Floodtide

by Heather Rose Jones

  Celeste didn’t have to help me, so maybe I was wrong about her not liking me, but she was funny about it. When I started rubbing up the linen with salt and vinegar before setting it to soak, like I’d learned from Aunt Gaita, she watched me close like she did sometimes when we were sewing together.

  “What’s that for?” Celeste asked later when I’d soaped it up and hung it by the fire.

  “You have to set the soap in with heat so it’ll rinse clean,” I said.

  “No. What you’re singing.”

  I stared at her for a moment. “Just washing charms.” It wasn’t singing really, but Aunt Gaita always put a bit of lilt in them that felt like music and made them easier to remember.

  “No.” Celeste spoke carefully like I’d said something foolish. When she did that, it always felt like she was measuring you with the tape and didn’t like the result. “I mean, what’s it for. What does it do?”

  Now she was the one being foolish. “It makes the washing take. You think my aunt would send me out to work without knowing all her secrets?” Everyone had little bits like that. Not real charms like the charmwives sell, but tricks of the trade. All the girls in service were greedy to learn each other’s house-charms. No one at Tiporsel House was friendly enough to share with me yet, so I’d kept Aunt Gaita’s to myself so far.

  Celeste came closer and poked at the cloth. “Do they work?”

  I shrugged. “It’s not a proper job unless you say charms.” I tried to think if I’d ever heard Mefro Dominique use house-charms. Maybe Celeste never had anyone to share them with her.

  “Have you tried washing one thing using the charm and another without it?”

  I laughed. “Why would I do that? That would be as silly as washing without soap!”

  “So you don’t know.” She sounded disappointed.

  It was like she didn’t believe in charms, but I knew that wasn’t so because she’d charmed my hurt leg that first day. “How did you know how to make my bruise go away?” I rubbed my hand over where it had been. I’d almost forgotten it.

  Celeste bit her lip and stared at me measuring-like again. “Didn’t you say you get your half-day off this Sunday?”

  I nodded.

  “I want to try something. Come meet me after morning Mass.”

  It was so nice to have her treat me like we were friends that I offered, “I could ask the housekeeper if I can go to Saint Nikule’s with you. We’re supposed to go to services, but it shouldn’t matter where.”

  * * *

  After Mass, Celeste dragged me off to one of the rag sellers in the market who had old kerchiefs and caps and other linens. Stuff that wasn’t so bad as to go to the paper-makers, but you wouldn’t want to wear it anywhere respectable. She haggled for a bundle of stained napkins, picking through them to find ones with stains that matched. I started to get an idea of what she was about, so I didn’t grumble too much when she made me pay for them.

  “We can sell them again afterward if they clean up well,” she told me and I hoped she was right.

  I thought we’d go straight back to Mefro Dominique’s, but instead Celeste led me around the back of the church by the little charity houses built between the buttresses opposite the market arcades. She rapped on one of the low doors. When a bent-backed old woman opened it she told me, “Wait here. I need to buy some herbs and things.”

  I was just as glad to stay outside. It was one thing to do house-charms like anyone might do, but the charmwives that hung around the Nikuleplaiz were another matter. People said you could buy curses from them as easy as blessings. I wondered if Celeste knew any curses. Maybe that was why the parish let them stay in the charity houses—to keep an eye on them. But maybe it was that selling charms didn’t earn you much, so they were always poor. Nobody turned to make a living as a charmwife unless they couldn’t do anything else.

  While I was waiting, I wandered over to the arcade to watch fortunes being told. My heart nearly stopped when I recognized one of the girls waiting to have her cards read.

  “Nan!”

  She jumped and looked around. When she saw me, she turned back to the other girls she was with like nothing happened. Why wouldn’t she even look at me when I’d been worried sick about her? Before I called again, she leaned over and whispered something, then started walking like she was going to go right by me. But as she passed, she grabbed my hand and pulled me along until we were out of sight around the end of the arcade.

  “Roz! What are you doing here? Where did you go?”

