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.”