Floodtide

by Heather Rose Jones

  I could have stayed there forever, sleeping on a pallet in the store room and borrowing Celeste’s oldest dress since mine wasn’t fit to be seen by customers. Celeste was taller than me, but skinnier so the lacing didn’t quite meet. I didn’t mind. I hoped Mefro Dominique had changed her mind about not letting me stay.

  She hadn’t. One morning a young lady came in—for a fitting, I thought. Ball gowns for catching a husband, maybe. She wasn’t dressed like a married woman yet, though she was old for that. I could tell from her clothes that her family had money, even from the plain walking dress. It’s in how it’s cut. I didn’t know how to make a dress look that way yet, but I could see it. But when she started talking to Mefro Dominique I could tell she was in charge. The older woman with her wasn’t dressed nice enough to be her mother.

  Mefro Dominique took them back into the parlor. If they needed to do measurements and look at stuffs, it would be Celeste she’d send for, so I was surprised when she called from the doorway, “Rozild, come in here if you please.”

  I tidied up my cap and made sure my dress wasn’t rumpled and followed her in. Mefro Dominique stood behind me and held me by the shoulders as if she thought I might run away. She said, “This is Rozild Pairmen. She’s a good girl and works hard.” And then to me, “Roz, this is Maisetra Sovitre, the royal thaumaturgist. She thinks she might have a place for you.” Then she pushed me forward a little bit and left the room.

  What had she told them? I stood there twisting my hands together nervously, then remembered to bob a little curtsey as I looked up.

  “I understand you’re looking for a position?”

  The lady’s voice was soft and kind, but my mind started running over all the things a thaumaturgist might need a girl like me for. They did real magic with the mystery guilds, not just charms like the old women in the market did or like Celeste had used to fix my leg. Mostly thaumaturgists were men. Men didn’t do charmwork. At least, you didn’t want to go to the ones that did. I’d never met a thaumaturgist before. But you knew about them from stories—the sort you told at mid-winter.

  I must have looked afraid because when I managed to say, “Yes, Maisetra,” she laughed a little. A pleasant laugh that made me feel a little easier.

  Then she looked at the older woman and said, “Charsintek, I’ll leave it to you to figure out what work she’s fit for.” She followed Dominique back into the front room.

  So the other woman was her housekeeper. I bobbled a second curtsey. “Mefro Charsintek?”

  She looked stern and sour like housekeepers always did. I wondered if the work did that to them or if you had to be that way to get hired for the position.

  “So. What can you do, girl?” she asked. No questions about why I was looking. That would come later, I thought.

  “I was a laundry maid,” I recited. “And helped out downstairs. I can do mending and fancy sewing. I’d like to learn dressmaking,” I added. “That’s why I came to Mefro Dominique.”

  She harrumphed and began quizzing me on the work, asking me how I’d deal with this stain or that kind of tear in a dress. I showed her the place on the sleeve of my chemise where I’d mended it so tiny you couldn’t even see it had been torn, except that the thread was a little darker.

  I kept waiting for her to ask, Why were you let go? What did you do? Let me see your references. She never did, so I knew Mefro Dominique must have told them about all that. But then why would they consider me at all? A woman who dressed like Maisetra Sovitre could have her pick of maids. The housekeeper gave another harrumph and left me standing there while she went out into the front of the shop.

  I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to go or stay, so I stood there waiting. Then Maisetra Sovitre came back into the parlor by herself. For the first time, I thought maybe there was a road in front of me. She had a nice smile—the sort that made you think she didn’t know there were bad people in the world. Certainly that she didn’t think you could be one of them.

  “Mefro Charsintek says that you’ll do,” she said. “Not for the heavy laundry, we have women come in for that. But she says there may not be enough mending and fine washing to keep you busy more than half-time—”

  My heart sank. No one would hire a maid to only work half-days. Not unless she lived out, and I didn’t have anywhere to stay.

  Maisetra Sovitre continued, “A girl like you—perhaps being in service isn’t for the best. You should learn a trade.”

  And now my heart sank further because I knew she’d found a way to say no. A girl like me. I knew what that meant.

