Rose Daughter

by Robin McKinley

  The wallpaper—what could be seen of it—all bore small climbing roses in different colours, and the table that stood in the centre of the first room, so that Beauty had to go round it to reach the next, had roses carved in relief round its edge, and inlaid in exquisitely tinted pietra dura across its surface; the stems of the torchères, standing in slender elegant clusters in every corner, were wound round with roses, and tiny rosebuds surrounded each individual candle; a stone maiden, not unlike the one Beauty had seen in the pool in the front garden, stood holding a bowl of roses over her head, whose brim she had tipped, and she was so covered by a cascade of stony roses that all of her that was visible were an eye, one cheek, a smiling mouth, and the tips of her toes.

  In the second room the panelled walls were almost entirely covered by a series of tapestries portraying a garden in each of the four seasons. “You’re cheating,” murmured Beauty, for there were roses showing in both the spring and autumn scenes, as well as rioting so profusely across the summer ones it was almost impossible to ignore them long enough to see what else was represented. “But perhaps it is true here,” Beauty said; “perhaps this is the garden I have yet to see?” And she heard the hope in her voice, but she also felt the wrench as she averted her mind from recollecting a dark red rose on a cottage windowsill.

  She walked over and touched one of the summer tapestries with her hands. A little peacefulness seemed to sink through her skin at the contact, and she realised that the dense air of this palace was lighter in these rooms, in her rooms, and her lungs did not labour here. She felt the tiny pressure of the silk rope round her neck that bore the little embroidered heart; she remembered the comfort of the touch of the beech tree in the middle of the wild wood, remembered the moment before the front door of the palace when she had known the Beast would keep his promise to her … and, before she could stop herself, remembered the last moments of her sisters’ arms round her and their scent in her throat. It was in the midst of that memory, as she took a deep, steadying breath, that she became aware of another scent.

  She dropped her hands and turned round, and on a tall japanned cupboard she found a china bowl full of dried rose petals. She drew her fingers through them—as she had often drawn her fingers through rose petals in smaller cracked or chipped bowls or saucers that stood at various sentinel posts around Rose Cottage—and gloried in the smell released; but at the same time there was a tiny doubt in the back of her mind that this was not quite the same rose smell as—as—When? Just now? Just when? She looked round, puzzled. Perhaps there were other bowls of other sorts of roses’ petals scattered about in these rooms, though she had not seen them. What she seemed to be remembering was a deeper, richer, almost wilder smell, a smell that might almost have given her dreams.

  She walked on through the rooms, following a wide swathe of sunlight. At last she came to what she recognised as a bedroom, because it contained a bed, although the bed was so tall it required its own short flight of stairs, drawn up against one long side (its wooden surfaces carved with rose-buds, its tread carpeted with pink rose-buds), and its curtains (patterned with crimson roses) looked too heavy for her to move by herself. She walked over to it, slid out of the straps that held her small bundle of belongings to her back, dropped the bundle at the foot of the bed. It tipped over and disappeared under the trailing hems of the bed-curtains.

  On the wall nearest the bed there was a fireplace, with a fire laid but not lit on the clean-swept grate, the tips of whose uprights and crosspieces were round flat open roses. Round the corner from it were two doors. She opened the first and found a tidy water-closet, with a subdued pattern merely of grapevines on its walls and one tactful candle sconce dripping golden grape leaves. But the second door opened upon a bathroom as grand as a ballroom, the walls gold-veined mirrors, the floor pink marble, and the bathtub as large as a lake, its taps so complicated by water violets and yellow flags it was hard to guess how they worked. The whole effect was so gaudy she took an involuntary step backwards, and then she laughed aloud. “No, no, I can’t use anything like this; I won’t; I should drown in the bath—supposing I ever made sense of those taps—fall down on the floor, and be horribly embarrassed by the walls. I’d rather wash out of a teacup, standing up in front of the fire, thank you.”

