As Old As Time: A Twisted Tale (Twisted Tale, A) (4 page)

The inventor ground his teeth, frustrated. “And the palace guards are just letting this sort of thing happen? To citizens?”

In answer, the boy tossed his chin, pointing across the way. There, lolling in the shadows like they were unemployed, stood a pair of castle guards who had been watching the whole thing. They gave Maurice twin looks of distrust and disgust.

“Something must be done about this,” the inventor began to say, turning back to the boy.

He had disappeared.

But Rosalind was there, suddenly, running forward and throwing her arms around him.

“I saw the whole thing. Marry me,” she said.

“What? Yes. What?” Maurice said.

“You are the best, kindest, bravest, nicest man I have ever met. I want to make sure you can’t ever leave me—by oath.”

“Well, of course. I mean, I was planning to ask you mys—”

But his words were cut off by a passionate kiss.

He only pulled back once, to ask the one thing that bothered him.

“You weren’t the boy there, being beaten up, were you? You weren’t testing me, were you?”

“Don’t be absurd! I came looking for you, using a ‘find friend’ spell. I need you and the cart to haul back some rather big packages for me.”

“Oh.”

“Besides, those two hooligans would have been blind, finless fish if they had tried to attack me. Now shut up and kiss me!” she added, planting her lips firmly on his again.

And so they were married. The wedding might have been hidden, both by its secret location and protective spells. The attendees might have been a trifle strange: tiny men who had advice for Maurice on the workings of metal; long-eared girls with hooves for feet who stamped impatiently for the priest to finish; bespectacled librarians and students; and the heavy-drinking young men Maurice still hung out with. But the party afterwards was as enthusiastic as any the kingdom had ever seen.

Except, perhaps, for Frédéric, who was not enthusiastic and spent the whole night looking uncomfortable and sour about the presence of so many
charmantes.

But besides his general grumpiness, there was only one real mishap the whole night: a wild boar, enticed by the smell of the food, managed to work its way in from the woods and root through quite a bit of the magical rose garden before the drunken guests could contain it.

“That’s an odd thing to happen,” Maurice commented.

“Magic,” a tipsy faun said, pushing her finger up on her nose to make a snout, “always comes back on itself.”

Maurice then remembered the man whose nose Rosalind had changed. His new wife was swearing roundly at the pig in her garden now—but not using any magic to shoo it away, he noticed.

“Wait—that’s not
him,
is it?” Maurice asked, alarmed.

“No!” the girl giggled. “Issa
pig
! But’s all the same. Everything comes back on itself again. Love, hate, magic, pig noses. S’how it works.”

“That seems reasonable,” said Maurice thoughtfully, who might have also been a little more in his cups than he appeared at first.

What a wonderful place this is, and what an amazing woman I’ve married,
he thought.
And what a magnificent wedding. Pigs and all.

Belle stomped off over the hill, wanting to run, wanting to maintain her dignity, not managing either. She kept up a strange fast-march in too precise a straight line that neither got her away from everything fast enough nor let her appear to be unaffected by it.

Behind her, on the lawn by the side of the house, was a wedding party.

Her
wedding party.

It was beautiful; she had to admit that.

There was a very tasteful canopy woven with sweet-smelling flowers. Paper bells and pink ribbons festooned a high arch. Tables were draped with shining white cloths and pink bunting, and spread with an array of savory delicacies. Silver buckets held bottles of chilled champagne; perfect little beads of moisture covered their gleaming sides like pearls. Like a painting.

There was a band, which was actually kind of terrible but enthusiastic.

There was an absolutely amazing-looking cake—the only thing Belle was really sad to leave behind. It had three tiers and its white and pink fondant perfectly matched everything else. Crowning the top was a tiny wedding couple, which she would have tossed aside, unexamined, in her haste to get to the cake underneath. Monsieur Boulanger might have been irksome in person but his skills as a baker were definitely in top form that day.

There was also a disappointed would-be groom sitting splay-legged in the pig wallow.

She hadn’t meant to push him that hard. But having done so, she wasn’t precisely displeased with the results.

The noise behind her was terrific: the squeaking of the blond triplets; the squonkings of the tuba and accordion, which now had no purpose; the not-quite
sotto voce
assurances of LeFou to Gaston; the apologetic titterings of the priest.

The priest.

For some reason
his
presence upset Belle the most.

She could almost dismiss the ridiculous band, the cake, the table, and everything else as all the accoutrements of a love-smitten madman—but a priest meant Gaston was deadly serious. He had every intention of “’til-death-do-they-part” marrying her.

“
Amor
does not
vincit omnia,
you ignorant man,” Belle muttered, “…when the woman doesn’t
amat
you back!”

She took a quick, undignified step aside to hide behind a scrub oak, then peeped out from behind it. Her heart sank. Besides the main characters in the wedding party, it looked like all the rest of town had shown up to bear witness to Gaston’s triumphant day. There was the silversmith, Monsieur LeClerc; Monsieur Hebert, the wigmaker and haberdasher; Madame Baudette, the couturier…the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker—
everyone
was there.

Everyone except for Monsieur Lévi.

His absence was extremely notable. He knew the kind of boy she would eventually marry, if she married.

And it certainly wasn’t Gaston.

Absent, also, was her father, of course, who was on his way to the fair. And her mother—but Belle hadn’t seen her since she was a baby, so that part wasn’t really so surprising.

Drifts of conversation came to her as the breeze shifted.

