Rose Daughter (21 page)

She turned back to her plate, leaning in her chair as
slit-had been before the Beast brought the little pot of salve. The Beast did
not return to his customary place, but he had straightened where he sal. She
touched the half-eaten apple. “I—I think I am not very hungry either,” she
said, for her appetite had gone. “I think what I most need is sleep. If you
will excuse me—”

He was on his feet in the instant, drawing back her chair.
She moved away without looking at him, conscious of her loose sleeves billowing
away from her arms, for she had not refastcned the wrist clasps. She had
arrived at the doorway when she heard the Beast’s low voice behind her, where he
still stood behind her chair. “Beauty, will you marry me?”

“Oh. no. Beast.” she whispered, and fled.

She did not run far. She was as tired as she had told the
Beast she was; she did not know if the corridor had shortened itself in
sympathy or if she had fallen asleep while she walked. In her bedroom her dress
fell away from her as soon as she touched the clasps at her shoulders, her
fingers as clumsy as the Beast’s. It pooled like water round her feet;
starlight and candlelight made it shimmer, as if it moved to a secret tide. The
little embroidered heart tapped against her skin in response to her quick
breathing. She was again almost too tired to pull her nightgown over her head,
and she crept up the stairs to her bed on all fours.

She dreamt her old dream, but with the change that had come
to it since she had spent her first night in the Beast’s palace; she hurried
down a long dim corridor, anxious to come to its end, for she was needed there.
She was wearing the dress she had worn this evening, and the wrist clasps had
come loose. A small, chilly wind pursued her, snaking

up her open sleeves, making the untended scratches on her
legs ache when it crept under her skirts. She must hurry....

She woke weeping. She knew at once it was very late; there
was a difference in the stillness even in the Beast’s palace that told her the
o’clock was inimical to daylight creatures. She remembered nights in the city
when they had danced till dawn, both inside and outside lit by lamps that made
the dancing floors almost as bright as day. . . . She thought she saw
Jeweltongue speaking to a young man with a handsome, intelligent, sulky face,
on a tall horse; she thought it was a picture out of her memory till she saw
that Jeweltongue was wearing Mandy’s old skirt.

There was a small plopping sound from the direction of the
bed stairs. She turned her head on the pillow to look and saw a small round
mound perched there. “Fourpaws?” she whispered. The mound rose up on four legs
and became slender and graceful, and Fourpaws walked delicately onto Beauty’s
bed, purring in her room-filling way. Beauty fancied she could see streams of
purring leaking out through the cracks in the bed-curtains made by the bedposts,
pouring out in the wider spaces on either side of her. which she preferred to
leave open so she could see out; she thought perhaps it was the strength of the
purring that roused the scent from the potpourri in the low dish on top of the
japanned cabinet, for as she drifted towards sleep again, slowly stroking
Fourpaws’ furry side, she could smell roses. Fourpaws’ fur was wonderfully
sleek and soft, soft as ... She fell asleep and dreamt she slept on warm fur,
and in the dream she slept both deeply and drcamlessly, for she was guarded by
a great shaggy shadow that paced back and forth in front of the door of her
chamber, and the tiny breeze of his motion brought the smell of roses to her
where she lay.

And then the dream changed again, although there was still a
cat’s fur under her fingers, and she blinked, and there was a black-brindlc-and-white
cat winding itself round her outstretched hands as she stooped to pet it. There
was bright daylight all around them, and she heard the clop of hoofs. “There,
Molly has lost her mind at last,” said a familiar voice. “I hope it won’t put
her off her stroke with the barn mice.”

“She’s only enjoying the sunlight,” said a strange male
voice.

“She’s not,” said the familiar voice; “she’s being petted by
a ghost. Look at her. She doesn’t purr like that for a sunny afternoon.”

The male voice laughed. Beauty thought: I am dreaming. Quite
composedly she looked up and saw Lionheart and a young man she did not
recognise leading two horses towards a barn a little distance away. The young
man was no taller than Lionhcart, though he had broad shoulders and big hands
and a plain, square, kind face. They paused near Molly, and Beauty looked at
their two faces and saw friendship there, the pleasure in each other’s company—and
something else.

