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
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
“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.
And Violet responded accordingly. “Well, I want something to eat. I’m hungry. That nasty salad stuff isn’t any good. I want blueberry bread.”
“Erris said you can’t have any.”
“What does he know?”
“You must think he knows something if you want to go outside,” Celestina said, with a tone of someone who has easily bested her opponent. “Anyway, he’s a fairy and your mother’s brother. Don’t you think we should trust him? So go back to bed and when he returns, we’ll see.”
Violet’s lips compressed and her pale face turned red rather abruptly. Her eyes cut to me, her rage plain, as if I had anything to do with it. I kept my face blank, and she turned with a toss of her hair. I felt I had been involved in some argument I did not clearly understand.
Neither of us spoke until the sound of Violet’s footsteps had shrunk into nothing.
“I’m sorry about her manners,” Celestina said.
Celestina didn’t like Violet either, I realized. She had been so solicitous to her, I had assumed her to be the sort of person who lives to care for others, but it was an incorrect assumption. I could see now that Celestina loved something here, the house and maybe even the romance of working for a man the villagers regarded as dangerous, but whatever the appeal was, it wasn’t Violet.
“Mr. Valdana is a wise sorcerer in many matters,” Celestina said, “but he’s blind to her. You should see the instructions he always leaves. ‘Buy her oranges. Read to her at night. Help her wash up.’ He seems to think her constant sicknesses have denied her so many things that he can’t possibly deny her anything.”
“But how can she grow up if he spoils her like a child?”
“I guess he thinks that will come when she is of age.
“What does Ordorio intend for her, eventually? She’s fifteen. I mean, most girls are beginning to be courted by then, aren’t they?”
“He’s mentioned that she might be able to return to the fairy kingdom and perhaps become queen, but not until she’s grown.”
“She can’t be a good queen if she can’t do anything for herself,” I said.
“Maybe not a good queen,” Celestina said. “But certainly she wouldn’t be the first pampered and sheltered queen in the world. Perhaps it won’t matter, now that Erris is here.”
Yes. Erris might be the one to inherit the throne and all its troubles. I was not sure if this thought was especially comforting either. I changed the subject to music until the noise of the sewing machine forced us into silence.
By lunchtime, Celestina was handing me a simple pair of newly made trousers and one of her own shirts. I slipped up to my room to change, a flush on my cheeks, as if I were still in Hollin Parry’s house and any moment he
