bestow. I felt shamed by her unselfishness but my stepfather worried aloud that she had no discretion. Of course he feared she might grow to be a sweet-faced fool, but I knew already that she was no more a fool nor foolish than I. She was merely good in so thoughtful and intelligent a way that it was impossible to argue with her. Indeed, there were times I found myself giving some favoured trinket of my own away to a worthy child simply because I could not find an argument in favour of keeping it. In her own way, Rose was as difficult to resist as our Mama, but her power lay in her essential sweetness and I never regretted my obedience.
I did not worry that she was lacking in wit, but there were times when it troubled me that she was unable to conceive that the world might mean her harm or do her mischief. When we walked out, she would run down any dark lane to introduce herself to a cat whose sly twinkling eyes she had spotted, never fearing there might be less savoury things than cats awaiting her. Sometimes, when I read to her, I found myself deliberately exaggerating the monsters and evil characters in her books, in the hope of frightening a little wariness into her. But it did not work. Rose only pitied the monsters their wickedness and wondered if a little kindness or something pretty might not shine a light into the darkness of their souls.
When Rose was five and I was seventeen, a clay man came to the house gate. Before I could stop her, Rose went to talk with him and offered him a drink from her mug. I hastened to draw her away, telling the man he might have his own mug and a pie if he went to the kitchen door and said that Miss Rose and Miss Willow had sent him. After my careful speech, which made my face flame, the man responded in a language I did not understand. I shook my head helplessly but he only shrugged and smiled and then he nodded to Rose, who beamed at him and rushed to the gate to wave him away.
‘You must not talk to strangers,’ I scolded her when he had gone.
‘He was not strange,’ she said.
‘I did not say he was strange. I said he was a stranger. That means someone we do not know. We should not speak to people we do not know.’
‘But why not?’
‘It is better that some people are left to be strangers.’
‘Perhaps some people prefer to be strangers,’ Rose conceded. ‘Indeed, I think Edgar might like it very much.’ Edgar was my stepfather’s rude and surly manservant, who had made it clear to Rose and me that he thought his master had complicated his life foolishly by marrying. He was careful to show only his most polite and deferential face to Mama. He was one of the few people who seemed immune to Rose’s charm, but he knew where the true power of the household lay.
‘A stranger might mean us harm,’ I explained, feeling unsettled by Rose’s innocent interrogation.
‘But we should see if he meant us harm. He was only going to sell ribbons at the fair. He saw me and thought of his own daughter.’
I stared at her. ‘How can you know that, Rose? That man spoke another language.’
‘I could see it, of course,’ she answered simply.
I did not know what to say to that. It must be that she had made up a little history for the ribbon seller, yet she had very little imagination, and sometimes sorely vexed me when I was reading one of my favourite tales to her with her insistence on querying everything that diverged from reality. I shook my head and said we had better go in as Reynaldo, who was now away at school, was due home any moment.
That was just one of many occasions upon which Rose revealed her ability to know things about people without being told, a power I lacked, for all my fabled ability to see things other people did not. Whenever I questioned Rose as to what she saw in this person to elicit her sympathy or to rouse her concern, she merely looked at me, bemused and smiling a little, as if she thought I was playing a joke on her, or setting her a puzzle. I suppose to her it was as if I pointed to a