Belle, page 14
“Good morning,” I crooned, running my fingers through his mane. “You’d like to go for a run, wouldn’t you? You don’t want to stay indoors any more than I do, do you, Corbeau?”
The horse whooshed out a breath, whether in agreement or disparagement of my proposed plan of action, I couldn’t tell. But he made no objection as I saddled him and led him into the courtyard. I walked over to a stone planter flanking the steps to the house, clambered up it, and mounted Corbeau. As I settled into the saddle, he pranced a little, reaching out with his neck to feel the bit between his teeth.
“Take me somewhere, Corbeau,” I commanded. “I don’t care where, so long as it’s away from here. Now run. Run!”
He shot from the courtyard like a bullet, heading for the orchard. Up and down the rolling land between the hills we went, as if running an obstacle course, then through a great meadow that lay beyond. The horse’s coat grew shiny with sweat. My hair tumbled loose around my shoulders, curling in every direction as if each strand had a mind of its own. But no matter how far Corbeau and I ran together, I could not outrun the fact that I was trapped. I could no longer see the loveliness of the land all around me. All I saw were prison bars.
At last even Corbeau’s strong legs grew tired, and his pace slowed. We settled into a walk, traveling aimlessly. Movement was all that was important. For once I stopped, I would be admitting the truth, admitting defeat: There was nowhere for me to go.
When I saw a pair of iron gates up ahead, I realized we had come to a place I recognized. It was the entrance to the Beast’s lands, the same gate I’d passed through I had no idea how many days ago now.
I brought Corbeau to a halt, tossed my leg over his head and slid down. I caressed the black velvet of his nose. Ten steps took me to the gate. It was shut fast, the couple’s hands clasped together tightly.
I moved forward until I stood before the image of the woman. Let go, I thought. Let go of his hand and let me out.
I felt a sob rise up, straight from my heart.
“Let me go,” I said. I slammed my fist against the gate, felt the iron bite into my skin. “Let me go. Let me out.”
Over and over I cried out my request, beating against the gate until my hands were bloody and raw. And still, the woman and her love clasped hands, pledging their devotion and my imprisonment both. Until at last, I sank to my knees, cradling my torn hands in my lap. Corbeau walked over to nuzzle the top of my head.
“Ah, Belle,” I heard the Beast say behind me, so gently that it made me want to weep. “What have you done?”
“Go away,” I said, without turning around. “I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to try, and fail, to gaze into your eyes. I don’t need to be reminded that I can’t see what’s hidden in the Heartwood, that I’m failing at the only thing I ever did well.
“I don’t want to be here. I never wanted to be here. I want to go home.”
A great stillness filled the air, as if the very land around me held its breath.
“Is that truly what you wish?” the Beast asked.
I did begin to weep then, great scalding tears, as the sob that rose from my heart threatened to split it open wide.
“Yes,” I choked out. “I can’t do what you need me to. I can’t do anything right. I don’t know why you even want to keep me here.”
“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 be 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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Just as the Beast promised, I was home by lunch-time. Corbeau had 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 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. The two had taken an unmistakable shine to each other. 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 had been like during the time that 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 thing I did ask 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 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 me 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. “May 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,” Grand-père Alphonse 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 seen 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 sensation 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 in 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 it is. Two different experiences, grief and joy, combined. True love never has 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 in 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 find 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.
