Rose Daughter

by Robin McKinley

  What if Jack’s story were true?

  They could not be driven out of another town, another life. They could not do it again. It would break them, and they would die of it, die as certainly as Beauty would have died if the Beast had not caught her when she fell off the ladder.

  “Beast—”

  He turned to her at once. “What is it? What troubles you? Can you not be pleased with what you have done here?” And he sank to his knees beside her and would have taken the hem of her still-soaking skirt in his hands, except that she twitched it out of his reach. “No, no! I will not have you on your knees! Stand up, stand up!”

  But he did not want to stand up, and she could not make him. He rocked back on his heels and looked up at her (not very far, for he was tall even kneeling); he was smiling, although there were tears in his eyes, and she noticed that he was not wearing the long black sleeveless gown she had never seen him without. Then we would have taken flight indeed, she thought, remembering the wind. But his remaining clothing was plastered to him by the rain, and she suddenly thought how much he looked like the round-limbed, handsome Beast who stood on a pedestal in the middle of the garden at Rose Cottage.

  She almost could not ask what she needed to ask. Timidly she moved forward again and set her hands on his shoulders. “Will you tell me—because I believe I need to know—what—what brought you to this place, and this—this shape?”

  His smile faded, but he remained looking up at her. “Oh, please stand up!” she said again, plucking uselessly at his shoulder. “If you will not stand up, I will sit down,” and she did, and drew her knees up under her wet skirts, and put her cheek against them, and told herself the damp was only rain and nothing to do with fresh tears.

  There was silence for a few heartbeats and the roses, and the sunlight, and the scent were still round them, and Beauty felt like a starving beggar looking through a window at a feast. And then the Beast said: “I told a sorcerer I believed magic to be a false discipline, leading only to disaster. It was a foolish thing to say, if not always untrue, or—I would not be as I am.”

  Beauty whispered, “Is that all?”

  The Beast sighed, and the roses fluttered, and the sunlight came and went among the leaves. “Is it ever all? Do you want the full story of my ruin? For I will tell you, if you ask.”

  “No … yes … no. I do not know what I am asking.” Her thoughts scrambled among fragments of truth and hope and love and fear, looking for a place to begin: There is a curse on my family—on our coming to Longchance—and it has found us out at last. Then is there not a curse on my coming here?

  Why did you ensorcell me to come to this place? Or if not you, who? Who put the rose on my father’s breakfast table?

  If you are a prisoner here, who ensorcelled you? Who tends your garden? Who is the old woman who leaves a basket in the night in front of doors that do not open?

  Why have the bats and butterflies and toads and hedgehogs returned and not the birds?

  Why do you ask me to marry you when you will not tell me who you are?

  Again she saw Jeweltongue’s pale desperate face, heard Lionheart saying: The Truewords do what their eldest son tells them to.… And Longchance does what the Truewords tell them.

  Her heart ached from the absence—the loss—of her sisters, whom she loved and trusted and knew, whose blood and bone were the same as her own, and to whom for that reason her first loyalty must lie. Her floundering thoughts seized on this as security: Here must her first loyalty lie. Here. She put her fingers to her temples, feeling the blood beating frantically there. “Oh, Beast,” she said, but she could not look at him, and her voice caught in her throat. “Beast, you must let me go.”

  He stood up then. “I—”

  She scrambled to her feet again too, staggering as her head swam, but when he would catch her elbow to steady her, she backed away from him. “You must let me go. See, your roses bloom again. That is what you called me here for, is it not?” she said wildly, and now the tears were running freely down her face, but she told herself she was only thinking of her sisters. “I have done what you brought me here to do; you must let me go. Please.” Perhaps I can do nothing, but what comes to them must come to me too. If we are the three named, let us at least be together for … whatever happens. And … I must go away from this place. If I carry this curse, let me … at least let me carry it away from … from this place.

  The Beast said, as if each word were a blow from a dagger: “I can deny you nothing. If you will go, then I give you leave to go. I have never been able to hold you here against your will.”

