Rose Daughter (11 page)

He woke to the sound of munching. There was more hay in the
alcove, and his pony was going at it busily. There was also a bucket of water
and another of the remains of a feed of mixed corn. The blanket was still over
her, barely; it hung down to her toes on one side and was halfway up her ribs
on the other, and it was caked with rnud and pony hair. The merchant pulled it
off her—she paused to say good-morning, shoving at his breast with her nose—and
laid it in front of the fire, thinking sadly that their ghostly presence here
did not extend quite far enough after all, and hoping that perhaps he might be
able to brush the worst of the mud and hair off when the blanket was dry.

But he was growing accustomed; when he turned back to his
side of the fire, he was not surprised to discover that his bed had
disappeared, and the largo table replaced with a smaller one, again with a
place setting for only one, but enough breakfast for six hungry old merchants.
“They are adjusting,” he murmured to himself. There was also a single red rose
in a silver vase.

When he looked up from his breakfast, his eye was caught by
a small door in the wall opposite him, standing a little open. He obediently
crossed the room to investigate; within was a bathroom, gloriously appointed
and the bath full of steaming hot water; beyond that was a water-closet. When
he had climbed at length from the delightful bath, he found a new suit of
clothes waiting for him; when he returned to the main room, the blanket he had
laid before the fire was not merely dry but clean, and the pony herself was
clean and brushed and saddled with tack as fresh and supple as if it had been
oiled every night since the day it was made. The pony’s thatch of a forelock
had been braided and tucked under the browband, and she looked very pleased
with herself.

“Thank you,” he said helplessly, standing in the middle of
the floor. “Thank you, thank you. You saved our lives.” There was no answer. He
turned towards the door and then paused, looking back at the breakfast table.
The remains of his breakfast were still there, as was the rose in the silver
vase. He remembered Beauty’s sad, half-joking wish, and plucked the rose out of
the vase, and put it into the breast of his coat. Then he took up the pony’s
rein and went through the archway, down the long crimson-carpeted corridor
towards the door, open now on a bright spring day.

But the silence of the palace was shattered by roars as of
some enormous wild beast; his quiet pony reared and shrieked and .jerked the
rein out of his hands. He was knocked winded to the floor; when he struggled to
stand up, the bright doorway was blocked by a Beast who stood there.

The merchant’s heart almost stopped beating in the first moments
of dumb terror. The Beast seemed not merely to blot out the sunlight but to
absorb it and grow even larger by its strength. The outside edge of his
silhouette was fuzzy and shimmering, as confusing to the eye as the merchant’s
view of the grey-white palace with its glinting white driveway had been the day
before. When the Beast stirred, rays of dazzling light shot in at the merchant
like messages from a lost world, but as he moved again, and they were effaced,
it was as if the Beast deliberately struck them away from the merchant, as a
cruel gaoler might strike at the outstretched hands of his prisoner’s
beseeching friends.

The merchant’s first fumbling thought was that this Beast
was rearing on his hind legs, but then he saw that his shape was not unlike a
man’s—only hugely, grotesquely, bigger than any man—and that he dressed like a
man. Grasping at his reason, the merchant hoped it was only fear, and the
dazzling, narrow bursts of light, which made the Beast so difficult to see. He lifted
his eyes, trying to find this man-shaped Beast’s face, to look into his eyes,
the belter to plead with him, for would not a man-shaped Beast respond to the direct
look of a man? His gaze travelled up the vast throat, found the great heavy
chin, the jaw of a carnivore, the too-wide mouth, thin lips curled back in a
snarl, the deadly gleam of teeth—He could raise his eyes no farther; his mind
was disintegrating with terror.

Before he lost himself to madness, he dropped his gaze to
look at the Beast’s garments, forced himself to stare at them, to recognise,
and to name to himself, cloth, buttons, laces, seams, gores, pleats. He saw
that the Beast was dressed entirely in black, and the clothes were themselves
odd, of no fashion the merchant knew. He wore an open, sleeveless gown, of some
kind of stiff heavy material overlaid with black brocade and trimmed in black
braid, which fell from thick gathers at the shoulders to a great whipping
length of hem which roiled out round him like half-opening wings as he paced
and roared. Beneath this was a long, soft, but close-fitting waistcoat,
embroidered, also in black, but in a pattern the merchant could not make out.
Even the shirt beneath it, the ruffle at the collar and wrists were unrelieved
black, as were the trunk-hose and the low boots, strapped tightly round the
ankles.

