Briar and Rose and Jack

by Katherine Coville

  At last they believe they are out of danger, and they run down the next flight of stairs. But they have picked up a tail; out of the shadows slips Lord Henry. His curiosity aroused by the girls’ sneaking manner, he follows along some distance behind them, hoping to catch them in some misdeed. He stalks them out of the keep and into the courtyard. Meanwhile, he himself has been spotted and pursued. Elizabeth, Jane, and Lady Arabella also want to enjoy the evening’s festivities, and when they see Henry slinking in the shadows, they immediately sense some intrigue going on. Like three curious cats, they pad on quiet feet after him.

  Briar and Rose creep along the wall of the keep, then dash across the courtyard and hasten into the doorway of the kennels. There they stop to peer cautiously out and check behind them, spotting Henry in a moment.

  The two girls, who frequent the animals’ various dwellings at every opportunity, are familiar with all the ins and outs of the kennels, the stables, and the mews, as well as all the various back ways and hidden doors of the castle. They are prepared to lead Lord Henry on a merry chase. Briar pauses just long enough to be sure he has seen her, and then they disappear into the recesses of the kennels and go through the rear passageway, which leads to the stables. Finally, they peek back out the front door of the stables in time to see Henry entering the front door to the kennels where they have just been. Then they spy Lady Arabella, Elizabeth, and Jane following a little way behind Henry. Seeing that the chase is on, Rose and Briar spend the next half hour weaving in and out of doorways, skittering along dark corridors, and finally taking refuge in a long-disused hidden stairway. After some time, they feel it safe to come out. Seeing no sign of the others, they make for the spot near the drawbridge where they had arranged to meet Jack.

  Lord Henry, having lost the trail, is set upon by Lady Arabella, Elizabeth, and Jane, who demand to know what he is about, sneaking around the castle like a thief.

  “Never you mind!” he replies.

  Lady Arabella, who will not be so easily deterred, says, “Oh, come on, Henry! Whatever you’re after, why not let us help?”

  Not usually prone to sharing anything with a gaggle of girls, he realizes that the four of them have a better chance of finding the fugitives than he does alone, and so he enlists their aid. Lady Arabella, though she seems to go along with him, is really alert for any opportunity to further her own plans to win Princess Rose’s friendship. Elizabeth is already anticipating her moment of glory telling on Briar and Rose for whatever they are up to. Jane, too meek to make a decision of her own, simply copies the others as she always does. They split up and search all over the castle, while Briar and Rose have already escaped from it.

  Jack finds Rose and Briar at the agreed-upon spot and, seeing that they have come in disguise, invites them to join in the games of the commoners’ children. Since all the village children know one another, Jack introduces Briar and Rose as servants’ children from the castle. At first the peasant children stare and point at Briar’s face. Briar is ready to run away, but Jack takes her by the hand and keeps her by his side, as if to announce that she is under his protection. Soon the two girls are accepted into the game of tag that is already in progress. The children are all playing at being fairies of various colors, and the one who is “it” is the evil gray fairy who chases them. The girls quickly forget about Lord Henry and the others as they lose themselves in the fun. The adults look on fondly, well aware of Princess Rose’s identity but determined that her evening of freedom shall not be spoiled by having it revealed.

  Meanwhile, Lord Henry and the three other girls, not thinking to go outside the castle and look among the commoners’ children, wander about in growing frustration until the trail goes cold. Lady Arabella, Elizabeth, and Jane become distracted in the courtyard by the Morris dancers, who have bells jingling on their shins and handkerchiefs flying in their hands. The three girls have all but given up the chase when they notice Lord Henry slipping surreptitiously into the mews, and they wonder if he has picked up the trail once more. Quickly making their way through the crowd surrounding the dancers, they start shadowing him again. And so the chase continues.

  Rose and Briar play happily until eventide; then they watch with Jack as the wakefires are lit and the cattle are blessed by leading them sunwise around the fires. The streets are lit with lanterns on poles, and the three children join those garland-bedecked villagers who are wandering from one fire to the next.

