CHAPTER

3

About three weeks after Lionheart’s first disappearance, she disappeared again. She had gone into town a few times by herself meanwhile—always on some errand, carefully agreed upon beforehand—and had come home in each case looking frustrated, or amused, or pleased, in a manner that did not seem to relate to the errands she was ostensibly accomplishing. She came home sullen and discouraged the day she successfully arranged for a local farmer to deliver some of last year’s manure-heap for Beauty’s garden, and yet was jubilant and exhilarated the day she failed to find a suitable shaft to replace the handle of her favourite hammer, the accident that broke it having put her in a foul temper for the entire day.

Neither Jeweltongue nor Beauty saw Lionheart leave, but both saw her return. They had not immediately recognised her. A very handsome young man had burst into the house at early twilight, with the light behind him, and they had stared up in alarm at the intrusion. Lionheart looked at their frightened faces, and laughed, and pulled her hat off so they could see her face clearly; but her hair was gone, chopped raggedly across the forehead and up the back of the head as if she had sawn at it with a pocket-knife. And she was wearing breeches and a man’s shirt and waistcoat.

Her sisters were speechless. Beauty, after a moment, recognised the clothing as having belonged to one of their stablelads, which had thus far survived being turned to one of Jeweltongue’s purposes, but that did not explain what Lionheart was doing pretending to be a boy.

“I have a job,” she said, and laughed again, and tossed her head, and her fine hair stood out round her face like a halo. “They think I’m a young man, you see—well, they have to: I’m the new stable-hand. At Oak Hall. But I won’t be in the muck-heap long because I made them dare me to ride Master Jack’s new colt—that’s Squire Trueword’s eldest son—this colt’s had every one of them off, you see. But I rode it. A few of them hate me already, but the head lad likes me, and I can see in his eye that the fellow who runs—that is, the master of the horse—has plans for me. My saints, I ache; I haven’t ridden in months, and that colt is a handful.

“Oh, and they say to get a decent haircut before I come to work tomorrow; I’ll have to bow to the squire, and to his spoilt son, if I want to ride his horses.”

Beauty trimmed her sister’s hair and then swept the silky tufts into a tiny pile of glinting individual hairs and saved them.

The house was lonely at first, with Lionheart gone, but she came home for a day every week, and baked all the bread for the week to come, and, with her new wages, bought butter and honey for the bread, and sugar and the squashed fruit—chiefly the last of the winter apples—at the bottom of the baskets at the end of market-days, and made pies and jam. She had made friends with the butcher’s boy, who occasionally slipped her a few more beef knuckles for the stew, a little extra lard in her measure; the butcher’s boy only knew that she had an ailing father and had recently been taken on up at the Hall. He didn’t know that the young man he spoke to was also the sister who cooked the stew and rolled the pastry.

Mrs Bestcloth was as good as her promise, and Jeweltongue’s introduction to Miss Trueword was duly achieved. And Jeweltongue was given a dinner dress to make. “From a silly painted picture in a magazine, if you please! If a real person had ever tried to walk in that dress, she would be so fettered by the ridiculous skirts she would fall over after her first step. Fortunately Miss Trueword is a little more sensible than her manner.”

“Which is to say you talked her into being sensible,” said Beauty, gently squeezing the small damp muslin pouch she hoped contained goat’s cheese. Her last attempt had been more like goat’s custard (as Lionheart mercilessly pointed out), but the texture this time was more promising.

“Mmm—well, I had a hard apprenticeship, you know, deflating that awful Mr Doolittle’s opinions of himself. If he is a philosopher, I am a bale of hay. But that’s all long ago now. And Miss Trueword is actually rather sweet. Here, let me hold that bowl for you. Don’t fret, dear. It was excellent custard last time. Your only mistake was telling Lionheart it was supposed to be cheese.”

