Rose Daughter (35 page)

“Now. Jeweltongue, listen to me.” She knelt by the young
woman’s side and put her hand earnestly on her arm. Jeweltongue’s arms were
still stretched across the seat of the chair, her head again resting upon them,
but her sobs had ceased. “My dear, why did you not tell anyone? About what had
become of your sister? Beauty, that is. How very astonishing that Lionheart is
another girl! Then—she must be soon to be married also, I gather? Aubrey is nothing
like his brother. If he’s fallen in love with her, he’ll mean to marry her.”

“Yes,” said Jeweltongue. “But Lionheart was afraid—afraid of
something like what Jack did here tonight.”

Mrs Oldhouse gave a very thorough and contemptuous snort.
“The storm had drowned all our intelligence, or we would never have let him go
on like that. What piffle. Bringing up that old nursery rhyme and brandishing
it like—like—like a little boy bringing a dead snake to scare his governess.
One may very well shriek, for who likes dead snakes’?.., Except little boys.
But my dear, you can’t have thought. ..” She hesitated and looked genuinely
troubled for the first time. “Jeweltongue, my very dear young friend . .. Lionheart
was afraid, you say? But we all know what Jack is. Just as—why did you not tell
anyone about—about whatever it is that has happened to Beauty? Because I gather
from Mr Whitehand’s response that even he did not know.”

“I fear that is more my fault than my daughters’,” said the
old merchant. “It is I who—”

“Father, we all agreed.” said Jeweltongue. “And ... it was
not only your ban, Father dear. Our life here has seemed ... it is so different
from anything we could have imagined when we still lived in the city.... But we
have been
happy
here, do you understand? And when you are happy, when
you have never been happy before, when you hadn’t even known you weren’t happy,
it is hard to believe that it won’t all go away again, isn’t it? The curse seemed
so ... likely, somehow. I did not quite
not
believe it, if you
understand.

“I had overheard a conversation Beauty had with Mrs Greendown—two
years ago now—she had said something about a curse, and 1 saw how Beauty looked
afterwards. And I noticed most particularly later, when Beauty told me about
what she had said, and she never spoke a word about a curse.”

Everyone else in the room was trying to drift close enough
to the little party clustered round the end chair of the second row to hear
what was being said, without being obvious enough about it to risk being sent
away. Jeweltongue looked up and round at them and laughed, a laugh more like
her real one, although with a catch in it. “Very well. We are caught out. I
will tell you everything—anything you want to know. 1 am sorry to ... not to
have trusted you. But it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. We have
not been here so very long, only a few, few years. Our name isn’t a Longchance
name—like Oldhouse, or True-word, or Whitehand And magic—once we learnt there
was none here, it seemed—it seemed rude to discuss magic with you, rather
like—like—”

“Discussing hairdressing with the bald, or rare vintages
with those overfond of their wine?” said Mrs Oldhouse. “Yes, I understand that.
We are all used to it, of course, and quite proof against the occasional
persons who wish to pretend they are superior to us for—for their perfect
sobriety, and full heads of hair. I think you might have—but never mind. I do
see.”

“And it suited us,” said the old merchant. “It suited us
that there was no magic here, I have been ... rather unreasonable about magic
since my wife died. It made us—it made me, at least—feel as if we had come to
the right place, this town that had no magic.”

“Yes,
that’s right,” said Jeweltongue. “And then—it
seemed—Jack is right enough that our memories of our life in the city are not
very good ones—and why we left—oh dear. I don’t want to go into all that—”

“That is none of our business, dear,” said Mrs Oldhouse.
“But you are here now, not in your nasty old city.”

“Yes. But you see, that’s part—you have been so very good to
us. We have been so happy here!” And Jeweltongue reached up to put her hand
over Mr Whitehand’s. “Oh, I can’t explain! It seemed ungrateful, somehow, to
tell you. And it meant—perhaps it meant—that we did not belong here after all.”

Her voice went squeaky on her last words, and she clutched
her baker’s hand rather hard, but he laughed a little and bent down to say
something privately in her ear, as Mrs Oldhouse said briskly: “We will go up to
Appleborough tomorrow and hire the very best of the seers—I know just the one,
Fareye, she doesn’t meddle in looking for the future, but she can find
anything—and ask her to tell us where your sister is.”

