Rose Daughter (14 page)

“Oh, but wait,” said Beauty. “Please. Your garden—”

“Later,” said the Beast, his hand on the door, and he
crossed the threshold without pausing.

Beauty looked after him as the door closed behind him, but
as soon as she looked away—to the other doors, to the sun lighting up the gilt
and coloured enamel tiles in the floor—she no longer knew which door they had
entered by. She turned to the one that had remained open, the one the Beast had
opened for her.

Inside was an enormous room, or rooms. There were no proper
doorways with doors, hut a series of large spaces semidivided by half-width
walls, their demarcations more clearly indicated by the arrangement of the
furnishings. There were jungles of furniture, cities of statuary, and the walls
were thick with tapestries and paintings.

The outer rooms of the palace which she had seen had been
even larger, more dramatically designed, more spectacularly ornamented: these
rooms were almost more humbling by being closer to her own experience of wealth
and magnificence. She knew she did not belong in this palace; this recurred to
her with every caress of the queer thick air against her skin. But in these
rooms ... It was a little as if a king had decided to reward a farmer, and
knowing the farmer would have no use for, nor interest in, silks and velvets
and fancy wines, still gave him a phaeton and a team of blood horses when he
would rather have had a good pair to pull his plough.

It took her a little while to realise that her sense of the
wrong sort of familiarity—the not merely disorienting, the distressing pull
towards something unsuitable, as the farmer might have admired, and even longed
for, the phaeton team—was caused by the fact that every decorative pattern,
every carving, every lick of paint and bit of fabric, were of vines and flowers
and trees and fruit. And the commonest representation was of roses.

The carpet she first stepped
ob
from the mosaic floor of the chamber of the star was dark
green, but it was also thick with huge pale pink cabbage roses. Towards the
first wide door space these grew darker till in the next room the roses were
all a vivid pink; but they faded again and lost some of their petals towards
the next doorway, till in the next room the roses Beauty walked on opened fiat,
their golden stamens showing in the centre of but a dozen or so gracefully
curved petals which were pink-tipped and cream-hearted ... and so on.

The wallpaper—what could be seen of it—all bore small
climbing roses in different colours, and the table that stood in the centre of
the first room, so that Beauty had to go round it to reach the next, had roses
carved in relief round its edge, and inlaid in exquisitely tinted pietra dura
across its surface; the stems of the torcheres, standing in slender elegant
clusters in every corner, were wound round with roses, and tiny rosebuds
surrounded each individual candle: a stone maiden, not unlike the one Beauty
had seen in the pool in the front garden, stood holding a bowl of roses over
her head, whose brim she had tipped, and she was so covered by a cascade of
stony roses that all of her that was visible were an eye, one cheek, a smiling
mouth, and the tips of her toes.

In the second room the panelled walls were almost entirely
covered by a series of tapestries portraying a garden in each of the four
seasons. “You’re cheating,” murmured Beauty, for there were roses showing in
both the spring and autumn scenes, as well as rioting so profusely across the
summer ones it was almost impossible to ignore them long enough to see what
else was represented. “But perhaps it is true here,” Beauty said; “perhaps this
is the garden I have yet to see?” And she heard the hope in her voice, but she
also feit the wrench as she averted her mind from recollecting a dark red rose
on a cottage windowsill.

She walked over and touched one of the summer tapestries
with her hands. A little peacefulness seemed to sink through her skin at the
contact, and she realised that the dense air of this palace was lighter in
these rooms, in her rooms, and her lungs did not labour here. She felt the tiny
pressure of the silk rope round her neck that bore the little embroidered
heart; she remembered the comfort of the touch of the beech tree in the middle
of the wild wood, remembered the moment before the front door of the palace
when she had known the Beast would keep his promise to her ... and, before she
could stop herself, remembered the last moments of her sisters’ arms round her
and their scent in her throat. It was in the midst of that memory, as she took
a deep, steadying breath, that she became aware of another scent.

