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 present 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 don’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.”
She rose to her feet, and Mr Whitehand rose too. “I’ll come with you,” he said.
She looked up and smiled. “No. You stay here and wait till the surgeon comes. I want someone besides my father to tell me what he says—and someone my father will have felt obliged to listen to too, if what he says is unwelcome. Besides, I—I think perhaps—”
“If it is magic,” said Mrs Oldhouse, “you will be much better off by yourself than with some dull Longchancer befogging all the—the—whatever magic does. Even you, Mr Whitehand. Go on then.” She added to the cat: “Take care of her, mind. Or no more warm evenings by the fire for you.”
Becky disappeared.
Jeweltongue took her cloak from the rack by the door and let herself out, Becky winding dangerously through her ankles. The night was clear after the rain, and there were stars overhead; the storm had left as quickly as it had come. Magic? Had the storm brought Beauty, taken her away again? Where was she? “I’ve never seen the stars so bright,” she said to Becky. “Have you? There’s the Ewer … and the Tinker … and the Peacock.” She took a deep breath, trying to regain her self-possession; it seemed to have gone with the storm and the ghost of her sister. “Oh!” The night air smelt of roses, strongly of roses.
Her nose was not so good for the variations of rose scent as was Beauty’s, but this odour put her immediately in mind of the dark red rose their father had brought home from the Beast’s palace, which had sat for weeks on their windowsill, whose petals had at last fallen when the roses in the garden—she could not help but think of them as Beauty’s roses—had bloomed in midsummer. She turned her head one way and then another, sniffing like an animal searching for water, or for danger, or for safety, and saw Becky trotting purposefully away from her. “Becky!” she called.
The cat stopped, turned her head, and looked at her. Curious how the starlight fell! The marmalade cat looked suddenly grey, and yet she stood next to a stand of black-eyed Susans, whose colour even in this faint light clearly showed orange. The cat turned away again and trotted on.
“Oh dear,” said Jeweltongue, but with her first step following, the smell of roses grew stronger still, and Jeweltongue broke into a trot herself. “I hope you are not leading me into any thickets,” she muttered under her breath. “I am a good deal higher up from the ground than you are, you know, and you are leading me directly into the middle of nowhere,” for the cat had gone straight across Mrs Oldhouse’s gardens and into the meadow beyond, easily picking her way across the stepping-stones in the stream at its bottom, while Jeweltongue, confused by the shadow dapples, splashed less skilfully in her wake. Jeweltongue was jerked to a sudden halt, and there was a sound of tearing cloth. “Oh, bother!” she said. “I liked these sleeves! I should have let Miss Trueword have this bodice after all.”
The cat trotted on, and Jeweltongue followed, her sense of urgency increasing. In her mind there was a picture of the dark red rose: Only a moment ago it had seemed to be little more than a bud; now it was full open; now she saw its petals curling back, drooping; now the first one fell.…
She battled her way through a thin hedgerow, and suddenly she knew where she was; this was the end of Farmer Goldfield’s land, and Rose Cottage was only a few steps that way and through the stand of trees. “I don’t know how you did that,” said Jeweltongue to the cat. “I was supposed to stay the night with Mrs Oldhouse, you know—do you know?—because it is much too long a walk home. Much longer than this. Oh—” A terrible thought struck her. “She’s not ill, is she? That isn’t why you have brought me in such a hurry—”
She began to run, but the cat was purring round her ankles, and she would not risk kicking her, and then it seemed rude not to thank her properly. So she stooped and petted her, and the cat purred, and rubbed her small round skull against Jeweltongue’s chin, and put her forepaws on Jeweltongue’s knees, and licked her once with her raspy tongue. Jeweltongue, looking into her face, said, “You’re not Becky at all, you’re some other cat,” at the moment that her hands, stroking the cat’s sides, felt the soft swellings of her breasts hidden by her silky fur. “Ah! You’re only in a hurry to go home to your kittens. Are you Beauty’s cat then?”
But the cat jumped down and ran off, and Jeweltongue hastened the last few steps to Rose Cottage, and at that moment she heard a heartrending wail from Tea-cosy, exiled for the night in the goat shed.
At the door of the cottage she met Lionheart, with her hand out to lift the latch; she turned at the sound of Jeweltongue’s approach. “You too! Tonight’s your literary party, isn’t it? You shouldn’t be home at all—especially not walking alone at this time of night. Listen to poor Tea-cosy! What’s wrong with us? I had to come.”
