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 look 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 salamanders 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. I think you may find it useful. It hooded its eyes. You may put me down.
Beauty set it back down on the pillar where it spent its days watching the townsfolk and pretending to be a garden ornament. It turned suddenly, like the lizard it almost was, and touched her hand with its tongue. I did not mean to frighten you, it said, and its voice was tinny and distant, like the last reverberation of an echo. Cup your hands and look into them now.
Beauty did so and at once felt heat, as if she held a small glowing sun in her hands. She looked down and again saw fire, red and hot and bottomless. “It—it doesn’t look very serene,” she quavered.
Trust me, said the salamander, and curled up and became the statue of a salamander.
CHAPTER
2
In six weeks from the day the news was first heard that the wealthiest merchant in the city had resigned his post in disgrace, his daughters had packed up what few goods remained to them—including himself—and begun the long journey to their exile near a village with the outlandish name of Longchance.
Everyone knew the old man’s health had broken with the ruin of his fortunes and that the girls were left to rescue themselves by what devices they could themselves contrive. While no one in the city was moved to offer them any financial assistance, there was a kind of cool ruthless pride in them that they had risen to the challenge. Beauty’s negotiating skills had won, or been allowed to win, by the thinnest margin, the ultimate round, and their father was to be spared the final misery and disgrace of prison—not because she had anything very much to offer in exchange for the old man’s meagre life but in recognition that her determination was absolute. And there was not, after all, any material gain to be had from letting the old man die in gaol. The price for this benevolence was a promise that the old merchant would do business in the city no more. It was a guarantee Beauty was happy to make for him.
They escaped only just before Lionheart’s roaring ceased to compel delivery of their groceries.
None of the sisters had ever before ventured out of the city more than a few days’ journey, and then only for some amusement at some great country seat. The old merchant had occasionally chosen to conduct his business in another city in person, but then he travelled by sea, always booking the most luxurious private cabin for the journey. Now they were on the road for weary week after weary week, with only such comforts as an ancient unsprung farm waggon and a pokey tent could offer. They had barely been able to pay for their place in a traders’ convoy heading in the direction they wished to go; they would be travelling often through near wilderness, and banditry was common. But the traders did not welcome them, and they were made quickly aware that their leader’s agreeing to take them on was not popular with the others and that they would receive no help if they found it difficult to keep up.
They did keep up. The merchant was ill and weak and wandered in his wits, but the three sisters did everything, as they had done everything since the Duke and the Baron had written a few words on two sheets of heavy, cream-laid paper and sealed them with their seals. Lionheart was tender to their two slow shaggy horses in a way Beauty had never seen her be tender with her high-couraged thoroughbreds, and Jeweltongue was gentle with their father in a way Beauty had never seen Jeweltongue be gentle with any human being less capable than she.
There was one bit of trouble early on, when one of the traders attempted to pay rough court to Jeweltongue; she had just bitten his hand when Lionheart hit him over the head with a horse-collar. The commotion brought some of the others. There was a brief, tense, ugly silence, when it might have gone either way, and then the traders decided they admired these soft city girls for defending themselves so resolutely. They dragged their colleague’s unconscious body back to his own fireside, and their captain promised there would be no more such incidents. There were not.
Winter came early that year; the traders’ convoy had to take shelter in a village barely halfway to their goal. It might yet have gone hard for the three sisters but for Lionheart’s ability to turn three wizened turnips into a feast for sixteen, Jeweltongue’s ability to patch holes in shirts more hole than shirt out of a few discreet excisions from the hems, and Beauty’s ability to say three kind words, as if at random, just before cold- and want-shortened tempers flared into fighting. By the time of the thaw, the traders were no longer sorry for their leader’s bargain with the ruined merchant and his three beautiful daughters, and the fellow still bearing a knot on the back of his head from a blow from a horse-collar had mended a frost-cracked wheel for the sisters and refused any compensation, saying that companions of the road took no payment from one another.
The three sisters and their father went the last few miles alone. The lawyers’ letter had described Rose Cottage as being at the end of the last track off the main way through the woods before Longchance’s farmlands began. The traders knew the way to Longchance well, and while none of them knew anything of Rose Cottage, they knew which track the last one was—or what was left of it, for it had not been used in many years. It was just wide enough to take two small horses abreast, and just clear enough for an old farm cart laboriously to lumber down.
A surprising number of the traders came round individually to say good-bye to their travelling companions, and several mumbled something about maybe looking in t’see how they was doing, on the way home again. Then the traders went on the wider way. The three sisters and the old merchant went the narrow one.
