Rose Daughter

by Robin McKinley

  She returned from the bonfire glade with her overskirt heavy with carefully uprooted heartsease, and spent a little time kneeling by the crosspath at the centre of the glasshouse, planting tiny purple faces in small clusters among her cuttings at the four corners.

  It was near lunchtime, but for the first time she was not hungry for it. She stood restlessly in the centre of her glasshouse, with the transplanted heartsease gleaming velvety and merry in the sunlight, and looked round her. The good work she had done no longer pleased her, because she knew her task was only half accomplished. She had to feed the soil, feed her roses, or nothing would come of all she had done so far, and her cuttings and seedlings would die too. “If I say ‘compost,’ I don’t suppose a compost heap appears by the water-butt, does it?” It didn’t.

  She walked through the orchard, too preoccupied to look for the Beast—or too ashamed, for how could she face him now, when the job she was here to do she was about to fail at?—and let herself into the walled garden again; but she found no compost heap, nor any of the usual signs of human cultivation, rakes and hoes and spades, trowels and hand forks and pruning knives, seed trays and bell glasses and pots for potting on, odd bits of timber that might do for props but probably won’t, twists of paper that used to contain seeds and haven’t found their way to the bonfire, broken pots, frayed string, and bits of rusty wire. “Very well,” she said. “You are much too—too organized for such mortal litter, but if you, you magic, don’t need compost to make—to allow—things to grow, why are the Beast’s poor roses dying?” It is the heart of this place, and it is dying. She looked out again over the too-tidy, too-beautiful vegetable beds and listened to the silence. Where were the birds?

  She slunk back through the orchard, looking only at her feet, not even interested in exploring the pond or stream the bulrushes heralded, not stopping to twist a fruit off any of the generously laden trees, because she suddenly felt she did not deserve such a pleasure. She went up to her balcony and stared at her lunch with no appetite.

  There was a slab of cheese, and she poked it with her finger. “Where do you come from then? Herbivore dung is exactly what I want. Cow would be splendid—goat, sheep, even horse. I’m not particular. Chicken is also good, although I’m quite sure one cannot produce cheese from chickens. I wish I knew more about cheese.” She tried to recollect everything the dairymaid who had married a city man might have told her about cheese varieties, but it was all too long ago. She had not been a good pupil because she had had too much on her mind, and the woman had been careful to give her only the most basic instructions. She thought of her own experiments with goat’s cheese and smiled grimly; no help for her there.

  She broke off a bit of this cheese and nibbled it, stared at the pattern of crumbs as if they were tea-leaves which could tell her fortune. “This isn’t even like any cheese I can remember anywhere else. It’s—it’s—” She stopped.

  She had eaten cheese in the palace before, and no doubt what was happening now was only because she was concentrating so hard that her mind had to leap in some direction, like a horse goaded by spurs. But suddenly she seemed to stand in a forest, and there was an undulating sea of moss underfoot, and the sunlight fell through the green and coppery leaves in patterns as beautiful as those on a spider’s back, and there was a smell of roses in her nostrils and in her mouth. But just as she would know Lionheart from Jeweltongue in the dark simply by her smell, just as each of the roses at Rose Cottage possessed a smell as individual as the shape of its stems and leaves and the colour of its flowers, so was this smell of roses different from the rich wild scent that belonged to the Beast. This scent was light and delicate and fine and reminded her of apples after rain, but with a flick, a touch, a tremor of something else, something she could not identify. She drew in a deep breath, and her heart lifted, and then the vision—and the scent—dissolved, and she was back in her rose-decorated room, staring at a plate of cheese and cheese crumbs.

  She hardly knew how she got through the afternoon, and she was preoccupied at dinner. When Fourpaws failed to put in an appearance, she found herself playing fretfully with the tails of the ribbons woven into her bodice, fidgeting with the silken cord of her embroidered heart, and twisting the gold chain set with coral that hung round her neck.

  “May I ask what troubles you?” said the Beast at last.

  Beauty laughed a little. “I am sorry; I am not good company this evening. No, I think I want to worry my problem one more day. It would please me to be able to solve it myself, although at present I admit I am baffled.”

