Veiled Rose (6 page)

Rose Red never saw other children. Once in a while she would climb a certain tree that grew high on the mountain slopes, and from its topmost branches she could see the shepherding valleys, where young boys and girls tended the family flocks. She could also see the main road that wound down the mountain to the village of Torfoot far below, and on still days in autumn or winter she could hear the town bells ringing, announcing fetes and feast days, weddings and funerals.

“I wish I could see them up close,” she had told her Imaginary Friend one spring. He sat in a branch by her cheek. “I wish I could dance with the other little girls round the Maypole.”

You will,
sang the thrush.
In good time.

“But not today?”

No, my child. Not today.

She scowled at the bird through her veils. “I want a real friend,” she told him.

I am a real friend.

“No you ain’t.”

Why say you this?
Being a prince, albeit a bird, he had a pretty way of speaking. Very different from the man she called father.

“Because you ain’t really here!” she said. “You come and go as I picture you, but you’re only in my head. I’m the only one what sees you. I want a friend that everyone knows and everyone sees is my friend.”

I am more real than you know.

“No you ain’t,” she said again, turning away from him. When at last she looked for him again, he was gone. But that may have been because she wanted him to go. She climbed back down from her tree, returned to her goat and the cottage, and prepared a meal for the man she called father. For those things at least were real.

But now, maybe things could be different.

Rose Red climbed the familiar branches of the old tree as swiftly as she climbed the ladder to her loft room in the cottage. The limbs extended almost like hands to help her, and she scaled all that dizzying way to the top, only stopping here and there to disentangle her long veils when they caught on stray twigs. She climbed until she nestled high above the rest of the world and could watch the garden gate of Hill House farther down the mountain. She saw when the boy arrived and crept quietly through the gate and across the yard. Despite the folds of her veil, she saw with eagle-eyed clarity as a red-faced woman met the boy at the kitchen door and shook a finger at his nose. She saw him propelled inside and the door shut.

“I wonder if he’ll come back,” she whispered to the tree. It swayed gently, soothingly. Rose Red sighed, adjusted her veil once more, and descended to the forest floor. At the base of the tree, where she had dropped it, lay the boy’s broad-brimmed floppy hat. She plucked it up again and carried it home.

Her nanny goat waited in the cottage yard and let out a great bellowing bleat the moment Rose Red emerged from the wood. She was an ornery creature and disliked above anything being staked in the yard all day. But Rose Red had not wanted her pet tagging along behind her today and, despite the goat’s irate protests, had left her in a patch of clover before venturing into the wood that morning.

The goat gave the girl evil glares and stamped her hooves. She’d demolished the patch of clover and grown bored with chewing her cud, and now strained at her tether, shaking her ears. “Bah!”

“Right, right, I’m comin’,” Rose Red said, picking up her pace. Despite the heavy gloves she wore, she undid the lead with nimble fingers and set the goat loose. The old nanny bounded away like a kid, kicking her back feet and shivering her shaggy coat.

“Baaah!”

“Don’t give me that,” Rose Red said, looping the tether into a neat pile and hitching it on the stake. “It’s not like you’re goin’ to starve. Looks like you’ve eaten down half the lawn just this afternoon.”

“Baaaah!” said the goat, prancing over to a patch of thistles and dandelions that she set to demolishing with a will. Rose Red left her grazing and began building a small fire in the yard, over which she would boil her porridge, as it was much too stuffy inside to cook. She did not speak as she worked, for her mind was taken up with the day’s adventures.

This was unacceptable.

The goat trotted over to where Rose Red crouched before her fire pit and gave her a nip on the shoulder.

“Hen’s teeth, Beana!” Rose Red exclaimed, lost her balance, and sat down hard. She pushed the goat’s long nose away angrily. “Hen’s teeth! I know you don’t like it when I leave you but . . . but honestly, cain’t a girl take a walk by herself once in a while? Fool goat! What’s eatin’ you?”

“Bah!” said the goat. She stamped and shook her little horns. “What’s eating me, she asks? Cruel, cruel girl! Running off like that without so much as a by-your-leave, and leaving me tied to a stake all day! In the rain! Like some
animal
!”

“Beana, you are an animal.”

“You do that again, and you’ll just have to find yourself some other goat to talk to, so help me!”

“I weren’t in no trouble.”

“Whoever taught you to speak?” The goat snorted. “ ‘
Wasn’t
in
any
trouble.’ You sound like you were raised by a bunch of sheep!”

Rose Red shrugged and clambered up from the dirt, brushing off the back of her skirt. The goat followed her to the cottage door and stood on the threshold bleating while Rose Red found a safe place for the boy’s floppy hat and started rooting around for her cooking pot and materials for a meal. “Where did you go, Rosie?”

“Up the mountain.”

“
Up
the mountain, did you say?”

“Yes,
up
the mountain, Beana!” She found a small bundle of dried leaves and took them down from their nail on the wall. “I know better than to go
down
; you’ve told me often enough.”

“Well, if you were going up the mountain, why didn’t you take me with you?” Beana’s eyes narrowed and her slitted nostrils flared. “Did you go up to the cave by yourself?”

“No.”

“Where
did
you go, then?”

The girl took a few more herbs, slipped them into a raggedy pocket, then carried her pot and foodstuffs back out to the fire, which was starting to blaze to life. She took a moment to tie the long ends of her veil back behind her head, out of her way. Now she wore not so much a veil as a mask. Tiny slits in the fabric at eye level provided her only line of sight, yet she moved gracefully enough for a country bumpkin. She tied the knot of fabric carefully, stalling for time as she chose her words. But she hadn’t been brought up to lie.

“I did go to the cave,” she said. “But not by myself.”