Jeweltongue said, “Father? Please.”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “I should have thought of it
myself. I don’t care if it’s magic. I don’t think I’ve cared about magic one
way or the other since Beauty’s roses first bloomed. But I am accustomed to
doing without it. And here in Longchance ... and when you feel in your heart
there is nothing you can do about something, you do not think clearly about it.
And I—it was my fault in the beginning.”

“No,” said Jeweltongue. “To seek to save your life in a snowstorm?
And enchantments are like that. You cannot know which step will spring the trip
wire.”

Her father smiled faintly. “I just want your sister back—as
you do—or at least to know what’s become of her. It’s been so long.”

“Seven months,” said Jeweltongue. “Seven endless months.
Seven months today.”

“But the Beast,” said someone. “Won’t you tell us about the
Beast?”

The marmalade cat, reappearing from nowhere, sprang into
Jeweltongue’s lap with a thump. “Oh!” said Jeweltongue. “Well, hello yourself!”
She raised a hand to stroke it, but it leapt down again at once and trotted oft
towards the door. It paused there and looked back. “Do you know where Beauty is
then?” said Jeweltongue, only half teasing.

The cat flicked her tail, went through the door, turned
round, and just poked her head back through, staring at Jeweltongue as she had
earlier stared at the empty aisle chair of the second row.

“It’s only a cat,” said someone.

“Hmph,” said Mrs Oldhouse.
“You
have never been the
intimate friend of any cat. And you do not know my Becky.”

Becky stood on her hind legs to twiddle the handle of the
open door with one forepaw and then sank back to the ground again, still
staring at Jeweltongue. “I—I think, if you don’t mind,” said Jeweltongue
apologetically, “I would quite like to see what she seems to want to show me.”

She rose to her feet, and Mr Whitehand rose too. “I’ll come
with you,” he said.

She looked up and smiled. “No. You stay here and wait till
the surgeon comes. I want someone besides my father to tell me what he says—and
someone my father will have felt obliged to listen to too, if what he says is
unwelcome. Besides, I—1 think perhaps—”

“If it is magic,” said Mrs Oldhouse, “you will be much
better off by yourself than with some dull Longchancer befogging all
the—the—whatever magic does. Even you, Mr Whitehand. Go on then.” She added to
the cat: “Take care of her, mind. Or no more warm evenings by the fire for
you.”

Becky disappeared.

Jeweltongue took her cloak from the rack by the door and let
herself out, Becky winding dangerously through her ankles. The night was clear
after the rain, and there were stars overhead; the storm had left as quickly as
it had come. Magic? Had the storm brought Beauty, taken her away again?
Where
was she?
“I’ve never seen the stars so bright,” she said to Becky. “Have
you? There’s the River... and the Tinker. . . and the Peacock.” She took a deep
breath, trying to regain her self-possession; it seemed to have gone with the
storm and the ghost of her sister. “Oh!” The night air smelt of roses, strongly
of roses.

Her nose was not so good for the variations of rose scent as
was Beauty’s, but this odour put her immediately in mind of the dark red rose
their father had brought home from the Beast’s palace, which had sat for weeks
on their windowsill, whose petals had at last fallen when the roses in the
garden—she could not help but think of them as Beauty’s roses—had bloomed in
midsummer. She turned her head one way and then another, sniffing like an
animal searching for water, or for danger, or for safety, and saw Becky trotting
purposefully away from her. “Becky!” she called.

The cat stopped, turned her head, and looked at her. Curious
how the starlight fell! The marmalade cat looked suddenly grey, and yet she
stood next to a stand of black-eyed Susans, whose colour even in this faint
light clearly showed orange. The cat turned away again and trotted on.

“Oh dear,” said Jeweltongue, but with her first step
following, the smell of roses grew stronger still, and Jeweltongue broke into a
trot herself. “I hope you are not leading me into any thickets,” she muttered
under her breath. “I

am a good deal higher up from the ground than you are, you
know, and you are leading me directly into the middle of nowhere,” for the cat
had gone straight across Mrs Old-house’s gardens and into the meadow beyond,
easily picking her way across the stepping-stones in the stream at its bottom,
while Jeweltongue, confused by the shadow dapples, splashed less skillfully in
her wake. Jeweltongue was jerked to a sudden halt, and there was a sound of
tearing cloth. “Oh, bother!” she said. “I liked these sleeves! I should have
let Miss Trueword have this bodice after all.”

The cat trotted on, and Jeweltongue followed, her sense of urgency
increasing. In her mind there was a picture of the dark red rose: Only a moment
ago it had seemed to be little more than a bud; now it was full open; now she
saw its petals curling back, drooping; now the first one fell....