  Soon there is a competition among the boys as to who can jump the highest over the bonfire, and Jack lines up to try. He gets a running start and makes a mighty leap, but he gets one foot singed for his trouble. He cheerfully leaves it to the bigger boys, for the height of the highest leap is said to determine the height of the year’s crops.

  As daylight fades and bedtime approaches, Briar and Rose are missed. Lady Arabella, Elizabeth, and Jane are also missing. Lady Beatrice suspects that something is afoot. She is certain that Briar will lead Rose into some kind of trouble, and perhaps the other three girls as well. She has raised the alarm, and servants have been sent out to search for them.

  Briar and Rose hear their names being called, and they look about for a place of safety. Just as Jack is leading them to hide behind a nearby cottage, a voice calls out, “Oh, there you are, my naughty little elflings! The dragons are looking for you. Would you like me to make you disappear?”

  The girls see that it is Zane, the jester, and they laugh. “Yes, make us disappear!” they both say.

  “Ah, but first you must answer my riddles!”

  “How long will that take?” moans Briar. “We’re in a hurry.”

  “Never fear! I’ll give you three easy ones. Pay attention, now!” Zane admonishes them, bopping each of them lightly on the head with his baton. “The first. Answer me this: What always weighs the same, no matter how big it gets?”

  “I know that,” says Briar. “It’s a hole!”

  “That’s it—very good! Hmm. Now tell me this: What runs around the cow pasture but never moves?”

  “A fence!” says Jack. “I’ve heard that one before!”

  “So you think you have gotten the better of me. I’ll give you a harder one. Let’s see . . . How about this, my clever young rascals. What has a hole in it, but holds the weight of the world?”

  Briar and Rose and Jack look at one another and shrug. “We’re stumped,” Rose admits.

  “Come on, Zane, tell us,” Briar says, “before somebody finds us!”

  “Ah, well then, I’ll take pity on you, since your poor brains are so feeble. What has a hole in it, but holds the weight of the world? A crown, my fine clotpoles, a crown! Now come with me and I’ll show you the secret of invisibility.”

  “We want to get back into the castle and hide out in the stables.”

  “All right, here’s the trick, elflings,” whispers Zane. “You’re rather big to disappear, so find someone bigger than you to hide behind—someone who’s going your way—and stay in their shadow. It only takes a bit of practice. There you go. Poof! Disappear!”

  Rose immediately spots a large woman near the edge of the road, heading in the direction of the drawbridge. Rose falls in step on the far side of her. Briar attaches herself to a burly man while Jack, having no need to hide, keeps a lookout. The way is treacherous—the searching servants seem to be everywhere—but with a bit of skill, darting from person to person, shadow to shadow, the children gradually make their way undetected back through the gatehouse and into the castle courtyard. From there it is but a short dash to the stables, where it seems that everyone is out taking part in the celebrations.

  They hurry to the tack room to convene the third meeting of the Giant Killers’ club. But once again they have been observed. Lord Henry, still watching for the pair, catches sight of them slipping into the stables, and he sneaks in after them. Lady Arabella, Elizabeth, and Jane observe him on the move and follow along, tiptoeing into the stables behind him. They catch up with him outside the tack room. Seeing th
em, Henry puts his finger to his lips in a signal for quiet, and they all creep into the empty stall next door.

  “We have to find out where he lives,” they hear Briar saying. “There may be some way we could follow him and do it there.”

  “Yes. Maybe poison his food!” says Jack.

  “But it must be such a long way away, all the way to the mountain, and we don’t know how far up he goes,” Rose says. “Besides, we could never keep up with him.”

  “No, but maybe he’s worn a path. His footprints must be clear enough to follow,” says Briar. “But you’re right; it’s awfully far. None of us have ever taken a journey like that. It could take days to get there, maybe even a week. We’d have to take all kinds of provisions, maybe even a packhorse or two. Nobody would let us.”

  The children sigh heavily. “But maybe when we’re older, we could,” says Jack. “Or maybe—”

  “Maybe what?” Rose asks.

