Rose Daughter (41 page)

They waited, listening, clinging to each other. There was
the faint, angry baying of a fading storm—or of a pack of wolves whose prey has
eluded it, mixed with the occasional hoarse cry of a hunting bird that has
missed its strike. But there was some other noise with it, a noise Beauty could
not identify, a noise as relentless as wind and rain, as if feet as numerous as
raindrops were marching towards them.

They looked round them, and near the door to the glasshouse
there was a shape, like that of a bent old woman, except that the pale light
shone through her, and she glowed like the horn of a unicorn, and Beauty heard
the Beast give a little grunt of surprise and delight, and she thought there
was a name in it, but she could not hear what it was. Her attention was caught
then by other lucent shapes, standing on the square path that led round the
inside of the glasshouse, and these were the unicorns themselves, waiting,
watching, poised and alert, lustrous as pearls.

And standing near the rear of the glasshouse were two other
Beasts, looking much like her own Beast, huge and shaggy and kind, but as much
bigger than her Beast as her Beast was bigger than she. Nor were they
terrifying to look upon, but were shaped into a wholeness, a unity, a clarity,
and a tranquillity that no mortal creature may possess, and Beauty felt a
strange, shivery joy at being so fortunate as to see them with her own eyes.
Behind them, instead of the fourth wall of the glasshouse, there seemed to
stand the facade of some immense dark fortress.

The sound of the approaching footsteps grew nearer, and
Beauty thought calmly: I cannot bear any more. I cannot. She turned her face
against the Beast’s body and closed her eyes, but she saw them anyway, the
massed sorcerous army, the winged bulls, the manticores and chimeras, the
sphinxes, not the small semidomesticated ones of her childhood, but the great
wild ones, big as the bulls they marched alongside, who, like the bronze winged
harpies that raged overhead, had wicked human faces, and hair of hissing asps:
the stony-eyed basilisks, the loathly worms, the cerberi, the wyverns, like
vast, deadly versions of her mother’s pet dragon; and many more creatures she
could not, or would not, name.

She had pressed herself against the Beast, and the little embroidered
heart made a tiny hole just beneath her breast—

bone, guarded by her lower ribs. With every breath it seemed
to dig itself a little deeper. And she lay against her beloved’s heart and ..,
began to feel angry. We have come through so much, she thought. Is it for
nothing after all? I want to attend my sisters’ wedding, 1 want to attend
my
wedding. If all the hordes of sorcery are here gathered to grind us to
nothing, is this the way we shall be denied the small homely pleasures we
desire, that we have earned? And she remembered a dry sorcerous little voice
once saying to her:
I
give you a small serenity....

She shook herself free of the Beast so quickly he had no
time to react, shook herself free so quickly indeed that her one hand did not
unclench itself in time and carried a little of the remains of the Beast’s
black shirt away with her, and ran to the door of the glasshouse. She ran at
such speed that she had the sensation of running
through
the shining
figure of the old woman. She threw the door open and stood there, facing not
the palace but all the worst-omened creatures of the inner and outer worlds,
and she clutched the rag of shirt in one hand and her embroidered heart in the
other and shook her fists over her head and shouted: “Go away! Can you not see
you have already lost?
There is nothing for you here!”

There was another clap of thunder as if all the thunder in
the ether between the worlds had clapped itself at once, and Beauty had a
dazzling glimpse of what had been the sorcerous army rolling about on the
ground in confusion and sorting itself out into baffled hedgehogs and
bewildered toads, confused spiders, flustered crickets, bumbling bees,
disoriented ladybirds and muddled grass-snakes, and hosts of other ordinary and
innocent creatures.

And the air all round her was full of birdsong.

She heard the laughter of the old woman behind her and heard
her voice for the last time, saying, “To think you told poor Mrs Greendown that
there was no magic in your family! Bless you, my dear, and your Beast, and
bless Rose Cottage, for it is yours now. I am happy with my moon- and starlight
friends, and my cows, and my wild wood, and besides, I am too old now to make
any more changes....” And then Beauty lost consciousness and knew no more.