She battled her way through a thin hedgerow, and suddenly
she knew where she was; this was the end of Farmer Goldfield’s land, and Rose
Cottage was only a few steps that way and through the stand of trees. “I don’t
know how you did that,” said Jeweltongue to the cat. “I was supposed to slay
the night with Mrs Oldhouse, you know—do you know?—because it is much too long
a walk home. Much longer than this. Oh—” A terrible thought struck her. “She’s
not ill, is she? That isn’t why you have brought me in such a hurry—”

She began to run, but the cat was purring round her ankles,
and she would not risk kicking her. and then it seemed rude not to thank her
properly. So she stooped and petted her, and the cat purred, and rubbed her
small round skull against Jeweltongue’s chin, and put her forepaws on
Jeweltongue’s knees, and licked her once with her raspy tongue. Jeweltongue,
looking into her face, said. “You’re not Becky at all, you’re some other cat,”
at the moment that her hands, stroking the cat’s sides, felt the soft swellings
of her breasts hidden by her silky fur, “Ah! You’re only in a hurry to go home
to your kittens. Are you Beauty’s cat then?”

But the cat jumped down and ran off, and Jeweltongue hastened
the last few steps to Rose Cottage, and at that moment she heard a heartrending
wail from Teacosy, exiled for the night in the goat shed.

At the door of the cottage she met Lionheart, with her hand
out to lift the latch; she turned at the sound of Jeweltongue’s approach. “You
too! Tonight’s your literary party, isn’t it? You shouldn’t be home at
all—especially not walking alone at this time of night Listen to poor Teacosy! What’s
wrong with us? 1 had to come.”

“I don’t know,” said Jeweltongue. “Something about—”

“—Beauty,” finished Lionheart, and pushed open the door.

She was asleep, lying as if flung on the hearth-rug, in
front
of
the banked fire; her arms and legs were sprawled, and her hair
lay across her face as if blown there by a strong wind. One hand seemed only
just to have dropped a dark red rose, its petals blowsily open and near to
tailing, and she was as wet as if she had been out in the storm.

“Beauty,” breathed Jeweltongue.

“Oh, Beauty!” said Lionheart.

Jeweltongue dropped to her knees beside her sleeping sister
and picked up one cold hand and began to chafe it. Lion-heart bent over them
just long enough to brush the hair from Beauty’s face, tenderly, murmuring,
“We’re like a three-legged stool with one leg gone, without you.” and then
knelt by the fire and began to dig through the ashes for embers worth blowing
on. She said between exhalations: “I couldn’t believe ., . any harm . . . had
come to her . . . even though ... I had no real reason ...”

“But the roses,” said Jeweltongue.

“Yes,” said Lionheart, feeding kindling chips into her tiny
flame flickers. They both glanced at the window over the back garden; even in
the darkness, the ruffled and scalloped edges of a few late roses that framed
it were visible. A little wind stirred, and several of the roses tapped their
heads against the panes; it was a reassuring sound. “If Beauty’s roses were
blooming, then so was Beauty.”

Jeweltongue rose abruptly and fetched an empty jam jar,
upside down next to the washing-up bowl, filled it with clean water from the
ewer, and put Beauty’s rose in it. “This is another one like the one Father
brought, isn’t it? I remember the smell. Only it’s nearly gone over. I wonder
what—” She hesitated.

“—adventures Beauty has had since she plucked it? Yes/
¹
said Lionheart. “But her adventure will have been nothing like Father’s,” She
tried to speak firmly, but her voice trailed away.

“The first one lasted and lasted, as if the rose itself were
enchanted.. . . Help me get her out of her wet things, and then if you’ll go
let Teacosy in before she brings the wild hunt’s hounds down on us.”

Teacosy rushed out of the goat shed and hurled herself
against the closed door of the cottage. At the
thump,
Beauty stirred for
the first time. Jeweltongue had been tying her dressing-gown round her. It was
a new one; Jeweltongue had only just finished making it last winter, to replace
the rag of overcoat Beauty had been using in the absence of anything better.
She had refused to take it with her to the Beast’s palace, as it was now the
nicest of their three: “An enchanted palace must have dressing-gowns and to
spare, or if not, I will make a velvet curtain serve.” Neither Jeweltongue nor
Lionheart had had the heart to use it, however, and it had hung untouched on
its peg for seven months. It had been such a long time! She stopped what she
was doing and stroked Beauty’s cheek. “Beauty? Please, darling . . .”