Belle, page 15
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, once 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 breathe. Then I saw that he had the branch of the Heartwood clasped to his chest. In horror, I saw 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 to see for so very 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 me, 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 your eyes,” he said, and his voice sounded just the same as it always had, heart and mind combined. And in it I heard more joy than I had ever believed possible.
“Your eyes are brown, Annabelle.”
“Indeed they are,” I said, as my heart began the melody it would sing until the day it ceased to beat.
“And my name is Belle.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Our story has a happy ending, but then you’ve probably known that all along.
I gave Gaspard the Heartwood as a wedding present, for it finally revealed the secret it had guarded for so long. The face of true love, which is, of course, not one face at all but two, for true love cannot happen on its own. This was what I’d been missing, the piece of the puzzle you’d think would jump right out, but is, instead, the last one you find.
True love always takes two, for it is about another more than you yourself.
The two of us were married not long after April and Dominic. Like them, we clasped hands and said our vows standing beside the vegetable garden. There wasn’t time to make me a dress as fine as April’s. But Maman gave me her favorite silk shawl. April wove a wreath of roses for my hair. Celeste baked a cake so tall it almost failed to come out of the oven door. I walked toward my true love with my father on one side of me and Grand-père Alphonse on the other. And so, surrounded by all I loved, we spoke our vows.
Afterward, Gaspard and Dominic carried the kitchen trestle table out of doors, and, beside the stream that ran behind the house, we ate the wedding feast Celeste had prepared. And it was here that Gaspard presented to me the only wedding gift that I had asked for: his story.
“I’d like to be able to tell you that I was once someone important,” he began. “A king or a prince, perhaps. But I was not, though my family was a noble one. We lived in the town by the sea, the same town you came from, sir,” he said, turning to my father.
When I had first brought Gaspard home, he had immediately gone down on one knee before my father. There he’d asked both his forgiveness for the way he’d behaved in the Wood, and Papa’s permission to marry his daughter. My father had given both.
“All my life, I had heard tales of the Wood,” Gaspard went on. “Tales of its enchantment, tales of its power, which was said to be that of life itself. It was for these reasons that we did no hunting there, in spite of the game that was abundant. It was said that your eyes could deceive you within the boundaries of the Wood, for only those whose own hearts were true could see what lived there in their own true forms.
“And if you did not see truly yet took what the Wood did not wish to give, then its power would exact a terrible price.”
“No one hunts there even today,” my father said. “Though the reason you give has been lost over the years.”
“How long were you in the Wood?” Dominic asked quietly.
“I’m not certain,” Gaspard replied. “A very long time, I think. So long a time I knew no way to count it.”
“But why?” I asked.
He gave my hand a squeeze. “As punishment. For, in the arrogance of youth, I decided that the rules need not apply to me. This, in spite of the fact that my heart was far from true, for obviously it was filled with my own desires alone. One day, I shot and killed a doe. I did not know—I did not see—that she had a fawn. The grief of the child for its mother was piteous to see. Even I came to regret what I had done.
“This was the only thing that saved me, in the end, I think. The reason the power of the Wood let me live instead of simply claiming my life as payment for the doe’s. She rose up before me, and as she did, her form changed, and she became the loveliest young woman I had ever beheld. She gathered the fawn up into her arms.
“‘See the grief your thoughtless act has caused?’ she asked, the tears hot upon her cheeks. ‘Since you behave no better than a beast, you may wear the form of one. Since you refuse to use your heart to see, your eyesight will be clouded. That which pains you will be easy to see. That which you desire most will be hidden from you.
“‘And this is how you will remain until the day that one true heart, with eyes to match, finds the way to free you from this curse you now bring upon yourself.’”
“That’s why you wanted to know what the Heartwood held,” I said. “For no eyes see more truly than those of true love.”
“As you have demonstrated,” he said with a smile.
