The Wonder Tales

3-2

Adelaide nodded, but said nothing else, seeming unwilling to speak.

‘Why do you ask?’ Margot prompted her.

‘Did you… happen to see anything unusual, as you approached the house?’

Surprised, Margot said at once: ‘I… thought I did, but it turned out to be nothing. A bird darting behind a tree, I think.’

Adelaide’s eyes brightened, and she clutched at this meagre offering with, Margot thought, unwonted enthusiasm. ‘I had the same experience! Margot, I am persuaded it was not a bird. I am sure there was someone there, only when I went to look, she had faded into the wind.’

‘She?’

‘I think there was a woman there, for I am sure I saw the flicker of rose-red skirts.’

Rose-red. The words sparked a feeling of recognition in Margot, for she would have used similar words to describe her own brief glimpse of colour. ‘But how could she fade into the wind?’ she asked.

‘I do not know, but I think… I wonder if perhaps it was Oriane? She had a skirt of such a colour, once.’

‘Did she?’ Margot had not known, and this snippet of information briefly influenced her. But she decided against the idea, and shook her head. ‘It cannot be, can it? What would she be doing, darting about the place like a stranger, hiding herself from us?’

‘Perhaps something has gone amiss with her,’ suggested Adelaide.

‘Such as what, that could inspire such peculiar behaviour?’

Adelaide had no answer to give, and no further arguments to offer in support of her theory. Watching the hope fade from her face, Margot felt a brute, to have crushed her tenuous belief in her friend’s nearness; but her conviction did not waver. It could not be Oriane.

But, then, who was it? For if Adelaide had seen something out of place this morning, and had, like Margot, been convinced of its being some other person, then Margot was more willing to entertain the real possibility that a stranger wandered the grounds of Landricourt. A stranger who did not wish to be seen.

Her cordial finished, she set her glass back upon Adelaide’s tray. ‘Where did you see this woman?’ she enquired.

Adelaide gestured with one slender hand: away behind the house, far from where Margot had been wandering that morning. ‘Betwixt the oaks there. But I have searched them all, Margot, and there is no one now. I have been watching all morning, too, as I could, and have not seen her return.’

She soon afterwards took her leave, off to visit and refresh the rest of the winemakers for their afternoon’s labours. Margot set aside her own work for a few minutes more, and went in search of Florian.

Florian had no information to offer, but he promised to be upon the watch for any further glimpses of a woman with rose-red skirts. With this Margot had to be satisfied, for the rosehips would not wait upon her convenience; several of her fellows were hard at work in the vast, vaulted cellar rooms below the house, crushing and filtering the rosehips she and Adelaide and Florian gathered and beginning the process of transforming them into wine. She could not spare the hour or more it would take to conduct a thorough search of the grounds. She resolved to take up the search later in the afternoon, when the onset of the twilight declared an end to the labours of the day. And she would take Florian with her.

As it happened, however, she did not have to wait nearly so long for an answer to the mystery.

For reasons best known to themselves, the majority of the rose-brambles had mostly colonised only the great dining room, the parlours, the drawing room and the bedchambers, leaving such spaces as the kitchens, the long gallery and the grand hall largely unexplored. Accordingly, Margot’s daily round ran from the dining room around and up through the bedchambers, and she paused only briefly to look in upon the rest of the house.

But today was different. Upon reaching the long gallery, she noticed two unusual things almost at once.

