Rose Daughter (20 page)

A thought pulled itself from nowhere in the back of her nind
and formed itself into a terrible solidity before she mild stop it. She
flinched away from it, but it was too late, t was a thought she had often
suppressed in the last year md a half, but here, in the Beast’s palace, where
she was listracted and dismayed by too many things, it had broken ree of her
prohibition.

What was the curse on three sisters living at Rose Cot-age?

She had held to her decision not to ask for more details—lor
to make any reference to the little Mrs Greendown had old her of it to her
family. Nor had Jeweltongue nor Lion-icart ever mentioned any disturbing hint
of such a tale to ier.

Had Beauty’s hopeful guess been correct, that Long-hanccrs,
accustomed to their long-standing loss of rnagic nd again disappointed of a
greenwitch—and secure in the nowlcdge of only two sisters living at Rose
Cottage—had een content to let the tale lie silent? Could Jeweltongue, /ho had
developed almost as great a gift for gossip as she had for sewing, really never
have heard anything of it? Or did she have the same fears of it—and had she
made the same decision about it—that Beauty had?

A curse must be a very dreadful thing, but it was unknown, a
bogey in the dark, as insubstantial as a bad dream. Her bad dream never had
done anything to her. then, had it’.’ It was just a bad dream. But her sisters’
happiness was as near to her as her own heart, and as precious. They were happy
at Rose Cottage—happy as they had not been when they lived in the city and were
great and grand.

It seemed to Beauty that Lionheart’s imposture was so
fragile and dangerous a thing that even thinking too much about a curse—which
might only be a folk-tale—could topple her. And then, if it weren’t a
folk-tale, destroy them all.

If it weren’t a folk-tafe, surely it would have caught up
with them—or whatever it was that curses did—by now? When they first set foot
over the threshold to Rose Cottage, when they first went to Longchance. when
they had lived there for a year and a day? And Mrs Greendown had said that the
greenwitch had been a good one and that Long-chance had been fond of her—the
greenwitch who had left Rose Cottage to three sisters.

Well, three sisters did not live at Rose Cottage now.

What had the princess who married the Phoenix felt about her
fate?

And using the same force of will that had enabled her to
sort through and comprehend her father’s papers, when his business failed and
his health broke, she thrust all thoughts of the curse away from her again and
pretended that her last thoughts had been of bats and butterflies.

The Beast will release me, she repeated to herself. He will
release nie because ... because he is a great sorcerer, and I am only a ... a
gardener.

He was waiting for her just inside the doorway of the same
hall where she had eaten dinner—and he had not—the two nights previous. For the
first time since she had closed her balcony windows and turned away to come to
dinner, her heart truly failed her, and an involuntary gesture towards her
little embroidered heart did not reassure her.

Her heart had not sunk when she set eyes on the Beast, but
when her eyes had moved past him and into that dark hall She hoped Fourpaws
would come again.

She turned back to the Beast and smiled with an effort.
^;
’My
Tor—Beast,” she said. My Beast, she thought, and Felt a blush rising to her
face, but the hall was not well lit enough for him to see. But what did she know
of how a Beast’s eyes saw? And she remembered, and did not wish to remember,
how quickly and surely he had walked into the darkness when he had left her the
night before. And the strangeness of him, and of her circumstances, washed over
her like a freak wave from a threatening but quiet sea, and she turned away
from him and moved towards her seat, grasping at the tall stems of the
torcheres she passed as if she needed them for balance.

He was at her chair at once, moving it forward as she sat
down. She thought of dinner-parties in the city, when some tall black-dressed
man would help her with her chair, and of her dislike of making
conversation—laboriously with dull, or distressedly with maliciously
witty—strangers, and tried to be glad she was here instead. But the effort was
only partly successful. The Beast bent to pour her wine, and she wished both to
cower away from the looming bulk of him and to reach out and touch him, to know
by the contact with solidity and warmth that he was real, even if the knowing
would make her fear the greater. She stared at his reaching arm. candlelight
winking off the tiny intricacies of black braid, dipping into the miniature
pools of shadow in the gathers of his shirt cuff. She folded her hands securely
in her lap.