“As we both have demonstrated,” I replied.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Celeste exclaimed. “Between the two of you and April and Dominic, all this lovey-dovey carrying on is enough to turn my stomach.”
By which you can see that not everything about us had changed. Celeste still had her sharp mind and equally sharp tongue. Today, however, she also had a twinkle in her eyes.
I laughed. “You only say that because you’re the oldest,” I replied. “You were supposed to get married first.”
Celeste shook her head with a smile. “I am finished with the way things are supposed to be,” she said. “And so, I think, we all are. No matter what the rest of you decide to do, I’m staying here. I like the country.”
“But you can’t stay on your own,” I protested. Papa and Maman had already announced their intention to return to the city, at least for a while.
“She won’t be alone,” April said. “I’ll stay with her, at least until Dominic comes back from sea.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” Celeste said. “Without you, I’d have to do the dishes myself.”
“But what about when he comes back?” I asked.
Celeste reached across the table to take my hand. “Do not worry about me, ma petite Belle. You and April found your way, and I am happy for you both. Now you must let me find mine. But you and Gaspard—what will you do?”
“We will go back to the great stone house in the Wood,” I replied. “There is a story there—more than one, I think—which I would like to understand before we settle anywhere else. And there is the Heartwood, too.”
“Come to us at Christmas, all of you,” Gaspard proposed. “And we will make the house that was so long a place of loneliness one of joy.”
And so, after many days together and of making preparations, those of us who would make the journey through the Wood were ready to go. April stayed behind with Celeste. Papa, Maman, along with Grand-père Alphonse, Gaspard, and I set out. The path through the Wood ran as straight as ever, save for the narrow, winding path that curved into its very heart. There was no way to miss it now.
Gaspard and I parted from my family, and rode to the great stone house in silence, with me seated before him on Corbeau. The iron gates stood open, as if welcoming us home. Every tree in the orchard was in bloom, though the days were shortening now. We left Corbeau in his stable. Then, hand in hand, we walked to where the Heartwood stood by the shore of the lake.
“Look,” I said when I saw it. “Oh, look, Gaspard.”
The blossoms of the Heartwood tree lay scattered on the ground. But in their place, its boughs were filled with fruit as ripe and golden as the sun. Slowly, almost reverently, I moved to lay a hand against the bark.
“Someday,” I said softly, “this tree will die. But what it carried in its heart will never be extinguished. Its roots go too deep, the fruit it bears is too nourishing, and the promise carried on the scent of its blossoms travels too far.
“True love may not always be easy to see, but once it has been discovered it can never be lost.”
“You are as honest at the end as you were at the beginning,” my true love said.
And I put my arms around him and kissed him beneath the branches of the Heartwood Tree, feeling my heart ache at the pure joy.
About the Author
CAMERON DOKEY is the author of nearly thirty young adult novels. Her other titles in the Once upon a Time series include Sunlight and Shadow, Before Midnight, Golden, Beauty Sleep, and The Storyteller’s Daughter. Her other Simon and Schuster endeavors include a book in the Simon Pulse Romantic Comedies line, How NOT to Spend Your Senior Year. Cameron lives in Seattle, Washington.
DON’T MISS:
THE NIGHT
DANCE
A Retelling of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses”
BY SUZANNE WEYN
Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere,
“Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?
Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?
For now I see the true old times are dead,
When every morning brought a noble chance,
And every chance brought out a noble knight.
Such times have been not since the light that led
The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.
But now the whole ROUND TABLE is dissolved
Which was an image of the mighty world;
And I, the last, go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds.”
From Morte d’ Arthur by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Rowena pressed her slim body into the cool shadowy corner of the high wall in the empty courtyard. Shaded by the towering building behind her, her wavy copper-colored hair seemed to take on a more auburn hue. A determined glint deepened her lively, celery-colored eyes into a stormy blue-green.