  “I will help you any way I can,” said the Beast. “As I have told you.”

  Beauty looked at him. He had turned his head so that the candlelight fell on one cheekbone, lit the dark depths of one eye; the tips of his white teeth showed even when his mouth was closed. He always sat so still that when he moved, it was a surprise, like a statue gesturing, or the wolf or chimera’s deadly spring from hiding.

  “Yes, Beast,” she said. “I know … you have told me this.”

  He made his own restless motion, plucking at the edge of his gown, as she had seen him do before. The fabric rippled and glistened in the candlelight, seeming to turn of its own volition to show off its black sheen, like a cat posing for an audience. She repressed the urge to stroke it, to quiet the Beast’s hand by placing her own over it.

  “It is a little early,” he said after a moment, “but I could take you on the roof tonight.”

  “Oh, yes!” said Beauty. “Please. When I woke up this morning, I was angry, because I usually do wake at least once in the night.”

  “Do you?” said the Beast, as he stood behind her chair while she folded her napkin and rose to her feet. “Does something disturb you?”

  She turned round and looked up at him. He was very near, and the rose scent of him was so heavy she felt she might reach out and seize it, wrap it round herself like a scarf. “I have always woken in the night,” she said, “since I was a little child, since—since I first had the dream I told you of, my—my first evening here.”

  The Beast was silent for a moment. “I have forgotten,” he said at last, and the words I have forgotten echoed down a dark corridor of years. “I too used to wake most nights, when—before—when I slept more than I do now. I had forgotten.”

  He turned away, as if still lost in thought, but she skipped round after him and slipped her hand beneath his elbow. His free hand drew her hand through and smoothed it down over his forearm, and his arm pressed hers against his side.

  She was aware that he was walking slowly to allow for both her height and her elegant burden of skirts—thank fate my shoes are more reasonable tonight, she thought—but still they made their way swiftly through what seemed to her a maze of corridors and then up a grand swirl of stairs. Magnificent furnishings demanded her attention on every side, but she turned her gaze resolutely away from them, preferring to stare at the fine black needlework on the Beast’s sleeve, glimpsed and revealed as they walked through clouds of candlelight and into pools of darkness.

  She was tired of looking up at portraits that stared down scornfully at her. She was tired of ormolu cabinets and chinoiserie cupboards that when she first looked bore sprays of leaves and flowers which when she looked again were deer or birds; tired of divans that had eight legs and were covered with brocade but between blink and blink had six legs and were covered with watered silk. She moved her fingers to lie lightly on a ridge of braid on the Beast’s sleeve; it was the same ridge in or out of candlelight. The rich scent of the crimson rose embraced her.

  But as they paced up the stairs, she looked up, for the ceiling was now very far away, and she wondered if she was seeing to the roof of the palace. It seemed much higher than the cupola on her glasshouse, and this puzzled her, and before she could remember not to let anything she seemed to see in this palace puzzle her, her eyes were caught by the painted pattern on the ceiling, which seemed to be of pink and gold—and auburn brown and eb
ony black, aquamarine blue and willow leaf green—and perhaps had people worked into it, or perhaps only rounded shapes that might be limbs and draperies, but certainly it seemed to reflect the swirling of the staircase—except that it did not, and the spiral overhead began to turn quickly, too quickly, and she lost her sense of where her feet were, and she stumbled because she could not raise her feet fast enough, and she tripped over the risers.

  The Beast stooped and picked her up as easily as she might have picked up Fourpaws and continued up the stairs. “Pardon me, please,” he said. “Close your eyes, and hold on to me because I am only … what I am. And forgive me, for I should have warned you. I went up this stair on all fours more than once before I learnt not to look up. This house—this place—has a strange relationship with the earth it stands upon. If you want to look round you, stop. When you walk, look only where you are walking. And in particular, do not look at the ceiling when you climb a turning stair, and do not look out any windows when you are walking past them. I—I should have said these things to you before; I have never had occasion to explain to—” He stopped. “I do not think the contents of any of the rooms will make you dizzy if you stand still to look at them. They mostly only, er …”

  “Change their clothing,” said Beauty, and the Beast gave a low rumble of laugh.