  “Dominique explained to me about the problem with the apprenticeship. Is that what you truly want?”

  I nodded cautiously.

  “Dominique says she’s willing, if I pay the fee and make it right with the guild. You would work half-days at Tiporsel House and half-days here learning the trade. There’s always clothing to be made for the household. I had to convince Charsintek that you wouldn’t take advantage and gad about when going back and forth. You wouldn’t, would you? Good, that’s settled. Mefro Charsintek will wait while you gather up your things.”

  And as easy as that, it was done.

  * * *

  The maisetra left in her little town-carriage—I’d already started thinking of Maisetra Sovitre as “the maisetra”—and Mefro Charsintek set a good pace from the shop up along the river. I wouldn’t have considered it far when I was back in Sain-Pol, but you got used to things being closer in the city. We crossed the Nikuleplaiz, then took the Vezenaf—the main road that followed the river past the Pont Vezzen. I’d get to know that road well! After that, the houses got nicer on the river side of the street, with carriage houses and stables on the left side where the land sloped up to the upper town. They were old houses—older than the ones around the Plaiz Nof where the Fillerts lived. At first I thought that meant that maybe Maisetra Sovitre wasn’t as rich as she looked, but I learned better soon enough.

  Mefro Charsintek hadn’t said a word all that time or even looked back to see if I kept up. Housekeepers are quite a step up from laundry maids, so I didn’t expect her to pass the day. But when we turned off the main street and down a tiny alley that ran between two of the houses, she stopped and turned to me so quickly I nearly ran into her.

  “I want you to be certain of one thing, Rozild Pairmen.” She said it softly, but I could tell from the way she used my whole name that there was nothing soft about what she was about to tell me. “Maisetra Sovitre has a kind heart. Nobody’s going to bother you about why you left your last place.”

  I knew she didn’t mean at Mefro Dominique’s. I’d expected this warning since we first set out.

  “But don’t you do anything, I mean anything to dirty the maisetra’s good name. If I hear you’ve been causing trouble in the household, you’re gone. Like that.” And she snapped her fingers in my face.

  I nodded because it wasn’t like she needed an answer from me. What sort of trouble would I cause anyway? I’d left Nan behind at the Fillerts and I didn’t know if I’d ever see her again—if maybe she’d been dismissed too and sent home in disgrace. Then Mefro Charsintek turned and led me the rest of the way down to the back door of the house and set about showing me my duties.

  * * *

  I hadn’t anything much to put away, but Mefro Charsintek found me a uniform from castoffs so at least I’d be able to return Celeste’s dress to her. Then she handed me to Ailis, one of the girls I’d be sharing a room with up in the attic, and told her to sort me out. She took me to the washing room where the mending was kept. It was dark, set deep against the hill, though there was a row of small windows along the top of one wall that let some light in. The narrow houses climbed up the slope from the river in steps with rooms tunneling into the rock and little terraces overlooking the water at the back. Instead of three or four floors, there were maybe seven or eight if you counted the storerooms under the kitchens down at the bottom up to the attic where we girls had rooms.

 
There was a pump right there by the stone sinks to bring water in and a hot pipe in from the kitchens where there was a boiler going almost all the time. The Fillerts’ laundry couldn’t hold a candle.

  “There’s the linens that need work,” Ailis said, pointing to a set of baskets.

  That would be darning and hems and sheets that needed turning. Work that had waited until there was enough to hire someone in.

  Ailis showed me another set of baskets. “There’s where we bring livery and working clothes. Everything has a laundry mark somewhere to know whose it is. Charsintek has the account book that lists them all. Do those before the linens.”

  I wanted to say she didn’t have to tell me my job. Most in service wouldn’t have more than one spare uniform, so they’d need them back quick. But I kept my mouth shut because I needed friends and you didn’t want to get a name for being pert. “Mefro Charsintek said I was to do the fine washing too,” I said.

  “Oh, you won’t find the family’s clothing kept down here. The ladies’ maids and valets will give you those direct. If they decide to trust you.”

