Authors: Patricia Wrede

Snow White and Rose Red (44 page)

BOOK: Snow White and Rose Red

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Madini’s presence in the gazing mirror did much to reconcile Dee, at least, to the loss of the other crystal, and he never again attempted to meddle directly with Faerie. He and Kelly spent several years in Poland and Bohemia, though relations between them grew more and more strained as the differences in their goals became more apparent. In the end, Dee returned to England alone, bringing the crystal with him, but by the time he found another man to act as scryer Madini’s sentence had been completed and the crystal was empty.

When the Widow returned home at last, late in the week following the sacking of Dee’s house, she was profoundly thankful that she and her daughters had missed the preceding events. For Mistress Townsend’s benefit, the Widow spun a tale of illness among distant relatives, who had urgently summoned her to help. To Mary Hudson she told a story somewhat nearer to the truth; then she packed up her Bible, her prayer book, and her book of spells, and left again. In time, most of Mortlak forgot that she and Rosamund and Blanche had ever lived in the tiny cottage at the edge of the forest.

“Snow White married the prince and Rose Red his brother, and they divided the dwarf’s treasure between them. They all went back to the prince’s kingdom, where they lived happily for many years. The girls’ mother lived with them, and she brought with her the two rosebushes from her garden. She planted them outside her window, and every year they bore beautiful roses, white and red. ”

AFTERWORD

I don’t know why I have always been so attached to the fairy tale
Snow White
and
Rose Red,
but I have. As a child, it was one of my favorite stories, and as an adult it remained a fond memory, though it had been years since I had read it. When Terri Windling told me about the Fairy Tales, it seemed a natural choice, and I was a little surprised to learn that no one else had already claimed the privilege of rewriting it.

When I finally reread Snow
White and Rose Red,
I began to understand why. The story told in the fairy tale was not nearly as smooth as my memory had made it. It was episodic and unconnected; characters appeared and disappeared without explanation, and the motives of nearly all of them were unclear, at best. Even if I chose to use the fairy tale as a loose framework for my own story, rather than as a kind of outline, I had a lot of work ahead of me.

Despite the fact that
Snow White and Rose Red
is one of the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm and therefore of German origin, I chose to set my story in England. The Elizabethan atmosphere seemed to suit the “feel” of the fairy tale; furthermore, it was an era that for me combined reality (or perhaps history) with magic. If the American colony of Virginia was named in honor of Elizabeth I, so was Spenser’s
Faerie Queen,
and it was not thought at all odd or irrational for a serious mathematician to make an equally serious study of astrology and magic. (Dangerous, certainly, but not irrational.)

Once the setting was determined, John Dee and Edward Kelly were the obvious choices for the role of the dwarf. From then on, the writing process focused sometimes on history, sometimes on the fairy tale, and sometimes on the story I was inventing, but it was always driven by the same two questions: “What on earth do he/she/they think they are doing?” and “Why in heaven’s name would they want to do it?” My goal was to tell a story whose general outlines and events would be true to the original fairy tale, while explaining the disconnected scenes and elements of the tale and integrating it with the rich background of the time and the actual events of 1582-1583.

How well I succeeded, you must decide for yourself.