Rose Daughter

by Robin McKinley

  “If everywhere that had ever had a curse thrown over it became antipathetic to magic, there would be no hands-breadth of earth left where any magical practitioner might stand. The question you must ask is, What became of the woman?

  “She was caught by the edge of her lover’s dying spell, like dust by the hem of a curtain, and she was swept along by it, back to Longchance, and spilled there … somewhere. I think, as in Mrs Oldhouse’s story, she is in some sense a ghost, but in some sense she is not a ghost.

  “I want you now to think back—only about thirty years. I cannot remember quite so far myself; I was in the cradle when it happened. But we came into a greenwitch again—after years, generations—without one. A greenwitch in Longchance. Rather a good one, I believe. I first remember her for her tolerance of small boys and small boys’ games. I saw less of her later on, for rose wreaths do not interest me … and I have never needed any of a greenwitch’s charms.

  “She had an adopted daughter, or there was a girl who lived with her, who grew up to be a very beautiful woman. Very beautiful indeed—eerily beautiful, some said. There were stories that there was something not quite right about her. Stories that went against her. These stories persisted until she decided to leave Longchance. There is a story that she made a very grand marriage in a city to the south, but I do not know if it is true.

  “Our greenwitch was never the same again after the girl left, was she? I remember my parents and aunt talking of it. She seemed to fade and to dwindle after the loss of her daughter, and she never recovered. She disappeared herself not so many years later, and greenwitches, you know, generally live a long time, and she was not a very old woman.

  “There was a bit of stir created after she disappeared, was there not? When we found out that our greenwitch had gone to a lawyer to tie up what happened to her cottage. The cottage that legend has it had been the cottage of the greenwitch, or magician, or sorcerer, of whom I have just been telling you, though it had been abandoned to ruin many years ago, till our recent greenwitch rescued it. Does anyone know who helped her set brick on brick, lay the rafters, dig the cesspit, thatch the roof? I have not been able to find anyone who does. House-building is not the usual run for a greenwitch’s magic, is it?”

  The room was silent. Even the sound of the storm had dropped during Jack Trueword’s story; the rain still fell against the windows, but it made a timid, mournful sound; the wind wept distantly like a lost child. No one inside Mrs Oldhouse’s best parlour stirred; there were no cries of “Go on, go on!” Beauty suddenly realised that the slow measured beat she heard was the tall cabinet clock in the corner. Be Ware, it said. Be. Ware. Tick. Tock. She moved her cold hands on the marmalade cat’s back.

  “And then,” Jack Trueword said, his voice very low and smooth, “and then … a few years ago three beautiful girls and their father moved into Rose Cottage. Three girls so beautiful that Longchance was dazzled by them—were you not?

  “But wait, you are saying, Was it not two daughters and a son? Very reassuring, that son, was he not, for all that he was also remarkably beautiful? For by his presence we have not needed to worry about that foolish fortune-telling rhyme, the one that describes the final working out of the curse on Longchance.

  “You remember I told you that something had happened recently to put me in mind of the old stories? Discretion should forbid me to tell this part of the story, but I began by saying that truth is important, and thus I cannot spare myself. I found myself falling in love with … one of these beautiful sisters. It was a curious experience; it was quite like falling under a spell. Oh, you will say, love is always like that. Perhaps it is, but was never quite like this before, in my small experience.

  “Well, I recovered; I would have thought no more about it, except … very recently I found, that my brother has fallen in love with another of the sisters. But the second sister, you will say, disappeared, rather mysteriously, some while ago now—some story about a relative in the city, which is curious, when you think about it, that we had never heard of any relatives in the city before; indeed the family has seemed to have rather ill memories of their life in the city. Well, that is the second sister. The third child, a son, works for our master of horses at the Hall. But that son is not a son; she is a daughter.”

  Be Ware, ticked the clock. Be Ware. The rain tapped and pattered; the wind moaned.

