Rose Daughter (9 page)

Her first impulse was to attend the very next market-day,
find Mrs Greendown, and ask her to tell her explicitly just what this curse
was. But she had second thoughts almost at once. She told herself that her
interest might cause, well, reciprocal interest, and there was Lionheart’s
secret to protect. But she knew that wasn’t the real reason for her change of
heart. She didn’t want to know because she didn’t want lo know. And she would
set herself to forgetting that Mrs Greendown had ever so much as mentioned a
curse. “There’s nothing wrong with you and nothing wrong with Rose Cottage.”
She would leave it there.

Jeweltongue was fascinated by the story of the greenwitch
who had left them Rose Cottage and appeared to harbour no suspicions that
Beauty was holding anything back, and by the end of her revised history, Beauty
had already half succeeded in forgetting what she had chosen not to tell.

“What a romantic story! At least we now know why we never
found the Longchance greenwitch’s signboard,” said Jeweltongue. “All the way to
Appleborough for a simple charm! I don’t think I miss magic, do you? We have
had little enough to do with it since Mamma died, but now it seems as if it’s
just one more thing we left behind in the city. It’s not as ihough the cleverer
practitioners ever came up with anything
realty
useful, like
self-peeling potatoes or needles that refuse to pierce human skin.”

That night Beauty had the dream. Her first reaction to
finding herself again in that dark corridor where the monster waited was of
heart-sinking dismay, for her last roses were still blooming in the garden. No!
she cried in her dream. Let me go! It is not your time! The light of the candle
nearest her flickered, as it” disturbed by the draught of her shout. But as she
drew her breath in again, she discovered that the corridor was full of the
smell of roses, a rich deep scent nothing like her mother’s perfume and even
more powerful and exciting than the scent of high summer in her garden. And she
was not afraid.

A second summer turned to autumn, to winter, and the third
spring arrived. But this year was different, Spring was cold and bleak: the
warmth of the turning year never came, and the rain never stopped. Summer
arrived in seas of brown mud; the rivers overflowed and drowned the seed in the
fields and more than a few calves and lambs. Everyone was still wearing coats
and boots at midsummer; everyone was low and discouraged; everyone said they
couldn’t remember a year like this....

And Beauty’s roses never bloomed.

They tried. The bushes put out leaves, draggled as they were
by the relentless rain, but the long, arching branches drooped under the weight
of the water, the weight of the heavy dark sky. The climber over the kitchen
door was torn out of its hold on the thatch, and Beauty spent a long dreary
afternoon tying it away from the door so that she need not cut the long stems.
She came indoors soaked to the skin and spent the next week sneezing and
shivering and standing over bowls of hot water and mint oil with a towel round
her head to keep in the steam.

The bushes all produced a few hopeful flower-buds, but the
sun never came to open them. Those flowers too stub—

born to know they were doomed turned as brown as the mud at
their feet as soon as the sepals parted; a few Beauty rescued, half open, and
brought indoors, where they sal dejectedly in a vase, too weary of the struggle
to finish opening, their petals brown-edged and soon falling. Nor did they bear
more than the faintest hint of their usual deep delicious scent.

Everyone grew bad-tempered. Jeweltongue’s remarks had edges
like knives; Lionheart shouted; their father withdrew again into dull silence.
Beauty, who should have been spending most of her time in the garden, felt like
a rat in a trap. She kept the house clean, mucked out the shed, fed Lydia and
the chickens—who were too depressed by the weather to fay—cooked the meals, ran
errands both real and imaginary just for something to do, and stared at the
ankle-deep slop that should have been her garden. And, with some effort, kept
her own temper .,. till Jeweltongue snarled and Lionheart bellowed at her too.
Finally she shouted back, threw a plate across the room and heard it shatter as
she ran upstairs—just before she burst into tears.

She buried her face in her pillow, so that no one downstairs
should hear her. The puppy Lionheart had rescued a year ago, rejoicing in the
name Teacosy for her diminutive size and the neat little hummock she made when
she curled up for a nap, followed her, and burrowed under Beauty’s trembling
arm to lick her wet cheek.

The leak in the corner of the loft dripped sullenly into its
pail. They had scratched enough money together at last to have their thatch
replaced this spring; but not only could no thatcher work in a steady downpour,
they now had to save the money to buy food for next winter—if they could. The
farmers were all fighting the same weather that kept the thatchers indoors and
ruined Beauty’s garden; market-days at Longchance were a sad affair.

