Rose Daughter (3 page)

Nor could she sleep at night. She felt she would welcome her
old nightmare almost as solace, so dreadful had their waking life become; but
the dream stayed away. Since her mother’s death it had never left her alone for
so long. She found herself missing it; in its absence it became one more
security that had been torn away from her, a faithful companion who had
deserted her. And it was not until now, with their lives a wreck around them,
that she realised she had forgotten what her mother’s face looked like. She
could remember remembering, she could remember the long months after her
mother’s death, waking from the dream crying, “Mamma!” and knowing what face
she hoped to see when she opened her eyes, knowing her disappointment when it
was only the nurse’s. When had she forgotten her mother’s face? Some unmarked
moment in the last several years, as childhood memories dimmed under the weight
of adult responsibilities, or only now. one more casualty of their ruin? She
did not know and could not guess.

What unsettled her most of all was that her last fading wisp
of memory contained nothing of her mother’s beauty, but only kindness, kindness
and peace, a sense of safe haven. And yet the first thing anyone who had known
her mother mentioned about her was her beauty, and while she was praised for
her vitality, her wit, and her courage, far from any haven, her companionship
was a dare, a challenge, an exhilarating danger.

In among her father’s papers Beauty discovered a lawyers’
copy of a will, dated in May of the year she had turned two, leaving the three
sisters the possession of the little house owned by the woman named. Beauty
puzzled over this for some time, as she knew all her father’s relatives (none
of whom wanted to know him or his daughters anymore), and knew as well that her
mother had had none; nor did she know of any connexion whatsoever to anyone or
anything so far away from the city of the sisters’ birth. But there was no easy
accounting for it. and Beauty had no time for useless mysteries.

There was a lawyers’ letter with the will, dated seven years
later, saying that the old woman had disappeared soon after making the will,
and in accordance with the law, the woman had now been declared dead, and the
house was theirs. It was called Rose Cottage. It lay many weeks’ journey from
the city, and it stood alone in rough country, at a little distance from the
nearest town.

Even their father’s creditors were not interested in it.

She wrote to the lawyers, asking if there was any further
transaction necessary if they wished to take up residence, and received a
prompt but curt note in reply saying that the business was no longer anything
to do with them but that they supposed the house was still standing.

Rose Cottage, she thought. What a romantic name. I wonder
what the woman who had it was like. I suppose it’s Like a lot of other house
names—a timid family naming theirs Dragon Villa or city folk longing for the
country calling theirs Broadmeadow. Perhaps—she almost didn’t dare finish the
thought—perhaps for us, just now, perhaps the name is a good omen.

Hesitantly she told her sisters about it. Lionheart said: “I
wish to go so far away from this hateful city that no one round me even knows
its name.”

Jeweltongue said: “I would not stay here a day longer than I
must, if they asked me to be mayor and my only alternative was to live in a
hole in the ground.”

It was teatime. Late-afternoon light slanted in through the
long panes of their sitting-room. They no longer used any of the bigger rooms;
their present sitting-room was a small antechamber that had formerly been used
to keep not-very-welcome guests waiting long enough to let them know they were
not very welcome. In here Jeweltongue saw that the surfaces were dust-free, the
glass panes sparkling, and the cushions all plumped. But the view into the garden
showed a lawn growing shaggy, and twigs and flower stems broken by rain or wind
lay across the paths. It had been three weeks since the Duke and Baron sent
their last messages.

Beauty sat staring out the window for a minute in the
silence following her sisters’ words. It was still strange to her how silent
the house was; it had never been silent before. Even very late at night, very
early in the morning, the bustle had only been subdued, not absent. Now silence
lay, cold and thick and paralysing as a heavy fall of snow. Beauty shivered,
and tucked her hands under her elbows. “I’ll tell Father, then, when he wakes.
At least something is settled. ...” Her voice tailed off. She rose stiffly to
her feet. “I have several more letters I should write tonight.” She turned to
leave.

