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.
Jeweltongue relumed even as Beauty was looking after her, and said, “Beauty, if you’ve sold all your roses, maybe you’ll come lend me your eye? Mrs Bestcloth has a new shipment in, and Miss Trueword says she will leave it up to me, and I’m drowning in riches, I can’t decide, I want to use them all.”
Over a late tea at home Jeweltongue said, “You and Mrs Grecndown were in close conversation for some while, were you not? Did she tell you anything interesting? Mrs Tree-worthy—she and her husband have the Home Farm, you remember—says Mrs Greendown knows everything about everything round here,’’
“Yes ... oh ... a bit. Not very,” said Beauty, glancing at their father, who had come home with them after a day doing sums in Longchance, and now had his scribbles on his knee, and was holding his teacup absentmindedly halfway to his mouth.
Jeweltongue knew what that glance meant and said briskly, “Never mind. Help me remember what Miss True-word’s final decisions were, so I can write them down, my head is still spinning”—help that Beauty knew perfectly well her sister never needed.
By the time she and Jeweltongue were alone together, she had decided to say nothing of the curse. She thought there was a good chance that no one else in magic-shy Long-chance would mention it to anyone else in her family; she was the one who was supposed to be a greenwitch. What did she herself think about the curse? She didn’t know. Curses were dangerous things; they tended to eat up their casters and were therefore unpopular among magical practitioners, though they still happened occasionally. Most likely Longchance’s curse was some folk-tale that, in generations of retelling, had begun to be called a curse to give it greater prestige.
Her first impulse was to attend the very next market-day, find Mrs Greendown, and ask her to tell her explicitly just what this curse was. But she had second thoughts almost at once. She told herself that her interest might cause, well, reciprocal interest, and there was Lionheart’s secret to protect. But she knew that wasn’t the real reason for her change of heart. She didn’t want to know because she didn’t want lo know. And she would set herself to forgetting that Mrs Greendown had ever so much as mentioned a curse. “There’s nothing wrong with you and nothing wrong with Rose Cottage.” She would leave it there.
Jeweltongue was fascinated by the story of the greenwitch who had left them Rose Cottage and appeared to harbour no suspicions that Beauty was holding anything back, and by the end of her revised history, Beauty had already half succeeded in forgetting what she had chosen not to tell.
“What a romantic story! At least we now know why we never found the Longchance greenwitch’s signboard,” said Jeweltongue. “All the way to Appleborough for a simple charm! I don’t think I miss magic, do you? We have had little enough to do with it since Mamma died, but now it seems as if it’s just one more thing we left behind in the city. It’s not as ihough the cleverer practitioners ever came up with anything realty useful, like self-peeling potatoes or needles that refuse to pierce human skin.”
That night Beauty had the dream. Her first reaction to finding herself again in that dark corridor where the monster waited was of heart-sinking dismay, for her last roses were still blooming in the garden. No! she cried in her dream. Let me go! It is not your time! The light of the candle nearest her flickered, as it” disturbed by the draught of her shout. But as she drew her breath in again, she discovered that the corridor was full of the smell of roses, a rich deep scent nothing like her mother’s perfume and even more powerful and exciting than the scent of high summer in her garden. And she was not afraid.
Chapter 4
A second summer turned to autumn, to winter, and the third spring arrived. But this year was different, Spring was cold and bleak: the warmth of the turning year never came, and the rain never stopped. Summer arrived in seas of brown mud; the rivers overflowed and drowned the seed in the fields and more than a few calves and lambs. Everyone was still wearing coats and boots at midsummer; everyone was low and discouraged; everyone said they couldn’t remember a year like this....
And Beauty’s roses never bloomed.
They tried. The bushes put out leaves, draggled as they were by the relentless rain, but the long, arching branches drooped under the weight of the water, the weight of the heavy dark sky. The climber over the kitchen door was torn out of its hold on the thatch, and Beauty spent a long dreary afternoon tying it away from the door so that she need not cut the long stems. She came indoors soaked to the skin and spent the next week sneezing and shivering and standing over bowls of hot water and mint oil with a towel round her head to keep in the steam.
The bushes all produced a few hopeful flower-buds, but the sun never came to open them. Those flowers too stub—
born to know they were doomed turned as brown as the mud at their feet as soon as the sepals parted; a few Beauty rescued, half open, and brought indoors, where they sal dejectedly in a vase, too weary of the struggle to finish opening, their petals brown-edged and soon falling. Nor did they bear more than the faintest hint of their usual deep delicious scent.
Everyone grew bad-tempered. Jeweltongue’s remarks had edges like knives; Lionheart shouted; their father withdrew again into dull silence. Beauty, who should have been spending most of her time in the garden, felt like a rat in a trap. She kept the house clean, mucked out the shed, fed Lydia and the chickens—who were too depressed by the weather to fay—cooked the meals, ran errands both real and imaginary just for something to do, and stared at the ankle-deep slop that should have been her garden. And, with some effort, kept her own temper .,. till Jeweltongue snarled and Lionheart bellowed at her too. Finally she shouted back, threw a plate across the room and heard it shatter as she ran upstairs—just before she burst into tears.
She buried her face in her pillow, so that no one downstairs should hear her. The puppy Lionheart had rescued a year ago, rejoicing in the name Teacosy for her diminutive size and the neat little hummock she made when she curled up for a nap, followed her, and burrowed under Beauty’s trembling arm to lick her wet cheek.
The leak in the corner of the loft dripped sullenly into its pail. They had scratched enough money together at last to have their thatch replaced this spring; but not only could no thatcher work in a steady downpour, they now had to save the money to buy food for next winter—if they could. The farmers were all fighting the same weather that kept the thatchers indoors and ruined Beauty’s garden; market-days at Longchance were a sad affair.