“You are pleased with him. are you not?” said Lionhearl in a
suddenly businesslike tone, turning to the horse the young man led. “I can tell
Mr Horsewisc you will take him?” And she held out her hand for the young man’s
reins.

The young man hesitated, looking at her, and Beauty wondered
at the odd way in which Lion heart now avoided meeting his eyes. Her hand,
still outstretched, trembled slightly. “Yes,” said the young man at last. “Yes,
I do like him, but it was you who saw him, was it not? Mr Horsewisc himself
said it was you who asked to try him.”

Lionheart dropped her hand and shrugged, “Yes, I saw him
first, but it was only that I was looking in the right direction, Mr Horsewise
would have seen him sooner or later.”

“That’s not how he tells it. He says he had seen enough
horses for the day, and that it was you who insisted on poking round in all the
corners where the Gypsies lurk for the unwary, and found Sunbright there, and
recognised his worth, and insisted Mr Horsewise come look at him when he sought
to put you off. And you—you know me very well. I prefer Sunbright to any of the
other horses Mr Horsewise brought back from the fair.”

“Good,” muttered Lionheart.

“Lionheart, I don’t understand you,” said the young man, and
there was something in his voice other than exasperation, something unhappy,
even anguished. “Mr Horsewise thinks the world of you, says he’s training you
up to be his successor. If you don’t want—even if you don’t—why won’t you at
least accept the—the reward you have earned?’’

Lionheart smiled a little, but she still would not meet his
eyes. “I don’t need a reward. My wages are as much as I need. And I love my
work here.”

“You love it, do you?” said the young man softly.

Lionheart stepped away from him violently; the horse she
held threw up its head and sidled away from her. “It’s—it’s just a manner of speaking!”
she said. Clumsily she reached out and tried to snatch Sunbright’s reins out of
the young man’s hands, hut the young man was too quick for her and grasped her
hand instead.

“Lionheart—’’

“Let me go!” said Lionheart. “Please. Just—just let me
go.”

“You must listen to me,” said the young man. “I’ve known for
some time. You know I guessed, don’t you? But I’ve kept your secret. Haven’t I?
Can’t you trust me a little? Because I also know—I—Lionheart—”

But Lionheart had’broken free and was running back to the
barn, with her puz/Jed horse trotting obediently behind her.

Ihere was still sunlight in her face, but she was back in
her bed in the Beast’s palace. She blinked at the canopy for a moment, and then
turned her head and looked into the room, looked at the queer shape the shadow
of the breakfast table threw on the sunlit carpet. The roses there looked so
bright and real she wondered if she might be able to pluck them and put them in
a vase. “But it can touch nothing living,” the Beast said. These roses would be
soft and rather furry, like the carpet; touching them would be like stroking a
dense-furred cat. But they would have no scent, only a smeil of dust and
weaving.

She sat up. There were short grcy-amber-brown hairs on her
pillow. She tried to brush them off. but she found her first attempts only
seemed to leave more cat hairs than ever, and some of them now looked black and
white, “Nonsense,” she said aloud, a little too sharply, and she half flung
herself down the bed stairs to the carpeted floor. It was sun-warm on her bare
feet, and she felt herself relaxing.

“At least you don’t change,” she murmured, sitting down
where she was, drawing up her knees, and putting her arms round her shins. ‘‘I
am grateful,” she said aloud, “that these rooms—my rooms—don’t change. In this
palace, where too many things change—where the paintings hanging in the
corridors change their faces and their frames, where the can-dlestands and
torcheres and sconces are in different places and are higher or lower and have
more branches or fewer, and there are different numbers of doors in the chamber
of the star, and the cnamehvork around the sun window changes colours, and
sometimes it’s vine leaves and sometimes it’s little inedailions, and the size
of the tiles underfoot is sometimes larger and sometimes smaller, and there are
of course different numbers of points on die star because there are different
numbers of doors, but that doesn’t explain why the points are sometimes
straight and sometimes curly—and perhaps it is a different dining-hall every
evening too, only it is too dark to see. There is almost nothing here that does
not change, except the glasshouse and—and me. And the Beast. And these rooms.
The roses on the carpet in the first room are always pale pink cabbages, and
the carpet in here is always velvety crimson roses mat have opened Hat—I
suppose the carpet is dyed with a magic dye and will not fade in all this
sunlight—and the tall japanned cabinet with the potpourri dish on top is always
where I first saw it, and the mountain and the bridge and the trees on its
front are always the same picture, and the potpourri bowl is always the same
pale green china. And the fire grate always has the same number of bars—eight,
I counted—and the bed stairs are the same number of steps, five.

