Giles suggested, very sweetly, that since we had a few moments to ourselves, I explain to him what was going on. I did so, mostly. I told him my mother was a fairy, without dwelling on what that made me, and I said she’d given me certain fairy gifts. I said an inimical force was sort of following me around. I didn’t mention Jaybee. I couldn’t bear to tell him about Jaybee. In Giles’s mind, I was Beauty and I was Catherine, both at once, and they were not necessarily the same person. He could accept that Elly had been Edward’s child, and Galantha was somehow my granddaughter, without giving up his belief that his first love, Beauty, still virgin and pure, was asleep at Westfaire. I was her, and I wasn’t her, so to speak. He had no trouble believing Galantha had been wickedly enchanted by a witch. He believed in witches. In those times, everyone believed in witches.
“I’ve been to see her,” Giles said, looking at his feet.
“Her?”
“Your grandchild. Galantha.”
I started to get up. He pushed me back, very gently. “She looks almost like she’s asleep, Beauty. Very pale, but not … you know, not rotted or anything. They’ve put her in a kind of case, so nothing will chew on her. I don’t think she’s dead.”
Giles had never seen Disney. This time I did get up.
“I want to see for myself,” I said, pulling the pins out of my hair and trying to find my comb. Giles found it for me and helped me braid up my white locks. When I had the wimple pinned tightly, my veil on and my kirtle smoothed out, he led the way outside.
We went up a gentle hill, not the one we had come down the night before, and through a bit of forest, down a much used path, and into the gaping entrance of a mine. She was lying well back inside, in an area lit by torches. The case looked more like a reliquary than anything else, bits of rock crystal and faceted gems pieced together with gold to make a domed lid in a design of flowers and leaves. The leaves were emeralds, I thought. Or maybe jade. Through the flatter, clearer bits I could see her, only a child, twelve or thirteen, perhaps. She was very beautiful, rather like the child Elizabeth Taylor, in that horse movie they always showed late at night on TV in the 1990s. She was incorruptible, as saints’ bodies are supposed to be. I thought of Giles and my conversation about mice and shrouds and laughed at myself.
Then I sat down beside the case and let some tears run, not many. After a while, Esky and one of his brothers came in and asked if I’d like the case opened. I said yes, and they unbuckled it at one side and laid the top back. She lay on a satin mattress, with a satin coverlet over her, her hands folded on her breast. She was dressed very simply, in a full white shift with puffy sleeves and a kind of laced bodice over it. Disney had got that part right.
The other brothers came from deeper in the mine, setting their tools down to one side and seating themselves on chair sized stones, one for each of them. From the wear on those stones, I could tell they had sat there like this time and again for years.
Giles took a deep breath. “She looks just like you,” he said to me. “When I first saw you.”
I looked at the child, considering. She looked something like Elly and something like her father, but a good deal like me. As though I’d passed on my own looks, skipping a generation. Her hair was black, of course, and mine had been gold, but otherwise, we looked much the same.
I nodded. Esky reached out to touch the bones of my cheeks and jaw and nodded. “I see it,” he said.
He could see more than I, then, but his brothers all nodded, telling each other how much the child resembled me. The resemblance, whether fancied or real, seemed to allay their suspicions.
“How?” I asked, motioning at them, her, everything, meaning “How did it happen?”
Esky sighed. “One day we heard this screaming noise, so we went to see what it was. This big huntsman was down on his knees, crying. He said Princess Ilene had told him she’d kill him unless he took this little girl into the woods and murdered her. He couldn’t do it. He said he was going to kill a deer and take its heart back instead. Then he went off and left the child behind. It was getting dark. Wolves was howling. We couldn’t leave her there. We took her along home. She was a sweet, pretty girl. Not much sense, but sweet.” He wiped his face with his hand, sighing.
“Well, some time went by. We got used to having her around. At first she couldn’t do nothing useful. We taught her. Cookery a little. Gardening a little. If I tell the truth, Lady Catherine, all of us lusted after her even though she was just a child. With all of us living here, we agreed we’d behave decent. We may be hermits, so to speak. We may not be very civilized, but our ma raised us to be decent folk. Right then, we should have took her over the mountains into Spain. Or took her back to Lourdes, we could have did that. Truth is, none of us travels much, except me, and I didn’t want her to go. She was so pretty.…”
He rose and went out of the cave. The brothers muttered among themselves, in their