He sat down where he had sat the night before, and the night
before that, at some little distance down the table, on her right hand. If she
had leant forward and stretched out her
arm,
she might still have
touched his sleeve. She could think of nothing to say after all; distractedly
she reached out, took an apple off a silver tray, and began to peel it.

“You have found my poor roses,” he said, after a little
silence. “That is, you found them on your first evening here and then knew why
I did not wish to show them to you. But today—

“I—oh, I had not thought!” she said, a whole new reading of
the day’s work she had been so proud of opening before her mind’s eye. She
dropped her apple and looked up at him, reaching forward after all, and
touching his sleeve, but without any awareness that she did so. “I love roses—I
wished to do something for you—for them—I did not think—I should have asked—but
I cannot bear to have nothing to do. Oh. are you offended? Please forgive—please
do not be offended.”

“I am not offended,” he said, obviously in surprise. “Why
would I be offended? I love roses too, and it is one of my greatest sorrows
that mine no longer bloom. I honour and thank you for anything you can do for
them.”

One of my greatest sorrows, she thought, caught away from
roses by the phrase. One. What was—were—the others? Why are you here? You would
not have killed my father if 1 had not come. Why did you say you would?
“They—they needed tending,” she said hesitantly. “Your roses.”

“And why have I not done so myself?” He raised his hands
again. “I am clumsier than you know. Lifting chairs and pouring decanted wine
is the limit of my dexterity. I feared to hurt my darlings worse....” There was
another little silence, and then, so low Beauty was not quite sure she heard
the words: “And besides, I do not know how.”

He paused again, and Beauty thought: Who is it that conjures
gloves and ladders out of the air, who is it that hauls my rubbish to the mouth
of the carriage-way—the mouth and no farther? When the Beast showed no sign of
continuing, Beauty said timidly: “But... sir ... the ... the Nu-men of this
place is very powerful.”

“Yes,” said the Beast softly. “It is. But it can touch
nothing living.”

Silence fell again, but for the first time in this hall, the
silence did not oppress her—although she hoped that did not mean Fourpaws would
stay away. She thought: I have something to do; I have earned my bread, and I
may eat it.

As she was reaching for a platter of hot food, the Beast
began: “I thank you again for your...” and his hand approached hers as she
touched the platter. There was a raek of caudles just there, and for a moment
their two hands and the platter made a graceful shape, the shadows crisp and
elegantly laid out, a bawl of fruit and a decanter adding height and depth.
Still
Life, with Candles,
she thought, or perhaps
Portrait of Two Hands.

“But—” rumbled the Beast, and his face curled terrify-ingly
into a frown. Beauty snatched her hand back, shrank in her chair. “What?” he
said, standing up, making a grab at her hand as she drew back, and then
standing still, visibly restraining himself. He sat down again, leant towards
her, and held out his hand. Slowly, feeling like a bird fixed by a snake,
Beauty extended her own, laid it in his. The palm of his hand was ever so slightly
furry, like a warm peach. “You have hurt yourself,” he said, in his lowest
growl; she felt she heard his words through the soles of her feet rather than
in her ears.

“Oh,” she said; her arms still stung and throbbed, but she
had not thought of them since she counted the doors in the chamber of the star
and found twelve. “Oh—it is only thorn scratches.” Relief made her voice
tremble. “They—they will h-heal.”

^;
’You must be more careful,” he said.

“Oh—well,” she said. “It is very hard not to be scratched,
pruning roses.”

“You must be more careful,” he repeated.

She smiled a little at his earnestness. “Very well. I will
be more careful. Perhaps the—the magic that lays out these dresses can come up
with a long-sleeved shirt that is thorn-proof but not so stiff and heavy as to
prevent me from bending my anus. That will be a very great magic indeed.”

The Beast laid her hand on the table again, as gently as he
might have set a bubble of blown glass on its pedestal. He turned and walked
away so swiftly she thought he must still be angry; she looked down at her arms
and touched the scratches with her fingers, wondering on whose behalf he was
angry. Hers, his, for his wounded honour as host, by his guest wounding herself
on his rose-bushes, for the roses themselves? It was true, her arms did ache,
she had been more careless than she should have been, in her eagerness to get
on—her eagerness to have something to do that would prevent her from thinking
about her family and her own garden, about why she was here. One or two of the
deeper cuts were slightly warm to the touch, perhaps turning septic.

