Susan was happy to come—was always happy to get out of the house these days, and away from her aunt’s shrewish, nagging voice. The closer Reaping came, the less she and Aunt Cord could abide each other, it seemed.
They took Pylon, who was happy enough to carry two girls riding double through the morning cool, and Maria’s story was quickly told. Susan understood almost at once that Maria’s position at Seafront wasn’t really in much jeopardy; the little dark-haired maid had simply been using her innate (and rather charming) penchant for creating drama out of what was really not very dramatic at all.
The second Reaping dress (which Susan thought of as Blue Dress With Beads; the first, her breakfast dress, was White Dress With High Waist and Puffed Sleeves) had been kept apart from the others—it needed a bit of work yet—and something
had gotten into the first-floor sewing room and gnawed it pretty much to rags. If this had been the costume she was to wear to the bonfire lighting, or the one she was to wear to the ballroom dance after the bonfire had been lit, the matter would indeed have been serious. But Blue Dress With Beads was essentially just a fancified day receiving dress, and could easily be replaced in the two months between now and the Reap. Only two! Once—on the night the old witch had granted her her reprieve—it had seemed like eons before she would have to begin her bed-service to Mayor Thorin. And now it was only two months! She twisted in a kind of involuntary protest at the thought.
“Mum?” Maria asked. Susan wouldn’t allow the girl to call her sai, and Maria, who seemed incapable of calling her mistress by her given name, had settled on this compromise. Susan found the term amusing, given the fact that she was only sixteen, and Maria herself probably just two or three years older. “Mum, are you all right?”
“Just a crick in my back, Maria, that’s all.”
“Aye, I get those. Fair bad, they are. I’ve had three aunts who’ve died of the wasting disease, and when I get those twinges, I’m always afeard that—”
“What kind of animal chewed up Blue Dress? Do ye know?”
Maria leaned forward so she could speak confidentially into her mistress’s ear, as if they were in a crowded marketplace alley instead of on the road to Seafront. “It’s put about that a raccoon got in through a window that ‘us opened during the heat of the day and was then forgot at day’s end, but I had a good sniff of that room, and Kimba Rimer did, too, when he came down to inspect. Just before he sent me after you, that was.”
“What did you smell?”
Maria leaned close again, and this time she actually whispered, although there was no one on the road to overhear: “Dog farts.”
There was a moment of thunderstruck silence, and then Susan began to laugh. She laughed until her stomach hurt and tears went streaming down her cheeks.
“Are ye saying that W-W-Wolf… the Mayor’s own d-d-dog … got into the downstairs seamstress’s closet and chewed up my Conversational d-d—” But she couldn’t finish. She was simply laughing too hard.
“Aye,” Maria said stoutly. She seemed to find nothing unusual about Susan’s laughter . . . which was one of the things Susan loved about her. “But he’s not to be
blamed, so I say, for a dog will follow his natural instincts, if the way is open for him to do so. The downstairs maids—” She broke off. “You’d not tell the Mayor or Kimba Rimer this, I suppose, Mum?”
“Maria, I’m shocked at you—ye play me cheap.”
“No, Mum, I play ye dear, so I do, but it’s always best to be safe. All I meant to say was that, on hot days, the downstairs maids sometimes go into that sewing closet for their fives. It lies directly in the shadow of the watchtower, ye know, and is the coolest room in the house—even cooler than the main receiving rooms.”
“I’ll remember that,” Susan said. She thought of holding the Luncheon and Conversational in the seamstress’s beck beyond the kitchen when the great day came, and began to giggle again. “Go on.”
“No more to say, Mum,” Maria told her, as if all else were too obvious for conversation. “The maids eat their cakes and leave the crumbs. I reckon Wolf smelled em and this time the door was left open. When the crumbs was gone, he tried the dress. For a second course, like.”
This time they laughed together.
3
But she wasn’t laughing when she came home.
Cordelia Delgado, who thought the happiest day of her life would be the one when she finally saw her troublesome niece out the door and the annoying business other defloration finally over, bolted out other chair and hurried to the kitchen window when she heard the gallop of approaching hoofs about two hours after Susan had left with that little scrap of a maid to have one of her dresses refitted.
She never doubted that it was Susan returning, and she never doubted it was trouble. In ordinary circumstances, the silly twist would never gallop one of her beloved horses on a hot day.
She watched, nervously dry-washing her hands, as Susan pulled Pylon up in a very unDelgado-like scrunch, then dismounted in an unladylike leap. Her braid had come half undone, spraying that damned blonde hair that was her vanity (and her curse) in all directions. Her skin was pale, except for twin patches of color flaring high on her cheekbones. Cordelia didn’t like the look of those at all. Pat had always flared in that same place when he was scared or angry.
She stood at the sink, now biting her lips as well as working her hands. Oh,
‘twould be so good to see the back of that troublesome she. “Ye haven’t made trouble, have ye?” she whispered as Susan pulled the saddle from Pylon’s back and then led him toward the barn. “You better not have, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty.
Not at this late date. You better not have.”
4
When Susan came in twenty minutes later, there was no sign of her aunt’s strain and rage; Cordelia had put them away as one might store a dangerous weapon—a gun, say—on a high closet shelf. She was back in her rocker, knitting, and the face she turned to Susan’s entry had a surface serenity. She watched the girl go to the sink, pump cold water into the basin, and then splash it on her face. Instead of reaching for a towel to pat herself dry, Susan only looked out the window with an expression that frightened Cordelia badly. The girl no doubt fancied that look haunted and desperate; to Cordelia, it looked only childishly willful.
“All right, Susan,” she said in a calm, modulated voice. The girl would never know what a strain it was to achieve that tone, let alone maintain it. Unless she was faced with a willful teenager of her own one day, that was. “What’s fashed thee so?”
Susan turned to her—Cordelia Delgado, just sitting there in her rocker, calm as a stone. In that moment Susan felt she could fly at her aunt and claw her thin, self-righteous face to strings, screaming This is your fault! Yours! All yours! She felt soiled—no, that wasn’t strong enough; she felt filthy, and nothing had really happened. In a way, that was the horror of it. Nothing had really happened yet.
“It shows?” was all she said.
“Of course it does,” Cordelia replied. “Now tell me, girl. Has he been on thee?”
“Yes … no … no.”
Aunt Cord sat in her chair, knitting in her lap, eyebrows raised, waiting for more.
At last Susan told her what had happened, speaking in a tone that was mostly flat—a little tremble intruded toward the end, but that was all. Aunt Cord began to feel a cautious sort of relief. Perhaps more goose-girl nerves was all it came down to, after all!
The substitute gown, like all the substitutes, hadn’t been finished off; there was too
much else to do. Maria had therefore turned Susan over to blade-faced Conchetta Morgenstem, the chief seamstress, who had led Susan into the downstairs sewing room without saying anything—if saved words were gold, Susan had sometimes reflected, Conchetta would be as rich as the Mayor’s sister was reputed to be.
Blue Dress With Beads was draped over a headless dressmaker’s dummy crouched beneath one low eave, and although Susan could see ragged places on the hem and one small hole around to the back, it was by no means the tattered ruin she had been expecting.
“Can it not be saved?” she asked, rather timidly.
“No,” Conchetta said curtly. “Get out of those trousers, girl. Shirt, too.”
Susan did as she was bid, standing barefoot in the cool little room with her arms crossed over her bosom .. . not that Conchetta had ever shown the slightest interest in what she had, back or front, above or below.