She wrote to the lawyers, asking if there was any further transaction necessary if they wished to take up residence, and received a prompt but curt note in reply saying that the business was no longer anything to do with them but that they supposed the house was still standing.
Rose Cottage, she thought. What a romantic name. I wonder what the woman who had it was like. I suppose it’s Like a lot of other house names—a timid family naming theirs Dragon Villa or city folk longing for the country calling theirs Broadmeadow. Perhaps—she almost didn’t dare finish the thought—perhaps for us, just now, perhaps the name is a good omen.
Hesitantly she told her sisters about it. Lionheart said: “I wish to go so far away from this hateful city that no one round me even knows its name.”
Jeweltongue said: “I would not stay here a day longer than I must, if they asked me to be mayor and my only alternative was to live in a hole in the ground.”
It was teatime. Late-afternoon light slanted in through the long panes of their sitting-room. They no longer used any of the bigger rooms; their present sitting-room was a small antechamber that had formerly been used to keep not-very-welcome guests waiting long enough to let them know they were not very welcome. In here Jeweltongue saw that the surfaces were dust-free, the glass panes sparkling, and the cushions all plumped. But the view into the garden showed a lawn growing shaggy, and twigs and flower stems broken by rain or wind lay across the paths. It had been three weeks since the Duke and Baron sent their last messages.
Beauty sat staring out the window for a minute in the silence following her sisters’ words. It was still strange to her how silent the house was; it had never been silent before. Even very late at night, very early in the morning, the bustle had only been subdued, not absent. Now silence lay, cold and thick and paralysing as a heavy fall of snow. Beauty shivered, and tucked her hands under her elbows. “I’ll tell Father, then, when he wakes. At least something is settled. ...” Her voice tailed off. She rose stiffly to her feet. “I have several more letters I should write tonight.” She turned to leave.
“Beauty—” Lionheart’s voice. Beauty stopped by Jeweltongue’s chair, which was nearest the door, and turned back. “Thank you,” said her eldest sister.
Jeweltongue reached suddenly up, and grasped Beauty’s hand, and laid the back of it against her cheek for a moment. “I don’t know what we would be doing without you,” she said, not looking up. “I still can’t bear the thought of.. . meeting any of the people we used to know. Every morning I think. Today will be better—”
“And it isn’t,” said Lionheart.
Beauty went back to the desk in another little room she had set up as an office. Quickly she began going through various heaps of papers, setting a few aside. She had already rebuffed suggestions of aid from businessmen she knew only wished to gloat and gossip; uneasily she discarded overtures from sorcerers declaring that their affairs could yet be put right, all assistance to be extended on credit, terms to be drawn up later upon the return of their just prosperity. Now she drew a sheet of her father’s writing-paper towards her, picked up a pen. and began to write an acceptance, for herself and her sisters, of the best, which was to say the least humiliating, offer of the several auction houses that had approached them, to dispose of their private belongings, especially the valuable things that had come to them from their mother, which their father had given his wife in better days. Beauty had told no one that she was not sure even this final desperate recourse would save their father from a debtors’ prison.
And in the next few days she made time wherever she could to visit various of the people who had adopted her animals. She learnt what she could, in haste and distress of mind, of butter—and cheese-making from a woman who had been a dairymaid before she married a town man, while her cat, once a barn-loft kitten, played lag to rules of her own devising among their feet and the legs of furniture. She learnt bottling and beer-making from an old woman who had been a farm wife, while her ex-racing hound made a glossy, beer-coloured hump under the kitchen table. She took the legal papers she was not sure she understood to a man whose elegant, lame black mare had foaled all four of his undertaker son’s best funeral carriage team. Another man, whose five cowardly hounds bayed tremendously at any knock at the front door from a vantage point under his bed, taught her how to harness a horse, how to check that its tack fitted, and the rudiments of how to drive it; and a friend of his saddled up his very fine retired hunter, the whites of whose eyes never showed anymore, and went to the big autumn horse fair to buy her a pair of pulling horses and a suitable waggon.
She came home from these small adventures with her head ringing with instructions and spent the evenings writing up notes, listening to the silence, trying not to be frightened, and wondering wearily what she was forgetting.
/ can teach you to remember, the elderly salamander said to her.
“Oh—oh no,” said Beauty. “Oh no, that won’t do at all. But thank you.”
Your other friends are giving you gifts, said the salamander, gifts of things you need, things you ask them for, but sometimes things they know to offer you. Why may not I also?
“It is very kind of you,” said Beauty, “but I have no claim on you.”
You have the claim of friendship, said the salamander. My master, since he retired, is interested only in counting his money. I shall miss you, for you have been my friend. Let me give you something. It will be a small something, if you prefer, something smaller than memory.
‘I would rather forget how to smoke meat and brew beer and saw and nail if I might also begin to forget the last few weeks,” said Beauty simply.
The salamander was silent, but she saw by the flicker in its cloudy eyes that it was thinking.
Pick me up, it said at last, so that I may took into your eyes.
Beauty picked it up gently, in a hand that shook only a very little.
This is more difficult than I expected. We saltunanders rarely give gifts, and when we do, they are rarely small. It made a faint, dry, rattling sound Beauty recognised as salamander laughter. This will have to do.
Abruptly it opened its eyes very wide, and Beauty was staring into two pits of fire, and when she sucked in her breath in shock, the air tasted hot and acrid with burning. Listen to me, my friend. I give you a small serenity. I would give you a large one, but I am uncertain of human capacity, and I furthermore believe you would not wish it. This is a serenity you can hold in the palms of your two hands—even smaller than I am. And she heard the rustling laugh again, even through the thunder of the fire. / think you may find it useful. It hooded its eyes. You may put me down.