Page 44 of The Hopeless Romantic’s Guide to Enchantment

But the Bickles were not any other household.

“You’re right!” declared Mrs Bickle, who managed to sit up and swoon in a single well-practised motion. “The yearnings of the soul cannot be gainsaid.”

This sentiment earned enthusiastic agreement from Mr Bickle. “Very well then, Erica. Do you wish to marry this bear?”

And to my utter delight, Miss Penworthy said: “Yes.”

* * *

“You are certain,” Miss Bickle asked her companion as she packed her bag to go, “that you definitely want to do this?” I had, by this stage, been observing Miss Bickle on and off for well over a year and this was the most tediously sensible I had ever seen her.

“I am,” lied Miss Penworthy.

“But what of your dream to meet an affluent, beautiful, older-but-not-inappropriately-old lady with a title of her own and spend the rest of your life as her pampered love puppet?”

At that, Miss Penworthy sighed the death of a dream. “My father is demanding I marry. I fear my window for finding an older-but-not-inappropriately-old lady with a title of her own who will let me spend the rest of my life as her pampered love puppet is closing.”

“So you’re going to marry a bear?”

“Well, it’s that or a man,” Miss Penworthy pointed out. “And in honesty I find the latter prospect more galling.”

Silently, Miss Bickle helped her friend into her pelisse and smoothed out the wrinkles from the sleeves. When that was done, she took her by the hands and said, “Well. Then you must follow your heart. And I hope you shall have a great adventure.”

Privately, Miss Penworthy hoped the same. Although she shared many traits with Miss Bickle – a fondness for literature, a still greater fondness for flights of fancy, and a tremendous willingness to defy social convention if she thought she’d get away with it – she was also aware of the differences between them. The Bickles may have been of poor stock, but Lysistrata Bickle was heiress to a fortune in tin, and that allowed her tremendous licence to dwell in one days and maybes. The Penworthys, by contrast, were a family of good name and little fortune, and the hour when Miss Penworthy would need to secure her future at the cost of her present was fast approaching.

Tears flirting with the corners of her eyes, she embraced Miss Bickle tightly. “Thank you. I shall try my very, very best to.”

* * *

Outside the Bickle residence, Miss Penworthy hauled herself onto the bear’s back and, with the Bickles waving her off as she went, let it carry her away into the darkness.

The moment the lights of the Bickle house had faded into the distance, she realised how profoundly foolish she had been. “You’re going to eat me, aren’t you?”

“No,” said the bear.

“Isn’t that what you’d say if you were going to eat me?”

“No,” said the bear.

Miss Penworthy thought about this. “Why not?”

“If I was going to eat you, there would be little you could do about it. So why would I lie?”

The rich blue midnight of the Cornwall coast slipped by as Miss Penworthy let that thought sink in. “You might want to catch me unawares?”

“I’m a bear,” said the bear. “I think there’s a limit to how unawares anybody can be in my presence.”

Riding a bear, it turned out, was much less uncomfortable than Miss Penworthy had feared it would be. The fur beneath her was warm and, gripping the beast’s coat firmly in her hands, she felt strangely secure. “Do you have a name, bear?”

For a moment, the bear made no answer. Then it said, “Yes and no.”

“I’m not sure yes and no is a sensical answer. Either you have a name, or you don’t.”

The bear shrugged, and the movement of its great shoulders ran through Miss Penworthy’s knees, up her legs, and hovered gently around the centre of her chest. Then, in low, gentle tones, the bear said, “You are riding a white bear along a cliffside, into a country that may or may not wholly exist within the physical world, and that’s the detail which strikes you as unusual?”

“Well, names are important. You must have a name. Or not have one. Those really are the only options unless” – years of keeping company with Miss Bickle paid off all at once – “you’re under some kind of curse which means your name is no longer your own and it, along with your proper shape, will be restored to you only if you can earn the love of a young woman before the sun sets on the eve of your nineteenth birthday.”

The bear was silent.