Miss Trueword’s frock was a great success; Jeweltongue was commissioned for three frocks for her nieces and a coat for the squire. She also altered the stable-boy’s uniform to fit Lionheart properly, using leftover bits from the squire’s coat for strength. They were no longer using the money they had brought with them; a few times Jeweltongue or Lionheart even added pennies to the cracked cup in the back of the kitchen store-cupboard where they kept it. Beauty had hurdles for her fencing, and the scarecrow—or something—was working, for her seeds were sprouting unmolested.

Even their father was taking a little more notice of the world round him, and when he sat and scribbled, he scribbled more and dozed less. He came outdoors most days for a stroll in the sunlight, and he often smiled as he looked round him. He complimented Beauty on her garden and Jeweltongue on her sewing; he had been startled by Lionheart’s new job—and even more by her new haircut—but had taken it quietly and made no attempt to forbid her to do something she had already thrown her heart into.

He still fell asleep early in the evenings and slept late into the mornings, while his daughters tiptoed round the kitchen end of the downstairs room getting breakfast and setting themselves up for the day. Each of the three of them caught the other two looking at him anxiously, heard the slightly strained note in the others’ voices when they asked him how he did, to which he invariably replied gently, “I am doing very well, thank you.”

“It is so hard to know if—if there is anything we should do,” Jeweltongue said hesitatingly to Beauty. “He was never home when we lived in the city, was he? He was always at work. Or thinking of work. Even when Lionheart and I were little—when you were still a baby—he never seemed to notice anything but business, and Mamma. After Mamma died, we never saw him at all. Sometimes I think we only knew he existed because the next new governess, and the next one after that, came to us saying our father had hired her … you remember.” She laughed a little, without humour. “Perhaps that’s why we treated them so diabolically. Lionheart and I, that is; you were always the peacekeeper. And after we outgrew our governesses … I don’t know what he was like before, you know? Other than abstracted. The way he is now, I suppose. But … I wish we could call in a greenwitch, or even a seer, and ask advice about him, but that’s the one thing we do know, isn’t it? No magic. And I keep forgetting to ask about it in Longchance—a greenwitch, I mean. It seems—” She paused, and there was a small frown on her face. “It seems almost peculiar, the way I keep not remembering. And the way it never comes up. Maybe it’s different in the country. In the city which magician had just invented the best spell for this or that—champagne that stays fizzy even in a punch bowl, something to keep your lapdog from shedding hair on your dresses—”

“How to produce cheese instead of custard,” murmured Beauty, watching Lydia’s kid decide—again—not to enter the gate into the back garden, carelessly left open. Maybe he merely did not like narrow spaces.

“—was a chief source of gossip, nearly as good as who was seen leaving whose house at what o’clock at night. Don’t you wonder what he’s writing? He keeps it under his pillow at night and in his pocket all day.”

Summer arrived. Beauty’s runner beans ramped up their poles; the broad beans were so heavy with pods the crowns of the plants sank sideways to the earth. The lettuce and beetroot grew faster than they could eat it; there were so many early potatoes Lionheart made potato bread and potato pancakes and potato scones.

The thorn-bushes had all disappeared under their weight of leaves. Even the deadest-looking ones round the almost-invisible statue had not been dead at all, only slow to wake from winter. And then flower buds came, and Beauty watched them eagerly, surprised at her own excitement, wanting to see what would come. The weather turned cold for a week, and the buds stopped their progress like an army called to a halt; Beauty was half frantic with impatience. But the weather turned warm again, and the buds grew bigger and bigger and fatter and fatter, and there were dozens of them—hundreds. They began to crack and to show pink and white and deepest red-purple between the sepals.

One morning Beauty woke up thinking of her mother. She could not at first imagine why; she had not had the dream and had awoken happy, and thinking about her mother usually made her sad. But … she sniffed. There was something in the air, something that reminded her of her mother’s perfume.

She hurried to the loft’s one little window and knelt so she could see out. The thorn-bushes’ buds had finally popped, and the scent was coming from the open flowers. Roses. These were roses. This was why their little house was called Rose Cottage.