  “Yes,” he said. “And please forgive me also for treating you so—”

  “Lightly,” suggested Beauty, and was gratified by another quick growly laugh.

  “—disrespectfully,” continued the Beast. “But I have also learnt that it is better not to—not to acknowledge when something here has had the better of you, if you need not.”

  And at that he reached the top of the stairs, and took two steps into the darkness there, and set her gently down on her feet. Involuntarily she leant against him, listening to the slow thump of his heart, hearing her own heart pattering frantically in her ears in counterpoint as she stirred and put herself away from him, feeling with her hands for the wall. “It is so dark!” she said.

  “Yes,” said the Beast’s voice, and it seemed to come from all round her, as if he still held her in his arms, or as if he had swallowed her up, like an ogre in a nursery tale. “This hall is always dark; I do not know why. I do not know why this great staircase leads you to something you are not permitted to see; I can tell you that candles will not stay kindled here, though the air is sweet to breathe. But this is the shortest way to the roof. I told you that any stair up will lead you to the roof eventually; it will, but sometimes it is a tedious process. And it is the sky we want.”

  He leant past her and threw open a door. Starlight flowed in round them, lighting up her pale hands, which she still held out in front of her against the dark of the hallway, playing in the carved surfaces of the cameo rings on her fingers and tweaking glints and gleams from the lace overlay of her skirt. The Beast was a darkness the starlight could not leaven.

  She turned, went up a narrow half flight of stairs, and ducked through a low opening. She was on the roof, surrounded by sky. “Directly before you,” said the Beast, and she could hear him stooping behind her, so that when he pointed over her shoulder, his arm was low enough for her eyes to follow, “is the Horse and Chariot. There”—his arm moved a little—“is the Ewer, and there”—only his finger moved—“the Throne.”

  “And there,” she said dreamily, “is the Peacock, and the Tinker—how clear his pack is, I have never seen it so clear—and the Sailing Ship.”

  “Then you are a student of the skies as well,” said the Beast.

  She laughed, turning to him. “Oh, no—I have told you nearly as many as I know. Our governesses taught us a little—a very little—a very little of anything, I fear, but the night sky was not their fault, for we lived in the centre of a city, where the gas-lamps were lit all night, and in weather fine enough to stand outdoors with your governess, there was probably also a party going on in some house nearby, with its grounds lit as bright as day. Please tell me more. I have never seen so many stars, so much sky. At home”—she faltered—“at … outside Longchance, where I lived with my sisters, although there are no gas-lamps, there are trees. I know no stars that stay low to the horizon, and the turning of the seasons always confuses me.”

  And so he told her more, and sometimes, with the name of some star shape, he told her the story that went with it. She knew the story of the Peacock, who was so proud of his tail that he was willing to be hung in the sky instead of marrying his true love, and how his true love, both sad and angry, asked that peahens, at least, might be spared having tails so grand that conceit might make them forget necessary things, like looking for supper and raising children.

  But she did not know the story that the Tinker was not a tinker at all, but a brave soldier who, having stolen the Brand of War, carried it in his pack till he could come up to the Ewer, which contained the Water of Life, where he could quench it forever. But the Ewer always went before him, and he chased her round and round the earth, because she knew that humanity could not be freed of its burden so easily and, for love of the Tinker, could not bear him to know his courage was in vain. Beauty had never seen the Three Deer, who dipped back and forth above and below the horizon, ever seeking to escape the Tiger, who ran after them; nor the Queen of the Heavenly Mountain, whose realm touched both the earth and the sky, and if you were the right sort of hero and knew exactly the right path, you might visit her, and she would show you the earth constellations spread out at your feet and tell you the stories they held.

  Beauty at last sighed and bowed her head. “You are tired,” said the Beast. “I am sorry; I have kept you too long. You must go to bed.”