  “I will come back to visit you,” said Beauty—the words burst out of her. “If I can. I will come back.”

  “Will you?” said the Beast. “Will you?”

  “Oh—yes,” said Beauty, and put her hand over her mouth to force the sobs back, but perhaps the Beast saw the gesture as for some other purpose.

  He turned away from her and snapped the stem of a dark red rose from the bush he had spoken to only a few minutes before. “Then take this rose. As long as it is blooming, as it is now, all is well with me. When the petals begin to fall, then take thought of your promise, for I will be dying.”

  “Dying?” said Beauty. “Oh—no—”

  “Yes,” said the Beast, as gently as he had said, You are quite safe. “I cannot live without you anymore, Beauty. Not now, not when I have had you here, not now that I have learnt how lonely I was, and am—was—for a little while—no longer. But as I brought you here by a lie, it is only just that I should lose you again.”

  “Beast—”

  Now he put his hand over her mouth, or just his fingertips. “Listen. Pull one petal of this rose and set it in your mouth, and you will be at home—in Rose Cottage—at once. If you decide you do wish to see me again, pull another petal and set it again in your mouth, and you will at once be here. But if you wait till all the petals have dropped, it will be too late; once they have loosed themselves from the flower, they can no longer return you here, and besides, when the last of them falls, I will die.”

  She put her hands over his hand, pulled it away. “No, I cannot bear it—oh—this cannot be happening. Not like this. Not like this.”

  The Beast said, “You belong with your family. And I have forgotten too much—too much of what it is to be a man. And I had never learnt what it is to love a woman. It is too late now.

  “Go.” He pulled a petal from the rose he held, then handed her the rose. Dumbly she took it. “Open your mouth.”

  “I—”

  He slipped the rose-petal between her lips. She just touched his hand again—“Oh, Beast”—but he was gone, and the glasshouse was gone, and all that was left was the feeling of the thorns of the rose he had given her stinging the palm of her hand, and the taste of the rose-petal in her mouth.

  CHAPTER

  13

  Jeweltongue had flung herself on her knees by the chair where Beauty had sat with the marmalade cat. “Oh, she was here, she was here, I saw her, did you not see her? I cannot bear the not knowing what has become of her! I would pull Longchance down with my own hands to know that she was well!” Her head ached, and she was aware that her nose was running and that she was behaving badly, and for the first time in her life, she did not care. Beauty! She had been here, hadn’t she? Or was it merely that worrying about her had finally begun producing phantoms of her? The ghost of a simulacrum made of rose-petals!

  Jeweltongue couldn’t remember ever having felt so helpless; even those last terrible weeks in the city, they had at least had one another—something neither she nor Lionheart had ever been aware they wanted or needed. And it had been Beauty then who had done what needed to be done, while all she and Lionheart could see was that their pride and arrogance had shattered like glass, and the shards lay all round them, and it was as if they cut themselves to the bone with every move they made. And so they had moved slowly, had been able to see no farther than across the room, across the p
resent minute. They owed their lives to Beauty, and she and Lionheart both knew it.

  Mrs Oldhouse, bending over her from one side, and Mr Whitehand from the other: “My dear, I did not know, why did you not tell us?” “My darling, I did not know, why did you not tell me?” And Jeweltongue weeping, weeping passionately, uncontrollably, as Jeweltongue never wept, as Jeweltongue never did anything.

  A sudden sharp heavy sound, a cry, and a clatter of furniture, including the unmistakable crack of splintering wood, and Jeweltongue’s father stood over the prostrate Jack Trueword, grimacing and cradling one hand with the other. Jack lay still. Someone in the audience laughed. “Well struck, Mr Poet!” said a voice.