  Maisetra Fillert’s lady’s maid had been happy to have me look to the stained clothes, but I knew some didn’t care to have anyone else touching their maisetra’s things.

  Then it was up and down stairs again following Ailis to find all the folk who did for the family and let them know what I was to look to. I tried to remember all the names and hoped Ailis would help me sort them out later.

  A stern older woman gave me a small bundle, saying with a sniff, “There’s Maisetra Pertinek’s caps. Get them as white as you can and don’t tear the lace!”

  Next a younger woman with a country accent—not like from Sain-Pol but more eastern—looked me over and said she’d wait and see if I was good enough to wash her mistress’s things, but she gave me a man’s shirt with a rip in the sleeve. “The mesnera tore that during her sword-practice. Mind you do it up strong so it doesn’t tear again, but it needn’t be pretty.” She said it as if it were an everyday matter for a lady to go off in shirt and breeches to a fencing salle.

  I worked out the family from bits and pieces like that. At the Fillerts there had been Maistir and Maisetra Fillert and their daughters and a guest or two sometimes. But old households like this one were filled with relatives and people with odd connections, like a little village under one roof.

  There was Maisetra Sovitre. I figured the house must be hers because she’d hired me.

  The man of the house was Mesner Pertinek, and I knew he couldn’t be the maisetra’s father because he was noble.

  But “the mesnera” wasn’t Mesnera Pertinek. She was only Maisetra Pertinek because he’d married beneath him. Even though she was Maisetra Sovitre’s aunt, she was more like a lady’s companion, like rich old widows sometimes had.

  The mesnera was Baroness Saveze. And didn’t that make me stare! To think I was serving in a house that had a baroness. But it wasn’t Baroness Saveze’s house either?

  Ailis gave me a strange look when I asked about that, like I was stupid. She explained that before the mesnera was a baroness, she was Maisetra Sovitre’s armin, to protect her because she was rich. There was some long story about that. But when she found out she was a baroness they were fast friends and Maisetra Sovitre invited her to stay on as a guest but more like a sister.

  I figured I’d work it out in time, but my head was spinning too much to remember it all at once.

  That first day, all I cared about was which mending I should do first so Mefro Charsintek wouldn’t be sorry. The heaps of bed linens almost made me cry, like that girl in the old story who had to spin three rooms of flax in a day. Not that I’d ever done any spinning. But the linens could wait. First Maisetra Pertinek’s caps went in to soak, along with the fine handkerchiefs, then I took up the baroness’s shirt. After that, it would be the household mending.

  Once I’d lit the lamps, I might have worked until midnight, except Ailis poked her head in with a scowl, saying, “Where have you been? Charsintek sent me to look for you.”

  I thought I’d done something wrong already, but it was only suppertime. All the other lower servants were sitting at the table in the common room, staring at me when I came in.

  Charsintek said, “Pay attention to the bells. Don’t be late again.”

  As we sat down, Ailis whispered sharply, “Don’t think to get round her by working straight through. You won’t be thanked for it and you’ll go hungry.”

  After that I kept my eyes on my plate and barely listened to the conversation over the meal, though it was the sort of stiff, polite things you could say when the housekeeper and butler were present. If I wanted more interesting gossip, I’d need to make some friends and I wasn’t sure how to do that since I’d already gotten on Ailis’s bad side somehow.

  It didn’t help that I woke up crying in the middle of the night with Ailis and one of the other girls cursing at me for the noise. I was dreaming about Nan. I was back wandering the cold streets and Nan was there with me. I needed to find some place safe for the both of us. But I couldn’t explain that. They thought I was homesick and had no sympathy at all.

  All I knew to do was work hard. It hadn’t saved me at the Fillerts, but what else could I do? At the end of Saturday, when Charsintek was inspecting my work she offered the nearest thing I’d had to a kind word. “I’ll say this for you girl, you’re not lazy.”

  She looked at the baskets still left to do. “If there were little enough mending that you could finish it in a day or a week, I wouldn’t have needed to hire someone. When do you start your apprenticeship with the dressmaker?”

  I hadn’t forgotten about it, but I hadn’t known how to bring it up either. “Whenever it pleases,” I said.

