Rose Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 then:
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 ils 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 putting out its first sticky leafbuds, but the low coarse
growth underfoot was malted 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 comer 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