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We live in a world of accidents finally, in which only aesthetic principles have a consistency of which we can be sure. (Anne Rice, Queen of the Damned)
This is the first thing
I have understood:
Time is an echo of an axe
Within a wood.
--Philip Larkin, XXVI (from The North Ship)
"Once upon a time, there was a beautiful enchantress. She lived in gilded hall covered with roses, ate pheasant every day, and fell asleep at night to the sound of nightingales."
"Who eats pheasant every day?" she asks her mother, who raises one finger from her spinning without letting go of the distaff. That finger says, 'be quiet.'
"But she didn't have anyone to share it with," her mother continues, tapping her foot on the treadle. "And she was very lonely. She spent her days walking in the forest and looking for friends. Somewhere along the way she forgot how to practice magic, however."
"Is this a lesson?" the girl askes suspiciously.
Her mother smiles and glances out the window. "Every story is a lesson. Even the fun ones.
"One day she was walking in the forest and she fell and hit her head. Hurting and confused, she stumbled into a part of the forest that she didn't know, and became horribly lost.
"Just when she was about to give up, she was discovered by a stranger, who picked her up and put her on his horse. He took her back to her castle and laid her in her velvet bed. He bound her wounds and fed her broth. And when she was well enough to leave she found him in her dining room, sitting in her chair.
"'Why are you in my chair?' she asked him.
'This is my chair,' the stranger said. 'It's always been my chair.'
"The enchantress knew this wasn't true, but when her servants entered with serving trays, they acted as if they didn't recognize her. They set the platter full of pheasant in front of the man and said, 'For you, my lord.'"
"I don't like her servants," the girl says. She has stopped peeling the apples in the bowl in her lap, but her mother uses that same finger to point to them. 'Keep working.'
"The enchantress tried to remember her magic, tried to make everyone see the truth, but she had forgotten how to do even the simplest of things." Her mother wound the last of the spun yarn onto the skein. "She sat down at the opposite end of the table, and ate what the servants brought her, but it wasn't the same. And the man declared himself the prince of the castle." She looks sad, then, sadder than before. "He placed her in the scullery and told her that she was lucky to be there, after she had almost died in the forest."
"When I grow up, I'm going to have a castle, and a Prince," she says with finality.
Her mother cocks her head and snaps the string between two teeth. "Well, I don't know. Wouldn't you rather just be an enchantress?"
The girl lifts her hand in front of her face and summons a small ball of green flame. "Magic is boring."
Her mother sets down her spinning and shakes her head, but there's something in her eyes that looks like the understanding that parents have for their children and their unformed ideas.
"It might be right now, but some day it will be very important. You must learn to use it wisely, or you can do horrible things."
The girl extinguishes the flame and casts her mother a withering look. Her mother, unfazed, shrugs her shoulders.
"Finish that stitching, and come to dinner."
***
In the frigid wind, she goes looking for somewhere. She doesn’t remember how she got here, or where she was coming from. The path behind her has no markings, and the snow is piling in uneven drifts against the trees.
She had been going somewhere. There's a bow in her hands, but she can't even feel it now, not in the way that she should. She only feels it after she sees it, lifts it to her face and runs one finger down the curve of the middle. Something hits her eyes and she touches her face to discover blood running down her temple. It's frigid and already freezing on her skin, which is already so cold that she can't feel it, not really.
There is a jangle of bells, and she turns to see a horse nearing. She knows it's a horse, she has words, but they are lodged in her throat, stuck there and stoppered as if with a cork.
There's a man on the horse, pale and swathed in red velvet and fur. His russet hair is tied back with a ribbon, but a few wisps escape in the front and blow across his eyes.
“What are you doing out here?” he asks, but his voice sounds as if it is coming from far away. She can see his lips moving, the shifting muscles of his horse under its skin. Her vision is blinded for a second when her hair flows over her face, and when she moves it away he’s already dismounted and coming closer. The crunch of his boots in the snow is crisp and muffled.