  I wanted to wrap my arms around her and kiss her until I’d kissed my fill, but we couldn’t do that with so many people about. “Oh, Nan,” I said, “what did Mefro Mollin say to you that day? I was so afraid you’d been dismissed too. What happened?”

  Nan stepped back away from me. She looked uncomfortable. “She found out about us.”

  “How?” I asked. “Who told her.”

  Nan’s face twisted up like she wanted to cry. “It was Ionek.”

  I was confused. “How would he know?”

  “Oh, Roz, don’t you know anything? He was sweet on me, and he was always bothering me. When I told him no, he said he’d seen us and he’d tell.”

  I felt like I had a stone in my belly. “Why would Mefro Mollin believe him?”

  “Roz, I’m sorry.”

  She couldn’t mean what it sounded like. “Nan, all you had to do was keep quiet.”

  “Roz, you don’t understand.” She really was crying now. “She was like a terrier who knows there’s a rat somewhere. I couldn’t lose my place. My pa would kill me. She said she’d turn out the both of us to make sure. I had to tell her it was your fault—that I didn’t know.”

  I grabbed her by the shoulders, though she tried to turn away. “What did you say to her?”

  “That I thought you were just being…friendly-like. That I didn’t know it was a sin.”

  I wanted to slap her. I wanted to scream at her. How could she?

  “Roz, it wasn’t so bad, was it? You’re doing well for yourself now, aren’t you?”

  I wasn’t going to tell her what I’d been through. I’d thought she felt the same way I did, but she couldn’t have. Not if she’d done that. And then Celeste came around the corner looking for me and Nan took the chance to slip away.

  * * *

  I was glad that Celeste wasn’t the sort to gossip. When we got back to the shop, we started setting up for washing the napkins and I forgot about Nan for a while.

  If I’d been doing regular washing, I would have put all the napkins in together, but Celeste told me to do one at a time. She watched me close as I worked through the steps, rubbing the cloth with salt and vinegar, soaking, using the washing ball, drying, then rinsing. It was like she was trying to catch me in a mistake. When I got nervous and only whispered the charmwords, she stopped me and made me start again, louder.

  “Is that it?” she asked when I’d draped the cloth over a rail to dry.

  “You can’t rush clean.” That’s what Aunt Gaita always said. Celeste was pricking me like she always did, and it felt good to know more than her.

  “Do another, then,” she ordered. “This time don’t do the charms.”

  “How can I—?”

  “Don’t say the words.”

  I sighed. Loudly so she’d hear it. It was harder than I thought to set it all up with my mouth shut. You get used to a way of doing things.

  “Did it feel different?” she asked when the second cloth had gone all the way to soak.

  “No.” I didn’t think she meant how I felt twitchy from doing things wrong way about. Charms weren’t like mysteries in church where you could feel the Holy Spirit moving like shivers down your spine. She couldn’t mean the wanting feeling I got from charms sometimes, because I’d never told her about that. Mefro Dominique had made it plain I wasn’t to talk about what I’d done with Nan, and I didn’t know how to describe the feeling without that part. But washing charms never made me feel it any
way, so that didn’t matter.

  We left the linens setting and went to fetch dinner from the cook shop up on the main street. Mefro Dominique insisted we all sit together for dinner, but when we were done, Celeste and I went back to working the napkins. Or I did and Celeste went back to watching me as I scrubbed them with a washing ball, first one then the other, rinsed them both hot twice, wrung them out, and shook the wrinkles out to hang them to dry, each one in turn. One exactly like Aunt Gaita had taught me and one biting my tongue to keep from saying the charms.

  When it was all done, I stood back, arms akimbo, and waited for Celeste to say something. She shook her head and said, “Didn’t work.”

  Celeste had a way of needling me without really meaning to. I’d stopped thinking she was jealous. It’s just how she is. She says things without thinking if she should, and she gets stuck on how she thinks the world ought to be. It comes out all sharp-edged like that. But it still stung and I barked back at her like two dogs at a gate.