The house too was recognisable from the description in the lawyers’ letter. Small; thatched, now badly overdue for replacement; one storey, with a loft over half of it, the roof so peaked that the upstairs room would be only partly usable; stone chimney on either of the narrow sides of the house, the one on the loft side much the bigger; two small tumbledown sheds and some bits of broken fence; and a chestnut tree growing a little distance from the front door. The remains of an overgrown garden spilled out behind the house, but even Beauty was too bone-weary to explore it.
But the house was surprisingly tall for its small size, and this gave it a curious authority and a reassuring air of steadfastness. They all sat and stared while the horses, perceiving the end of the road and a lack of attention in the hands on their reins, dropped their heads and began to nose through the debris of winter for anything to eat.
It was earliest spring. The sky was blue, the birds sang, the chestnut tree was putt
ing out its first sticky leafbuds, but the low coarse growth underfoot was matted weeds interspersed with bare muddy patches, the brown buds crouched on drearily empty branches, and the house had obviously been derelict for a long time. The clearing it sat in was reverting to woodland, with opportunistic saplings springing up everywhere; there was a bird’s-nest built into a corner of the front door and an ominous crown of ragged twigs on one of the chimneys. The two sheds hadn’t a sound wall between them; there was nowhere to keep the waggon or stable the horses. It was a cheerless homecoming.
Lionheart was the first to jump off the waggon, stride forward, and throw the unlatched door of the house open, spattering herself with shreds of broken bird’s-nest and fighting off the maleficent embraces of the long thorny stems of an overgrown bush just beside the door. Jeweltongue and Beauty followed her slowly; their father sat dully in the cart. Beauty’s heart sank when Lionheart opened the door so easily; she had feared the worst when the lawyers had sent her no key, but if the house had been open to weather and all depredations both animal and human.…
“No leaks,” said Lionheart, looking towards the ceiling. She climbed the ladder and stuck her head through the trapdoor. “Nor any I can see up here,” she said, her voice muffled.
“No rubbish in the corners,” said Jeweltongue. She walked round the one big downstairs room, touching the walls. “It’s not running with damp. It doesn’t even smell of damp. Or of mice.”
Beauty was standing in the middle of the floor, slowly turning in her place, half watching Jeweltongue touching the walls, half looking round herself, thinking, It does not smell of mice, nor of damp, but it does smell of something—I don’t know—but it’s a friendly smell—not like a years-closed-up house. Well, there may be horrors tomorrow—birds’-nests in the chimneys, snakes in the cellar—but … And her heart lifted for the second time since the Duke and Baron had written those final lines, and she remembered that the first time had been when she discovered the papers saying that they still possessed a little house called Rose Cottage. Rose Cottage. She had wanted the name to be a good omen.
Lionheart came downstairs again, and the three sisters looked at one another. “It’s perhaps just a bit small,” said Lionheart.
“But it’s ours,” said Jeweltongue, and walked over to Beauty and tucked her hand under her sister’s arm.
“Those little leaded windows don’t let in much light,” said Lionheart.
“The ceiling is high enough to make the house seem bright and airy,” said Jeweltongue.
“None of our furniture will sit straight on this floor,” said Lionheart.
“None of the wisps and remnants we now call our furniture is going to sit straight anywhere,” said Jeweltongue, “and we can invent a new parlour-game for winter evenings, rolling pennies across the slopes.”
Lionheart laughed. “There’s a baking oven,” she said, looking at the bigger chimney. “And think of the fun I’ll have learning where its hot spots are. The first loaves will have slopes on them like the floor.” She looked round again. “And we’ll never be lonesome because we’ll always be under one another’s feet. Not like—not like the last weeks in the old house.”
Beauty felt Jeweltongue shudder. “No. Never like that. Never again.”
They returned outdoors. Their father had made his way down from the waggon and was standing under the tree near the front door. “It’s a chestnut,” he said. “I’ve always loved chestnut trees. I was a champion conker-player when I was a boy. Chestnut trees are messy, though; they shed all year long. Aside from the sticks little boys throw up into them to dislodge the conkers.” And he laughed. It was the first time they had heard him laugh since the blow fell, months ago in the city.
Jeweltongue, to her infinite disgust, found she could neither saw nor hammer straight; but Beauty could, and Lionheart learnt from Beauty. They rehung doors, patched broken flooring, rebuilt disintegrating shutters, filled in the gaps in the sills—mostly with planking salvaged from the tumbledown sheds. As their shabbiest dresses grew more and more ragged, they tied the skirts round their legs till it was almost as if they wore trousers; they wrapped themselves up in the old silver-polishing tunics that had once belonged to their major-domo; their hair they bound back severely, and Lionheart threatened to cut hers off. “Long hair is a silly fashion for ladies who have nothing better to do with their time than pin it up and take it down,” she said.
“I like my long hair,” said Beauty.
