Rose Daughter (8 page)

Beauty’s garden grew and bloomed, and bloomed, and the roses
were even more spectacular this year than last. This second year Beauty took a
deep, deep sigh, and cut many of her beloved roses, and worked them into
wreaths and posies, and let them dry. and she went in with Jeweltongue one
market-day to sell them, and they were gone by micfmorning. She invested some
of her little profit in ribbons, and wove them into bouquets with more of her
roses, and raised her prices, and they, too, disappeared by mid-morning at the
next market-day she went to.

“Rose Cottage,” the townspeople said, nodding wisely. “We
all wondered if there was a one of you would wake ‘em up again,’’ and they
looked at her thoughtfully. Several asked, hopefully but in some puzzlement,
“Are you a—a greenwitch then? You don’t look like a sorcerer.”

“Oh, no!” said Beauty, shocked the first time she was asked.
But eventuaiiy, as that question or one like it went on being repeated, and
remembering Jeweltongue’s puzzlement about the apparent lack of interest in
Longchance in all [he magical professions, she asked in her turn, “Why do you
think so?”

But most of those addressed looked uneasy and gave her
little answer. “The old woman was, you know,” they muttered over their
shoulders as they hastened away.

A very old memory relumed to her: Pansy telling her that her
mother’s perfume smelt of roses. What she had forgotten was Pansy saying that
it was generally only sorcerers who could get roses to grow. And she thought
again of the green threads in the old fencing around Rose Cottage and how she
had never seen any animal cross that boundary. Even their new puppy had to be
let out the front door to do her business; she wouldn’t go out the back.

But one woman lingered iong enough to say a little more.
She’d been listening, bright-eyed, to Beauty denying, once again, that she was
a greenwitch, and the farm wife who received this news went off shaking her
head. “There, there, Patience; we can’t have everything, and that’s a nice
wreath you bought yourself.” To Beauty she said: “We all know Jeweltongue, and
gettin’ to be your father’s pretty well known, that young scamp Salter, calls
himself a wheelwright, well, I guess nothing’s wrong with his wheels, but he
ain’t never learnt nothing about running a business, and your father had him
all tidied up in a sennight. And your firebrand brother, Lionheart, well, Mr
Horse wise knows how to ride a high-mettled lad, too, and a good thing for both
on ‘em! But you’re always home in your garden, ain’t you? My cousin Sandy had a
couple o’bottles of your pickled beets from your father last winter, which was
sweet of him as she didn’t expect no payment for what she done, but that’s how
we knew you’re home working hard.

“My! Smell those roses! Don’t it take me back! Funny how the
house has stood empty this long, roses or no roses. It’s a snug little place,
even if it is a iittle far out of town for comfort. We knew when the old woman
disappeared she’d left some kind of lawyers’ instructions about it—but nobody
came, and nobody sent word, and for a long time we just hoped she’d come back,
because we was all fond of her, fond of her besides having a greenwitch in
Longchance again, which we ain’t had long before, nor since neither.” She
nodded once or twice and started to move away.

Then the greenwitch who had made the fence charms had
lived
in Rose Cottage! Then it was
she
who had left the house to them?
But.,. Beauty reached out and caught the woman’s sleeve. “Oh, tell me more.
Won’t you—please?” she begged. “No one wants to talk about it, and I—I can’t
help being interested.”

“Not that much to tell, when all’s said and done,” said the
woman, but she smiled at Beauty. “Who is it you remind me of? Never mind, it’ll
come to me. We don’t talk about magic much, here in Longchance, because we
ain’t got any. You have to go as far as Appleborough even to buy a charm to
make mended pottery stay mended. We’ve had a few green witches try to settle
around here—never at Rose Cottage, mind—but they never stayed. They said they
had too many bad dreams. Dreams about monsters living in our woods. We’ve never
had so much as a bad-tempered

bear in our woods. In a hard winter the wolves come to Apple
borough, but they don’t come to Longchance. But dreams are important to
greenwitchcs and so on, you know, so they leave.

“Miffs us, you know? Why not Longchance? We can’t decide if
it’s because we’re specialer than ordinary folk, or worse somehow, you know’.’
But it’d be handy to have our own greenwilch again, and them roses ain’t
bloomed since the old woman left, and so we’ve been hoping, see?”

“The old woman—tell me about the green witch,” said Beauty.
“What was she like? How long did she live here? Did she build Rose Cottage, did
she plant the roses?”