  “I’m just thinking. Maybe we could poison the food he takes from here!”

  “How would we do it?” Rose asks. “It would take an awful lot of poison to kill a giant.”

  In the stall next door, Henry and the girls look at one another, wide-eyed. Henry, without hesitating, bursts into the tack room and blurts, “You think you’re going to kill the giant?”

  Lady Arabella, Elizabeth, and Jane follow after him with gasps of astonishment.

  “Who asked you?” Rose exclaims, near tears that their secret has been discovered. “This is our club, and we don’t want you in it, so you can all stop following us and go away!”

  Henry, ignoring her, says, “You can’t go poisoning the giant’s food! Suppose he doesn’t eat enough to kill him. You’d just make him very sick, and very, very mad! He’d probably flatten the whole village, and maybe the castle too! Don’t you think if it was that easy to get rid of him, they would have done it already?”

  “Have you got a better idea?” asks Briar.

  “Well, I wouldn’t get us all killed, to begin with.”

  Lady Arabella’s mind is working feverishly, trying to calculate a response that will be most likely to please Rose without seeming to approve of the preposterous venture. “Um . . . I’m sure it’s very brave of you to even think of killing the giant, but please tell me you don’t intend to really try it.”

  “Yes, we do!” exclaims Briar. “Maybe not today. Just someday, but we’ve got to start planning. We are the Giant Killers’ club, and that’s our only aim, to someday kill the giant.”

  “And if you thought about it for one minute,” adds Rose, “you’d see that it’s the only way to save the kingdom from that terrible old monster! The grownups have given up. Papa can’t afford a whole big army. It’s up to us now.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Elizabeth insists, “and I’m telling!”

  “Me too!” echoes Jane.

  Lady Arabella turns on the two and warns, “If you do tell, then you’re not my friends anymore!”

  Elizabeth and Jane look as if they’ve been slapped by the older girl, and they close their mouths and stand back.

  Lady Arabella has seen the belief in Rose’s eyes, and figuring that it will cost her nothing to seem to go along with the princess, she says, “I want to join your club. I want to kill the giant too. What do I have to do to join?”

  Briar, Rose, and Jack look at one another; they huddle in a circle for a whispered conference, then nod. “You may join,” Rose announces, “if you take the oath and uphold our code of honor.”

  “Wait a minute,” Lord Henry says. “You mean he’s in your club? That peasant? I’m not joining if he’s in it!”

  Jack, who has recognized from the first that these other children must be nobles, hangs his head and is silent.

  “This is Jack,” Briar says, “and he is noble in spirit. He is one of us.”

  “Well, you’d better keep him away from me. Just make it clear that if I’m joining, I’m in charge.”

  “Nobody’s in charge,” Briar responds. “Everybody’s the same.”

  “If I’m not in charge, I’m going to tell everyone what you’re up to, and they’ll never let you out of their sight again,” Henry says, folding his arms.

  At this, Briar, Rose, and Jack go into another huddle, which lasts for some minutes. Finally, the three stand before the others and Rose announces that they will all be allowed to join. But only with the understanding that anyone breaking the oath will face terrible torments and suffer the curse of the Giant Killers from that day forward.

  “What is this oath, then?” demands Henry.

  Rose clears her throat, puts her hand on her heart, and says, “We do solemnly swear on our lives to kill the evil giant, to stay true to our cause through thick and through thin, and to defend one another to the death.

  “That’s the oath,” she pronounces, “if you have the courage to take it. You probably ought to think about it first.”

  “I’m not afraid to take it,” insists Henry, “as long as everybody knows that I’m in charge.”

  Rose reports their decision that Lord Henry may consider himself in charge. This is not quite the same as saying that he is actually in charge, but Henry does not notice the difference, and he assumes a look of puffed-up pride.

  Rose turns to Elizabeth and Jane. “What about you? You don’t have to join, but if you ever speak of this to anyone else, you’ll suffer unspeakable torments.”

  “Well, what if I don’t want to swear ‘on my life’?” says Elizabeth. “What if we aren’t brave or stupid enough to try to kill the giant? What could we do anyway?”

