Rose Daughter (28 page)

“That was not good-natured of you,” she said, “but 1 still
thank you for the basket.” She returned to her balcony, a little anxiously, for
she was not sure how much time had passed. She saw nothing and had to hope she
had missed nothing.

She went quickly to the chamber of the star, but no door
opened for her. She counted the doors: twelve. No, ten. No—eleven.
Eleven?
Can
you make a star of eleven points? “Stop that,” she said. “Or I’ll make a rope
out of the sheets on my bed and climb over the balcony.” A door opened. “And no
nonsense about where this corridor goes,” she said. The door closed, and
another one opened. She walked through it, and it closed behind her, but the
corridor was dark. She was still carrying her candle from her basket search,
and so she held it up before her in a hand that trembled only a little;
fiercely she recalled her dream to her mind.. . . But there was the door into
the courtyard. It was a little open; she could see a crack of starlight round
it.

She stepped softly outside, and there was the old woman, already
moving back towards the carriage-way, having left her basket at the palace doors.
Beauty had been much longer in the corridor than she guessed. She flew after
her, trying to make her feet strike the treacherous courtyard pebbles as
quietly as the Beast always walked. The old woman did not look round, but
perhaps it was only because she was old and deaf.

She disappeared into the shadows of the carriage-way so completely
that Beauty, pausing at the tunnel’s edge for fear of being seen by the waiting
silver beasts, thought suddenly that perhaps she had imagined her, that she had
seen no old woman at all. Frightened and bewildered, she looked back over her
shoulder; the basket by the doors was gone. She let her breath out on a
sob—“Oh”—and moved forward again, and the old woman was on the far side of the
bonfire clearing, about to disappear finally among the trees, but one of the
milky-pale creatures that followed her turned its head at the sound of her sob
and looked straight into Beauty’s eyes.

She might not have noticed if it had not turned its head.
Its haunches were too round for a deer, its legs too long and slender for a
horse, and the curling tail was like nothing she had ever seen, for it looked
more like a waterfall than anything so solid and rooted as individual hairs,
but it was still a tail. It turned its head to look at her, and so she saw,
shimmering in the starlight, the long peariy horn that rose from its forehead.

She looked, blinked, and they were gone—old woman and unicorns.
Gone as if they had never been; gone as the old woman’s basket at the palace
doors was gone; gone without sound. The light of the stars still flooded the
bonfire clearing, poured silver and glinting over the remains of Beauty’s
bonfires, over the tiny-tempest piles of last year’s leaves, over the
scatterings of stones, over the patches of earth seen among the rest. Over
queerly gleaming golden heaps of...

Beauty emerged from the carriage-way in a daze and stooped
at the first golden pile, took out her trowel, and... began to laugh. “Oh
dear!” she said. “This is not the way a maiden is supposed to meet a unicorn.
It should be a romantic and glamorous meeting ... but if I had not needed what
I need, I would not have been so interested in strange silvery creatures that
met mysterious old women at the edges of wild woods, certainly not interested
enough to dare to follow them here, in the middle of the night, in this ...
this place.” Her laughter stopped. “But then again ... what would either the
unicorn or I have done after it laid its head in my lap?”

She looked at her hands, dim in the starlight, at their
short, broken nails and roughened skin. Her memory provided other details: the
blotches of ingrained dirt, the thorn scabs and scars, the yellowy-grey streaks
of bruising across the back of one hand where she’d pulled a ligament in her
forefinger. “I wonder—I wonder, then, is it only that it is unicorn milk and
butler and cheese? None of my dreams are my own—none of the animals—not even
the spider—they all—they only—they come to a maiden who has drunk the milk of a
unicorn? Is that all that matters?” she whispered, as if the Numen might hear
and answer her. “This is a story like any nursery tale of magic? Where any
maiden will do, any—any—monster, any hero, so long as they meet the right
mysterious old women and discover the right enchanted doors during the right
haunted midnights....”

For a moment she felt as if some hidden spell had reached
out and gripped her and turned her to stone. She felt that while her body was
held motionless, she was falling away from herself, into some deep chasm. With
a tremendous effort she opened her eyes again and spoke aloud, although her
voice was not quite steady. “Well, I cannot know that, can I? I can only do
what I can do—what I can guess to try—because I am the one who is here, / am
the one who is here. Perhaps it will make a good nursery tale someday.”

