Winter Rose

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Yes,” she said, astonishing me again. “The thought has crossed my mind, these past few days. Who she might have felt such passion for, to abandon her own life when he abandoned her.”

  “Who?” I breathed. “Do you know?”

  But she only shook her head. “If there was anyone, she couldn’t have loved him very long. The whole village would have guessed at anything longer than half a season. Longer than a week, more likely. And then our father would have known.”

  “He never—”

  “No. You see how he is about her. There’s not a shadow of mistrust in all his memories.” She looked at me then, her eyes the smoky-grey of the fading light over the fields, no longer haunted, still unfamiliar in their calm. “You brought this up before. You said I was doing what she did.”

  “Well, I wondered.”

  She held my eyes a moment longer, glimpsing something—a cascade of brier roses, maybe, a fall of light. Perhaps she had been there, as a child, perhaps she had seen…

  Perhaps there had never been anything at all to see.

  I saw snowdrops in the snow one morning, and the yellow buds of crocuses. It did not seem possible that this harsh winter could ever end, but the crocus did not lie. Snow fluttered in the air, but melted as it touched the ground. As days passed, patches of brown earth began to appear in the fields. I watched the last of winter rattle in an icy sheet off the barn roof, break into pieces on the ground. One day it rained. Laurel, whom I had helped wash and feed and dress without even thinking about it, finally pushed me away that morning, laughing. She was still thin, but she moved easily now, and her skin had lost the fragile, waxen pallor she had gotten from wandering among ghosts. We sat outside that afternoon for the first time, watching sunlight slip between the swollen clouds to ignite a sudden glitter of raindrops all around us, on branch and harrow tooth and stone. I could not see enough, I thought; I could not smell enough of earth, and rain, and the scent of rain on the slowly budding branches. I needed more eyes, another nose. So I complained to Laurel, and she laughed again, which seemed as improbable a sound as the sound of returning birds.

  Then she put her arm around me tightly, kissed my cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered, “for not leaving me alone this winter. For staying with me.”

  I was silent, surprised: I must have become more human in spite of myself. My thoughts veered abruptly; I tugged them back into here and now, afraid of the secret and dangerous wood within, afraid to wonder what was dream and what was truth, and how much of either of those was love.

  Perrin rode into the yard then, splashing mud and water. He dismounted beside the porch and handed me some early violets. I dropped my face into them and breathed, feeling their sweet scent flow into my blood. Laurel and Perrin studied each other, searching for signs of new life. I saw some in the calm in Perrin’s eyes, the faint, wry crook of his mouth. Sunlight had flushed the color into Laurel’s skin, or maybe Perrin had. He smiled a little.

  “You look beautiful,” he said to her. He sat down on the steps, cast a practiced glance at our father’s furrows. Laurel picked up the piece of linen she was embroidering with sunflowers for Beda. Perrin’s eyes had snagged on distances; suddenly we were all looking where he looked, beyond the fields to the patch of wood that hid Lynn Hall.

  “Whatever happened to him?” Perrin breathed. “What happened? I’ve been waiting for them to find his body thawing along the road somewhere, but he vanished like a ghost.” His face turned swiftly then to Laurel. “I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head, her eyes still on the cloud and blazing blue where the chimney smoke would have drifted. “It’s all right. I wonder, too, still.” She drew her needle through the linen, painted a petal with yellow thread, while Perrin watched her. She seemed to hear his thoughts; she said slowly, “I wonder, but I don’t look for him. When I think back that far, to what happened between us, I don’t recognize myself. Now I hardly remember what did happen. If anything did at all, it happened to someone else.” She met his eyes. “That’s how it seems.”

  He nodded, not smiling now. “Do you miss him?”

  “No,” she said softly. “No more than I miss what I was when I did miss him.”

  For a while Perrin appeared sporadically, like the sun, not saying much, not staying long. And then the leaves began to open on the trees and he came every day, riding into the yard while I watched the sun flame behind the wood, then slowly fade. Spring brought back familiar human sounds as well as birds. Our father whistled, going from barn to house; I heard him and Perrin laugh together, muddy from plowing, too redolent with fertilizer to come into the house.