“You don’t want much, do you?” said the woman, but she set
her shopping basket down. Beauty hastened forward with the stand’s only chair
and herself sank down at the woman’s feet. “That’s kind of you, dear, and I
like to talk. You want to know what the rest of us Longchancers don’t want to
talk about, you come to me—or if you want it in a parlour with a silver
tea-service, you go to Mrs Oldhouse. Between us we know everything.

“No, our green witch didn’t build Rose Cottage nor plant the
roses, but there weren’t much left of neither of ‘em when she arrived. The roof
had fallen in, and you couldn’t see the rosebushes for the wild berry brambles
and the hawthorn, and us in Longchance had wandered into the way of thinking
that, the roses were just a part of the old talc because no one had seen one in
so long. It was funny, too, it was like she knew what she was looking for, like
she was coming back to a familiar place, though no one round here had ever seen
her before. I know this part of the story from my old’ dad, mind, I was a
kiddie myself then.

“She came old, and when she disappeared, she disappeared
old, though it was like she hadn’t got any older in between, if you follow me,
and she’d been here long enough to see babies born and grow up and have their
own babies.

“She lived at Rose Cottage, and she made rose wreaths.
That’s another thing about her. She smelt of roses all year long, even in
winter. She was an odd body generally—had a habit of taking in orphan hedgehogs
and birds with broke wings and like that—took a child in once that way too, but
when she grew up, she left here and never came back. A beauty, she was; stop a
blind man dead in his tracks, I tell you.” She stopped suddenly and gave Beauty
a sharp look. “My! It’s prob’ly my mind wool-gathering, but it’s that old
woman’s foundling you remind me of. It’s prob’ly just the scent o’ your roses,
after all this time, confusing my thinking.

“Where was I? Well, the girl never came back, and no wonder,
maybe, not to come back to this bit of nowhere, but it was a bit hard on the
old woman, maybe. Not that she ever said anything. And when the old woman
herself went off... As I say, we was fond of her, and if we’d known she was
missing sooner, we might have gone looking. Maybe she went back to where she came
from. If she died, I hope she went quick, just keeled over somewhere and never
knew what happened.

“Rose Cottage has stood empty, ten years, fifteen, since she
went. Not even the Gypsies camp there. She’d let it be known she was tying it
up all legal in case anything happened to her. I suppose that should have told
us we wouldn’t be having her much longer, one way or another. We don’t have
much to do with lawyers round here; but most of us have family, and she didn’t.
Not that girl, who went off and left her and never sent no word back.

“But your sister—that Jcweltongue—she says you never knew
the old woman. Never knew anything about it, except the will, and the house.”

Beauty thought of that last terrible time in the city, remembered
again the lifting of the heart when she held the paper in her hands that told
her they had somewhere to go, something that yet belonged to them: a little
house, in a bit of nowhere, called Rose Cottage. “Yes,” said Beauty. “That’s
right; we knew nothing about it till we saw the will. It had—it had been
mislaid among my father’s papers.”

“That’s all right, dear,” said the woman. “I ain’t prying
... much; folks’ troubles are their own, and we’ve all had ‘em. But it’s ...
interesting isn’t it? Like you said to begin, you can’t help being interested.
Because the point is.

the old woman had to know something about you. And her
roses—they ain’t bloomed since she left. Till you came.

“And you’re the one we’ve kind of been waiting for, see? Because
you’re the one always in the garden. Alt your family says so. ‘That Beauty, you
can’t hardly get her indoors to have her meals.’ And we maybe got our hopes up
a bit. Ah, well, it’s as I told Patience, we can’t have everything, and I dunno
but what your wreaths are even better’n the old woman’s.” She had picked up
Beauty’s last remaining wreath and was looking at it as she spoke. She hesitated
and glanced at Beauty again. “D’you know why everyone wants a rose wreath,
dear? Forgive me for insulting you by asking, but you look as if maybe you don’t
know.”

“No-o,” said Beauty. “Not because they’re beautiful?’’

The woman laughed with genuine amusement. “Bless you. Maybe
it’s no wonder they grow for you after all. You know—pansy for thoughtfulness,
yew for sorrow, bay for glory, dock for tomorrow? Roses are for love. Not
forget-me-not, honeysuckle, silly sweethearts’ love but the love that makes you
and keeps you whole, love that gets you through the worst your life’II give you
and that pours out of you when you’re given the best instead.