Furtively glancing back at the towering manor that was her home, she saw one of her eleven sisters, Eleanore, peer out from a high, narrow window. Even from this distance she could read the look of longing in her sister’s expression. Prickly though Eleanore could be, Rowena still sympathized with the trapped restlessness she knew her sister felt. Still, she couldn’t take the chance of being seen, and she shrank back farther into the shadows.
Rawkeeeee! Rowena’s hand suddenly flew to her heart as she whirled toward an open kitchen window on the first floor of the manor. The panicked squawk of a captive pheasant had made her jump.
Helen, the cook, appeared in the window with a small axe held high over her head and the bird clasped firmly in her other hand. She ended the struggling creature’s life swiftly with a strong, well-placed blow to its neck against a chopping board. Then she strode away from the table by the window with the beheaded pheasant in her arms, setting about the business of preparing the bird for roasting.
When Rowena turned her attention back to the upper window, Eleanore was no longer there. In the next minute, Helen reappeared at the kitchen window, but only for a second, to pull the shutters closed.
Rowena waited, barely breathing, for several minutes more. Soon she felt confident that things were finally as she had hoped they’d be at this hour. Her sisters would be busy with their weaving and embroidery. Their father, Sir Ethan of Colchester, was reviewing his monthly accounts, a process that usually took hours. Most likely he wouldn’t lift his head from his books until Mary, the head housemaid, summoned him for dinner.
Reaching into the cobalt blue velvet cape she wore against the late spring’s still-cool breezes, Rowena withdrew a small iron cleaver that she’d smuggled from the kitchen. Even in this shadowed spot, its blade gleamed. Her father’s military past had left him with a love of rules, order, and efficiency. Among his many dictates to the servants was his insistence that they regularly sharpen all the household blades on a whetstone.
A scuffle at her feet caused her eyes to dart downward. She immediately jumped back, startled by a tiny gray field mouse that had scurried in through the narrow opening that rose from the base of the wall in an inverted v-shape. The creature paused for a moment to stare up at her, then zigzagged its way across the courtyard, probably headed for the kitchen.
When her heart had settled, Rowena turned again toward the wall. With eager fingers, she traced the lines of a crack that traveled from the top of the break in the wall halfway up to the top. Several fissures snaked out from the main fracture, further weakening this section of the enclosure.
The day before, when Mary had ordered two of the house boys to remove a brown, dead, potted tree—one of the many potted plants adorning the slate-tiled courtyard—from this corner of the courtyard, Rowena had first noticed the break in the wall. She instantly recognized the opportunity she’d been hoping for.
With the cleaver in her firm grip, she attempted several slow practice passes to be sure that when the moment was right, her aim would be accurate. Then, wrapping her fingers around the cleaver’s iron handle, she waited, her back pressed against the wall.
In the next moment, the bell from the monastery outside the nearby town of Glastonbury chimed as it always did at this hour, calling the monks to prayer.
Now! Rowena thought wildly. She smashed the cleaver’s blade down into the line of the crack, the deeply satisfying crash masked by the resonating bell.
The cleaver stuck fast into the wall. With two hands, she frantically yanked it out and struck again.
And now!
And now!
Again and again, she savagely wielded the blade into the cracks, straining every lean muscle of her lithe body. With each blow her joy mounted as the crumbling powdery stone tumbled to her feet.
The bell ceased its summoning toll.
Dropping to her knees, Rowena took a quick moment to recover from her violent effort and then pushed the debris away from the opening. She lay flat on her stomach and rolled onto her right shoulder. From this vantage point it was immediately apparent that even if she managed to get her head through the opening, her shoulders would never make it.
Rowena rolled back up into a crouch and then slowly stood, resolving not to give in to disappointment. The monastery bell would chime again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, just as it had rung at the same hour on every day of her life. There would be other chances to chip away at this wall, the cursed barrier that had closed her off from the wide, glorious world for the past twelve years, since the time when her mother had left them.
Cameron Dokey, Belle
