Veiled Rose

by Anne Elisabeth Stengl

  “Someone you met when you came here before?” She reached out and put a hand on top of one of his. He flinched but did not pull away. Her hand was soft. “Someone they don’t want you to associate with?”

  Leo nodded. Her eyes were so blue. He had never seen eyes like hers before.

  “What was his name?” she asked in a gentle voice.

  “Rose Red,” Leo blurted, though he’d not intended to share. Something in those eyes of hers made him want to tell her his secrets, even as he blushed. “Her name was Rose Red. She was a girl who kept a goat around here.”

  “Oh.”

  Daylily’s hand withdrew from his, and he found that he rather missed it. Her whole body stiffened beside him, and she wrapped her hands very firmly about her knees. “I see. They would frown upon you associating with one of the country goat girls, wouldn’t they?”

  “Well, you know, they—”

  “Young love is always quickly squelched in a boy of your position, and I understand why you would resent it.”

  “I wasn’t really—”

  “But no fear,” continued Daylily, rising and brushing off her skirts in a most businesslike manner. “I’m sure you will find your—what was her name?—your little goat girl again. These things have a way of coming out right.”

  “Daylily, I—”

  “We’d best be on our way.” She was already halfway across the creek, and Leo hastened to rise and follow her. “I left Foxbrush in a bramble somewhere, and I doubt that he’s extracted himself. I don’t suppose you brought a pair of gloves with you?”

  Daylily descended the incline with surprising grace in all those skirts, and again Leo thought, as he followed her, that perhaps pretty girls had more uses than he’d ever given them credit for.

  3

  I feared you’d never come back to me.”

  Rose Red enters the cave as though drawn against her will. Steam rises and swirls about her uncovered face like caressing hands as she kneels before the dark pool. She turns away. But she cannot escape the voice.

  “I thought you would forget me again, now that he’s returned.”

  “I want to forget you.”

  “But you always come back to me.”

  She shudders in the dark of that nightmare and clenches her hands into fists. “You never let me go!”

  “You never leave.”

  “How can I leave? You plague my dreams.”

  Her Dream smiles up from the water, and his face is horrible to see. “If you wanted to, you could leave the mountain. Yet you choose to stay. You cannot be parted from me, my sweet princess.”

  Her head bows to her chest. Tears burn in her eyes. “Beana don’t want me to leave the mountain.”

  “Beana does not love you as I do.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Leo does not love you as I do.”

  “Shut up!” She leaps up and grabs the nearest loose stone she can reach, flinging it at the face in the water with all her strength. The splash shatters the image, and for a moment Rose Red is free of his gaze.

  But the rock sinks. The waters settle. And the face returns.

  “Someday, princess, you will understand that no one can be so constant a friend as I.”

  Then his eyes burn hers, and she cannot look away.

  “If you choose him over me, make no mistake . . . I will make him pay.”

  Rose Red woke up. She was covered in sweat yet very cold.

  Those dreams! They grew more horrible with each passing night, and sometimes she could not shake them even as day drew on. “Just a dream,” she whispered, trying to force her heart to slow its racing. “Just a dream, nothin’ more.”

  She put up a hand, realized that her face was bare, and hastily felt around for her veil. Not that there was anybody near besides Beana, but she did not like to take chances.

  It was chilly in the cottage. She had not lit a fire in the hearth for many months now, nor had she attempted to mend the thatch. It was more like a shed these days than a home, an empty, inhospitable shed. Beana slept in the center of the one room, and Rose Red lay with her head pillowed on the goat’s shaggy back. She sat up now and drew her veil over her head, listening for the familiar sound she knew she would not hear.

  The old man’s snoring.

  How long had it been now since . . . since everything?

  Rose Red got up carefully so as not to disturb Beana and stepped through the sagging cottage door. How long had it been since she’d had a proper meal? Much too long ago to calculate! How long since she’d had a proper night’s sleep? Several weeks now at least. Not since the boy had returned to Hill House.

