Rose Daughter (33 page)

“And then,” Jack Trueword said, his voice very low and
smooth, “and then ... a few years ago three beautiful girls and their father
moved into Rose Cottage. Three girls so beautiful that Longchance was dazzled
by them—were you not?

“But wait, you are saying. Was it not two daughters and a
son? Very reassuring, that son, was he not, for all that he was also remarkably
beautiful’? For by his presence we have not needed to worry about that foolish
fortune-telling rhyme, the one that describes the final working out of the
curse on Longchance.

“You remember I told you that something had happened recently
to put me in mind of the old stories? Discretion should forbid me to tell this
part of the story, but I began by saying that truth is important, and thus I
cannot spare myself. I found myself falling in love with . ,. one of these
beautiful sisters. It was a curious experience; it was quite like falling under
a spell. Oh, you will say, love is always like that. Perhaps it is, but was
never quite like this before, in my small experience.

“Well, I recovered; I would have thought no more about it, except.
. . very recently I found that my brother has fallen in love with another of
the sisters. But the second sister, you will say, disappeared, rather
mysteriously, some while ago now—some story about a relative in the city, which
is curious, when you think about it, that we had never heard of any relatives
in the city before; indeed the family has seemed to have rather ill memories of
their life in the city. Well, that is the second sister. The third child, a
son, works for our master of horses at the Hall. But that son is not a son; she
is a daughter.”

Be Ware,
ticked the clock.
Be Ware.
The rain
tapped and pattered; the wind moaned.

Jeweltongue took a step forward, shaking off Mrs Old-house’s
hand and her father’s. “Curse? What curse? I don’t believe you.” Tears began to
stream down her face. “Lion-heart mentioned a curse; I didn’t believe her
either. Yes, Lionheart is my sister, not my brother. It has nothing to do with
your horrid curse; it is that she wanted to work with horses, and she is good
at that, is she not? I know she is good at that, and she knew no one would take
her on if she were a woman, so she went as a man. What is this curse? Your
curse has cursed us, more like, for it is true—although not as Jack True word
says—that Beauty has not returned to the city. What is this curse! Has it an enchanted
palace, and a Beast, and a rose?”

Mrs Oldhouse said: “A Beast? I have never heard of any
Beast. Jack, you are a bad man. I do not believe this has anything to do with
our friends”—her voice quavered—“even if Lionheart is their sister.”

Jeweltongue said wildly: “Tell me this curse!”

Mrs. Oldhouse recited hastily: “ Three in a bower/ And a
rose in flower / Until that hour / Stand wall and tower,’ It’s only a child’s
nursery rhyme. We used to skip rope to it. It was our favourite skipping-rhyme
because it was ours, you know how children are.

“The three in a bower were three beautiful sisters, we knew
that, but the cur—the rhyme doesn’t say anything about their being beautiful,
that’s just to make it a better story, that’s what happens to stories that are
told over and over. When I was a child, and grew old enough to understand that
my favourite skipping-rhyme meant something, it was all the more delicious, do
you see? Not having magic is just. .. not having something .. . but a curse ...
Of course the sisters had to be beautiful. And the bower, that had to be Rose
Cottage, because of the rose, even though when I was a girl, no one lived
there, and the wall and tower were Longchance, although Longchance doesn’t have
any towers, but you have to have it for the rhyme, do you see? It’s like the
sisters being beautiful. And it was all to do with some great magic that had
gone terribly wrong many years ago, and it explained why there was no magic in
Long-chance now, although it didn’t explain it very well, but then foretellings
never do, do they? I never knew a seer who would give you a plain answer.

“And I don’t see why—really, now that I think about it—why
our old skipping-rhyme is necessarily a curse. Perhaps it is only a prediction
of how—of how it will all be resolved. Maybe that’s why it says lower—not for
the rhyme but because Longchance doesn’t have any, do you see? But I have to
say I don’t like the sound of your Beast. What Beast? Is it fierce?”

