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, Lionhe
art, 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 sm
ile.
“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.