Beastly Beauty

Forty-Four

Arabella stood on the threshold of the gatehouse, staring across the moat, her brow furrowed.

Beau stood next to her, as pacey as a racehorse, every nerve in his body crackling with impatience. He wanted to make a start, to move, to pick up a hammer and nail things together, to build the bridge.

But Arabella was still figuring out how to do that without getting anyone killed.

“For my plan to work, much depends on the tensile strength of the wood,” she said, and then launched into a lecture on load-bearing force, center of mass, deflection, and several other terms he didn’t understand.

As she talked, Beau shifted his weight and accidentally nudged a rock off the threshold with his foot. It hit the water with a deep plunk. A few seconds later, a dozen gruesome faces surfaced, snarling and snapping. More joined them, drawn by their noise, until the moat was a boiling froth of rotting monsters.

“Did you have to rile them?” Arabella asked. “I can’t hear myself think.”

Beau didn’t reply. He just stared. At a jawless dead man with a salamander crawling out of his eye socket. He wanted to ask her how it was possible for a dead man to be swimming around in the moat, growling at them. He wanted to ask her so many things, but she’d made it clear she would not answer. His questions made her angry, which didn’t bother him. They also made her scared, which did.

He wished he knew why she was frightened of Hope and Faith. He wished she trusted him enough to tell him. Worst of all, he wished he knew why he wished these things. Why did he care? Arabella, her life, this place, the other people in it—they weren’t his concern. Matti was his concern; his only concern.

“You’re certain about this idea of yours? The wooden pilings? The boards?” he asked, frustration simmering in his voice.

“Not at all.”

“Why can’t we just throw a rope across? I could hand-over-hand it across the moat. I’m strong enough.”

“Who’s going to tie the rope off on the other side?”

“Somebody.”

“That’s a bit vague.”

“Somebody’s bound to walk through the woods doing something on their way from someplace to somewhere,” he huffed.

Arabella gave him a sidelong look that told him he was being silly and unhelpful.

“What if we tied a rope to an arrow?” he ventured. “And shot the arrow into a tree?”

Arabella considered this, then said, “An arrow fired from a longbow—which has a draw weight of about one hundred and fifty pounds—traveling at about, oh, say one hundred and seventy feet per second over a distance of, mmm … I’d guess forty yards … would almost certainly generate enough force to pierce a tree trunk, but would it be enough to embed itself deeply? And even if it did, the rope would only be attached to the arrow’s shaft.” She glanced down at the monsters again. “Do you really want to trust your life to a slender piece of wood?”

“What if we made an arrow out of metal, like a fireplace poker? And fired it out of a gun?”

“That’s called a harpoon. Have you got one?”

Beau’s frustration boiled over. He leaned his head back and let out a long, loud groan. They’d been standing here for half an hour and had made no progress. He was not one inch closer to Matti. Every minute that ticked by felt like a sharp-toothed harrow dragged across his heart.

Arabella, unmoved by his noise, continued to concentrate on the space between the castle and the far bank, then she said, “During his conquests of what we now call Germany, Julius Caesar built a thousand-foot wooden bridge across the Rhine. Did you know that?”

“No. But whatever he did, let’s do that.”

“He had the forests of Gaul to plunder for timber and forty thousand men to cut it down. They built enormous pile drivers on the riverbank, moved them into the water, then drove supports deep into the riverbed. Then they connected the supports with horizontal beams, laid decking across them, and marched to the other side. And they did it in just ten days.” She turned to Beau. “We can do a modified version.”

“Now who’s being silly?” Beau asked.

“I really think we can. I based my drawing on the simple, elegant footbridges constructed from bamboo by the rural peoples of India. They work the same way as Caesar’s bridge, essentially, but are a lot easier to build.”

“Arabella? We don’t have any bamboo.”

“No, we don’t. We’ll have to use oak planks instead. They don’t have as much give, but they’ll still work … I think.”

“You think,” Beau said, glancing at the monsters again.

Arabella unrolled her drawing. “You see, if we just—” Before she could finish her thought, a frigid gust ripped the drawing from her hands. It held the fluttering paper aloft over the moat for a few seconds, then dropped it into the water. The monsters tore it to pieces.

“Hey, there’s a good omen,” said Beau.

Undeterred, Arabella reached into one of the braziers at the side of the archway and pulled out a piece of charcoal. Then she walked into the gatehouse. Its inner walls, protected from the weather, were a light, smooth gray. She went to one and started to sketch.

“We drive the pilings in diagonal pairs, to form Xs. It shouldn’t be too hard, not as long as there’s a deep enough layer of mud to drive into. The first pair goes in here”—she slashed an X across the wall—“about a foot from the gatehouse. The next pair goes in three feet from the first.” She slashed another X across the wall. “We can’t space them out any farther because each support must double as a work platform from which to construct the next pair, since we don’t have the luxury of movable pile drivers …”

Excitement colored Arabella’s voice as she spoke. Her movements, always measured and contained, became big and sweeping. Her exertions flushed color into her pale cheeks. Her eyes, their depths always hidden, now danced like quicksilver.

Beau watched in quiet astonishment as she sketched, frowned, erased a mistake with her sleeve and started again. It seemed to him as if a butterfly had suddenly emerged from its cocoon and shaken out its magnificent, shimmering wings.

She kept talking, kept drawing, turning to him every now and again, but he wasn’t really sure that she saw him. She saw something else, something he could not. She saw lines and angles, forces and counterforces, tension and balance. She saw elegance, beauty, and strength.

And for the first time, for the very first time, Beau saw her.