‘Why does she cry?’ she said.
‘The prayers. They hurt her.’
Polly spun round when something touched her shoulder. It was Tonker.
‘Mrs Enid says we’re to get to work,’ she said. ‘She says the guards come round and check . . .’
It was women’s work, and therefore monotonous, backbreaking and social. It had been a long time since Polly had got her hands in a washtub, and the ones here were long wooden troughs, where twenty women could work at once. Arms on either side of her squeezed and pummelled, wrung out garments and slapped them into the rinsing trough behind them. Polly joined in, and listened to the buzz of conversation around her.
It was gossip, but bits of information floated in it like bubbles in the washtub. A couple of guards had ‘taken liberties’ – that is, more than had already been taken – and had apparently been flogged for it. This caused much comment along the tub. Apparently some big milord from Ankh-Morpork was in charge of things and had ordered it. He was some kind of wizard, said the woman opposite. They said he could see things happening everywhere, and lived on raw meat. They said he had secret eyes. Of course, everyone knew that that city was the home of Abominations. Polly, industriously rubbing a shirt on a washboard, thought about this. And thought ^bout a lowland buzzard in this upland country, and some creature so fast and stealthy that it was only a suggestion of shadow . . .
She took a spell on the copper boilers, ramming the stewing garments under the bubbling surface, and noted that in this place without weapons of any sort she was using a heavy stick about three feet long.
She enjoyed the work, in a dumb kind of way. Her muscles did all the necessary thinking, leaving her brain free. No one knew for sure that the Duchess was dead. It more or less didn’t matter. But Polly was sure of one thing. The Duchess had been a woman. Just a woman, not a goddess. Oh, people prayed to her in the hope that their pleas would be gift-wrapped and sent on to Nuggan, but that gave her no right to mess with the heads of people like Wazzer, who had enough trouble as it was. Gods could do miracles, Duchesses posed for pictures.
Out of the corner of her eye Polly saw a line of women taking large baskets from a platform at the end of the room and stepping out through another doorway. She dragged Igorina away from the wash trough and told her to join them. ‘And notice everything!’ she added.
‘Yes, corp,’ said Igorina.
‘Because I know one thing,’ said Polly, waving at the piles of damp linen, ‘and it’s that this lot will need the breeze . . .’
She went back to work, occasionally joining in the chatter for the look of the thing. It wasn’t hard. The washerwomen kept away from some subjects, particularly ones like ‘husbands’ and ‘sons’. But Polly picked up clues here and there. Some were in the keep. Some were probably dead. Some were out there, somewhere. Some of the older women wore the Motherhood Medal, awarded to women whose sons had died for Borogravia. The bastard metal was corroding in the damp atmosphere, and Polly wondered if the medals had arrived in a letter from the Duchess, with her signature printed on the bottom and the son’s name squeezed up tight to fit the space:
We honour and congratulate you, Mrs L. Lapchic of Well Lane, Manx, on the death of your son Otto PwtrHanLapcbic on June 25 at ██
The place was always censored in case it brought aid and comfort to the enemy. It astonished Polly to find that the cheap medals and thoughtless words did, in a way, bring aid and comfort to the mothers. Those in Munz who had received them wore them with a sort of fierce, indignant pride.
She wasn’t sure she trusted Mrs Enid very much. She had a son and a husband up in the cells, and she’d had a chance to weigh up Blouse. She’d be asking herself: what’s more likely, that he gets them all out and keeps them safe, or that there’s going to be an almighty mess which might well harm us all? And Polly couldn’t blame her if she went with the evidence . . .
She was aware of someone talking to her. ‘Hmm?’ she said.
‘Look at this, will you?’ said Shufti, waving a sodden pair of men’s long pants at her. ‘They keep putting the colours in with the whites!’
‘Well? So what? These are enemy longjohns,’ said Polly.
‘Yes, but there’s such a thing as doing it properly! Look, they put in this red pair and all the others are going pink!’
