Beauty

Beauty was born without a mother. That is to say his mother died in childbirth, leaving him in the peculiar care of his father and his father’s servants. Since Beauty’s father was a soldier, he was often absent from the family estate. Beauty, therefore, spent all of his waking and sleeping moments with the women who cleaned, cooked, and cared for the castle in which he lived.

So uninterested was Beauty’s father in him that he even went as far as to allow the housemaid-turned-nursemaid (she gave birth to a daughter at the same time Beauty was born and was able to nurse him at her breast) to name the poor boy. Having used what she thought was the best name available on her own daughter (some said she was the spawn of the gentleman for whom the woman worked), and she couldn’t very well call the boy Adrianna two (or too, the woman knew not the distinction) she simply called him what he was.

From the time Beauty was a babe he learned the ways of women. They taught him to clean and to cook and to care for them when they were tired at the end of the day. Time and time again his father would return home from battle only to find his son rubbing the feet of a char woman. The more it happened the less his father expected of him.

And so Beauty went without the benefit of a role model. His father was the only man Beauty knew of, for his father surrounded himself only with women unless he was off to war. From his father Beauty learned only that if he was ignored, there would surely be a woman to take care of him.