A moment later she heard voices behind her.
"Bathe her and put a soothing ointment on her bu**ocks," the Prince was saying, "and you may talk to the Princess if you like, and she to you. You are to treat her with the utmost respect," said the Prince and then she heard his steps dying away.
She lay too afraid to look behind her. The door was closed again. She heard steps. She heard the cloth in the basin of water.
"It's me, dearest Princess," said a woman's voice, and she realized it was a young woman, a woman her own age, and could only be the Innkeeper's daughter.
She buried her face in the pillow. "This is unbearable," she thought, and suddenly with all her heart she hated the Prince, but she was far too humiliated to think of it. She felt the girl's weight on the bed beside her, and just the rough cloth of her apron brushing against Beauty's bu**ocks caused the sore and stinging flesh to ache more keenly.
She felt as if her bu**ocks must be enormous, though she knew they were not, or giving off some terrible light with all their redness. The girl would feel their heat; this girl, of all girls, who had tried so hard to please the Prince by spanking her far harder than the Prince had realized.
The wet cloth stroked her shoulders, her arms, her neck. It stroked her back and then her thighs and legs and feet, the girl carefully avoiding her sex and the soreness.
But then after the girl had wrung out the cloth, she touched the bu**ocks lightly.
"O, I know it hurts, dearest Princess," she confided. "I'm so sorry, but what could I do when the Prince commanded me?" The rag was rough on the soreness, and Beauty realized this time that the Prince had left her with a score of welts. She moaned, and though she loathed this girl with a violent feeling she'd never had for anyone else in her brief life, the cloth nevertheless felt good to her.
The moist cloth was cooling her; it was like the gently massaging of an itch. And Beauty grew quiet as the girl continued to bathe her in a gently circular motion.
"Dearest Princess," the girl said, "I know how you suffer but he is so very handsome, and he will have his way, there's nothing to be done about it. Please talk to me, please tell me that you don't despise me."
"I don't despise you," Beauty said in a small spiritless voice. "How could I blame you or despise you?"
"I had to do it. And what a spectacle it was. Princess, I must tell you something. You may be angry with me, but maybe it will be a consolation to you."
Beauty closed her eyes and pressed her cheek into the pillow. She did not want to hear it. But she liked the girl's voice, its respect and gentleness. The girl did not mean to hurt her. She could feel that awe in the girl, that humility Beauty had known in all her servants all her life. It was no different, not even with this one who had held her over her knee in a tavern and spanked her in the presence of crude men and villagers. Beauty pictured her as she remembered her from the kitchen door: her dark curly hair in ringlets about her little round face, and those big eyes full of apprehension. How fierce the Prince must have seemed to her! Why she must have been terrified that at any moment, the Prince would order her stripped and humiliated! Beauty smiled to herself, thinking of it. She felt a tenderness for the girl, and for her gentle hands, which were now bathing the hot, aching flesh so carefully.
"All right," Beauty said, "what is it you want to tell me?"
"Only that you were so lovely, dearest Princess, that you have such beauty. Even as you were there, why, how many who seem beautiful could have kept their beauty in such a trial, and you were so beautiful, Princess." Over and over she said this word, better words she did not know. "You were so...so graceful, Princess," she said. "You bore it so well, with such obedience to his Highness, the Prince."
Beauty said nothing. She was thinking of it again, of how it must have seemed to the girl. But it gave Beauty such a frightful sense of herself that she stopped thinking of it. This girl had seen her so closely, had seen the redness of her flesh as it was punished, and had felt her writhing uncontrollably.
Beauty would have cried again, but she didn't want to.
For the first time, through a film of ointment, she felt the girl's naked fingers on her. They massaged the welts.
"Ooooh!" the Princess gasped.
"I'm sorry," said the girl. "I am trying so to be gentle."
"No, you must go on. Rub it in well," sighed Beauty, "it feels good, actually. Maybe it's that moment when you take your fingers away." How try to explain it, her bu**ocks flooded with this pain, itching with it, the welts little hard pebblelike bits of pain, and those fingers pinching them and then releasing them.
"Everyone adores you, Princess," the girl whispered. "Everyone has seen your beauty, and nothing to disguise it or hide your defects, and you have no defects. And they are swooning over you, Princess."
"Is that really so? Or do you say it to console me?" asked Beauty.
"O, it is so," said the girl. "O, you should have heard the rich women out in the Inn yard tonight, all of them pretending they weren't envious, but all of them knew that stripped they couldn't hold a candle to you, Princess. And of course the Prince was so beautiful, so handsome and so..."
"Ah, yes," sighed Beauty.
The girl had coated the bu**ocks now and was putting even more ointment into the flesh. And she worked some of it into Beauty's thighs, her fingers stopping just before the hair between Beauty's legs, and again, with fierce annoyance and shame, Beauty felt that pleasure coming back. And with this girl!
"O, if the Prince were to know it," she thought suddenly. She couldn't imagine him being pleased, and it suddenly occurred to her that he might punish her any time she felt this pleasure without his giving it to her. She tried to put it out of her mind. She wished she knew where he was now.
"Tomorrow," the girl said, "when you go on to the Prince's castle, the road all along the way will be lined with those who want to see you. Word is spreading all through the Kingdom..."
Beauty gave a little start at these words. "Are you sure of it?" she said fearfully. It was too much to think of suddenly. She remembered that peaceful moment in the afternoon forest. She had been alone ahead of the Prince and had some how managed to forget the soldiers following him. And suddenly to think of people all along the road waiting to see her! She remembered the crowded village streets, those inevitable moments when her naked thighs or br**sts even had been brushed by an arm or the fabric of a skirt -- she felt her breath halt.