  One night, going upstairs after supper, I heard Perrin play the flute again.

  It brought tears to my eyes, memories I did not want to acknowledge. It also made me suddenly restless, impatient to feel wet grass under my feet, taste the wild strawberries. I wanted to drink the cold sweet water from the well, and see the new leaves covering the rose vines. I sat on the steps and listened, and thought of the wood at night, and how the moonlight would catch in the wet, silvery curves of branches, hang trembling from a leaf.

  The playing stopped. I heard Laurel’s gentle voice, teasing a little, our father’s chuckle, Perrin’s unruffled answer. I went up quietly, feeling the new leaves opening in me, catching light.

  The next morning, I rode into the village with my father’s winter boots to have the leaks cobbled out of them, and to get some salve for the cows from the apothecary. I told him about Laurel as he put the salve into a jar. As usual, his impassive face said very little; his eyes told me much.

  “I thought she would die,” he said simply. “That terrible winter night. I could not see any hope for her.”

  “None of us could, then.”

  “She never heard from Corbet?” I shook my head. “Then it really wasn’t him who caused her illness. I wish I knew what it was… It’s a terrifying thing to watch.”

  “Yes.”

  “What have you found in the wood? I know it’s early yet, but you were most likely out there before the snow finished melting. Myrtle blooms early, and violet; I could use both.”

  “I haven’t—” I cleared my throat. “I haven’t been out there yet.”

  His brows flickered; I had astonished him. “Have you been ill, Rois?”

  “No. I’ve just been busy, with Laurel…” I paused, felt his clear, practiced gaze. I asked, without meeting it, “Did anyone ever find Corbet? Or hear any news of him?”

  “No.” He set a stopper in the jar mouth and reached for his seal. He said, melting wax, “Corbet Lynn has passed from gossip into one of the village mysteries, along with the stranger at his hearth, and whose baby it really was that got left at Ley Gett’s door that summer…”

  “No one came looking for the stranger?”

  “I’ve kept him on ice, waiting for someone to claim him. But I can’t leave him there much longer in this weather. It’s time to put him under. I don’t know what else to do with him.”

  I thought of Tearle, the outcast of two worlds, trapped in one even after death, about to be given a stranger’s grave in the other. “Let me see him,” I begged without thinking: His face was all I had of Corbet. I felt Blane’s surprise, raised my eyes to meet his sudden suspicion. I added lamely, “I feel sorry for him. He died so young in a place where no one knows him.”

  “Rois—”

  “There’s nothing more I can tell you. But he can’t just go into his grave without anyone sparing him a thought. He died beside me; I may have been asleep, but at least he wasn’t entirely alone. I suppose you could say that of anyone around here, I knew him best.”

  “I suppose you could say that.” I heard other things in Blane’s even voice, questions that he would have to take to his own grave, because I would never answer them. He turned; I followed him through the inner room, and out the back door into sunlight. The stone icehouse, big enough to hold a coffin or two, windowless and with only one door, looked as likely a
vault as any. “Best stay outside a moment,” Blane suggested as he unlatched the door. “He’s surrounded by ice and stone, but sometimes, when the weather changes, things get in…”

  He stood there in the doorway without moving, without speaking, for a long time, letting the place air out, I thought, while I watched some birds fly north over Ley Gett in his field furrowing south. Then I looked at the apothecary’s back. Still he hadn’t moved; he might have been turned to stone.

  “What is it?”

  He didn’t hear me. I went to the door finally and saw what he saw in the clear spring light.

  The man lying there had long grey hair and a strong, aged face marked with all the lines and shadows of one who had traveled his way through human time. I recognized him; a ghost of his beauty lingered, in the graceful bones of cheek and jaw, in his hands. Tears of wonder stung my eyes: He was no longer spellbound. She could not hold him, or she no longer wanted him; she had relinquished him to time.