“Beauty—” Lionheart’s voice. Beauty stopped by Jeweltongue’s
chair, which was nearest the door, and turned back. “Thank you,” said her
eldest sister.

Jeweltongue reached suddenly up, and grasped Beauty’s hand,
and laid the back of it against her cheek for a moment. “I don’t know what we
would be doing without you,” she said, not looking up. “I still can’t bear the
thought of.. . meeting any of the people we used to know. Every morning I
think. Today will be better—”

“And it isn’t,” said Lionheart.

Beauty went back to the desk in another little room she had
set up as an office. Quickly she began going through various heaps of papers,
setting a few aside. She had already rebuffed suggestions of aid from
businessmen she knew only wished to gloat and gossip; uneasily she discarded
overtures from sorcerers declaring that their affairs could yet be put right,
all assistance to be extended on credit, terms to be drawn up later upon the
return of their just prosperity. Now she drew a sheet of her father’s
writing-paper towards her, picked up a pen. and began to write an acceptance,
for herself and her sisters, of the best, which was to say the least
humiliating, offer of the several auction houses that had approached them, to
dispose of their private belongings, especially the valuable things that had
come to them from their mother, which their father had given his wife in better
days. Beauty had told no one that she was not sure even this final desperate
recourse would save their father from a debtors’ prison.

And in the next few days she made time wherever she could to
visit various of the people who had adopted her animals. She learnt what she
could, in haste and distress of mind, of butter—and cheese-making from a woman
who had been a dairymaid before she married a town man, while her cat, once a
barn-loft kitten, played lag to rules of her own devising among their feet and
the legs of furniture. She learnt bottling and beer-making from an old woman
who had been a farm wife, while her ex-racing hound made a glossy, beer-coloured
hump under the kitchen table. She took the legal papers she was not sure she
understood to a man whose elegant, lame black mare had foaled all four of his
undertaker son’s best funeral carriage team. Another man, whose five cowardly
hounds bayed tremendously at any knock at the front door from a vantage point
under his bed, taught her how to harness a horse, how to check that its tack
fitted, and the rudiments of how to drive it; and a friend of his saddled up
his very fine retired hunter, the whites of whose eyes never showed anymore,
and went to the big autumn horse fair to buy her a pair of pulling horses and a
suitable waggon.

She came home from these small adventures with her head
ringing with instructions and spent the evenings writing up notes, listening to
the silence, trying not to be frightened, and wondering wearily what she was
forgetting.

/
can teach you to remember,
the elderly salamander
said to her.

“Oh—oh no,” said Beauty. “Oh no, that won’t do at all. But
thank you.”

Your other friends are giving you gifts,
said the
salamander,
gifts of things you need, things you ask them for, but sometimes
things they know to offer you. Why may not I also?

“It is very kind of you,” said Beauty, “but I have no claim
on you.”

You have the claim of friendship,
said the
salamander.
My master, since he retired, is interested only in counting his
money. I shall miss you, for you have been my friend. Let me give you something.
It will be a small something, if you prefer, something smaller than memory.

‘
I would rather forget how to smoke meat and brew
beer and saw and nail if I might also begin to forget the last few weeks,” said
Beauty simply.

The salamander was silent, but she saw by the flicker in its
cloudy eyes that it was thinking.

Pick me up,
it said at last,
so that I may took
into your eyes.

Beauty picked it up gently, in a hand that shook only a very
little.

This is more difficult than I expected. We saltunanders
rarely give gifts, and when we do, they are rarely small.
It made a faint,
dry, rattling sound Beauty recognised as salamander laughter.
This will have
to do.

Abruptly it opened its eyes very wide, and Beauty was
staring into two pits of fire, and when she sucked in her breath in shock, the
air tasted hot and acrid with burning.
Listen to me, my friend. I give you a
small serenity. I would give you a large one, but I am uncertain of human
capacity, and I furthermore believe you would not wish it. This is a serenity
you can hold in the palms of your two hands
—
even smaller than I am.
And
she heard the rustling laugh again, even through the thunder of the fire. /
think
you may find it useful.
It hooded its eyes.
You may put me down.

