Authors: Robin McKinley
Beauty trimmed her sister’s hair and then swept the
silky-tufts into a tiny pile of glinting individual hairs and saved them.
The house was lonely at first, with Lionheart gone, but she
came home for a day every week, and baked all the bread for the week to come,
and, with her new wages, bought butter and honey for the bread, and sugar and
the squashed fruit—chiefly the last of the winter apples—at the bottom of the
baskets at the end oi” market-days, and made pies and jam. She had made friends
with the butcher’s boy, who occasionally slipped her a few more beef knuckles
for the stew, a little extra lard in her measure; the butcher’s boy only knew
that she had an ailing father and had recently been taken on up at the Hall. He
didn’t know that the young man he spoke to was also the sister who cooked the
stew and rolled the pastry.
Mrs Bestcloth was as good as her promise, and Jeweltongue’s
introduction to Miss Trueword was duly achieved. And Jeweltongue was given a
dinner dress to make. “From a silly painted picture in a magazine, if you please!
If a real person had ever tried to walk in that dress, she would be so fettered
by the ridiculous skirls she would fall over after her first step. Fortunately
Miss Trueword is a little more sensible than her manner.”
“Which is to say you talked her into being sensible,” said
Beauty, gently squeezing the small damp muslin pouch she hoped contained goat’s
cheese. Her last attempt had been more like goat’s custard (as Lionheart
mercilessly pointed out), but the texture this time was more promising.
“Mmm—well. I had a hard apprenticeship, you know, deflating
that awful Mr Doolittle’s opinions of himself. If he is a philosopher, I am a
bale of hay. But that’s all long ago now. And Miss Trueword is actually rather
sweet. Here, let me hold that bowl for you. Don’t fret, dear. It was excellent
custard last time. Your only mistake was telling Lionheart it was supposed to
be cheese.”
Miss Trueword’s frock was a great success; Jeweltongue was
commissioned for three frocks for her nieces and a coat for the squire. She
also altered the stable-boy’s uniform to fit Lionheart properly, using leftover
bits from the squire’s coat for strength. They were no longer using the money
they had brought with them; a few times Jeweltongue or Lion-heart even added
pennies to the cracked cup in the back of the kitchen store-cupboard where they
kept it. Beauty had hurdles for her fencing, and the scarecrow—or something—was
working, for her seeds were sprouting unmolested.
Even their father was taking a little more notice of the
world round him, and when he sat and scribbled, he scribbled more and dozed
less. He came outdoors most days for a stroll in the sunlight, and he often
smiled as he looked round him. He complimented Beauty on her garden and
Jeweltongue on her sewing; he had been startled by Lion-heart’s new job—and
even more by her new haircut—but had taken it quietly and made no attempt to
forbid her to do something she had already thrown her heart into.
He still fell asleep early in the evenings and slept late
into the mornings, while his daughters tiptoed round the kitchen end of the
downstairs room getting breakfast and setting themselves up for the day. Each
of the three of them caught the other two looking at him anxiously, heard the
slightly strained note in the others’ voices when they asked him how he did, to
which he invariably replied gently, “I am doing very well, thank you.”
“It is so hard to know if—if there is anything we should
do,” Jeweltongue said hesitatingly to Beauty. “He was never home when we lived
in the city, was he? He was always at work. Or thinking of work. Even when
Lionheart and I were little—when you were still a baby—he never seemed to
notice anything but business, and Mamma. After Mamma died, we never saw him at
all. Sometimes I think we only knew he existed because the next new governess,
and the next one after that, came to us saying our father had hired her... you
remember.’’ She laughed a little, without humour. “Perhaps that’s why we
treated diem so diabolically. Lionheart and I, that is; you were always the
peacekeeper. And after we outgrew our governesses ... I don’t know what he was
like before, you know? Other than abstracted. The way he is now, I suppose.
