Rose Daughter

by Robin McKinley

  He leant towards her, the shaggy hair of his head falling low over his forehead so that she could no longer see his dark eyes, and pulled her arm gently straight, till he could tuck the hand against his own round shoulder; she felt his warm breath stirring the fine hairs on her forearm; his long mane brushed the back of her hand. How could a Beast smell so sweetly of roses? No, no, it must be the sharp smell of the ointment that was creeping into her eyes, drawing two tears from under the lids to spill down her cheeks.

  He saw, and stopped at once, drawing back, holding only her hands in his, holding them against his breast; her knuckles grazed against the embroidery of his waistcoat. “Have I hurt you? The last thing I meant—”

  She drew her hands gently out of his, curled them under her chin. “No—no—I do not know what is wrong with me. I—I think it is only that I am tired.” She blinked, looked at him, smiled a little tremulously; she was shivering, a deep, deep tremor far inside herself, but she did not wish him to see, to know or to guess, and she feared what he might guess. She told herself she did not wish to hurt him by making him think she was still afraid of him. “It is only that I am tired. Your ointment is—is wonderfully soothing. I no longer even feel the scratches.”

  She turned back to her plate, leaning in her chair as she had been before the Beast brought the little pot of salve. The Beast did not return to his customary place, but he had straightened where he sat. She touched the half-eaten apple. “I—I think I am not very hungry either,” she said, for her appetite had gone. “I think what I most need is sleep. If you will excuse me—”

  He was on his feet in the instant, drawing back her chair. She moved away without looking at him, conscious of her loose sleeves billowing away from her arms, for she had not refastened the wrist clasps. She had arrived at the doorway when she heard the Beast’s low voice behind her, where he still stood behind her chair. “Beauty, will you marry me?”

  “Oh, no, Beast,” she whispered, and fled.

  She did not run far. She was as tired as she had told the Beast she was; she did not know if the corridor had shortened itself in sympathy or if she had fallen asleep while she walked. In her bedroom her dress fell away from her as soon as she touched the clasps at her shoulders, her fingers as clumsy as the Beast’s. It pooled like water round her feet; starlight and candlelight made it shimmer, as if it moved to a secret tide. The little embroidered heart tapped against her skin in response to her quick breathing. She was again almost too tired to pull her nightgown over her head, and she crept up the stairs to her bed on all fours.

  She dreamt her old dream, but with the change that had come to it since she had spent her first night in the Beast’s palace; she hurried down a long dim corridor, anxious to come to its end, for she was needed there. She was wearing the dress she had worn this evening, and the wrist clasps had come loose. A small, chilly wind pursued her, snaking up her open sleeves, making the untended scratches on her legs ache when it crept under her skirts. She must hurry.…

  She woke weeping. She knew at once it was very late; there was a difference in the stillness even in the Beast’s palace that told her the o’clock was inimical to daylight creatures. She remembered nights in the city when they had danced till dawn, both inside and outside lit by lamps that made the dancing floors almost as bright as day.… She thought she saw Jeweltongue speaking to a young man with a handsome, intelligent, sulky face, on a tall horse; she thought it was a picture out of her memory till she saw that Jeweltongue was wearing Mandy’s old skirt.

  There was a small plopping sound from the direction of the bed stairs. She turned her head on the pillow to look and saw a small round mound perched there. “Fourpaws?” she whispered. The mound rose up on four legs and became slender and graceful, and Fourpaws walked delicately onto Beauty’s bed, purring in her room-filling way. Beauty fancied she could see streams of purring leaking out through the cracks in the bed-curtains made by the bedposts, pouring out in the wider spaces on either side of her, which she preferred to leave open so she could see out; she thought perhaps it was the strength of the purring that roused the scent from the potpourri in the low dish on top of the japanned cabinet, for as she drifted towards sleep again, slowly stroking Fourpaws’ furry side, she could smell roses. Fourpaws’ fur was wonderfully sleek and soft, soft as … She fell asleep and dreamt she slept on warm fur, and in the dream she slept both deeply and dreamlessly, for she was guarded by a great shaggy shadow that paced back and forth in front of the door of her chamber, and the tiny breeze of his motion brought the smell of roses to her where she lay.