  She closed the door hastily and continued her exploration. There was a vast wardrobe suitable for hanging dresses, and next to it a chest of drawers with matching footstool, so that you could see into the top drawer when you opened it (both chest and footstool were festooned with roses twisted among the delicate stars of virgin’s bower). Next to that were a lower table, with what was probably a jewel-case (painted over with roses) sitting on it, and a cushioned chair (its needlework seat pansies and roses). “You are all very handsome, but nothing to do with me,” she said, and made no move to open anything. “All I need is one small—quite small—shelf, if you please. You do know what small means?”

  She turned back towards the bed, and there next to it, in a corner of the fireplace wall, was a small white-painted shelf, perfectly plain—she blinked—no, it was not perfectly plain; almost white roses were dusted all over it, almost white with the faintest blush of pink, that caught the eye only after you had been looking at it for a little time—because of course it must be nonsense to think she had watched them coming into being.… “But what do I know of housekeeping in enchanted palaces?” she said. She looked at the edge of her bundle, just visible as a wrinkle in the bottom of the bed-curtains, and thought, No, I cannot bear unpacking just now. She looked round again at the huge, beautiful, crowded room. Not now. Not here.

  She walked rather quickly towards the window, which took up half the wall; curtains were bunched on its either side, and there was a dignified frill at its head, but the tall panes reached the floor and were hinged like doors. She went to them, pushed the centre ones open, and stepped outside onto a narrow balcony.

  The warmth of the sun wrapped round her like the arms of a friend or of a sister, and her desolation struck her, and the tears rushed down her face, and she sobbed till she could not stand and knelt on the balcony, clinging to the rail, pressing her wet face against the warm stone. She wept until her throat hurt and her eyes were sore and her head ached, and then she stopped because she was too tired to weep anymore. After a little time she stood up and went back into the bedroom to look for water to wash her face, and there it was, on a little table near the fireplace, a generous basin of it, with pink soap and an assortment of ruby-coloured towels; the outlines of roses were stitched in red thread along their hems. The water was warm, as warm as the sunlight, although it stood in shadow; she looked round, to catch sight of some servant leaving, but saw no one.

  How silent the palace was! No rustle and murmur of human life, not even birdsong, the scritch and patter of mice in the walls, or the creak of beams adjusting their load. Nothing but the silence, the thick, liquid silence, a silence that was itself a presence. A listening presence.

  This house was quieter even than their city house had been during the last weeks they had lived there.

  Hastily she picked up the soap. It was very fine, smooth soap and made her aware, as she had not been aware for many months, of her rough gardener’s hands, and it smelt of roses. Her tears began to flow again, so she set the soap down and made do with the warm water. Then she returned to the balcony.

  From where she stood, the palace ran round at least three sides of an immense courtyard. She could see only partway along the long faces to either side of her and could not see at all where the fourth side should run, or whether it was open or not, because her view was blocked by a glasshouse.

  The glasshouse was itself big enough to be a palace, and it glittered so tempestuously in the sun she had to find a patch in its own shade for her eyes to rest upon. It was very beautiful, tier upon graceful tier of it rising up in a shining silvery network of curves and straight lines, each join and crossing the excuse for some curlicue or detail, the cavalcades of
panes teased into fantastic whorls and swoops of design no glass should have been capable of. Merely looking at it seemed an adventure, as if the onlooker’s gaze immediately became a part of the enchanted ray which held the whole dazzling, flaring, flaunting array together.

  Beauty found that she was holding her breath—in delight; and when she expelled it, a laugh came with it. The glasshouse was joyous, exuberant, absurd; immediately she loved it. It was her first friend, here in the Beast’s gigantic palace, sunken in its viscous silence.

  At the very top of the glasshouse—she blinked against the glare—was a small round cupola and what she guessed was a weather vane, although she could not identify its shape, but she thought she saw it move. The palace was three immense storeys tall, but the glasshouse was taller yet.

  She had turned and was making her way quickly back through the long swirl of rose-covered rooms before the idea had finished forming in her mind: There is the Beast’s garden.

