Authors: Robin McKinley
Lionheart’s face relaxed, and she gave a faint and reluctant
laugh. “I’m sorry. I know I am—I am not at my best, which is to say that I know
you must know that I am not at my best, and I—I—oh, I can’t help it! It’s just
the way it is. It won’t go on forever. I can’t...” But whatever else she
thought of saying remained unsaid.
Jewcltongue laid the net and the ribbons down and came over
to help Lionheart mop up. “What’s wrong, dearest? Surely it would be a little
easier for you if you told us.”
Lionheart, on her knees, leant her forehead against the edge
of the table and closed her eyes. “No.”
“Weil, will you tell me anyway if I ask you?”
Lionheart opened her eyes and began to smile. “You are
giving me warning you are about to begin plaguing me to death about it, are
you?”
“Yes,” said JeweJtongue at once. “I was willing to let it
alone, you know, and wait for you to solve it yourself, but it’s been weeks.
It’s been—it’s been since the week after you went to the horse fair with Mr
Horsewise. Your great triumph, I thought. Has Mr Horsewise decided his protege
is just a little too young to be so clever?”
“Your estimation of my abilities is touching but misplaced,”
said Lionheart—“Mr Horsewise knows more than I’ll ever learn. It isn’t Mr
Horsewise.”
“Then you had better straighten out whatever it is, or it
will
be
Mr Horsewise,” said Jeweltongue, “because I can’t believe you aren’t
behaving like this at work too. I know you too well.”
LionhearL rocked back on her heels and stared wide-eyed at
Jeweltongue, and then her face began to twist and crumple, and, savagely as she
bit her lips, the tears would come. Jeweltongue put her arms round her, and
Lionheart pressed her face into her sister’s breast and roared, for Lionheart
could never weep quietly.
Their father rose from his place by the sitting-room hearth,
and came to the sink, and began to pump water for the teakettle, stooping to
pal Lionheart’s back as he passed her. He filled a bowl and left it on the
table near Jeweltongue, with a towel, and when Lionheart had subsided to a
snuffle, Jeweltongue tenderly wiped her sister’s face till Lionheart snatched
the towel away from her with a return of her usual spirit and mutlered, “I’m
not a baby, even if I’m behaving like one,” and scrubbed at her face till the
skin turned a bright blotchy red, “Matches your eyes nicely, dear,” said Jeweltongue.
Teacosy, judging that emotions were cooling to a safe level,
came out from behind die old merchant’s armchair, to which haven she had
withdrawn after being hit in the eye with some Hying batter. She sidled up to
Lionheart, put her nose in Lionhearl’s lap, and when she was not rebuffed, the
rest of her followed.
The old merchant made tea and passed cups down to the two
sisters still sitting on the floor, murmuring, “Old bones, you must forgive
me,” and drew up a chair for himself. When he sat down, Lionheart leant back
against his legs and sighed, and be stroked the damp hair away from her
forehead.
“It’s—it’s Aubrey,” Lionheart said at last. “He’s—he’s
guessed.”
“He won’t have you turned away!” said Jeweltongue, shocked.
“I would not have thought him susceptible to doltish views of propriety. And he
has been a good friend to you. has he not?”
“It’s worse than that,” said Lionheart. “I—I’m in love with
him. And I think—I’m pretty sure—he’s in love with me.”
“But that’s not—”
“Isn’t it?” said Lionheart swiftly. “Has Master Jack
forgiven you for preferring a short, stoop-shouldered fiour-monger with hands
like boiled puddings to his tall, elegant, noble self, whose white hands have
never seen a day’s work? D’you want to think about what happens next? This is
going to be one Loo many for Master Jack’s vanity, from the occupants of that
tatty little witch’s cottage beyond the trees at the edge of Farmer Goldfield’s
lands, where no respectable sort of folk ought to be willing to live in the
first place. You must have heard some of the stories that are being told about
why Beauty . .. where Beauty . . . why she isn’t here just now. Stories with
magic in them, here in Longchance, where everyone knows magic never comes.”
Her voice faltered, and then she went on. “And surely you’ve
heard that there’s a curse on this place if three sisters live in it’.’ The
tads like to tease me about it, say I’m pretty enough to be a girl if I wore a
dress and learnt to walk right, hut they’ve never told me what exactly the
curse is, and I don’t like to ask outright, do I?