  “What do you mean it doesn’t work? Look! The stains are gone!”

  “But the stains are gone on both of them,” Celeste pointed out. “The one where you said the charms and the one where you didn’t.”

  I squinted at them. She was right. If you put the two napkins side by side I couldn’t tell which was which.

  “Maybe…” I said slowly. “I know I didn’t say it out loud, but it’s hard not to think the charms when my hands are doing the work. Maybe thinking them hard enough works the same as saying them.”

  Celeste stared at me in that measuring way. She leaned close to whisper, even though Mefro Dominique was upstairs.

  “I’ll tell you how I know it didn’t work, but don’t you ever tell anyone else. Swear it!”

  She waited. It wasn’t enough for me to nod. I said, “I swear.”

  “I can see charms when they work. And when they don’t work.” She was whispering so I had to lean closely to hear. “That’s what you can’t tell anyone. I’ll get in trouble if people know I can tell when charms don’t work. Most charmwives, they sell charms they learn from someone else. I learn as many charms as I can, but I only sell the ones that work.”

  That was a new thought. Everyone knew some charmwives were better than others and some were outright frauds. They always had some excuse for why what they sold you didn’t work. What if they didn’t know?

  “I want to know why,” Celeste continued. “Maman wants me to keep to doing sick-charms, but you can’t poke at a sick-charm to see how it works. If it already works, I don’t want to break it. And if it doesn’t work, how can I offer someone hope if I don’t know I can fix it up? But something like this?” She waved her hand at the drying napkins. “I can poke at your washing-charms and see what happens and it doesn’t hurt anyone if I’m wrong.”

  She stepped back, watching me closely, and spoke more normal-like. “I’m not saying that none of your aunt’s washing charms work, but that one didn’t. At least not when you do it. The only reason that kerchief is white is salt and vinegar and Mallo’s washing balls.”

  She probably meant the last bit to make me feel better, but she’d taken something from me. Like when a cloud crosses the sun and you get a chill. I stuck my chin out and said, “I’m going to keep using it anyway.”

  Celeste nodded with a brief jerk, as if that were the right thing to say. That made me madder and Celeste could tell, though she wasn’t always good at seeing people even if she could see charms. She said more friendly-like, “Maisetra Talarico says we don’t bless our bread to change the bread, we bless it to change ourselves. Maybe charms can be like that too.”

  “Who’s Maisetra Talarico?” I asked. The name sounded deliciously foreign, and I imagined a woman in a bright dress sitting in a corner of the plaiz saying wise things. “Is she one of the charmwives?”

  Celeste gave me a look of pure scorn, but it was serious this time. “You don’t know who Maisetra Talarico is? She’s one of your maisetra’s friends. Comes and goes at Tiporsel House all the time. She’s Italian and she’s a black lady like my maman.”

  “That’s as much as you know about working in a great house,” I countered. “I never go into the family rooms. I never even see Maisetra Sovitre except when she comes down to talk to Cook about meals. And if your Maisetra Talarico is so important, how come she talks to you?” That was mean, but I was feeling mean.

  Celeste didn’t answer that. “Do you have any washing charms that use…stuff? Like writing things or burning candles or something you touch it with? I don’t mean vinegar and bluing, but something more than words. I work best with that kind.”

  I thought a bit. “There’s one for getting bloodstains out where you sprinkle it with salt and rub it with a stone while you say the words. But I left my bloodstone at the Fillerts’ house.”

  “A regular bloodstone, like the kind you use to stop bleeding?”

  I nodded. “But it has to be smooth and polished so it doesn’t snag the cloth.”

  “We’ll try that one next time.”

  Then I had to leave for the long walk up the Vezenaf to Tiporsel House so I wouldn’t get scolded for being out late. If I ran, I could make good time, but I wanted to think and a thinking walk might take me more than half an hour.