She woke to gentle hands putting cool cloths on her
forehead, and she opened her eyes and smiled. It was Jeweltongue who bent over
her and stroked her forehead, but there was someone else sitting at her side
and holding one of her hands, with Teacosy in his lap, looking there as small
as a day-old puppy.

“Your exits and entrances are so dramatic,” said Jeweltongue
composedly. “This time you brought with you the most exquisite small
glasshouse—it looks as if it were entirely made of spun sugar—although it has
rather disrupted the centre of the garden, where it has chosen to root itself.
But it will make the most enchanting—if I dare use that term?—wedding pavilion,
next week,”

Then she looked at the person who sat at Beauty’s side and
said, “I shall have my work cut out for me, finishing your wedding-suit in
time. I do not think I have a tape that will reach round you. Fortunately I’ve
almost finished with Beauty’s dress; we have rather been expecting you, if you
want to know. Call me if you need help keeping her lying down. I am sure she
should not get up today, but as you may have noticed, she is a bit impetuous
and willful. And I suspect
you
of being overindulgent.” And she left
them.

They were upstairs in Rose Cottage, and he sat next to her
on the floor by the wide lumpy mattress. By her feet lay Fourpaws, her eyes
half lidded and a half-grown black kitten playing with her tail. “The first
thing I will do is build you a bed frame,” he said. “It is one of the drawbacks
of living too deep-sunk in magic, that the homely tasks are all taken away from
you.”

“Dishwashing,” said Beauty. “I should be glad of never doing
the washing-up again.”

“Then I shall do it,” he replied. “But my second task will
be to restuff that mattress.”

“No,” said Beauty. “The first thing you will do is marry me,
and the second thing you will do is come with me to Longchance, where we shall
scour the town for painting things, for you shall not waste any more of your
time on roofs, and if Longchance does not have what we want, we will go
directly to Appleborough, and if Appleborough does not have what we want, then
we will mount an expedition and go on a quest, and perhaps we will find the
Queen of the Heavenly Mountain too. Everything else can wait a little.” She sat
up gingerly. “How did we come here?”

“I carried you the last way, but it was not far. When my
head stopped spinning on my shoulders, and my eyes cleared of the stars that
whirled round and round in them, I found us at the beginning of a little track
leading through the woods from the main way, and I thought we must be there for
a reason. So I picked you up and carried you here, and I understand there is to
be a wedding here in a few days and that there are more people about than there
generally are in preparation for it.

“But everyone rushed up to me as if we were what they were
waiting for—your sisters call me Mr Beast—and welcomed me, even your father.
Then I carried you up here—after I have finished with the bed frame and the mattress,
I will build a set of proper stairs—to be out of the bustle below. Not, you know,
that I am entirely clear about where here is, but I am sure you will tell me in
time.”

“This is Rose Cottage, of course,” said Beauty, “where my
family and I moved from the city, when our father’s business failed and we were
too poor to do anything else. Here Jeweltongue learnt to sew dresses that made
people happy to wear them, and Lionheart learnt the language of horses and how
to speak to them instead of merely to rule them, and / learnt to grow roses.
And one sister and our father are going to live with her husband, the baker,
because they do not love the country so much as they love the town, and my
other sister is going to live with her husband, the horse-coper, who is also
the squire’s second son, and I hope we are going to live here with lots and lots
and
lots
of roses.”

Beauty fell silent, looking at him, and her mind and heart
were so full of love for him she could at first think of noth

ing else. But then she remembered the first time she had
looked into his face and remembered how she had needed the salamander’s gift to
do so, and she wondered where that terribleness had gone. Perhaps it had
dropped away when he had stood once again in his glasshouse and seen his roses
blooming; perhaps it had been torn from him with his fine, sombre clothing—he
was presently awkwardly wrapped in a spare quilt, which made a kind of half
stole over his shoulders, and it was radiant with pinks and crimsons and
purples and sunset colours, for Jeweltongue had made it from bits left over
from the Trueword women’s frocks, and the bright colours woke unexpected ruddy
highlights in the Beast’s dark hair. Perhaps, said a tiny, almost inaudible
voice in the very back of Beauty’s mind, perhaps it left forever when you told
him you loved him and wished to marry him.

