"Oh, yes. Terrible. How embarrassing for them." Gilda bit her lip. From their raw condition, Merrigan guessed she had been doing an awful lot of that lately.
"For your sake, do this one thing for me." Merrigan leaned forward, implying she was saying something that others perhaps should not hear. That had always had the effect of making people listen twice as intently. "Gilda, make sure you and your father wear underclothes tomorrow."
"Well of course we would. The weavers promised us they are making underclothes to go with our new clothes. It would be highly unsuitable ... Oh." She flushed such a bright red, Merrigan felt the heat of her cheeks from the other side of the parlor.
All seven dwarves giggled, so their teacups rattled in their saucers.
"Think of all the unworthy people who will see you and your father in the ..." Merrigan pursed her lips, feigning delicacy. "Well, in the all-together. I assure you, the unworthy will not be as embarrassed as you, and they will be just as unwilling as before to admit what they can't see—or admit what they can. Do you understand me? Is my meaning clear?"
"Oh—Oh—Mistress Mara—" Gilda burst into tears.
By the time she had calmed down, she soaked four of the handkerchiefs Merrigan made sure her girls carried with them.
More important, Gilda promised she would refuse to model the new clothes unless her father agreed to wear his oldest underclothes, the winter style that started high on his neck and even covered his feet. She promised not to let the weaver's wife, who was assigned to help her dress, convince her to put on the new underclothes made of the miraculous cloth.
"I'm disappointed," Aubrey admitted, when Merrigan reported on the meeting two hours later.
"How? They'll be decently clothed and their reputations will only be bruised, not entirely shredded, with a charge of public indecency thrown on top of everything else," Merrigan said.
"Oh, no, not that. I'm delighted it worked so well. You are an utter genius, Mistress Mara." The young man shook his head. His sorrow softened his bony features and gave him an aura of nobility that was quite appealing. "No, I was hoping to hear the weavers would not be involved in dressing Master Gilbrick and Gilda. If I were playing such a cruel trick on someone, I would not wait for the deception to fall apart, and flee at the last minute. I would be packing up my wagonload of gold and fleeing the city tonight."
"Maybe they will anyway," young Timo the Mouse offered.
Chapter Thirteen
The boy, who was a head shorter than his yearmates, had a habit of hiding in shadows and listening where he wasn't invited. This time, he was under the table where Merrigan and Aubrey and the other foster parents were conferring.
"He's right," Nasius said in his pleasantly rumbly voice. "They're liars. They've been lying all along. Why not make everyone think they'll be here in the morning? We should post guards over them tonight, to make sure they don't leave before everything falls apart and the crowds clamor for justice."
"But what can a gang of orphan boys do to stop them?" Merrigan said.
"We don't have to stop them." Aubrey's smile took on a nasty glee that changed her image of him. She liked it. "Our children just need to raise such a ruckus that they can't go anywhere in the city without everyone around them knowing who they are. And hopefully, wonder why they're leaving, when they're supposed to be there for the unveiling of their miraculous clothes."
AN INVITATION CAME for Aubrey, Merrigan, and her seven girls to come to witness the unveiling. Aubrey was torn. He wanted to lead the teams of orphans watching for the weavers to flee. During the visit with Gilda, Merrigan had been dismayed to learn that Gilbrick had paid the weavers with almost half his hoard of exquisite, rare bolts of cloth from all over the world. It was all too easy to imagine the frauds starting up their scheme somewhere else, convincing people they were skilled by selling all that beautiful cloth they hadn't made. For all Merrigan knew, that was how they had been operating for years: take beautiful cloth from their last dupe and use it to trick the people in the next town or country; get rich on it; then convince another Gilbrick to hand over his stores of more beautiful, rare, expensive cloth.
"On the positive side, they have to handle two wagonloads," Aubrey said, as he watched the teams of children head out into the city to their assigned watching posts. "The more wealth they have to handle, the harder it will be for them to vanish."
Merrigan kept busy and fought her inexplicable nervousness during the waiting, by cutting out the first of dozens of winter coats. Gilda wanted to help the orphanage, now that she knew about it. She sent ten bolts of sturdy, woolen cloth back with Merrigan and her girls, to make coats for the children. Plus the handcart that held the cloth. It was a princely gift, and Merrigan hesitated to mention that those ten bolts would only provide coats for half the children. Well, it was a start. Maybe by the time she had the first batch of coats made up, Gilda would feel guilty about something else and provide more cloth for the rest of the children.
"That's ... odd," Bib said.
Merrigan worked alone while her girls were at their lessons. She had him sitting out on the table, talking with her. Bib had been sitting on a thick stack of maps of the city all morning, absorbing all the information, the routes, the traffic patterns, to try to predict which way the weavers would go when they fled the city.
"What is?" She paused in snipping the selvage edge of the cloth.
"There's magic.