  I didn’t know I had stopped breathing until I took a breath again. “If you ask the oldest in the village,” I said shakily, “they’ll probably tell you who he is.”

  “I’m sure they will.” I had never heard Blane’s voice so dry. “And I’m sure you won’t.” I said nothing. He closed the door gently, so not to wake the dead. “The stranger we found in Lynn Hall died of natural causes, and I’ll swear that on my father’s bones to anyone who asks. Whatever haunted Lynn Hall has exacted its price. Enough is enough. I’ll bury him tonight in an unnamed grave. If he’s still around.”

  I heard Nial Lynn’s voice out of the past: No one will know you when you die… Even your gravestone will stand silent… My skin prickled. They had all been true, as Corbet said, all the curses. Except that I had known Tearle, I had seen… I had changed that curse at least, in spite of Nial Lynn; his son’s unmarked stone would speak its tale to me.

  I left Tearle Lynn at least in peace, but I still couldn’t bring myself to go back to the wood. It seemed a shadow world I was afraid to return to, even in memory—not alone, not without Corbet. And I didn’t know if I would ever see him again, outside of the dream where I had left him. Maybe, I thought, that’s where he had always been. So my dream had told me in the end.

  And then one morning I opened my window to the soft air, and heard the familiar sound of hammering from within the wood.

  I stared, stunned, across the sunlit green. I thought of Laurel, and my throat closed. I whirled, not knowing what to do, and bumped into her as she came in to find me.

  She held my shoulders. “It’s all right, Rois. I knew he was back.”

  “When—? How—?” I could not speak. He had not come to find me; I might not know this stranger who had returned to Lynn Hall. Everything had happened; maybe nothing had happened. A man rebuilding his house had gone away in winter and returned in spring.

  “He sent me a letter. He asked Salish to give it to our father. He read it and gave it to me. He—”

  “When?”

  “A few days ago. He must have gotten people to work for him again. Salish said all those wild stories about him came down to nothing but a stranger falling ill during a storm and wandering into Lynn Hall.” She paused, the faint, anxious line appearing between her brows. “Rois you’re not still—”

  “No.” I shook my head quickly. “No.” That seemed a lie, but so did “yes”; I did not know in what dream I might still love him. “I’m just startled. Go on.”

  “So was I. I wanted time to think—that’s why I didn’t tell you. Then I realized that there wasn’t very much left of anything to think about.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That he had had to leave unexpectedly in the middle of that storm. There were urgent family matters. And then someone died. He had no time to send a message. Later, he began to realize that he might never be able to come back, and there seemed no way to tell me that. That’s what he wrote. I’m not sure what he meant. He could not find a way to return here until winter’s end. He said that he hoped some day I would forgive his silence, as well as any trouble he had caused. He said he understood that might not be easy.”

  “Have you?”

  “What?”

  “Forgiven him?”

  She was silent a little; I watched the blood rise in her face. She smiled the dancing, sunlit smile she teased Perrin with, and I hugged her suddenly.

  “You’re going to marry Perrin.”

  “He found a way to forgive me.”

  “And Corbet?”

  “I don’t seem to have room to remember being hurt,” she answered simply. “He said that if I ever wanted to see him as a friend, I should write to him, but that he wouldn’t come here without permission. I’m glad you’re not angry with me, Rois.”

  “For what?”

  “For not listening to you. For causing you and Perrin and our father so much grief. You were right all the time. I should have waited for spring.”

  I waited, watching the green deepen in the wood, the sodden fields turn tidy with straight furrows, the first faint color wash along them. I was afraid of his politeness, his indifference, I knew, so I waited until I could bear it, if he had nothing more than that to give me.

  I went one morning when Laurel had gone on her first ride to the village, and our father was in the fields, and there was no one to ask where I went. I started briskly, with one thing on my mind. But as I rode into the wood it showed me a hundred things to catch my attention: hyacinths and wood anemones, great pink and gold raspberry blossoms, hawthorn, lacy dogwood, lady’s-slipper, purple trillium. It lured me here and there, it spoke my name in small white blossoms. I rode past all its distractions, for every fall of the hammer on Lynn Hall drove a name deeper into my heart, and the closer I came to it, the harder my own heart pounded. Remember this, the wood said. Remember that. There seemed nothing I could forget, and no peace or mercy in remembering.