For the first: the roses had changed their minds about the gallery. Hitherto, they had only peeped tentatively into it from a far, upper corner, sending forth but few leafy tendrils to mingle with the soft, green-daubed murals arrayed across the walls. But somewhere in between Margot’s last visit and today — had it been only yesterday, that she had last looked in? — the entirety of the far wall was awash with a thicket of glossy rose leaves and thorny, tangled vines. Unlike those in the rest of the house, whose petals were falling as they formed their plump rosehips, these were in full bloom; there must be hundreds of flowers, Margot thought dazedly, and their scent thickened the air with a heavy floral pungency. Nor was their growth haphazard, to her further astonishment. The spaces upon the walls where portraits had once hung — rectangular patches, brighter with colour than the more faded paint around them — had been left untouched, while twining ropes of thorn-clad stalks had snaked and twisted and coiled unhindered over the rest of the wall, following the shapes of the elegant curlicues and ornately coiling leaves that lay, painted and inert, beneath them. The effect was a new, curiously flourishing mural worked in living greenery, splashed everywhere about with the bright-white petals in their fragrant clusters.

The roses were reaching for the adjacent wall; Margot fancied she could almost see them growing as she watched. A particularly enterprising tendril was reaching for the ears of a great white horse painted between two windows, the beast rearing in elegant indignation. It now wore a crown of budding roses.

The second point of interest was this: that the grandly oversized chair lingering in solitary splendour at the distant end was now occupied.

Margot had always secretly adored that chair. It was so stupendously overdone: more than big enough to seat two side-by-side, its back rose to a towering height, its arms too high to rest comfortably upon. It more nearly resembled a throne than a chair, especially situated as it was amidst such grandeur. And while the chair was as decayed as the gallery itself, its cream silk upholstery tattered and frayed and its frame riddled with the scars of woodworm, it had endured. Margot admired that in a chair.

It made a strange, but strangely fitting, seat for the woman who now sat enthroned upon it, her legs crossed beneath the layered, rose-red silks of her skirts. Her bodice was of crimson velvet, and a shawl as light and delicate as tangled spider’s webs hung over her thin shoulders. One toe peeped out from beneath the vivid silks, revealing the tip of a silvery silken slipper. The shoe was stained with rosy colours, as though she had been dancing through a thick carpet of rose petals. Her thin, white fingers were held up before her, for between them a web every bit as ethereal and tangled as her shawl was strung in glittering strands, anointed here and there with diamond-bright droplets of dew. She was absorbed in the contemplation of her web, so much so that she did not appear to notice Margot’s entrance at all. Her fine-featured face was as white as the roses around her, the eyes so intent upon her work an eerily bright green against such pallor. Amber-winged moths had settled in the wispy mass of her pale, gold-spun hair; Margot thought them fanciful ornaments, until startled by the flicker of a wing into a realisation that they were quite real.

Surprised beyond all power of speech, Margot stood in thunderstruck silence for some moments, watching the singular woman with something like awe. Her amazement only grew when, with a delicate flicker of her fingers, the woman set the fragile strands of her web shivering; the dewdrops twinkled, moon-bright, and — Margot did not think it was her imagination — the creeping tendrils of the rose-thicket crept a little farther onward, slowly unfurling polished green leaves at their lady’s command.

It occurred to Margot that the ragged throne was the source of the thicket, the central point from which all vines fanned outwards. Who was this woman, that the roses stretched and grew and blossomed at her whim?

Margot realised, with a jolt, that those searing green eyes had focused upon her; she was herself observed. She swallowed a sudden flutter of fear — what was she to be afraid of? No move had this visitor made to harm her, or any of the winemakers, and there had been opportunity enough — and spoke. ‘Who are you?’

Those green eyes flickered. ‘They call me Rozebaiel,’ said the woman, and the web shivered under the soft exhalation of her breath. She added, ‘Sometimes,’ in a softer tone, scarcely more than a whisper. Then her emerald gaze sharpened upon Margot, and she said in a challenging way: ‘And who are you? This is not my Landricourt. What have you done with it?’ The name, Landricourt, Margot recognised, though Rozebaiel had not spoken it in the usual way. There came an unusual inflection; the syllables formed more of a Laendricourt.

‘I—’ Margot stopped, unsure what to say, for of course it was Landricourt. What else could it be supposed to be? ‘I am Margot de Courcey,’ she offered, resolving to let the other matter slide. ‘I am a winemaker here.’