She let her trowel fall into her lap and cupped her poor
hands together, and the quick soft liquid rush of the salamander’s heat
comforted her. But there was a juddering or a tingling to the warmth that sank
through her skin and ran through the rest of her body—like the pinprick
thumping of numberless tiny impatient feet. She knew the rhythm of those steps;
they were the steps of someone going back to check she’d latched the
chicken-house gate, when she knew perfectly well that she had, or those of a
nursemaid going to fetch the third clean handkerchief in as many minutes,
trying to send her small charge to a party clean and combed and well dressed—“I
am sorry, my friend,” she said to the salamander in her mind. “I suppose I am
rather like a chicken or a small child—to a salamander.” There was a little
extra thrill of heat between her palms—the nursemaid saying,
You had better
not lose this one
—and then it was gone.

She rose to her feet again, laying down her basket and dropping
her trowel, and moved towards the edge of the clearing. She put her hand on a
convenient tree and paused, because she did not wish to lose herself in the
wood, but she leant beyond her tree, peering into the tangled black wilderness
where the starlight could not reach.

She felt almost as if there were gentle fingers rubbing her
neck softly, then just touching her temple, to turn her face to look in the
right direction. .. . The fingers were gone, if they had ever been, but there
was a meadow before her—though the trunk of the tree was still beneath her own
hand—and animals grazed there: ponies, horses, cows, and sheep. The meadow was
large, larger than she saw at first, for it was dotted with clumps of trees,
and she could see narrow bridges of grass through greater stands and thickets
that led into other meadows.

She did not see the old woman for a little while, for she
was hidden behind the flank of the cow she was milking. She heard her singing
first, but since it was a song she often sang herself, she thought she was only
hearing its echo in her own mind: “And from her heart grew a red, red rose, and
from his heart a briar.”

The old woman stood up, her head appearing above the
fawn-coloured back of the cow, and as she rounded its tail and the rest of her
came into Beauty’s view, Beauty saw the pail of milk in one hand and the stool
in the other. She walked carefully to the next cow, sat down on the stool, and
again began to milk and to sing; she had the voice of a young girl, sweet and
joyous.

Now Beauty could see the entire process: the old woman’s
head half buried in the cow’s flank, the slight movement of each wrist in turn,
the faint quick twinkle of the streams of milk. It was only then that Beauty
began to see what she had assumed to be piles of earth or stones in the long
flowery grass were small leggy sleeping heaps of calves and lambs and foals.
Two lambs lay on top of their dozing mother not far from Beauty’s tree, looking
very like the cow-parsley they lay among.

Beauty still stood in starlight, but she looked onto a
morning scene and felt the sleepy summer heat of it against her face and
against the hand on the cool trunk of the tree. She did not think her feet
could be made to move, out of the starlight and into some strange dawn, but
there was a great peace held in this meadow, like water in a lake. She wished
she had a goblet, or a ewer, and might dip it up, like lake water; she could
smell it where she stood, a fresh morning smell, mixed in with the warm smells
of grass and grazing animals. She stretched her other hand out and felt something—something—something
just brush against her fingertips that was neither sunlight, nor starlight, nor
grass, nor tree. She closed her eyes to concentrate, and the sensation became
just the tiniest bit like velvet, just the tiniest bit like someone’s breath,
just the tiniest bit like whiskers. She opened her eyes.

It was a unicorn, of course. She was expecting that. Its
eyes were deepest gold-brown-green-blue and held her own. What she was not
expecting ... she could see the meadow through the rest of it. As it bowed its
head to settle its muzzle more snugly into her hand—carefully, for its luminous
horn stretched past her shoulder—she saw it as she might see leaf shadows
moving across the meadow, except that these shadows were dappled silver-white,
instead of dappled dark, and the shape of them was not scattered, like tossing
leaves on wind-struck branches, but formed quite clearly the long beautiful
head, the graceful neck, the wide-chested body, the silken mane and curling
tail, the exquisitely slender legs of the unicorn. If it were not for the eyes
and the faint whiskery velvet against her hand, she might have thought it was
not there at all.

