Theodora Goss - The Rose in Twelve Petals

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2024-11-23 0 0 33.89KB 15 页 5.9玖币

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I. The Witch

This rose has twelve petals. Let the first one fall:

Madeleine taps the glass bottle, and out tumbles a bit of pink

silk that clinks on the table—a chip of tinted glass—no, look

closer, a crystallized rose petal. She lifts it into a saucer and

crushes it with the back of a spoon until it is reduced to

lumpy powder and a puff of fragrance.

She looks at the book again. “Petal of one rose crushed,

dung of small bat soaked in vinegar.” Not enough light comes

through the cottage's small-paned windows, and besides she

is growing nearsighted, although she is only thirty-two. She

leans closer to the page. He should have given her spectacles

rather than pearls. She wrinkles her forehead to focus her

eyes, which makes her look prematurely old, as in a few

years she no doubt will be.

Bat dung has a dank, uncomfortable smell, like earth in

caves that has never seen sunlight.

Can she trust it, this book? Two pounds ten shillings it cost

her, including postage. She remembers the notice in The

Gentlewoman's Companion: “Every lady her own magician.

Confound your enemies, astonish your friends! As simple as a

cookery manual.” It looks magical enough, with Compendium

Magicarum stamped on its spine and gilt pentagrams on its

red leather cover. But the back pages advertise “a most

miraculous lotion, that will make any lady's skin as smooth as

an infant's bottom” and the collected works of Scott.

3 The Rose in Twelve Petals

by Theodora Goss

Not easy to spare ten shillings, not to mention two pounds,

now that the King has cut off her income. Lather lucky, this

cottage coming so cheap, although it has no proper plumbing,

just a privy out back among the honeysuckle.

Madeleine crumbles a pair of dragonfly wings into the

bowl, which is already half full: orris root; cat's bones found

on the village dust heap; oak gall from a branch fallen into a

fairy ring; madder, presumably for its color; crushed rose

petal; bat dung.

And the magical words, are they quite correct? She knows

a little Latin, learned from her brother. After her mother's

death, when her father began spending days in his bedroom

with a bottle of beer, she tended the shop, selling flour and

printed cloth to the village women, scythes and tobacco to the

men, sweets to children on their way to school. When her

brother came home, he would sit at the counter beside her,

saying his amo, amas. The silver cross he earned by taking a

Hibernian bayonet in the throat is the only necklace she now

wears.

She binds the mixture with water from a hollow stone and

her own saliva. Not pleasant this, she was brought up not to

spit, but she imagines she is spitting into the King's face, that

first time when he came into the shop, and leaned on the

counter, and smiled through his golden beard. “If I had

known there was such a pretty shopkeeper in this village, I

would have done my own shopping long ago.”

She remembers: buttocks covered with golden hair among

folds of white linen, like twin halves of a peach on a napkin.

“Come here, Madeleine.” The sounds of the palace, horses

4 The Rose in Twelve Petals

by Theodora Goss

clopping, pageboys shouting to one another in the early

morning air. “You'll never want for anything, haven't I told

you that?” A string of pearls, each as large as her smallest

fingernail, with a clasp of gold filigree. “Like it? That's

Hibernian work, taken in the siege of London.” Only later does

she notice that between two pearls, the knotted silk is stained

with blood.

She leaves the mixture under cheesecloth, to dry

overnight.

Madeleine walks into the other room, the only other room

of the cottage, and sits at the table that serves as her writing

desk. She picks up a tin of throat lozenges. How it rattles.

She knows, without opening it, that there are five pearls left,

and that after next month's rent there will only be four.

Confound your enemies, she thinks, peering through the

inadequate light, and the wrinkles on her forehead make her

look prematurely old, as in a few years she certainly will be.

5 The Rose in Twelve Petals

by Theodora Goss

II. The Queen

Petals fall from the roses that hang over the stream,

Empress Josephine and Gloire de Dijon, which dislike growing

so close to the water. This corner of the garden has been

planted to resemble a country landscape in miniature:

artificial stream with ornamental fish, a pear tree that has

never yet bloomed, bluebells that the gardener plants out

every spring. This is the Queen's favorite part of the garden,

although the roses dislike her as well, with her romantically

diaphanous gowns, her lisping voice, her poetry.

Here she comes, reciting Tennyson.

She holds her arms out, allowing her sleeves to drift on the

slight breeze, imagining she is Elaine the lovable, floating on

a river down to Camelot. Hard, being a lily maid now her belly

is swelling.

She remembers her belly reluctantly, not wanting to touch

it, unwilling to acknowledge that it exists. Elaine the lily maid

had no belly, surely, she thinks, forgetting that Galahad must

have been born somehow. (Perhaps he rose out of the lake?)

She imagines her belly as a sort of cavern, where something

is growing in the darkness, something that is not hers, alien

and unwelcome.

Only twelve months ago (fourteen, actually, but she is bad

at numbers), she was Princess Elizabeth of Hibernia, dressed

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