by Jay Lake
Her face fell. “You are clever. Mind how you use that knife between your ears.” Her pique already passed, Mistress Leonie called me close to feel the tight weave of the wool and discourse a short time on the husbanding of certain goats to be found in the Blue Mountains, whose very fur was as fine as all but the most costly thread.
With one hand behind me and out of her sight, I eased a length of silk from the box and let it fall to the floor. Mistress Leonie was with her goats in that moment, running her fingers up and down the length of cashmere, and she did not see.
I was content with that. She would surely see it, but without me trying to push the cloth beneath a chair or hide it somehow, its fall would be an accident of the cloth case and nothing more.
Her eyes were better than I had credited, though. When Mistress Leonie folded up the cashmere, she bade me stand beside the chest and went to call for Mistress Tirelle and the sand-filled tube.
An hour later, I was in the courtyard, shivering away the last of the day’s gray light beneath the pomegranate tree. The cold let me pretend I was not still shaking from the sobs. These people were wicked monsters. I would slay them all like a god before demons, then march home across the waters.
I knew better, though. Federo had taken me from my father with words, not a dandy’s dueling blade. I would take myself from these maggot women with words, not weapons.
The gate banged open, startling me. A mounted man swept in to ride at a trot across the Pomegranate Court. Federo, of course, appearing as if summoned by my thought of him.
He caught sight of me before reaching the building, and slid from his horse in a single motion.
“Girl.” A genuine warmth filled Federo’s voice, the first warmth I had found since coming to this place of stone and suffering. “How do you like it here?”
“Oh . . .” I was ready to spill my woe and fear. Then I glanced at the house. Mistress Tirelle stood in the shadows of the balcony. “The rain is cold, and the sun is too small in the sky.” That also was too much of a complaint, most likely.
“Silly thing.” He bent down and stroked my hair away from my cheek. “Wear a wrap, and you will be warm. This city is not so blessed by the sun.”
I had not been given a wrap, but I knew I could not say this where Mistress Tirelle might overhear.
He took my chin in his hands, tilted my head back and forth. He then looked at my bare arms and shoulder. My skin was still flushed and stinging from the beating, but there were no bruises. I realized in that moment the purpose of the sand-filled tube was precisely that: to discipline me without marring me.
“What have you learned?” he asked.
“I can cook spinach. And sew eleven different stitches.” I smiled; I could not help myself. “I know when to use the juice of lemons and when to use palm oil on a scratched table.”
“We will make a lady of you yet.” His grin was large, as if this imprisonment of mine were the best thing for everyone.
“What do you mean by ‘make a lady’?” I asked him. No one had yet told me my purpose here.
“In time, Girl, in time.” He ruffled my hair again. “I would speak to Mistress Tirelle once more. Mind my horse, if you please.”
I knew nothing of horses except that they were as tall as Endurance but with the mad eyes of birds in their long, slack faces. I decided to mind his horse from behind the pomegranate tree, in case the beast took a fit. A chill rain began to fall as I waited.
After a while Federo came back out with a troubled look. “You are more difficult than you should be, Girl,” he told me. “Your intelligence and your pride perhaps serve you too well. This is a game for the patient.”
“You are wrong, sir. This is no game.”
“No,” he said. “Perhaps it is not. Nonetheless we play.” He leaned close. “I will be back to check. You will tell me if things go awry.”
Things were all awry, had been since the day this man had dragged me away from Papa’s ox and my belled silk. That was not what he intended, and not what he wished to hear. “Yes,” I told him in the words of my birth.
He smiled and climbed back into his saddle. Mistress Tirelle waddled out and with very poor grace offered me a shabby wool cloak. “Here, Girl,” she said. “You might be cold.”
I stood in the growing icy rain and watched her march back into the shadows of the house. I wondered what words I might ever summon to break her down.
Mistress Leonie and I continued to sew clothes, but they did not seem to be for me to wear. Or for anyone else.
“You will never in your life lift a needle once you leave this place, Girl,” she told me as we pieced together the shoulder yoke of a blouson.
I nodded. That was sometimes safe. Of course, I was forbidden to answer, or question further. They were training me in all the arts of a lady, but I would be permitted to practice none of them.
There was little point to this that I could see. I had already resolved to be the best of them at everything they did. In service of that determination, I pushed my anger down.
Her next remark echoed my thoughts. “Do you know why this would be so?”
“Am . . . am I to answer that, Mistress Leonie?” My back itched in anticipation of the blows of the sand-filled tube.
“Yes. You may speak.”
“I am to understand these arts, without practicing them.”
“You are a little snip.” Despite her words, her voice was without rancor. “You will be called upon time and again to judge the worth of a thing, a deed, a place, or a person. Is this woman’s dress what a great lady of Copper Downs would wear, or an imitation crafted by mountebanks in pursuit of a daring theft? Is that room cleaned so well that a god might be received within and accorded due honors, or have the maids been lazy? What of that soup whose bay leaves were picked too green—will it poison your noble guests?”
“So I am to understand the arts in order to assess the work of others.”