  She made her way into the yard. It was a shambles these days, and the kitchen garden was overgrown with weeds save where Beana had nibbled them down. Though the night was dark, Rose Red could see it all clearly through the slit in her veil, but she turned her gaze away and passed into the forest.

  The watching and unhappy wood.

  She did not know how intently it watched her, though she felt the tension running through the very bones of the mountain. Was the wood’s unhappiness connected with her own?

  The shadows fell deep and solemn where she walked. She caught a gleam of white in the darkness and recognized at once her Imaginary Friend. But she turned away, shaking her head. She did not want to imagine anything right now.

  A thrush sang in the darkness. Then she heard the soft rustle of wings and a light weight pressed into her shoulder.

  My child, said the thrush in the voice of her Prince. Why do you scorn me?

  “I don’t want you,” said Rose Red, trying to shrug the little bird away. “Scat.”

  You are weary with sorrow. Allow me to comfort you.

  “Some comfort you are.”

  Have I not promised never to abandon you?

  “Is that so?” She took hold of the gently gripping claws with her gloved fingers and wrenched the bird from her shoulder. It fluttered from her grasp and settled on the ground before her, the white of its breast luminous in the darkness. But Rose Red turned away and continued down the mountain. “Make me some more promises, why don’t you? Promise imaginary food to keep off starvation. Promise imaginary shelter to keep me warm. Promise a whole town full of imaginary folks what will pretend they don’t hate the very sight of me. Promise to give me work so that I might pretend to live again!”

  The thrush took to the air and followed her. She did not see it, for her head was bowed. “Promise imaginary medicine what can pretend to heal,” she whispered, “even after hope of healin’ is long gone.”

  My child—

  “Stupid fancies!” she growled. “Why do you trouble me so? You when I’m awake, him when I’m sleeping! Cain’t you just let me alone?”

  The bird spoke no more, at least not that she heard. The silence of the wood fell heavily around her. How long, she wondered, since she’d spoken a word to another person? Beana didn’t count. She was only a goat, after all, and so couldn’t really talk, for all she was the best friend Rose Red had.

  Leo had been her best friend once. But that was years ago. He wouldn’t remember her. Not the way she remembered him.

  She’d seen the carriage climbing the hill from her perch in the topmost boughs of the grandfather tree. Somehow she’d known it must be he. But the thought gave her no joy.

  She emerged from the forest onto the path and continued on down. “I ain’t goin’ to the house for him,” she muttered to herself as her feet padded softly on the hard dirt. Her quick eyes darted about, for even at this darkest hour of the night it wouldn’t be impossible to meet one of the mountain folk coming or going. That was the last thing she wanted. And as she approached Hill House, she must watch all the windows for any sign of a candle, any indication that some member of the staff might yet be awake or even rising early for some odd duty.

  There was none, so she climbed the garden gate into the yard.

  The gardens held no interest for her, not even the starflower
vines that bloomed white at night. She passed over the lawns to a quiet corner in the back. A corner where marble stones were planted in the earth, some elegantly carved, some not. The founder of Hill House had a most impressive statue, a white panther seated with its mouth open. A spider had, indecorously, built a web among those carved fangs.

  In a smaller, simpler nook were wooden markers carved with nothing save names. Rose Red, like a ghost in her rags and veils, passed between the graves until she came to one of those wood markers on which the name Mousehand was written, though she could not read it.

  She knelt there and wept behind her veil.

  “What did you have to go and die for, Dad?” she demanded, putting a hand on the marker. “What did you have to go and die for and leave me all alone? I told you, didn’t I? I told you not to!”

  She pressed her forehead to the marker, and her veil grew damp with her tears.

  He had died on a cold autumn night, many months ago now. She had known he would but had lied to herself that he would not. In retrospect, she could not deny that she had known all along that it was his final night when he crawled onto his pallet and called her to him.

  “Rosie, com’ere a moment, will you?”

  “Yeah, Dad?” She’d knelt by his side and put out a hand for him to find and grasp. When his fingers closed about hers, she noticed how weak they were.