“I don’t know,” said Jeweltongue. “Something about—”
“—Beauty,” finished Lionheart, and pushed open the door.
She was asleep, lying as if flung on the hearth-rug, in front of the banked fire; her arms and legs were sprawled, and her hair lay across her face as if blown there by a strong wind. One hand seemed only just to have dropped a dark red rose, its petals blowsily open and near to falling, and she was as wet as if she had been out in the storm.
“Beauty,” breathed Jeweltongue.
“Oh, Beauty!” said Lionheart.
Jeweltongue dropped to her knees beside her sleeping sister and picked up one cold hand and began to chafe it. Lionheart bent over them just long enough to brush the hair from Beauty’s face, tenderly, murmuring, “We’re like a three-legged stool with one leg gone, without you,” and then knelt by the fire and began to dig through the ashes for embers worth blowing on. She said between exhalations: “I couldn’t believe … any harm … had come to her … even though … I had no real reason …”
“But the roses,” said Jeweltongue.
“Yes,” said Lionheart, feeding kindling chips into her tiny flame flickers. They both glanced at the window over the back garden; even in the darkness, the ruffled and scalloped edges of a few late roses that framed it were visible. A little wind stirred, and several of the roses tapped their heads against the panes; it was a reassuring sound. “If Beauty’s roses were blooming, then so was Beauty.”
Jeweltongue rose abruptly and fetched an empty jam jar, upside down next to the washing-up bowl, filled it with clean water from the ewer, and put Beauty’s rose in it. “This is another one like the one Father brought, isn’t it? I remember the smell. Only it’s nearly gone over. I wonder what—” She hesitated.
“—adventures Beauty has had since she plucked it? Yes,” said Lionheart. “But her adventure will have been nothing like Father’s.” She tried to speak firmly, but her voice trailed away.
“The first one lasted and lasted, as if the rose itself were enchanted.… Help me get her out of her wet things, and then if you’ll go let Tea-cosy in before she brings the wild hunt’s hounds down on us.”
Tea-cosy rushed out of the goat shed and hurled herself against the closed door of the cottage. At the thump, Beauty stirred for the first time. Jeweltongue had been tying her dressing-gown round her. It was a new one; Jeweltongue had only just finished making it last winter, to replace the rag of overcoat Beauty had been using in the absence of anything better. She had refused to take it with her to the Beast’s palace, as it was now the nicest of their three: “An enchanted palace must have dressing-gowns and to spare, or if not, I will make a velvet curtain serve.” Neither Jeweltongue nor Lionheart had had the heart to use it, however, and it had hung untouched on its peg for seven months. It had been such a long time! She stopped what she was doing and stroked Beauty’s cheek. “Beauty? Please, darling …”
The door opened to the sound of Lionheart’s expostulations, and Tea-cosy launched herself at Beauty and began frantically licking her face, making little squeaking whimpers and wagging her short tail so hard her body vibrated down its full length, and between the counter-impulsions of wagging and licking, her ears seemed to spin out almost sideways, in a blur like hummingbirds’ wings.
“Saints!” said Jeweltongue, trying to lift her away, but the dog, usually immediately amenable to anything any of the sisters suggested, struggled in her grip and began to burrow under Beauty’s arm and side.
“Tea-cosy,” murmured Beauty, trying to sit up. “I’d know that frenzy anywhere … you’re much worse than Fourpaws, I’d forgotten … don’t eat me, please.”
And then there were several minutes while the sisters simply wept in one another’s arms, and several more minutes when no one could say anything in particular, and then Lionheart got up to make tea, and Jeweltongue, Beauty, and Tea-cosy remained in front of the now enthusiastically burning fire, and Jeweltongue’s arms were round her sister, and Beauty’s head was on her shoulder, and Tea-cosy was stretched across both their laps.
“Are you ready to talk?” said Lionheart, returning with the tray.
Beauty sighed and shook her head—gingerly, because it felt so odd. She felt odd all over: Her skin was overtender and faintly prickly, like the end, or the beginning, of fever, and her thoughts spun stupidly in place and would not connect with one another. She had a strange savour in her mouth, as if she had been eating rose-petals. Why could she not remember the journey here? What had happened? She had a sense of something, of some doom near at hand, but she could not remember what it was. She did not want to remember. “Why is it so dark? Is it the middle of the night? Where is Father?”
