Authors: Pamela Ditchoff
Mrs. Beast
Mrs. Beast
A Novel
By
Pamela Ditchoff
ALSO BY PAMELA DITCHOFF
The Mirror of Monsters and Prodigies
Seven Days & Seven Sins
STAY THIRSTY PRESS
An Imprint of Stay Thirsty Publishing A Division of STAY THIRSTY MEDIA, INC. 
Copyright © 2009 by Pamela Ditchoff
All Rights Reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
[email protected]
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Cover Design:
Jason Mathews
Pamela Ditchoff
MRS. BEAST
Chapter One
Shortly After Happily Ever After
Within the alabaster walls of Palace Fleur de Coeur, alone with her husband inside the Great Hall, Princess Beauty faces away from Prince Runyon, the back of her tulle and silk gown hiked up at the waist. Her cheeks are blushed with the modesty she surrendered to grant the Prince’s request. She imagines that at this moment her countrywomen are gazing out cottage windows wearing Bruegel grins of utter contentment on their broad, flat faces, a babe underfoot, another on the breast as their husbands sow spring fields.
Beauty sighs wistfully and prays this embarrassment will be compensated by a child planted in her womb.
Runyon, the Prince, has only twice bedded his wife since their wedding night three months ago.
He reclines on a brocade divan; a halo of wheat blonde hair frames his angular face.
He yawns and exhales with exaggerated boredom. "Now, I want you to bend ovah."
Beauty hesitates and bites her cherry pink lip. She gazes about the hall as if she may find an answer in this room where she spent so many happy hours dining and dancing with her beloved Beast.
But she finds neither comfort nor magic anywhere within the once-austere and elegant Great Hall. For now, hundreds of candles light dozens of chandeliers, Persian carpets lay wall to wall beneath red velvet love seats, and pots of scented civet fat vaporize in corners.
Nude statues cast in lewd poses are staggered throughout the Great Hall, full-length mirrors line the walls, and a portrait of Prince Runyon hangs above each mirror.
In the room's center is Runyon's divan swaged in yellow silk, from which he claps his hands and whines, “Well? How wong do you propose to keep me waiting?”
Beauty gathers her lustrous chestnut curls and obeys his request.
She closes her eyes and pictures the last time they'd mated when he was still the Beast and they had rolled and growled on a secluded moss bed like two badgers: the scent of his musk bag stinging her nostrils, his coppery fur clutched in her fists, the exquisite moment his fangs gripped her clavicle muscle.
Beauty's back begins to ache, but she's determined to please her husband.
After all, Runyon had granted her request to spend a day together without the company of his fawning entourage.
Since his transformation occurred, Dukes, Countesses and royal-wanna-be's constantly drop by the palace, buttering up Runyon with the finesse of a patissier.
"I shall be gweatly pweased if you will try wiggwing that thing," Runyon says in the manner of speech affectation popular with vain and bored nobles.
Beauty has not been schooled in the art of seduction, and had no such need when Runyon was his beastly self.
However, she did promise to love, honor, and obey, and although fairy tale beauties are
modest, they're also blindly obedient to husbands and fathers.
She swallows the lump of pride rising in her throat and does as her husband commands.
Muted waves of tittering and sniggering fill the Great Hall.
A pair of mirthful eyes twinkles behind the holes in each of Runyon's portraits.
They are not alone after all.
Beauty snaps upright, then collapses in a faint.
*
*
*
Outside the walls of Palace Fleur de Coeur, northwest beyond the rose garden, is the last twenty miles of French fairy tale countryside that ends with the Deep Icy River bordering Grimm Land.
In the dense forests of Grimm Land, angst clings and spreads like lichen. Roaming and skulking among the trees are animals capable of speaking, granting wishes, and swallowing children.
The place is lousy with frogs, witches, giants, dwarfs, elves and goblins, but fairy tale beauties are rare as sixty carat diamonds.
Sharp objects, to which beauties are particularly vulnerable, abound:
knives, axes, spindles, and thorns.
Grimm peasants and gentry dwell in burgs and villages below hilltop castles where kings exact impossible promises, queens plot infanticide, princes await
adventure, and princesses await princes.
And in her Art Deco Palace atop Grimm Land's Glass Mountain, the
highest and least accessible point in all of fairy tale domain, Elora the Enchantress is watching as Beauty falls to the floor.
*
*
*
"Bricklebrit!" Elora curses, and Croesus, the Ibizan hound curled at her feet, spits three gold coins from his mouth.
Elora woke at noon in a mean mood. Head fuzzy, tongue furry, she regretted that third goblet of punch.
Last night was the Vernal Equinox and, as the most mystical enchantress of the realm, Elora had been obliged to entertain Grimm Land's magic minions. The Gingerbread Witch sat in Elora's Duncan Grant chair, stinking of singed flesh and fuming over Hansel and Gretel devouring each new candy cottage she built. Rumpelstiltskin crabbed on the shortage of nubile miller's daughters while nervously picking dog hair from the Velcro strip that bound his two halves together.
Old Mother Gothel, a blonde braid big as an anaconda wrapped around her neck, climbed Elora's stainless-steel winding staircase chanting, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair."
Godfather Death, reeking of cave dirt and candle wax, silenced her by drawing a lit taper from his trench coat, holding his fingers over the wick, and fixing her with a stony glare.
The Nixie of the Mill Pond, her voice a saccharine breeze, insisted something be done about, "The goddamn fairies pissing in my pond."
The Thirteenth Wise Woman still held a grudge over Sleeping Beauty, and the twelve others debated the definition of virtue.
Is wealth a virtue, is beauty a virtue, is sweetness a virtue; can casting a spell be virtuous?