She was the first awake; it was barely dawn. Her sisters would be stirring soon, and she wanted the first enchanted minutes of discovery to be hers alone. She wrapped the old coat she used as a dressing-gown round her—almost every morning at breakfast Jeweltongue promised to make her a real one soon—and went softly downstairs and into the garden, thoughtlessly barefoot, walked straight down the centre path to the big round bed in the middle of the back garden, the earth dawn-cool against her feet. The roses nodded at her as if giving her greeting; their merest motion blew their fragrance at her till she felt drunk with it.

Her sisters found her there a little while later, her hands cupping an enormous round flower head as if it were the face of her sweetheart. They stood openmouthed, breathing like runners after an exhilarating race; then Jeweltongue kissed her, and Lionheart reached out a hand and just stroked the silky petals of a pale pink rose with one finger. Neither said a word; slowly they went back indoors again and left Beauty alone with her new love.

At first she could not bear the thought of cutting them, even one, despite their profusion, but at last she chose just three—one white, one pink, one purple-red—and brought them indoors, found something to use as a vase, and knelt by their father’s bed, holding them near his face. She saw him take a long breath in and smile, before he opened his eyes.

He murmured her mother’s name, but gently, knowing she was gone but happy in the memory of her; then his eyes found Beauty’s, and he smiled again. “Thank you,” he said.

“They are beautiful, are they not?” said Beauty.

“Almost as beautiful as she was,” he said.

Beauty said nothing.

For over two months the roses bloomed and bloomed and bloomed. Beauty had never been so happy, and for the third time in her life the dream went away. The monster was gone while her roses were in flower. She had to tear herself away from the contemplation of them to tend to the rest of her garden, to eat her meals, to sleep; she had never liked to do nothing, but she found now that if she could do nothing beside a rose-bush in full bloom, she was entirely happy.

Now that she knew what they were, she changed her mind at once about tending the bushes—however hazardous an operation this would be to herself personally. No longer were they in danger of being dug up and consigned to the bonfire as soon as she had time to spare. She trimmed and trained and painstakingly fixed and tied the bushes and climbers round the cottage. She groped gingerly into the very depths of the tangle of the round bed to take out all the dead wood she could find and arrange the stems to arch and fall most gracefully, the better to show off their radiant burden of flowers. Every last spadeful of the remains of the load of manure Farmer Goldfield had brought her went round the base of the bushes, and she mourned the generous hand she had used earlier in fertilising her vegetables. Next year she would bargain for two loads of manure.

One mystery remained. She still could not decide what the statue in the middle of the centre rose-bed represented. In her valiant adventures pruning away the old wood and scrabbling out the weeds, she had also made four of the eight wheel-spoke paths navigable again, had therefore been able to reach the hub and free the statue of its leafy confinement. But she still had no idea what it was supposed to be. She almost thought it changed, from one day to the next, because one day it would remind her of a dragon, the next day a chimera, the third day a salamander, the fourth day a unicorn.… “This is ridiculous,” said Beauty, aloud, to the unicorn. “You are not the least bit lizardy and snakelike, and I know you have been lizardy and snakelike previously; positively I have seen scales. Now stop it.” After that it only ever looked like some tall, elegant, but unknown beast, its long sleek hair cascading over its round muscled limbs, its great eyes peering sombrely out from beneath its mane.

“Now you are really very handsome,” said Beauty. “And much nicer than anything with scales. But I still wish I knew what you were.”

When the roses finally stopped blooming, Beauty felt as if she had lost her dearest friend; but she gathered all the fallen petals she could and put them in saucers and flat bowls, and even after they dried, if she ran her fingers through them, the scent awakened and made her happy.

She kept a little bowl of them by her pillow, where she could reach them in the night, because as soon as the last petal had dropped from the last rose in flower, the dream returned. When it did, and she found herself safely restored to her own bed but still shaken by the memory of the dark corridor and the knowledge of the patient monster, she held a cupped handful of rose-petals under her nose till the warmth of her skin brought the scent out again, and then she drifted gently back to sleep.