“It is the middle of the night—when did you arrive, my love?—and Father is in Longchance, at the—the remains of a literary party. He read his own poem; he was very grand! And they called him Mr Poet after! But there was, er, a tiny accident—he’s really perfectly all right—and I came on alone.”
“In the middle of the night,” murmured Lionheart. “How did you know to come?”
Jeweltongue felt herself blush, but the firelight was warm on all their faces, and none of them wanted to disturb their own little family magic by lighting a lamp. “Well … there was this cat—”
Lionheart sat bolt upright. “But that is precisely what happened to me!”
Jeweltongue tightened her arm round Beauty, and Beauty looped her arms round the front end of Tea-cosy and hugged her, and the dog sighed hugely on a long low note of utter contentment and fell asleep, muttering faintly in her dreams.
The sisters found in themselves a great reluctance to discuss anything at all. They were home in Rose Cottage, all together again, and it was the middle of the night. They had no responsibilities; responsibilities returned with daylight. The fire crackled; Tea-cosy kicked as she ran after a dream rabbit; the roses round the kitchen window tapped against the glass; peace pooled around them like water.
Lionheart sighed, and put her teacup down. “I will have to go back to the Hall soon. I’m sorry. Would that I had known to bring Daffodil! That’s something you don’t know, Beauty; when we tried to send her back with the traders, they had a note from the captain saying we were to keep her, that she was a country pony, not a city pony. So we sent half a fair purchase price south and will send the other half in the spring. She’s a great favourite at the Hall. It’s the first time anyone has ever seen Dora happy on horseback, riding Daffodil, which is a great thing for poor Dora, in that family.
“Beauty, please, can you bear it? Can you bear to tell us what happened? Even a little of it? Mostly—really—only—are you home—home—home for—” Her courage failed her, and she could not finish her sentence.
But Beauty, to her sisters’ alarm, turned in Jeweltongue’s arms and began to weep against her sister’s breast. “I do not know what to do! It is all too impossible! He is very kind—and—and—oh—but his roses are blooming again, I am sure that is what he wanted of me—” Why had she a picture in her mind of the Beast saying, Beauty, will you marry me? Why would someone so great and grand, like the Beast, want to marry her? She was beautiful, but that would fade, unlike Jeweltongue’s skill with her needle and Lionheart’s horse sense. She had always been the least of the sisters, called Beauty because she had no other, better characteristic to name her as herself. She could make roses bloom—but that was the unicorns and the old woman. There was a little gap in the magic, that was all, and she had mended it, merely by being there, as if she were a bit of string.
“I am sure that is what he wanted of me, and I cannot possibly live without you and Father, but I have begun to wonder if I cannot live without—” And here her tears overcame her, and she sobbed without speaking. Tea-cosy woke up and began to lick her wrist.
Jeweltongue stroked her hair, and eventually Beauty sat up again, drawing her hand away from the dog. “You will wear a hole in the skin soon, little one,” she said, and took the dog’s head between both her hands, and smoothed the fur back over her skull and down her neck and ears. “Your hair is so thick and curly, after Fourpaws! I wonder if Fourpaws—” She almost said, “misses me,” but stopped before the dangerous words were out. Dangerous, why? she thought; but she had no answer, only the sick, torn, unhappy feeling she’d had since—since … She could not remember. How had she come here? Why could she not remember the Beast’s last words to her? Why then was she so sure that those last words had been important?
“Who is Fourpaws?” said Jeweltongue.
“Fourpaws is a cat I—who lives where I have been staying. She has just had kittens. She is very pretty—rather small, grey with amber flecks and huge green-gold eyes.”
“But that must be the cat that I—” “But that is the cat—” Jeweltongue and Lionheart spoke simultaneously.
“I didn’t finish telling you,” said Lionheart. “I’ve been horribly restless all evening, but I thought—I told myself—it was just the storm. Molly came in and wouldn’t go out again—usually she sleeps in the barn, and indeed, Mr Horsewise doesn’t like her in the house; he says she has to earn her keep—but she wouldn’t settle down either and kept winding through my legs and making this fretful, irritating, hoarse little mewing till I thought—with the wind and the rain and her going grrup grrup in anything resembling a lull—I would go mad with it.