“Terrible, but is it really surprising? That girl isn’t right in the head….”

“Turning down Gaston? The most handsome, eligible bachelor in town?”

“Stupid hussy. I’d give my right pinky to wear his ring.”

“Who does she think she is?”

“Does she think she can do better?”

“Maybe she’ll try Dupuis’s son instead—you know, the simple one who counts pebbles all day. More to her taste.”

Belle balled up her fists and threw herself against the tree trunk in rage.
None
of them thought she was good enough for Gaston, the town’s favorite son…the most handsome boy, with the bluest eyes and best physique, the best shot with a gun…

No one ever asked if he was good enough for
her.

That was just the way the townspeople were.

On the one hand, they did nothing—had done nothing—but gossip endlessly about Belle and her father. How odd they were. How odd
she
was. Always reading. No friends. No suitors.

How Maurice rarely came to the pub for a drink. How he didn’t have a respectable trade. How his wife had disappeared.

How, some whispered, he consorted with the devil down in his basement.

Her father had finally put an end to
that
rumor by inviting a select few to come by and inspect his house for evidence of demonic shenanigans. They had been carefully chosen: Monsieur LeClerc, who knew a bit about technology and metal, and Madame Bussard, the town gossip, sure to spread the news of what she had seen. What they saw were the half-built contraptions and engines of someone they immediately assumed was a madman. Later, Belle wasn’t sure if she preferred the fear the villagers exhibited before this experiment, or the pity and ridicule after.

But on the other hand, there was Gaston, who, despite Belle’s strangeness, came after her with the relentlessness of a crazed hunting dog after a boar. It wasn’t that he overlooked the oddity of the father and daughter; it was more like it was irrelevant compared to Belle’s status as prettiest girl in town.

Plus he felt he could fix her. Make her
normal
. His overwhelming masculinity and presence would exorcise her desire to read and think and be alone.

Was there a tiny part of Belle just a little bit tickled to be the center of attention of such a handsome boy, the town favorite?

Of course. Yes.

That cake looked like Boulanger had spent a lot of time on it.

But she would trade it all in immediately for being left alone…for being treated by Gaston the same way the rest of the town treated her.

The crowd looked so tiny from up where she was. Belle backed away from the tree, watching the wedding party grow even smaller. In the strange, honey-like softening of the afternoon sunlight, the scene looked both more brilliant and less real—like a miniature painting. She held up her thumb and managed to block out everything with its tip, erasing everyone from the landscape.

It was like what she did when she read.

As soon as she opened a book, this little town disappeared into a vast map of countries both real and imagined.

The people down below, cleaning up from the non-wedding and erased by her thumb tip, didn’t think anything interesting or important lay beyond the next bend in the river. They had no curiosity about the new lands beyond the sea or the ancient lands to the east. They had no regard for the recent discovery that other planets had moons just like the one that smiled down at them.

Belle wanted more. She wanted to
see
more. She wanted to travel to the lands she had read about, where people ate with delicate sticks, not forks.

At the very least, she wanted to be carried there in her imagination.

Belle lowered her thumb, and the townspeople reappeared.

She plopped herself down on the grass, defeated.

The truth was…reading wasn’t enough anymore.

It wasn’t enough to catch a glimpse of these lands and ideas through the small window of the pages she turned. She wanted to step through and feel the yellow waters of the Yangtze
herself
, to hear the celestial music of foreign pipes, to taste the foods described by adventurers who traveled purposefully into the areas on maps labeled
Here there be tygres.

Looking to the west, where the late afternoon was drawing to a dark close, she didn’t see the endless landscape that often set her dreaming.

Instead she saw thick black clouds that stretched to the heights of the sky, roiling and boiling with wind and winking with lightning.
Fine.
It suited her mood. She clenched her fists unconsciously, wishing she could bring the storm faster, like a wizard or enchantress in one of her books. She wished she could stand on top of the hill in the midst of the winds and the thunder, untouched, alone, as all the would-be wedding guests fled for the safety of their homes.

And then she remembered her father, who was somewhere out on the road, heading to the fair.

Guiltily, she unclenched her fists and forced her shoulders to relax—as if she really did have some control over the weather.

She rolled over onto her stomach and scanned the road as best she could, but either he was already too far into the forest or the dust in the air had obscured him and Phillipe and the cart.

She sighed and desultorily picked a dandelion. Under a protective tarp on that cart was her father’s masterpiece, his finest invention. When fueled up and working properly, it could split a pile of logs in half the time it took two men. An amazing achievement, sure to win a prize.

Belle puckered her lips and blew on the dandelion.

Either you could see how many feathery seedpods were left stuck to the head and pretend it was that o’clock, or you could make a wish.

She chose the latter.

If
Maurice won the prize, and
if
it were a big one, then maybe she could convince him to move to a bigger city. Maybe even the one that he sometimes talked about, where they had lived when she was a baby. There her father could spend all his time inventing—not trying to eke out a living for himself and his daughter among countryfolk who thought he was mad.

And then Belle could have all the books she wanted. And no one would look at her as being odd; not in a city full of odd people.

Or maybe some rich member of nobility would see his invention for the genius it truly was and sponsor him…take him and Belle away like a fairy godmother and whisk them into a world of academics, science, and people just like them. They would be part of all the exciting things this century promised, far away from this provincial town and its stupid ambush weddings.

(She was glad her papa wasn’t around to see
that.
He wouldn’t have gotten angry, the way she had; he would have been merely very, very confused. It wouldn’t have helped things.)