Rose Daughter (6 page)

Beauty had not realised how much she had missed spending
time in a garden, missed the smell and texture of earth, the quiet and
companionable presence of plants. It was a wonderful spring that year, day
after day of warmth and blue skies and the lightest, freshest of breezes, and
while the rain fell as often as it needed to to keep the soil moist and
workable and the streams full, it almost always fell tactfully after dark.

There were a few little beds round the house—flowers only.
Beauty thought. Most of her attention was taken up by the back garden, which
was mostly vegetables and quite a substantial plot for a house so small. Here
she could more easily trace the rows and blocks of old plantings. Near the
kitchen door, for example, was an herb patch. It had been laid out in a circle,
like a wheel with spokes; but some of the wedge shapes were empty, and others
had been colonised by their neighbours. She picked leaves from the imperialists:
pungent, bitter, sharp, sweet. She knew the names of a few of them: fennel,
chervil, marjoram, mint.

Beauty had walked along what remained of the boundary fence
round the back garden, thinking that her first task must be to replace it. (She
had thought even then, while Lionheart was still engaged upon rebuilding the
privy, that she would try to recruit Lionheart’s assistance for the fence,
though she would not find it so interesting, because it would help keep her out
of mischief.) Once she started planting things, she would want to keep the
chickens from scratching up her beds. Lydia was no problem: she was staked out
each morning, helping to keep the newly reclaimed meadow a meadow, and had
shown no desire—at least not yet—to slip her halter and go foraging for delicacies.
But the woods ran quite near them; deer, and who knew what else lived in the
wilds here, would eat anything the chickens missed. Except, perhaps,
strong-flavored herbs.

She stooped and broke off the tip of a dead vine. It still

bore small shrivelled pods of—something; Beauty wasn’t sure
what. It was odd, when she thought about it, that the garden didn’t show more
signs of the depredations of enterprising wildlife; it was no longer producing
very much, but—she rubbed the pods between her fingers—these would have been
edible the year they grew, and if they’re growing in a garden, presumably they
are
edible. Beauty dropped the pods again. She had no more time now to puzzle
over useless mysteries than she had had when she had been going through her
father’s papers and discovered a will concerning Rose Cottage.

If they had a successful garden, they would be able to put
up enough food that they would not have to fear the long winter. The
precariousness of their present life suddenly appeared to her as if she stood
on the brink of a literal abyss, staring into it till the impenetrable darkness
made her dizzy. She knell heavily, feeling the cool dampness seep through her
skirts to chill her knees, and scooped up a little earth in her hands,
scrabbling at it, ending up with a handful of earthworms and wild violet roots
for her pains. But it made her laugh—weeding with her fingernails—and the real
weight of the earth comforted her. A confused earthworm thrust a translucent
pink front end (or possibly rear; it was difficult to tell with earthworms) out
of her handful. She knew this garden would do its best for her. It didn’t
matter how she knew.

There were still cabbages growing, here and there, in
erratic little clumps,, and those might be bean shoots, and those, piranthus
squash. And now. here, this was truly the end. Beauty broke off a bit of the
old fence, woven like matting, and it crumbled in her hands.

She sighed and stood still. If they were going to have food
from the garden this year, she had to get busy. She should already be busy.
Next market-day she would ask Jeweltongue to bring her seed—perhaps she should
go herself and ask what grew most easily here—oh, but she shouldn’t waste a
day; in weather like this the farmers’ crops would already be shooting, and she
hadn’t even cleared her ground. She should be able to rig up some kind of scarecrow
till she figured out what to do about fencing; clothing suitable for scarecrows
was perhaps the only thing they had plenty of.

There was something plucking at the boundary of her
attention. She looked down at the fence shreds in her hand. They looked like
nothing at all and smelt both damp and dusty, but... She shook them in her palm
and then poked them with a finger. A thread separated itself from the
miscellany: a green thread. She picked it up in her free hand and held it under
her nose. It smelt neither damp nor dusty; it smelt... No, she couldn’t say
what it smelt of, hut for a moment she saw, as if she were dreaming it, a
meadow surrounded by a wood, and in it fawn-coloured cows grazed, and the
shadows from the trees fell strangely, some of them, for they seemed to be
silver rather than dark.