The winter that year was long and hard, but the old merchant and his daughters were little troubled by it, except that Lionheart, two or three times, could not get home through the snow on her days off. Beauty’s vegetables had surpassed all expectations, and the cold room under the house was full of sacks and bundles and bottles. The life that had been slowly returning to the old merchant had begun to grow strong; it was he who cleaned out the cellar, blocked the rat-holes, and borrowed the tools Lionheart considered hers to build the shelves to hold Beauty’s produce.

“See that you take very good care of my hammer,” said Lionheart. “I had a fiend of a time finding the right shaft for the new handle.”

“I shall be very careful indeed not to hit it accidentally with any axes,” said their father drily.

After the clean cold whiteness of winter, when spring’s mud and naked brown branches and grey rain and smells of rot and waste came round again, they were only happy to know that summer was coming again—strangely content in their new life. There was never any longer an edge—except occasionally of laughter—to Jeweltongue’s voice when she spoke to, or about, her clients. “I’ve decided judicious flattery is the greatest art of all,” she said. “Forget philosophy.” She hummed to herself as she drew up the dress patterns she delighted in creating.

Lionheart brought home the runt of the litter when the squire’s favourite spaniel whelped, saying in outrage that the squire had planned to have it drowned. Once she came home still shaking in fury and told of thrashing some young lad who wanted to jump a frightened colt over a fence too big for it—“Just to show us what a big brave man he is. He won’t last. Mr Horsewise won’t have his kind near his horses.”

The old merchant found a job doing sums for several of the small businesses in Longchance; he bought himself some clean sheets of paper and began copying some of the contents of his accumulation of scribblings onto them.

“Father, I am dying of curiosity,” said Jeweltongue.

“I will tell you someday,” he replied, smiling to himself.

Beauty’s garden grew and bloomed, and bloomed, and the roses were even more spectacular this year than last. This second year Beauty took a deep, deep sigh, and cut many of her beloved roses, and worked them into wreaths and posies, and let them dry, and she went in with Jeweltongue one market-day to sell them, and they were gone by midmorning. She invested some of her little profit in ribbons, and wove them into bouquets with more of her roses, and raised her prices, and they, too, disappeared by midmorning at the next market-day she went to.

“Rose Cottage,” the townspeople said, nodding wisely. “We all wondered if there was a one of you would wake ’em up again,” and they looked at her thoughtfully. Several asked, hopefully but in some puzzlement, “Are you a—a greenwitch then? You don’t look like a sorcerer.”

“Oh, no!” said Beauty, shocked the first time she was asked. But eventually, as that question or one like it went on being repeated, and remembering Jeweltongue’s puzzlement about the apparent lack of interest in Longchance in all the magical professions, she asked in her turn, “Why do you think so?”

But most of those addressed looked uneasy and gave her little answer. “The old woman was, you know,” they muttered over their shoulders as they hastened away.

A very old memory returned to her: Pansy telling her that her mother’s perfume smelt of roses. What she had forgotten was Pansy saying that it was generally only sorcerers who could get roses to grow. And she thought again of the green threads in the old fencing around Rose Cottage and how she had never seen any animal cross that boundary. Even their new puppy had to be let out the front door to do her business; she wouldn’t go out the back.

But one woman lingered long enough to say a little more. She’d been listening, bright-eyed, to Beauty denying, once again, that she was a greenwitch, and the farm wife who received this news went off shaking her head. “There, there, Patience; we can’t have everything, and that’s a nice wreath you bought yourself.” To Beauty she said: “We all know Jeweltongue, and gettin’ to be your father’s pretty well known, that young scamp Salter, calls himself a wheelwright, well, I guess nothing’s wrong with his wheels, but he ain’t never learnt nothing about running a business, and your father had him all tidied up in a sennight. And your firebrand brother, Lionheart, well, Mr Horsewise knows how to ride a high-mettled lad, too, and a good thing for both on ’em! But you’re always home in your garden, ain’t you? My cousin Sandy had a couple o’bottles of your pickled beets from your father last winter, which was sweet of him as she didn’t expect no payment for what she done, but that’s how we knew you’re home working hard.

