“Where did the girl go?” Brevart asked.
The air in the kitchen grew decidedly colder. Uncle Samwell looked down. Alinesse took a deep breath.
“She’s gone, dear. Remember? She left in a huff this morning. Servants are so prickly nowadays, are they not?”
“Or, they simply do not like being the subject of advances,” Tesara put in. “And now there’s no tea, and no wood, and no dinner,” she added, with venomous pleasure.
Yvienne felt a throbbing in her temples. Why, oh why, did they have to moan and blame? So much could be done if they just pulled together. Instead, they took pleasure in being miserable.
“I’ll go to Mastrini’s and put another notice in,” she said. Her simple reticule already carried a neatly written notice for a diligent, sturdy housemaid for daily work, not to live in, a guilder half per week. She also intended to put in for a position herself, as governess. She knew better than to tell her parents that. Better to present it as a fact, after she had been engaged in a household.
And her third errand would not be discussed at all, neither before nor after.
“Someone needs to talk to Uncle,” Tesara persisted, giving her relative a glare. “He has to stop.”
“I say,” protested her uncle.
Alinesse grew exasperated. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Tesara.”
“He’s making the girls leave. And Port Saint Frey is running out of housemaids. It’s not as if they’re lining up to work here, and Uncle makes it worse. It’s rather foul, don’t you think – Uncle flirting with the girls?” Tesara gave a shudder.
“Tesara!” Alinesse said.
“I say!” Uncle protested once more.
“I’m going,” Yvienne interjected, hoping to divert the escalating hostilities. “Is there anything else we need from town?”
The combatants said no, and she escaped thankfully.
Chapter Four
Yvienne held onto her hat with one gloved hand and tight to her shawl with the other as the wind caught both the instant she stepped outside the kitchen door. She walked briskly toward the business district. Goodness only knew what excuses she would have to make to the manager of the housing agency about Uncle.
Mastrini’s Household Staffing Agency was on the second floor of a crooked row of shops that was one street up from the harbor. The traffic bustled here and Yvienne had to step lively over the cobblestones. Carts rumbled up and down the steep street, for though this wasn’t the Crescent it still rose up the hills overlooking the harbor. She stepped aside for a beer wagon laden with casks and pulled by a team of huge sorrel horses with flaxen manes.
If House Mederos had retained its status she would never have come here unescorted. Despite everything that had happened, their loss had given her something unexpected – her freedom.
Here people were surly and busy, but they looked her in the eye as equals. No one tugged his forelock or curtseyed, and one young man even took her elbow and pulled her aside to make room for two men coming up the hill with their sailor trunks hoisted high on their shoulders. He was off before she could do more than stare at him with an open mouth.
She could hear the strange calling shouts of the hawkers on the harbor level, their singsong notes a kind of language that she could almost understand. People threaded themselves all around her, and soon she fell into the same rhythm. She lengthened her stride, her skirts swishing, and walked purposefully like everyone else. She did have somewhere to go. She had business to attend to.
There was Mastrini’s. Its sign with a white glove signifying household staff pointed upwards, a clever direction. She hastened up the dark narrow stairs and came to a single door at the landing. The same white glove, this time in a come in position, beckoned to her. Yvienne knocked, and then let herself in.
The clerk looked up at Yvienne’s entrance and rolled her eyes.
“Miss Mederos,” she said starchily, for all that she was Yvienne’s age or even younger. “Really, we can’t continue on like this.”
Yvienne was peripherally aware of a personage in plain rough clothing and a deep poke bonnet sitting on the bench by the door.
“Miss Mastrini, please. It won’t happen again, I promise,” she said.
“Heather Moon said that your uncle was lewd and unbecoming.”
Yes. That was Uncle all right. She looked the clerk straight in the eye.
“I’ll make him stop,” she said. Her declaration was met with the clerk’s skeptical demeanor. “Please,” she added, desperate. It wasn’t that she and Tesara couldn’t do the work. They had been thoroughly trained in the scullery arts at Madam Callier’s. But it would kill her parents if their daughters, their hopes for the future, would be reduced to scrubbing floors.
The girl sighed. “I suppose I can see who we have.” She said it with the air of someone who didn’t think it would do any good.
Yvienne reached into her small purse and handed her a folded paper, meticulously written out. “I’d also like to give you this.”
The girl scanned it and raised an eyebrow. “You wish to be a governess?”
“I think my qualifications will suit.”
Her vitae were woefully short, but she had learned something in spite of all of Madam Callier’s efforts. And she could hardly do worse than the average governess.
“Do you have any letters of reference?” Miss Mastrini asked.
“No.”
“Well then, I’m afraid–”
“Miss Mastrini, they all know me. They know my family, they know my situation, they know everything about me, including that I’m desperate, poor, and the smartest girl in Port Saint Frey. Surely there’s someone who is looking for a governess for their girls who knows they can trust one of their own – even one such as me.”
The room was silent. She was deeply ashamed that the person on the bench had to hear her plea. Miss Mastrini pursed her lips and then came to a sudden decision. She smoothed out the resume and stamped it with a red ink stamp. Approved, Yvienne read upside down. The