  CHAPTER

  6

  She half ran out upon the round chamber with the star in its floor. She stood in the centre, turning round and round, with the sun pouring down on her, and her feet playing hide-and-seek with the coloured tiles in the centre of the star. “Oh! I shall never find my way! How do I go to the glasshouse?” She had spoken aloud only in her private dismay, and had only just noticed that there were ten doors instead of eight, and had begun to tell herself she must have miscounted the first time when one door swung slowly open. She fled through it before she had time to change her mind, before she had time to be frightened again or to weep for loneliness. The garden would comfort her.

  She had only the briefest impression of a portrait of a dauntingly grand lady in an extravagantly furbelowed frame, hanging on the first turn of the corridor beyond the door, before she rushed past it. She was remembering the glasshouses in their garden in the city, which were paltry things compared to this one, nor could they convince their summer flowers to bloom quite all year round—not even the mayor’s great glasshouse could do that, with its hot-water pipes, which ran beneath all its benches and floors, and its shifts of human stokers, working night and day, to keep the boiler up to temperature—and the winters there were much milder than in the environs of Longchance and Appleborough. Perhaps this glasshouse was the answer to the question of how the Beast had had a rose with which to ensnare her father.… She jerked her thought free of that grim verb ensnare. But perhaps it was only a glasshouse, and not sorcery, that was the answer to her question.

  Unexpectedly she found herself remembering something Mrs Greendown had said to her: Roses are for love. Not silly sweethearts’ love but the love that makes you and keeps you whole, love that gets you through the worst your life’ll give you and that pours out of you when you’re given the best instead.… 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.…

  But the Beast was a sorcerer, wasn’t he? Of course. He must be.

  The corridor twisted and twisted again, and the sunlight came through windows in what seemed any number of wrong directions, and she began to wonder at the decisiveness of her feet, so briskly stepping along, nearly scampering, like Tea-cosy after a thrown stick.… But then the world straightened out, with a lurch she seemed almost to feel, and there was a door to the outside, which opened for her, and she stepped through it and was in the courtyard she had seen from her balcony, and the glasshouse was in front of her.

  She approached it slowly after all. It was very splendid and very, very large, and she felt very small, and shy, and shabby—“Well, I am very small and shabby,” she said aloud. “But at least my face and hands are clean.” And she held up her clean hands like a token for entry. “No, that is the wrong magic to enter even a magic garden,” she said, and looked up at the glasshouse towering over her, and all its gorgeous festoonery seemed to be smiling down at her, and again she laughed, both for the smiling and for the ridiculousness of the notion.

  “Here,” she said, and reached inside the breast of her shirt with one hand, and drew out a small wrapped bundle of the cuttings she had brought, and with her other hand reached into her pocket and drew out a handful of rose-hips. She stepped forward again, holding her gifts to her body, but when she came to the glasshouse door, she held them out, as if beseechingly.

  And then she laughed yet again, but a tiny, breathless snort of a laugh, a laugh at her own absurdity, tucked her rose-hips and her cuttings back inside her clothing, set her hand upon the glasshouse door, and stepped inside.

  She had been able to see little of what might lie inside the glasshouse from her balcony because the sun was so bright; she had had some impression of shadows cast, but she was unprepared for what she found. The glasshouse’s vastness was entirely filled with rose-bushes. The tall walls were woven over with climbers, and the great square centre of the house was divided into quarters, and each quarter was a rose-bed stuffed with shrub roses.

  But they were all dead, or dying.

  Beauty walked slowly round the edges of the great centre beds, looking to either side of her, looking up, looking down. Occasionally some great skeletal bush had managed to throw up a spindling new shoot bearing a few leaves; she saw no leaves on the climbers, only naked stems, many of them as big around as her wrists. She had thought when she first saw the thorn-bushes massed round the statue in the garden of Rose Cottage that they were dead; but she had not known what sleeping rose-bushes look like. She knew now. The Beast’s roses were dying.

