Rose Daughter (23 page)

She looked down, so as not to step on any hedgehogs, and saw
that they had all uncurled, and were standing up on their legs, and sniffing
the air in an interested manner. She thought one of them looked up at her and
deliberately met her eyes, as if to say, “Thank you.”

“Well,” she said, “thank you loo. I hope you’ll stay here,
and eat lots of slugs and things, and be happy. Be happy too, please. You won’t
be very small hedgehogs here for long, will you’.’ Although I can’t say this
place looks as if it has ever seen a slug in its life—I guess if there are
hedgehogs, there will be slugs loo. Oh—and to think I toid the bat to fly to
the wild wood. Perhaps it already knew better. Perhaps that’s why it came, and
it only got a little lost and flew through my balcony instead.
¹
’

She wandered down the paths for a little while, thinking
about a rose jungle like this vegetable jungle. All her bushes would be at
least as tall as she was, and the climbers would climb right up into the
cupola, and there would be so many leaves and flowers eveiywhere that the
overeager gardener wouldn’t know where the thorns were lying in wait until it
was too late.... She laughed. As she walked, she picked a handful of pods, and
shelled them, and ate the peas raw, and they melted on her tongue; and she
pulled off hand fills of different lettuces, and every leaf was as sweet and
tender as the peas, and she was sorry for the lunch she had had, that she could
not eat more.

In her wanderings she eame to another wrought-iron gate, and
she opened it and went through it, and here were great fields of sweet-corn,
with fat green ears trailing golden tassels as long as her arm, and of wheat,
and the longer-haired barley. She walked just a little way along the barley, to
run her hands through the feathery awns, softer than any birds’ down, softer
than Fourpaws’ flank. “But I must go back,” she said, “for I have work to do.”

Inside the walled garden again she put her hand out, for one
last mouthful of peas, for a fig to eat on her road; but her hand paused in the
reaching, and even though the sunlight still shone on her warm and bright, she
shivered. The taste of the peas and the lettuce in her mouth was not as sweet
as it had been, for it seemed to her suddenly somehow soulless—as if while her
tongue could be tooled, her body knew this food would not nourish her. And she
thought again of the meals in the Beast’s palace—and wondered again about the
cheese and the butter.

It was not until that moment that she noticed the silence.
She was growing accustomed to silence, to the nearly unbroken silence of the
palace and its grounds, the silence that made her talk aloud to herself in a
way that would never have occurred to her when she still lived with two sisters
and a father (and a dog, a goat, and chickens), and a little town not far away.
But she now realised that there had been an uneasiness shadowing her from the
moment she had stepped through the first gate, struggling with her
hedgehog-filled overskirt. And the uneasiness was that she neither saw nor
heard any birds.

In the palace there was some excuse for soundlessness; in
the courtyard, perhaps, as well, but in a garden, in any garden, let alone one
so magnificent as this one, . . There must be birds in a garden, just as there
must be midges and flies and aphids, and slugs and beetles and borers, and
spiders and hedgehogs and butterflies. But there were none here, neither flying
overhead, nor calling from the branches, nor hopping through the leaves at
ground level.

As she went back towards the gate into the orchard, she
found herself brushing against the plants for the soughs and swishes and
rustles, just as she had brushed her hand against curtains and sconce pendants
when she had followed the Beast into the palace for the first time. Before she
let herself through the second gate, she looked round for the hedgehogs, but
they had all disappeared.

It was later than she realised; the light was already
lengthening towards evening. The long grass in the orchard seemed to drag at
her, and by the time she came to the tunnel into the courtyard, she was
conscious of how tired she was. She stood for a minute at the edge of the
orchard, listening to the wind moving among the grass blades and the trees; it
was a comforting sound, but not so comforting as the chirp of a single sparrow
would have been. She was thinking about nothing in particular—about the end of
day, about weariness, about the likelihood of a hot bath waiting for her. But
there was a little, itchy, tickling sense of some thought trying to catch her
attention, something about. . . about strength, about sorrow, about joy; about
the joy of... of... As soon as she was aware even of so much, it was gone.

