Rose Daughter (12 page)

“Father, what is it?” said Lionheart.

He shook his head. “Let me sit down—let us all sit down, and
I will tell you. Beauty—this is for you.” And he took the rose from the breast
of his coat. It should have been crushed and wilting after several hours in a
pocket, but it was not; it was still a perfectly scrolled, half-open
goblet-shaped bud of richest red, poised delicately on a long stem armed with
the fiercest thorns.

“Oh! What a beauty!” said Beauty. “I have none of that
colour. I wonder if it would strike if I cut the stem?”

Lionheart had turned to the pony. ‘That’s a good little
beast,” she said, not noticing how her father shivered at the word
beast.
“Is
she your profit from the city? You could have done much worse.”

Jeweltongue was rubbing one of her father’s lapels between
her fingers. “That is the most elegant cloth. I wish I had some of that.
Perhaps 1 can ask the traders to look out for some for me when they come
through again. Father, you must tell me where you found it. Master Jack would
buy a coat ot that faster than his sisters order dresses.”

“Father, you have pricked yourself,” said Beauty. “There is
blood on the stem.”

And then the old merchant shuddered so terribly that he
nearly fell down, and the sisters forgot everything in their anxiety for him.

He seemed to them to be feverish, and so they drew out his
bed, and pulled off his boots, and tucked him up with blankets and propped him
with pillows, and fed him soup, and told him not to talk but just to rest. He
wanted to resist them, but he found he had no strength to resist, so he drank
the soup and fay back, murmuring, “I will lie here just a little while, and
then I will tell you,” but as he said, “I will tell you,” his face relaxed, and
he was asleep.

Once or twice that day he woke and said aloud in distress,
“I must tell you—I must tell you,” and each time one of the sisters went and
sat beside him, and took his hand, and said, “Yes. yes, of course you will tell
us, but wait a little till you’re feeling stronger. You have had a very long
journey, and you are weary.”

Beauty dreamt the dream that night, but the endless corridor
was lined with rose-bushes, and while she could see no roses, their scent was
heavy upon the air. But this lime the perfume gave her no comfort, and the long
thorny branches tore at her as she tried to walk past them, and one caught her
cheek. With the sharp suddenness of the pain she almost cried out, only just
stopping herself by biting her lips, and when she touched her face, there was
blood upon her fingertips. When she woke, she found blood on her pillow; she
had bitten her lip in her sleep, and three drops had fallen on the pillow slip,
making a shape like a three-petalled flower or a rose-bud just unfurling.

The old merchant slept all the rest of the next day, and
that night, and the day following, waking seldom, though sleeping restlessly,
and Beauty and Jeweltongue went about their ordinary tasks with heavy hearts
and distracted minds, wondering what their father would tell them and wishing
both that he might sleep a little longer so they need not hear it quite yet,
and that he might wake soon and let them know the worst. Lionheart, much valued
as she now was by her employers, had asked and been granted special leave to
come home every evening while her father was so ill, at least till she had some
notion of whether he grew sicker or would mend. She left before dawn and came
home after dark, riding her father’s pony, whom she had named Daffodil, and she
was tired and short of sleep, but so were all three sisters, for worry.

On the third evening, at last, the old merchant’s head
cleared, and he called his daughters to him, that he might tell them his story,
and he told them all of it, sparing himself nothing. He finished by saying, “I
do not wish to lie to you now. But there is no question of Beauty taking my
place. As soon as I am strong enough again to walk that far, I will return to
the Beast’s palace. And then the Beast can deal with me as he sees fit. But I
am glad to have had the chance to see you all, my dears, my dearcr-lhan-dears,
this final time, to tell you how much 1 love you and to say goodbye.”

Beauty had sat cold and motionless through the last of her father’s
story, and at these words the tears ran down her cheeks and dropped into her
lap. “Ah! That 1 should have asked you for a rose! I was selfish in my little,
little
sorrow—and it is I who will take up the fate / have earned. Father, I am going
to the Beast’s palace.”