  He saw me from among the peaked, raw beams rising on his roof. Crispin, working with him, stopped pounding nails a moment to wave at me. But Corbet dropped his hammer and went to the ladder. I slid off my horse, clung to her, suddenly terrified. I could not look a man in the eyes and ask him if, in any world, he had ever turned into ivy. If he had lived among his own ghosts. If he had ever loved me or if I had only dreamed that he had. If he had ever been real in my eyes at all, and if not, then what polite stranger had spoken my name all winter.

  “Rois.”

  I forced myself to look at him. He wore a homespun work shirt, rolled at the elbows, loose at the neck; I saw the sweat glisten in the hollow of his throat. His eyes seemed stranger’s eyes, full of light that now hid nothing: the faint shadow of trouble in them, the brief indecision before he spoke again.

  “Thank you for coming. I hoped—somehow—you would not be too angry with me.”

  “No.” Words stuck. I had to clear my throat, pick through them carefully, to find the words that belonged only in this world. I could feel my hands trembling; I wound the reins tightly through my fingers. “Laurel told me you had written to her. You vanished so suddenly. We thought—we didn’t know—” I faltered under his unfamiliar gaze. “We thought everything. Even that you might have died.”

  “It was cruel of me,” he said simply, “to leave like that.”

  “It seemed cruel.” I unwound my hands, feeling my way a little more easily into memory, since I knew we both remembered that at least. “Laurel said you had some urgent family matters.”

  He nodded. “I was called home. And then my father died.”

  I blinked. Worlds merged briefly, separated. “I’m sorry—”

  “It was quite unexpected. But I found myself tangled in family affairs for so long, I was afraid I might not make it back here.”

  “You were afraid?”

  He smiled a little, then. “Winter didn’t frighten me away. I did want to return.” He paused, studying me a moment. “You look well. But changed. Was the winter hard?”

  “Yes. Very.” />
  “How is your father? And Laurel?”

  “They’re both well.” I watched his eyes. “Laurel is going to be married soon, to Perrin.”

  I saw little in his eyes but relief. “I’m glad,” he said softly; like Laurel’s memories, his had not survived the winter storms. “That’s the way it should be. Is she happy?” He read the answer in my face; the tension left his own. “I’m glad,” he said again.

  There seemed suddenly nothing left to say; only Crispin’s hammer spoke. Words turned back into dreams; they would fade eventually, I knew. Eventually. I shifted awkwardly, wondering how to say goodbye, wondering if there had been any world in which we did not.

  “Well—”

  “I know,” he said abruptly, “why you seem so changed. You didn’t walk barefoot through my wood. You rode here, and you’re wearing shoes.”

  I glanced down at them, surprised. I found him seeing other things in me, an expression in my eyes, maybe, or something I had done to my hair. “You seem changed, too,” I said. “Winter was hard on us all.”

  “Yes.” He drew a deep breath of the tantalizing air then, and his face opened as he turned to contemplate his house. “I think this time it will be different,” he said, more to himself than to me. I did not ask him what he meant.

  “I should go. No one knows where I am.”

  “You never worried about that before,” he commented. It made me smile, that he remembered. His answering smile, brief but warm, seemed unfamiliar, too. “There is something that I wanted to ask you, Rois. That is, if you found your way to speaking to me again.”

  “What?” I asked vaguely, hearing only my name again, his voice saying it.

  “About my garden. Or what passes for it. Oh—and something else.” He reached into his shirt pocket. “Before I forget. I found this in my house. I wonder if you know who it belongs to.”

  I looked at what lay on his palm. Then I looked at him. I closed my eyes suddenly, feeling light like gold on my mouth, seeing gold behind my eyes. All the words I knew freed themselves again, to visions, dreams, her wild wood, my wood.