Her dress that evening was dark green, with long
close-fining sleeves buttoned with many tiny buttons, and a high neck, and
round it went a wide necklet of great square emeralds, each as large as the palm
of a child’s hand. There were emerald drops for her ears that were so heavy she
was not sure she could wear them all evening; when she had put them on and
turned her head, the tiny spray of opals and peridots that hung below the
emeralds brushed her shoulders. There were two heavy emerald wristlets whose
clasps closed with small substantial snicks like the locks of treasure vaults;
her shoes were so stiff with the gems sewn closely all over them she could
barely bend her feet. When she leant down to pick up a dark green bath towel
and hang it over the back of a chair she creaked. “All T need is—let’s see—a
tiara, and perhaps a cape, sewn all over to match the shoes, and I will be too
ponderous to move,” she said, “and you will have to send a coach and four to
transport me to the dining-hall.”

There was a sudden wild sibilancc from inside the wardrobe,
and she started. “That was a joke!” she said hastily; her voice had gone all
high and thin. She turned and half ran—tittupping in her unyielding
shoes—through her rooms to the chamber of the star; there her shoes made a dramatic,
resonant clatter, as if the coach and four were there, waiting for her,
invisible but not inaudible.

“Oh dear!” she said. “No more jokes!” She ran across the
slar and through the door that opened for her, and at once her shoes were
muffled by carpeting. “Maybe that is the trouble with this place,” she said.
“No sense of humour.” But her words were muffled even as her shoes were, and
she began to feel her spirits muffled too; and she went on silently to the
dining-hall. where the Beast silently waited.

She sat down, tasted the wine the Beast had poured for her,
and resolutely began to eat. She was not going to miss any more dinners. The
shadows that were the Beast caught at the comer of her vision. She only knew he
was there because she had seen him sit down; he sal as still as some great
predator waiting for his prey. The tinkle of her cutlery hid the sound of his
breathing, as the mutter of dry leaves underfoot might hide the hunter’s. She
tried to recall the mood of the morning. “Do you go every day to the orchard?”
she said.

“Yes. I spend much of each day there. Nights I spend on the
roof.”

Beauty said, astonished, “But when do you sleep? And does
not the weather trouble you?’’

“I do not steep much. And the weather troubles me little...
in this shape. It is harder on my suits of clothing. The magic can turn the
weather too, when it chooses. I prefer it to come as it will; mostly I have my
way in this.” The Beast looked at her. “in the winter, occasionally, sanctuary
is provided to some traveller.”

Beauty shivered and, because she could not help herself,
said, “It has happened more than once then.”

“Yes . . . more than once. They run away, of course, when
they see me. If they do not see me, they leave for loneliness—or fear of
shadows.”

Very low, Beauty said: “But none has ever stolen from you before.”

The Beast said, “Your father is not a thief. It was my heart
he took, and he could not have known that. Others have stolen.” The Beast’s voice
became indifferent. “They had no joy of what they took, and no one has ever
found this place twice.”

The silence was all round her again, pressing through even
the Beast’s words while he was still speaking; with a tiny gasp Beauty made a
sudden gesture and knocked the butt of her knife against a copper bowl, which
rang like a gong. “Oh! I’m sorry!” she said, but as the echoes died away, there
was Fourpaws, winding round the table leg nearest Beauty’s chair, twisting the
long tail of the heavy dark table runner till the goblet and small saucer near
the corner danced in their places. Beauty reached out to steady the goblet just
as Fourpaws stopped and looked at her reproachfully.

“Pardon me,” said Beauty. “I should have known you never
knock anything over unless you mean to do it.”

Fourpaws forgave her, and purred, and jumped into her lap,
and Beauty began to cat again, but only with one hand, since the other was
necessarily occupied with stroking Four-paws. It is rather awkward, eating with
one hand. The Beast had not moved, but he was smiling.

“Not all other beasts fear you,’’ said Beauty, stroking and
stroking as Fourpaws purred, and lashed her tail, and purred.