But... I wish we could call in a greenwitch, or even a seer, and ask advice
about him, but that’s the one thing we do know, isn’t it? No magic. And I keep
forgetting to ask about it in Long-chance—a greenwitch, I mean. It seems—” She
paused, and there was a small frown on her face. “It seems almost peculiar, the
way I keep not remembering. And the way it never comes up. Maybe it’s different
in the country. In the city which magician had just invented the best spell for
this or that—champagne that stays fizzy even in a punch bowl, something to keep
your lapdog from shedding hair on your dresses—”
“How to produce cheese instead of custard,” murmured Beauty,
watching Lydia’s kid decide—again—not to enter the gate into the back garden,
carelessly left open. Maybe he merely did not like narrow spaces.
“—was a chief source of gossip, nearly as good as who was
seen leaving whose house at what o’clock at night. Don’t you wonder what he’s
writing? He keeps it under his pillow at night and in his pocket all day.”
Summer arrived. Beauty’s runner beans ramped up their poles;
the broad beans were so heavy with pods the crowns of the plants sank sideways
to the earth. The lettuce and beetroot grew faster than they could eat it;
there were so many early potatoes Lionheart made potato bread and potato
pancakes and potato scones.
The thorn-bushes had all disappeared under their weight of
leaves. Even the deadest-looking ones round the almost-invisible statue had not
been dead at all, only slow to wake from winter. And then flower buds came, and
Beauty watched them eagerly, surprised at her own excitement, wanting to see
what would come. The weather turned cold for a week, and the buds stopped their
progress like an army called to a halt; Beauty was half frantic with
impatience. But the weather turned warm again, and the buds grew bigger and
bigger and fatter and fatter, and there were dozens of them—hundreds. They
began to crack and to show pink and white and deepest red-purple between the
sepals.
One morning Beauty woke up thinking of her mother. She could
not at first imagine why; she had not had the dream and had awoken happy, and
thinking about her mother usually made her sad. But... she sniffed. There was
something in the air, something that reminded her of her mother’s perfume.
She hurried to the loft’s one little window and knelt so she
could see out. The thorn-bushes’ buds had finally popped, and the scent was
coming from the open flowers. Roses. These were roses. This was why their
little house was called Rose Cottage.
She was the first awake; it was barely dawn. Her sisters
would be stirring soon, and she wanted the first enchanted minutes of discovery
to be hers alone. She wrapped the old coat she used as a dressing-gown round
her—almost every morning at breakfast Jeweltongue promised to make her a real
one
soon
—and went softly downstairs and into the garden, thoughtlessly
barefoot, walked straight down the centre path to the big round bed in the
middle of the back garden, the earth dawn-cool against her feet. The roses
nodded at her as if giving her greeting; their merest motion blew their
fragrance at her till she felt drunk with it.
Her sisters found her there a little while later, her hands
cupping an enormous round flower head as if it were the face of her sweetheart.
They stood openmouthed, breathing like runners after an exhilarating race; then
Jeweltongue kissed her, and Lionheart reached out a hand and just stroked the
silky petals of a pale pink rose with one finger. Neither said a word; slowly
they went back indoors again and left Beauty alone with her new love.
At first she could not bear the thought of cutting them,
even one, despite their profusion, but at last she chose just three—one white,
one pink, one purple-red—and brought them indoors, found something to use as a
vase, and knelt by their father’s bed, holding them near his face. She saw him
take a long breath in and smile, before he opened his eyes.
He murmured her mother’s name, but gently, knowing she was
gone but happy in the memory of her; then his eyes found Beauty’s, and he
smiled again. “Thank you,” he said.
“They are beautiful, are they not?” said Beauty.
“Almost as beautiful as she was,” he said.
Beauty said nothing.
For over two months the roses bloomed and bloomed and
bloomed. Beauty had never been so happy, and for the third time in her life the
dream went away. The monster was gone while her roses were in flower. She had
to tear herself away from the contemplation of them to tend to the rest of her
garden, to eat her meals, to sleep; she had never liked to do nothing, but she
found now that if she could do nothing beside a rose-bush in full bloom, she
was entirely happy.
