Rose Daughter

by Robin McKinley

  “I will miss the horses,” said Beauty a little wistfully.

  “Perhaps you will become fond of the goat,” said Jeweltongue. “Or even the chickens.”

  “Does one ever grow fond of chickens?” said Beauty dubiously. “Perhaps the goat.”

  “We will make an effort for a very nice goat,” said Jeweltongue.

  The two sisters were determined to be optimistic about their first meeting with the local townsfolk; but clinging to optimism left them little energy for anything else, and their conversation soon faltered. To prevent herself from thinking too much about their last experiences of townspeople, Beauty looked round the thinning woodland they were passing through and silently recited: Oak. Larch. Don’t know what that is. Sycamore. Rowan. Wild cherry. More oak. Snowdrops, aren’t they pretty! Truly spring is coming.

  But when they arrived in Longchance, they discovered what else they had won by making aged turnips into feast dishes, and warm clothes out of rags, and cooperation from antagonism. When the traders’ convoy had passed through, the only news of the new residents of Rose Cottage left behind was that they were a merchant’s family, fallen on hard times. The traders had not so much as named the three sisters and had mentioned the old merchant’s illness as if this were the central fact about the family. Most important of all, the traders left no sense of any mystery to be solved. The townsfolk were inquisitive—Rose Cottage had stood empty for a long time, and Longchance was small enough to be interested in any newcomers besides—but not agog; cautiously friendly, not suspicious.

  And Longchance was a good-natured town. They gave the sisters good advice and a good price for the horses, if not for the rickety waggon. Beauty and Jeweltongue came home exhausted but content. They had credit to spend at the village shops, a promise of delivery via the carter from the sawyer and the smith, a basket of pullets peeping aggrievedly under the shawl tucked round them to keep them from leaping out, a bundle of fresh vegetables to enliven their stale end-of-winter stores, and a very nice goat indeed, following them thoughtfully on the end of a string tied round her neck. She was a silky brown and white goat with long eyelashes around her enigmatic slot-pupilled eyes, and the farmer’s daughter had named her Lydia and wept at parting from her.

  “Oh, fiddlesticks!” said Jeweltongue, shortly after they had turned off the main way onto the rutted little track to Rose Cottage. “I forgot to ask about a greenwitch! Fiddle, fiddle, fiddlesticks. If Lionheart hasn’t got the chimney clear, there’ll be no living with her. It’s odd, though; I didn’t see a signboard for a greenwitch, did you? I’d’ve expected her to be in the centre of town. Longchance is a little bigger than we expected, isn’t it? Or more energetic, at least. I thought … well, never mind. I’m glad of it; I like it; it has a good air. But I’d’ve guessed it might almost support a seer or a small magician, and I didn’t see hide nor hair of any of the professions. Well, a penny saved. And it will be much harder to sneak anything of that sort past Father in a house the size of Rose Cottage.”

  But they arrived home to discover Lionheart triumphant, if a little red from scrubbing, and two fully functional chimneys.

  Spring advanced. Beauty and Lionheart were relieved to find that their awkward carpentry and inexperienced mends were holding firm and that, so far as they could tell, there was nothing terribly wrong with their little house. They hoped the thatch would keep the rain out one more year; perhaps next spring, somehow, they could find the money to have it redone. Meanwhile, their father slept in a truckle-bed by the warm banked kitchen fire downstairs, and the three sisters rigged a patchwork canopy—Jeweltongue took time out from making shirts to put together scraps from her mending basket—over the mattress they shared in the loft, so that the pattering rain of little many-legged creatures falling out of the thatch did not trouble them as they slept.

  Beauty began to have strange, vivid dreams unlike any she had had before. Sometimes she saw great lordly rooms like those of a palace, though of nowhere she had ever herself been; sometimes she saw wild landscape, most often in moon- and starlight. Sometimes she saw her family: Jeweltongue speaking to a young man wearing a long apron, his hands covered with flour; Lionheart, with her hair cropped off so short that the back of her neck was bare, rubbing the ears of a horse whose nose was buried in her breast, while a man with a kind earnest face stood leaning against the horse’s shoulder; her father, in a fine coat, reading aloud from pages he held in his hands, to an attentive audience.

  And then one night her old dream came back. She had not had it in so long—and her life had changed so much meanwhile—she had almost forgotten it; or rather, when she remembered it, which she occasionally did, she thought of it as a part of her old life, gone forever. Its return was as abrupt and terrifying as a blow from a friend, and Beauty gave a convulsive lurch in bed, and a half-muffled shriek, and sat up as if she were throwing herself out of deep water.