Beana stared with all the potency of a goat’s gaze. Then she
baaah
ed again and tossed her head. “You know I don’t like you to use those Paths, Rosie! Who, by Lumé’s crown, did you go with?”

“Leo.”

“And who is Leo? Another imaginary friend?”

“A boy.”

“What, the boy who gave us such a fright in the wood yesterday?”

“Yup.”

Beana snorted. “Now you’re making up stories.”

The girl took a stick and moved the ashes in the fire pit to smother the fire, leaving behind glowing coals, over which she placed her pot. “Why does everybody think I make up stories? I went up the mountain to the cave, and I took Leo with me! He wants to hunt the monster, and now he thinks it lives in there, and now he’s my friend, and I’m goin’ to help him.”

“Hunt the monster?”

Rose Red nodded.

Beana backed away from the fire pit and walked out to a far corner of the yard. She fell to nibbling the grass in a thoughtful way, her tail to the cottage. And still the scents of the mountain drifted to her, the smell of Hill House’s kitchen fires and the sloping gardens where the old man worked.

And far down the hill, away in the low country, she could smell that Other unlike all others, could feel it with senses beyond the five natural ones. She muttered soft goaty noises to herself as she grazed. She’d been a goat as long as the girl had been alive, and ten years of eating anything that would fit in her stomach had wiped out any dietary scruples with which she might have been born.

The girl slipped up beside her and placed a hand on her back. “He’s goin’ to be my friend, Beana.”

“Bah.”

“I’ll take you with us next time, right?”

“Baaah.”

“I will! And you’ll like him. He’s not much good at climbin’ and he’s loud as anythin’ in the forest. But he’s nice. He tells good stories and makes funny faces.”

“And that’s the real measure of a friend, isn’t it?”

The girl chewed her lip beneath her veil, biting a bit of the linen along with it. “I want a friend, Beana. A real friend. Who really talks.”

The goat raised her nose and gazed up at the girl with as much tenderness as a goat’s face can express. “Times are changing, Rosie,” she said. “You’re growing up faster than I can blink! And I’m sad to say, there’s nothing I can do to stop it.” She nuzzled the girl’s hand, lipping at the ragged glove. “Promise me, girl, that you’ll not take the boy back to the cave.”

Rose Red licked her lips. “He wants to, Beana.”

“But he shouldn’t.”

Rose Red shrugged.

“We both know what it would mean should he see the monster, Rosie.”

“Maybe he won’t see it?” The girl whispered this hope as though afraid to even acknowledge it. “Maybe he won’t see anythin’?”

“Sweetest girl,” said the goat, “you’ll only hurt yourself if you become attached to this boy. Let him go. Let us keep to our simple life the way we always have. Quiet, to ourselves, watching over that man you call father. Yes?”

Rose Red shook her head. “Leo’s goin’ to be my friend, Beana.” Tears pricked her eyes and dampened the cloth of her veil. “He’s goin’ to.”

The goat huffed. “We’ll see, then, won’t we? But you’re not to go to the cave again. And you’re
not
to stake me out in the yard, Lord Lumé help you if you do! Agreed?”

Rose Red nodded. “All right, Beana.”

The man she called father came home well after dark.

“Did you have a good day, Rose Red?” he asked her.

“I did, Dad,” she replied, then fed him porridge for supper.

He did not ask if she had seen the boy or not. He himself had watched the young mister enter the wood in a raincoat and hat and emerge again without the hat but carrying his beanpole. And the old gardener thought his own thoughts on the matter, ate his lumpy gruel, and creaked his way to bed.

Rose Red checked to be certain her goat was bedded down for the night. Beana gave her a slobbery kiss on the cheek through the veil, and Rose Red patted her nanny between the horns. Then she returned to the cottage, banked the fire, and climbed to her little loft bedroom up above. She fell asleep to the sound of the old man’s snores as though they were soothing lullabies.

And then she dreamed.

Rose Red steps down the ladder like a spider descending its thread, then glides from the cottage on a breath of wind. No one, not even Beana, notices her passing, for she is dreaming and invisible. She glides into the wood and climbs the mountain, higher and higher, to where the rocks are dagger sharp. But they cannot hurt her, for she has no substance.

She approaches the cave at last.

In the odd, moonless light of dreams, it looks more like a wolf’s head than ever. But Rose Red enters without fear or hesitation, and now she sees as well in that close darkness as she does in broad daylight. The cave leads downward, and soon she comes to a subterranean stream. The water flows silently, not even a trickle disturbing the quiet. It pools in a hollow before continuing its long journey through the mountains. The water in this pool swirls and steams.

She approaches. Till this moment, she has felt neither hot nor cold in this dreamland, but the steam rising from the pool is scalding. Nevertheless, she kneels at its edge, removes her veil, and looks into the turning water.

A face not her own looks back at her.

“Princess,” speaks a voice as smooth as the night sky, “you come again to visit me.”

“Silly,” says she. “I always come.”

“And always it is such a pleasure to me. How fares your lonely life?”

She shakes her head and shrugs. “Right enough. Nothin’ much different.”

But he gazes at her from his pool and sees many things in her face. “What secret are you keeping from me?”

She licks her lips and shrugs again.

“I see that you are hiding something. Tell me, my princess. Why should we have secrets from each other?”

“You knows that you hadn’t ought to call me ‘princess,’ don’t you?” she says.

“That is what you are,” speaks the one in the pool.

“That’s a silly game from when I was a bit of a girl! I’m grown up now; I’m nearly ten! I don’t need to play games no more. No pretend.”

The one in the pool looks upon her with narrowing eyes. Then he says, “You will always be a princess to me.”

“Hogwash,” she snaps. “Beana wouldn’t approve of such things, not even in dreams, if she was to know.”