‘Wine?’ said Rozebaiel sharply, and looked wildly about, as though expecting to see the evidence of it materialise at any moment. ‘You make the amberwyne here?’

‘The… the amberwine?’ repeated Margot, nonplussed. ‘I do not think I ever heard it called such—’

As she spoke, Rozebaiel dropped her tangled web of gossamer strands — which vanished, smoke-like, into the air — and snatched the head from a drowsing rose peeping over her left shoulder. This she thrust at Margot, interrupting her. ‘These,’ she said forcefully, though not quite in anger. ‘What are they!’

‘R-roses,’ said Margot, aware as she spoke that the obvious answer was not the one sought, but unable to give any other.

Rozebaiel tenderly stroked the pallid petals of the rose she held, then tossed it negligently onto the floor. It lay there, three petals fallen onto the rotting floorboards and the rest already wilting.

Margot found her voice. ‘Forgive me,’ she said, for it never hurt to be polite, however peculiar the circumstances. ‘How came you to be here?’

Anger — if that was what it was — drained out of Rozebaiel’s delicate face and her extraordinary eyes grew large with distress. ‘I do not know, but I should very much like to go back. At once.’

‘Back to where? Where is it that you are from?’

‘Laendricourt.’

‘But this is Landricourt.’

‘Whatever it may be, it is not my Laendricourt! It is some semblance only, an echo, and what an echo! How can you have let it fall into ruin?’ Rozebaiel looked at Margot with such reproach that she felt shamed, as though she was personally responsible for the house’s state. But that was nonsense. It must have been well on its way to ruin by the time Margot was born.

‘It is a great shame,’ she agreed, staring in familiar sadness at the faded walls; the gaping patch in the middle of the floor where the boards had fallen through; the softly glowing pools of light that filtered through the holes in the ceiling. ‘I have often wondered who owns it, how they can have permitted—’

‘Owns it?’ interrupted Rozebaiel. ‘No one can own Laendricourt.’

Margot blinked. ‘Well, then of course it is a ruin.’

Rozebaiel’s head tilted. ‘How so?’

‘Why, if it is owned by no one then nobody is responsible for its maintenance.’

‘All are responsible,’ said Rozebaiel.

The import of Rozebaiel’s earlier words struck Margot all at once, and she gasped. ‘What do you mean, you do not know how you came to be here?’

‘I mean,’ said Rozebaiel slowly, ‘that a day ago and a half I was there, and now I am here.’

‘A day and a half! Why, that is just when Oriane disappeared — or it may be, she has not been seen since. I wonder—’

There was no point in finishing the sentence, for at mention of the word disappeared, Rozebaiel darted out of her chair and, with a quick, fierce look at Margot, she turned in a swirl of ethereal shawl and flyaway hair and vanished at a run through the far door.

By the time Margot reached the door, there was no further sign of Rozebaiel; the long corridor stretching beyond was empty in both directions.

Margot turned back into the gallery, nonplussed. Lying on the vacated chair was a thin ribbon of cloth, a gauzy thing as cloudy-light as Rozebaiel’s shawl, and as pale as the roses in the midst of which she had sat enthroned. Margot picked it up, handling it with care, for the cloth was so delicate she feared she might break it. It glistened as if with dew, like the web Rozebaiel had been weaving among her fingers; but when Margot touched it, she found the droplets were not water. They had no substance to them at all.

She would go to Florian, she decided, and show him this thing, in proof of a tale that might otherwise seem implausibly wild. But as she turned to leave, she noticed something else curious. Above the threadbare throne, nestled so deep within a tangle of leaves that Margot had almost missed it, was a single blossom out of place among its brethren; for while the petals that ringed the outer edge of the flower were of the customary pallid, moon-pale hue, its heart flushed a deep, harvest gold.

Margot had not much time to wonder at this change, for as she gazed upon the two-toned rose, the great clock chimes began to strike across the Vale; the Gloaming was coming in.