‘There are a lot of the old wreaths from Rose Cottage
around, not just over my door. There’s an old folk-tale—maybe you never heard
it in your city—that there aren’t many roses around anymore because they need
more love than people have to give ‘em, to make ‘em flower, and the only thing
that’ll stand in for love is magic, though it ain’t as good, and you have to
have a lot of magic, like a sorcerer, and I ain’t never heard of a kind
sorcerer, have you? And the bushes only started covering themselves with thorns
when it got so it was only magic that ever made ‘em grow. They were sad, like,
and it came out in thorns. Maybe it was different when the world was younger,
when people and roses were younger.”

The woman stood up, and briskly took out her purse, and paid
Beauty for her wreath, picked up her shopping basket, and turned to go; but she
paused, frowning, as if she could not make up her mind either to say something
or to leave it unsaid.

“I’d much rather know,” said Beauty softly, and the woman
looked at her again with her friendly smile.

“You may not, dear, but I’m thinking maybe you’d better,
I’ve told you there’s no magic hereabouts. There are tales about why, of
course. I’d make one up meself if no-body’d taken care of the job before me.
There was some kind of sorcerers’ battle here, they say, long, long ago, no one
knows rightly how long, and it ain’t the kind of thing the squire puts down in
his record book, is it? ‘One sorcerers’ battle. Very bad. Has taken ail magic
away from Longchance forever’—if we had a squire in those days, though Oak Hall
is as old as anything around here, and sorcerers don’t live in wilderness. But
there’s a curse tacked on to the end of it, like the sting on a manticore’s
tail. It don’t rightly concern you. because the tally calls for three sisters,
and there’s only the two of you—”

“My . . . brother?” said Beauty faintly.

The woman laughed. “Oh, the menfolk don’t count—like usual,
eh? No, you want sorcery, you got to go to a man, but there’s nothing anybody
should want to have done a greenwitch can’t do.... Now, now, don’t go all
wide-eyed and trembly on me like that. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. There’s
nothing wrong with you and nothing wrong with Rose Cottage. And we’re all glad
of you: that Jeweltongue can almost outtalk
me
when she puts her mind to
it, and you should see her wrapping that old Miss Trueword round her finger!
That’s a sight, that is.

“Pity you ain’i a greenwitch then. We could use one. A greenwitch
would make a good living here, you know. You could even afford a husband.” And
the woman winked. “Maybe you should talk to your roses about it, see if they’ll
tell you a few charms.”

Ask her roses to tell her greenwitch charms? Beauty’s astonishment
and worry broke and were swept away on a tide of laughter, taking her questions
about the curse, and about bad dreams about monsters in the forest, with it. The
woman took no offense but patted her hand, grinning, and went away.

Jeweltongue relumed even as Beauty was looking after her,
and said, “Beauty, if you’ve sold all your roses, maybe you’ll come lend me
your eye? Mrs Bestcloth has a new shipment in, and Miss Trueword says she will
leave it up to me, and I’m drowning in riches, I can’t decide, I want to use
them all.”

Over a late tea at home Jeweltongue said, “You and Mrs Grecndown
were in close conversation for some while, were you not? Did she tell you
anything interesting? Mrs Tree-worthy—she and her husband have the Home Farm,
you remember—says Mrs Greendown knows everything about everything round here,’’

“Yes ... oh ... a bit. Not very,” said Beauty, glancing at
their father, who had come home with them after a day doing sums in Longchance,
and now had his scribbles on his knee, and was holding his teacup
absentmindedly halfway to his mouth.

Jeweltongue knew what that glance meant and said briskly,
“Never mind. Help me remember what Miss True-word’s final decisions were, so I
can write them down, my head is still spinning”—help that Beauty knew perfectly
well her sister never needed.

By the time she and Jeweltongue were alone together, she had
decided to say nothing of the curse. She thought there was a good chance that
no one else in magic-shy Long-chance would mention it to anyone else in her
family; she was the one who was supposed to be a greenwitch. What did she
herself think about the curse? She didn’t know. Curses were dangerous things;
they tended to eat up their casters and were therefore unpopular among magical
practitioners, though they still happened occasionally. Most likely Longchance’s
curse was some folk-tale that, in generations of retelling, had begun to be
called a curse to give it greater prestige.