“My! Smell those roses! Don’t it take me back! Funny how the house has stood empty this long, roses or no roses. It’s a snug little place, even if it is a little far out of town for comfort. We knew when the old woman disappeared she’d left some kind of lawyers’ instructions about it—but nobody came, and nobody sent word, and for a long time we just hoped she’d come back, because we was all fond of her, fond of her besides having a greenwitch in Longchance again, which we ain’t had long before, nor since neither.” She nodded once or twice and started to move away.

Then the greenwitch who had made the fence charms had lived in Rose Cottage! Then it was she who had left the house to them? But … Beauty reached out and caught the woman’s sleeve. “Oh, tell me more. Won’t you—please?” she begged. “No one wants to talk about it, and I—I can’t help being interested.”

“Not that much to tell, when all’s said and done,” said the woman, but she smiled at Beauty. “Who is it you remind me of? Never mind, it’ll come to me. We don’t talk about magic much, here in Longchance, because we ain’t got any. You have to go as far as Appleborough even to buy a charm to make mended pottery stay mended. We’ve had a few greenwitches try to settle around here—never at Rose Cottage, mind—but they never stayed. They said they had too many bad dreams. Dreams about monsters living in our woods. We’ve never had so much as a bad-tempered bear in our woods. In a hard winter the wolves come to Appleborough, but they don’t come to Longchance. But dreams are important to greenwitches and so on, you know, so they leave.

“Miffs us, you know? Why not Longchance? We can’t decide if it’s because we’re specialer than ordinary folk, or worse somehow, you know? But it’d be handy to have our own greenwitch again, and them roses ain’t bloomed since the old woman left, and so we’ve been hoping, see?”

“The old woman—tell me about the greenwitch,” said Beauty. “What was she like? How long did she live here? Did she build Rose Cottage, did she plant the roses?”

“You don’t want much, do you?” said the woman, but she set her shopping basket down. Beauty hastened forward with the stand’s only chair and herself sank down at the woman’s feet. “That’s kind of you, dear, and I like to talk. You want to know what the rest of us Longchancers don’t want to talk about, you come to me—or if you want it in a parlour with a silver tea-service, you go to Mrs Oldhouse. Between us we know everything.

“No, our greenwitch didn’t build Rose Cottage nor plant the roses, but there weren’t much left of neither of ’em when she arrived. The roof had fallen in, and you couldn’t see the rosebushes for the wildberry brambles and the hawthorn, and us in Longchance had wandered into the way of thinking that the roses were just a part of the old tale because no one had seen one in so long. It was funny, too, it was like she knew what she was looking for, like she was coming back to a familiar place, though no one round here had ever seen her before. I know this part of the story from my old dad, mind, I was a kiddie myself then.

“She came old, and when she disappeared, she disappeared old, though it was like she hadn’t got any older in between, if you follow me, and she’d been here long enough to see babies born and grow up and have their own babies.

“She lived at Rose Cottage, and she made rose wreaths. That’s another thing about her. She smelt of roses all year long, even in winter. She was an odd body generally—had a habit of taking in orphan hedgehogs and birds with broke wings and like that—took a child in once that way too, but when she grew up, she left here and never came back. A beauty, she was; stop a blind man dead in his tracks, I tell you.” She stopped suddenly and gave Beauty a sharp look. “My! It’s prob’ly my mind wool-gathering, but it’s that old woman’s foundling you remind me of. It’s prob’ly just the scent o’ your roses, after all this time, confusing my thinking.

“Where was I? Well, the girl never came back, and no wonder, maybe, not to come back to this bit of nowhere, but it was a bit hard on the old woman, maybe. Not that she ever said anything. And when the old woman herself went off … As I say, we was fond of her, and if we’d known she was missing sooner, we might have gone looking. Maybe she went back to where she came from. If she died, I hope she went quick, just keeled over somewhere and never knew what happened.