‘‘Look at the cat!” shouted Jack Trueword, pointing at
Beauty and looking frightened half out of his wits, but as he did so, the
marmalade cat leapt off Beauty’s lap straight at Jack, as if it meant to do him
a mischief; he threw up his arms; Beauty said, “Oh, no!” and made a snatch at
the cat as it leapt, falling half off her chair as she did so; and Jeweltongue
shrieked,
“Beauty!”
—

—and Beauty found herself falling off the top of a ladder,
struck down by wind and rain; she screamed, drowning even the cacophony of wind
in her ears, scrabbling for purchase against the rain-slick panes of her
glasshouse; her finger-ends found eight strange little hollows in the leading
of one frame and dug themselves in, but she would not be able to hold herself
there long, sprawled against the slope, and the wind blowing so brutally she
hadn’t a chance of regaining the ladder, where her useless feet remained, just touching
the rungs—

And then there was a hand on her shoulder, and she was
dragged inexorably back the way she had fallen, and her weight was on her feet
again, and the wind was partially blocked by something very large bending over
her, and a voice she could just hear below the infuriated wind spoke in her
ear: “Beauty. I have you. Set your feet firmly on the rungs again; 1 will
shield you. I am too heavy even for this wind to shift. You are quite safe.
Listen to me, Beauty. You must come down now.”

But the shock of what had almost happened still gripped her,
as mercilessly as the storm itself, and she was too panic-stricken to move.
When she opened her mouth to breathe, the wind stuffed it with rain and her own
sodden hair. She began to shiver, and she realised she was wet to the skin and
cold to the bone, and her shivering redoubled, and her hands seemed to have
frozen to the tops of the ladder uprights, she could not make the fingers move.

She whimpered, but he could not hear her, so it did not
matter. And she wanted—so terribly wanted—to be off this nightmare ladder and
down on the ground again. The rain and wind billowed over her, and the Beast
waited, and she thought of what he had said, and she turned her head a little,
and looked up; the Beast was only a blackness to her eye, but he must have seen
her looking, because one great hand moved from its place below hers on the ladder
uprights and wrapped itself gently round her nearer one, and with that touch
some feeling and possibility of motion returned to her fingers.

He released her hand, and she stiffly brought it down to the
first rung; the finger joints ached with cold and dread. She straightened her
body slowly, moved her other hand to the first rung, unsealed one foot from its
resting place, and stepped down to the next rung. Now she felt the Beast’s arms
round her, outside hers, and his waistcoat buttons brushed her back, and she
felt him take a step down, to keep pace with hers.

They went down together very slowly. She still shivered, and
felt as exhausted as if she had run a great race, and sometimes fumbled for her
hand—or foothold, and some—

times had to stop to rest. But she watched his hands
following hers, so that she did not have to look up or down, and she never
stopped again any longer than she needed to catch her breath. It was a much
longer journey down than it had been going up, and the wind still sang in her
ears, but the words it sang were the wrong verse:
Lord Goodman died for me
today, I’ll die for him tomorrow.

As her feet touched the rung below the first silver girder,
the wind slammed in under the Beast’s arm, like a clever swordsman finding a
weakness in his opponent’s guard, and seized her and flung her down, and her
feet slid off the rungs, one forward and one back, and there was a sharp hard
blow to one of her knees and another to her other ankle, and for a moment she
did not know which was up and which down, and the wind would have had her off
then had the Beast not caught her in his other arm. The wind screamed and
hammered at the ladder, and Beauty stared up at the glasshouse and the
tumultuous sky, and there was a cracking noise, and the top of one of the uprights
was torn off, the rungs broken, and the pieces hurled down on them.

Beauty felt rather than saw one strike the Beast’s back and
felt him wince, but he still held her, and he still stood firm upon the ladder.
Again he spoke in her ear, calmly, as if he were addressing her across the
dinner table: “I fear I need both my hands to climb. But I do not think that
will happen again.” She nodded against his breast and put her hands and feet on
the rungs again, and he released her, and they started down the last part of
their journey.