She dropped her hands and turned round, and on a tall
japanned cupboard she found a china bowl full of dried rose petals. She drew
her fingers through them—as she had often drawn her fingers through rose petals
in smaller cracked or chipped bowls or saucers that stood at various sentinel
posts around Rose Cottage—and gloried in the smell released; but at the same
time there was a tiny doubt in the back of her mind that this was not quite the
same rose smell as—as—When? Just now? Just when? She looked round, puzzled.
Perhaps there were other bowls of other sorts of roses’ petals scattered about
in these rooms, though she had not seen them. What she seemed to be remembering
was a deeper, richer, almost wilder smell, a smell that might almost have given
her dreams.

She walked on through the rooms, following a wide swathe of
sunlight. At last she came to what she recognised as a bedroom, because it
contained a bed, although the bed was so tall it required its own short flight
of stairs, drawn up against one long side (its wooden surfaces carved with
rose-buds, its tread carpeted with pink rose-buds), and its curtains (patterned
with crimson roses) looked too heavy for her to move by herself. She walked
over to it, slid out of the straps that held her small bundle of belongings to
her back, dropped the bundle at the foot of the bed. It tipped over and
disappeared under the trailing hems of the bed-curtains.

On the wall nearest the bed there was a fireplace, with a
fire laid but not lit on the clean-swept grate, the tips of whose uprights and
crosspieces were round flat open roses. Round the corner from it were two
doors. She opened the first and found a tidy water-closet, with a subdued
pattern merely of grapevines on its walls and one tactful candle sconce
dripping golden grape leaves. But the second door opened upon a bathroom as
grand as a ballroom, the walls gold-veined mirrors, the floor pink marble, and
the bathtub as large as a lake, its taps so complicated by water violets and
yellow flags it was hard to guess how they worked. The whole effect was so
gaudy she took an involuntary step backwards, and then she laughed aloud. “No,
no, I can’t use anything like this; I won’t; I should drown in the
bath—supposing I ever made sense of diose taps—fall down on the floor, and be
horribly embarrassed by the walls. I’d rather wash out of a teacup, standing up
in front of the fire, thank you.”

She closed the door hastily and continued her exploration.
There was a vast wardrobe suitable for hanging dresses, and nexl to it a chest
of drawers with matching footstool, so that you could see into the top drawer
when you opened it (both chest and footstool were festooned with roses twisted
among the delicate stars of virgin’s bower). Next to that were a lower table,
with what was probably a jewel-case (painted over with roses) sitting on it,
and a cushioned chair (its needlework seat pansies and roses). “You are all
very handsome, but nothing to do with me,” she said, and made no move to open
anything. “All I need is one small—quite small—shelf, if you please. You do
know what
small
means?”

She turned back towards the bed, and there next to it, in a
corner of the fireplace wall, was a small white-painted shelf, perfectly
plain—she blinked—no, it was not perfectly plain; almost while roses were
dusted all over it, almost white with the faintest blush of pink, that caught
the eye only after you had been looking at it for a little time—because of
course it must be nonsense to think she had watched them coming into being.. .
. “But what do I know of housekeeping in enchanted palaces?” she said. She
looked at the edge of her bundle, just visible as a wrinkle in the bottom of
the bed-curtains, and thought, No, I cannot bear unpacking just now. She looked
round again at the huge, beautiful, crowded room. Not now. Not here.

She walked rather quickly towards the window, which took up
half the wall; curtains were bunched on its either side, and there was a
dignified frill at its head, but the tall panes reached the floor and were
hinged like doors. She went to them, pushed the centre ones open, and stepped
outside onto a narrow balcony.

The warmth of the sun wrapped round her like the arms of a
friend or of a sister, and her desolation struck her, and the tears rushed down
her face, and she sobbed till she could not stand and knelt on the balcony,
clinging to the rail, pressing her wet face against the warm stone. She wept
until her throat hurt and her eyes were sore and her head ached, and then she
stopped because she was too tired to weep anymore. After a little time she
stood up and went back into the bedroom to look for water to wash her face, and
there it was, on a little table near the fireplace, a generous basin of it,
with pink soap and an assortment of ruby-coloured towels; the outlines of roses
were stitched in red thread along their hems. The water was warm, as warm as
the sunlight, although it stood in shadow; she looked round, to catch sight of
some servant leaving, but saw no one.