  And then the dream changed again, although there was still a cat’s fur under her fingers, and she blinked, and there was a black-brindle-and-white cat winding itself round her outstretched hands as she stooped to pet it. There was bright daylight all around them, and she heard the clop of hoofs. “There, Molly has lost her mind at last,” said a familiar voice. “I hope it won’t put her off her stroke with the barn mice.”

  “She’s only enjoying the sunlight,” said a strange male voice.

  “She’s not,” said the familiar voice; “she’s being petted by a ghost. Look at her. She doesn’t purr like that for a sunny afternoon.”

  The male voice laughed. Beauty thought: I am dreaming. Quite composedly she looked up and saw Lionheart and a young man she did not recognise leading two horses towards a barn a little distance away. The young man was no taller than Lionheart, though he had broad shoulders and big hands and a plain, square, kind face. They paused near Molly, and Beauty looked at their two faces and saw friendship there, the pleasure in each other’s company—and something else.

  “You are pleased with him, are you not?” said Lionheart in a suddenly businesslike tone, turning to the horse the young man led. “I can tell Mr Horsewise you will take him?” And she held out her hand for the young man’s reins.

  The young man hesitated, looking at her, and Beauty wondered at the odd way in which Lionheart now avoided meeting his eyes. Her hand, still outstretched, trembled slightly. “Yes,” said the young man at last. “Yes, I do like him, but it was you who saw him, was it not? Mr Horsewise himself said it was you who asked to try him.”

  Lionheart dropped her hand and shrugged. “Yes, I saw him first, but it was only that I was looking in the right direction. Mr Horsewise would have seen him sooner or later.”

  “That’s not how he tells it. He says he had seen enough horses for the day, and that it was you who insisted on poking round in all the corners where the Gypsies lurk for the unwary, and found Sunbright there, and recognised his worth, and insisted Mr Horsewise come look at him when he sought to put you off. And you—you know me very well. I prefer Sunbright to any of the other horses Mr Horsewise brought back from the fair.”

  “Good,” muttered Lionheart.

  “Lionheart, I don’t understand you,” said the young man, and there was something in his voice other than exasperation, something unhappy, even anguished. “Mr Horsewise thinks the world of you, says he’s training you up to be his successor. If you don’t want—even if you don’t—why won’t you at least accept the—the reward you have earned?”

  Lionheart smiled a little, but she still would not meet his eyes. “I don’t need a reward. My wages are as much as I need. And I love my work here.”

  “You love it, do you?” said the young man softly.

  Lionheart stepped away from him violently; the horse she held threw up its head and sidled away from her. “It’s—it’s just a manner of speaking!” she said. Clumsily she reached out and tried to snatch Sunbright’s reins out of the young man’s hands, but the young man was too quick for her and grasped her hand instead.

  “Lionheart—”

  “Let me go!” said Lionheart. “Please. Just—just let me go.”

  “You must listen to me,” said the young man. “I’ve known for some time. You know I guessed, don’t you? But I’ve kept your secret. Haven’t I? Can’t you trust me a little? Because I also know
—I—Lionheart—”

  But Lionheart had broken free and was running back to the barn, with her puzzled horse trotting obediently behind her.

  There was still sunlight in her face, but she was back in her bed in the Beast’s palace. She blinked at the canopy for a moment and then turned her head and looked into the room, looked at the queer shape the shadow of the breakfast table threw on the sunlit carpet. The roses there looked so bright and real she wondered if she might be able to pluck them and put them in a vase. “But it can touch nothing living,” the Beast said. These roses would be soft and rather furry, like the carpet; touching them would be like stroking a dense-furred cat. But they would have no scent, only a smell of dust and weaving.