“Our friends love us, so at present the stories are only
stories, even the curse—whatever it is. But... the True-words do what their
eldest son tells them to, you know; they think he’s wonderful: they think he’s
just loo clever and wise and good to bother himself with
doing
anything.
And Longchance does what the Truewords tell them.”
Beauty felt herself driven out of her own dream, pushed
away, as if by a storm wind, and battered and beaten by some force she could
not resist—but the sensation was much more sluggish lhan that. She felt weighed
down, dragged, muffled and inauled. She no longer dreamt, but she could not
wake, and she tossed in her bed as if her bedclothes imprisoned her.
Finally she threw herself successfully into wakefulness, and
there was sunlight on the carpet, and the teapot steaming through the spout
slit in the tea-cosy. All her pillows had fallen to the floor, and the
bedclothes, and her own hair, were wound in a great snarl round her. It took
her a minute or two to creep free, for she moved languidly, and she had trouble
understanding what she was looking at and which way to pull to loosen the
snare. She had to think about it to so much as brush her hair out of her mouth
in the right direction. Even awake as she was now it was difficult not to feel
trapped and to struggle blindly.
She felt her way down the bed stairs and poured herself a
cup of tea with an unsteady hand and then sat, staring at the cup while the tea
grew cold, holding the embroidered heart in both her hands, and saying to
herself. It was only a dream. It was only a dream. Please. It was only a dream.
Finally she drank the cold tea, and poured herself another
cup, and drank it hot, and the clouds in her mind and heart began to thin and
shred and then to blow away. “I must—I must return soon,” she muttered. “I must
know what is happening. And—if anything is happening, I must be there to share
it with them.” She kept remembering Lionheart saying.
The stories that are
being told about why Beauty isn’t here .
And the curse.
Surely you’ve heard that there’s a curse
on this place if three sisters live in it?
The curse was catching up with
them at last.
They’ve never told me what exactly the curse is....
She knew little of the Longchance baker and less of either
of Squire Trueword’s sons, but she knew about gossip, about how people talk and
how stories grow. She remembered Mrs Greendown saying, /
like to talk.
And
she remembered Mrs .Greendown telling her about the country greenwitch to whom
it mattered so much that Rose Cottage go to a particular family, who lived many
miles away in a city that perhaps no one living in Longchance had ever seen,
that she went to a lawyer and had papers drawn up to do it. Papers drawn up that
left it specifically to the three sisters of that family. And she remembered
Mrs Greendown saying,
f ain’t prying . .. much; but it’s ... interestin.’,
isn’t it? Like you said to begin, you can’t help being interested.
And she remembered saying to Mrs Greendown,
I’d much
rather know,
and Mrs Greendown replying,
You may not, dear, but I’m
thinking maybe you’d better. ...
;
’I must go home,” she said. “The roses must
bloom soon, for I must go home.” She stood up from the breakfast table and
walked out to the balcony, nursing her teacup in one hand and the embroidered
heart in the other, and stood staring at the glasshouse, effervescing in the
light of the early sun; slowly her face eased into a small smile. “Well,” she
said in her ordinary voice, “what is it to be today then? Nothing too—too
demanding. I’m probably about in a mood for spiders.”
As she said
spiders,
there was a twinkle in the
corner of her eye, as if the glasshouse had found a mirror to repeat itself in,
and she turned to look. The spiderweb hung the entire length of the balcony
door frame, and it caught the sunlight just as the glasshouse did, and lit up
in tiny fierce lines of fire and crystal.
“Oh,” said Beauty, letting out a long breath. “Oh.” It was
so beautiful she almost touched it, remembering just in time; but even the tiny
air current stirred by her fingers made the nearest gossamer thread quiver and
wink, and she saw die spider come out of its comer of the door frame and pluck
a connecting thread to see if there was anything worth investigating.
“Well, you are a handsome spider,” said Beauty bravely, “as
spiders go, and I salute you for a most radiant and well-composed web, and I
daresay I can bear you as a roommate—so long as you stay out here. I do not
want any of your daughters spinning their homes in my bed-curtains. I hope you
understand.”
