Rose Daughter (34 page)

She looked up, and the Beast stood near her, looking at the
dark red rose-bush which had been the only one alive and blooming the day
before. “I remember you,” he murmured, as if to himself. “I remember...”

And as he said, “I remember,” suddenly she remembered sitting
as a ghost with a marmalade cat in her lap, and she remembered all those other
dreams she had had while she was asleep in her grand high bed in the palace and
had told herself in the mornings were only dreams, and she remembered
Jeweltongue’s voice, as the marmalade cat made its spring, saying
Beauty!
And
Beauty herself did not know if she now believed that the dreams had been more
than dreams or if it was only that she was frightened to think that they might
be more. And, a very little, she remembered the dream she had once had so
often, about a long dark corridor and a monster that waited for her—only for
her—and remembered too, so faintly that it was barely a memory at all, how that
dream had changed when she came to this place, and how she had hurried along
that corridor to comfort the lost unhappy creature there.. . .

But the look on Jack Trueword’s face was what dazzled her
mind’s eye now, the look on his face, and the stricken look on Jeweltongue’s.
Jeweltongue, who had never been overset by anything, not their mother’s death,
not their father’s ruin, not her broken engagement; Jeweltongue, who had found
Rose Cottage welcoming even on that first grey, depressing day, who had found
her own skill as a dressmaker and chosen it finally over any chance of being
what she had been before. Jeweltongue, who loved the life she had made in
Long-chance, just as Lionheart loved her life, as their father loved his life,
a life. Beauty thought suddenly with a pain like a mortal wound, that they
might all lose. . ..
Has Master Jack forgiven you for preferring a short,
stoop-shouldered flour-monger with hands like balled puddings to his tall,
elegant, noble self... ? D’you want to think about what happens next?.., Surely
you’ve heard that there’s a curse on this place if three sisters live in it?
She
remembered Mrs Greendown saying:
The tally calls for three sisters, and
there’s only the two of you.

What if Jack’s story were true?

They could not be driven out of another town, another life.
They could not do it again. It would break them, and they would die of it, die
as certainly as Beauty would have died if the Beast had not caught her when she
fell off the ladder.

“Beast—”

He turned to her at once. “What is it? What troubles you?
Can you not be pleased with what you have done here?” And he sank to his knees
beside her and would have taken the hem of her still-soaking skirt in his
hands, except that she twitched it out of his reach. “No, no! I will not have
you on your knees! Stand up, stand up!”

But he did not want to stand up, and she could not make him.
He rocked back on his heels and looked up at her (not very far, for he was tall
even kneeling); he was smiling, although there were tears in his eyes, and she
noticed that he was not wearing the long black sleeveless gown she had never
seen him without. Then we would have taken flight indeed, she thought,
remembering the wind. But his remaining clothing was plastered to him by the
rain, and she suddenly thought how much he looked like the round-limbed,
handsome Beast who stood on a pedestal in the middle of the garden at Rose
Cottage.

She almost could not ask what she needed to ask. Timidly she
moved forward again and set her hands on his shoulders. “Will you tell
me—because 1 believe I need to know—what—what brought you to this place, and
this—this shape?”

His smile faded, but he remained looking up at her. “Oh.
please stand up!” she said again, plucking uselessly at his shoulder. “If you
will not stand up, I will sit down,” and she did, and drew her knees up under
her wet skirts, and put her cheek against them, and told herself the damp was
only rain and nothing to do with fresh tears.

There was silence for a few heartbeats and the roses, and
the sunlight, and the scent were still round them, and Beauty felt like a
starving beggar looking through a window at a feast. And then the Beast said:
“I told a sorcerer I believed magic to be a false discipline, leading only to
disaster. It was a foolish thing to say, if not always untrue, or—I would not
be as I am.”

Beauty whispered, “Is that all?”

The Beast sighed, and the roses fluttered, and the sunlight
came and went among the leaves. “Is it ever all? Do you want the full story of
my ruin? For I will tell you, if yon ask.”