  Jeweltongue took a step forward, shaking off Mrs Oldhouse’s hand and her father’s. “Curse? What curse? I don’t believe you.” Tears began to stream down her face. “Lionheart mentioned a curse; I didn’t believe her either. Yes, Lionheart is my sister, not my brother. It has nothing to do with your horrid curse; it is that she wanted to work with horses, and she is good at that, is she not? I know she is good at that, and she knew no one would take her on if she were a woman, so she went as a man. What is this curse? Your curse has cursed us, more like, for it is true—although not as Jack Trueword says—that Beauty has not returned to the city. What is this curse! Has it an enchanted palace, and a Beast, and a rose?”

  Mrs Oldhouse said: “A Beast? I have never heard of any Beast. Jack, you are a bad man. I do not believe this has anything to do with our friends”—her voice quavered—“even if Lionheart is their sister.”

  Jeweltongue said wildly: “Tell me this curse!”

  Mrs. Oldhouse recited hastily: “‘Three in a bower / And a rose in flower / Until that hour / Stand wall and tower.’ It’s only a child’s nursery rhyme. We used to skip rope to it. It was our favourite skipping-rhyme because it was ours, you know how children are.

  “The three in a bower were three beautiful sisters, we knew that, but the cur—the rhyme doesn’t say anything about their being beautiful, that’s just to make it a better story, that’s what happens to stories that are told over and over. When I was a child, and grew old enough to understand that my favourite skipping-rhyme meant something, it was all the more delicious, do you see? Not having magic is just … not having something … but a curse … Of course the sisters had to be beautiful. And the bower, that had to be Rose Cottage, because of the rose, even though when I was a girl, no one lived there, and the wall and tower were Longchance, although Longchance doesn’t have any towers, but you have to have it for the rhyme, do you see? It’s like the sisters being beautiful. And it was all to do with some great magic that had gone terribly wrong many years ago, and it explained why there was no magic in Longchance now, although it didn’t explain it very well, but then foretellings never do, do they? I never knew a seer who would give you a plain answer.

  “And I don’t see why—really, now that I think about it—why our old skipping-rhyme is necessarily a curse. Perhaps it is only a prediction of how—of how it will all be resolved. Maybe that’s why it says tower—not for the rhyme but because Longchance doesn’t have any, do you see? But I have to say I don’t like the sound of your Beast. What Beast? Is it fierce?”

  “Look at the cat!” shouted Jack Trueword, pointing at Beauty and looking frightened half out of his wits, but as he did so, the marmalade cat leapt off Beauty’s lap straight at Jack, as if it meant to do him a mischief; he threw up his arms; Beauty said, “Oh, no!” and made a snatch at the cat as it leapt, falling half off her chair as she did so; and Jeweltongue shrieked, “Beauty!”—

  —and Beauty found herself falling off the top of a ladder, struck down by wind and rain; she screamed, drowning even the cacophony of wind in her ears, scrabbling for purchase against the rain-slick panes of her glasshouse; her finger-ends found eight strange little hollows in the leading of one frame and dug themselves in, but she would not be able to hold herself there long, sprawled against the slope, and the wind blowing so brutally she hadn’t a chance of regaining the ladder, where her useless feet remained, just touching the rungs—

  And then there was a hand on her shoulder, and she was dragged inexorably back the way she had fallen, and her weight was on her feet again, and the wind was partially blocked by something very large bending
over her, and a voice she could just hear below the infuriated wind spoke in her ear: “Beauty. I have you. Set your feet firmly on the rungs again; I will shield you. I am too heavy even for this wind to shift. You are quite safe. Listen to me, Beauty. You must come down now.”

  But the shock of what had almost happened still gripped her, as mercilessly as the storm itself, and she was too panic-stricken to move. When she opened her mouth to breathe, the wind stuffed it with rain and her own sodden hair. She began to shiver, and she realised she was wet to the skin and cold to the bone, and her shivering redoubled, and her hands seemed to have frozen to the tops of the ladder uprights, she could not make the fingers move.