“Rose Cottage has stood empty, ten years, fifteen, since she went. Not even the Gypsies camp there. She’d let it be known she was tying it up all legal in case anything happened to her. I suppose that should have told us we wouldn’t be having her much longer, one way or another. We don’t have much to do with lawyers round here; but most of us have family, and she didn’t. Not that girl, who went off and left her and never sent no word back.

“But your sister—that Jeweltongue—she says you never knew the old woman. Never knew anything about it, except the will, and the house.”

Beauty thought of that last terrible time in the city, remembered again the lifting of the heart when she held the paper in her hands that told her they had somewhere to go, something that yet belonged to them: a little house, in a bit of nowhere, called Rose Cottage. “Yes,” said Beauty. “That’s right; we knew nothing about it till we saw the will. It had—it had been mislaid among my father’s papers.”

“That’s all right, dear,” said the woman. “I ain’t prying … much; folks’ troubles are their own, and we’ve all had ’em. But it’s … interestin’, isn’t it? Like you said to begin, you can’t help being interested. Because the point is, the old woman had to know something about you. And her roses—they ain’t bloomed since she left. Till you came.

“And you’re the one we’ve kind of been waiting for, see? Because you’re the one always in the garden. All your family says so. ‘That Beauty, you can’t hardly get her indoors to have her meals.’ And we maybe got our hopes up a bit. Ah, well, it’s as I told Patience, we can’t have everything, and I dunno but what your wreaths are even better’n the old woman’s.” She had picked up Beauty’s last remaining wreath and was looking at it as she spoke. She hesitated and glanced at Beauty again. “D’you know why everyone wants a rose wreath, dear? Forgive me for insulting you by asking, but you look as if maybe you don’t know.”

“No-o,” said Beauty. “Not because they’re beautiful?”

The woman laughed with genuine amusement. “Bless you. Maybe it’s no wonder they grow for you after all. You know—pansy for thoughtfulness, yew for sorrow, bay for glory, dock for tomorrow? Roses are for love. Not forget-me-not, honeysuckle, silly sweethearts’ love but the love that makes you and keeps you whole, love that gets you through the worst your life’ll give you and that pours out of you when you’re given the best instead.

“There are a lot of the old wreaths from Rose Cottage around, not just over my door. There’s an old folk-tale—maybe you never heard it in your city—that there aren’t many roses around anymore because they need more love than people have to give ’em, to make ’em flower, and the only thing that’ll stand in for love is magic, though it ain’t as good, and you have to have a lot of magic, like a sorcerer, and I ain’t never heard of a kind sorcerer, have you? And the bushes only started covering themselves with thorns when it got so it was only magic that ever made ’em grow. They were sad, like, and it came out in thorns. Maybe it was different when the world was younger, when people and roses were younger.”

The woman stood up, and briskly took out her purse, and paid Beauty for her wreath, picked up her shopping basket, and turned to go; but she paused, frowning, as if she could not make up her mind either to say something or to leave it unsaid.

“I’d much rather know,” said Beauty softly, and the woman looked at her again with her friendly smile.

“You may not, dear, but I’m thinking maybe you’d better. I’ve told you there’s no magic hereabouts. There are tales about why, of course. I’d make one up meself if nobody’d taken care of the job before me. There was some kind of sorcerers’ battle here, they say, long, long ago, no one knows rightly how long, and it ain’t the kind of thing the squire puts down in his record book, is it? ‘One sorcerers’ battle. Very bad. Has taken all magic away from Longchance forever’—if we had a squire in those days, though Oak Hall is as old as anything around here, and sorcerers don’t live in wilderness. But there’s a curse tacked on to the end of it, like the sting on a manticore’s tail. It don’t rightly concern you, because the tally calls for three sisters, and there’s only the two of you—”

“My … brother?” said Beauty faintly.