“The storm cleared off from the east, you know; you would have had it longer in Longchance, I think. As soon as the wind dropped, I opened the door and pretty well threw her out, but when I tried to close the door again, she was standing on the threshold. If I hadn’t seen her in time, I think I’d’ve closed it on her, because she really wasn’t moving.
“But I was in a state myself by then. I had this craving to go back to Rose Cottage. I don’t know how else to describe it. I was convinced I’d find Beauty there, you know? Only I knew that was ridiculous. But I thought a walk might calm me down a little, so I came out. Everyone else was asleep. We get up early, you know, we fall asleep early. We all have our own tiny cubbies, upstairs from the common room, so even if it’s not allowed, and it isn’t, if you want to slip out, it’s not hard.
“Molly was thrilled, and gambolled and played like a kitten, always coming back to me and then dashing off somewhere, and I was so preoccupied with fighting my longing to come home I just followed her for something to do … and then discovered I was out in the middle of the woods and had no idea where I was. I would have said I know every foot of woodland around here, not just the bridle paths but the deer trails—the rabbit trails, for pity’s sake!—but I was completely lost. And then I followed Molly because I didn’t know what else to do.
“And then about the time I spilled out on a track I did know—the one that runs along the length of Goldfield’s farm—and I saw Molly in fairly bright starlight after all the shadows under the trees, I saw it wasn’t Molly. All cats are grey in the dark, but Molly is brindle-black and white, and the white shows. You see her white front twinkle in the dark of the barn when you’re up before dawn.”
“And she came up to you to say good-bye, and when you petted her, you noticed she was nursing kittens,” said Jeweltongue.
“Yes,” said Lionheart. “And we’d covered far more distance than we should have been able to. One of the reasons I was so cross about being lost is that we hadn’t been walking long—not long enough to get really lost in. When I came out on the farm road, I was only about half an hour from here, and on foot in the dark, from the Hall, it’s at least three hours. Which is why I need to leave soon. I don’t suppose your Fourpaws will be hanging round waiting to take me back.”
“Half an hour,” said Jeweltongue. “I guess she, Fourpaws, had to dash off to relieve Becky, who was bringing me.”
They both turned to Beauty, who was staring out the window at her roses. “I can’t remember,” she said softly. “I remember this morning … and Fourpaws’ kittens … and the night before … the unicorns—oh, I remember the unicorns!—and so I didn’t want to go into the glasshouse this morning. There is something I cannot remember. I went to find the Beast.… Oh!” She sat up again, and leant forward to grasp Jeweltongue’s hands. “I remember Jack Trueword—the story he told—I was afraid—have I ruined it for all of us?—Do we have to leave Longchance? I had to come back to see if you were all right—”
“If we were all right!” exploded Lionheart. “You’ve been gone seven months with never a word, and now suddenly you reappear because of something that conceited little fop said, and you want to know if we’re all right? You wretched, thoughtless brute, why didn’t you ever send us word about you?”
“Seven months?” Beauty said slowly. “Seven months? But it’s only been seven days. The butterflies were the first morning, the day after I arrived, and then the bat, and the hedgehogs, and the spider, and the toads, and this morning was Fourpaws’ kittens—seven days.”
“Dear,” said Jeweltongue, “it’s been seven months for us.”
There was a silence. “I’m so sorry,” said Beauty.
Lionheart slid to her knees beside Beauty, and took her hands away from Jeweltongue, and held them tight. “I’m sorry—sorrier. I’m sorry I shouted. You would have sent word if you could—even if it had been only seven days. It’s just … it’s been so long, and we knew nothing.”
“It’s been so long,” agreed Jeweltongue in a low voice. “And we can’t let Father know how it troubles us.…”
“Hardest for you,” said Lionheart to Jeweltongue, though she still held Beauty’s hands. “We’ve had to pretend that we know you’re all right—we’re sisters, our hearts beat in each other’s breasts, we know—and also, it’s Father who has the aversion to magic. If it comes up at all, then he berates himself, and he’s still not strong, you know; he’s never really been strong since we left the city. So it’s all been up to us. And Jeweltongue is here, day after day, every day.”
“I’ve dreamt of you,” said Beauty. “I dreamt of Mr Whitehand—”
“Yes,” said Jeweltongue. “We became engaged late in the spring.”
