Merrigan felt a little queasy when the words, "It's just not fair," kept echoing through her head at odd times throughout the day.
The front of the warehouse had been partitioned into a general living area for the children. They worked on the various activities they had found to add to the income for their massive "family," sorting through rags and salvaged odds and ends that the wealthy tossed from their homes. Many of the children were dressed in the discarded high fashion of two or three years before, cut down to fit, or else simply hemmed up and belted in. Some children, she learned later, wore the same dress or the same trousers for several years, letting down the roughly tacked hems or moving the holes in their belts as they grew. Some were self-taught tinkers, repairing broken pots and pans, fashioning tools to assist them. Some learned carpentry by fixing broken stools and small cabinets and even a chest of drawers that it had taken four boys to haul home. Some were even learning to make shoes by taking discards from the tanneries, cobbler shops, and saddlers, and following the patterns of the shoes they wore or dug out of the city's trash heap.
One back corner of the warehouse was the washhouse. The children took turns all day, hauling water in buckets from wells three streets away, to fill massive cauldrons that sat on fires all day, heating the water. With so many children, doing laundry to keep them in clean clothes and providing hot water for baths every third day was a full-time occupation. Every child was expected to pitch in, helping with the laundry in some way, either hauling water, scavenging wood and coal for the fires, scrubbing the clothes, tending the drying racks, and filling the bathing tubs. Merrigan was amused to discover that the punishments levied by the foster parents didn't include extra time in the laundry room. The children liked being clean, they liked the luxury of hot water, and the laundry was the warmest area of the warehouse, after the kitchen, when winter winds howled and rattled the walls.
Clothes for mending came straight out of the laundry room. Aubrey consulted with Pansy, the constantly humming, tiny old woman generally in charge of the girls. She found a bed for Merrigan near the laundry, among the girls who had shown an aptitude for sewing. Her bed was on the bottom shelf of a stack of five, and Merrigan was grateful. While some of the girls seemed to enjoy clambering around like the pet monkey her oldest brother had doted on, she shuddered at the thought of having to climb a ladder every night and every morning.
Aubrey introduced Merrigan to the sewing team of seven and explained that she had been a guest of Master Gilbrick but had found it necessary to leave the household. Two of the girls burst into tears. It turned out they had already heard that Aubrey had been cast out of his apprenticeship. They had been depending on him putting in a good word with Master Gilbrick, to eventually convince one of his seamstresses to apprentice them.
"Don't you worry about that," Merrigan said, when Aubrey gave her a helpless, almost terrified look. Was it the girls' tears that knocked him off balance, or did he have such a soft heart that he felt as if he had betrayed them by losing his job? Men, no matter how wonderful, could be dunderheads. "Between us, we will build a reputation so tailors and dressmakers will be begging to learn from you."
That cheered up the girls in general, and helped the weeping ones to stop dripping and sniffling. Of course, they wanted to hear all about the miraculous cloth that was the talk of the city and had been so eagerly anticipated for weeks. They didn't entirely or immediately accept Merrigan's word that there was no cloth, that it was all a nasty trick. She decided that was wise of them. After all, she had just met them. As the day went on and Merrigan got settled with her students and they set up their sewing room to their satisfaction, news came in from other children who had gone out into the city. Everyone was in raptures over the colors of the cloth, the way it shimmered in the light, the delicate texture, and the miraculous things it could do.
Merrigan decided there was a kind of rough but solid wisdom among those who were all but invisible in society. One by one, the older children crossed the city to the weavers' street, to glimpse the cloth on display in the shop window. One by one, they came back, scratching their heads, puzzled. After all, none of them could see it. One by one, they agreed with Merrigan—they were the lowest of the low in all of Alliburton, and there was nothing that made them unworthy of their position. Therefore, if they were worthy, they should be able to see the cloth. But they couldn't. Therefore, there was no cloth.
What amused Merrigan was the clincher in the argument. Someone pointed out that Aubrey couldn't see the cloth. If their beloved Aubrey couldn't see it and insisted there was no cloth, well then, there was no cloth. Therefore, all who said they could see it were fools and liars.
With the children as spies, Merrigan didn't need to leave the safe confines of the warehouse. Her seven girls became her eyes and ears in the world. After only three days, she took to calling them "dwarves" in her mind, because there was something sadly un-childish about them, their common sense and cleverness and responsibility. They went out on chores for the other foster parents, ran errands, carried messages for merchants and shopkeepers and artisans to earn a penny or two, and gathered up all the gossip and news of the city. Then they came home and told the adults. Merrigan decided
