Beauty had not realised how much she had missed spending time in a garden, missed the smell and texture of earth, the quiet and companionable presence of plants. It was a wonderful spring that year, day after day of warmth and blue skies and the lightest, freshest of breezes, and while the rain fell as often as it needed to to keep the soil moist and workable and the streams full, it almost always fell tactfully after dark.
There were a few little beds round the house—flowers only. Beauty thought. Most of her attention was taken up by the back garden, which was mostly vegetables and quite a substantial plot for a house so small. Here she could more easily trace the rows and blocks of old plantings. Near the kitchen door, for example, was an herb patch. It had been laid out in a circle, like a wheel with spokes; but some of the wedge shapes were empty, and others had been colonised by their neighbours. She picked leaves from the imperialists: pungent, bitter, sharp, sweet. She knew the names of a few of them: fennel, chervil, marjoram, mint.
Beauty had walked along what remained of the boundary fence round the back garden, thinking that her first task must be to replace it. (She had thought even then, while Lionheart was still engaged upon rebuilding the privy, that she would try to recruit Lionheart’s assistance for the fence, though she would not find it so interesting, because it would help keep her out of mischief.) Once she started planting things, she would want to keep the chickens from scratching up her beds. Lydia was no problem: she was staked out each morning, helping to keep the newly reclaimed meadow a meadow, and had shown no desire—at least not yet—to slip her halter and go foraging for delicacies. But the woods ran quite near them; deer, and who knew what else lived in the wilds here, would eat anything the chickens missed. Except, perhaps, strong-flavored herbs.
She stooped and broke off the tip of a dead vine. It still
bore small shrivelled pods of—something; Beauty wasn’t sure what. It was odd, when she thought about it, that the garden didn’t show more signs of the depredations of enterprising wildlife; it was no longer producing very much, but—she rubbed the pods between her fingers—these would have been edible the year they grew, and if they’re growing in a garden, presumably they are edible. Beauty dropped the pods again. She had no more time now to puzzle over useless mysteries than she had had when she had been going through her father’s papers and discovered a will concerning Rose Cottage.
If they had a successful garden, they would be able to put up enough food that they would not have to fear the long winter. The precariousness of their present life suddenly appeared to her as if she stood on the brink of a literal abyss, staring into it till the impenetrable darkness made her dizzy. She knell heavily, feeling the cool dampness seep through her skirts to chill her knees, and scooped up a little earth in her hands, scrabbling at it, ending up with a handful of earthworms and wild violet roots for her pains. But it made her laugh—weeding with her fingernails—and the real weight of the earth comforted her. A confused earthworm thrust a translucent pink front end (or possibly rear; it was difficult to tell with earthworms) out of her handful. She knew this garden would do its best for her. It didn’t matter how she knew.
There were still cabbages growing, here and there, in erratic little clumps,, and those might be bean shoots, and those, piranthus squash. And now. here, this was truly the end. Beauty broke off a bit of the old fence, woven like matting, and it crumbled in her hands.
She sighed and stood still. If they were going to have food from the garden this year, she had to get busy. She should already be busy. Next market-day she would ask Jeweltongue to bring her seed—perhaps she should go herself and ask what grew most easily here—oh, but she shouldn’t waste a day; in weather like this the farmers’ crops would already be shooting, and she hadn’t even cleared her ground. She should be able to rig up some kind of scarecrow till she figured out what to do about fencing; clothing suitable for scarecrows was perhaps the only thing they had plenty of.
There was something plucking at the boundary of her attention. She looked down at the fence shreds in her hand. They looked like nothing at all and smelt both damp and dusty, but... She shook them in her palm and then poked them with a finger. A thread separated itself from the miscellany: a green thread. She picked it up in her free hand and held it under her nose. It smelt neither damp nor dusty; it smelt... No, she couldn’t say what it smelt of, hut for a moment she saw, as if she were dreaming it, a meadow surrounded by a wood, and in it fawn-coloured cows grazed, and the shadows from the trees fell strangely, some of them, for they seemed to be silver rather than dark.
Her head cleared, and she looked at the bit of green thread again. Greenwitch charms. There was a greenwitch in Long-chance after all, and she had sold garden charms to whoever had lived in Rose Cottage before them. Charms strong enough to be working more than fifteen years after they had been pur into place. That was more like sorcerer’s work, but no sorcerer would sloop to making garden charms, certainly not for anyone living in a place like Rose Cottage. Beauty had already remarked that she’d never seen a chicken in the back garden but had put it down to being still too unsettled by her new life to notice everything that was happening round her—even the things she meant to look out for.
Perhaps—perhaps if she took down and buried the remains of the old fence very carefully where it stood (and before it finished falling down of its own initiative; obviously the charms had included no longevity spell for lathe and reed), some of the old charm would persist. Whoever the unknown greenwitch was, if she was this good, Beauty couldn’t possibly pay her for new charms.
She put the bit of string in her pocket. She felt curiously reluctant to say anything about her discovery to her sisters. Perhaps it was only her father’s familiar ban on all magic in their family that made her so uneasy, made her feel that even her brief vision, with its unmistakable whiff of magic, was a meddling in things too big for her. What did cows in a field have to do with a garden charm? Never mind. But if bits of green string would help to keep her garden whole, she would treat them politely. And she would as well put up a scarecrow and start at once on a new fence.
She had been staring at the musty little slivers of matting left in her hand and dropped them in relief. When she looked up again, she let her gaze wander down the length of the garden and was immediately distracted by her favourite mystery, the one she couldn’t ignore, whether she had time for it or not. This one was, after all, quite an intrusive mystery. She wanted—she longed—to know what the deadly thomed shrubs that grew all over this garden were.