“No .. . yes ... no. I do not know what I am asking.’’ Her
thoughts scrambled among fragments of truth and hope and love and fear, looking
for a place to begin: There is a curse on my family—on our coming to
Longchance—and it has found us out at last. Then is there not a curse on my
coming here?

Why did you ensorcel me to come to this place? Or if not
you, who? Who put the rose on my father’s breakfast table?

If you are a prisoner here, who ensorcelled you? Who tends
your garden? Who is the old woman who leaves a basket in the night in front of
doors that do not open?

Why have the bats and butterflies and toads and hedgehogs returned
and not the birds?

Why do you ask me to marry you when you will not tell me who
you are?

Again she saw Jeweltongue’s pale desperate face, heard Lionheart
saying:
The Truewords do what their eldest son tells them to,... And
Longchance does what the Truewords tell them.

Her heart ached from the absence—the loss—of her sisters,
whom she loved and trusted and
knew,
whose blood and bone were the same
as her own, and to whom for that reason her first loyalty must lie. Her
floundering thoughts seized on this as security: Here must her first loyalty
lie.

Here. She put her fingers to her temples, feeling the blood
beating frantically there. “Oh, Beast,” she said, but she could not look at
him, and her voice caught in her throat. “Beast, you must let me go.”

He stood up then. “I—”

She scrambled to her feet again too, staggering as her head
swam, but when he would catch her elbow to steady her, she backed away from
him. “You must let me go. See, your roses bloom again. That is what you called
me here for, is it not?” she said wildly, and now the tears were running freely
down her face, but she told herself she was only thinking of her sisters. “I
have done what you brought me here to do; you must let me go. Please.’” Perhaps
I can do nothing, but what comes to them must come to me too. If we are the
three named, let us at least be together for ., , whatever happens. And ... I
must go away from this place. If I carry this curse, let me ... at least let me
carry it away from . . . from this place.

The Beast said, as if each word were a blow from a dagger:
“I can deny you nothing. If you will go, then I give you leave to go. I have
never been able to hold you here against your will.”

“I will come back to visit you,” said Beauty—the words burst
out of her. “If I can. I will come back.”

“Will you?” said the Beast. “Will you?”

“Oh—yes,” said Beauty, and put her hand over her mouth to
force the sobs back, but perhaps the Beast saw the gesture as for some other
purpose.

He turned away from her and snapped the stem of a dark red
rose from the bush he had spoken to only a few minutes before. “Then take this
rose. As long as it is blooming, as it is now, ail is well with me. When the
petals begin to fall, then take thought of your promise, for I will be dying.”

“Dying?” said Beauty. “Oh—no—”

“Yes,” said the Beast, as gently as he had said. You are
quite safe. “I cannot live without you anymore. Beauty, Not now, not when I
have had you here, not now that I have learnt how lonely 1 was, and am—was—for
a little while—

no longer. But as I brought you here by a lie, it is only
just that I should lose you again.”

“Beast—”

Now he put his hand over her mouth, or just his fingertips.
“Listen. Pull one petal of this rose and set it in your mouth, and you will be
at home—in Rose Cottage—at once. If you decide you do wish to see me again,
pull another petal and set it again in your mouth, and you will at once be
here. But if you wait till all the petals have dropped, it will be too late;
once they have loosed themselves from the flower, they can no longer return you
here, and besides, when the last of them falls. I will die.”

She put her hands over his hand, pulled it away. “No, I
cannot bear it—oh—this cannot be happening. Not Like this. Not like this.”

The Beast said, “You belong with your family. And I have forgotten
too much—too much of what it is to be a man. And 1 had never learnt what it is
to love a woman. It is too late now.

“Go.” He pulled a petal from the rose he held, then handed
her the rose. Dumbly she took it. “Open your mouth.”

“I—”

He slipped the rose-petal between her lips. She just touched
his hand again—“Oh, Beast”—but he was gone, and the glasshouse was gone, and
all that was left was the feeling of the thorns of the rose he had given her
stinging the palm of her hand, and the taste of the rose-petal in her mouth.

