t done anything you wanted.”
“You came in the first place,” he said. “Apparently that must be enough. You should take Corbeau. He will speed your journey. If you hurry, you can be home by lunchtime.”
“But you – what will happen to you?” I asked.
The Beast spun around so suddenly I faltered back a step, crashing against the gates. With a scream like an animal caught in a trap, they began to swing apart.
“I am finished answering your questions,” he snarled. Never had he seemed more like a Beast than he did at this moment. “You asked to go; I have given you leave. I suggest you depart, before I change my mind.”
He gave Corbeau a slap on the rump. The horse gave a cry, echoing that of the gate, and bolted forward. I stumbled after him. As I passed through the gate, I saw it had changed. It was broken, rusted. The couple’s hands, once so tightly bound together, were shattered at the wrists. No longer would they be able to cling together. They were torn apart forever.
And it was only then that I realized I had left behind the branch of the Heartwood.
CHPATER TWENTY-TWO
Just as the Beast promised, I was home by lunchtime. Corbeau halted not far from the gate. I hauled myself up onto his back, which took some doing as there was nothing to help me mount and my hands were raw. There was no chitchat between me and the horse as we traveled this time. Before, Corbeau’s gait had seemed even and smooth. Now it seemed likely to shake me apart, finding every loose stone or rut.
“I’m sorry,” I finally said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt him. I didn’t know I could. I just wanted to see my family. Why is it that so much to ask?” Corbeau shook his head, as if to drive the sound of my voice from his ears, and kept walking. It didn’t take long to leave the Wood behind. We reached the turnoff to the house, my house, just as the sun reached the top of the sky. I reined Corbeau to a halt for a moment, gazing at the place I’d come to think of as home.
The roses I had planted before I’d left had new green leaves. At the side of the house, I could see that April had hung a load of washing out to dry. As I watched, a figure appeared in the kitchen doorway, then came down the steps.
Papa! I thought.
I urged the horse forward then, banging my heels against his sides until at last he gave in and took me where I wanted to go. I saw my father lift a hand to shade his eyes, heard him give a great shout. And then I was in the yard with my family all around me.
I had done it. I was home.
“I still can’t believe that Beast let you leave,” Maman said several days later, for what felt like at least the millionth time.
I was putting away the clean dinner dishes. April and Dominic had gone for a walk. Celeste was visiting Corbeau in the stables to see if she could interest him in a carrot. Papa was working on a project in his workshop. He’d spent more time in the workshop than he had in the house since I went away, according to Maman.
The days following my return had brought the color back into my father’s face, the straightness to his shoulders, though it had not quite erased the worry in his eyes. As for my mother, she had stayed by my side almost constantly, as if I might disappear or set off again if she didn’t keep me in sight at all times.
By mutual, and silent, consent, once the general exclamation over my unexpected reappearance had died down, no one questioned me much about what my life has been like during the time I was gone. It was as if we all wished to simply savor being together again. The explanations could wait, and they would come. Not that I had very satisfactory ones to give. For now, it was enough just to be at home.
“And I can’t understand why he did it,” my mother went on. “Why force you to come, then let you go before you’d accomplished what he wanted?” I’m not so sure I understand, myself, I thought. Aloud, I gave the only explanation I had.
“He let me go because I asked him to, Maman.”
My mother exhaled a quick breath through her nose. “Then you should have asked him to do it earlier,” she said. “You would have saved us all a lot of worry, especially your Papa.”
“I did,” I said, suddenly remembering this. “It was almost the first thin I did ask him for, in fact. He said no.”
“Then why did he say yes the second time you asked?” my mother said.
“I don’t know, Maman,” I answered.
I don’t know.
Grand-père Alphonse came to find me not long after. He had ridden from town just that morning to bring the news that the last of my father’s ships had come safely to port. We were rich again. We could return to our old lives at any time we chose, if that was what we wanted.
Surprising as this news was. There was more to follow, for neither my mother nor my sisters, once so fashionable, seemed at all eager to get back to town. April and Dominic were planning to be married before he went back to sea in a ceremony that would take place beside the vegetable garden. They didn’t seem the least bit interested in trading a simple country wedding for a fancier one in town.
We learned to be happy here, to be a true family, I thought. And happiness, once found, is hard to give up.
“Come take a walk with me, Belle,” Grand-père Alphonse suggested as I finished the last of the washing-up chores. “We have a few moments of real daylight left before the sun goes down.”
Twilight, I thought. I turned to my mother. “Would you like to come with us, Maman?”
“No, no, you go ahead,” my mother said with a wave of her hand. “I have some sewing I want to do.” My mother was embroidering the bodice of April’s wedding dress.
Grand-père Alphonse and I went outdoors together, turning our footsteps toward the stream that ran behind the house.
“I have been watching you all day, Belle,” Grand-père Alphonse observed after several minutes had gone by. “You are very quiet, and it seems to me that you are not quite yourself. Are you unhappy?”