“Precisely.” She smiled, her delight in me as her pupil overcoming the power she preferred to hold above me. “If you know a Ramsport stitch from a pennythreaded seam at a glance, you can tell much about the person who stands before you.”
“I might know if they had a good tailor, or only a swiftly made copy.”
“Again, you have the right of it. Now turn this sleeve over and show me what we have missewn. There is an error, I assure you.”
In the course of that work, which was one of the most pleasant days I had passed with Mistress Leonie, I was able to free some silk for my purposes.
It took me many nights of effort to find the best way to thread a pomegranate seed. Little meshes such as I had used aboard Fortune’s Flight with the metal scraps were no good. Instead I employed a stolen needle for a drill and cut my way through each pip. I then sewed it to my silk.
The cloth was nothing like a proper swath of bells from home. It made no noise except when I folded it on itself. Then the beads clattered with a wooden whisper. Still, they were there, nubbins beneath my fingers that resumed the twice-broken count of my days.
I found a place in the ceiling of my sleeping room where beams met the wall. There I stored my silk, my seeds, and my little sewing kit. Nothing else here at the Pomegranate Court belonged to me, not even my own body. This was mine.
While I was plotting at my past, winter settled in outside with a blanket of frozen misery covering the stones and the ghostly branches of the pomegranate tree. I spent the cold nights abed as I clutched my silk close and ran my fingers over the pomegranate seeds. I hoarded enough of them to account for every day of my life, or as close as I could reckon. They were not bells, but their shapes beneath my fingertips reminded me of who I truly was, beyond the arts required of a lady of Copper Downs.
Would these count? Did they serve to mark my days and give my soul a path when it was needed? What would my grandmother have said? Endurance would never have minded. My father would not have known what to say—I am not sure the affairs of women had ever
made much sense to him.
Which is why he sold you, a traitor thought whispered in my head. A boy he would have loved enough to keep.
I cried then, open tears for the first time in months here in this cold place. I did not think I was sobbing aloud, but in time Mistress Tirelle came to find me curled on the floor wrapped in misery.
“Girl,” she said, her voice soft with the huskiness of sleep. “What is that cloth clutched in your hand?”
She drove me out into the snowy courtyard with a wooden spindle. Mistress Tirelle seemed to have no regard for the marks of the beating this time. She almost shrieked her fury with each blow.
“You will let go of this obsession, you idiot trollop!”
“I’ll never let go!” I shouted in my words. My old words.
Her fist caught me on my chin to send me sprawling. My shift was already soaked with sweat and blood. The snow traded its cold through the damp, clinging fabric to chill my spine and ribs.
“So help me, if you speak that heathen trash one more time, I shall fork your tongue. The Factor will have you sold for a tavern wench, and you’ll be dead of men before you’re twenty.”
I tried to get away from her, but she swung the spindle again and caught me across the knees. The pain was stunning.
“You will burn that silk now, out here under the stars.”
“There is snow—” I began to answer, but Mistress Tirelle slapped me.
“You were not given leave to speak. Remain here.”
She waddled back to the porch and up the stairs. I sat shivering in the snow, swallowing my own blood and wishing I had a way to die.
The duck woman was back a minute or two later with one of the copper coal urns used to keep our sleeping rooms warm during a winter night. “Here,” she said. “Tear the silk in pieces and lay it within.”
Crying, I did so, or tried to. The silk was strong, as its kind of cloth always is. Mistress Tirelle found a knife within her swaddles and nicked the swath for me.
My tears stood near frozen on my face as I fed the strips to the glowing pit. She handed me a vial of oil. “Pour it over.”
I poured. The days of my life burned away as if they’d never been. The pomegranate seeds crackled in the heat, popping in little groups, taking the ghosts of what had been mine away with them.
May this burning reach my grandmother, I thought.
When the fire had died, Mistress Tirelle forced me to carry the urn to the upstairs kitchen. Even through a heavy pad, the metal reddened my hands and wrists. When we arrived, she rubbed oil of the palm on my burns with a rough, careless grip, then found a wide, low pot of the sort used for cooking small fowl atop the fire rather than within it.
She scooped the ashes of my silk and the burnt husks of pomegranate seeds from the warming urn to the stewpot. Some wine and some water followed, and a generous handful of salt. Mistress Tirelle mixed this awhile, watching it bubble until the mixture steamed.
The smell was awful.
Everything fit into a large serving bowl, which she set before me, saying, “Eat.”
The stew was a mass of grayish brown.
“Eat it,” she said, “and we are done. Do not eat it, and you are finished.”
I choked through the bitter stew of ashes and salt. I was eating my past. But I vowed that I would still have a future.
Later in my rooms, I sat in the bed and looked outside the door, which Mistress Tirelle had left standing open. In the shadows of the snow-heavy pomegranate, for a moment, I thought I saw a sleeping ox. I knew it could not possibly be so, but still the sight comforted me.
After my first year in the Pomegranate Court, new Mistresses entered as well, for other arts. Mistress Tirelle still worked with me in the kitchen. Mistress Leonie continued with the sewing and fabrics. Mistress Marga, who was much younger than the other two, came to show me the ways of a true and thorough cleaning of the building, northern style. Mistress Danae brought sheaves of paper and the wandering letters of Stone Coast writing to me, renewing what Federo had begun aboard Fortune’s Flight.