The last few rungs were even harder than the first ones had
been; she was sick and dizzy with the after-effects of the dream-vision of
Jeweltongue, and Mrs Oldhouse, and Jack Trueword, and the marmalade cat; and
she could not believe she and the Beast could reach the bottom of the ladder
safely. He stepped off it first and had his hands round her waist to steady her
as her feet touched the wet pebbles of the courtyard, but she slipped and
slithered on the suddenly treacherous surface, and her ankles twisted and her
knees would not hold her. and she was so tired her mind played tricks on her,
and she was not sure but what she was still alone on the top of the ladder and
feeling it shifting under her as the wind prepared to throw it down. But no,
the Beast was here; he held her still.

He pointed along the glasshouse wall, and she remembered
they were still standing in flooding rain, and the wind, even on the ground,
was nearly .strong enough to lift her off her feet; the pebbles of the
courtyard scudded before it like crests torn from the tops of waves. And so
they made their way together along the wall and round the corner of the
glasshouse, and then at last there was a familiar handle under her hand, and
she turned it and pushed, and they were both inside the glasshouse.

The storm dropped away at once, as if it had never been, as
if the closing of the glasshouse door were a charm against it, or the end of a
spell, and with the silence, and the sunlight now streaming through the panes,
and the astonishing sight that met their eyes—and the clatter of too many
thoughts and fears in Beauty’s mind—Beauty forgot climbing the ladder, forgot
the weather vane, forgot Mrs Oldhouse’s story, and Jack Trueword’s, and Jeweltongue
shouting
Beauty.’,
forgot the storm and the fall that would have killed
her, forgot everything but what she and the Beast saw—and smelt.

For the glasshouse had come back to life indeed. There were
roses everywhere she looked, red roses, white roses, and pink roses, and every
shade among them, in great flat platters and round fat orbs of petals, roses
shaped like goblets and roses shaped like cups, roses that displayed stamens as
fine as a lady’s eyelashes, roses that were full up to the brim with a muddle
of petals, roses with tiny green button centres. There were red-tipped white
roses, and white-tipped red ones, bright pink ones and soft pink ones that were
darker at their hearts and some that were nearly white-centred; white ones that
were snowy all through, and white ones just touched with ivory and cream, or
the sunset-cloud tints of pink and gold; and the reds were all the tones of
that most mysterious and allusive of rose colours, from the warm rosy reds like
ripening cherries to the darkest black—

reds of velvet seen in shadow; and the purples were finer
than any coronation mantle.

And the smell, everywhere, was so rich and wonderful Beauty
wanted to cup her hands to it and drink it, and yet it was not one smell, but
all the rose scents discernible and individual as all the colours of roses: the
spicy ones, and the ones that smelt of apples or grapes or of oranges and
lemons, and the ones that smelt of almonds or of fine tea, and most
particularly the ones that smelt only as certain roses smell, and they were the
most varied and seductive of all.

The foliage was so thick, glossy-green or matte-, hunter
green and olive and grey-green and nearly blue, that it should have shut out
every wink of sunshine, but it did not: the light was so bright Beauty blinked
against it, and the white roses glittered like constellations on a clear night.

“Oh,” said Beauty. “Oh.”

The Beast, as if in a dream, said, “I have not been here in
... I do not know how long. It has been a long time. I have not come since the
roses started dying.”

Beauty ran forward suddenly, toward the farthest corner of
the glasshouse, and there knelt—or would have knelt—by the one rose-bush that
had still been in flower when she had first entered here; but it was tall and
strong now, as tall as she was, and covered with flowers. She could not count
them, there were so many, or rather, she did not wish to spend the time
counting them when she could smell and look at and touch them. She turned to
examine her cuttings, and all the little bushes were knee-high, and all had
flower-buds, and the first of these were cracking open, and at their feet an
exuberance of heartsease foamed green and purple. She looked at her seedbed,
where the seedlings were only a little smaller than the bushes from the
cuttings, and these too bore the first tiny green bumps that would become
flowers, not leaves. One precocious seedling had its very first bud just unscrolling,
and she wondered what it would be, for while she knew the mothers of all her
seeds, she did not know die fathers. She touched it softly, and a whiff of rose
scent came to her even among all the perfumed richness around her, and this
scent was new, and not quite like any other, and while it reminded her of a
scent she had once breathed standing by
a
meadow watching a woman milk
her cows, a fine, wild, pure, magical smell, it was also unmistakably that of a
rose.