Rose Daughter (27 page)

“Perhaps the—the badgers, and foxes, and deer, and rabbits
and hares, and mice and voles and weasels and stoats and squirrels, perhaps
they are waiting for us. And the birds. I do so hope the birds come back!”

Beauty led her ever-increasing menagerie into the orchard
and on towards the walled garden, and the grass stems rattled almost as loudly
as spears as it followed her. She did not quite dare to stop again, but she
walked sideways for a few steps to look behind her, and she could no longer see
her creatures, but the grasses tossed and rippled like a sea cut by a fleet of
ships. She turned to face front again just as there was a small streaking
explosion like the path of a cannonball to one side of her. and something
landed with a heavy thump on her shoulder.

“Oh!” said Beauty, recognizing the bushed-out tail in her
eye as belonging to Fourpaws. “I wondered what had become of you.” Even a cat
has some difficulty riding on the shoulder of someone wading through tall
grass, and Beauty put up a hand to steady her and did not protest the faint
prick of several sets of claws through the thick collar of her dressing-gown.
“A tew too many of them even for you, eh?” said Beauty, and added hastily,
mindful of Fourpaws’ dignity, “I am myseif very grateful for your
company—someone else with warm blood and breath—even if your tail is still in
my eye.”

When she came to the walled garden, .she threw open the gate
and stood aside, and she looked back as well and saw little threads of bobbing
grass stems leading off in all directions from the main body of her army,
assuring her that everyone was seeking the sort of landscape it liked best.
“There’s water at the bottom of the slope,” she called softly. “But you
probably knew that already.”

When there was a lull in the flow of creatures over the
threshold, she went in and opened the gate on the far side of the garden, into
the fields of corn. She paused again to stroke the barley and wheat-awns, and
as she paused, she looked round, and her eye was caught by a yellow and white
butterfly. It whirled up in a warm draught, and she saw more coloured flickers;
there were half a dozen deepest ruddy gold and peacock blue and green
butterflies sunning their wings on a narrow mossy ledge in the garden wall.

At that moment she felt a gentle shove against her foot. She
looked down, and there was a hedgehog, looking up at her; it was much larger
than any of the four she had brought to the garden in her skirt. “The slugs and
snails, and borers and beetles, they’re back too, are they? You would not be so
shiny and plump else.”

She went back thoughtfully through the garden, and now, when
she looked, she could see holes and spots on some of the stems and leaves, and
once she saw a snail hastening across the path in front of her, its shining
neck stretched its fullest length, its tail streaming behind it; she could only
see that it was moving at all by the tangential observation that it was now
nearer the side of the path it was aiming at than it had been when she first
saw it. She also heard the crickets singing, and swirls of butterflies were
gleaming over the heads of the ruby chard, and she had to wave her free hand at
a little puff of gnats she walked through.

Surely, if all this were happening, she would find a way to
save her Beast’s roses?
It is the heart of this place, and it is dying.

Fourpaws leapt down when they reentered the orchard, but she
stayed close at Beauty’s heels all the way back to the palace and upstairs to
the breakfast table laid in front of Beauty’s balcony. Beauty set a bowl of
bread and milk on the floor for Fourpaws and poured herself her first cup of
tea. “When the bluebottles are buzzing repellently in all the corners where one
can’t get at them, and the mice are chewing holes in the wainscoting and
leaving nasty little pellets in the pantry, and the wood borers are eating the
furniture and leaving ominous little heaps of dust about, will the tea stew,
too, like ordinary tea, instead of tasting fresh-brewed when it has sat half
the morning, as this does?” she said; but her eyes were on the pyrotechnics of
her glasshouse in the sunlight.

Fourpaws finished her bread and milk and mewed for more.
“You’re going to have to start catching mice, you know,” said Beauty, setting
down a fresh bowl. “Instead of shadows, I would have thought you might prefer
mice.” But when Fourpaws finished the second bowl and mewed for a third. Beauty
looked at her in surprise. “Someone your size can’t possibly need a third bowl
of bread and milk,” she said. Fourpaws looked at her enigmatically and, holding
her gaze, reached out with one imperious forepaw and patted the empty bowl.
Beauty laughed. “Very well. But this is your last. Absolutely.”