Each in their way demonstrated the mysteries of their art. Mistress Marga showed me how different oils were selected for varying woods, depending not only on the nature of the material itself, but also on how heavy the use and whether it met with direct sunlight. She spoke hours on starch, and why the proper stiffening of a cuff or collar could speak so thoroughly of a gentleman’s worth and station in the life of the city.
Mistress Sualix came to show me the secret magics of numbers, how they danced in lines and columns and arrays to give birth to new numbers. Her voice was close and quiet, and seemed careless of the discipline in which the others held me. To her, all the world was numbers. They moved ships and coin and the booted feet of swordsmen. She soon had me believing this, too, so that I thought I heard the measured breathing of the entire city in a small stack of coin.
Mistress Balnea came to instruct me on horses, dogs, and the rarer pets of which some women made their playpretties. She displayed tinted pictures rendered on stretched hides, and spoke of shoulders and stance and colors, and promised me a ride of my own in the spring. I did not see much point in mounting a pony only to circle the courtyard outside, but I did not tell the horsemistress this.
Music came, too, in the form of Mistress Maglia, a thin, vengeful woman who made Mistress Leonie’s malices seem like caresses. Her feelings were not personal, quite the opposite, but she made it most clear that I was nothing to her but another instrument. Her purpose was to fit my voice to the singing best regarded among these northern folk, and ensure that I knew a spinet from a harpsichord. I was still quite small when Mistress Maglia first began my training, and my voice had that angelic sweetness that very young children may possess. She warned me of the wreck I would become before I finished growing, then threatened to break me before my time if I did not mind every note and work exactly as she bade.
“I’m not afraid of the Factor like these other biddies,” she snapped. “You will be perfect, or you will be nothing, by my own hand.”
Two good things came from this new flood of Mistresses. One, my days were more varied and busy than when I had first arrived. This meant less time with Mistress Tirelle, and more distractions to occupy me. The world was already unfolding in a way I would never have imagined finding within a cage such as the Pomegranate Court. I felt guilty for comparing this favorably to spending my days swimming in ditches beneath the brassy sun.
Still, I was never beaten at home.
Two, with more Mistresses coming and going, I had an increasing sense that there was a world beyond these bluestone walls. Sounds rarely reached within the courts, and when they did, such noises were indistinct and meant little. The women who taught me came and went to other errands that implied they had responsibilities, schedules, things required of them. They often stopped to chatter. Care was taken to keep the words from my ears, but not always and not enough. Their bits of gossip told me of other girls being raised in other courts of the Factor’s house. These girls were all rivals to one another and to me—this sweetling was a genius of spice and flame in the kitchen, while that little flower inked calligraphy to match the very angels.
I was but a small child when such words first crossed my ears. They only strengthened my resolve to master everything before me. Someday I would walk free.
My bed was a great square so soft that I sometimes slept on the floor beside it. At night, when Mistress Tirelle had retired huffing and grumbling to her sleeping room, I would lie awake and tell myself stories in the language of my birth. I quickly came to realize how little I knew of my own tongue, compared with my increasing mastery of the rough, burred Petraean of these Stone Coast people. I could speak of fruits and spices and tailoring and the finer points of dogs only in the language of my captivity.
In my own language, I did not even have a word for dog. Endurance had been our only animal, besides a few scrawny jungle fowl scratching about Papa’s hut. I could chatter
of turtles and snakes and biting flies, but still the world those words encompassed was small enough to crack my heart.
One day I had pieced together another few lines of Seventeen Lives of the Megatherians. Mistress Danae believed that a lady should always reach beyond herself. The words were gigantic, speaking of ideas I did not understand at that time. What does a small child know of transmigration and condonation? Still, the sounds were present in their tricksy, shifting letters. She guided me through them one slow, patient step at a time.
I rose from my lesson. My bladder was full, and it was not quite the hour for me to assist Mistress Tirelle in the upper kitchen. With her keen sense of cruelty in full flower, she had decreed we would work with soups for a while.
To my surprise, she waited just outside the door of the common room. Mistress Tirelle was not in the habit of standing about in the cold. Not without great need.
“Girl,” she said, then paused a moment. Such a lack of assurance was also unlike the duck woman. “A new Mistress is here for you to meet. She is . . . is not on my schedule, but Federo has sent her.” Eyes narrowing, Mistress Tirelle went on. “Be warned. This is not someone you should warm to as you have your other Mistresses.”
It was all I could do not to burst out laughing. Who had Mistress Tirelle thought I might have warmed to? That she should imagine such an idiotic thing was beyond credibility. I nodded instead, then looked down at my feet to hide the light undoubtedly dancing in my eyes.
“You believe that I jest.” She grabbed my ear, then thought the better of it even as I braced for the shock of pain. “This is something else, Girl. None of your little rebellions—no foreign talk, no thieving, no nothing. You get the urge to earn a beating, you just come tell me and I’ll knock the pores right off your skin. But do not play the monkey with this new Mistress.”