  “Oh, help!” said Jeweltongue, who lay next to her and was awakened by Beauty’s violence. “My dear, whatever is the matter?” She sat up too, and put an arm round Beauty, rubbing her own eyes with her other hand. Beauty said nothing, and Jeweltongue began to pat her sister’s arm and back in a desire to comfort them both. Beauty turned jerkily and put her head on her sister’s shoulder. “Was it a bad dream?” said Jeweltongue.

  “Yes,” said Beauty. “Yes. It is a very old dream—I’ve had it all my life—I thought it had gone—that I had left it behind in the city.”

  “All your life?” said Jeweltongue slowly. “You have had this nightmare all your life and I never knew? I—”

  But Beauty put her hand over her sister’s mouth and said, “Hush. We were different people in the city. It doesn’t matter now.”

  Jeweltongue kissed her sister’s hand and then curled her own fingers tightly round it and held it in her lap. “I swear you must be the nicest person ever born. If I didn’t love you, I would hate you for it, I think.”

  “Now you know how I feel the six hundred and twelfth time in a row you’re right about something,” said Lionheart sleepily from Jeweltongue’s other side. “What is happening?” she said through an audible yawn. “It’s still dark. It’s not morning already, is it, and I have forgotten to open my eyes?”

  “No,” said Jeweltongue. “Beauty’s had a nightmare.”

  “Nightmares are hell,” said Lionheart feelingly. “I used to have them—” She stopped abruptly. “Not so much anymore,” she said, “except some nights, when the beetle and spider rain is bad, I start dreaming the thatch is leaking.”

  “I’m all right now,” said Beauty.

  “No, you’re not,” said Jeweltongue. “I can still feel your heart shaking your whole body. Whatever is your nightmare about? Can you tell us?”

  Beauty tried to laugh. “It sounds so silly. I’m walking down a dark corridor, with no doors or windows anywhere, and there’s a monster waiting for me at the far end. I can’t see it, but I know it’s there. It’s—it’s … I suppose it’s just that I haven’t had it in so long. But it seems so—so much stronger than it used to. I mean … you always feel like you’re in a nightmare when you’re having it, don’t you? Or it wouldn’t be a nightmare. But tonight … just now, I was there.”

  There was a little silence, and then Lionheart sat up as if to climb out of bed but stopped with one foot touching the floor. “If Jeweltongue would remove herself so that she is no longer sitting on my nightgown, I will go brew us some chamomile tea. It’s good for almost everything; it should be good for nightmares too. You stay here so we don’t disturb Father.”

  After that first time the dream came back often, but Beauty did not wake her sisters again. She grew accustomed—she forced herself to grow accustomed—to the feeling that she was there, that the only difference between her waking life and her life in the dream was that in the dream she did not know where she was.

  She looked for details in her waking life that she would not be able to match in the dream, in some hope that such small
exact trifles would orient her so firmly to the world of Rose Cottage and Longchance that the dream would distress her less when she found herself once again in that great dark not-quite-empty place, but this did not turn out as she wished. If she examined the wood grain in the walls of Rose Cottage one day, the next night she dreamed of examining the wallpaper in the corridor in the flickering light of the candles. If she touched the wall in reaction to the uncertainty of what she could see, or guessed she saw, she felt the slight roughness of the paper itself, the seams where the lengths met, and the slickness where the paint had been drawn on over the stencil.

  She found that her dream had changed in another way. She had begun to pity the monster she approached.

  She feared him no less for this; she did not even know why she felt pity and grew angry with herself for it. She would rush along the endless shadowy corridor with her head bowed and her arms crossed across her breast, feeling grief and pity and raging at herself, Why do I feel sorry for a monster who is going to eat me as soon as seen, like the Minotaur with his maidens? When she woke, she remembered how, when she was still only a child, she had realised that she did not seek to escape, but to come to the end of the corridor and get it over with—whatever it was going to be. And she remembered how sick and dizzy and helpless and wild—almost mad—that realisation had made her feel. It’s only a dream, she had said to herself then, and she repeated it now, silently, in the peaceful darkness of Rose Cottage, with the reassuring sound of her sisters’ breathing by her side. It’s only a dream. But why do I dream of a terrible monster waiting for me, only for me?

  Jeweltongue gained her first commission to make fine shirts, for the family who held the Home Farm. “She bought two of my rough shirts for her husband a little while ago and said at the time that the work was far too good for farm clothes. Oh dear! It’s just what I want to believe, you see.”

  “Home Farm?” said Lionheart. “Maybe the squire’ll hear of you and order a dozen brocade waistcoats.”

  “Oh, don’t!” said Jeweltongue. “I want it too badly. The squire has a big family, and they like good clothing. Mrs Bestcloth has already told me.” Mrs Bestcloth was the draper’s in Longchance. “She says they’re the only reason Longchance even has a draper’s and that someday one of them will be in when I am, and she’ll introduce me.” Jeweltongue buried herself in her task, sitting by the window while daylight lasted, drawing closer to the fire as dusk fell. Their one lamp lived at her elbow; Lionheart grumbled about cooking in the dark, but not very loudly. All three sisters resisted the temptation to stroke the good fabric Jeweltongue was working on and remember the old days.