Beauty was dressing by the time Fourpaws finished her third
breakfast, but between the time Beauty dropped her shirt over her head and the
time she could see again and was smoothing her hair back, the cat had
disappeared. When she had finished brushing and tying up her hair, and lacing
her boots, and patting her pockets to check that everything she needed was
still there, and had paused to drink a last cup of tea, she realized that
through the minor bustle of getting ready for the day (what remained of the
day, she thought), she had been hearing furtive noises coming from under her
bed. She knelt and lifted the edge of the long curtain. “You aren’t tormenting
any lost toads, are you?”

Fourpaws sat up and looked at her indignantly. There was
just room for a small cat to sit up lo her full height under Beauty’s bed. Then
she threw herself down and rolled over on her back, curving her forepaws
invitingly; but Beauty looked at her face and her lashing tail and rather
thought she had the mien of a cat who was planning on seizing an arm and
disembowelling it with her hind feet while she bit its head off. “I think not,”
said Beauty.

Fourpaws dropped over onto her side and half lidded her
eyes, but the tail was still lashing. “I have no idea what you’re up to,” said
Beauty, “but 1 will leave you to it.” She dropped the curtain hem and rose to
her feet.

She knew it was a vain gesture. But once she was out of
doors, she could not resist walking down the second side of the palace wall,
and looking for the closed gates, and, having found them, looking for any trace
of—of anything, any disturbance, any mark of any sort of visitor, but no trace
did she find. The pebbles were as flawlessly raked as ever, the grey-white wall
as spotless, the doors as perfectly barred.

She walked the rest of that wall, and through the
carriageway in the cross wall, and stood at the mouth of the tunnel and peered
out. The trees looked as if they went on a very long way, but perhaps they did
not. Perhaps there was a clearing just behind the first rank, where milk-white
cows grazed, where an old woman made butter and cheese to bring to the poor
imprisoned Beast and his guest... .

She sighed deeply, squared her shoulders, and walked into
the glen. When she arrived at its edge, she took a bit of gardening string from
her pocket and tied it round the trunk of a slender tree that stood opposite
the carriage-way, and then she began working her way through the trees beyond,
letting the string trail through her fingers behind her. If the old woman came
here often, there should be a path, but perhaps the path was magic too, and
only appeared on clear nights when the old woman wanted it.

She could find no glade where cows, milk-white or otherwise,
grazed, nor any small secret huts where old women might churn their butter and
draw off their whey and leave their cheeses to ripen. She followed her string
back to the clearing, tied it to another tree, and set out in a slightly
different direction, twice that morning and three times in the afternoon. She
found nothing and gained only filthy bramble-scratched hands and smudges on her
skirt where she had tripped and fallen, and crumbly leaves and sap-sticky twigs
in her hair and down her collar.

As the sun sank towards twilight, she gave it up, rolled her
string into its ball for the last time, and went slowly through the
carriage-way and into the courtyard. Slowly she entered her glasshouse for the
first time that day, to water her cuttings and her seedbed, but she entered
sadly and neither sang nor looked round her as she went about her tasks.

When she said good night to the one blooming rose-bush, she
felt like asking it to forgive her. She did not, not because it was a foolish
thing to say to a rose-bush but because she felt she could not bear it if the
bush seized magic enough to give itself a voice for three words and forgave her
as she asked.

Her bath towels this evening were as golden as the sunset on
the glasshouse panes, and her dress was as golden as the towels, and her
necklace was of great warm rough amber, strung with garnets so dark they looked
nearly black till they caught the light and flared deepest crimson, like the
heart of a rose.

Her mood lifted a little when she saw the Beast waiting for
her, and she made an effort at the conversation over dinner, telling stories of
her childhood in the city, of her governesses, of her sisters, of her garden.
But when she touched the embroidered heart, as she inevitably did when she
spoke her sisters’ names, she did so abstractedly, for her mind was on the old
woman and on her roses, the Beast’s roses, which must be fed or die.