  She sat up. There were short grey-amber-brown hairs on her pillow. She tried to brush them off, but she found her first attempts only seemed to leave more cat hairs than ever, and some of them now looked black and white. “Nonsense,” she said aloud, a little too sharply, and she half flung herself down the bed stairs to the carpeted floor. It was sun-warm on her bare feet, and she felt herself relaxing.

  “At least you don’t change,” she murmured, sitting down where she was, drawing up her knees, and putting her arms round her shins. “I am grateful,” she said aloud, “that these rooms—my rooms—don’t change. In this palace, where too many things change—where the paintings hanging in the corridors change their faces and their frames, where the candlestands and torchères and sconces are in different places and are higher or lower and have more branches or fewer, and there are different numbers of doors in the chamber of the star, and the enamelwork around the sun window changes colours, and sometimes it’s vine leaves and sometimes it’s little medallions, and the size of the tiles underfoot is sometimes larger and sometimes smaller, and there are of course different numbers of points on the star because there are different numbers of doors, but that doesn’t explain why the points are sometimes straight and sometimes curly—and perhaps it is a different dining-hall every evening too, only it is too dark to see. There is almost nothing here that does not change, except the glasshouse and—and me. And the Beast. And these rooms. The roses on the carpet in the first room are always pale pink cabbages, and the carpet in here is always velvety crimson roses that have opened flat—I suppose the carpet is dyed with a magic dye and will not fade in all this sunlight—and the tall japanned cabinet with the potpourri dish on top is always where I first saw it, and the mountain and the bridge and the trees on its front are always the same picture, and the potpourri bowl is always the same pale green china. And the fire grate always has the same number of bars—eight, I counted—and the bed stairs are the same number of steps, five.

  “And the garden tapestries are always there. I particularly love the garden tapestries. I might not realise if some of the other things were changed just a little—things I can’t count—but I would see it at once in those tapestries; you, er, you change the tint of one columbine, and I would notice it. I am glad they are all, always there. Even if, er, you have rather odd habits about matching jewelry with bath towels. I am even glad of those gilt console tables, although I think they are hideous, because at least they are always the same hideous.”

  She was still half asleep as she spoke, her eyes wandering meditatively over what she could see from where she was, and her gaze slowly settled back on the carpet she sat on. Several of the roses really did look surprisingly three-dimensional, although this one close at hand seemed less dark crimson than brown.… Her eyes snapped fully open, and she leant towards what was distinctly a small round lump on the carpet. Not Fourpaws, too small. “What … you’re a hedgehog!”

  It stirred at her touch and then curled up tighter. “You’re a very small hedgehog. And you shouldn’t be wandering round enchanted palaces looking for adventures. How did you get in here? At least bats and butterflies fly.”

  She stood up and began tapping gingerly at other bits of carpet. She found two more hedgehogs. Bemusedly she sat down at her breakfast table and poured herself a cup of tea. “Well. You would be quite useful in the glasshouse if there were any slugs, but at present there’s nothing for slugs to eat, so there are no slugs. I daresay by the time there are slugs, you will be full-grown and somewhere else. If I had a compost heap, you could sleep under the compost heap. Oh dear! If only I had something to compost! Grey and white pebbles and stone chips will not do. How am I going to feed my roses?” She put her feet under the table. “Oh!” She raised the edge of the tablecloth to look. Four hedgehogs.

  When she came to get dressed, she discovered a canvas tunic with long sleeves folded up on the floor of the wardrobe under her skirt, and behind her skirt on its peg a canvas overskirt. “Very convenient for the transportation of hedgehogs,” she said. There were tough leather boots that laced to her knees in the way of her searching hand when she scrabbled under the bed for her shoes. Then she bumped the curled hedgehogs together with one foot as gently as she could (even rolled-up hedgehogs do not readily roll) and, protecting her hands behind her overskirt, bundled them into her lap. “I hope tomorrow’s animal infestation isn’t fleas,” she murmured, and walked towards the chamber of the star, grateful for the first time for the eerieness of doors that opened themselves.

  The lady, or the lady’s cousin, who was usually in the first painting in the corridor that led to the glasshouse had changed her hair colour, and her pug dog was now a fan. She gazed at Beauty with unchanged superciliousness, however. But this morning Beauty, with her arms full of possibly flea-infested hedgehogs, put her tongue out at her.

