Having said that and set the jar back in its niche he had gone straight up the stairs to what he called his work and she, in her mind, called his toys. And she had gone across to the jar and counted the coins. How wicked, she thought, the way good men are cheated; had that field been mine I should have haggled and sold it for at least twice as much as this. And then she had realised, for the first time, fully, that Melchior not only trusted her—she had known that—but that he was depending upon her.
So, shameful as it was for a slave born in the family house and reared therein, to do such a thing, she had gone and sought casual labour. Always far down in the valley where she was not known. And always, if questioned, she had said that she came from Pyangyong. Sometimes she had added the information that she was a widow.
It had worked until last year. Then something had gone wrong inside her head; far worse than the buzzing in her ears. When she stooped—and all field work involved stooping–she’d turned dizzy. Naturally she had ignored this, just as she had ignored her aching back, her stiff knees and elbows. But, working on through the dizziness, she had fallen and lain unconscious. She always came round, as good as new, and no harm done; but she’d had such spells so often, in so many different fields and orchards, that now no one would employ her. There was a superstitious belief that to have a worker die, at work, brought bad luck.
There were still things she could have done, inside houses; she could have cooked, preserved fish and meat, mended, done anything that did not entail much stooping; but the trouble was that in the valley there were only rich families who had slaves and servants of their own to do such work, or poor ones who would never hire domestic labour. The same problem had bedevilled her one or two begging expeditions; the poor had nothing to spare and in the big houses the servants had chased her off, calling her a dirty old woman. Today the situation was desperate, she
must go out to findfuel, and, if it were humanly possible, something to eat tomorrow.
When she opened the door the pig squealed in anguished anticipation; she gave it a calculating look as she passed. Nothing but skin and bone now, and it would be worse tomorrow. Tomorrow she must, by some means, gain Melchior’s attention and make him understand about the pig. It seemed strange that such a clever man should be so stupid about simple things.
Still, she was his slave and she must do her best for him. In addition, she loved him very much. She had lost her heart to him more than half a century ago, when she was fifteen and he a handsome young man of twenty. Oh, how handsome he had been, tall and slim and elegant, with such bright eyes and glossy black hair, and such beautiful manners. The old master had been alive then, the tower did not exist and they were all living in the magnificent house that stood half-way down the slope, overlooking the valley. She was the youngest of the female slaves, and the prettiest, and it was quite usual for masters, young or old, to take a comely slave girl to bed. She remembered the dusks of summers long ago, when the young master was home from his studies, and the night wind blew softly and she’d haunted the courtyard outside his bedroom and yearned for him. She’d done her best to attract his notice, putting oil on her hair and scent on the palms of her hands. If someone then, with the gift for seeing, had told her—You’ll live alone with him for thirty years, sharing a fire and a dish, how wrongly she would have interpreted it, how overcome with joy she would have been.
Bodies grew old, she thought, shuffling down the hill; handsome young men turned into thin, frail ones—but she still thought Melchior good-looking, for his age; and in comely girls the sap dried up, till they were like old twisted trees and nobody would believe that once they had worn flowers behind their ears and been desirable, and almost died of their own desiring.
In the end even desire failed.
But duty remained; and a kind of fondness, and that was why she was out here in the biting wind with the mud seeping through the rags that wrapped her feet instead of remaining indoors and thinking that it was a master’s duty to provide his slave with at least one meal a day.
After a time she drew level with the big house under whose warm-coloured, curving tiled roof both she and Melchior had been born. She had never visited it to ask for employment or charity; it was too near the tower; she might be recognised and so bring shame upon Melchior; and Melchior, looking out from his tower, might even have seen her. Also she had felt a curious reluctance to go back there where life had run so comfortably in the old days.
This morning she thought about the past. The old master had possessed a sternness unknown to his grandson, but he had been just, and there had never been a mistress to make things hard. The old mistress had died in childbed, and Melchior’s mother had died, with his father, in the time of the great sickness, two years before Senya herself was born. In the comfortable house life had been pleasant; plenty of fuel, plenty of food, plenty of tea. Of all the things she had lacked in recent years Senya missed tea most. It came from China and was very expensive, so it had been one of the first things to be cut out. Melchior seemed not to notice; he drank ..hot water without comment or complaint, but Senya still yearned to see the green leaves uncurling and yielding their flavour and fragrance, and the water changing colour. Between a bowl of hot water and a bowl of tea there was all the difference in the world.
She came back to the present. Either the wind was stronger than usual or meagre feeding was telling at last in increased feebleness; she was making very slow progress. Ordinarily she would have been in the valley by this time and here she was, still skirting the wall that surrounded the big house. It offered some shelter from the wind and she paused to gather strength. Through an archway she could see into the main courtyard. It wore its winter look. The big tubs of lilies had been taken indoors and every rose tree had been loosened from its stake, bent over and swathed in sacking. Very soon now it would look very different. Spring, when it came, came at a bound. She remembered
how, for several years, she had watched the rosetrees being unshrouded and straightened, and the lily tubs brought out, with excited anticipation. Maybe on some warm, scented evening this year Melchior would notice her and she would be able to give her maidenhead where she had already given her heart. That was all she asked.
It had never happened; and all that wasted hope and emotion might have been a sadness and a hurt to remember, but for one thing. If she had failed to make her humble way into his bed, so had women not so humble. Many men, with silk-clad, tiny-footed, jewel-shining daughters, had desired that rich, handsome young man as a son-in-law, and Senya had watched fearfully, feeling that she could hardly bear it if he took a wife without first taking her, yet knowing that she must bear it and give no sign for fear of ridicule. That misery, at least, she had escaped. Melchior had taken the sky as his bride, and such a rival any woman could accept, not gladly, but with fortitude.
She stood in the shelter of the wall and realised with dismay that this morning, even if she forced herself on, down into the valley, she would never climb back again. Old, yes, she was old, her ears buzzed as though bees were swarming there, and when she stooped she grew dizzy; but she’d never felt feeble before. Now she did, her legs trembled under her and she felt dizzy without stooping. It occurred to her—and it was a shocking thought—that if she was to have anything to offer her master when tomorrow morning he came down from the tower, she must ask for, and obtain it from this house.
She turned and looked back at the tower, a long grey finger pointing to the sky with a glass dome at its tip. It seemed far from where she stood, skulking in the shelter of the wall, to where her master was, high in the glass dome. But he had that wonderful glass, the thing he claimed to have invented.