The Rose Bride (9 page)

“Oui, Stepmother,” Rose dutifully answered.

“If your father were alive, he’d know what to do. Two men and two fortunes,” Ombrine said, sighing. “And the second loss was so unnecessary.”

“A waste,” Desirée concurred.

Rose put down her spoon and folded her hands in her lap. She kept her gaze lowered. To look straight at Ombrine was to invite her wrath.

“May I be excused?” she asked. “I’m not hungry.”

“More for us,” Desirée sang, picking up her spoon and reaching toward Rose’s bowl.

“How dare you behave so,” Ombrine snapped at
Desirée. “We may have no money, but we are not beggars.” She gave Rose a sharp nod. “Leave. Be sure to clear the table after we’re finished.”

“Oui, Stepmother.” Rose scooted out of her chair.

“You have mending,” Ombrine added. “Quite a bit. You’ve fallen behind.”

“Oui, Stepmother, I’ll get right to it.”

“In your room,” Ombrine said pointedly.

Rose clenched her fists but said nothing more as she left the table. Her room was cold and drab, and Ombrine seemed to take special delight in forcing her to stay there as much as possible.

She lit a candle, went to her room, and sat down on her bed beside a mound of threadbare clothes. By the dim, flickering light, she took the first piece off the pile. It was Ombrine’s black traveling cloak. The wine stain had been patched over like a bandage on a wound, but Rose still remembered how it had gotten there.

By the time the candle was burned halfway down, she had finished the cloak and moved onto one of Desirée’s petticoats. Her eyes were scratchy with fatigue and her shoulders throbbed. She tried not to think of the past, when she had spent long hours embroidering beautiful flowers and patterns just for decoration.

A harsh rap on her door made her jump. On the other side, Ombrine said, “We’re going to bed. Clear the table and wash the dishes.”

“Oui, Stepmother,” Rose called.

She draped the petticoat over her arm and took
up her candle. The floorboard creaked as she passed Elise’s old room. No one slept there now

She walked down the stairs to the dining room. Something skittered in the darkness, and Rose guessed it was a mouse. Perhaps it had enjoyed a fine feast off her plate.

Neither Ombrine nor Desirée had lifted a finger to carry anything to the kitchen. Desirée’s plate sparkled as though she had licked it clean. Ombrine had finished off the decanter of cheap table wine.

Rose scraped the leavings on her own plate into a dish for the pigs, wondering if there were any survivors in the pen. After she washed and dried the tableware and the cooking pots, she blew out her candle to conserve the wax and left it in the kitchen. By the moonlight, she carried the dish to the pigpen. Grunting shapes moved in the darkness; Rose smiled faintly at the evidence of life. Rather than dump such a pitiful amount of food into the trough, she pushed the bowl through a hole in the fence.

Taking a glance over her shoulder, she stole to the rose garden. Her breath caught as she spied another rectangle of white at the base of the statue of Artemis.

This time there were two coins.

“Merci,” Rose whispered. She folded the letter and buried it as before. Then she plucked another purple rose, kissed it, and left it at the feet of the statue.

She put the coins in the apron she wore and hurried back to the pigpen to retrieve the dish. It had been emptied, which gave her hope that in the morning, they would have a pig or two left.

When she reached the dark kitchen, she found her flint and relit her candle. The yellow light threw her silhouette against the kitchen wall. She pumped a bit of water over the dish, planning to wash it with the next batch.

As she set it on the counter, a larger, blacker shadow swallowed up her silhouette. Her scalp prickled. For a moment she thought it was the menacing figure she had seen that rainy night, walking along the path with Ombrine and Desirée.

She whirled around, to find Ombrine in the doorway, a candle in her hand.

The light cast her face in hollows, like a skull. Her eyes were so black they looked like empty sockets.

“What are you doing?” Her voice was taut as she advanced on Rose. Menace wafted around her like a fog.

“I—I went to feed the pigs,” Rose said haltingly, taking a step backward.

“You liar,” Ombrine said. “I watched you from my window. You went to feed the pigs an hour ago.”

Before Rose had a chance to answer—saying what, she had no idea—Ombrine darted forward and wrapped her hand around Rose’s upper arm. It was the first time Ombrine had ever touched Rose, and her stepmother’s skin was as cold as the dead. She dug her long fingernails into Rose’s flesh and the pain shot straight into Rose’s fluttering heart.

The coins in her apron clinked together. Ombrine’s eyes widened.

“What is this?” she screamed. Her hand dove into Rose’s apron and emerged with the coins. “Where did you get this Have you been stealing money from me?”

“Non, non!” Rose cried. She didn’t know what to do. “I—I found them. Beside the pig trough.”

“Liar!” Ombrine shouted. She reached back her free hand and slapped Rose hard across the face. The sound was like a whip crack, the shock so great that Rose momentarily went blind. No one had ever struck her before.

Stumbling as Ombrine dragged her through the kitchen, Rose flung her hand against the jamb to keep from being knocked against it. Her sight returned and all she saw was Ombrine’s square shoulder and tangled hair in a nimbus of candlelight.

