The gardens held no interest for her, not even the starflower vines that bloomed white at night. She passed over the lawns to a quiet corner in the back. A corner where marble stones were planted in the earth, some elegantly carved, some not. The founder of Hill House had a most impressive statue, a white panther seated with its mouth open. A spider had, indecorously, built a web among those carved fangs.
In a smaller, simpler nook were wooden markers carved with nothing save names. Rose Red, like a ghost in her rags and veils, passed between the graves until she came to one of those wood markers on which the name Mousehand was written, though she could not read it.
She knelt there and wept behind her veil.
“What did you have to go and die for, Dad?” she demanded, putting a hand on the marker. “What did you have to go and die for and leave me all alone? I told you, didn’t I? I told you not to!”
She pressed her forehead to the marker, and her veil grew damp with her tears.
He had died on a cold autumn night, many months ago now. She had known he would but had lied to herself that he would not. In retrospect, she could not deny that she had known all along that it was his final night when he crawled onto his pallet and called her to him.
“Rosie, com’ere a moment, will you?”
“Yeah, Dad?” She’d knelt by his side and put out a hand for him to find and grasp. When his fingers closed about hers, she noticed how weak they were.
His fingers squeezed hers until the blue veins stood out. “Rosie,” he said, “did I ever tell you about the first time I laid eyes on you?”
“ ’Course you did,” she whispered, but he wanted to tell it again, and she did not stop him.
“It was late one moonlit night,” he said, “and you know I cain’t sleep in the full moon. It works on my joints a right awful magic! So I took myself for a little walk. Now that was back when I worked for the Eldest, our good King Hawkeye. He’d asked me to plant the red roses along the Swan Bridge path. A sad thing that, for now all the roses are gone. Aye, within a year of that very night, some strange blight struck every bush in Southlands, and not a single blossom grew, not so much as a pink-edged bud.
“But that night, I was mighty proud of the landscaping I’d done, and there is nothing like the scent of roses in the moonlight to fill a man with all sorts of goodness, swollen joints be dashed!”
Rose Red smiled, running her thumb up and down the man’s bony wrist.
“I strolled down that path, enjoying my roses, then on out across Swan Bridge. I walked a long way out there under the moon, and looked down into the dark wood below. All the trees rippled like water, their leaves reflecting back the white light so’s I could have thought I stood above the ocean. It was a sight, Rosie!”
“Sure, Dad. Sure it was.”
“But it was cold too, so I had to start making my way back homeward. I was nearin’ the end of the bridge and just getting a whiff of them roses of mine when I heard in my ear the prettiest sound I ever did hear. It was a bird’s song, one I didn’t know, prettier than a nightingale, prettier than a mourning dove’s coo.”
“A wood thrush,” Rose Red murmured.
“That’s what it was, girl, right enough. A wood thrush, and at that hour, singing as though his heart would break for the pure joy of singin’! And I saw him, sittin’ all proud and mighty like a little prince in the throne of my grandest, reddest rosebush, not two steps from Swan Bridge.”
The old man’s voice trailed off, and Rose Red thought perhaps he had gone to sleep. But when she tried to lay his hand aside, his grip tightened. A deep chuckle rumbled in his chest, though it ended with a wheezy cough. “Ah, Rosie,” he said, “I’ll not forget my surprise when suddenly this awful commotion under the bush started up! But then I saw this white bundle and realized it was that bitty thing makin’ all the racket. So I made my way to the bush, and that’s when I found you.”
He smiled a toothless smile, and his dim eyes circled about, as though wanting to meet her gaze. “You were somethin’ different, Rosie,” he said. “Like no other baby I’d seen.”
“I’m sure I was that,” she said.
“Now, Rosie, there ain’t no call for soundin’ so down in the mouth! When I say you were like no other baby, I mean because it was obvious to me that you were a miracle, brought to me by the moon and that bird, and born right under my reddest bush, with three great red petals fallen on your forehead.”
She could tell he was close to dozing off by now. His eyelids slid slowly over his bleary eyes, and he rubbed them with his free hand like a toddler insistent on staying up.
“My Rose Red,” he said, “you are a Faerie child. Born different from everyone else, and that’s why you look the way you do. It takes special eyes, Faerie eyes, to see you as you really are.
“You’ve never seen them, my girl, but listen to me now: Not in all the world was there a flower that can excel the rose. The fairest of the fair is she, with a smell as sweet as spring and summer combined. But when I looked at you there in the moonlight, you were more beautiful even than my reddest rosebush. You listenin’ to me, girl?”