“You have very beautiful hair,” said Lionheart. “I used to think—before we shared a bedroom—I used to think it must shine in the dark, it has such a glow to it. Mine is just hair.”
Their father was still frail and spent most of his days and evenings near the smaller fire, in the area which they used as their sitting-room. His was the one comfortable chair, but none of the three sisters ever sat still long enough to enjoy a comfortable chair—said Lionheart—so he might as well have it, or it would be wasted. As he began to grow a little stronger, he found a pen and a little ink and some bits of half-used paper, and began to write things down on them, and murmur to himself. But his eyes were now more often clear than they were not, and he recognised each of his daughters as herself and no one else, and they began to feel hopeful of his eventual recovery—as they had not for the long sad weary time just past—and went about their work with lighter hearts as a result.
Jeweltongue and Beauty at first were the only ones to venture to Longchance. “We don’t all three need to go, and Father can’t,” said Lionheart, “and you two are much better at saying the right thing to the right person than I am—you know you are.”
“What you mean is, we can come home and tell you who is going to vex you into shouting, so you can refuse to have anything to do with them and leave the work of it to us,” said Jeweltongue.
Lionheart grinned, then sobered. “Yes, you’re right—you nearly always are, it’s one of your greatest faults—but, you know, we can’t afford to … to annoy anyone here. I’ll try to be polite, but when some buffoon is yammering away at me, my mind goes blank of anything but wanting to knock ’em down and sit on ’em.”
So Jeweltongue and Beauty went alone to sell their horses and waggon, leaving Lionheart experimenting with lashing together an assortment of short whippy poles cut from the saplings they had begun clearing from round the house. There were still birds’-nests in one of the flues of the kitchen chimney, which they had thus far failed in reaching from either end, although Lionheart had managed to begrime herself thoroughly with soot, nest fragments, and bird droppings once already, with her last lot of lashed poles.
“You’ll come home to two fully functioning chimneys,” she promised, “or I’m going to drown myself in the well. Although if I succeed, I may inadvertently have drowned myself anyway, trying to rasp the feculence off me again.”
“Couldn’t we look for a greenwitch to sell us a charm for the chimney?” said Jeweltongue, dropping her voice after a quick glance at their father, who was chewing the end of his pen and scowling furiously at his scrap of paper.
“With what money?” said Lionheart, testing the whippiness of one of her poles with a muttered “’Tis enough to try the patience of a saint.”
“You wouldn’t know,” said Jeweltongue. “A witch’s charm must be cheaper than having your body fouling our well.”
“I will take pains not to drown myself,” said Lionheart. “Now go away before I bite you.”
Jeweltongue, while her sisters had been busy with repairs to the house, had spent her time cutting and sewing rough but sturdy shirts out of the several bolts of material they had found stowed in the back of the housekeeper’s wardrobe. “What in sky or on earth did she want with such stuff?” said Lionheart on discovery.
“Perhaps her secret lover is a poacher. It would make a splendid poacher’s jacket,” said Jeweltongue.
“It would make an entire regiment of poachers splendid jackets,” said Lionheart.
“Neve
r mind,” said Jeweltongue grimly. “The auction house won’t want the stuff; whatever it is, we get to keep it. It’ll wear like iron. I’ll think of something to do with it.” And so it had gone into the drab heap of bits and pieces they would take with them into exile.
Jeweltongue sewed till her fingers bled from the harshness of the fabric and the wiry strength of the thread; but the shirts (minus any pockets useful for poaching) would be as tough as she had predicted, and in the working community they now found themselves in, she was sure—she was almost sure—there would be buyers for them. Lionheart was right about their little remaining hoard of money: It would not last them their first year, and what they still needed for the house, plus a few chickens and a goat and somewhere to keep them, would take whatever they made on the sale of the horses and waggon.
Jeweltongue left her elder sister to her pole-lashing and went outdoors to find her younger one waiting for her. Beauty was sitting on the high rickety seat of the decrepit old waggon, singing to the horses, who were obviously listening to her. “And from her heart grew a red, red rose, and from his heart a briar.…”
“Oh dear!” said Jeweltongue. “Isn’t there something more cheerful you could sing?”
Beauty stopped and looked surprised. “It has never occurred to me that that is not a cheerful song.”
“I’ve never felt that lovers who failed to embrace while they were alive were going to derive much joy out of plants embracing after they’re dead,” said Jeweltongue.
“Maybe you just don’t understand about plants,” said Beauty, smiling.
“No, I leave all that to you,” said Jeweltongue. “I would rather make sailcloth shirts for the rest of my life than weed a flowerpot once. And I have absolutely no intention of making sailcloth shirts for the rest of my life.” She climbed lightly up the side of the farm cart and settled herself delicately on the hard plank seat. “I shall not miss this cart in the least,” she said.