  Jeweltongue slowly, dazedly, turned her head. Jack Trueword lay sprawled and ungainly across Mrs Oldhouse’s hearth-rug; she blinked. Her thoughts were confused by all that had happened; her chief thought now was how grateful she was that he had stopped telling his terrible story.… How small he looked, lying there, silent and still. It was the first time, she thought, she had ever seen him ungraceful. Jack had always had the gift of grace, even of charm, however spoilt and selfish you knew he might be in the next moment, but she had been accustomed to believe that she could ignore his bad temper. She closed her eyes. But if his story was more than just bad temper …

  She opened her eyes and looked at him again. It was suddenly very hard to remember how frightening he had been, just a few minutes ago, telling his story. Lying in the splintered remains of Mrs Oldhouse’s chair, he looked like something the storm had picked up and indifferently tossed away.

  “I suppose we had best move him,” said another voice, without enthusiasm, after a little, startled, general pause.

  “Let him come round on his own,” said a third voice promptly. “Have you hurt your hand badly, sir?”

  “I, er, I fear I may have. I must … apologize very profoundly. It was a stupid and a wicked thing to have done. I cannot think what came over me.”

  “Whatever it is, I’m glad it did,” said Mrs Oldhouse, half straightening, but still patting a bit of Jeweltongue’s shoulder not covered by Mr Whitehand’s arm, and addressing the top of her head. “If someone had done that to him years ago, he might not have turned out so mean-spirited. I could easily have done the same myself to Miss Trueword—who is one of my dearest friends, and after all, she introduced you to me—when I heard of that result of her invitation to supper. My dear, you must learn not to be so clever, it will attract the wrong sort of person—at least until you are as old as I am—but then, you will be safely married soon, so that is all right,” she said, and patted Mr Whitehand’s shoulder instead. “Have you really damaged your hand, Mr … Poet? I shall call you that hereafter, I think, it is so much more suitable than your own name. Should we call for the surgeon? The storm seems to have abated at last.”

  “I think that might be wise,” said a man who had been examining the old merchant’s hand, and Mrs Oldhouse rang for a servant.

  “At last!” she said, turning back to her friends. “I am free of Great-Aunt Maude’s hideous chair! How clever of you, Mr Poet, to strike him in just that direction. I suppose we might put a blanket over him. Or his cape—oh.” And she snatched it up off the chair. “How could I not have noticed? I will have his skin if that chair is ruined.

  “Now, Jeweltongue, listen to me.” She knelt by the young woman’s side and put her hand earnestly on her arm. Jeweltongue’s arms were still stretched across the seat of the chair, her head again resting upon them, but her sobs had ceased. “My dear, why did you not tell anyone? About what had become of your sister? Beauty, that is. How very astonishing that Lionheart is another girl! Then—she must be soon to be married also, I gather? Aubrey is nothing like his brother. If he’s fallen in love with her, he’ll mean to marry her.”

  “Yes,” said Jeweltongue. “But Lionheart was afraid—afraid of something like what Jack did here tonight.”

  Mrs Oldhouse gave a very thorough and contemptuous snort. “The storm had drowned all our intelligence, or we would never have let him go on like that. What piffle. Bringing up that old nursery rhyme and brandishing it like—like—like a little boy bringing a dead snake to scare his governess. One may very well shriek, for who likes dead snakes? … Except little boys. But my dear, you can’t have thought …” She hesitated and looked genuinely troubled for the first time. “Jeweltongue, my very dear young friend … Lionheart was afraid, you say? But we all know what Jack is. Just as—why did you not tell anyone about—about whatever it is that has happened to Beauty? Because I gather from Mr Whitehand’s response that even he did not know.”

  “I fear that is more my fault than my daughters’,” said the old merchant. “It is I who—”

  “Father, we all agreed,” said Jeweltongue. “And … it was not only your ban, Father dear. Our life here has seemed … it is so different from anything we could have imagined when we still lived in the city.… But we have been happy here, do you understand? And when you are happy, when you have never been happy before, when you hadn’t even known you weren’t happy, it is hard to believe that it won’t all go away again, isn’t it? The curse seemed so … likely, somehow. I did not quite not believe it, if you understand.