  She laid her four spiky parcels down at the foot of the water-butt (having had a brief exciting moment holding her laden skirt together with one hand and one knee while she rapidly worked the glasshouse door handle with the other hand). “These are excellent garments,” she said, brushing her sleeves and her skirt front. “I can even bend my arms. The shirt reminds me very much of Jeweltongue’s first … oh.” She squeezed her eyes shut on her tears as one might hold one’s nose against a sneeze; after a little while the sensation ebbed, and she opened her eyes again and gave one or two slightly watery sniffs. The hedgehogs had not moved. “If you stay there a little longer, I will take you to the wild wood later on. But I have things to do first.”

  The half-open bud of the red rose was fully open now, and one of the other two was cracking, and—best of all—she found a tiny green bump of a new flower-bud peeking from the joint between another leaf and stem. She took a deep breath of the open flower’s perfume; it was as good as sleep, or food.

  She watered her cuttings. “You are striking, are you not?” she said to them briskly, like a governess addressing her students. “You are sending out little white rootlets in all directions, and soon you will prove it to me by producing your first leaf buds. I want you blooming by the end of this season, do you hear me? You shrubs, at least. You climbers, perhaps I will give you till next year.”

  She heard her own voice saying it—by the end of this season, next year—and she stopped where she stood, and the water from the watering-can she carried wavered and stopped too. She looked up towards the cupola several storeys over her head, and her mind went blank, and she felt panic stir in its lair, open its eyes.… She opened her mouth and began to sing the first thing that came into her head: “And from her heart grew a red, red rose, and from his heart a briar.…”

  She worked all that morning as hard as she had worked the day before. She worked to keep her memories at bay and to keep panic asleep in its den. And as she worked, she sang: “A knightly dance in the grove they tread, with torches and garlands of roses red.” She worked until her back and shoulders ached and sweat ran down between her breasts and her shoulder blades, and it was as well for her that she was wearing long canvas sleeves and overskirt, for she would not have noticed if the thorns had cut her, if her pruning-knife or her hand rake had slipped. She worked because there were new memories that troubled her now, not only memories of the sisters and father she
missed but memories of kindness and … memories of the Beast.

  “She had not pulled a rose, a rose, a rose but barely one, when up there starts …” Beauty faltered in her singing, and her stomach took advantage of the break in her concentration and told her loudly that it was lunchtime.

  She stopped and looked round almost blankly. The rose beds were now all splendidly tidy. She had pruned away almost as much dead wood as she had the day before; there was tying and staking yet to be done, but the elegant shapes of the bushes themselves were now cleanly revealed. There were rows of little hillocks of leaves down all the paths, and the rather bigger hill she’d automatically collected near the door (though she supposed the magic would once again transport it all for her to the mouth of the carriage tunnel to her bonfire glen) had four little collapsed-entry leaf-falls on one side of its circumference. “Oh dear,” said Beauty guiltily. “I’d forgotten all about you.”

  She put her hand on the glasshouse door and thought. She was a gardener, and she disliked the idea of putting four perfectly good slug- and insect-eating hedgehogs into a wild wood—wasting them, to her mind. She went outdoors and looked up, stretching her back and shoulders as she did so; the jacket and the overskirt were protecting her skin admirably, but they could do nothing for the ache in her muscles, or for the weariness of the hand that held the pruning-knife. It was still early enough in the year that the sun, while warm, was not yet oppressive. She wondered how hot the glasshouse became in high summer; was temperature regulation within the magic’s purview? Or was the excellent system of vents and of windows that opened and panes that unlatched, and lacy screens that rolled down, and the handles and levers to work them, invisible till there was need for it? Maybe it was merely hidden from her dull eyes amidst all the gorgeous tomfoolery of the glasshouse’s design.

  She looked up at the weather vane she could barely see and wondered again what it was; she could just make out a bulk of shape to one side, a narrower finger of something on the other.