  “What can you do?” scoffs Rose. “Probably nothing! But if you can’t do anything else, you can keep your mouths shut. Agreed?”

  Jane and Elizabeth look to Lady Arabella, who lifts her chin and says, “Come on! I’m joining. Are you?”

  The two girls are less afraid of the giant than of losing Arabella’s patronage. They hold each other’s hands for courage and nod in unspoken agreement.

  “All right then,” Rose says, pleasantly surprised. “A moment of silence.”

  The moment passes, and she says, “Now repeat after me . . .”

  The oath is administered, the new initiates repeating the words with appropriate gravity if not the deepest conviction.

  “And then there’s the code of honor,” Briar adds, and she goes down the short list of virtues that they’ve chosen as their guiding principles, with the others echoing them.

  Finally, the secret hand signal and handshake are revealed. By now, Henry, Lady Arabella, Elizabeth, and Jane are beginning to join in the spirit of the thing.

  “Maybe we could make up our own language!” offers Jane, this being the first original idea she has ever expressed in her life. Briar and Rose, who have always had their own private sign language, exchange glances, both subtly shaking their heads in the negative, signaling their agreement that they will not share their secret language with the others.

  Henry, catching on to Jane’s idea, says, “Yes. We ought to have a sign for danger.”

  “And maybe another sign for if the danger’s passed?” Lady Arabella suggests.

  The little group experiments a bit and settles on a pair of signals; then Henry says that it’s time to discuss the giant.

  “We ought to be finding out everything we can about him. We’ll have to keep track of when he comes and what he takes and everything he says.”

  “We can tell you about the last time he came! We saw it all,” Briar says. She and Rose quickly recount everything they observed on the giant’s last raid, including the fact that he had carried off the magic harp from the royal treasury. The other children volunteer their own thoughts about the giant and his habits, and much discussion ensues.

  “Couldn’t we dig a deep pit, disguise it so he couldn’t tell it was there, and make him fall into it?” says Elizabeth.

  “We couldn’t dig a pit deep enough, silly. Besides, how would we make him fall in it?” Henry asks.

&n
bsp; “Maybe he could get struck by lightning?” Lady Arabella offers. “If we could just get him to come out during a thunderstorm.”

  Briar, Rose, and Jack come up with a few half-baked ideas of their own, only to give them up again, and the excitement wanes.

  “Well, that’s all I can think of for now,” said Henry, beginning to lose interest. “You must know that we can’t do much of anything until we’re older. It would be suicide to even try.”

  “Yes,” puts in Lady Arabella, “let’s not do anything dangerous. We’ll have to have a foolproof plan before we do anything, right?”

  Elizabeth and Jane agree with this wholeheartedly as they back out of the room and turn to go.

  Henry hesitates, then fires one last shot. “Just remember, I’m in charge now!” He smiles triumphantly and departs.

  Lady Arabella flashes the secret Giant Killers’ signal for Rose’s benefit and follows the others out.

  Left to themselves, Briar, Rose, and Jack wait silently until Briar sticks her head out the door of the tack room and finally turns to say, “They’re gone.”

  “Well . . .” breathes Rose. “Now what?”

  “I say we invent a new secret signal,” Briar responds, “one that’s just for the three of us when we want a private meeting.”

  Jack laughs. “And we didn’t tell them about the red blanket at the window signal, so we can still use that.” They decide to use a circle, formed with the thumb and forefinger, as their private sign; then they consider other places to hold their meetings, finally settling on a storage shed behind the kitchen.

  “Now we can go on the way we were before, and Henry can think he’s in charge,” says Rose.

  “Well, at least there are more of us now to fight the giant,” Briar observes.

  “Do you think they’ll really help?” Rose asks. “I wonder.”

  “But they took the solemn oath—on their lives!” Jack protests. “I could find you a whole bunch of my friends who would take the vow in a minute. And they would mean it! Only Lord Henry would never let them.”

  “Lord Henry would never have to know,” says Rose, smiling.