“And of Aubrey Trueword—”
Lionheart said suddenly: “That day Molly was behaving like a lunatic, as if she could see someone who wasn’t there, was that you? When Aubrey first told me he knew I—”
“Yes,” said Beauty. “And tonight—was it tonight?—I—”
“I saw you,” said Jeweltongue. “I saw you, sitting in Mrs Oldhouse’s parlour.”
“But what about Jack’s story? He means us harm, if—Lionheart, I dreamt of a day when you told Jeweltongue and Father about Aubrey, but that you didn’t dare, because of the curse, because of the stories people were telling about my going away … because of Jack—”
It was Lionheart’s turn to blush. She stood up abruptly and went to refill the kettle. “I—I’m brave enough about some things. Not about others. When we had to leave the city, I thought I’d die. Not for grief, or even anger, but more from a kind of … amazement that the world could be so unlike what I had thought. And then … fear. Fear for all those things I didn’t know. I would get up in the morning and look at my petticoats, and my stockings, and my shoes, and my dress, and I didn’t know which one to put on first, or whether my shoes went on my feet or my head. I would decide they went on my feet from the shape. How could I live when I knew nothing?”
“Darling heart, we all felt like that,” said Jeweltongue.
“And people like Jack … terrify me,” continued Lionheart, as if she had not heard. “It’s why I hated your salons so much, Jeweltongue. I’d rather face a rogue horse any day. Horses are honest. You know where you are with horses.”
“You know where you are with people like Jack Trueword,” said Jeweltongue. “You are in the presence of form without substance, sound without meaning, clatter without articulation.”
“Stop it,” said Lionheart. “If you mean dog droppings and green slime, say it.”
“Wait,” said Beauty. “Jeweltongue, you were frightened tonight. I saw it.”
“Was I? Yes, I suppose I was,” said Jeweltongue. “You see, since you went away … anything to do with magic, I cannot help wondering if it has anything to do with you. I keep wanting to know more about spells and enchantments, but I don’t want to know, for fear what I learn will be worse than not knowing. But there is no magic in Longchance; there is no way to ask tactfully, there is no way to ask for comfort … and what made it worse, although not the way you mean, is that it’s true Longchance has been whispering little tales about your going away, dear, but they’re hopeful—and embarrassed—little tales. You see, Longchance has never quite given up the idea you’re a greenwitch, because the roses bloomed for you, and while the last greenwitch disappeared mysteriously too, the roses stopped blooming when she went, and we’ve made no secret of it that we’ve had a garden full of roses this year too.
“And then, as Lionheart says, we’ve been so determinedly bright and sunny about your absence, everyone positively has to squint from the glare when they look at us, although I know my poor Whitehand had guessed there was something about something I wasn’t telling him.… And meanwhile I have kept looking at your roses, and they look so—so happy, if one can say that about flowers, I’ve wanted so to believe they were telling me—”
“Us,” said Lionheart.
“—what we wanted—badly wanted—to know. But then Mrs Oldhouse’s story, out of nowhere, and with the storm pounding away at us like a monster yelling for our lives, and then Jack coming in, wet as a water spirit, and threatening us with that curse I’ve been worrying about for years—”
“Then you did know,” said Beauty.
“After all the talking-to you gave me the day I told you about Aubrey!” interrupted Lionheart in high dudgeon, and then began to laugh. “So much for no secrets between sisters!”
She had paused, tea-kettle in hand, beside the jam jar containing the dark red rose. Its first petal had already fallen; she picked it up, rubbing it gently between her fingers for the deliciously silken feel, as she hung the kettle over the fire again. “Oh, Beauty, won’t you please tell us what has been happening to you? I really must go off again—as it is, I’ll be back after dawn and will have to tell Mr Horsewise something—and I will explode of curiosity if you don’t. Start with Fourpaws. Why is she called Fourpaws?”
“The Beast named her. She is the only creature—was the only creature—who would live in the palace with him, and he said she must be a sorcerer in her own country, and he would not imbalance the delicate network of her powers by giving her a powerful name when she has done him the great kindness of breaking the loneliness of his house.” And there rose up in her the memory of the evenings they sat together in the great dark dining-hall, and she did not remember the pressing shadows, the imprisoning silence, but the companionship of the Beast, and Fourpaws, purring, on her lap.