  “I had overheard a conversation Beauty had with Mrs Greendown—two years ago now—she had said something about a curse, and I saw how Beauty looked afterwards. And I noticed most particularly later, when Beauty told me about what she had said, and she never spoke a word about a curse.”

  Everyone else in the room was trying to drift close enough to the little party clustered round the end chair of the second row to hear what was being said, without being obvious enough about it to risk being sent away. Jeweltongue looked up and round at them and laughed, a laugh more like her real one, although with a catch in it. “Very well. We are caught out. I will tell you everything—anything you want to know. I am sorry to … not to have trusted you. But it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. We have not been here so very long, only a few, few years. Our name isn’t a Longchance name—like Oldhouse, or Trueword, or Whitehand. And magic—once we learnt there was none here, it seemed—it seemed rude to discuss magic with you, rather like—like—”

  “Discussing hairdressing with the bald, or rare vintages with those overfond of their wine?” said Mrs Oldhouse. “Yes, I understand that. We are all used to it, of course, and quite proof against the occasional persons who wish to pretend they are superior to us for—for their perfect sobriety, and full heads of hair. I think you might have—but never mind. I do see.”

  “And it suited us,” said the old merchant. “It suited us that there was no magic here. I have been … rather unreasonable about magic since my wife died. It made us—it made me, at least—feel as if we had come to the right place, this town that had no magic.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Jeweltongue. “And then—it seemed—Jack is right enough that our memories of our life in the city are not very good ones—and why we left—oh dear. I don’t want to go into all that—”

  “That is none of our business, dear,” said Mrs Oldhouse. “But you are here now, not in your nasty old city.”

  “Yes. But you see, that’s part—you have been so very good to us. We have been so happy here!” And Jeweltongue reached up to put her hand over Mr Whitehand’s. “Oh, I can’t explain! It seemed ungrateful, somehow, to tell you. And it meant—perhaps it meant—that we did not belong here after all.”

  Her voice went squeaky on her last words, and she clutched her baker’s hand rather hard, but he laughed a little and bent down to say something privately in her ear, as Mrs Oldhouse said briskly: “We will go up to Appleborough tomorrow and hire the very best of the seers—I know just the one, Fareye, she doesn’t meddle in looking for the future, but she can find anything—and ask her to tell us where your sister is.”

  Jeweltongue said, “Father? Please.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “I should have thought of it myself. I d
on’t care if it’s magic. I don’t think I’ve cared about magic one way or the other since Beauty’s roses first bloomed. But I am accustomed to doing without it. And here in Longchance … and when you feel in your heart there is nothing you can do about something, you do not think clearly about it. And I—it was my fault in the beginning.”

  “No,” said Jeweltongue. “To seek to save your life in a snowstorm? And enchantments are like that. You cannot know which step will spring the trip wire.”

  Her father smiled faintly. “I just want your sister back—as you do—or at least to know what’s become of her. It’s been so long.”

  “Seven months,” said Jeweltongue. “Seven endless months. Seven months today.”

  “But the Beast,” said someone. “Won’t you tell us about the Beast?”

  The marmalade cat, reappearing from nowhere, sprang into Jeweltongue’s lap with a thump. “Oh!” said Jeweltongue. “Well, hello yourself!” She raised a hand to stroke it, but it leapt down again at once and trotted off towards the door. It paused there and looked back. “Do you know where Beauty is then?” said Jeweltongue, only half teasing.

  The cat flicked her tail, went through the door, turned round, and just poked her head back through, staring at Jeweltongue as she had earlier stared at the empty aisle chair of the second row.

  “It’s only a cat,” said someone.

  “Hmph,” said Mrs Oldhouse. “You have never been the intimate friend of any cat. And you do not know my Becky.”

  Becky stood on her hind legs to twiddle the handle of the open door with one forepaw and then sank back to the ground again, still staring at Jeweltongue. “I—I think, if you don’t mind,” said Jeweltongue apologetically, “I would quite like to see what she seems to want to show me.”