Rose Daughter Read Online Free PDF

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 sterns of an overgrown bush just beside the door. Jewe!-tonguc
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 comers,” 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 ber 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. Weil, there may be horrors tomorrow—birds’-nests in the
chimneys, snakes in the cellar—but. .. And her heart lifted for die 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 Jewehongue, 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
Lion-heart threatened to cut