“I shouldn’t be,” I said at once, as much to myself as to him, I think. “I got everything I wanted, didn’t I?”
“I don’t know. Did you?” asked Grand-père Alphonse.
“Of course I did,” I replied. “I got to come home. The Beast let me go before he had to. I’m still not sure I understand why.”
“Is that so?”
“Stop playing twenty questions with me, Grand-père Alphonse,” I snapped. I stopped walking and gave a strangled laugh. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Now I sound just like him.”
In the time I had been gone, Papa had built a bench to sit beside the stream.
Grand-père Alphonse led me to it and we sat down.
“Tell me what distresses you so, ma Belle.”
“I couldn’t read the Heartwood, Grand-père Alphonse,” I said. “I couldn’t see its face, no matter how hard I tried. I failed him, and I’m so afraid…” I broke off, battling a sudden impulse to weep.
“I’m so afraid I’ve failed us both somehow.” I dashed a hand across one cheek, as the tears won the day and began to fall anyhow. I really was upset, much more than I had realized. “I hate to cry.”
“I know you do,” Grand-père Alphonse observed with a gentle smile. He dug in his pants pocket and produced a handkerchief. “You always did, even as a child. Tell me more. What about him?’
“He’s a Beast,” I said, and blew my nose loudly. “What else is there to know?”
“There must be something, I think,” Grand-père Alphonse said. “Or you would not be twisting my second-best handkerchief up into knots.”
“He confuses me,” I burst out. “He makes me confuse myself. One minute, he’s asking me for the impossible and all I want to do is run away. The next, all I want to do is give him what he wants.”
“But surely you should only do that if it’s what you want as well.”
“I don’t know what I want!” I wailed. “Can’t you see that’s the problem?” Grand-père Alphonse opened his arms and enfolded me inside them. I wept as though the end of the world had come. He held my quietly until the storm had passed.
“I’ve ruined your shirt,” I said after many moments.
“I doubt that,” Grand-père Alphonse said mildly. “And even if you have, I have others.” He ran a hand over my head, the way he did when I was a child. “Nay I tell you what I think, Belle?”
“I wish you would,” I said.
“I think you do know what you want. The problem is you don’t want to admit it.” I gave another sob, but I sat up. “I can’t admit it,” I said. “It’s admitting the impossible. I’m not sure how long the Beast – I don’t have anything else to call him but that – and I have actually known each other. I’m not even sure I like him. So how can it be that now that I’m away from him I find…”
I paused and pulled in one shaking breath. “How can it be that I love him? I don’t even know when it happened. I wasn’t even sure it had.”
“It doesn’t take very long,” even said. “As little as between one heartbeat and the next. Love is many things, ma Belle. And the face it wears is not always what we expect.
That’s one of the things that makes it wonderful.”
“I’ve never seen his face,” I said. “He’s never seen mine. That’s part of the problem.”
“You think so?” Grand-père Alphonse asked. “I grant you seeing his face may be necessary to free him. Both you and your father have told us so. But it seems to me that a face is not required for the rest. For what love truly is, where it truly resides, is in a place that none of us can see.”
“The heart,” I whispered.
“Just so,” said Grand-père Alphonse.
So I had see a true vision in the lake that night, I thought. For I had wished to see what I loved most. And the lake had shown me the Beast and me together. But my eyes had not understood the image my heart rendered at my own request, for I had not yet learned to look with the eyes of love, the eyes of the heart.
I lifted my right hand and turned it over to gaze down into the palm, at the place where the young man in the vision had pressed his lips. I felt a fine tingling begin there.
Spreading out toward my fingertips, up my arm. It was the same sensations I experienced when a piece of wood began to share its secrets. The sensation the Heartwood had denied me for what felt like days without end, save for one moment only. The one on which the Beast and I had held it together.
“Oh, of course,” I said aloud.
“Belle?” Grand-père Alphonse said.
“The Heartwood,” I replied. “I tried so hard to see what it held within it, to find the face of true love. And all the time, I was going about it the wrong way. Looking for the wrong thing.
“It took two,” I said. “Two different people to make the Heartwood what is it.
Two different experiences, grief and joy, combined. True love never had just one face, does it? It must always have two, or it isn’t true love at all.
“That’s why I couldn’t see anything, no matter how hard I looked. I was only looking for one thing, one face. I forgot that, to find true love, you must look with love’s eyes.”
“I think,” Grand-père Alphonse said, “that you have grown very wise all of a sudden, ma petite Belle. What will you do with such wisdom, I wonder?”
“Go back,” I answered at once. “He let me go because he loved me. I see that now. He gave me what I wanted most. He let me leave him. Now I have to go back and finish what I started. But first I must talk to Papa.” I stood up and started for the barn.
“You are sure, Belle?” my father asked a short time later. Following my startling pronouncement in his workshop, Papa had insisted we all go back to the house. Despite my sense of urgency, I had agreed. I had left my family once without saying good-bye. I would not do so a second time.