  She whimpered, but he could not hear her, so it did not matter. And she wanted—so terribly wanted—to be off this nightmare ladder and down on the ground again. The rain and wind billowed over her, and the Beast waited, and she thought of what he had said, and she turned her head a little, and looked up; the Beast was only a blackness to her eye, but he must have seen her looking, because one great hand moved from its place below hers on the ladder uprights and wrapped itself gently round her nearer one, and with that touch some feeling and possibility of motion returned to her fingers.

  He released her hand, and she stiffly brought it down to the first rung; the finger joints ached with cold and dread. She straightened her body slowly, moved her other hand to the first rung, unsealed one foot from its resting place, and stepped down to the next rung. Now she felt the Beast’s arms round her, outside hers, and his waistcoat buttons brushed her back, and she felt him take a step down, to keep pace with hers.

  They went down together very slowly. She still shivered, and felt as exhausted as if she had run a great race, and sometimes fumbled for her hand- or foothold, and sometimes had to stop to rest. But she watched his hands following hers, so that she did not have to look up or down, and she never stopped again any longer than she needed to catch her breath. It was a much longer journey down than it had been going up, and the wind still sang in her ears, but the words it sang were the wrong verse: Lord Goodman died for me today, I’ll die for him tomorrow.

  As her feet touched the rung below the first silver girder, the wind slammed in under the Beast’s arm, like a clever swordsman finding a weakness in his opponent’s guard, and seized her and flung her down, and her feet slid off the rungs, one forward and one back, and there was a sharp hard blow to one of her knees and another to her other ankle, and for a moment she did not know which was up and which down, and the wind would have had her off then had the Beast not caught her in his other arm. The wind screamed and hammered at the ladder, and Beauty stared up at the glasshouse and the tumultuous sky, and there was a cracking noise, and the top of one of the uprights was torn off, the rungs broken, and the pieces hurled down on them.

  Beauty felt rather than saw one strike the Beast’s back and felt him wince, but he still held her, and he still stood firm upon the ladder. Again he spoke in her ear, calmly, as if he were addressing her across the dinner table: “I fear I need both my hands to climb. But I do not think that will happen again.” She nodded against his breast and put her hands and feet on the rungs again, and he released her, and they started down the last part of their journey.

  The last few rungs were even harder than the first ones had been; she was sick and dizzy with the after-effects of the dream-vision of Jeweltongue, and Mrs Oldhouse, and Jack Trueword, and the marmalade cat; and she could not believe she and the Beast could reach the bottom of the ladder safely. He stepped off it first and had his hands round her waist to steady her as her feet touched the wet pebbles of the courtyard, but she slipped and slithered on the suddenly treacherous surface, and her ankles twisted and her knees would not hold her, and she was so tired her mind played tricks on her, and she was not sure but what she was still alone on the top of the ladder and feeling it shifting under her as the wind prepared to throw it down. But no, the Beast was here; he held her still.

  He pointed along the glasshouse wall, and she remembered they were still standing in flooding rain, and the wind, even on the ground, was nearly strong enough to lift her off her feet; the pebbles of the courtyard scudded before it like crests torn from the tops of waves. And so they made their way together along the wall and round the corner of the glasshouse, and then at last there was a familiar handle under her hand, and she turned it and pushed, and they were both inside the glasshouse.

  The storm dropped away at once, as if it had never been, as if the closing of the glasshouse door were a charm against it, or the end of a spell, and with the silence, and the sunlight now streaming through the panes, and the astonishing sight that met their eyes—and the clatter of too many thoughts and fears in Beauty’s mind—Beauty forgot climbing the ladder, forgot the weather vane, forgot Mrs Oldhouse’s story, and Jack Trueword’s, and Jeweltongue shouting Beauty!, forgot the storm and the fall that would have killed her, forgot everything but what she and the Beast saw—and smelt.

  For the glasshouse had come back to life indeed. There were roses everywhere she looked, red roses, white roses, and pink roses, and every shade among them, in great flat platters and round fat orbs of petals, roses shaped like goblets and roses shaped like cups, roses that displayed stamens as fine as a lady’s eyelashes, roses that were full up to the brim with a muddle of petals, roses with tiny green button centres. There were red-tipped white roses, and white-tipped red ones, bright pink ones and soft pink ones that were darker at their hearts and some that were nearly white-centred; white ones that were snowy all through, and white ones just touched with ivory and cream, or the sunset-cloud tints of pink and gold; and the reds were all the tones of that most mysterious and allusive of rose colours, from the warm rosy reds like ripening cherries to the darkest black-reds of velvet seen in shadow; and the purples were finer than any coronation mantle.