They took the stairway, Ombrine practically
running up the stairs as she pulled Rose behind like a recalcitrant donkey. At the landing, Desirée appeared, grinning and excited. She was wearing the purple cloak Rose had been embroidering for her father.

“What are you doing? What is that?” Ombrine demanded, jerking Rose in front, then pushing her again to keep her moving.

“I found it,” Desirée said. “It’s not worth anything, Mother. It will merely keep out the cold.”

“Then give it to me. Everything here is mine, to do with as I wish. Is that not so, Stepdaughter?”

Rose couldn’t stop staring at the cloak. Everything about that night rushed in ... and everything about this one. The world had shifted on its axis again and something even more wicked was on its way.

The winds blew and the world turned, and before she knew it, Rose was sixteen. She continued to work like a slave and disaster dogged the Marchands at every turn. One night the
chtâeau
caught fire and nearly burned to the ground. Ombrine announced that every coin she had saved went to patch the roof and a couple of walls, barely adequate to keep out wild animals and weather. She threatened all the servants with a beating—Rose included—if they so much as whispered about the condition of the
château
with anyone.

And so, Laurent Marchand’s beautiful home was gone. His lands were in a shambles. The topiary garden and hedge maze died. If anyone in the Forested Land ever spoke of him, it was to say that his life had been a waste.

Despite the fact that no one tended the beautiful garden Celestine had created, it continued to flourish. The purple rosebush blazed bright as a sunrise below the protective gaze of the goddess Artemis. The magic of undying love sustained it. In the few moments Rose could manage to steal away, the garden sustained her.
But there were no more letters and no more coins. Though she herself was not sent to market, she asked the servant who regularly went to look for Elise. He said no one had heard of her, which made Rose suspect he hadn’t asked at all.

Of a night, she heard Ombrine and Desirée walking past her room, down the stairs and out of the
château
. She would listen for their return hours later. They would murmur together about “the circle,” and about “him.” The strange plants in the herb garden were joined by more, and occasionally she smelled an odd, sulfurous odor emanating from Ombrine’s rooms.

She feared witchcraft and she became more cautious, more alert. She prayed to Artemis for protection—and she began to carry a knife in her apron. She made certain she cooked every meal in the
château
, taking nothing from Ombrines hand. She thought of running away, weaving fantasies of fleeing to the village, locating Elise, and joining Monsieur Valmont in the colonies. Life there would certainly be preferable to life here. But she didn’t act; she was certain Ombrine would find them and punish them all severely.

Life had become a matter of survival and it took all Ombrine’s resources to keep her people from dying of starvation. She no longer worried about mending and clean sheets. A turnip was as precious as an embroidered cloak.

Although Rose was in more danger of dying then than she had ever been, the disastrous change in circumstances yielded a benefit: freedom. Ombrine
didn’t care where her stepdaughter roamed—as long as she returned with something for the family to eat. If Rose failed, Ombrine would fly into a rage and hit her.

Thin, bruised, and nut-brown from the sun, Rose would stretch on her back in the rose garden after her days of hard labor, pray to her goddess, and listen to the roses.

“You are loved
.

“You are loved
.

“You are loved.”

She remembered a night long ago when her mother had promised her birthday magic and how that night had been Celestine’s last. She remembered how urgently her mother had wanted her to know that she was loved. Starving, destitute, and alone, she wondered why it was so important. Could love feed her? Could love protect her? If she was loved, why was she so close to death herself?

She gazed up at the statue of Artemis and whispered, “Why is all this happening?”

“You are loved,”
the roses whispered and that was the only reply.

One dry spring afternoon in her sixteenth year, Rose was searching the deep wildwood for mushrooms. The limbs of the trees interlaced, creating canopies that shielded the loamy earth from the sun. Some places in the forest were so dark that she had to search by candlelight. She kept her candle,
her flints, and her precious shoes in the bottom of her gathering basket. She had one pair of shoes left, made of splotched and tattered leather. Her rows and rows of lovely velvet slippers had disintegrated long ago.

Her stomach growled with hunger. Her hands trembled. She usually found a treasure of little brown caps, but today, there was nothing and her hands shook harder at the thought of coming back empty-handed. Hunger made for anger and everyone was always hungry, especially Ombrine. It hadn’t rained all month, and crops were withering in the fields. The Marchands were lucky; they still had their silvery stream.

The shadow that had fallen over the Marchands was spreading everywhere. The Pretender was massing his troops against the king. War was coming and the estates were hoarding what food they could manage to coax from the ground. Peasants and villagers had to fend for themselves and the pickings were getting slimmer.

She decided to give up the search for the day. She was tired and hungry, and night was beginning to fall. She would stop at the rose garden for some solace and to prepare herself to face Ombrine with an empty basket.

She was back on the grounds sooner than she would have liked. The ruined
château
rose in the gloom like a watchful wolf, eager to run some food to ground.

Shivering, she walked past the statues of the two does, eager to rest for a few moments among the roses and hear that she was loved.