But she did notice that when she fell silent, the Beast
offered no tales of his childhood in response to her own.

“Fourpaws does not join us this evening,” she said at last,
as she sliced a pear; candlelight winked off the blade of her knife and warmed
its ivory handle almost to the gold of her sleeve.

“She cannot come every night,” said the Beast, “or we would
cease to hope for her appearance; 1 learnt that long ago.”

Beauty laid her knife down and took hold of her courage and
said, “Why sat you alone in this dark hall, for all those nights, when you will
not eat with knife and plate?”

There was a silence, and Beauty looked at her neatly sliced
pear but did not move to pick up any bit of it. She folded her hands tightly in
her lap and willed herself not to take her words back. She did not fear his
anger, and she did fear to do him hurt; but it seemed to her that he held too
much to himself as a burden and that if he had chosen—had demanded—had
ensorcelled her to be his companion, she would do the best for him that she
could. And so, while she waited for his answer, she thought again of the glasshouse,
and the roses there, and the old woman, and the silver beasts hi the wild wood,
and did not offer to withdraw her question.

At last he spoke, and each word was like a boulder brought
up from the bottom of a mine. “When the change first... came upon me, I... I
lost what humanity remained to me... for a time. I still cannot. . . remember
that lime clearly. When I had learnt to ... walk like a man again, and had ...
found ... clothes that would cover me as I now was, and discovered that I could
still speak ... so that a man or woman might understand me, 1... still wished
some daily ritual of humanity to remind me of... what I had been and what I no
longer was. And I chose ... to sit in this dining-haJl, though I cannot...
wield knife and fork like a man. There might have been other rituals that would
have done.

This is the one which first... suited me, and... I have
looked no further.”

When the change first came upon me
... If his words
were boulders, they weighed her down too. Beauty leant towards him, so that she
could lay her hand on the back of his nearer hand. Her hand and fingers
together could not reach the full width of his palm, and when, after a moment,
his other hand was laid over hers, it covered her wrist as well.

He released her and sat back. She ate her pear, and then
picked up a nutcracker in the shape of a dragon, and began cracking nuts. “I
guess you have not yet solved your dilemma,” said the Beast.

“Oh dear,” she said, fishing out a walnut half with a nut
pick on whose end crouched a tiny silver griffin. “Is it so obvious? I have
tried—”

“I have learnt your moods, a little,” said the Beast. “I see
you are preoccupied.”

“I fear I am,” she admitted, “but—if you didn’t mind—a walk
on the roof would be the pleasantest of distractions.”

“I would be honoured,” said the Beast, and this evening, as
they walked up the whirlpool stairs together, Beauty kept her eyes firmly down
and on the Beast’s black shoes and her soft gold slippers, coruscating with
tiny gems. And when she left him, much later, on the roof, and he said to her,
gravely, “Beauty, will you marry me?” she answered as she had the night before,
“Good night, Beast,” only this time she did not shiver.

She kept her forearms crossed against her body as she
hurried back to her room and pinched herself every few steps, saying aloud, “I
am awake; I am still awake.” When she reached her rooms, she took off her
dinner dress but put her day clothes back on. She almost thought her nightgown
flapped its sleeves in protest; there was some pale flicker caught at the edge
of her sight, where it always iay over the back of a chair by the fire, so it
would be warm when she put it on. She turned sharply to look at it, but it only
lay limply over its chair, as a nightgown should.

“Basket,” she said. “I need a basket, and I’m afraid I

need it now, please. And a trowel. A wide one. I should have
asked before, but I hadn’t thought of it yet.” She turned round looking, but
there was no basket. “Nevermind what I need it for,” she said. “The Beast did
say you would provide anything in your power. I don’t believe you can’t find me
a basket.” But there was still no basket.

“Well,” she said, and picked up a candle, kindled it at the
edge of the fire, and began walking through her rooms, peering into dark
corners. She found the basket at last, tucked behind a small ebony table,
inlaid with hammered silver, which sparkled like snow in the candlelight. The
glitter was such that she almost didn’t see the basket. The trowel lay in its
bottom.