“Hello? Do you speak French? Do you understand me?”
Of course she does—she knows what he’s saying. She starts to respond, but nothing comes out of her throat but a puff of frozen air. It feels like claws running up and off her tongue. Her head starts to ache horribly and the sudden unveiling of the pain, as if it just remembered that it is there is so strong it makes her knees buckle.
"You're hurt—" the man begins when he reaches her. His brown gloves slide down the side of her head and come away with dark red blood. Everywhere he touched her feels like she's been burned with fire.
He slings her up into his arms, and then steps up an outcropping of stones so that he can mount his horse with his hands full. Everywhere he touches her is warm, like a branding she wants all over the rest of her body. When the horse starts off, the gentle rocking reminds her of a boat she doesn’t ever remember being on.
***
The bed is warm, and his fingers are even warmer. His eyes are genuinely clear and concerned when she takes a rasping breath, the intake of air something that stings all the way down.
“You have to be still,” he says, but then his face recedes and is replaced with someone else's, a woman, her hair covered with a linen cap, her eyes soft and gentle. Her face drops away and a cloth takes its place, running along her face, warm, like a bath made from silk.
"Dear, you've taken a nasty tumble," the woman's voice says, "and I'm afraid that you've developed a fever as well." The cloth leaves her face, but the light is dimmer even so. "The Master brought you here as quickly as he could, but I'm afraid you're still very chilled."
Ah, so that is why she can't feel her fingers or feet. In the distance, perhaps through the glass paned window, or out in the hallway, she can hear a dog barking. A child is laughing, and men are speaking in hushed tones.
"Both of you get out of here!" the woman snaps, but in a low voice, so it doesn't hurt as much as startles her. The talking vanishes and there's a sound of a door shutting.
She tries to speak, and her voice sounds raspy and feels as if it is being pulled from her with baling wire. "I lost—I lost--"
"There," the woman murmurs, the flat of one palm landing gently on her chest, like a cat settling in for a long nap, heavy and comforting. The blankets slide up over her shoulders. "We'll talk when you're better. Don't try to stay awake."
She doesn't.
***
The castle is huge, and cold, but pockets of warmth exist around every hearth, and she floats from one to another, exploring everything in that sphere of heat until she becomes bored and dashes to the next, her borrowed robe swishing around her legs in a strange way. The dress isn't uncomfortable, but it feels like too much.
There is a library filled with books, none of them dusty but many of them unread, their spines and pages stiff with disuse. There is a den with well-worn chairs and multitudinous animal heads mounted on the walls. The faint smell of tobacco lingers in the air. There is a room filled with nothing but bolts of fabric, another with tables full of drying herbs. There's a room with shelves of bottles, lying on their side, some very dusty, some brand new. Lumiere, her sometime guide, tells her that this is a wine cellar, and it doesn't have a fireplace, so she doesn't linger.
The kitchens are her favorite place, with its sturdy clean wooden prep tables and rising bread on the hearth that is large enough to sit five comfortably, its fireplace wide enough to fit a horse standing up.
Lumiere guides here there with a candlestick, as the day is long over and the castle's unused rooms aren't lit when no one is in them. They wind through the wide hallways built to accommodate so many throngs of people or platters rushing up from the warm depths of the kitchen, until they arrive at the large wooden doorframe and are greeted with a woman's low throated laughter.
Lumiere reaches up and covers her eyes before clearing his throat, and a piece of crockery is dropped to the floor. His hand falls and she sees her nursemaid, Mrs. Potts, slapping Cogsworth's back as he buckles his trousers and stealthily slinks into the pantry.
“Oh my,” says the woman, straightening her hat and smoothing her pinafore. “I had thought you would be resting still.”
Lumiere passes close enough to her for his laugh to be audible. "I was lonely," she says, reaching out to run her wingers down the wooden table when she passes.