“A cat is a law unto itself,” said the Beast gravely, “even
one cat from another cat. And Fourpaws, like any cat, is herself. That is the
only explanation I have; and while she stays here, as she does, it is enough.”

“It is enough,” agreed Beauty, and asked another question,
as she might ask a friend: “What do you do on the roof at night?”

“Look at the stars, when it is clear enough. I told you that
this place and I have grown to each other’s shape over the years. I will send
no weather away if I know it is coming, but it is often clear at night here.”

Beauty thought of the bit of sky she could see from her balcony,
and how blocked it was by the hugeness of the palace and even the peak of her
beloved glasshouse; and she remembered the trees around Rose Cottage and the
great bowl of sky she could see from there; and she thought of what the view
must be from the tool” of the palace, with no trees, no houses, no city
lights.. .. “Oh. might 1 ever come up? Is there some bit of roof where I would
not be disturbing you?”

“I answered a question much like that in the orchard earlier
today. I would be glad of your company.”

“How shall I know where to find you?”

“Any late night that you wake, look out of your window, and
if the sky is clear, come and find me. Any stair up will take you eventually
onto the roof.” He paused and looked troubled. ‘‘You—you will not be
frightened? I know you do not like the dark.”

Beauty looked at him in surprise, but she realised at once
that the surprise must be directed at herself, for while she had loved the soft
darkness in the garden at Rose Cottage, she did not like the dark in the
Beast’s palace, which was silent but not quiet, did not like the shadows thrown
by things which changed into other things when she was not looking at them, did
not like the shadows containing other things she could not see.... “Perhaps I
shall be frightened,” she said slowly, “but I shall still come and look for
you.”

“Will you marry me?” said the Beast.

“No, Beast,” said Beauty, and the hand stroking Four-paws
stopped and curled its fingers, and Fourpaws leapt from her lap and disappeared
into the darkness.

She slept too deeply that night for wakening. She saw her sisters
moving round the ground floor of Rose Cottage. Their father was again frowning
over bits of paper by the hearth, but his scowl was that of firm concentration,
and he bit the end of his pen briskly. She looked into his well-loved face and
saw a clarity and serenity there that had never been there before. Even her
earliest memories of him. when her mother was still alive, made him out to have
been ... not merely preoccupied with business or by his adoration of his wife,
but somehow a little haggard, a little overstretched by life or work, by
responsibility or longing. Beauty smiled in her sleep to see him now, even as
she wished to put out her hand and smooth the lines from his lace and the
sorrow from his eyes that had been there only since she had come to the Beast’s
palace, only since she had begun having these dreams about the home she had
left. If this is only a dream—she thought, dreaming—why can I not do this? Why
can I not tell my dream-father and my dream-sisters that I am well and whole?
Just as I used to touch the wallpaper of that long windowless corridor and feel
the roughness of the paper and the slickness of the paint, and the edges where
the lengths joined.

Just as I petted a cat called Molly while Lion heart and her
young man looked on.

But she could not.

Jeweltongue was humming to herself as she settled down
across from her father and picked up a froth of pink ribbons and net. “I will
be glad when Dora outgrows the frou-frou stage. Mrs Trueword never grudges
paying my labour, but all this nonsense is simply boring.”

Lionheart, at the kitchen table, beating something in a
bowl, said, “She may not outgrow it, you know. She may decide she is expressing
a unique and exquisite taste. Try considering yourself lucky. Out of six women
in one family to sew for. you have only one addicted to frills,”

“Hmm,” said Jeweltongue, biting off thread and watching her
sister through her eyelashes.

Lionheart lost her grip on her bowl with the violence of her
mixing, hit herself in the stomach with her spoon gone out of control, and
grunted,
“Rats’-nests.’”
as batter flew across the room.

“You’ve been out of soils for weeks now,” said Jeweltongue.
“You come home every seventh day and bang round the house like a djinn in a
bottle, and go off again next morning looking like the herald of the end of the
world, I say this with the understanding that you may now upend the remains of
your bowl over my head.”