McKillip, Patricia A - Winter Rose

by Winter Rose(Lit)

  I waited, watching the green deepen in the wood, the sodden fields turn tidy with straight furrows, the first faint color wash along them. I was afraid of his politeness, his indifference, I knew, so I waited until I could bear it, if he had nothing more than that to give me.

  I went one morning when Laurel had gone on her first ride to the village, and our father was in the fields, and there was no one to ask where I went. I started briskly, with one thing on my mind. But as I rode into the wood it showed me a hundred things to catch my attention: hyacinths and wood anemones, great pink and gold raspberry blossoms, hawthorn, lacy dogwood, la­dy's-slipper, purple trillium. It lured me here and there, it spoke my name in small white blossoms. I rode past all its distractions, for every fall of the hammer on Lynn Hall drove a name deeper into my heart, and the closer I came to it, the harder my own heart pounded. Re­member this, the wood said. Remember that. There seemed nothing I could forget, and no peace or mercy in remembering.

  He saw me from among the peaked, raw beams ris­ing on his roof. Crispin, working with him, stopped pounding nails a moment to wave at me. But Corbet dropped his hammer and went to the ladder. I slid off my horse, clung to her, suddenly terrified. I could not look a man in the eyes and ask him if, in any world, he had ever turned into ivy. If he had lived among his own ghosts. If he had ever loved me or if I had only dreamed that he had. If he had ever been real in my eyes at all, and if not, then what polite stranger had spoken my name all winter. "Rois."

  I forced myself to look at him. He wore a homespun work shirt, rolled at the elbows, loose at the neck; I saw the sweat glisten in the hollow of his throat. His eyes seemed stranger's eyes, full of light that now hid nothing: the faint shadow of trouble in them, the brief indecision before he spoke again.

  "Thank you for coming. I hoped -somehow -you would not be too angry with me."

  "No." Words stuck. I had to clear my throat, pick through them carefully, to find the words that belonged only in this world. I could feel my hands trembling; I wound the reins tightly through my fingers. "Laurel told me you had written to her. You vanished so suddenly. We thought - we didn't know-" I faltered under his un­familiar gaze. "We thought everything. Even that you might have died."

  "It was cruel of me," he said simply, "to leave like that."

  "It seemed cruel." I unwound my hands, feeling my way a little more easily into memory, since I knew we both remembered that at least. "Laurel said you had some urgent family matters."

  He nodded. "I was called home. And then my father died."

  I blinked. Worlds merged briefly, separated. "I'm sorry - '

  "It was quite unexpected. But I found myself tangled in family affairs for so long, I was afraid I might not make it back here."

  "You were afraid?"

  He smiled a little, then. "Winter didn't frighten me away. I did want to return." He paused, studying me a moment. "You look well. But changed. Was the winter hard? "

  "Yes. Very."

  "How is your father? And Laurel?"

  "They're both well." I watched his eyes. "Laurel is going to be married soon, to Perrin."

  I saw little in his eyes but relief. "I'm glad," he said softly; like Laurel's memories, his had not survived the winter storms. "That's the way it should be. Is she happy?" He read the answer in my face; the tension left his own. "I'm glad," he said again.

  There seemed suddenly nothing left to say; only Crispin's hammer spoke. Words turned back into dreams; they would fade eventually, I knew. Eventually. I shifted awkwardly, wondering how to say goodbye, wondering if there had been any world in which we did not.

  "Well - "

  "I know," he said abruptly, "why you seem so changed. You didn't walk barefoot through my wood. You rode here, and you're wearing shoes."

  I glanced down at them, surprised. I found him see­ing other things in me, an expression in my eyes, maybe, or something I had done to my hair. "You seem changed, too," I said. "Winter was hard on us all."

  "Yes." He drew a deep breath of the tantalizing air then, and his face opened as he turned to contemplate his house. "I think this time it will be different," he said, more to himself than to me. I did not ask him what he meant. "I should go. No one knows where I am."

  "You never worried about that before," he com­mented. It made me smile, that he remembered. His an­swering smile, brief but warm, seemed unfamiliar, too. "There is something that I wanted to ask you, Rois. That is, if you found your way to speaking to me again."

  "What?" I asked vaguely, hearing only my name again, his voice saying it.

  "About my garden. Or what passes for it. Oh - and something else." He reached into his shirt pocket. "Before I forget. I found this in my house. I wonder if you know who it belongs to."

  I looked at what lay on his palm. Then I looked at him. I closed my eyes suddenly, feeling light like gold on my mouth, seeing gold behind my eyes. All the words I knew freed themselves again, to visions, dreams, her wild wood, my wood.

  "Rois?" He touched me lightly. I opened my eyes. "Yes." I wanted to weep, I wanted to laugh, as I took my mother's ring from him. "I know whose it is." I slipped it into my skirt pocket; this time it would not turn into leaves. I met his eyes, filled my eyes with him, look­ing for all the small things I had loved. I found them still there. I could reach out to them or not; he could say yes, he could say no. He smiled at me suddenly, not under­standing what he saw, but drawn to it. Freedom, I could have told him: a new word for both of us.

  "What was the other thing you wanted to ask? About your garden?"

  "Oh. The old rose trees. Some are still alive, I think. But so wild and overgrown with ivy I don't know if they'll bloom. I wondered if you might look at them."

  "They survived the winter?"

  "Even that winter."

  I looked beyond him to the garden, where the but­termilk mare cropped placidly in a patch of grass. "Rois? Do you think you might?"

  Beyond the garden the young leaves on the trees had turned the wood a misty green. Shadows lay within the mist, and unexpected falls of light, the mysteries of its seasons, ancient, familiar, forever unpredictable.

  "I might," I said. "Yes."