How silent the palace was! No rustle and murmur of human
life, not even birdsong, the scritch and patter of mice in the walls, or the
creak of beams adjusting their load. Nothing but the silence, the thick, liquid
silence, a silence that was itself a presence. A listening presence.

This house was quieter even than their city house had been
during the last weeks they had lived there.

Hastily she picked up the soap. It was very fine, smooth
soap and made her aware, as she had not been aware for many months, of her
rough gardener’s hands, and it smelt of roses. Her tears began to flow again,
so she set the soap down and made do with the warm water. Then she returned to
the balcony.

From where she stood, the palace ran round at Least three
sides of an immense courtyard. She could see only partway along the long faces
to either side of her and could not see at al! where the fourth side should
run, or whether it was open or not, because her view was blocked by a
glasshouse.

The glasshouse was itself big enough to be a palace, and it
glittered so tempestuously in the sun she had to find a patch in its own shade
for her eyes to rest upon. It was very beautiful, tier upon graceful tier of it
rising up in a shining silvery network of curves and straight lines, each join
and crossing the excuse for some curlicue or detail, the cavalcades of panes
teased into fantastic whorls and swoops of design no glass should have been
capable of. Merely looking at it seemed an adventure, as if the onlooker’s gaze
immediately became a part of the enchanted ray which held the whole dazzling,
flaring, flaunting array together.

Beauty found that she was holding her breath—in delight; and
when she expelled it, a laugh came with it. The glasshouse was joyous, exuberant,
absurd; immediately she loved it. It was her first friend, here in the Beast’s
gigantic palace, sunken in its viscous silence.

At the very top of the glasshouse—she blinked against the
glare—was a small round cupola and what she guessed was a weather vane,
although she could not identify its shape, but she thought she saw it move. The
palace was three immense storeys tall, but the glasshouse was taller yet.

She had turned and was making her way quickly back through
the long swirl of rose-covered rooms before the idea had finished forming in
her mind: There is the Beast’s garden.

She half ran out upon the round chamber with the star in its
floor. She stood in the centre, turning round and round, with the sun pouring
down on her, and her feet playing hide-and-seek with the coloured tiles in the
centre of the star. ‘‘Oh! I shall never find my way! How do I go to the
glasshouse?” She had spoken aloud only in her private dismay, and had only just
noticed that there were len doors instead of eight, and had begun to tell
herself she must have miscounted the first time when one door swung slowly
open. She fled through it before she had time to change her mind, before she
had time to be frightened again or to weep for loneliness. The garden would
comfort her.

She had only the briefest impression of a portrait of a
dauntingly grand lady in an extravagantly furbelowed frame, hanging on the
first turn of the corridor beyond the door, before she rushed past it. She was
remembering the glasshouses in their garden in the city, which were paltry
things compared to this one, nor could they convince their summer flowers to
bloom quite all year round—not even the mayor’s great glasshouse could do that,
with its hot-water pipes, which ran beneath all its benches and floors, and its
shifts of human stokers, working night and day, to keep the boiler up to
temperature—and the winters there were much milder than in the environs of
Longchance and Appleborough. Perhaps this glasshouse was the answer to the
question of how the Beast had had a rose with which to ensnare her father. ...
She jerked her thought free of that grim verb
ensnare.
But perhaps it
was only a glasshouse, and not sorcery, thai was the answer to her question.

Unexpectedly she found herself remembering something Mrs
Greendown had said to her:
Roses are far love. Not silly sweethearts’ love
but the love that makes you and keeps you whole, love that gets you through the
worst your life ‘II give you and that pours out of you when you’re given the
best instead.... There aren ‘t many roses around anymore because they need more
love than people have to give ‘em. to make ‘em flower, and the only thing
that’ll stand in for love is magic, though it ain ‘t as good, and von have to
have a lot of magic, like a sorcerer. ...