  Charsintek frowned. “Best to go by whole days. That way you won’t be wasting time going back and forth. I’ll send a boy round so she expects you on Monday, and see you bring back your copy of the contract and give it to Ponivin for the accounts. You can have Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for dressmaking, and your half-day off is every other Sunday after church. What you do with that is your own affair.”

  It came to me that three days wasn’t half of seven. It wasn’t quite a half-time apprenticeship, but Maisetra Sovitre was paying the fee, so she could say how much time it was for, and it was more than I could have dreamed of a month ago.

  Chapter Four

  March 1824—Washing

  It was both strange and comfortable to find myself on Mefro Dominique’s doorstep early Monday morning—though not as early as on the morning I begged her to take me in. I stepped back into the work like putting on comfortable old shoes. It wasn’t that different being ’prenticed than when I was sewing for my bed and board. There was still cleaning and errands to run. The sewing was still plain and simple, not even as hard as mending, but Mefro Dominique wanted it done exactly so. She said she needed to train me out of bad habits. If I didn’t do it exactly like she showed me, I’d have to pick it all out.

  That didn’t happen very often. Celeste was working there beside me in the sewing room and kept me in line with a sharp word. At first I thought maybe she was jealous of me being there, but she always set me right, even when it stung. I didn’t mind because it meant Mefro Dominique would nod approvingly and give me something harder next time. But I wished that Celeste…that she liked me. Not in any special way, but so we might be friends.

  Celeste worked faster than me, of course, and had harder work. Sometimes when she finished, she’d start on what I had left until everything was done. I thought it was to show me up, but there wasn’t any point in being fast if I didn’t set my stitches right. If we finished the work before dusk, Mefro Dominique would send Celeste out to the market while she looked over my sewing and set me to household chores.

  One afternoon when there were no fittings, Mefro Dominique came in while we were still sewing and said, “Celeste, petite, that’s enough for now. Why don’t you go to the Strangers’ Market and
see if you can find any new trimmings. Spend some time at Saint Nikule’s if you want.”

  In a trice, Celeste clattered up the stairs to fetch her coat, bonnet, and basket, then down again and out the front door with a jangle of the bell. The Strangers’ Market was the place in the Nikuleplaiz where bargemen and sailors sold things they brought back from foreign lands. But I didn’t know why Celeste would want to go to church on a Wednesday afternoon.

  “You put that away for now,” Mefro Dominique told me, “and come keep me company in the front room. Bring your sewing things.”

  I knew she didn’t need company—she often sat out in the front room alone waiting for customers and filled the time doing accounts or matching up bits of fabric to see what went together or studying the fashion pictures. But she sat me down on a stool behind the counter and took up a strip of silk and said, “Let me show you how to make buttonholes.”

  They weren’t the ordinary sort you put on cuffs or petticoats, but the fancy ones worked in silk for pelisses and gowns. She showed me step-by-step as we worked twenty-four down one side of the fabric, then told me to finish another twenty-four up the other side until she couldn’t tell mine from hers. That was the day I started to become a real dressmaker. After that, it was a regular thing when Celeste went out that we’d sit together and she’d teach me something special.

  * * *

  I found out what Celeste did at Saint Nikule’s those afternoons, but it started out with a length of linen that had fallen against a windowpane and got mildewed from the damp. When we found it, Mefro Dominique said something in French. I don’t think she was swearing. She was too nice for that. She handed the cloth to me and said, “Rozild, since you’re a laundress, see what you can do with this. If you can get the stains out, it’s yours for a new chemise.”

  We didn’t do washing regular at Mefro Dominique’s, but I didn’t want to carry it all the way back to Tiporsel House, so Celeste helped me set up a borrowed tub out back and I spent a few coins at the chemist’s for washing balls and things because I hadn’t had a chance to work up my own receipts yet. I didn’t want anyone calling me a thief over a bit of Maisetra Sovitre’s soap. I’d earned a little doing mending on folks’ Sunday clothes—it was only the uniforms that were my job and it was worth it to lose some sleep to have spending money before the next quarter day.