Rose Daughter

by Robin McKinley

  If they had a successful garden, they would be able to put up enough food that they would not have to fear the long winter. The precariousness of their present life suddenly appeared to her as if she stood on the brink of a literal abyss, staring into it till the impenetrable darkness made her dizzy. She knelt heavily, feeling the cool dampness seep through her skirts to chill her knees, and scooped up a little earth in her hands, scrabbling at it, ending up with a handful of earthworms and wild violet roots for her pains. But it made her laugh—weeding with her fingernails—and the real weight of the earth comforted her. A confused earthworm thrust a translucent pink front end (or possibly rear; it was difficult to tell with earthworms) out of her handful. She knew this garden would do its best for her. It didn’t matter how she knew.

  There were still cabbages growing, here and there, in erratic little clumps, and those might be bean shoots, and those, piranthus squash. And now, here, this was truly the end. Beauty broke off a bit of the old fence, woven like matting, and it crumbled in her hands.

  She sighed and stood still. If they were going to have food from the garden this year, she had to get busy. She should already be busy. Next market-day she would ask Jeweltongue to bring her seed—perhaps she should go herself and ask what grew most easily here—oh, but she shouldn’t waste a day; in weather like this the farmers’ crops would already be shooting, and she hadn’t even cleared her ground. She should be able to rig up some kind of scarecrow till she figured out what to do about fencing; clothing suitable for scarecrows was perhaps the only thing they had plenty of.

  There was something plucking at the boundary of her attention. She looked down at the fence shreds in her hand. They looked like nothing at all and smelt both damp and dusty, but … She shook them in her palm and then poked them with a finger. A thread separated itself from the miscellany: a green thread. She picked it up in her free hand and held it under her nose. It smelt neither damp nor dusty; it smelt … No, she couldn’t say what it smelt of, but for a moment she saw, as if she were dreaming it, a meadow surrounded by a wood, and in it fawn-coloured cows grazed, and the shadows from the trees fell strangely, some of them, for they seemed to be silver rather than dark.

  Her head cleared, and she looked at the bit of green thread again. Greenwitch charms. There was a greenwitch in Longchance after all, and she had sold garden charms to whoever had lived in Rose Cottage before them. Charms strong enough to be working more than fifteen years after they had been put into place. That was more like sorcerer’s work, but no sorcerer would stoop to making garden charms, certainly not for anyone living in a place like Rose Cottage. Beauty had already remarked that she’d never seen a chicken in the back garden but had put it down to being still too unsettled by her new life to notice everything that was happening round her—even the things she meant to look out for.

  Perhaps—perhaps if she took down and buried the remains of the old fence very carefully where it stood (and before it finished falling down of its own initiative; obviously the charms had included no longevity spell for lathe and reed), some of the old charm would persist. Whoever the unknown greenwitch was, if she was this good, Beauty couldn’t possibly pay her for new charms.

  She put the bit of string in her pocket. She felt curiously reluctant to say anything about her discovery to her sisters. Perhaps it was only her father’s familiar ban on all magic in their family that made her so uneasy, made her feel that even her brief vision, with its unmistakable whiff of magic, was a meddling in things too big for her. What did cows in a field have to do with a garden charm? Never mind. But if bits of green string would help to keep her garden whole, she would treat them politely. And she would as well put up a scarecrow and start at once on a new fence.

  She had been staring at the musty little slivers of matting left in her hand and dropped them in relief. When she looked up again, she let her gaze wander down the length of the garden and was immediately distracted by her favourite mystery, the one she couldn’t ignore, whether she had time for it or not. This one was, after all, quite an intrusive mystery. She wanted—she longed—to know what the deadly thorned shrubs that grew all over this garden were.

  Lionheart, after her first few encounters with the daggerfurred ogre standing guardian by the front door (it was inevitably Lionheart who, flinging herself through the door at speed, had caught a superficial blow of the thorny branches across the forehead and come in with blood sheeting down her face), had wanted to have it and all its fellows out, as part of meadow clearance and garden ground preparation, and had offered herself “as the blood sacrifice,” she said. “You can bury my flayed body under the doorstone to bring yourselves luck afterwards.”

  “Having failed to drown yourself in our well a few weeks ago?” enquired Jeweltongue. “You are such a life profligate. You’ll be offering next to hurl yourself off the roof for—for—it escapes me what for, but I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

  Beauty, who was the acknowledged gardener in the family, had declined this dubiously advantageous offer although she had immediately tied the chief offender firmly away from the front door and lopped off what couldn’t be tied. She had already cut a hole in the truly astonishing climbing thorn-bush by the kitchen door. This had sent out so many long, uninhibited stems that it was now rioting over the entire rear wall of the house, nailing the kitchen door shut in the process as uncompromisingly as any carpenter could do it. It had climbed well up onto the roof also, no doubt considerably to the detriment of the thatch it clung to, and had begun to curl itself round the kitchen chimney. Not even the fact that this chimney was now in regular use again seemed to discourage it.