There was a silence, as Jeweltongue and Lionheart tried to adjust to this other sort of Beast than the one they had heard about from their father. There was tremendous relief in this new idea of a thoughtful, wistful Beast, but there was tremendous bewilderment too. “Will you tell us about the Beast?” said Jeweltongue timidly. “Surely he is a sorcerer too?”
“Oh no,” Beauty heard herself saying immediately. “I—I don’t know why I said that. I had assumed that he was, as you did, but lately, as I have grown to know him better …”
She fell silent, and in the silence Lionheart watched the second petal fall from the dark red rose.
Jeweltongue said: “Surely there is some boundary to the magic—how long to pay the debt of one blooming rose in the middle of winter? Isn’t seven months enough?”
Again Beauty heard her own voice answer, speaking almost as quietly as a rose-petal falling: “He told me he cannot—that he never could—hold me against my will.” She knew the words were true as soon as they were out of her mouth, but where had they come from? And why could she not remember?
Why couldn’t she remember how she had left the Beast’s palace and come to Rose Cottage?
Jeweltongue laughed, a laugh like a child’s bubbling up from somewhere beneath her heart. “But then you can stay with us! I can finally give poor Whitehand a day! He has been very good, although—since I had not told him the truth—he has been puzzled at why my sister is quite so unspecific about when she might be able to return, only long enough to attend a wedding. I know it has occurred to him that I have not meant to marry him at all, but I do! Oh, I do! But I could not be married without your being here, Beauty, or, at the very, very, very least, knowing that you were well. There now, Lionheart, you can put Aubrey out of his misery too.”
“We were planning on a double wedding, just like—not at all like—we were going to do in the city many years ago,” said Lionheart.
“Not at all like,” said Jeweltongue quickly, with a touch of her old acidity. “Once you finally overcame your peculiar terrors—rogue horses, indeed! It is as well I do not know the daily facts of your life, or I should not sleep for worrying!—and gave your hand to poor Aubrey.”
Beauty leant over to touch Lionheart’s knee. “Then you have told him yes? And that is all well? What of Mr Horsewise?”
Lionheart smiled reminiscently. “Mr Horsewise was appalled for about two and a half heartbeats, and then it occurred to him that he’s been fighting off a suspicion about me almost since I’d come to work for him, and he hadn’t wanted to know because if he knew the wrong thing, he might lose me, and … well …”
“Go on,” said Jeweltongue. Lionheart muttered something inaudible, and Jeweltongue laughed her merry, bubbling laugh again. “Mr Horsewise dotes on her! She is the finest ‘lad’ he’s ever had, you see, and now he not only won’t lose her but is positively obliged to promote her, because Aubrey is going to take the horse end of affairs at the Hall on and run it as a business, which is deeply offensive to Jack, of course, but Aubrey worked it out with his father so that Jack can’t touch it, although—”
“Although we’re going to have to work like slaves to make a success of it,” finished Lionheart.
“As soon as the sun is up, I’ll measure you for your wedding-dress,” said Jeweltongue, “that is, the dress you will wear to our wedding.” Her happiness faltered for a moment, for she would have liked it to be a triple wedding, but now that Beauty was home again, surely … “You won’t be nearly as hard to please as Lionheart, I’m sure. Oh, I’m so glad! What colour, do you think? Gold? Green? Blue? Darling, what is it?”
“Oh—my Beast. He is my friend, you see—”
“Your friend?” bellowed Lionheart. “Your gaoler, your kidnapper, and you have told us that he has admitted he could not keep you in the first place, so he is a liar and a trickster as well—”
“Oh no, no,” said Beauty in great distress. “You do not understand at all. I will go back to visit him. I take care of his roses!”
“You have roses enough to care for here!” said Lionheart.
Jeweltongue laid her hand on Beauty’s. “If the Beast is your friend, then we must—we must learn that. But it is hard for us, just now, at the beginning, especially when we haven’t—haven’t quite known if we had lost you entirely.”
“He never—” began Beauty. “He always—”
Jeweltongue smiled. “I believe you. Go on. We’re listening.” She flicked a quelling look at the more volatile Lionheart, but Lionheart was dreamily watching something behind her and Beauty’s heads. She turned to see; another petal wavered and fell from the dark red rose, and then, after the merest breath of a pause, a whole gust of petals.
