Beauty Read Free Page A

Raymond hadn't taken me over, I should be as woefully ignorant about many important things as they. Papa has made no effort to arrange a marriage for me. When I've raised the subject with him, he has said, "Wait until-well, until you're sixteen, Beauty. Then we'll discuss it." Not likely! I can count upon the fingers of one hand the number of "discussions" I've had with Papa, count them and quote them from memory.
    "Ah, Beauty," he says. "Doing well with your studies/cooking/music/herbary?"
    "Yes, Papa."
    "Good girl. Always do well with your studies/cooking/music/herbary."
    Once in a great while, when I have been greatly troubled, I've gone all the way to his rooms to talk with him. This isn't a journey to take lightly! Starting in my rooms, which are off the long corridor behind the kitchens, I go up one flight of stairs to the corridor outside the small dining hall. This is the tall one hung with crusaders' weapons and banners and with paneling carved all over with birds and flowers and fish. Then I go through the little suite between and into the large dining hall, an even taller room, where the ceiling is decorated with stone rosettes dependent from the multiple arches, each like lacework, where the long wall is one tall window after another-all looking over the garden with the apricot tree that Beloved and I get all the fruit from because the people in the kitchens always forget it is there-and the other walls are hung with tapestries telling stories of gods and goddesses, most of them naked. At the far end of this dining hall, I come out into the great hall, under the dome. Father Raymond says it is not unlike a cathedral dome, though smaller. Since I've never seen a cathedral, I see it as the inside of a lovely shiny melon, pressing up toward the sky, round windows set about it like gems in a ring, poking up in the center to make the high lantern visitors say they can see from miles away as they approach on the north road. They look for it, they say, as the first sight of the most beautiful building in the world!
    The floor of the great hall is marble, laid in designs. When I was little, I used to play there, walking along the designs as though they were paths in a garden. From the great hall, two curving stairs follow the walls up behind a graceful stone balustrade, joining at the center before three arches with statues of veiled women set beneath them. No one alive made the statues. Grandfather brought them from a country across the sea from the Holy Land, from a man who had dug them up from an ancient city, and Papa says Grandfather did it because the architects of Westfaire told him to. From either side of the arches, other corridors lead left and right, and at the far end of the leftward one, up another flight of curving stairs, are Papa's rooms. All the floors, except the one in the small dining hall, which is made out of tiny woven strips of walnut wood, are laid in mosaics, ribbons and leaves and flowers and fruits bordering all the walls. It's hard to walk over them without stopping to look at them. It's hard to climb the stairs without listening to the way my clothes trail along the steps, the way the smooth stone feels under my hand. It's hard to go anywhere in Westfaire without stopping and staring, sometimes for a long, long time. Besides, it's just a very long way to Papa's rooms, so I don't go there very often, only when I'm desperate.
    And when I do go, when I get there, I knock on Papa's door and call, "Papa, may I talk to you?"
    "Not now, Beauty," he always replies over the sound of female giggles. "I'm very busy just now. Later on, perhaps."
    Now that is what our filial relationship amounts to! I don't think that's enough of one for the new stepmama to threaten.
    I am not jealous of whatever attention Sibylla may receive from the aunts, either. I heartily hope she will take my share along with her own. They pay entirely too much attention to me, all the time, without being in the least comforting or