  Even Jeweltongue felt that Lionheart had the right idea, if a little overexuberantly expressed, but Beauty said, “No. They were planted; it’s obvious they were planted deliberately. There must be a reason for them. I want to know what it is.”

  After that she had to stand by her decision, but she nonetheless wondered if the game could possibly prove worth the candle. Tied-in stems of these whatever-they-were had a habit of working themselves loose, or suddenly growing an extra half league, or turning themselves round where they stood (Beauty knew that this was really only any plant’s desire to lean towards the sun, but quite often it seemed a malign strategy) and grasping at passersby. There was also, at each of the house’s four corners, a lower, rounder shrub with the same flexible stems covered with thorns. These were almost more dangerous than the climbers, because they were as wide as they were tall, and their arching branches seemed to lie in wait for the unwary, suddenly uncoiling themselves from round corners to ensnare their victim.

  And in the very centre of the big back garden, where the lengthwise central path met a shorter path running crosswise, there was another circular bed, like the herb wheel, only much larger, and here grew more bushes like those round the house, with long wicked stems studded with knife points. While the herbs had merely colonised across their spoke boundaries, these bushes had thrown an impassable network of bristling stems higher than a man’s head in all directions, sprawling, manticore-tailed, across the paths round them as well, so that forcing them back to within their original bounds had been Beauty’s first necessary operation for reclaiming that part of the garden for other, more useful purposes.

  There was a statue at the heart of that great shapeless, impenetrable morass, but it was so caught round with spiny stems (and rank weeds bold enough to make their way through) Beauty had not a notion of what it might be.

  The stiletto bushes round the house were leafing out, big dark green leaves and surprising deep maroon ones. Many of the bushes in the centre wheel looked dead, their long, perversely floppy branches grey-green, almost furred, and nearly leafless. Some of them had the tiniest leafbuds showing, as if they were not sure of their welcome (that’s true enough, thought Beauty). These in the centre bed were covered with the longest, toothiest thorns (many of them hooked like fangs, for greater purchase) of anything in the whole well-armed ba
ttalion. Beauty looked at them musingly every time she went into the garden. All the thorn-bushes were ugly, but these were the ugliest.

  But it was this crazy tangle of them at the very centre of the garden which told her—even more clearly than the pernicious presence of their cousins by both doors of the house—just how loved these awful plants must have been. Very well, she would keep them—for this year.

  CHAPTER

  3

  About three weeks after Lionheart’s first disappearance, she disappeared again. She had gone into town a few times by herself meanwhile—always on some errand, carefully agreed upon beforehand—and had come home in each case looking frustrated, or amused, or pleased, in a manner that did not seem to relate to the errands she was ostensibly accomplishing. She came home sullen and discouraged the day she successfully arranged for a local farmer to deliver some of last year’s manure-heap for Beauty’s garden, and yet was jubilant and exhilarated the day she failed to find a suitable shaft to replace the handle of her favourite hammer, the accident that broke it having put her in a foul temper for the entire day.

  Neither Jeweltongue nor Beauty saw Lionheart leave, but both saw her return. They had not immediately recognised her. A very handsome young man had burst into the house at early twilight, with the light behind him, and they had stared up in alarm at the intrusion. Lionheart looked at their frightened faces, and laughed, and pulled her hat off so they could see her face clearly; but her hair was gone, chopped raggedly across the forehead and up the back of the head as if she had sawn at it with a pocket-knife. And she was wearing breeches and a man’s shirt and waistcoat.

  Her sisters were speechless. Beauty, after a moment, recognised the clothing as having belonged to one of their stablelads, which had thus far survived being turned to one of Jeweltongue’s purposes, but that did not explain what Lionheart was doing pretending to be a boy.

  “I have a job,” she said, and laughed again, and tossed her head, and her fine hair stood out round her face like a halo. “They think I’m a young man, you see—well, they have to: I’m the new stable-hand. At Oak Hall. But I won’t be in the muck-heap long because I made them dare me to ride Master Jack’s new colt—that’s Squire Trueword’s eldest son—this colt’s had every one of them off, you see. But I rode it. A few of them hate me already, but the head lad likes me, and I can see in his eye that the fellow who runs—that is, the master of the horse—has plans for me. My saints, I ache; I haven’t ridden in months, and that colt is a handful.

  “Oh, and they say to get a decent haircut before I come to work tomorrow; I’ll have to bow to the squire, and to his spoilt son, if I want to ride his horses.”

  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 of 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 skirts 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 Lionheart 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 Lionheart’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 them 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 Longchance—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.

  T
he 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.