“He is—he is—oh, I don’t know how to describe him!” said Beauty. “He is very tall, and very wide, and very hairy; he is a Beast, just as he is named. He eats apples in two bites, including the cores. But he is—that is not what he is like.”
“What is he like then?” Jeweltongue prompted.
“He is gentle and kind. He loves roses. He loves roses best of all, but his were dying; the only one still blooming was the one from Father’s breakfast table. Of course, when I knew—when I found—I had to rescue him—help them—rescue them—him. He walks on the roof every night, looking at the stars. On the roof he has drawn the most beautiful map of the sky.… ” Beauty was weeping as she talked.
“My dear,” said Jeweltongue, gently turning her sister’s face towards her. “Why do you weep?”
“Every night, after supper, he asks me to marry him,” said Beauty, and she knew she spoke the truth, that it was no mirage of memory, and then she was weeping so passionately she could speak no more.
Jeweltongue put her arms round her and rocked her back and forth as if she were a little child. “Well—and do you wish to marry him?”
Beauty wept a little longer, and slowly her tears stopped, and she looked up. Jeweltongue looked gravely back at her. “He is—he is very great, and grand, and … he is a Beast.”
“Yes, very large, very hairy, you said. Great and grand—foo. Are you afraid of him?”
“Afraid of him? Oh, no!”
“Well then, if he were an ordinary man, instead of a Beast, and my darling younger sister burst into tears immediately after telling me he had asked her to marry him, I would advise her that it is perfectly obvious that she should say yes.”
“But—”
“He is very large and very hairy, and your introduction to each other was … awkward, and first impressions are so important. Very well. What is it you dislike? That he eats apples in two bites, including the cores?”
Beauty laughed through the last of her tears. “No, no! Although in an ordinary garden, I should want the cores for my compost heap.”
Lionheart groaned. “You only ever think of one thing! Your roses!”
Beauty flashed back: “You only ever think of one thing! Your horses!”
Jeweltongue said, “Do you remember Pansy’s story—many years ago, when we were still quite little, before Mamma died—of the princess who married the Phoenix?”
“Yes,” murmured Beauty. “I remember.”
“It is very odd,” said Lionheart. “Jeweltongue, d’you remember the way the rose Father brought lasted what seemed like nearly forever? It wasn’t just that it was the middle of winter, was it? Look, the last petal is already falling from the rose Beauty brought with her.”
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.
“The last petal!” cried Beauty, her last conversation with the Beast suddenly and terribly recalled to her mind, and she threw herself to her feet, knocking painfully into Jeweltongue, spilling Tea-cosy, who gave a little yip of surprise, to the floor, spinning in the direction Lionheart was looking, reaching for the forgotten rose there in its humble jam jar, reaching for the last petal, her hand darting out faster than her mind could direct it, but that last petal fell from its flower head before her fingers touched it, dropping softly into her palm, and she stared at it in horror. “Oh no,” she whispered. “Oh no.”
“Darling, what is it?” said Jeweltongue.
“What is it about the last petal?” said Lionheart. “What enchantment does it hold that frightens you so?”
But Beauty did not hear them. She looked up from the last petal in her hand, sightlessly staring at her sisters. When the last of them falls, I will die. “Do you remember,” she said, “when Father brought that first rose home, I cut two pieces from its stem and planted them, hoping they would strike. Did they? Did they? Oh, please tell me at least one of them did!”
Jeweltongue put a hand to her face. “I—I’m not sure. I don’t remember. I—I am not much of a gardener, dear, dear Beauty. Please try to forgive me.”
Beauty turned and fled into the rear garden. She was so distraught by terror and grief she could not remember where she had put the two stem cuttings; she cursed herself for not telling Jeweltongue to tend them particularly, for cuttings are very vulnerable as they struggle to produce their first roots, but she cursed herself more for not remembering—until it was too late—for not watching her rose, the Beast’s rose, that he had given her last of all. And she looked at the petal in the palm of her hand and saw the smear of blood there, from clasping the stem of that rose too tightly. How could she not have remembered?
She thought of the endless wall of the palace, the first time she had tried to follow it to the corner of the courtyard, to see what lay behind the glasshouse. She thought of the first evening she mounted the spiral staircase, the basket she had almost not found, and the storm that had come from nowhere, as soon as she touched the weather vane.