‘And? I used to love pink when I was about seven.’*
* It is an established fact that, despite everything society can do, girls of seven are magnetically attracted to the colour pink.
‘But pale pink? On a man?’
Polly looked at the next tub for a moment, and patted Shufti on the shoulder. ‘Yes. It is very pale, isn’t it? You’d better find a couple more red items,’ she said.
‘But that’d make it even worse—’ Shufti began.
‘That was an order, soldier,’ Polly whispered in her ear. ‘And add some starch.’
‘How much?’
‘All you can find.’
Igorina returned. Igorina had good eyes. Polly wondered if they’d ever belonged to someone else. She gave Polly a wink and held up a thumb. It was, to Polly’s relief, one of her own.
In the huge ironing room, only one person was working at the long boards when Polly, taking advantage of the temporary absence of Mrs Enid, hurried in. It was ‘Daphne’. All the rest of the women were gathered round, as if they were watching a demonstration. And they were.
‘—the collar, d’you see,’ said Lieutenant Blouse, flourishing the big, steaming, charcoal-filled iron. ‘Then the sleeve cuffs and finally the sleeves. Do one front half at a time. You should hang them immediately but, and here’s a useful tip, don’t iron them completely dry. It’s really a matter of practice, but—’
Polly stared in fascinated wonder. She’d hated ironing. ‘Daphne, could I have a word?’ she said, during a pause.
Blouse looked up. ‘Oh, P . . . Polly,’ he said. ‘Um, yes, of course.’
‘It’s amazing what Daphne knows about pleat lines,’ said a girl, in awe. ‘And press cloths!’
‘I am amazed,’ said Polly.
Blouse handed the iron to the girl. ‘There you are, Dympha,’ he said generously. ‘Remember: always iron the wrong side first, and only ever do the wrong side on dark linens. Common mistake. Coming, Polly.’
Polly kicked her heels for a while outside, and one of the girls came up with a big pile of fresh-smelling ironing. She saw Polly, and leaned close as she went past. ‘We all know he’s a man,’ she said. ‘But he’s having such fun and he irons like a demon!’
‘Sir, how do you know about ironing?’ said Polly, when they were back in the washing room.
‘Had to do my own laundry back at HQ,’ said Blouse. ‘Couldn’t afford a gel and the batman was a strict Nugganite and said it was girls’ work. So I thought, well, it can’t be hard, otherwise we wouldn’t leave it to women. They really aren’t very good here. You know they put the colours and the whites together?’
‘Sir, you know you said you were going to steal a gate key off a guard and break his neck?’ said Polly.
‘Indeed.’
‘Do you know how to break a man’s neck, sir?’
‘I read a book on martial arts, Perks,’ said Blouse, a little severely.
‘But you haven’t actually done it, sir?’
‘Well, no! I was at HQ, and you are not allowed to practise on real people, Perks.’
‘You see, the person whose neck you want to break will have a weapon at that moment and you, sir, won’t,’ said Polly.
‘I have tried out the basic principle on a rolled-up blanket,’ said Blouse reproachfully. ‘It seemed to work very well.’
‘Was the blanket struggling and making loud gurgling noises and kicking you in the socks, sir?’
‘The socks?’ said Blouse, puzzled.
‘In fact I think your other idea would be better, sir,’ said Polly hurriedly.
‘Yes . . . my, er . . . other idea . . . which one was that, exactly?’
‘The one where we escape from the washhouse via the clothes-drying area, sir, after silently disabling three guards, sir. There’s a kind of moving room down the corridor over there, sir, which gets winched all the way to the roof. Two guards go up there with the women, sir, and there’s another guard up on the roof. Acting together, we’d take out each unsuspecting guard, which would be more certain than you against an armed man, with all due respect, sir, and that would leave us very well positioned to go anywhere in the keep via the rooftops, sir. Well done, sir!’