Kissing the Witch (3 page)

I left the rose drying against my mirror, in case I ever came home. My sisters, onion-eyed, watched us leave at dawn. They couldn’t understand why my father carried no gun to kill the
beast. To them a word was not something to be kept. They didn’t speak our language.

The castle was in the middle of a forest where the sun never shone. Every villager we stopped to ask the way spat when they heard our destination. There had been no wedding or christening in
that castle for a whole generation. The young queen had been exiled, imprisoned, devoured (here the stories diverged) by a hooded beast who could be seen at sunset walking on the battlements. No
one had ever seen the monster’s face and lived to describe it.

We stopped to rest when the light was thinning. My father scanned the paths through the trees, trying to remember his way. His eyes swivelled like a lamb’s do when the wolves are circling.
He took a deep breath and began to speak, but I said, Hush.

Night fell before we reached the castle, but the light spilling from the great doors led us through the trees. The beast was waiting at the top of the steps, back to the light, swaddled in
darkness. I strained to see the contours of the mask. I imagined a different deformity for every layer of black cloth.

The voice, when it came, was not cruel but hoarse, as if it had not been much used in twenty years. The beast asked me, Do you come consenting?

I did. I was sick to my stomach, but I did.

My father’s mouth opened and shut a few times, as if he was releasing words that the cold air swallowed up. I kissed his papery cheek and watched him ride away. His face was lost in the
horse’s mane.

Though I explored the castle from top to bottom over the first few days, I found no trace of the missing queen. Instead there was a door with my name on it, and the walls of my room were white
satin. There were a hundred dresses cut to my shape. The great mirror showed me whatever I wanted to see. I had keys to every room in the castle except the one where the beast slept. The first book
I opened said in gold letters: You are the mistress: ask for whatever you wish.

I didn’t know what to ask for. I had a room of my own, and time and treasures at my command. I had everything I could want except the key to the story.

Only at dinner was I not alone. The beast liked to watch me eat. I had never noticed myself eating before; each time I swallowed, I blushed.

At dinner on the seventh night, the beast spoke. I knocked over my glass, and red wine ran the length of the table. I don’t remember what the words were. The voice came out muffled and
scratchy from behind the mask.

After a fortnight, we were talking like the wind and the roof slates, the rushes and the river, the cat and the mouse. The beast was always courteous; I wondered what scorn this courtesy veiled.
The beast was always gentle; I wondered what violence hid behind this gentleness.

I was cold. The wind wormed through the shutters. I was lonely. In all this estate there was no one like me. But I had never felt so beautiful.

I sat in my satin-walled room, before the gold mirror. I looked deep into the pool of my face, and tried to imagine what the beast looked like. The more hideous my imaginings, the more my own
face seemed to glow. Because I thought the beast must be everything I was not: dark to my light, rough to my smooth, hoarse to my sweet. When I walked on the battlements under the waning moon, the
beast was the grotesque shadow I threw behind me.

One night at dinner the beast said, You have never seen my face. Do you still picture me as a monster?

I did. The beast knew it.

By day I sat by the fire in my white satin room reading tales of wonder. There were so many books on so many shelves, I knew I could live to be old without coming to the end of them. The sound
of the pages turning was the sound of magic. The dry liquid feel of paper under fingertips was what magic felt like.

One night at dinner the beast said, You have never felt my touch. Do you still shrink from it?

I did. The beast knew it.

At sunset I liked to wrap up in furs and walk in the rose garden. The days were stretching, the light was lingering a few minutes longer each evening. The rose-bushes held up their spiked
fingers against the yellow sky, caging me in.

One night at dinner the beast asked, What if I let you go? Would you stay of your own free will?

I would not. The beast knew it.

And when I looked in the great gold mirror that night, I thought I could make out the shape of my father, lying with his feverish face turned to the ceiling. The book did say I was to ask for
whatever I wanted.

I set off in the morning. I promised to return on the eighth day, and I meant it when I said it.

Taking leave on the steps, the beast said, I must tell you before you go: I am not a man.

I knew it. Every tale I had ever heard of trolls, ogres, goblins rose to my lips.

The beast said, You do not understand.

But I was riding away.

The journey was long, but my blood was jangling bells. It was dark when I reached home. My sisters were whispering over the broth. My father turned his face to me and tears carved their way
across it. The rose, stiff against the mirror, was still red.

By the third day he could sit up in my arms. By the fifth day he was eating at table and patting my knee. On the seventh day my sisters told me in whispers that it would surely kill him if I
went back to the castle. Now I had paid my ransom, they said, what could possess me to return to a monster? My father’s eyes followed me round the cottage.

The days trickled by and it was spring. I pounded shirts on black rocks down by the river. I felt young again, as if nothing had happened, as if there had never been a door with my name on
it.

But one night I woke to find myself sitting in front of my mirror. In its dark pool I thought I could see the castle garden, a late frost on the trees, a black shape on the grass. I found the
old papery rose clenched in my fist, flaking into nothing.

This time I asked no permission of anyone. I kissed my dozing father and whispered in his ear. I couldn’t tell if he heard me. I saddled my horse, and was gone before first light.

It was sunset when I reached the castle, and the doors were swinging wide. I ran through the grounds, searching behind every tree. At last I came to the rose garden, where the first buds were
hunched against the night air. There I found the beast, a crumpled bundle eaten by frost.

I pulled and pulled until the padded mask lay uppermost. I breathed my heat on it, and kissed the spot I had warmed. I pulled off the veils one by one. Surely it couldn’t matter what I saw
now?

