Rose Daughter

Her
earliest memory was of waking from the dream. It
was also her only clear memory of her mother. Her mother was beautiful,
dashing, the toast of the town. Her youngest daughter remembered the blur of
activity, friends and hangers-on, soothsayers and staff, the bad-tempered pet
dragon on a leash—bad-tempered on account of the oca-mnda leaves in his food,
which prevented him from producing any more fire than might occasionally singe
his wary handler, out which also upset his digestion—the constant glamour and
motion which was her mother and her mother’s world. She remembered peeping out
at her mother from around various thresholds before various nurses and
governesses (hired by her dull merchant father) snatched her away. She remembered
too, although she was too young to put it into words, the excitability, no, the
restlessness of her mother’s manner, a restlessness of a too-acute alertness in
search of something that cannot be found. But such were the brightness and
ardour of her mother’s personality that those around her also were swept up
into her search, not knowing it was a search, happy merely to be a part of such
liveliness and gaiety.

The only thing that ever lingered was the sweet smell of her
mother’s perfume.

Her only memory of her mother’s face was from the night she
woke from the dream for the first time, crying in terror. In the dream she had
been walking—she could barely walk yet in her waking life—toddling down a long
dark corridor, only vaguely lit by a few candles set too far into their
sconces, too high up in the walls. The shadows stretched everywhere round her,
and that was terrible enough: and the silence was almost as dreadful as the darkness.
But what was even worse was that she knew a wicked monster waited for her at
the end of the corridor. It was the wickedest monster that had ever lived, and
it was waiting just for her, and she was all alone.

She was still young enough to be sleeping in a crib with
high barred sides; she remembered fastening her tiny fists round the wooden
bars, whose square edges cut into her soft palms. She remembered the dream—she
remembered crying—and she remembered her mother coming, and bending over her,
and picking her up, whispering gently in her ear, holding her against her
breast, softly stroking her back. Sitting down quietly on the nurse’s stool and
rocking her slowly till she fell asleep again.

She woke in her crib in the morning, just as usual. She
asked her nurse where her mamma was; her nurse stared and did not believe her
when she tried to tell her. in the few words she was old enough to use, that
her mamma had come to her in the night when she had cried. “I’d’ve heard you if
you yelled, miss,” said the nurse stiffly, “And I slept quiet last night.”

But she knew it was her mother, had to have been her mother.
She remembered the sweet smell of her perfume, and no one but her mother ever
wore that scent.

Her perfume smelt of flowers, but of no flowers the little
girl ever found, neither in the dozens of overflowing vases set in nearly every
room of their tall, magnificent town house nearly every day of the year, nor
anywhere in the long scrolling curves of the flower-beds in the gardens behind
the house, nor in the straight, meticulous rows within the glasshouses and
orangeries behind the garden.

She once confided to a new nurse her wish to find the flower
that had produced her mother’s scent. She was inspired to do so when the nurse
introduced herself by saying, “Hello, little one. Your daddy has told me your
name, but do you know mine? It’s Pansy, just like the flower. I bet you have
lots of pansies in your garden.”

“Yes, we do,” replied the little girl politely. “And they’re
my favourite—almost. My favourite is a flower I do not know. It is the flower
that my mother’s scent comes from. I keep hoping I will find it. Perhaps you
will help me.”

Pansy had laughed at her, but it was a friendly laugh. “What
a funny little thing you are,” she said. “Fancy at your age wanting to know
about perfume. You’ll be a heart-breaker in a few years, I guess.”

The little girl had looked at her new nurse solemnly but had
not troubled to explain further. She could tell Pansy meant to be kind. It was
true that she had first become interested in gardens as something other than
merely places her nurses sometimes took her. in the peremptory way of
grown-ups, when she had made the connexion between perfume smells and flower
smells. But she had very soon discovered that she simply liked gardens.

Her mother’s world—her mother’s house—was very exciting, but
it was also rather scary. She liked plants. They were quiet, and they stayed in
the same place, but they weren’t boring, like a lot of the things she was
supposed to be interested in were boring, such as dolls, which just lay there
unless you picked them up and did things with them (and then the chief thing
you were supposed to do with them, apparently, was to change their clothes, and
could there be anything more awfully, deadly boring than changing anyone’s
clothes any more often than one was utterly obliged to?). Plants got on with
making stems and leaves and flowers and fruit, whatever you did, and a lot of
them were nice to the touch: the slight attractive furriness of rabbit’s-ears
and Cupid’s darts, the slick waxy surfaces of camellia leaves and ivy—and lots
of them had beautiful flowers, which changed both shape and colour as they opened,
and some of them smelt interesting, even if none of them smelt like her
mother’s perfume. And then there were things like apples and grapes, which were
the best things in the world when you could break them off from the stem
yourself and eat them right there.

