Lionheart. after her first few encounters with the dagger-furred ogre standing guardian by the front door (it was inevitably Lionheart who, flinging herself through the door at speed, had caught a superficial blow of the thorny branches across the forehead and come in with blood sheeting down her face), had wanted to have it and all its fellows out, as part of meadow clearance and garden ground preparation, and had offered herself ‘‘as the blood sacrifice,” she said. “You can bury my flayed body under the doorstone to bring yourselves luck afterwards.”
“Having failed to drown yourself in our well a few weeks ago?” enquired Jeweltongue. “You are such a life profligate. You’ll be offering next to hurl yourself off the roof for—for—it escapes me what for, but I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
Beauty, who was the acknowledged gardener in the family, had declined this dubiously advantageous offer although she had immediately tied the chief offender firmly away from the front door and lopped off what couldn’t be tied. She had already cut a hole in the truly astonishing climbing thorn-bush by the kitchen door. This had sent out so many long, uninhibited stems that it was now rioting over the entire rear wall of the house, nailing the kitchen door shut in the process as uncompromisingly as any carpenter could do it. It had climbed well up onto the roof also, no doubt considerably to the detriment of the thatch it clung to, and had begun to curl itself round the kitchen chimney. Not even the fact that this chimney was now in regular use again seemed to discourage it.
Even Jeweltongue felt that Lionheart had the right idea, if a little overexuberantly expressed, but Beauty said, “No. They were planted; it’s obvious they were planted deliberately. There must be a reason for them. I want to know what it is.”
After lhat she had to stand by her decision, but she nonetheless wondered if the game could possibly prove worth the candle. Tied-in stems of these whatever-they-were had a habit of working themselves loose, or suddenly growing an extra half league, or turning themselves round where they stood (Beauty knew that this was really only any plant’s desire to lean towards the sun. but quite often it seemed a malign strategy) and grasping at passersby. There was also, at each of the house’s four corners, a lower, rounder shrub with the same flexible stems covered with thorns. These were almost more dangerous than the climbers, because they were as wide as they were tail, and their arching branches seemed to lie in wait for the unwary, suddenly uncoiling themselves from round corners to ensnare their victim.
And in the very centre of the big back garden, where the lengthwise central path met a shorter path running crosswise, there was another circular bed, like the herb wheel, only much larger, and here grew more bushes like those round the house, with long wicked stems studded with knife points. While the herbs had merely colonised across their spoke boundaries, these bushes had thrown an impassable network of bristling stems higher than a man’s head in all directions, sprawling, manticore-tailed, across the paths round them as well, so that forcing them back to within their original bounds had been Beauty’s first necessary operation for reclaiming that part of the garden for other, more useful purposes.
There was a statue at the heart of that great shapeless, impenetrable morass, but it was so caught round with spiny stems (and rank weeds bold enough to make their way through) Beauty had not a notion of what it might be.
The stiletto bushes round the house were leafing out, big dark green leaves and surprising deep maroon ones. Many of the bushes in the centre wheel looked dead, their long, perversely floppy branches grey-green, almost furred, and nearly leafless. Some of them had the tiniest leafbuds showing, as if they were not sure of their welcome (that’s true enough, thought Beauty). These in the centre bed were covered with the longest, toothiest thorns (many of them hooked like fangs, for greater purchase) of anything in the whole well-armed battalion. Beauty looked at them musingly every time .she went into the garden. All the thom-bushes were ugly, but these were the ugliest.
But it was this crazy tangle of them at the very centre of the garden which told her—even more clearly than the pernicious presence of their cousins by both doors of the house—just how loved these awful plants must have been. Very well, she would keep them—for this year.
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 wear—
ing 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 Hal!. 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.