“A fair choice. You looked well. Now put down the knife and pick a fruit from that basket behind you. You may look for only the count of three.”
I looked over my shoulder to see a basket tucked behind the small block. It was filled with pomegranates. All the fruits on top were unripe, several dusted with some molder.
Quickly I reached in and grabbed a firm one, then rushed to place it on the table.
The fruit was of good color, but the shape was distended, with lumpy ends. “A woman might eat of that,” said Mistress Tirelle. “But you could have done better.”
I wanted to ask how, but I had not been given permission to speak.
“Let us go outside.”
I followed her into the courtyard. The breeze was up a little, with a faint coolness on it I had never felt before. The tree was heavy with fruit. A few more lay on the cobbles around it. Most of the windfall was in the basket in the lower kitchen, of course, picked up by someone other than me.
“You have until the count of three to select one from the tree.”
I looked. There were a hundred in my vision if there was a one. I pointed at a flash of melon-colored flesh halfway up.
“Hold your hand steady,” she said, then fetched a long pole with a little metal basket at the end. I had never seen that tool before. The night sometimes brought so much to our little court.
Mistress Tirelle used the picker to bring down my pomegranate. I could not say how she knew which one, but so far as I could tell, she pulled down mine.
“The skin is split,” she said. “See? There are blackflies within. You will learn to pick well, the first time.”
We went back inside, where she made me eat the spoiled fruit I had chosen. The mealy flesh was bitter enough to bring tears to my eyes while the blackflies stung the inside of my mouth. I had the better of her, though, in that I sucked the flesh off some of the seeds and spat them into my hand, so I could keep them in place of my lost bells.
The following week Mistress Tirelle and I were in the courtyard beneath the shadow of our tree. The air was strangely chilled, the sun a wan and sullen disc in the sky. We were exercising my fruit-choosing skills. She would whip a blind off my face, and I would select a pomegranate with only a moment’s glance. Down it would come, and we examined its defects together.
“See now,” she said, “how much your eyes can know before your mind does. Let that first choice be true, and all else will follow from it. Let that first choice be false, and trouble will out every time.” The duck woman leaned close. “Never allow yourself to be seen to make the effort. It must come from within, on the moment.”
We were interrupted by an iron clangor which took me by surprise. I had not heard that sound once in the whole time since being brought here by Federo. Mistress Tirelle looked up and passed a quirk of her lips.
“Your next Mistress is here,” she said.
For a moment, I thought I might be free of Mistress Tirelle. That flash of elation must have shown upon my face, for her eyes narrowed and the smile that hadn’t truly been there vanished with the finality of a tight-closed door. She drew back her hand to strike a blow, then stayed herself, instead saying, “Come with me.”
We walked to the dark gate through which I had come. The archway was large enough to admit a carriage, but a postern was let within. A bell hung there, which Mistress Tirelle rang once. The door creaked open, and a slender woman of sour aspect stepped through. She was as pale and sharp-eyed as all the other maggot folk of this city, wearing a long apron of dark blue over gray skirts and a gray blouse.
“Girl,” said Mistress Tirelle. “This is Mistress Leonie. She will work with you on your sewing.”
Thus we moved on to the next phase of my education. I was broken to the harness. Now it was time for me to learn my tricks.
I received my first real beating shortly thereafter, upon being cross with Mistress Leonie. She was quieter and of gentler voice than Mistress Tirelle, and so I was lulled into a sense of trust. I’d thought anyone would be better company than the duck woman with her casual cruelties and calculated rages.
My basic needlework having already been established, Mistress Leonie had moved me into different kinds of stitches. We worked with an assortment of needles and types of thread. Some were difficult for me to manipulate. I hissed in frustration during our morning hours one day.
“What is it, Girl?”
“This silly needle slips in my hand,” I complained. “I hate the silk thread.”
“You will do as you’re told.”
“It’s stupid. We can use an easier thread.”
She looked me up and down, then stepped to the doorway and called for Mistress Tirelle. They whispered together a short while. Mistress Leonie came back and resumed her seat with a smirk.
Mistress Tirelle reappeared a moment later with a cloth tube in one hand. It was fat as a sausage and slightly more than a foot in length. “Remove your shift,” she ordered.
I glanced at Mistress Leonie in a rush of embarrassment. I still did not realize what was about to come, and thought only for my modesty. Even that idea was new to me, brought by the language of my captivity and the chilly necessities of life in the Factor’s house here so far north of the country of my birth.
Shrugging out of my shift, I faced her.
“Turn and bend to grasp your knees.”
Mistress Tirelle began to beat me across the buttocks and thighs with the silk tube. It had been filled with sand, then wetted, so it was heavy and struck me with a harder, deeper blow than the flat of her hand could do. I cried out at the first, which earned me a growl to silence and another, sharper blow. She laid into me for the count of twenty. Then: “Don your shift, and continue with Mistress Leonie’s instruction.”
Sitting was agony, but I did not dare show it. As I brought my shaking hands to the needle and thread, I saw the flush on Mistress Leonie’s cheeks. She looked happy.
Thus we went on. Now that the silk tube was out, punishments became far more frequent and for less cause. I was beaten if I used one of my own words. I was beaten if I came late to instruction or the table. I was beaten if I was thought to be disrespectful, something Mistress Leonie found to be the case at least two or three times each week. If I merely forgot something, Mistress Tirelle beat me for that as well.
Though Endurance had first taught me patience, Mistress Tirelle made that lesson my way of life. The slap of her sandals on the wooden floors took the place of the bell of Papa’s white ox. Her coarse, labored breathing was Endurance’s snorting to call me back, though now the danger was greatest at the center of my life.
The courtyard outside grew ever colder as my first northern winter arrived. Grim rains would set in that lasted for days. I was miserable with the chill. Mistress Tirelle swaddled herself in more wool than ever, but did not bother to offer me anything to put over my shift. I cured my pomegranate seeds in the small warming pot allowed me for the nights, and stole wisps of thread for my silk.
Soon, I would steal the whole cloth. I had only to find a way to distract Mistress Leonie.
She had brought a flat chest that opened from the top into a series of drawers like wooden wings spread ever wider. Cloth lay folded within-muslins, cottons, poplins, silks, woolens, and other fabrics-all of it heavy with the smell of camphor and the scent of the cedar wood from which the chest had been made. Some lengths were in colors that might have shamed a butterfly. Others were simple and somber.
“Each of these is as fine as you will discover in any market,” Mistress Leonie said.
I had never been in any market, but she was not interested in the tale of my short years.
“I have shown you how to tell the thread count. With practice, your eye will gauge the quality even from a distance. That is not everything there is to cloth, but it stands for much.” She turned a yard-long run of fine wool over in her hands. “I will bring a loom, for you should see how this is made.” That dangerous leer crept across her face, which spoke of a beating soon to come. “Tell me, Girl, what is the wool I hold?”