Jeweltongue had flung herself on her knees by the chair
where Beauty had sat with the marmalade cat. “Oh, she was here, she was here, I
saw her, did you not see her? I cannot bear the not knowing what has become of
her! I would pull Longchance down with my own hands to know that she was well!”
Her head ached, and she was aware that her nose was running and that she was
behaving badly, and for the first time in her life, she did not care. Beauty!
She
had
been here, hadn’t she? Or was it merely that worrying about her
had finally begun producing phantoms of her? The ghost of a simulacrum made of
rose-petals!

Jeweltongue couldn’t remember ever having felt so helpless;
even those last terrible weeks in the city, they had at least had one
another—something neither she nor Lionheart had ever been aware they wanted or
needed. And it had been Beauty then who had done what needed to be done, while
all she and Lionheart could see was that their pride and arrogance had
shattered like glass, and the shards lay all round them, and it was as if they
cut themselves to the bone with every move they made. And so they had moved
slowly, had been able to see no farther than across the room.

across the present minute. They owed their lives to Beauty,
and she and Lionheart both knew it.

Mrs Oldhouse, bending over her from one side, and Mr Whitehand
from the other: “My dear, I did not know, why did you not tell us?”

“My darling, I did not know, why did you not tell me?’
^?
And Jeweltongue weeping, weeping passionately, uncontrollably, as Jeweltongue
never wept, as Jeweltongue never did anything.

A sudden sharp heavy sound, a cry, and a clatter of
furniture, including the unmistakable
crack
of splintering wood, and
Jeweltongue’s father stood over the prostrate Jack Trueword, grimacing and
cradling one hand with the other. Jack lay still. Someone in the audience
laughed. “Well struck, Mr Poet!” said a voice.

Jeweltongue slowly, dazedly, turned her head. Jack True-word
lay sprawled and ungainly across Mrs Oldhouse’s hearth-rug; she blinked. Her
thoughts were confused by all that had happened; her chief thought now was how grateful
she was that he had stopped telling his terrible story.... How small he looked,
lying there, silent and still. It was the first time, she thought, she had ever
seen him ungraceful. Jack had always had the gift of grace, even of charm,
however spoilt and selfish you knew he might be in the next moment, but she had
been accustomed to believe that she could ignore his bad temper. She closed her
eyes. But if his story was more than just bad temper...

She opened her eyes and looked at him again. It was suddenly
very hard to remember how frightening he had been, just a few minutes ago.
telling his story. Lying in the splintered remains of Mrs Oldhouse’s chair, he
looked like something the storm had picked up and indifferently tossed away.

“I suppose we had best move him,” said another voice,
without enthusiasm, after a little, startled, general pause.

“Let him come round on his own,” said a third voice
promptly. “Have you hurt your hand badly, sir?”

“I, er, I fear I may have. I must. . . apologize very
profoundly. It was a stupid and a wicked thing to have done. 1 cannot think
what came over me.”

“Whatever it is, I’m glad it did,” said Mrs Oldhouse, half
straightening, but still patting a bit of Jeweltongue’s shoulder not covered by
Mr Whitehand’s arm, and addressing the top of her head, “If someone had done
that to him years ago, he might not have turned out so mean-spirited. I could
easily have done the same myself to Miss Trueword—who is one of my dearest
friends, and after all, she introduced you to me—when I heard of that result of
her invitation to supper. My dear, you must learn not to be so clever, it will
attract the wrong sort of person—at least until you are as old as I am—but
then, you will be safely married soon, so that is all right,’’ she said, and
patted Mr White-hand’s shoulder instead. “Have you really damaged your hand, Mr...
Poet? I shall call you that hereafter. I think, it is so much more suitable
than your own name. Should we call for the surgeon? The storm seems to have
abated at last”

“I think that might be wise,’
¹
said a man who had
been examining the old merchant’s hand, and Mrs Oldhouse rang for a servant.

“At last!” she said, turning back to her friends. “I am free
of Great-Aunt Maude’s hideous chair! How clever of you, Mr Poet, to strike him
in just that direction. I suppose we might put a blanket over him. Or his cape—
oh.”
And she snatched it up off the chair. “How could I not have noticed? I will
have his
skin
if that chair is ruined.