Mrs. Potts casts a look at the pantry when Cogsworth emerges, his ascot flawless, his hair combed. "Do you know where the master is?"
Cogsworth rolls his eyes. "In the hothouse, of course," he says, as if she is a fool to even ask.
Mrs. Potts takes her hand, and it is warm and damp. "Let's see if we can locate him for you."
The hot house is warm, almost oppressively so, laid with long tables of plants and think metal pipes that run along the glasswork ceiling. A few lanterns are lit here and there, and many of the flowers have closed for the night. She can see the top of Adam's head. The prince is busy with tiny scissors and small pipettes of liquid, feeding something to the open blossom of a violet flower, its open blossom like a tiny mouth ready to be fed.
"Beautiful, aren't they?" Mrs. Potts says, brushing the red petals with her hand. "The prince grows them himself."
Adam looks up at the sound of her voice, and when he sees them, his face lights up in a smile. He sets down his pipettes and turns to the table behind him, one that looks to be covered in lush red mounds. Roses, hundreds of them, grow in pots and long trenchers, so many blossoms the leaves seem to be an afterthought. He cards his hands through them, glancing left and right, as if looking for something. He finds what he wants, because his little scissors descent and there is a distinct snap of a cut.
"She lived in a gilded castle covered in roses," she murmurs.
"What's that, dear?" Mrs. Potts asks, leaning in.
She tries to see something in the other woman's face, something that should be familiar, but there's nothing in there that she knows from before, the before she can't yet remember.
"I just remembered something, but I'm not sure what it means."
Mrs. Potts pats her arm. "It will all come back to you."
And then she is gone, and Adam is walking towards her, a long stem in his hand. The petals of the rose are crimson, the same color as his riding cloak, the same color as her blood on his glove.
His face is beautiful, and his eyes are alight with eagerness. His eyes linger on her shoulders, then run down to the yellow skirts of her dress, as if he is imagining something else, something different, but no less delightful.
"I made this one for you," Adam says, lifting the rose. "I cut it for you, I mean," he quickly amends. "It grows itself."
She takes the rose, thorny stem declawed and petals blossoming full and open. It looks like a moon of summer, like a promise of spring.
***
"Do you remember anything?" Adam asks, his eyes so close to her that they are all she can see. His body is remarkably warm under the covers. His whole bed radiates heat into her, trying to touch a place inside her that she can't seem to penetrate.
"No," she answers. He asks her this often, both when they are alone and with others. He often asks her when they go somewhere new, such as riding in the forest, or walking in the outside gardens, still covered in snow that seems as if it will never melt. Surely spring will come soon.
She has more answers now than she did weeks ago, when he first found her, or when she woke finally, or when they lay together in his bed for the first time, his arms warm and powerful and her relief so palpable that she almost wept.
Sometimes she sees faces in the dark. Sometimes she hears the steady skip thirrup of a spinning wheel. Sometimes she sees a bow in her hand, a bow that had a use before, but was left abandoned in a drift when she had collapsed into Adam's arms.
"It will come to you," he says hollowly, turning onto his side and propping up his head on his hand.
"I feel as if I read this in a book somewhere," she sighs, stretching. "But it's all so distant." She turns onto her back and raises her arms above her head, pointing her toes as well. Adam reaches out with one big paw and pulls her across the silk sheets by the waist. His hands are so very large. "Do you know what I mean?"
"I don't read," he says, his hand dipping lower to brush the top of her thighs and her pubic hair.
"You should read," she admonishes him. "My mother always told me that it was important to learn—"
She stops, frozen. Her mother. For just a moment, she saw a woman in a cabin, foot on a treadle, hair in a kerchief, and then, as quickly as the image came, it was gone.
"You mother?" Adam says, head cocking. "Are you remembering?"
"My mother always told me that if I didn't pay attention to my lessons, something bad would happen," she whispers.