From the nurses’ point of view, the youngest girl was the
least trouble of the three. She neither went out seeking mischief, the more
perilous the better, the way the eldest did, nor answered impertinently (and
with a vocabulary alarmingly beyond her age), the way the second did. Her one
consistent misbehaviour, tiresome enough indeed as it was, and which no amount
of punishment seemed able to break her of. was that of escaping into the garden
the moment the nurse’s eye was diverted, where she would later be found,
digging little holes and planting things—discarded toys (especially dolls),
half-eaten biscuits, dead leaves, and dry twigs—singing to herself, and
covering her white pinafores and stockings with dirt. None of the nurses ever
noticed that the twigs, were they left where she planted them, against all
probability, grew. One old gardener noticed, and because he was old and
considered rather silly, he had the time to spend making the little girl’s
acquaintance.

Nurses never lasted long. Despite the care taken and the warnings
given to keep the nurses in the nurseries, eventually some accident of meeting
occurred with the merchant’s wife, and the latest nurse, immediately found to
be too slow or too dowdy or too easily bewildered to suit, was fired. When
Pansy came to say good-bye, she said, “1 have to go away. Don’t cry, lovey,
it’s just the way it is. But I wanted to tell you: it’s roses your mum’s
perfume smells of. Roses. No, you don’t have ‘em here. It’s generally only
sorcerers who can get ‘em lo grow much. The village I was born in, we had a
specially clever greenwitch, and she had one. just one, but it was heaven when
it bloomed. That’s how I know. But it takes barrels of petals to make perfume
enough to fill a bottle the size of your littlest fingertip—that’s why the
sorcerers are interested, see, I never knew a sorcerer wasn’t chiefly out to
make money—your pa’s paying a queen’s ransom for it, I can tell you that.”

When the youngest daughter was five years old, her mother
died. She had bet one of her hunting friends she could leap a half-broken colt
over a farm cart. She had lost the bet and broken her neck. The colt broke both
forelegs and had to be shot.

The whole city mourned, her husband and two elder daughters
most of all. The youngest one embarrassed her family at the funeral by
repeating, over and over, ‘‘Where is my mamma? Where is my mamma?”

“She is too young to understand,” said the grieving friends
and acquaintances, and patted her head, and embraced the husband and the elder
girls.

A well-meaning greenwitch offered the father a charm for his
youngest daughter. “She’ll work herself into a fever, poor little thing,” the
woman said, holding the little bag on its thin ribbon out to him. “You just
hang it round her neck—I’d do it myself, but it’ll work better coming from your
hands—and she’ll know her mamma’s gone, but it won’t hurl till she’s a little
more ready for it. It’ll last three, four months if you don’t let it get wet.”

But the merchant knocked the small bundle out of the woman’s
hand with a cry of rage, and might have struck the greenwitch herself—despite
the bad luck invariably attendant on any violence offered any magic
practitioner—if those standing nearest had not held him back. The startled
greenwitch was hustled away, someone explaining to her in an undertone that the
merchant was a little beside himself, that grief had made him so unreasonable
that he blamed his wife’s soothsayers for not having warned her against her
last, fatal recklessness, and had for the moment turned against all magic. Even
her pet dragon had been given away.

The greenwitch allowed herself to be hustled. She was a
kindly woman, but not at all grand—greenwitches rarely were—and had known the
family at all only because she had twice or three times found the youngest daughter
in a flowerbed in one of the city’s municipal parks and returned her to her
distracted nurse. She gave one little backward glance to that youngest daughter,
who was still running from one mourner to the next and saying, “Where is my
mamma? Where is my mamma?”

“I don’t like to think of the little thing’s dreams,”
murmured the green witch, but her escort had brought her to the cemetery gate
and turned her loose, with some propelling force, and the greenwitch shook her
head sadly but went her own way.

The night of her mother’s funeral her youngest daughter had
the dream for the second time. She was older in the dream just as she was in
life; older and taller, she spoke in complete sentences and could run without
falling down. None of this was of any use to her in the dream. The candles were
still too high overhead to cast anything but shadows; she was still all alone,
and the unseen monster waited, just for her.

After that she had the dream often.

At first, when she cried out for her mamma, the nurses were
sympathetic, but as the months mounted up to a year since the funeral, and no
more than a week ever passed before another midnight waking, another sobbing
cry of “Mamma! Mamma!” the nurses grew short-tempered. The little girl learnt
not to cry out. but she still had the dream.

And she eluded her protectresses more often than ever and
crept out into the garden, where the old gardener (keeping a wary eye out for
the descent of a shrieking harpy from the nursery) taught her how better to
plant things, and which things to plant, and what to do to make them happy
after they were planted.

She grew old enough to try to flee, and so discover that
this did her no good in the dream; it was the same dark, silent, sinister corridor,
without windows or doors, the same unknown, expectant monster, whichever way
she turned. And then she discovered she had never really tried to nm away at
all, that she was determined to follow the corridor to its end, to face the
monster. And that was the most terrifying thing of all.

She wondered, as they all three grew up, if it was the dream
itself that made her so different from her sisters. They were all beautiful;
all three took after their mother. But the eldest one was as brave as she had
been, and her name was Lionheart; the second one was as clever as she had been,
and her name was Jeweltongue. The youngest was called Beauty.