I saw hair black as rocks under water. I saw a face white as old linen. I saw lips red as a rose just opening.

I saw that the beast was a woman. And that she was breathing, which seemed to matter more.

This was a strange story, one I would have to learn a new language to read, a language I could not learn except by trying to read the story.

I was a slow learner but a stubborn one. It took me days to learn that there was nothing monstrous about this woman who had lived alone in a castle, setting all her suitors riddles they could
make no sense of, refusing to do the things queens are supposed to do, until the day when, knowing no one who could see her true face, she made a mask and from then on showed her face to no one. It
took me weeks to understand why the faceless mask and the name of a beast might be chosen over all the great world had to offer. After months of looking, I saw that beauty was infinitely various,
and found it behind her white face.

I struggled to guess these riddles and make sense of our story, and before I knew it summer was come again, and the red roses just opening.

And as the years flowed by, some villagers told travellers of a beast and a beauty who lived in the castle and could be seen walking on the battlements, and others told of two beauties, and
others, of two beasts.

Another summer in the rose garden, I asked,

Who were you

before you chose a mask over a crown?

And she said, Will I tell you my own story?

It is a tale of an apple.

T
HE MAID WHO
brought me up told me that my mother was restless. She said I had my mother’s eyes, always edging towards the steep
horizon, and my mother’s long hands, never still. As the story went, my mother sat one day beside an open window looking out over the snow, embroidering coronets on a dress for the
christening of the child she carried. The maid warned her that she’d catch her death if she sat in the cold, letting snow drift in and sprinkle her work. My mother didn’t seem to hear.
Just then the needle drove itself into her finger, and three drops of blood stained the snow on the ebony window frame. My mother said to her maid, The daughter I carry will have hair as black as
ebony, lips as red as blood, skin as white as snow. What will she have that will save her from my fate?

The maid had no answer, or not one that she could remember.

Then the pains seized my mother and carried her away.

Though I was so much smaller than she was, I was stronger; I had no reason not to want to live.

It was the maid who cared for me as I grew. Every autumn in her pocket she brought me the first apple from the orchard. This was not the mellow globe they served my father a month later, but the
hardly bearable tang of the first ripening, so sharp it made me shudder.

Let it be said that my father did grow to care. After the maid, too, died in her turn, he found me wandering the draughty corridors of the castle and took me up in his ermine arms. In the
summertime he liked to carry me through the orchard and toss me high in the air, then swing me low over the green turf. He was my toyman and my tall tree. As I grew and grew, he bounced me on his
lap till our cheeks scalded.

But the day there was a patch of red on my crumpled sheet, my father brought home a new wife. She was not many years older than I was, but she had seen one royal husband into the grave already.
She had my colouring. Her face was set like a jewel in a ring. I could see she was afraid; she kissed me and spoke sweetly in front of the whole court, but I could tell she would be my enemy. There
was room for only one queen in a castle.

Yes, I handed this newcomer the ring with its hundred tinkling keys, the encrusted coronet, the velvet train of state, till she was laden down with all the apparatus of power. But it was me the
folk waved to as the carriage rattled by; it was me who was mirrored in my father’s fond eyes; mine was the first apple from the orchard.

I know now that I would have liked her if we could have met as girls, ankle deep in a river. I would have taken her hand in mine if I had not found it weighted down by the ruby stolen from my
mother’s cooling finger. I could have loved her if, if, if.

Her lips were soft against my forehead when she kissed me in front of the whole court. But I knew from the songs that a stepmother’s smile is like a snake’s, so I shut my mind to her
from that very first day when I was rigid with the letting of first blood.

In the following months she did all she could to woo my friendship, and I began to soften. I thought perhaps I had misread the tight look in her eyes. Eventually I let her dress me up in the
silks and brocades she had brought over the mountains. It was she who laced up my stays every morning till I was pink with mirth; last thing at night it was she who undid the searing laces one by
one and loosed my flesh into sleep. With her own hands she used to work the jewelled comb through my hair, teasing out the knots. Not content with all this, she used to feed me fruit from her own
bowl, each slice poised between finger and thumb till I was ready to take it. Though I never trusted her, I took delight in what she gave me.

My father was cheered to see us so close. Once when he came to her room at night he found us both there, cross-legged on her bed under a sea of velvets and laces, trying how each earring looked
against the other’s ear. He put his head back and laughed to see us. Two such fair ladies, he remarked, have never been seen on one bed. But which of you is the fairest of them all?

We looked at each other, she and I, and chimed in the chorus of his laughter. Am I imagining in retrospect that our voices rang a little out of tune? You see, her hair was black as coal, mine as
ebony. My lips were red as hers were, and our cheeks as pale as two pages of a book closed together. But our faces were not the same, and not comparable.

He let out another guffaw. Tell me, he asked, how am I to judge between two such beauties?

I looked at my stepmother, and she stared back at me, and our eyes were like mirrors set opposite each other, making a corridor of reflections, infinitely hollow.

My father grinned as he kissed me on the forehead, and pushed me gently out of the room, and bolted the door behind me.

But as the full of a year went by and my stepmother stayed as thin as the day he had first brought her to the castle, my father’s mouth began to stiffen. He questioned every doctor who
passed through the mountains. He made his young wife drink cow’s blood, to strengthen her, though it turned her stomach. Finally he forbade her to go walking in the orchard with me, or lift a
hand, or do anything except lie on her back and wait to find herself with child, the child who would be his longed-for son.