"Lessons? Like what? Spinning? Baking?" Adam ducks under the covers and begins to lick a line from her navel to her cunt. His tongue is searing. Something about him is always so warm, and she doesn't know if it because he is too hot or she is too cold. He slides two fingers into her and crawls between her legs, then slides up over her until he can press his face into the space between her breasts.
"No," she says, trying to ignore him for another minute so that she can finish her thought. He can be very distracting. Her eyes unfocus when she stares out at the sun. The roses in the vase by the bed are directly between her sight and the fire, and when everything becomes blurry she sees a ball of red and green in a halo of light.
"Whatever your name is, I love you," Adam murmurs into her neck. "I love your skin."
She can't see his face, but she imagines that he is smiling.
***
In the weeks that follow, she still can't remember her name. She sits alone in the flower house and tries to think of what it might be. She often thinks that it might be Rose, for how familiar the flower seems to her, how it strokes a rich chord in her chest when she says the word out loud.
It's not enough to go on, though. Adam says that time will heal her mind and that one day she will remember. She had considered just picking a name for herself, but every time she almost decides on one, that hard spot in her chest thumps, and her scar throbs and her head aches. She sees the image of a woman's finger listing from a distaff, as if to say 'Not yet.'
One evening she joins him for dinner in the great hall. The table is long, but she sits to his right next to the head. He is eating pheasant that he has shot himself, but she's declined—the image of the bird on the serving platter is enough to remind her that she is missing something, yet again.
"I'm afraid that you can't stay here any longer," he says suddenly, as if it is a bone he has to spit out into a napkin.
She doesn't know what to say. Her throat closes a little, and she is forced to swallow the wine in her mouth in small increments so she doesn't drown.
"The thing is," he continues, pushing the bones about on his plate. "I'm already engaged to someone else." He glances at her, as if to be sure that she is listening to him. "I courted her last summer, and she's from a very fine family—"
"I remember this," she says. The vegetables on her plate suddenly swirl in her vision, as if they aren't part of this reality, of her reality.
He frowns. "I don't think I mentioned it, really."
"But I thought—"
Adam shrugs. "It's not that I don't—I just—look," he turns to her. "I can't very well keep you here, not when she's coming here with her family. How would that look? It's not like I can pretend you're my sister."
The scar on her head throbs. "But I don't know where to go," she says. He pushes away from the table so hard that her chair clatters backwards to the floor. Adam stands, rounding the table.
"This was my house," she whispers. "This was all mine."
"I think you're confused," Adam says, his eyes hard. "I've been very patient, but I can't let you stay—"
"I remember this," she says again, but it comes out all garbled. Her head pounds. She sees now, behind her eyes, his hands sliding along her bare skin, fingers pressing her stomach, her breasts, his mouth on her neck. "I remember what you did."
"If you like," he says finally, "I could talk to Cogsworth, perhaps get you a position in scullery—"
Her hands clench and open, once, twice, and then a third time, and they feel suddenly warm. When she raises them to her face, they are green.
"You're a beast," she says. "Everyone here should see it."
His eyes are wide, riveted to the green fire in front of him as she holds her hands out. "Wait—" he says, reaching out to grab her wrists, but when his skin touches hers, the fire races up to cover him.
"Your outsides should match your insides," she says, and the moment she says it, she can feel something snap, something building inside her that wasn't supposed to break. Her magic races along that broken copper wire and shorts, bursting out of her all wrong, exploding and expanding, until she is the center. She can hear Adam screaming, and her own body is soft and hard, moving, running, until she isn't even there anymore, the tail of green mist trailing behind her like a banner.
The spell rolls out in waves, engulfing the castle, the forest, the countryside, and a little town that lies in the valley just beyond those trees.
***
Gaston looks across the ravine, his hair blowing across his face. He doesn’t remember how he got here, or where he was coming from. The woods behind him are thick and unmarred by trails or any discernible path.