The woman laughed. “Oh, the menfolk don’t count—like usual, eh? No, you want sorcery, you got to go to a man, but there’s nothing anybody should want to have done a greenwitch can’t do.… Now, now, don’t go all wide-eyed and trembly on me like that. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. There’s nothing wrong with you and nothing wrong with Rose Cottage. And we’re all glad of you; that Jeweltongue can almost outtalk me when she puts her mind to it, and you should see her wrapping that old Miss Trueword round her finger! That’s a sight, that is.

“Pity you ain’t a greenwitch then. We could use one. A greenwitch would make a good living here, you know. You could even afford a husband.” And the woman winked. “Maybe you should talk to your roses about it, see if they’ll tell you a few charms.”

Ask her roses to tell her greenwitch charms? Beauty’s astonishment and worry broke and were swept away on a tide of laughter, taking her questions about the curse, and about bad dreams about monsters in the forest, with it. The woman took no offense but patted her hand, grinning, and went away.

Jeweltongue returned even as Beauty was looking after her, and said, “Beauty, if you’ve sold all your roses, maybe you’ll come lend me your eye? Mrs Bestcloth has a new shipment in, and Miss Trueword says she will leave it up to me, and I’m drowning in riches, I can’t decide, I want to use them all.”

Over a late tea at home Jeweltongue said, “You and Mrs Greendown were in close conversation for some while, were you not? Did she tell you anything interesting? Mrs Treeworthy—she and her husband have the Home Farm, you remember—says Mrs Greendown knows everything about everything round here.”

“Yes … oh … a bit. Not very,” said Beauty, glancing at their father, who had come home with them after a day doing sums in Longchance, and now had his scribbles on his knee, and was holding his teacup absentmindedly halfway to his mouth.

Jeweltongue knew what that glance meant and said briskly, “Never mind. Help me remember what Miss Trueword’s final decisions were, so I can write them down, my head is still spinning”—help that Beauty knew perfectly well her sister never needed.

By the time she and Jeweltongue were alone together, she had decided to say nothing of the curse. She thought there was a good chance that no one else in magic-shy Longchance would mention it to anyone else in her family; she was the one who was supposed to be a greenwitch. What did she herself think about the curse? She didn’t know. Curses were dangerous things; they tended to eat up their casters and were therefore unpopular among magical practitioners, though they still happened occasionally. Most likely Longchance’s curse was some folk-tale that, in generations of retelling, had begun to be called a curse to give it greater prestige.

Her first impulse was to attend the very next market-day, find Mrs Greendown, and ask her to tell her explicitly just what this curse was. But she had second thoughts almost at once. She told herself that her interest might cause, well, reciprocal interest, and there was Lionheart’s secret to protect. But she knew that wasn’t the real reason for her change of heart. She didn’t want to know because she didn’t want to know. And she would set herself to forgetting that Mrs Greendown had ever so much as mentioned a curse. “There’s nothing wrong with you and nothing wrong with Rose Cottage.” She would leave it there.

Jeweltongue was fascinated by the story of the greenwitch who had left them Rose Cottage and appeared to harbour no suspicions that Beauty was holding anything back, and by the end of her revised history, Beauty had already half succeeded in forgetting what she had chosen not to tell.

“What a romantic story! At least we now know why we never found the Longchance greenwitch’s signboard,” said Jeweltongue. “All the way to Appleborough for a simple charm! I don’t think I miss magic, do you? We have had little enough to do with it since Mamma died, but now it seems as if it’s just one more thing we left behind in the city. It’s not as though the cleverer practitioners ever came up with anything really useful, like self-peeling potatoes or needles that refuse to pierce human skin.”

That night Beauty had the dream. Her first reaction to finding herself again in that dark corridor where the monster waited was of heart-sinking dismay, for her last roses were still blooming in the garden. No! she cried in her dream. Let me go! It is not your time! The light of the candle nearest her flickered, as if disturbed by the draught of her shout. But as she drew her breath in again, she discovered that the corridor was full of the smell of roses, a rich deep scent nothing like her mother’s perfume and even more powerful and exciting than the scent of high summer in her garden. And she was not afraid.