Now that she knew what they were, she changed her mind at
once about tending the bushes—however hazardous an operation this would be to
herself personally. No longer were they in danger of being dug up and consigned
to the bonfire as soon as she had time to spare. She trimmed and trained and
painstakingly fixed and tied the bushes and climbers round the cottage. She
groped gingerly into the very depths of the tangle of the round bed to take out
all the dead wood she could find and arrange the stems to arch and fail most
gracefully, the better to show off their radiant burden of flowers. Every last
spadeful of the remains of the load of manure Farmer Goldfield had brought her
went round the base of the bushes, and she mourned the generous hand she had
used earlier in fertilising her vegetables. Next year she would bargain for two
loads of manure.
One mystery remained. She still could not decide what the
statue in the middle of the centre rose-bed represented. In her valiant
adventures pruning away the old wood and scrabbling out the weeds, she had also
made four of the eight wheel-spoke paths navigable again, had therefore been
able to reach the hub and free the statue of its leafy confinement. But she
still had no idea what it was supposed to be. She almost thought it changed,
from one day to the next, because one day it would remind her of a dragon, the
next day a chimera, the third day a salamander, the fourth day a unicorn....
“This is ridiculous,” said Beauty, aloud, to the unicorn. “You are not the
least bit li/jjrdy and snakclike, and I know you have been lizardy and
snakelike previously; positively I have seen scales. Now stop it.” After that
it only ever looked like some tall, elegant, but unknown beast, its long sleek
hair cascading over its round muscled limbs, its great eyes peering sombrely
out from beneath its mane.
“Now you are really very handsome,” said Beauty, “And much
nicer than anything with scales. But I still wish I knew what you were.”
When the roses finally stopped blooming, Beauty felt as if
she had lost her dearest friend; but she gathered all the fallen petals she
could and put them in saucers and flat bowls, and even after they dried, if she
ran her fingers through them, the scent awakened and made her happy.
She kept a little bowl of them by her pillow, where she
could reach them in the night, because as soon as the last petal had dropped
from the last rose in flower, the dream returned. When it did, and she found
herself safely restored to her own bed but still shaken by the memory of the
dark corridor and the knowledge of the patient monster, she held a cupped
handful of rose-petals under her nose till the warmth of her skin brought the
scent out again, and then she drifted gently back to sleep.
The winter that year was long and hard, but the old merchant
and his daughters were little troubled by it, except that Lionheart, two or
Ihree times, could not get home through the snow on her days off. Beauty’s
vegetables had surpassed all expectations, and die cold room under the house
was full of sacks and bundles and bottles. The life that had been slowly
returning to the old merchant had begun to grow strong; it was he who cleaned
out the cellar, blocked the rat-holes, and borrowed die tools Lionheart
considered hers to build the shelves to hold Beauty’s produce.
<;
See that you take very good care of my
hammer,” said Lionheart. “I had a fiend of a time finding the right shaft for
the new handle.”
“I shall be very careful indeed not to hit it accidentally
with any axes,” said their father drily.
After the clean cold whiteness of winter, when spring’s mud
and naked hrown branches and grey rain and smells of rot and waste came round
again, they were only happy to know that summer was coming again—strangely content
in their new life. There was never any longer an edge—except occasionally of
laughter—to Jeweltongue’s voice when she spoke to. or about, her clients. “I’ve
decided judicious flattery is the greatest ait of all,” she said. “Forget
philosophy.” She hummed to herself as she drew up the dress patterns she
delighted in creating,
Lionheart brought home die runt of the litter when the
squire’s favourite spaniel whelped, saying in outrage that the squire had
planned to have it drowned. Once she came home still shaking in fury and told
of thrashing some young lad who wanted to jump a frightened colt over a fence
too big for it—“Just to show us what a big brave man he is. He won’t last. Mr
Horsewise won’t have his kind near his horses.”
The old merchant found a job doing sums for several of the
small businesses in Longchance; he bought himself some clean sheets of paper
and began copying some of the contents of his accumulation of scribblings onto
them.
“Father, I am dying of curiosity,” said Jewekongue.
“I will tell you someday,” he replied, smiling to himself.