A Wild Swan by Michael Cunningham Page B

he’d recently learned he would not receive), he plucked a rose from a particularly abundant bush. One rose out of thousands.
    Wrong castle. Wrong rosebush.
    The beast pounced on the father. The beast was more than eight feet tall, a hybrid of wolf and lion, with bright, murderous eyes and thickly furred arms bigger than the father’s waist. The beast was somehow all the more menacing for the fact that he wore a waistcoat over a ruffled shirt.
    He proclaimed rose-stealing a capital crime. He raised a paw like a bouquet of daggers. He was about to peel the father’s face from his skull, and work his way down from there.
    Please, sir, the rose was for my daughter!
    Stealing is stealing.
    Imagine a voice like a lawn mower on gravel. Try not to think about the beast’s breath.
    She’s the loveliest and most innocent girl in the world. I offered to buy her anything she wanted, and all she asked for was a rose.
    The beast paused over that.
    She could have had anything, and she asked for a rose?
    She’s an unusual girl. I love her as I love life itself.
    The beast lowered his paw, thrust it forcefully into the pocket of his coat, as if to keep it from striking out on its own.
    Go home, then. Say goodbye to your daughter. Give her the rose. Then come back here and accept your punishment.
    I will.
    If you’re not back by this time tomorrow, I’ll hunt you down and kill your daughters before I kill you.
    The beast turned and strode back to his castle, on legs big and powerful as a bison’s. The father, clutching the rose, leapt onto his horse and rode away.
    *   *   *
    When the father reached home he told his daughters the story, said he’d be off on the morrow, at dawn, to be flayed by the beast.
    His younger daughters assured him it was all bluff. The beast couldn’t possibly know where they lived. The beast was a standard-issue psychopath. Threats are easy to deliver; the beast was surely on to other hallucinations already. The beast was probably, at that very moment, trying to figure out who was whispering obscenities from the cupboards, or why the furniture kept rearranging itself.
    So, Poppa, could we see what you brought us?
    Oh, yes, of course …
    He began removing the parcels from his saddlebag.
    *   *   *
    Only Beauty knew that the beast would track them down, and murder them. Only Beauty understood what a single rose might signify, what acts a rose could inspire, if you lived without hope. If you were a beast confined to a castle, or a girl confined to an obscure and unprosperous village.
    And so, after midnight, when her father and sisters were asleep, Beauty slipped out to the stable, mounted her father’s horse, and told it to take her to the beast’s castle. The horse, being a beast itself, was more than ready to comply.
    It looked like an act of ultimate self-sacrifice. That was not untrue. But it was also true that Beauty preferred whatever the beast might do to another day of tending the geese, another night of needlepoint.
    It was true as well that she hoped her father might come for her, when he woke at daybreak and saw she was gone. It was true that she entertained images of her father confronting the beast—her father who’d been the beast of her youth, enormous and bristling with hair; her father who’d been ostentatiously kind and gentle even as she, unblinded by the naïveté her sisters enjoyed, understood the effort required of him to refrain from certain acts he could so easily have committed, with the girls’ mother safely absent under her cross in the churchyard.

    Beauty speculated, as the horse took her through nocturnal field and chirruping fen to the beast’s castle, over the battle she might be inspiring. She took (why deny it?) a certain pleasure in wondering who would claim her—father or fiend?
    *   *   *
    The father was, in fact, stricken when morning broke