Her head cleared, and she looked at the bit of green thread
again. Greenwitch charms. There was a greenwitch in Long-chance after all, and
she had sold garden charms to whoever had lived in Rose Cottage before them.
Charms strong enough to be working more than fifteen years after they had been
pur into place. That was more like sorcerer’s work, but no sorcerer would sloop
to making garden charms, certainly not for anyone living in a place like Rose
Cottage. Beauty had already remarked that she’d never seen a chicken in the
back garden but had put it down to being still too unsettled by her new life to
notice everything that was happening round her—even the things she meant to
look out for.

Perhaps—perhaps if she took down and buried the remains of
the old fence very carefully where it stood (and before it finished falling
down of its own initiative; obviously the charms had included no longevity
spell for lathe and reed), some of the old charm would persist. Whoever the
unknown greenwitch was, if she was this good, Beauty couldn’t possibly pay her
for new charms.

She put the bit of string in her pocket. She felt curiously
reluctant to say anything about her discovery to her sisters. Perhaps it was
only her father’s familiar ban on all magic in their family that made her so
uneasy, made her feel that even her brief vision, with its unmistakable whiff
of magic, was a meddling in things too big for her. What did cows in a field
have to do with a garden charm? Never mind. But if bits of green string would
help to keep her garden whole, she would treat them politely. And she would as
well put up a scarecrow and start at once on a new fence.

She had been staring at the musty little slivers of matting
left in her hand and dropped them in relief. When she looked up again, she let
her gaze wander down the length of the garden and was immediately distracted by
her favourite mystery, the one she couldn’t ignore, whether she had time for it
or not. This one was, after all, quite an intrusive mystery. She wanted—she
longed—to know what the deadly thomed shrubs that grew all over this garden
were.

Lionheart. after her first few encounters with the
dagger-furred ogre standing guardian by the front door (it was inevitably Lionheart
who, flinging herself through the door at speed, had caught a superficial blow
of the thorny branches across the forehead and come in with blood sheeting down
her face), had wanted to have it and all its fellows out, as part of meadow
clearance and garden ground preparation, and had offered herself ‘‘as the blood
sacrifice,” she said. “You can bury my flayed body under the doorstone to bring
yourselves luck afterwards.”

“Having failed to drown yourself in our well a few weeks
ago?” enquired Jeweltongue. “You are such a life profligate. You’ll be offering
next to hurl yourself off the roof for—for—it escapes me what for, but I’m sure
you’ll think of something.”

Beauty, who was the acknowledged gardener in the family, had
declined this dubiously advantageous offer although she had immediately tied
the chief offender firmly away from the front door and lopped off what couldn’t
be tied. She had already cut a hole in the truly astonishing climbing
thorn-bush by the kitchen door. This had sent out so many long, uninhibited
stems that it was now rioting over the entire rear wall of the house, nailing
the kitchen door shut in the process as uncompromisingly as any carpenter could
do it. It had climbed well up onto the roof also, no doubt considerably to the
detriment of the thatch it clung to, and had begun to curl itself round the
kitchen chimney. Not even the fact that this chimney was now in regular use
again seemed to discourage it.

Even Jeweltongue felt that Lionheart had the right idea, if
a little overexuberantly expressed, but Beauty said, “No. They were planted;
it’s obvious they were planted deliberately. There must be a reason for them. I
want to know what it is.”

After lhat she had to stand by her decision, but she
nonetheless wondered if the game could possibly prove worth the candle. Tied-in
stems of these whatever-they-were had a habit of working themselves loose, or
suddenly growing an extra half league, or turning themselves round where they
stood (Beauty knew that this was really only any plant’s desire to lean towards
the sun. but quite often it seemed a malign strategy) and grasping at
passersby. There was also, at each of the house’s four corners, a lower,
rounder shrub with the same flexible stems covered with thorns. These were
almost more dangerous than the climbers, because they were as wide as they were
tail, and their arching branches seemed to lie in wait for the unwary, suddenly
uncoiling themselves from round corners to ensnare their victim.