But she had turned the corner, arrived at the top of the staircase, found the basket, and descended from the ladder. The Beast had carried her up the stair and guarded her down the ladder. He would not be dead; she would not allow it. She had sent butterflies and bats and hedgehogs and toads into the palace gardens, she had welcomed kittens (and one spider) into the palace when the Beast himself had said no creature would live on his lands. The unicorn had come to her, and the roses bloomed. She would not let him die.
She would not let him die. Her resolution faltered. As soon as her sisters had told her she had been seven months away, she should have remembered, she should have thought at once to look at the rose. It did not matter what her father’s rose had done; she knew the enchantment that held her Beast and his roses had changed, for she had changed it. And now she was destroying everything when the Beast had trusted her. When the Beast had loved her.
Blindly she went down the centre path of the garden towards the great riotous tangle at its heart; the roses there had gone over from their full midsummer flush, but there were still a few heavy flower heads bowing their branches with their weight. She was vaguely aware, as her eyes began to focus on what lay round her, that the night’s darkness was greying towards morning. Her gaze settled on the statue within that centre bed, the statue of a beast she had never been able to name; and it was a beast like her Beast, and she remembered him on his knees in the glasshouse, drenched by rain, looking up at her, smiling. But the statue was no longer standing, as it had when she last stood in Rose Cottage’s garden. It was lying, curled up on its side, one forelimb over its head, looking lost, and hopeless, and as if it only waited to die. “You cannot die,” said Beauty.
She heard the first bird heralding the dawn; two notes, then silence. “Tell me,” she said to the poor lost Beast, held close by the thorny tangled weave of rose stems, where he could not have stirred even had he wanted to. “Tell me where your rose grows! It must have struck! I say it must have struck! I am coming back to you, do you hear me? Help me! As you made a mistake when you brought me to you, so I have made a mistake now! And as I released you from yours, release me now from mine!” Lord Goodman died for me today, I’ll die for him tomorrow.
A second bird called. Beauty took a deep breath, trying not to begin crying yet again. I have done nothing but weep this evening, she thought. If I had wept less and thought more, I would not be—and then the tears came very close indeed, and she had to hold her breath altogether to keep them in.
She let her breath out finally and stood quietly, feeling her shoulders slump, listening to a third and fourth and fifth bird. I must bring the birds back to the Beast’s garden too, she thought idly; I want to hear them singing when we stand in the orchard together.… And then there was a scent on the air she remembered, a scent unique to itself, threading its way through all the other rose scents, heavy in the dew of predawn, and she turned and walked down the crosspath to the edge of a little side bed, still half invisible in the tentative light of early dawn. And there were two tiny, rather weakly bushes, but they were both alive, and by next season they would be growing strongly. One of them was wisely conserving all its strength for growing roots and leaves; the other one held one black-red bud, much smaller than the buds of its parent bush and barely open, open just enough for its first wisp of perfume to have escaped. She knelt by it slowly and touched it with the hand that still held the last petal from the dead flower, and as she knelt, she heard her sisters come up behind her.
She did not rise, but she turned her head to look at them. “Give me your blessing, please,” she said, “and know that I will come back to you when I can. But I must go back to my Beast just now, for he needs me most. Jeweltongue, give your Mr Whitehand his day, and let Aubrey Trueword and Lionheart share it, and have your wedding, and know that I bless you in it, wherever I am. Tell Father I love him, and I am sorry to have missed this meeting with him.
“And—and most especially know that I love you and that it is true that our hearts beat in one another’s breasts.” And for the first time in what felt like years, her hand touched the little embroidered heart that Jeweltongue had made her, on her leaving for the Beast’s palace the first time, but she did not draw it out from beneath her shift, and it was only then that she realised she was wearing the dressing-gown Jeweltongue had made for her, only last winter, that she had refused to take with her last spring. It smelt of washing day and faintly of dust, and she knew, even as she had known at her leaving, that neither of her sisters would have used it for the sorrow of her going.
She turned back to look at the little rose; it was half open now, and one of its outermost petals was trying to curl back, free from its sisters. “And … feed these two little bushes! Give them a few of the oldest, rottenest, shrivelledest scrapings from the back of the manure heap, just a few, not too many—that is what they like. Even if you haven’t time to build a compost heap, you can do that. Cuttings are very tender. They must be encouraged, not bullied, into growing.” She seized the petal that was separating itself from the others and gave it a gentle tug; it came free in her hand, and she set it in her mouth.