Beauty raised her head and gently pushed the cold nose and
wet tongue away from her face. “You are a silly beast,” said Beauty. “You know
you can’t climb down the ladder again yourself. What a good thing you never
grew too large to carry.”

Teacosy heard by the tone of Beauty’s voice that she was succeeding
in comforting her, whatever those particular words meant; the main thing, from
her point of view, was that they did not contain the dreaded word
No.
She
dodged Beauty’s restraining hand, put her paws on Beauty’s arm, and licked her
face harder than ever, wagging her tail till her whole body shook. “Your
generous sympathy is not all joy, you know,” murmured Beauty through the
onslaught.

She was just beginning to think she should go back down and
sweep up the fragments and go on with dinner while Lionheart finished her
week’s baking when she heard footsteps on the loft ladder. Jeweltongue laid
their dented little tea-tray down on the floor beside the mattress—the chipped
saucers clattered in the dents, and the cups clattered in the mismatched
saucers—sat down next to her sister, and began to rub her back gently. “I’m
sorry. We’re enough to try the patience of a saint, and even you’re not a saint,
are you? I don’t think I could hear to live with a real saint.”

Beauty gave a soggy little laugh, rolled up on an elbow, and
caught her sister’s hand. “Do you ever miss the city? You must think about
it—as I do—but do you ever long for it?”

Jeweltongue sat quite still, with an odd, vacant expression
on her face. “How strange you should ask that just now. I was only thinking
about it this afternoon. Well, not so strange. It’s the weather that does it,
isn’t it? The cottage grows very small when it’s too wet to be out of doors. I
hadn’t realised how often I took my sewing outdoors, till this year, when I
can’t. And the cottage is smaller yet when Lionheart is here too, roaring away.

“I don’t know if I miss it. ... I miss some things. I
sometimes think it” I have to wear this ugly brown skirt one more day, I shall
go mad. I still remember Mandy, who wore it first; do you remember her?
Creeping round all day with eyes the size of dinner plates, waiting for me to
say something cross to her. Oh! How many cross things I did say, to be sure!
No, I don’t long for that life. But I would like a new skirt,”

“Do you miss the Baron?”

JewelEongue laughed and picked up the teapot to pour. “I
miss him least of all. Although I would have enjoyed redecorating his town
house. Drink this while it’s hot. Lion-heart has sent you a piece of her
shortbread, see? You have to eat it or her feelings will be hurt. She roars
because she can’t help herself, you know.”

“I do not,” said Lionheart’s head, appearing through the trapdoor
in the loft floor. “I roar because—because—It’ you let Teacosy eat that
shortbread, Beauty, I really
shall
roar. And if you don’t come
downstairs soon, I will feed your supper to Lydia.”

It was at the end of the summer that the letter came. Each
spring and autumn since they had lived in Rose Cottage, one or two or three of
the traders from the convoy that had brought them here stopped in on their
journey past, to see how the old man who had once been the wealthiest merchant
in the richest city in the country and his three beautiful daughters—with a
good deal of joshing about the metamorphosis of the eldest into a son, always
accompanied by the promise not to give her away—did in their exile.

The leader of the original convoy seemed to take a
proprietorial pleasure in their small successes and always noticed the improvements
they had made since last he saw them: brighter eyes, plumper frames, clothing
that not only fitted well (Jeweltongue would have nothing less round her) but
which bore fewer visible darns and patches, chairs all of whose legs matched,
enough butter and butter knives to go round when they had a fifth, or even a
sixth, person to tea.

This visit was less cheerful than usual; the weather had
been bad all over the country, and the traders suffered for it too. Lionheart,
who was the best of the three sisters at pretending high spirits she did not
feel, was not there, and Mr Strong was preoccupied. He was in a hurry; the
convoy had lost so much time to the weather they were passing right through
Longchance with barely a pause. “Mr Brownwag-gon and Mr Baggins send their
regards and beg pardon for not coming round,” he said. “But we’ll be returning
near here in a few days, before we head south again, and one of us will stop in
if there is any reply we can take for you.”

Reply? They glanced at one another, puzzled.