“As sure as I can be, Papa,” I replied. “I think I understand” – I cast a quick look in Grand-père Alphonse’s direction – “that I see the truth now. I understand why I could not read the Heartwood before.”
“But you think you can now,” my father said.
“Yes,” I answered, just as I had in his workshop. “I do think so.” I looked around, at my family’s shocked and sober faces. “I can’t leave this unfinished. It isn’t right. But even more, going back is what is in my own heart.”
“Well, then,” my father said into the startled silence that greeted these words. “I think that you must follow your heart and go.”
“Roger, how can you say such a thing?” my mother exclaimed. “How can you let her go into danger a second time?”
“I’m not so sure she’s going into danger,” my father said, his eyes on mine. There was not a trace of worry in them now. As if learning what I held in my heart had freed the pain he’d carried in his the whole time I’d been gone. “Perhaps she never was.” My father shifted his gaze to April, sitting at Dominic’s side.
“I remember how April looked,” he went on quietly, “when we did not know whether or not Dominic was coming home. Perhaps the greater danger lies in not finishing what is started, in carrying unanswerable questions all the days of our lives.
And I think, finally, that I will put my trust in my daughter ahead of my own fear. I will put my trust in her strong heart.”
“But he is a Beast,” Maman protested, though I think even she knew that she had lost the argument.
“And Dominic was once a thief,” April spoke up. “Not everyone ends the same as they begin, Maman. Papa is right. Belle’s heart is strong. Give it the chance to find its own way. Let her go.”
“Oh, very well, since I see I am outnumbered,” my mother said waspishly, but I saw the sheen of tears on her eyes.
“Thank you,” I said as I went to kiss her. I turned to face the rest of my family.
“Thank you all.”
And so I set out to fin the heart of the Wood through no other enchantment than the strength of my will, with a power no greater than that which I carried in my heart.
I never would have made it, but for Corbeau. For it seemed to me that the Wood did not welcome me back. I had injured one it claimed as its own. The path turned and twisted where once it had run straight. Unexpected branches kept sweeping across it, as if to knock me from the back of the horse. A cold, sharp wind blew straight into my face, although it was early summer.
But Corbeau never faltered. I laced my fingers through his mane, closed my eyes, and held on tight. And so, throughout that long, cold night, I searched for the home of my beloved not with the eyes of the mind, but of the heart.
We came to the iron gates just at dawn.
The young woman still stood, one broken hand outstretched, but the right-hand side, the one with the image of the young man, had completely tumbled down. It lay in pieces on the ground. At the sight of it, a terrible fear seized my heart.
“Fly,” I urged the horse. “Fly, Corbeau. Take me to him. Don’t let me be too late.”
Through the ruined gates and along the avenue, we flew, clattering up the hill and into the courtyard.
“I’m here. I’ve come back. Where are you?” I shouted. And it seemed my heart would break that I had never asked him for his name. I, who had been so very concerned about my own. But I would not call out for him, naming him a Beast.
I found him in the study.
He was sitting in a wingback chair, drawn up before the fireplace, the same one in which my father had fallen asleep, one upon a time. His long legs were stretched out before him. His head was thrown back. His eyes were closed. For one horrible, endless second, it seemed he did not breather. Then I saw that he had the branch of the Heartwood clasped to his chest. In horror, I sat that the petals had begun to turn a color not a single one had ever been before: brown.
Oh, my love, I thought. I came so close, so very close to losing you. To not seeing us both in time.
I knelt down beside him, placed my hand on top of his hand where it clasped the Heartwood. The other I placed against his face, the one I’d tried so hard not so see for so long.
“I want you to look at me,” I said, willing it with all my might, with all my heart.
“Open your eyes, and look into mine. I know you can hear me. I know you can do this.”
“Please,” I said. “Don’t leave e, now that I’ve found you at last. Don’t leave me to love alone.”
I saw his eyelids flutter then. The power of the Heartwood sang up my arm. I felt his chest rise, as he pulled a single breath.
He opened his eyes, and looked straight into mine.
“One,” I said, and watched his eyes widen.
“Two.” His other hand came up, and covered mine.
“Three.” The petals of the Heartwood flushed, as if they were a young girl blushing.
“Four.” And now I could hardly see, for the tears that filled my eyes.
“Five.”
There was a sound like a clap of thunder, the wings of wild birds, a single voice singing its favorite song on a clear, bright morning. The great stone house seemed to shake on its foundation. My gaze never faltered. I kept it steady on his, and realized that, at long last, I was seeing myself truly, reflected back through the eyes of true love.
I looked at him and saw a handsome young man with eyes of green and hair the color of copper.
“Tell me your name, if you please,” I said. And, for the very first time, I saw him smile.
“Gaspard.”
He sat up, then drew me into his lap, and pressed his lips to mine. I felt my heart beat, five deep strokes, and I knew that it was given to him for all time. Then Gaspard drew back and gazed into my face once more.
“I can see you eyes,” he said, and his voice sounded just the same as it always has, heart and mind combined. And in it I heard more joy than I had ever believed possible.
