“What are you doing here?” I demanded.
“I wanted to see you wind him.” Violet pulled her oversize robe closer around her neck. The collar touched her cheeks. “He is my uncle. You don’t have to snap.”
“What makes you think he would want you to see him wound?” I said sternly. “He wishes no one had to wind him at all. The least you could do is ask him first!” I was ashamed for Erris, and perhaps in some way, ashamed for myself. I never forgot that I was the one who had done this to him. My anger overflowed, but a wave of sense rushed in behind and stayed my hand.
She seemed taken aback by my emotion. “I don’t see what the trouble is,” she said, sounding haughty but still hesitating.
“Because,” I said, “how would you like it if you couldn’t wake up in the morning until someone wound you? How would you like it if beneath your clothes, you weren’t flesh and blood? Would you want people to know, and look at you? Would you feel like yourself?”
She glanced quickly at the keyhole in Erris’s back, and her lips pinched in. She tossed her head and left the room at a hurried shuffle. She ought not to even be out of bed, I thought. But if she wanted to constantly endanger herself, well, I didn’t care.
I frowned. It was true-no one would care if she endangered herself except her absent father. She likely never left this house, and never had visitors. Violet was as much a secret as Annalie had been, except she had no spirits to keep her company.
Well… that wasn’t my affair either.
I found Celestina in the kitchens, wearing a linen shirt, men’s trousers, and boots, which she nearly jumped out of when I said good morning.
“My goodness. You scared me. I’m not fit for company yet.”
I smiled. “I don’t care. Where I’m from, girls, even queens, wear trousers. Of course, they’re more likely to be made from colorful silk than brown wool, but either way, I don’t care if you dress like that all day.”
“Really?” Celestina flipped her frying bacon. “Because, when Mr. Valdana’s gone, this is exactly what I do wear all day. You know how long it took me to come to the door when you first knocked? It’s because I was scrambling into a dress.” She laughed.
I laughed too. “I wonder if fairy women ever wear trousers.” I adored my fine clothes, the dresses made of silk and good wool Hollin had bought me, but sometimes I dearly missed having a good lounge. You couldn’t lounge with a corset around your ribs and a collar around your neck, and it seemed that the lower the neckline of a Lorinarian gown dipped, the smaller the waistline became, so any comfort you may have gained was lost.
Erris walked in a moment later, moaning at the aroma. “Must you make things that smell all the way from my bedroom?”
“What do you think of trousers?” I said, changing the subject before Erris’s teasing tone turned into melancholy.
“Trousers?”
“Did fairy women ever wear them?”
“Not often,” Erris said. “Fairies are vain and prefer looking fancy, but we don’t have such moral ideas about clothes as humans do, so I wouldn’t be offended.”
“In that case,” Celestina said, “I will continue to practice shocking behaviors.”
After breakfast, Erris went out for more foraging. Outside, the morning fog had vanished from the lawn, but it still swathed the bottom half of the trees, and I peered through the curtains as he vanished into it.
Celestina came back down from bringing Violet breakfast, scooping the cat up from the rag rug so his limbs dangled from her arm while she scratched his round cheeks. “Would you like me to measure you and make you some trousers?”
I laughed again. “Oh, I couldn’t really…” I hesitated. There was no logical reason I shouldn’t wear whatever I liked out here. The rules of Lorinarian society had clearly seeped into me almost unnoticed, like a disease.
“You might as well,” Celestina said. “When winter comes, and there is work to do, it’s so much easier.”
I suppressed a bristle that she assumed I would do work during the winter. It stirred bad memories of the farm. But I was going to be more useful here. I wouldn’t be complaining about every little thing like Violet.
Celestina motioned me from the kitchen. “Come on.”
I followed her to a small room, feminine, but not overly so, with a sewing machine and a trunk spilling fabrics by the window. A bird perched on the branch of an apple tree outside the window but flew away when we drew near. Celestina whistled at it, almost absently, but it didn’t come back. In the corner was a heavy wooden chair with plush green padding, facing a card game that seemed long abandoned-in fact, a few cards lay scattered on the floor now, and Celestina stooped to pick them up. A guitar leaned against the wall by the chair.
“Who plays the guitar?” I asked.
“Oh, I do, a little bit.” She shuffled through a mess on the table by the sewing machine to find her measuring tape. “It belonged to my brother. And before that, my great-uncle. My brother left it behind when he went to the city, ‘seeking his fortune,’ which apparently meant a job at the slaughterhouse.” She made a face, then unfurled a measuring tape between her hands and measured my inseam in a casual way, through my skirt. Precise measurements of these trousers didn’t seem terribly important. “What’s your waist measurement without your corset, would you say?”
“Twenty-two inches?”
“You tiny thing!” She scribbled down her numbers. “We’ll make it twenty-three. You’ll get fat with all the pie.” She pulled some coarse brown wool from the middle of the pile of cloth spilling from the trunk.
Determined to be helpful, I asked if there was anything I could do while she started to measure fabric. I couldn’t make clothes, but I could mend and sew buttons, and so she gave me one of Violet’s dresses with a hole under the arm, followed by a shirt with two buttons gone.
“We should probably go into town soon,” Celestina said, an unvoiced sigh hovering around her words. “I need some supplies anyway, but especially with two winter guests.”
“I don’t think the locals thought much of us,” I said. An understatement.
“No, well, they don’t think much of anyone who knows Mr. Valdana.” She was facing the window, but I saw her shoulders tense. “I used to belong there, and now I don’t like to go to market or anywhere. They really aren’t bad people at heart… but they don’t think beyond this village. Or at least the district.”
“Are your parents still living?”
“Yes. My parents and two younger sisters and two younger brothers. And my older brother who works at the slaughterhouse. All still living. I don’t see them much. They wish I had stayed home. I could care for them in their old age, I suppose.” She snorted.
“Will you marry?” I was being more forward with her than I had been with another girl in a long time. But then, few girls were so immediately open with me. “Surely some young man would appreciate your pickles.”
She laughed. “No, no, no. He must like me for more than my pickles! Oh, come to town with me and just see if there’s a boy I would look twice at even if he would look twice at me. A lot of young men have been leaving, anyway, ever since they extended the train line. It became rather a highway to temptation, I suppose. The old men are forever grousing about it.”
We both stopped at the sound of soft footsteps on the hall rug. Violet appeared, looking pale and peevish, swathed in a shawl atop her nightgown, skinny legs in whimsically striped socks.
“Get back in bed!” Celestina said. “You can’t always be getting out of bed and wandering the house.”
“Shouldn’t I be out of doors like Erris said?”
“We’ll wait until he gets back. It seems chilly to me, but we’ll see. I can’t go right now.” Celestina talked to Violet like she was still a child.