He would not hear of it; but she would hear of nothing else,
and they argued. Beauty, always the gentle one, the peace-maker, was roused to
fury at last; she crossed her arms tightly over her stomach as if she were
holding herself together and roared like Lionheart—or like the Beast. But the
old man’s strength came back to him twice over in this, and for a little while
he was again the man he had been just after the death of his wife, wild with
the strength of grief and loss. And so the old merchant and his youngest
daughter shouted at each other till Teacosy fled the house and hid in the
now-crowded shed with the goat, the chickens, and the pony, Daffodil.

But Jeweltongue and Lionheart, after a little thought, came
in on Beauty’s side, saying, “He says she will take no harm of him, and he
declared he would kill you!”

“I am old, and the little left remaining of my life is
worthless; you love me, but that is all. The three of you will do well enough
without me.”

But that all three of his daughters should range themselves
against him was too much for him after all, for he was older now, and the
winter had gone very hardly with him, and he had been near the end of what
remained of his bodily strength before the blizzard and the meeting with the
Beast. His fever came on him again, and he lay half senseless for many days,
rousing himself occasionally to forbid Beauty to leave him, although he seemed
to have forgotten where she was going. The sisters took a little of what
remained of their thatching money—for they had come through the lean winter
just past with a little to spare, partly on account of having one less mouth to
feed in their father’s absence—and paid the local leech for a tonic, but it had
no effect.

“I do not think he will mend till I am gone,” said Beauty at
last, a fortnight after their father had come home with his dreadful news. But
then her sisters clung to her, and Jeweltongue wept openly, and even
Lionheart’s face was wet, although she had twisted her expression into her most
ferocious scowl.

“I will—1 will surely be able to visit,” Beauty said,
weeping with them. “This palace must be close at hand—as Father has described
it. Or he is so great a sorcerer as to make it seem so, and I do not care the
truth of it. I am a quick walker—I will find a way to come here sometime and
tell you how I get on. It will—perhaps I will be like Lion-heart, who comes
home every seven days. I will—I will weed the garden, while Lionheart bakes
bread. Remember, he has—he has promised no harm to me. And—can a Beast who
loves roses so much be so very terrible?”

Her eyes turned again to the red rose in the vase on the windows!]!.
It had opened slowly and was now a huge flat cupful of darkest red petals, and
its perfume filled the little house. As its colour was like none of her roses,
so was its perfume different from them also; this was a deeper, richer, wilder
smell, and it seemed almost to follow her round during the day, so that it was
in her mouth when she cleaned out the shed or weeded the farthest row in her
vegetable garden. And it came to her every night, in the dream, where the
rose-bushes now grew thicker and thicker, till they crossed the corridor and
tangled with the bushes on the other side, and she could only force her way
through them more and more slowly, wrapping her hands awkwardly in her skirts
as she handled the dangerous stems. And yet, in her dream, it never occurred to
her not to go on; it did not even occur to her to look behind her and see if
the way back was clear.

Beauty had cut two bits off the long stem of the dark red rose
and thrust them into her cuttings bed, and she spoke to them every day, saying,
“Please shoot for me, for my sisters and my father, so that they may think of
me when they see you bloom,” for she in truth did not believe, in her heart of
hearts, that the Beast would keep his promise. But it was equally clear to her
that this was her fate, that she had called its name and it had come to her,
and she could do nothing now but own it.

And so it was less than three weeks since the old mer—

chant’s return when Beauty packed up the few things she had
chosen to take with her and set out. But she had thought often and long about
her Father’s story: how the Beast had been roused by the theft of the rose, how
he had dwindled and looked sad, how he had taken particular interest in the
daughter who believed her roses were her friends. And so she took one more
thing with her, secretly, tucked away in her clothing.

She embraced her sisters on the doorstep in the early
morning. Their father had had a bad night, and Jeweltongue had sat up with him.
There were hollows under her eyes and heavy lines around her mouth, where there
had never been lines before. Lionheart looked little better, for her
late-and-early hours were telling even on her strength. The three of them spoke
quietly, for their father was finally asleep, and they hoped that he would not
learn that Beauty was gone till it was too late to stop or to follow her.

