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 Jewekongue.
“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 micfmorning. 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 mid-morning 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 eventuaiiy, 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 [he 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 relumed 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 iong 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, Lionheart, well, Mr Horse wise 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 iittle 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 green witches 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 Apple borough, but they don’t come to Longchance. But dreams are important to greenwitchcs 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 greenwilch 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 green witch,” 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 green witch 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 wild berry 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 talc 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.