“And the garden tapestries are always there. I particularly
love the garden tapestries. I might not realise if some of the other things
were changed just a little—things I can’t count—but I would see it at once in
those tapestries; you, er, you change the tint of one columbine, and I would
notice it. I am glad they are all, always there. Even if, er. you have rather
odd habits about matching jewelry with bath towels. I am even glad of those
gilt console tables, although 1 think they are hideous, because at least they
are always the same hideous,”

She was still half asleep as she spoke, her eyes wandering
meditatively over what she could see from where she was, and her gaze slowly
settled back on the carpet she sat on. Several of the roses really did look
surprisingly three-dimensional, although this one close at hand seemed less
dark crimson than brown. . .. Her eyes snapped fully open, and she leant
towards what was distinctly a small round lump on the carpet. Not Fourpaws, too
small. “What,,, you’re a hedgehog!”

It stirred at her touch and then curled up tighter. “You’re
a very small hedgehog. And you shouldn’t be wandering round enchanted palaces
looking for adventures. How did you get in here? At least bats and butterflies
fly.
”

She stood up and began tapping gingerly at other bits of
carpet. She found two more hedgehogs. Bemusedly she sat down at her breakfast
table and poured herself a cup of tea. “Well, You would be quite useful in the
glasshouse if there were any slugs, but at present there’s nothing for slugs to
eat, so there are no slugs. 1 daresay by the time there are slugs, you will be
full-grown and somewhere else. If I had a compost heap, you could sleep under
the compost heap. Oh dear! If only 1 had something to compost! Grey and white
pebbles and stone chips will not do. How am I going to feed my roses?” She put
her feet under the table. “Oh!” She raised the edge of the tablecloth to look.
Four hedgehogs.

When she came to get dressed, she discovered a canvas tunic
with long sleeves folded up on the floor of the wardrobe under her skirt, and
behind her skirt on its peg a canvas overskiit. “Very convenient for the
transportation of hedge-bogs,” she said. There were tough leather boots that
laced to her knees in the way of her searching hand when she scrabbled under
the bed for her shoes. Then she bumped the curled hedgehogs together with one
foot as gently as she could (even rolled-up hedgehogs do not readily roll) and,
protecting her hands behind her overskirt, bundled them into her lap. “I hope
tomorrow’s animal infestation isn’t fleas,” she murmured, and walked towards
the chamber of the star, grateful for the first time for the eerieness of doors
that opened themselves.

The lady, or the lady’s cousin, who was usually in the first
painting in the corridor that led to the glasshouse had changed her hair
colour, and her pug dog was now a fan. She gazed at Beauty with unchanged
superciliousness, however. But this morning Beauty, with her arms full of
possibly flea-infested hedgehogs, put her tongue out at her.

She laid her four spiky parcels down at the foot of the
water-butt (having had a brief exciting moment holding her laden skirt together
with one hand and one knee while she rapidly worked the glasshouse door handle
with the other hand). “These are excellent garments,” she said, brushing her
sleeves and her skirt front. “1 can even bend my arms. The shirt reminds me
very much of Jcweltongue’s first... oh.
^:>
She squeezed her eyes
shut on her tears as one might hold one’s nose against a sneeze; after a little
while the sensation ebbed, and she opened her eyes again and gave one or two
slightly watery sniffs. The hedgehogs had not moved. “If you slay there a
little longer, I will take you to the wild wood later on. But I have things to
do first.”

The half-open bud of the red rose was fully open now, and
one of the other two was cracking, and—best of all—she found a tiny green bump
of a new flower-bud peeking from the joint between another leaf and stem. She
took a deep breath of the open flower’s perfume; it was as good as sleep, or
food.