Beauty set it back down on the pillar where it spent its
days watching the townsfolk and pretending to be a garden ornament. It turned
suddenly, like the lizard it almost was, and touched her hand with its tongue.
/
did not mean to frighten you,
it said, and its voice was tinny and
distant, like the last reverberation of an echo.
Cup your hands and look
into them now.

Beauty did so and at once felt heat, as if she held a small
glowing sun in her hands. She looked down and again saw fire, red and hot and
bottomless. “It—it doesn’t look very serene,” she quavered.

Trust me,
said the salamander, and curled up and
became the statue of a salamander.

in
six weeks from the day the news was first heard
that the wealthiest merchant in the city had resigned his post in disgrace, his
daughters had packed up what few goods remained to them—including himself—and
begun the long journey to their exile near a village with the outlandish name
of Longchance.

Everyone knew the old man’s health had broken with the ruin
of his fortunes and that the girls were left to rescue themselves by what
devices they could themselves contrive. While no one in the city was moved to
offer them any financial assistance, there was a kind of cool ruthless pride in
them that they had risen to the challenge. Beauty’s negotiating skills had won,
or been allowed to win, by the thinnest margin, the ultimate round, and their
father was to be spared the final misery and disgrace of prison—not because she
had anything very much to offer in exchange for the old man’s meagre life but
in recognition that her determination was absolute. And there was not, after all,
any material gain to be had from letting the old man die in gaol. The price for
this benevolence was a promise that the old merchant would do business in the
city no more. It was a guarantee Beauty was happy to make for him.

They escaped only just before Lionheart’s roaring ceased to
compel delivery of their groceries.

None of the sisters had ever before ventured out of the city
more than a few days’ journey, and then only for some amusement at some great
country seat. The old merchant had occasionally chosen to conduct his business
in another city in person, but then he travelled by sea, always booking the
most luxurious private cabin for the journey. Now they were on the road for
weary week after weary week, with only such comforts as an ancient unsprung
farm waggon and a pokey tent could offer. They had barely been able to pay for
their place in a traders’ convoy heading in the direction they wished to go;
they would be travelling often through near wilderness, and banditry was common.
But the traders did not welcome them, and they were made quickly aware that
their leader’s agreeing to take them on was not popular with the others and
that they would receive no help if” they found it difficult to keep up.

They did keep up. The merchant was ill and weak and wandered
in his wits, but the three sisters did everything, as they had done everything
since the Duke and the Baron had written a few words on two sheets of heavy,
cream-laid paper and sealed them with their seals. Lionheart was lender to
their two slow shaggy horses in a way Beauty had never seen her be tender with
her high-couraged thoroughbreds, and Jeweltongue was gentle with their father
in a way Beauty had never seen Jeweltongue be gentle with any human being less
capable than she.

There was one bit of trouble early on. when one of the
traders attempted to pay rough court to Jeweltongue; she had just bitten his
hand when Lionheart hit him over the head with a horse-collar. The commotion
brought some of the others. There was a brief, tense, ugly silence, when it
might have gone either way, and then the traders decided they admired these
soft city girls for defending themselves so resolutely. They dragged then:
colleague’s unconscious body back to his own fireside, and their captain
promised there would be no more such incidents. There were not.

Winter came early that year; the traders’ convoy had to take
shelter in a village barely halfway to their goal. It might yet have gone hard
for the three sisters but for Lionheart’s ability to turn three wizened turnips
into a feast for sixteen, Jeweltongue’s ability to patch holes in shirts more
hole than shirt out of a few discreet excisions from the hems, and Beauty’s
ability to say three kind words, as if at random, just before cold—and
want-shortened tempers flared into fighting. By the time of the thaw, the
traders were no longer sorry for their leader’s bargain with the ruined
merchant and his three beautiful daughters, and the fellow still bearing a knot
on the back of his head from a blow from a horse-collar had mended a
frost-cracked wheel for the sisters and refused any compensation, saying that
companions of the road took no payment from one another.