Hob
A month had passed by since Beauty had left us, and we did not even know if she still lived. More than a dozen times I had nearly left myself to follow the road to the forest and find her, but I could not bring myself to cause Elizabeth more worry. My father still thought she was with Simon and his family, so Simon could not come and visit us, and I had had to stop him from riding out into the forest as well more than once.
The month had changed to November and the weather long since turned cold, but now the wind brought the promise of snow. Elizabeth and I sat in the parlour as we had so often done, but I could not settle.
“I’m going out,” I said at last.
“Out?” Elizabeth exclaimed. “It’s nearly freezing out there.”
“I can’t stay in,” I said. “I don’t know why, I just feel restless. As though something is going to happen.”
“As if anything else could! If you must go out, wear a cloak at least. We don’t want anything to happen to you as well. And don’t stay out long – it’ll be dark soon,” she said.
I nodded in a non-committal way, but took her advice, over the cloak at any rate. I went to the furthest away garden and walked as the sun went down. I sat on a stone bench, kicked my shoes off underneath it and curled my feet under me. I was waiting – for something, but I could not say what. The first flakes of snow started to fall and I turned my face to the sky to fell them better.
“Hob! Hob, I need you.” The voice came out of nowhere, but I knew whose it was. “Hob, please! Come to me!”
In the air before me hovered the rose, Beauty’s rose. I reached my hand out through the falling snow to take it, and the world around me changed.
I was in a room much like the one my father had described to us – perhaps that very room. The ceiling was high above my head, the panelled walls far apart. Great curtained windows ran from floor to ceiling along one wall – the furthest from the door, and in the centre was a four-poster bed. On the bed was my sister.
She looked pale, almost as death. I dropped the rose and let my cloak fall to the floor and ran to her.
“Beauty?” I said, taking her hand, which was hot. I felt her forehead – she was burning with fever.
“Hob?” she said hoarsely and opened her eyes to slits.
“Go back to sleep,” I said. “I’m here, I’ll look after you.”
Her eyes slid back shut before I had even finished speaking. I patted her hand, then got up and looked around the room again. Despite its grandeur, there was nothing here to suggest it was a sickroom – no remedies, or medicine, and no one to care for her.
I went to the door, noticing on the way that my cloak seemed to have picked itself up and hung itself neatly on a peg near the fire, where it was dripping melted snow onto the tiles. I opened the door and looked out into a long, dark corridor. Again, the ceiling was high and the walls panelled, but someone seemed to have decided that it would look best if decorated with hideously deformed statues, and had put them at irregular intervals all the way to the stairs. As I passed by them I could almost feel them turn to watch me go.
At the head of the stairs two great candelabras flared into light as I approached, casting a shadowy light into the great hall below. I would rather have had complete darkness; the candles flickered in a draft and set the shadows in the hall moving and dancing until I fancied that smirking people hid in every patch of darkness, all of them watching me hesitate at the top of the stairs. The thought of Beauty alone and sick in that room upstairs was the only thing that made me walk down into the darkness.