“I am very back to front today,” Mr Strong said, groping in
his breast-pocket. “Please forgive me. This rain gets into one’s head and rots
the intellect. I would have come anyway to say hello, but as it happens—” and
he pulled out an envelope and laid it on the table.

Soon after, he said his good-byes and left them, but the
echo of the door closing and the slog of his footsteps had long gone before
anyone made a move toward the envelope. Jeweltongue, who had sat next to Mr
Strong at tea, and was nearest, said, “It’s addressed to you, Father,” but her
hands remained buried in the fabric on her lap. Beauty stood up and collected
the tea-things, putting the bread and butter back in the cupboard with elaborate
care, setting the dirty plates in the washing-up bowl as if the faintest rattle
of crockery would awaken something terrible.

She had finished washing up, tipped the water down the pipe,
pumped enough fresh water to refill the kettle and the water-jug, and begun to
dry the tea-things and put them away when Jeweltongue abruptly leant forward,
jerkily picked the letter up, and dropped it hastily in front of her father, as
if she wanted to be rid of it as quickly as possible, as if she wanted to push
it as far away from herself as she could, as if it were literally unpleasant to
the touch.

Their father dragged his eyes away from the fire—hissing as
the rain dripped into the chimney—and took it up. He held it for a long moment
and looked back at the fire, as if tempted to toss it into the heart of the
small blaze. With a sigh, he bowed his head and broke the seal.

One of his ships, presumed lost at sea, had returned, loaded
with fine merchandise, worth a great deal of money. His best clerk—whose wife
sent her regards, adding that she still prized her collection of once-silent
canaries who now sang chorales finer than the cathedral choir, and whose
rehabilitated sphinx was, she and her husband agreed, better than any watchdog
they had ever had—had contrived to have the ship impounded till his old master
could arrive. But he pleaded that he should come soon, for he himself was only
a clerk, and working for a new master, who took a dark view of his new clerk
working for another man.

“What he does not say is ‘a man disgraced and driven out of
town,’” said the old merchant, having read the letter aloud to his daughters.
“I suppose I must go.’’

Silence fell. Beauty went on polishing and polishing the
dish in her hand; Jeweltongue stared blankly at the needle she had just
threaded. Teacosy, who had been hiding under the table—her usual lair in
anxious times—crept out, scuttled over to Beauty on her belly, and tried to
press herself between Beauty’s feet, tucking her head and forequarters under
the hem of her skirt.

Beauty reached down absently with the hand still holding the
damp tea-towel, to pat the still-visible hindquarters. “Wait at least till
Lionheart comes home again,” she said.

The old merchant appeared to rouse himself. “If 1 can. But I
must be prepared to leave when the convoy returns.”

When Lionheart came home two days later, she hurtled through
the door as she had done every week since mis wretched year had begun,
scowling, ready to shout at anything that displeased her, softening only to
greet the ecstatic Teacosy.

Her father’s news stopped her. Bewilderment, and dismay, replaced
the scowl. “Must you go? Surely—surely you can ask Mr Lamb to dispose of the
goods and—and take a commission?”

“I could. But it would not be honourable.” He lifted his
shoulders. “You do not know; there may be something left at the—at the end.”
His daughters, Beauty particularly, knew better than he did how many debts had
been left to pay after their house had been seized and their property
auctioned. There were legal papers saying these were to be forgotten, but they
would be remembered again as soon as there was money to pay them. “What shall I
bring you?”

Lionheart shook her head, and her scowl returned. “Yourself,
home safe. Soon.”

Their father smiled a little. “Jeweltongue?”

Jeweltongue smoothed the sleeve on her lap. It was silk,
with lace insets, and the lace had gold threads hi it that caught the light. It
was much like one of the sleeves of a dress she had herself worn to the party
when trie Baron had taken her a little aside and proposed marriage to her,
telling her that he cared for nothing but her and her beauty and brilliance and
that if she agreed to marry him, he would be the happiest man on earth. She was
to leave all her dresses and jewels to her sisters, for once she was his bride
he would buy her a new wardrobe that would make the queen herself look dowdy;
her father could provide her with a dowry or not, it was a matter of greatest
indifference to him. She had always been fond of that dress, and when Miss Jane
True-word had spoken of silken sleeves with lace insets, she had remembered it.
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all. But that you come home again as quickly
as you may.”