  And the smell, everywhere, was so rich and wonderful Beauty wanted to cup her hands to it and drink it, and yet it was not one smell, but all the rose scents discernible and individual as all the colours of roses: the spicy ones, and the ones that smelt of apples or grapes or of oranges and lemons, and the ones that smelt of almonds or of fine tea, and most particularly the ones that smelt only as certain roses smell, and they were the most varied and seductive of all.

  The foliage was so thick, glossy-green or matte-, hunter green and olive and grey-green and nearly blue, that it should have shut out every wink of sunshine, but it did not; the light was so bright Beauty blinked against it, and the white roses glittered like constellations on a clear night.

  “Oh,” said Beauty. “Oh.”

  The Beast, as if in a dream, said, “I have not been here in … I do not know how long. It has been a long time. I have not come since the roses started dying.”

  Beauty ran forward suddenly, toward the farthest corner of the glasshouse, and there knelt—or would have knelt—by the one rose-bush that had still been in flower when she had first entered here; but it was tall and strong now, as tall as she was, and covered with flowers. She could not count them, there were so many, or rather, she did not wish to spend the time counting them when she could smell and look at and touch them. She turned to examine her cuttings, and all the little bushes were knee-high, and all had flower-buds, and the first of these were cracking open, and at their feet an exuberance of heartsease foamed green and purple. She looked at her seedbed, where the seedlings were only a little smaller than the bushes from the cuttings, and these too bore the first tiny green bumps that would become flowers, not leaves. One precocious seedling had its very first bud just unscrolling, and she wondered what it would be, for while she knew the mothers of all her seeds, she did not know the fathers. She touched it softly, and a whiff of rose scent came to her even among all the perfumed richness around her, and this scent was new, and not quite like any other, and while it reminded her of a scent she had once breathed standing by a meadow watching a woman milk her cows, a fine, wild, pure, magical smell, it was also un
mistakably that of a rose.

  She looked up, and the Beast stood near her, looking at the dark red rose-bush which had been the only one alive and blooming the day before. “I remember you,” he murmured, as if to himself. “I remember …”

  And as he said, “I remember,” suddenly she remembered sitting as a ghost with a marmalade cat in her lap, and she remembered all those other dreams she had had while she was asleep in her grand high bed in the palace and had told herself in the mornings were only dreams, and she remembered Jeweltongue’s voice, as the marmalade cat made its spring, saying Beauty! And Beauty herself did not know if she now believed that the dreams had been more than dreams or if it was only that she was frightened to think that they might be more. And, a very little, she remembered the dream she had once had so often, about a long dark corridor and a monster that waited for her—only for her—and remembered too, so faintly that it was barely a memory at all, how that dream had changed when she came to this place, and how she had hurried along that corridor to comfort the lost unhappy creature there.…

  But the look on Jack Trueword’s face was what dazzled her mind’s eye now, the look on his face, and the stricken look on Jeweltongue’s. Jeweltongue, who had never been overset by anything, not their mother’s death, not their father’s ruin, not her broken engagement; Jeweltongue, who had found Rose Cottage welcoming even on that first grey, depressing day, who had found her own skill as a dressmaker and chosen it finally over any chance of being what she had been before. Jeweltongue, who loved the life she had made in Longchance, just as Lionheart loved her life, as their father loved his life, a life, Beauty thought suddenly with a pain like a mortal wound, that they might all lose.… Has Master Jack forgiven you for preferring a short, stoop-shouldered flour-monger with hands like boiled puddings to his tall, elegant, noble self …? D’you want to think about what happens next?… Surely you’ve heard that there’s a curse on this place if three sisters live in it? She remembered Mrs Green-down saying: The tally calls for three sisters, and there’s only the two of you.