The spider dropped the thread and retreated. A narrow gleam
of sunlight, barely thicker than gossamer itself, found an unexpected entry
into the spider’s corner and touched its back. The spider had curled itself
into a little round blob with no tegs showing (it immediately became smaller
when. with its legs tucked up, it was no longer so mercilessly identifiable as
a spider), and under the sunlight’s caress it glittered bright as polished jet,
and there was some faint gold and russet pattern upon it, which would not have
disgraced the bodice of a lady or the shield of a knight.
Beauty had leant closer to look and gave a kind of hiccup,
which should have been a laugh, except that she did not want to disturb the
spider again with her breath. “I draw the line at discovering spiders to be
beautiful too,” she said, “but I, er, take your point.”
It was not until then that she remembered she had wanted to
wake during the night and go onto the roof, and her life in the Beast’s palace
crept back to her and wrapped itself round her, and she did not notice it or
how comfortably it fitted her.
On this, her fourth day, she found the first leafbuds on her
cuttings and the first green tips aboveground in her seedbed.
She had a last load of clippings and rubbish to haul to the
bonfire glen; she raked and swept till the ground between the bushes was
satisfyingly brown and bare, and she weni round a last time, looking at
everything with her pruning-knife in her hand, and mostly felt her decisions
had been good ones. She had found green wood in nearly all her new roses (to
herself she called them her roses, as if they were merely an extension of those
at Rose Cottage, though she knew she was only rescuing them for the Beast), and
even those she had had no success with she was not yet ready to dig up and
dispose of; arguing to herself that they might yet shoot from the base if she
gave them a little more time.
There was perhaps more tying up she could do, more propping
and spreading out—the stakes and string had of course appeared for the purpose,
under and around the water-butt—but the glasshouse was nearly as tidy as she
could make it. “Barring an infinity of buckets of hot soapy water and a rag on
a very long stick,” she said, looking up at the thousands and thousands of
bright panes round her; “but I’m very—
very
—glad to say you don’t look as
if you need it.”
She leant her tools by the water-butt and bundled up a few
handfuls of leaves and twigs in her overskirt with her tinderbox in her pocket,
so that she could begin the fire, while she didn’t examine too closely her
expectation that the magic would bring the rest of the debris. And she might
keep her back to the carriage-way, so she need not see it arrive either. Would
leaves and twigs tumble suddenly out of nothing? Might she see—
something
—carrying
a great bundle of rubbish? No, she would definitely keep her back to the
carriage-way.
She put a trowel in another pocket as well. “I might have a
look round for heartsease at the edge of the wood,” she murmured, “just to have
something flowering to frame the paths. But once you’re all growing, and I see
what shapes you come to, I can plant up the empty spots with pansies.” But this
time she did not react to the implications of her words, and though she hummed
and sometimes sang to herself as she worked, she did not do so to drive fear
away from her.
She returned from the bonfire glade with her overskirt heavy
with carefully uprooted heartsease, and spent a little time kneeling by the
crosspath at the centre of the glasshouse, planting tiny purple faces in small
clusters among her cuttings at the four corners.
It was near lunchtime, but for the first time she was not
hungry for it. She stood restlessly in the centre of her glasshouse, with the
transplanted heartsease gleaming velvety and merry in the sunlight, and looked
round her. The good work she had done no longer pleased her, because she knew
her task was only half accomplished. She had to feed the soil, feed her roses,
or nothing would come of all she had done so far, and her cuttings and
seedlings would die too. “If! say ‘compost,’ I don’t suppose a compost heap
appears by the water-butt, does it?” It didn’t.
She walked through the orchard, too preoccupied to look for
the Beast—or too ashamed, for how could she face him now, when the job she was
here to do she was about to fail at?—and let herself into the walled garden
again; but she found no compost heap, nor any of the usual signs of human
cultivation, rakes and hoes and spades, trowels and hand forks and pruning
knives, seed trays and bel! glasses and pots for potting on, odd bits of timber
that might do for props but probably won’t, twists of paper that used to contain
seeds and haven’t found their way to the bonfire, broken pots, frayed string,
and bits of rusty wire. “Very well,” she said. “You are much too—too
organized
for such mortal litter, but if you, you magic, don’t need compost to
make—to allow—things to grow, why are the Beast’s poor roses dying?”
It is
the heart of this place, and it is dying.
She looked out again over the
too-tidy, too-beautiful vegetable beds and listened to the silence. Where were
the birds?