Teacosy, aware that something had gone wrong with the old
merchant’s homecoming, had been shadowing each sister in turn so closely that
whoever was chosen for that hour could not move without tripping over her. In
the last few days she had apparently decided that the wrongness threatened
Beauty most and never left her side, generally creeping up the loft ladder
during the night to sleep on her feet and having to be carried down in the
mornings. She was now leaning against Beauty’s shins so heavily she felt like a
boulder instead of a small dog, except that boulders don’t tremble.

“I cannot think the Beast’s palace can be found unless he
chooses it be found; surely Father will understand that searching is useless.
...” Beauty’s voice trailed away. “Do not forget to water my cuttings bed every
day; twice a day, if the summer grows hot....” Again her voice faltered. It was
difficult to think of what needed to be said when there was so much and so
little to choose from. Finally she stood silent, gripping her sisters’ hands,
smelling the warm human smell of them, the scent of each as precise and
individual as the shape of her face, and she was terribly aware that she was
going to a place where there would be no hands to grasp nor arms to embrace
her, and no friendly human smells.

Jewel tongue loosed her hand from Lionheart’s and reached
into a pocket in her apron. “This is for you,” she said to Beauty. She held out
a tiny embroidered heart on a silk rope. “It’s to—to—I don’t know. It’s not to
remember us by, because I know you’ll remember us, but it’s to have something
to hold in your hand when you think of us. I—I only thought of it myself a few
nights ago; you know it’s been so hard to think clearly about anything since
Father returned.... I would have made you a rose, but I didn’t think I could do
one well enough in so short a time; hearts I can do in my sleep. As I think I
did this one. And—I’ve used some of Lionheart’s hair. You remember you picked
up the bits after you finished cutting it, and put them in the old sugar bowl
on the mantel? So you have both of us, Lionheart and me. Here. Take it.”

Beauty released both hands to take the silk rope and set it
round her neck, and then the three sisters embraced, till Beauty broke away and
went running down the track, her tears cold on her face in the early-morning
breeze, and the desolate howl of Teacosy in her ears.

When she came to the end of the little track that led to
Rose Cottage and set her feet upon the wider way that came up from the city and
wound past Longchance on its way to its end in the wild mountains of the east,
she closed her eyes and turned in a circle three times clockwise, and then she
walked three steps forward, holding her hand in front of her face just in case
she walked into a tree, though she was quite certain she would not. After three
steps she opened her eyes and found herself on a track only a little bigger
than the one that led off the main way to Rose Cottage, but it was a track she
was quite sure she had never seen before. The wood on either side of her beyond
the track looked older and wilder than thai around Rose Cottage. The tangle
here told her that there would be no frequent glimpses of farmland beyond, as
there were everywhere near Long-chance, where the undergrowth was regularly
cleared and the old trees were felled for firewood and building.

Furthermore, running on either side of her, at just a little
distance, as if the track had once been broader, were two rows of beech trees,
as if lining a drive. She had seen few beeches since they had left the city,
and she had missed them. She left the track for a moment when there was a
tittle suggestion of a gap in the low scrub and put her hands on a beech tree.
The fee! of the smooth familiar bark gave her courage. She touched
Jeweltongue’s little embroidered heart and returned to the path.

She wondered if her father had awakened yet, if he had
missed her, if Jeweltongue would tel! him she was only out in the garden, if Teacosy’s
wretchedness would give them alt away immediately. She wondered if she had been
right to guess that her father would not mend till she left—and that he would
mend when she did. Had the Beast sent his illness? Did he watch them from his
palace? What a sorcerer could and could not do could never quite be relied
on—not even always by the sorcerer. She could hate him—easily she could hate
him—for the misery of it if he had sent it. If he kept his promises like a man,
did he suppose that they, mere humans as they were, would keep theirs any less?
The price was high for one stolen rose, but they would pay it. If he had sent
her father’s illness to beat them into acquiescence, she would hate him for it.