And in the very centre of the big back garden, where the
lengthwise central path met a shorter path running crosswise, there was another
circular bed, like the herb wheel, only much larger, and here grew more bushes
like those round the house, with long wicked stems studded with knife points.
While the herbs had merely colonised across their spoke boundaries, these
bushes had thrown an impassable network of bristling stems higher than a man’s
head in all directions, sprawling, manticore-tailed, across the paths round
them as well, so that forcing them back to within their original bounds had
been Beauty’s first necessary operation for reclaiming that part of the garden
for other, more useful purposes.

There was a statue at the heart of that great shapeless,
impenetrable morass, but it was so caught round with spiny stems (and rank
weeds bold enough to make their way through) Beauty had not a notion of what it
might be.

The stiletto bushes round the house were leafing out, big
dark green leaves and surprising deep maroon ones. Many of the bushes in the
centre wheel looked dead, their long, perversely floppy branches grey-green,
almost furred, and nearly leafless. Some of them had the tiniest leafbuds showing,
as if they were not sure of their welcome (that’s true enough, thought Beauty).
These in the centre bed were covered with the longest, toothiest thorns (many
of them hooked like fangs, for greater purchase) of anything in the whole
well-armed battalion. Beauty looked at them musingly every time .she went into
the garden. All the thom-bushes were ugly, but these were the ugliest.

But it was this crazy tangle of them at the very centre of
the garden which told her—even more clearly than the pernicious presence of
their cousins by both doors of the house—just how loved these awful plants must
have been. Very well, she would keep them—for this year.

About three weeks after Lionheart’s first disappearance, she
disappeared again. She had gone into town a few times by herself
meanwhile—always on some errand, carefully agreed upon beforehand—and had come
home in each case looking frustrated, or amused, or pleased, in a manner that
did not seem to relate to the errands she was ostensibly accomplishing. She
came home sullen and discouraged the day she successfully arranged for a local
farmer to deliver some of last year’s manure-heap for Beauty’s garden, and yet
was jubilant and exhilarated the day she failed to find a suitable shaft to
replace the handle of her favourite hammer, the accident that broke it having
put her in a foul temper for the entire day.

Neither Jeweltongue nor Beauty saw Lionheart leave, but both
saw her return. They had not immediately recognised her. A very handsome young
man had burst into the house at early twilight, with the light behind him, and
they had stared up in alarm at the intrusion. Lionheart looked at their
frightened faces, and laughed, and pulled her hat off so they could see her
face clearly; but her hair was gone, chopped raggedly across the forehead and
up the back of the head as if she had sawn at it with a pocket-knife. And she
was wear—

ing breeches and a man’s shirt and waistcoat.

Her sisters were speechless. Beauty, after a moment, recognised
the clothing as having belonged to one of their stablelads, which had thus far
survived being turned to one of Jeweltongue’s purposes, but that did not
explain what Lionheart was doing pretending to be a boy.

“I have a job,” she said, and laughed again, and tossed her
head, and her fine hair stood out round her face like a halo. “They think I’m a
young man, you see—well, they have to: I’m the new stable-hand. At Oak Hal!.
But I won’t be in the muck-heap long because I made them dare me to ride Master
Jack’s new colt—that’s Squire Trueword’s eldest son—this colt’s had every one
of them off, you see. But I rode it. A few of them hate me already, but the
head lad likes me, and I can see in his eye that the fellow who runs—that is,
the master of the horse—has plans for me. My saints, I ache; I haven’t ridden
in months, and that colt is a handful.

“Oh, and they say to get a decent haircut before I come to
work tomorrow; I’ll have to bow to the squire, and to his spoilt son, if I want
to ride his horses.”