But then she remembered something else she had done, and her
heart smote her. “I—I had to choose for both of us—where I found you, in the
bonfire glade. I—I tried to make the best choice I could. Did I—can you—are you
unhappy with it?”

Her beloved shook his head. “1 am content past my ability to
describe. But...” And he hesitated.

“But what?” said Beauty, fearing the answer.

“But... the husband you would have had, had you made the
other choice, would have been handsome—as handsome as you are beautiful, I do
not know if—’’

But Beauty was laughing and would not hear what he might
have said. She put her hands over his mouth and, when he had stopped trying to
speak through them, took them away only to kiss him. “I would not change a—a
hair on your head, except possibly to plait a few of them together, so as not
wholly to obscure the collar and front of the wedding-suit Jeweltongue designs.
But I—I think I will choose to believe that you would miss being able to see in
the dark, and to be careless of the weather, and to walk as silently as
sunlight. Because I love my Beast, and I would miss him very much if he went
away from me and left me with some handsome stranger.”

“Then everything is exactly as it should be,” said the
Beast.

My first novel was called
Beauty: A Retelling of the
Story of Beauty and the Beast.
It was published almost twenty years ago.

Beauty and the Beast has been my favourite fairy-tale since
I was a little girl, but I wrote
Beauty
almost by accident, because the
story 1 was trying to write was too difficult for me.
Beauty
was just a
sort of writing exercise—at first. I very nearly didn’t have the nerve to send
it to a publisher when I was done. Everyone knows the fairy-tale, 1 thought.
Everyone knows how it ends; no one—certainly no publisher—will care.

But a publisher did take it, and a lot of people have told
me they like it. And that was that. Of course f wasn’t going to tell Beauty and
the Beast again, even if it was my favourite fairy-tale. Even if it has been
retold hundreds of times by different storytellers, in different cultures and
different centuries. Even though I knew it had resonances as deep as human
nature, as the best fairy—and folk-tales do, including a lot that I couldn’t
reach, though I could feel they were there.

Five years ago I moved to England to marry the writer Peter
Dickinson. I was happy in Maine, where I had been living, with my typewriter,
one whippet, and several thousand books, in my little lilac-covered cottage on
the coast. And then I found myself three thousand miles away, in another
country, living in an enormous, ramshackle house surrounded by flower-beds and
covered in wisteria and clematis and ancient climbing roses whose names no one
remembered.

Gardening in Maine is an epic struggle, where you can have frosts
as late as June and as early as August, where a spade thrust anywhere in the
so-called soil will hit granite bedrock a few inches down and rattle your teeth
in your skull, and where roses are called annuals only half-jokingly. In
England garden-visiting is the top item on the list of tourist
attractions—before any of the cathedrals or any of the museums, before
Stonehenge or the Tower of London. I didn’t plan to become a gardener, but 1
don’t think 1 could help it. Peter says that the disease had obviously been
lying dormant in my blood, and southern England and a gardening husband have
been a most effective catalyst.

It occurred to me, now and then, as I planted more rosebushes—because
while I am a passionate gardener, I am a rose fanatic—that it’s almost a pity
I’d said all I had to say about Beauty and the Beast. There was so much about
roses I’d left out. because I didn’t know any better.

Last winter I sold my house in Maine. I still loved it, even
though I knew I would never live there again, and I knew it would be a
tremendous wrench to cut myself loose from that last major attachment of owning
property in the country where I was born. I was not expecting, when Peter and I
returned to Maine to close up, sign papers, and say good-bye, that everything I
have missed about life in America as an American—which I had ordered myself to
ignore while I put down roots over here—would rush out of hiding and start
hammering me flat, like some of Tolkien’s dwarves having a go at a recalcitrant
bit of gold leaf. It wasn’t just a wrench; it felt like being drawn and
quartered.