  I’d never met anyone who talked about charms the way Celeste did. I’d never thought about Aunt Gaita being a charmwife. She wasn’t, really. Charmwives sell you charms and it’s for stuff you can’t do another way, like keeping your husband from straying or making the hens keep laying at the end of summer or taking care of sick children if you couldn’t afford the doctor. Aunt’s charms weren’t like that. They were more like saying prayers before you went to sleep—something you did because you didn’t want to know what might happen if you didn’t do them. The linens would stay yellow or the wool would shrink or the dye from one cloth would run all over another one.

  I thought about the bent-backed old charmwife we visited in the charity house. Celeste wasn’t like her, but partly that was because Celeste talked about charms like they were put together of pieces and the pieces mattered. The same way it mattered which way you threaded a needle so the thread wouldn’t fray. Mefro Dominique had showed me that one day, twisting up a bit of thread and then having me run my fingers one way and the other along it. Celeste tried to explain charms the same way, but I couldn’t touch it like I could touch the thread.

  That’s what I needed to think about on the walk up along the river. I remembered other things Aunt Gaita had taught me that we might try the next day and other bits I’d learned at the Fillerts. There’d be time to let things soak or dry while we did the sewing. It wasn’t the charms I cared about, it was having Celeste talk to me like a friend even when it felt like quarreling.

  I hadn’t made any friends at Tiporsel House yet. It’s hard if you’re not working elbow-to-elbow. No one else had business in the laundry room except the washing women who came when I wasn’t there. At night the girls shared whispered secrets, but my secrets weren’t the sort of thing I could tell. That made me think about Nan and I knew I’d be crying in my sleep again.

  You need friends to watch your back and give you a hand. I hadn’t worked hard enough at making them. So my next mending day I asked Mefro Charsintek if I could take my work out to the servants’ common room. “It doesn’t make sense for me to burn oil all by myself in the laundry when there’s better light there,” I said. “I promise I won’t be in the way.”

  Maybe she guessed that I was lonely, but she said I could. After that it was easier to talk to folks. Not gossiping or anything, just friendly talk—the sort that turned into helping out and then into favors traded and trusting each other. It was Celeste gave me the thought I could do that again and not make the mistake I made with Nan.

  I didn’t know I’d make a different mistake this time.

  Chapter Five

  March 1824—Delivering

  The common room was one of the few rooms downstairs with lots of wind
ows. It looked out over the upper edge of the garden and sunlight even made it into the kitchen where it opened off to one side. The year was turning toward spring and we were allowed to go into the garden as long as the family wasn’t using it. It was damp and gray now, but in summer I imagined taking my work out to the benches there. Not the bench by the dock right down at the edge of the river—everyone warned me that was the baroness’s and we weren’t to use it.

  The garden sloped down from the back of the house to the river. You could enjoy watching the birds skim over the water and listening to the whistles and shouts of the rivermen. Sometimes one of the family would send word down to hail a riverman and then I could see them pass by in all their fine clothes to be handed into the boat and rowed off somewhere. Once Charsintek wanted me to bring a delivery back from the Nikuleplaiz and gave me a coin for a ride. But most times when a boat came to the dock, it was the kitchen delivery from the market out past the east gate. Every morning Cook or her assistant took a hired fiacre off to the market and sent the baskets back by the river. It was like a second set of roads. There’d be a sharp whistle up from the dock and Cook would send whoever was idling about down to fetch things up. Sometimes the riverman would help carry baskets too, for the extra teneir or to get the boat unloaded more quickly. That was how I met Liv.

  * * *

  It was a fine day and the door had been left open to the gardens, the easier to hear a halloo from the dock. I was keeping quiet because Cook was out of sorts and one of the kitchen maids was being scolded. Nothing to do with me, but best to lay low. We heard a sharp whistle from down by the water and then the yipping of a dog. Some of the rivermen kept a little dog trained to bark at doors if you didn’t hear the whistle. Lufise came out of the kitchen with a quick smile and a wink to me as if to say, “There’s an excuse to get out of the kitchen for a few minutes.”