It is impossible to know what day it is, but he vaguely knows that it is evening, and becoming darker with every passing second. He hears the crunch of shoes on snow behind him and turns to see a little man running towards him, a man who is familiar. It takes Gaston a few more seconds to remember that the man is Lefou, and he is his friend, as much as either of them have friends.
He stops to wonder why he wouldn't have friends.
“Gaston! We’ve been looking for you!” Lefou scoops up some snow and compresses it into a ball, then lobs it at Gaston. It misses, but Gaston can feel the wind of it when it passes his face. Lefou is half his height, and when he finally puffs up next to Gaston, he has to crane his neck to look up at him.
“Where have you been?” he asks, brushing snow from his mittens.
Gaston stars at his hands, so cold and stiff they look blue, and doesn’t know what to answer. The hands feel too big, too unfamiliar, as if they aren’t his. "I don't know."
"You know what this weather reminds me of?" Lefou says, flipping up his collar and turning back towards where he'd come from. Gaston follows, wondering where his coat is. He must have lost it. He must have dropped it. "It reminds me of the day you came out of the forest for the first time," he finishes. "Remember that?"
Gaston isn't sure he remembers. He tries to think back, but the snow blurs the edges of his vision and he's not sure that his body is supposed to be so big.
No wait, of course it is. He raises his hands again and clenches his fists. The blood rushes to them, and when he opens them, his palms are pink and rosy. Callused from years of chopping and building and hunting and in general doing things. Male things.
"Where's your stuff?" Lefou asks, and Gaston looks around him to see what this 'stuff' might be: just snow and rocks and more snow.
Lefou shakes his head. “You went out hunting for three days and didn’t bring anything back?” Lefou says, as they make their way to the outskirts of the village. “What happened?”
"I lost something," he murmurs. "Or I forgot something…"
Lefou ignores this and trudges merrily through the snow, stamping his feet when they reach the streets and he can walk in the mud and horse shit that lines the walkways. All the houses are lit up as the inhabitants sit down to dinner, and all the shops are closed and dark. Gaston shoves his hands in his opposite sleeves to warm them, and then decides it looks strange.
“Hey, there’s someone new in that old cottage on the other side of town," Lefou says casually as he opens the door to the tavern. "Some crazy guy. But he's got a daughter."
Gaston shakes his head, and his hair falls about his face. He'd had a tie for it, but obviously he'd lost it in the forest. Several men and not a few women shout his name, and the warmth that his face isn't entirely due to the fire in the hearth.
"Oh?"
Lefou holds up two fingers to the barkeep, but it was pointless—the mugs of beer were already on their way towards him, both for Gaston, on a tray carried by a woman that was more breasts than face. Gaston likes what he sees, but he's not sure why. The feeling makes him uncomfortable.
"Yeah, and she's a beauty."
***
"He's no monster, Gaston, you are."
Gaston is not a little bit tipsy when he makes his offer to Belle. Everything is lined up just so, and really, she doesn't have any other options.
He's been chasing Belle all summer and fall. None of his normal tricks have worked—feats of strength, appeals to physical beauty, not even a few carefully chosen haunches of venison. All his attempts to woo her have failed.
At first it was a given that she would fall into his arms. In the past year here in the village, women have been easy to trust, and even easier to give up their bodies. Gaston doesn't remember much of the life before, but he thinks that he must have been popular, must have been powerful, must have been wanted, even admired, because everyone in this village loves him. He doesn't talk about Life Before, because he doesn't remember it, and no one seems to care.
He had been fine with his life before Belle, hunting, fishing, tossing axes and in general working with his hands. It had been a good thing, to be admired for being.
The first time he had seen Belle, she had had her nose in a book, and the image of it, her brown hair pulled back in a loose tail with a ribbon, sparked something in his memory. It had felt like an itch under his skin, something he could feel but not reach. Before he'd really pursued her, before she'd developed her wariness of him, she'd tried to explain books to him, learning, the urge to know.