  In the last corner she came to, her head turned of its own volition, following a breath of rich wild sweetness, and there was the bush that had produced the dark red flower that had sat on her father’s breakfast table in the Beast’s palace and on Rose Cottage’s windowsill. The living part of it was much smaller than the dead, but living it was, in all the sad desert of the magnificent glasshouse; three slender stems were well clothed in dark green glossy leaves, and each stem bore a flower-bud. Two of these were still green, with only their tips showing a faint stain of the crimson to come, but the third was half open, just enough for its perfume to creep out and greet its visitor. Beauty knelt down by the one living bush and slowly drew out and laid her cuttings and her rosehips in her lap, as if demonstrating or offering them or asking acceptance; and then, as if involuntarily, both hands reached out to touch the bush. The stems nodded at her gently, and the open flower dipped as if in greeting or blessing. “We have our work laid out for us, do we not?” she said softly, as if speaking in the ear of a friend.

  She left the rose-hips in a little heap under the living bush but stood up again holding her cuttings, looking round her thoughtfully. “Where shall I put you?” she said aloud. “Shall I make a little bed for you, so that I can watch you, or shall I plant you now and hope you will give hope and strength to your neighbours? You must be brave then, because I cannot spare even one of you.” And so she planted them, one each in the four outer corners of the centre beds, four more in the inner corners, sixteen more centred on each side of each square.

  Her four cuttings from Rose Cottage’s two climbers she placed in the four corners of the glasshouse, beneath the skew-whiff jungle of the old climbing stems. She found a water-butt and watering-can near the door she had entered by, and she watered each of her tiny stems, murmuring to them as she did so, and by then the sun was sinking down the sky, and the glasshouse was growing dim, and she was tired.

  She said good-evening to the one living bush and the pile of rose-hips and went to the door; with her hand on the faceted crystal doorknob she turned and said: “I will return tomorrow; I will make a start by pruning—by trying to prune you—all of you—Oh dear. There are so many of you! But I shall attend to you all, I promise. And I must think about where to make my seedbed. Sleep well, my new friends. Sleep well.” She went out and closed the door soft
ly behind her.

  She had taken little thought of how to go where she wished to go; she had turned automatically in the direction she had come, but brooding about the dying roses, she had only begun to notice that she seemed to be walking into a blank wall … when suddenly there was an opening door there. She stopped and blinked at it. She supposed it was the same door she had come out by; all the palace walls looked very much alike. She turned and looked at the glasshouse. The glasshouse had only one door; she had looked very carefully while she was inside it. Very well, the glasshouse was her compass, and this was the way she had come when she left the palace, and the door was set very cleverly into the palace wall so that it was invisible until you were very near, and an awful lot of these doors did seem to open of themselves, although the Beast had opened doors in the usual way, and the glasshouse had waited (politely, she felt; it was what doors were supposed to do) for her to open its door.

  She stared at the palace door, now standing open like any ordinary door having been opened by ordinary means. Very well, she knew she had entered an enchantment as soon as she set foot on the white-pebbled drive leading to the palace; if self-opening doors were the worst of it, she was … she could grow accustomed.

  She looked up again and could see the weather vane twinkling in the golden light of the setting sun. She thought for a moment that it twinkled because it was studded with gems—anything seemed possible in this palace, even a jewel-encrusted weather vane—but then she realised that it was carved, or cut out, in such a way that what she was seeing were tiny flashes of sunlight through the gaps as it turned slowly back and forth on its stem. She strained her eyes, but she was no nearer guessing what its shape was. Twinkle. Twinkle. There was no breath of the breeze that the weather vane felt on the ground where she stood.

  She went through the open palace door, and some of the candles were now lit in their sconces—even though the sconces lit seemed to be in different locations on the walls from when they had been unlit—and shone brighter than the grey light coming through the tall windows. Just over the threshold she paused and looked round her. There had been a little square table beside the door to the courtyard, a little square table of some dark reddish wood, with a slope-shouldered clock on it, and the clock had a pretty painted face. She had only caught a glimpse of it, for she had been in a hurry to go to the glasshouse, but she was quite sure of the table and the clock. The clock was still there, but it now had an inadequately clad shepherdess and two lambs gambolling over its curved housing, and the table was round.