She looked up sharply; the Beast had returned, as silently
as he always did. In one hand he held a tiny pot, which he set on the table at
her elbow, and raised its lid. Because his hands were close under her eyes, she
saw for the first time that he was indeed clumsy; she saw the difficulty with
which he closed his fingers round the Lid of the pot and how the pot nearly
slid from his other hand’s hold as he pulled the lid off, and she wondered for
the first time how much of a Beast he truly was. Perhaps his size and strength
were as illusory as his ferocity and cruelty. Then why ... then what... then
who ... ?

The lid popped free, rolled across the table, skittered into
the side of a plate, and fell over, thrumming to itself til! its motion was
exhausted and it lay still. The pungent smell of an herbal salve eddied up and
smote her sense of smell, and the Beast’s own odour of roses, strong from his
nearness, was overwhelmed.

She tried to laugh. “That will cure me, will it?” she said,
and looked up at him where he towered over her; he was nothing but a huge black
shape against what little light there was. One wing of his robe had fallen on
the edge of the table and huddled there like a small creature. As he moved
back, and it slid away and disappeared, following his motion, it did not look
like the hem of a garment righting itself, but like a small wary lover of
darkness regaining sanctuary. He sat down.

“It will. It will cure .. . almost anything.”

She looked at him, at his face; she thought she could guess
something the ointment could not cure. She touched the coo! salve timidly,
touched it to the back of one hand, to her wrist, dabbed it on her forearm. The
Beast sat in silence, watching her, but she felt his impatience. She stopped
and looked at him,

“You are less kind to yourself than you are to my roses,” he
said. “Like this.” Before she had time to think, he had fumbled at the sleeve
catch of her nearer wrist, and it fell open, the light material of the sleeve
falling away and leaving her arm bare, pale in the candlelight but for the dark
lines of blood. He dipped his own fingers in the pot—one at a time, for the pot
was small and his fingers were large—put his other hand over the tips of her
fingers, and ran the ointment in one long luxurious swathe up her hand to her
arm and shoulder and down again. The long dangerous talons did not reach past
the deep pads of his fingers; the glittering tips never so much as grazed
Beauty’s skin. He picked up her hand, turned her arm over, and smoothed more
ointment down the lender insidcs of her wrist and forearm and elbow, to the
delicate flesh of her upper arm; then he stroked the arm all over, back and
front, again and again, till the ointment disappeared. His fingers and palm
felt like suede, and the warmth they left was not wholly that of friction.

“Turn towards inc. that I may do the other,” he said
gruffly. Half in a trance, she turned and held her other arm out towards him,
leaving him to unfasten the wrist catch before he drew more ointment
deliciously over her skin.

He leant towards her, the shaggy hair of his head falling
low over his forehead so that she could no longer see his dark eyes, and pulled
her arm gently straight, till he could tuck the hand against his own round
shoulder; she felt his warm breath stirring the fine hairs on her forearm; his
long mane brushed the back of her hand. How could a Beast smell so sweetly of
roses? No, no, it must be the sharp smell of the ointment that was creeping
into her eyes, drawing two tears from under the lids to spill down her cheeks.

He saw, and stopped at once, drawing back, holding only her
hands in his, holding them against his breast; her knuckles grazed against the
embroidery of his waistcoat. “Have I hurt you’? The last thing I meant—’

She drew her hands gently out of his, curled them under her
chin. “No—no—1 do not know what is wrong with me.

I—I think it is only that I am tired.” She blinked, looked
at him, smiled a little tremulously; she was shivering, a deep, deep tremor far
inside herself, but she did not wish him to see, to know or to guess, and she
feared what he might guess. She told herself she did not wish to hurt him by
making him think she was still afraid of him. “It is only that I am tired. Your
ointment is—is wonderfully soothing. I no longer even feel the scratches.”