The Beast threw back his head and roared a last time; then
he spoke, and his voice shook the walls. “1 have fed and sheltered you and your
creature when you both would have died in the blizzard else! And you repay my
kindness and hospitality by stealing my rose!”

The merchant opened his mouth, but no words came. He leant
against the wall of the corridor and closed his eyes, waiting for the blow.

“Speak!”

The merchant opened his eyes. The Beast was standing still
at last, and now the sunlight streamed in round him; there was a wide channel
of light from the doorway to the merchant’s feet, one edge of it sculpted by
the shape of the Beast’s shoulder and the fall of his gown. Perhaps that gave
the merchant courage; perhaps it was that as the Beast was now standing, he was
half turned sideways, and with the wings of the gown collapsed round him, he
looked only huge, no longer big enough to obliterate the sky. The merchant
wondered where his pony had got to.

“I—I—” The merchant’s voice was a croak, but as he discovered
he could again speak, his mind began to race, spilling out frantic excuses. “I
am very grateful—I am very grateful—truly 1 am—I know we would have died—we
were nearly dead—I am sorry about the rose—I was not thinking—that is, I was
thinking, but your house is so grand—I thought you would not miss it—it is just
that my youngest daughter grows roses, but the weather this year meant none of
them bloomed, and she was so sad, so sad, her roses are her friends, and she is
such a good girl, a kind girl, I thought to bring this one to her.. . .”

As the merchant said, “Her roses are her friends,” the Beast
gave a little shudder. The merchant saw it in the ripple in the edge of the
channel of light, as the Beast’s gown swirled and fell still again. The
merchant had kepi his eyes fixed on that track of sunlight as he spoke, and now
both edges of the channel ran suddenly straight, as the Beast moved away from
the door. The merchant looked longingly out upon the shimmering while driveway,
at the border of smooth lawn he could see, and the dark haze of trees beyond,
but he knew there was no point in trying to run. The Beast would snatch him out
of the air before he reached the door. He wished again he knew where his pony
was.

He glanced towards the Beast, who had his back to him, and
the merchant was suddenly, unwelcomely shaken by an unmistakable flare of pity,
for the Beast stood with his great shoulders and head bowed in a posture unfathomably
sorrowful. If he had been a man, and even if that man had threatened his life
but a moment before, the merchant would have put a hand on his shoulder. But he
was a Beast, and the merchant remained next to his wall. But he wondered .. .
and now, perhaps, he hoped.

The Beast turned back towards the merchant, catching the
edge of the sunlight again, halving the bright track that led to the merchant’s
feet, and fragments of light glanced off the curves and angles of his face as
he turned. The merchant’s breath caught on a sob, and he turned his own face to
the wall. He did not dare close his eyes—were not the Beast’s footfalls
silent?—but he had, just then, confused by pity and dread and daylight, nearly
looked into the Beast’s face.

“Your daughter loves roses, does she?” the Beast said at
last. Now that he was no longer roaring, his voice was so deep the merchant had
to strain to hear the words. “They grow for her. do they?”

“Oh yes,” said the merchant eagerly, looking at the Beast’s
feet. “Everything in the garden grows for her, but the roses most of all.
Everyone in the town comments on it.” The merchant raised his eyes just lo the
Beast’s breast level; his peripheral vision told him the Beast still stood with
his shoulders stooped and his head lowered. The merchant was appalled when he
heard his own voice saying: “I—I—may I bring you some this summer, to—to
replace what I—I stole? Her—her—her wreaths are very much admired. ...”

In the silence following his involuntary words, the merchant
heard his heart drumming in his ears, and there was a red fog over his vision
that was not explained by the crimson carpet. The Beast stood as if
considering. “No,” he said at last. “No. I want your daughter.”