  His fingers squeezed hers until the blue veins stood out. “Rosie,” he said, “did I ever tell you about the first time I laid eyes on you?”

  “ ’Course you did,” she whispered, but he wanted to tell it again, and she did not stop him.

  “It was late one moonlit night,” he said, “and you know I cain’t sleep in the full moon. It works on my joints a right awful magic! So I took myself for a little walk. Now that was back when I worked for the Eldest, our good King Hawkeye. He’d asked me to plant the red roses along the Swan Bridge path. A sad thing that, for now all the roses are gone. Aye, within a year of that very night, some strange blight struck every bush in Southlands, and not a single blossom grew, not so much as a pink-edged bud.

  “But that night, I was mighty proud of the landscaping I’d done, and there is nothing like the scent of roses in the moonlight to fill a man with all sorts of goodness, swollen joints be dashed!”

  Rose Red smiled, running her thumb up and down the man’s bony wrist.

  “I strolled down that path, enjoying my roses, then on out across Swan Bridge. I walked a long way out there under the moon, and looked down into the dark wood below. All the trees rippled like water, their leaves reflecting back the white light so’s I could have thought I stood above the ocean. It was a sight, Rosie!”

  “Sure, Dad. Sure it was.”

  “But it was cold too, so I had to start making my way back homeward. I was nearin’ the end of the bridge and just getting a whiff of them roses of mine when I heard in my ear the prettiest sound I ever did hear. It was a bird’s song, one I didn’t know, prettier than a nightingale, prettier than a mourning dove’s coo.”

  “A wood thrush,” Rose Red murmured.

  “That’s what it was, girl, right enough. A wood thrush, and at that hour, singing as though his heart would break for the pure joy of singin’! And I saw him, sittin’ all proud and mighty like a little prince in the throne of my grandest, reddest rosebush, not two steps from Swan Bridge.”

  The old man’s voice trailed off, and Rose Red thought perhaps he had gone to sleep. But when she tried to lay his hand aside, his grip tightened. A deep chuckle rumbled in his chest, though it ended with a wheezy cough. “Ah, Rosie,” he said, “I’ll not forget my surprise when suddenly this awful commotion under the bush started up! But then I saw this white bundle and realized it was that bitty thing makin’ all the racket. So I made my way to the bush, and that’s when I found you.”

  He smiled a toothless smile, and his dim eyes circled about, as though wanting to meet her gaze. “You were somethin’ different, Rosie,” he said. “Like no other baby I’d seen.”

  “I’m sure I was that,” she said.

  “Now, Rosie, there ain’t no call for soundin’ so down in the mouth! When I say you were like no other baby, I mean because it was obvious to me that you were a miracle, brought to me by the moon and that bird, and born right under my reddest bush, with three great red petals fallen on your forehead.”

  She could tell he was close to dozing off by now. His eyelids slid slowly over his bleary eyes, and he rubbed them with his free hand like a toddler insistent on staying up.

  “My Rose Red,” he said, “you are a Faerie child. Born different from everyone else, and that’s why you look the way you do. It takes special eyes, Faerie eyes, to see you as you really are.

  “You’ve never seen them, my girl, but listen to me now: Not in all the world was there a flower that can excel the rose. The fairest of the fair is she, with a smell as sweet as spring and summer combined. But when I looked at you there in the moonlight, you were more beautiful even than my reddest rosebush. You listenin’ to me, girl?”

  “I’m listenin’, Dad.”

  In that last moment before sleep claimed him, his eyes became very bright. “Rosie,” he said, “keep yourself safe, d’you hear me? Keep your face covered, for they won’t know what to make of a face like yours. And never forget, you were the greatest gift to me.”

  With that, he let go of her hand and fell asleep, filling their hovel with his thunderous snores. And when the sun crested the mountain and Rose Red went to shake him awake before the porridge went cold, she found he’d gone and died on her without so much as a by-your-leave.