In the back of her mind—in the part of her brain and body
still in the bonfire clearing in the middle of the night—a voice said, What
makes you think you are seeing anything but the shadows cast by your own
fancies? The meadow, the old woman, all the grazing beasts and their little
ones, the serenity, tangible as a warm bath smelling of roses at the end of a
long weary day, all this you think you see is because you live alone in a huge
haunted palace with a huge haunted Beast, whose secrets you cannot guess. All
you see is only because you miss Rose Cottage, you miss your sisters, your
father.

What makes you think any of it is there?

And the silver-dappled shape before her shivered like smoke,
like cloud beginning to uncurl itself into some further metamorphosis of the
imagination; perhaps it would become a lion, a sphinx, a rose-bush....

But a tiny singing voice in another part of her mind
answered:
I know
it is all, all there, all as I see it. And the unicorn
raised its nose from her hand and breathed its warm breath into her face, a
breath smelling of roses, but light and gay and fresh, as exhilarating as
spring after winter, but with a faint sweet tang a little like the smell of
apples after rain. The currents of air touched her skin like rose-petals; it
breathed into her face and vanished.

But her eyes had adjusted now, and she saw the old woman,
moving very carefully indeed with a full pail, walking towards the edge of one
of the bigger stands of trees, and in the dark shadows under their branches,
she saw the silver shadows. The old woman turned, just before she entered the
dark-and-silver shadows, and, framed by them, looked towards where Beauty
stood, as if she knew someone watched there. She was too far away for Beauty to
see her plainly, but Beauty thought she had the face of a friend, and she was
strangely reassured by that brief indistinct glimpse of the old woman’s face,
as if some memory of long-ago comfort had been stirred. Then the old woman
turned away again, and the silver shadows parted to let her through.

Beauty knew that was all. She dropped her head, and her hand
from the trunk of the tree, and there were the wild woods close round her
again, and the only light was from the stars, and the air was chill. She took
the few steps back to her basket dully, but as she stooped again beside it, it
was already full, full of the darkest, sweetest, richest compost she could
imagine; and her unused trowel lay beside it, its clean blade winking in the
starlight. She scooped up a handful of her basket’s contents and crumbled it between
her fingers; it smelt of earth and kept promises. There was still a wink of
gold in it, like no ordinary farmyard fertilizer, telling her where it had come
from, but it was as if two seasons of weather and earthworms had already sieved
and stirred and transformed it into something she and her rosebushes loved much
better than gold. She could almost hear it sing:
And from her heart a red,
red rose.. . .

“I will never be able to shift die basket,” she murmured.
“It must weigh more than I do.” She put the unused trowel in her pocket. Then
she took a deep breath, and put her hand under the peak of the basket handle,
and stood up. The basket came up too, as lightly as if it were empty.

She walked slowly through the bonfire glade, the
carriage-way, and went at once to her glasshouse, and ran her free hand along
its framed panes—
slide-bump-slide-bump
—as she walked between it and the
palace wall, be-cause her glasshouse would not change its length to dismay her.
But she went on putting each foot down very carefully and breathing very gently
and regularly, for she was still half afraid that the midnight magic that was
carrying the basket for her would take fright at her mortal presence so near it
and run off.

When she came to the glasshouse door, she went in at once
and set the basket down with a happy sigh. The starlight seemed brighter in
here than it did in the courtyard, despite the white reflecting walls of the
palace and the pale stones underfoot, despite the black stems of the roses and
the wild labyrinthine structure of the glasshouse itself, whose shadows fell on
her like lace. She walked round her rose-beds, dropping a handful of her
beautiful compost at the foot of every rose-bush. She smoothed it with her
other hand, so that it formed a little ring at the base of each. After each
handful she returned to the basket for the next; her trowel remained in her
pocket, nor did she touch the hand fork lying on the water-butt. The last
handful went to the dark red rose blooming in the corner. The basket of compost
went just around, one handful for each, not a thimbleful was left; but that
last handful was just as full as the first. There was no room in her heart and
mind for words, even for a song; she was brimming over with joy.