Just the thought made that itch even stronger.
Gaston looks at her now, thinking about books with barely cracked spines. He sees a flash of a woman at a spinning wheel, her finger lifted in a gesture that tells him to wait, to listen, to think, to look for a lesson in a story.
He has a story.
"The beast will come after your children! He'll make off with them in the night! We're not safe till his head is mounted on my wall! I say we kill the beast!"
The deafening noise is all he needs to hear. It feels like ice under his skin.
***
Gaston falls from the tower, down into a swirl of snow. Things go white in her vision when Adam's face, that beastly face, fades from view, and her back snaps with the impact on the flagstones.
She lifts a hand, not sure if she can even raise it, if she even is raising it, and the largeness of it confuses her. Her feet feel gone.
Her eyes look past her hand, to see a figure sitting in the snow, on one of the rocks of the courtyard. The woman is knitting, a long cascade of red wool, red as blood, of roses. She looks up from the work in her hands and smiles, but it is a thin smile. Her apron is as white as the snow around her so that she blends in with it, making it impossible to see where she ends and the snow begins. Threads of gold hair have escaped her green kerchief.
"I had been wondering where you were," the woman says.
"I lost you," she tells her mother.
Her mother sets down her knitting and lays her hands in her lap, tapping her thighs as if to call her over to sit in it. She can't move, but oh, she wants to.
"I'm so sorry," she says.
"Amelie," her mother says, her eyes soft, the corners of her lips curving up. "It's time to come home."
"There was something I was supposed to do," she says. The light is getting brighter, and it is hard to hold on to thoughts. But she can see something red in her mother's hands, her red wool turning into rose blossoms. "There's someone I need to see."
"He doesn't know you, and he never will," he mother says. There's a shrill whistle and the faint shouting of people. She sees torches in the distance.
"I did something bad," she whispers. "I remember something bad."
"Yes, and now you have to let that go, so you can come home." She pulls her kerchief from her head, and her blonde hair falls down to her waist, curling in soft waves that float in an invisible breeze that doesn't match the howling wind Amelie can barely hear under the crackle of distant fire. "Let that boy go, and come to dinner."
Amelie sees her hand now, right in front of her face, and she clenches it into a fist. When she opens it the flame is faint, but green. Sher breath releases in a burst of air, all at once, finally unstuck from whatever had been holding it for so long.
"I remember now."
Up on the parapet, Adam feels a tingling in his fingertips first. And as his body starts to transform, he feels a sense of something, something unfamiliar, but right. It feels like loosing a bow strong, like snipping a rose, like sliding from a saddle.
Release.
***
"Once upon a time there was a little girl who knew magic. But magic is very difficult, and she wasn't sure how to use it to get what she wanted. One day she made a mistake, and it cost her and the others around her dearly. Then she forgot all about it for a very long time.
"But you can always find your way back, and things can always be undone, if you are willing to pay for it. And sometimes after you pay, you find that there are still other good things waiting for you. "
"Like what?" the girl asks her mother. She is sitting at the hearth and watching her mother stitch a rose into the dress that she will wear tomorrow for May Day.
"Like home," her mother says. "Like family."
"What about love?" the little girl asks her mother. The fire is so warm, and she is feeling drowsy. Her mother pauses, reaching up to pull her kerchief out of her hair and let her hair tumble down. She scratches at her skull, pressing into the scar she has shown to her daughter, the scar she got once when she had been lost in the forest, before she'd been rescued by papa.
"Love is very important, once you understand that it's very powerful," her mother tells her, smiling. Her eyes look sad. "And if it's real."
"But how will I know if love is real?"
Her mother sets her sewing aside and pats her thighs, and the little girl crawls into her lap. "That's a very difficult question, and one you will have to discover for yourself."
"Did you?"
Her mother doesn't answer.
***
There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged wings; alas!
Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.
(WB Yeats, "The Two Trees")
END