  She’d had to carry his body down to Hill House. Those who served in Hill House were honored to be buried among their predecessors, and Mousehand deserved that honor more than anyone. Down the deer trail and the mountain path Rose Red had borne him, to the gates of Hill House . . . then the most horrible part. She could not call out to those in the house. She could not ask for their aid. No, she must leave the man she called father there by the gate to be discovered later that day, for the household to suppose that he had died on his way to work.

  For if the household saw him with her, even in death, they would shun him and refuse to lay him to rest in the house graveyard.

  He was found, he was buried, his name carved on a wooden marker.

  She did not realize until he was gone just how greatly she had depended on the old gardener. Of course she had loved him and been cared for by him. Though they had lived simply, she had never had to worry about where the food would come from. Mousehand would venture down to the village to buy the meal and barley. Mousehand had purchased seeds as needed for the kitchen garden, and when the garden was insufficient, Mousehand had provided supplements.

  Rose Red, covered in her veils, dared not venture to town. So she remained in the forest, and winter set in, and she rationed out her meager supplies. Those supplies failed, and Rose Red starved.

  Eventually, things became so bad that hunger drove her from her safe cottage yard and into the more remote mountainfolk homesteads. She stole for the first time in her life. Only little bits and pieces, things she was almost certain would not be missed. But that did not make it any easier on her, and she hated herself for having come to this state.

  “Don’t blame yourself, Rosie,” Beana told her. “If these folks were as good and kind as they like to think themselves, all you’d have to do is ask, and they’d give you as much or more.”

  There could be no asking, however. So Rose Red stole from storage houses and took no comfort in Beana’s words. After all, Beana was only a goat. What did she know?

  The only relief in all this terrible time was that when she fell asleep at night, she never dreamed.

  When spring and summer returned, survival became a little easier. Rose Red could find roots and wild vegetables, and her body was tougher than anyone looking at her small form might suppose. Beana was always there with her to comfort her. She busied herself making plans for
the coming winter, attempting to salvage what she could of the kitchen garden despite the lack of new seeds.

  But then Leo had returned to Hill House. And with him came the dreams.

  Angry dreams born, Rose Red was sure, out of her hurt and fear. Dreams that grew angrier with each passing day, until even in waking hours she still felt that anger surging along beside her. Beana sensed it too, but they never spoke of it, nor of Leo. But what work Rose Red had managed on the kitchen garden failed, and ruin took the cottage yard in a hold that would never be broken. The summer was passing; winter would soon be upon them.

  As she knelt that night before Mousehand’s grave, her back to the house and her veiled face streaked with drying tears, Rose Red knew that she would not survive another such winter.

  “Bah.”

  A gentle nose nuzzled the back of her neck. Rose Red startled only a little before turning to put an arm over Beana’s neck. “What you doin’ here, fool goat?”

  “I could ask the same of you,” Beana replied.

  “How’d you get through the gate?”

  “You left it open.”

  Rose Red frowned. “I didn’t.”

  The goat tossed her horns. “You’re not supposed to come down here. It isn’t safe; you know that.”

  Rose Red turned back to the grave and rested one hand on the mound of earth under which the old gardener rested. “I miss him sometimes.”

  “Doesn’t make it any less dangerous,” said Beana, but she knelt down beside the girl anyway, and they remained awhile in silence, listening to the sounds of the night.

  “Beana,” Rose Red said, her gloved fingers twining in the goat’s hair, “what becomes of a person when they die?”

  The goat gave her a sidelong glance. “How should I know? I’m just an old goat.”

  “He cain’t be gone. Not completely,” Rose Red persisted. “His body wore out, but he wouldn’t just be gone.” Tears dampened the veil where it rested on her cheeks. “Don’t goats have notions of what happens afterward?”

  Beana sighed, tilting her head as she thought. “Mind you,” she said at last, “I couldn’t tell you for sure, but . . . but what I heard is that when a body dies, the spirit leaves this world and passes into the Netherworld, where one must walk Death’s Path. This path looks different to different folks. For some, it is a hard and lonely way . . . and they walk it alone, in darkness.”