When they had finished eating, Mouche still ruminating on fatefulness, the gardener took a look at Mouche’s face, then told him to do no more than he could comfortably do for the rest of the day. A barrow was laden with tools and they pushed it to a long arbor walk overgrown with fruit vines and edged with flowers, where things needed a general clipping and weeding and neatening up. Mouche had his own taste to guide him, which was considerable. Ornery had a shipman’s love of order, for, as she told Mouche, disorder breeds death at sea, where a loop of rope or a tool left out of place can spell the difference between life and death.
Mouche found that concentrating on the work made the pain lessen. Between them they worked, both sensibly and conscientiously enough to feel a sense of satisfaction in late evening when the gardener finally came to see what they’d accomplished. The man nodded once or twice as in pleased surprise, then patted their shoulders as he took them back to his own house to give them a plentiful supper.
“Well, now, I’d have said you were both useless as tits on a boar, but you’ve proved me wrong,” the old man said when he had filled Ornery’s stew bowl and salad bowl and laid out a thick slab of cheese on a chunk of brown bread wrenched from the new loaf. After another long look at Mouche’s face, he furnished him with a mug of broth and more chunks of the bread to be softened, he said, by dipping.
“What are you doing here, and how did it all happen?” he asked when he had them provided for.
Between mouthfuls, Ornery explained about the Timmys without once referring to them by name. “And Mouche told me his Madame says, people who don’t exist, can’t exist, not until this Questioner person goes away. And the Questioner person is to be staying here, in Mistress Mantelby’s house.
“Par’s I’m concerned, it’s all a mistake, an’ I got to get me back to the ship,” said Ornery. “This Mantelby woman, she took me wrong, she did. I’m no supernumerary. I got to get back, or maybe I’ll lose my place. An’ I got to get word to my sister, too, or she’ll fret herself sick over me.”
“ ‘ould you sto’ us?” Mouche asked the old man. “If we ran away?”
The old man poked the fire and snorted. “Well o’ course I’d stop you. Old I may be, and not so spry, but I’ve still got good sense, as well as work that needs doing. Now, you stick around here, workin’ away, stooped a little, maybe, so’s you look older, with nice thick veils over your young faces and a good deal of manure rubbed in your hair and eyebrows, that one up at the house, she’ll ignore you like you don’t exist, just like she allus did them others that don’t exist. That cut on you, thas good protection, too, for she doesn’t pay attention to people that’re hurt, or sick. But you run off, that steward, he’ll report it because he’s her nephew, and if he doesn’t tell her everything, she’ll put him out on the street, maybe blue-body him into the bargain. My, she loves disposin’ o’ nephews. So, he’ll tell her if you run off, depend on it, and right then you’ll go down in her bad book. She don’t abide being crossed, so people don’t stay in her bad book long. Right soon they just vanish, quick as you can say, oh, my gracious. Sometimes there’s bones and sometimes there’s not. And who you think she’ll take to task for you leaving? Whose back will she stripe? Whose bones will she roast? Eh? Mine, that’s whose.”
He shook his head sadly and set a burning splinter to the pipe he had just filled with shreds of fragrant willowbark, then waved the smoking pipe about his head to drive away the midges. “No, sailor, I’ll send letters for you, so your people won’t worry, but you’ll be smart to wear those old invisibles’ robes and the thick veils. I scrounged ‘em for you as uglification, just to keep you meek and safe from harm. I had the laundry boy wash ‘em and stitch ‘em together, to make them big enough. I figure anybody in those robes likely won’t get seen anyhow, seein’ as how we don’t see those robes, if you take my meaning.”