  “I am not tired—or, that is, only my neck is tired,” said Beauty, reaching beneath the gold and coral chain, and the silken rope of the embroidered heart, to rub it. But then she blinked, looking down at her feet, and backed up a step, and backed up another. “But, sir—Beast—what is this we walk on? Why are we walking on anything so lovely?” And she went on backing up and backing up, but the roof was covered with the delicate, glowing paintwork.

  She knelt down and touched the arched neck of the fiery chestnut Horse drawing the red-and-blue-and-gold Chariot, and the face of the Queen of the Heavenly Mountain was so kind and the eyes so welcoming that Beauty almost spoke to her, and, between opening her mouth and, remembering, closing it again, had reached out to brush a lock of hair from where it had fallen across her cheek, as she might have done to one of her sisters. For several minutes after that she was too stunned, too enthralled to speak; at last she said wonderingly, “There is nothing as splendid as these anywhere inside your palace.

  “But—no—splendid is not the right word. They are splendid, but they are—they are so friendly. Oh dear!” she said, and looked up at him, half laughing, half embarrassed. “How childish that sounds! But so many of the beautiful things in the rooms beneath us—push you away—tell you to stand back—order you to admire and be abashed. These—these draw you in. These make you want to stay and—and have them for company. Yes, that’s right. But I—I am still making them sound like a—like—sort of comfortable, though, am I not? Like a bowl of warm bread and milk and an extra pillow, and that’s not it at all. They are not comfortable. Indeed, I feel that if I lived with them for long, I should have to learn to be … better, or greater, myself. If this Queen of the Heavenly Mountain looked down at me from my bedroom wall every day, soon I should have to go looking for that path to her domain. I wouldn’t be able to help myself.”

  The Beast still stood silent.

  “Oh—am I still describing it all wrong? I told you our governesses never taught us much. And Jeweltongue is the artistic one of us. Lionheart is the bold one, and I—I—I am the practical one. I don’t mind being the practical one, but these—oh, these pictures do not make me feel the least bit practical!” She took a deep breath and clasped her hands over her heart, as if she felt some stirring in her blood she had not felt before.


  “Tell me—please tell me—do you know how they came here—these pictures? It is so odd that they should be here, where they will be rained on and scoured by wind. Do you know how they came here?”

  There was a long silence. “Hmm,” rumbled the Beast at last. “I drew them.”

  “You?” she said, amazed. “But—but you told me you are clumsy!”

  “My hands are clumsy,” said the Beast, “but they are steady. I have had … enough time, to learn how to do what I wish to do. I tried … different things. Sometimes I use a very long brush, which I hold between my teeth.”

  “But—you have said you spend the nights here! Do you work in the dark?”

  “I see very well in the dark, so long as the sky is clear,” said the Beast. “The shadows indoors are much darker.”

  She crept, feeling foolish but too entranced to care, across the roof, stooping even lower to peer at a particularly fine bit of work: a deer’s flank, a peacock’s feather, the vine leaves winding up a pole. There were more stars and stories here than she could learn in years of nights. She came at last to the low balustrade which ran along the edge of the roof. There was something painted here too, but it was almost entirely in shadow, and she could not see it.

  She looked down the vast length of the roof—for they had walked round only one tiny bit of this wing of the palace—and along its balustrade, and it seemed to her that all the shadows were populated by the Beast’s fine, living, vivid painting, but nowhere could she see any bit of balustrade that did not stand so thoroughly in its own shadow that she thought her weak human eyes could make out what was upon it.

  “Candles,” she said aloud—a little too loud—and went firmly to the low door, which projected into the roof no higher than the balustrade, and looked inside on the top stair. She saw nothing, but she persisted, seeing candles in her mind’s eye, insisting on candles, and eventually she found a nook, and in it a candle in a small holder and a tinderbox. She lit the one with the other, and stood up, and went back to the balustrade where she had first noticed the patterns she suspected were painting, and stooped again, and—somehow she had known this was what she would find—the Beast had painted roses all along the balustrade, as far as she walked, stooping for the candle flame to light them but careful with the candle, that no wax would drip on the paintings she could not help but walk on.