The merchant gasped; a great pain seized his breast, and two
tears rolled down his face.

“Stand up, man, and catch your pony, and ride home. I could
kill you, you know, and it would be my right, for you have stolen my rose. But
I am not going to kill you. Go home and tell your daughter to come to me.”

“No—oh no!” cried the merchant. “No—you may as well kill me
now, for I will not sacrifice one of my daughters to take my place!”

“Sacrifice?” said the Beast. “I said nothing of killing the
girl. She will be safe here, as safe as you were, last night, till you stole my
rose. Nothing comes here that is dangerous—save me—and 1 give you my word she
will take no harm of me.”

The merchant, far from standing up, had sunk down, as his
knees gave way, and now he bowed down till his fore—

head nearly touched the floor, and covered his face with his
hands.

“Nay, you think a Beast’s word is not to be trusted?” As the
Beast strode towards him, the merchant, in a final spasm of terror, struggled
again to his feet and spread his hands, thinking to meet his death as bravely
as he could, but all he feit was the sleek thickness of the Beast’s fur as he
forced his huge clawed hand into the breast of the merchant’s coat. He saw the
Beast’s great hand closing tight round the rose’s stem; when he opened it
again, the palm had been pierced by one of the thorns, and three drops of blood
fell softly to the crimson carpet, making a dark stain like a three-petal led
flower or the first unfurling of a rosebud.

“I am a man in this,” said the Beast, staring down at the merchant;
the merchant felt that look burning into his scalp. “I keep my promises. By my
own blood I swear it.

“I am lonely here—tell your daughter that. She is a kind
girl, you say. Just as no fierce creatures come here for fear of me, who am
fiercer, so no gentle ones come either. I desire companionship.

“I give you a month; send her to me by then, or, believe
this, merchant—I will come and fetch her. Take her this as a token of my oath.”
And the Beast bowed down low before the merchant’s amazed eyes, tower than the
merchant would have guessed any Beast of such bulk could bow, till his long
mane trailed on the carpet and mixed with the crumpled wings of his black gown,
and laid the rose at the merchant’s feet.

The Beast sprang up at a bound, turned, and took two steps
out of the doorway, turned again, and disappeared. The merchant heard no
footfalls, but perhaps that was only because of the ringing in his ears.

He slowly picked up the rose and stood staring at it. As he
had fixed his mind on the Beast’s garments a little time before, now he fixed
his mind on this rose. It seemed to him he had never seen one so dark, in its
centre almost as black as the silhouette of the Beast; but the outer petals
were of a redness more perfect and pure than he could remember seeing anywhere
in his life, with no hint of blue suggesting purple, no weakening of its depth
of colour towards pink; and as most of Beauty’s roses reminded him of silk, so
this one reminded him of velvet.

He looked up. He seemed quite alone, and his heartbeat no
longer deafened him. He took a cautious step; again his legs would hold him. He
turned away from the sunlight, walked back down the corridor, and found his
pony trembling in the now-empty alcove where she had spent the night. So glad
was she to see him that he led her without fuss back towards the front door and
towards the place where they had met the Beast, though he felt her neck under
his comforting hand still rigid with tear. He mounted just over the threshold,
and they set out on their journey once again.

It
was hardly noontime when the merchant saw the tiny
track to Rose Cottage winding off to the right of the wider track he was on,
which he had found almost at once, as soon as the pony had stepped into the
trees at the edge of the Beast’s garden. He was not fully convinced that he was
not still held in some dream-state manipulated by the Beast, and he often
reached out and touched the branches of trees, when they passed near enough, to
reassure himself of their reality—but what, he said to himself despairingly,
was not a sorcerer as great as the Beast capable of?

But then Beauty was running towards him; she had seen him
from where she had been in the garden, and she flew to him, and half dragged
him off the pony, and embraced him, laughing, and crying Jeweltongue and Lionhcart’s
names. It wasn’t till all three sisters—and Teacosy—were there, hugging and
patting him and saying (or barking) how glad they were to see him (under the astonished
gaze of Lydia, who stopped eating to watch), how relieved they were to have him
home with them again, that it came to them he was not rejoicing with them.