  But Lionheart had begun to grow restless. She had thrown herself into rebuilding the second shed to be marauder-proof, so they did not have to bring Lydia and the chickens indoors at night—“Just before I went mad,” said Jeweltongue, who was the one of the three of them who minded most about a clean house and therefore did more than her fair share of the housework. Then Lionheart built them a new and magnificently weatherproof privy—“Please observe that all my joins join,” she said—and finished clearing the meadow round the cottage so it was a meadow again. Beauty had helped with both shed and privy, but she was more and more absorbed in reclaiming the garden, which didn’t interest Lionheart in the slightest; and Lionheart was, indeed, enjoying herself, although her hurling her materials round and swearing at her tools when she had not skill enough to make them do what she wanted might have led anyone who knew her less well than her sisters to believe otherwise.

  But there were no more major projects to plunge into and grapple with. Lionheart trimmed the encroaching undergrowth back a little from the track that led from the main way to their cottage; but after that she was reduced to chopping wood for their fires—and this late in the year they only needed the one fire for cooking—and the cooking itself, which was necessarily plain and simple and which she had furthermore grown very efficient at. “Who wants to be indoors in spring anyway?” she muttered. “Maybe I’ll apprentice myself to a thatcher.”

  One morning she disappeared.

  “Oh, my lords and ladies, what will she get up to?” said Jeweltongue, but she had her sewing to attend to. Beauty spent the day in the garden, refusing to think about anything but earth and weeds and avoiding being torn to shreds by the queer thorny bushes which there were so many of around Rose Cottage.

  Lionheart returned in time to have the last cup of tea, very stewed, from the teapot, and to get supper. “Where have you been?” said Jeweltongue.

  “Hmm?” said Lionheart, her eyes refocusing from whatever distant mental picture she had been contemplating. “Mmm. Don’t you grow awfully bored just looking at one stitch and then the next stitch and then the next? I have been giving you something to distract you, by worrying where I was,” replied Lionheart, but, before Jeweltongue could say anything else, added, “Have you met our local squire yet? Or his sister? The sister is the one you want to put yourself in the way of, I would say. She looks to be quite vain about her dresses.”

  “Lionheart, you didn’t!” said Jeweltongue in alarm.

  “No, no, I didn’t,” said Lionheart. She dropped her voice so their father, dozing in his chair by the fire, would not hear her. “What would I say? ‘Good day, sir, in the old days my father wouldn’t have let you black his boots, but now my sister would be glad of a chance to make your waistcoats? For a good price, sir, please, sir, our roof needs rethatching’?” Lionheart’s careless tone did not disguise her bitterness, nor did her sisters miss the glance she gave to her hands. In the old days they had all had lady’s hands; even the calluses Lionheart had from riding were smooth, cushioned by the finest kid riding gloves, pumiced and lotioned by her maid. Lionheart raised her eyes and met Beauty’s across the table. “I know that look,” said Lionheart. “What sororal sedition are you nursing behind that misleadingly amiable stare?”

  “I am wondering what you thought about the squire’s sister’s horse,” said Beauty.

  Lionheart laughed. “It’s the right target, but your arrow is wide. The squire’s sister drives a pair of ponies older and duller—although rather better kept—than those farm horses we brought here, and the squire himself rides a square cobby thing suitable to his age and girth. But if you had asked about the squire’s eldest son’s horse …”

  “What?” said Jeweltongue. But Lionheart refused to be drawn. She stood up from the table and began to bang and clatter their few pots and pans, as if to drown out any further questions. Finally Jeweltongue said: “Have a little care. Mrs Oldhouse says the tinker will not be here again for months.”

  Their father woke up, stared bemusedly at the cup of now-cold tea sitting at his elbow, and went back to musing over his pen and scribbles. “May I make you some fresh tea, Father?” said Lionheart, guiltily caught mid-clash.

  “No, no, my dear, I am not thirsty,” he said absently; then he looked up. “You have been away, have you not? We missed you at lunch. Have you had an interesting day?”

  A smile Lionheart looked as though she would repress if she could spread across her face. “Yes, Father, a very interesting day,” she replied.

  “Stop making those absurd grimaces,” said Jeweltongue with asperity. “You look like you have bitten down on a mouthful of alum.”

  Lionheart was very thoughtful for the next few days, and while Jeweltongue tried a few times to wheedle something further out of her—with no success whatsoever—Beauty felt that if Lionheart had decided to tell them nothing, then nothing was what they would be told, and declined to help wheedle. Furthermore, she was by now too preoccupied with her garden to think long about anything else.

  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 wor
kable 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.