Chapter Text
It is almost suppertime—Maeglin can tell by the way he rumbles inside, and by the way a little hole in the shutters has swollen just wide enough so that it easily lets in a single ray of setting sun. It rests like a flaming coin of light on a particularly scuffed floorboard, and Maeglin pulls himself to his feet. He ungracefully trips on his way to Alma’s tall chair, right under the window, but once there he summons all the agility stored in his fragile little body and scrambles up onto the threadbare cushion.
It used to have buttons, but the buttons have rolled away, or been plucked. Maeglin likes shiny things. He was born into shadows, and likely shall always remain there, yet given the chance he will snatch at silverware with his baby fingers, bite down on sun-yellow thread, and scramble after tossed pennies.
Maeglin sets his thin little hand over the hole in the shutter and watches the light disappear. Holding his breath, he calls for Alma, for Lavinia—for anyone. He cannot say all their names proper and true, but that is not why they do not come to him.
That is never why they do not come.
It is only that he is the least important thing in their lives.
-
Maeglin is a little mole, or so his mother calls him. He cherishes the comparison, but sometimes he feels that his heart is made more of earth than of blood. As he grows older, he tries to pack it close and tight, so nothing might be shaken loose. However, knowledge, which he often thirsts for, sometimes turns traitor and digs sad little burrows into him.
Once, when he is five, he pauses Lavinia while she is tucking him into his nest of straw and blankets, just next to the large bed that the younger women share when they need a nap, or when they are not working at night.
“Vinna,” he says, turning on his side, turning his face into a poorly stitched pillow. “Vinna, I want another me.”
Lavinia clicks her tongue and asks him what on earth he means. She is in a hurry to leave him, because Katherine-who-is-not-Kate has brought up a message from the tavern that a Mr. Barnet urgently requires her advice—something about the rowdy miners passing through town.
Maeglin struggles to explain. “Just, there is Lieselotte and Katherine and Alma. But I’m—please,
aren’t there any children like me?”
“Don’t be foolish,” Lavinia says, but she gives his shoulder a sharp pat before she leaves the room, tucking wisps of her dull hair behind her ears. Maeglin watches her go, and almost forgets that Katherine is still present until she steps out from behind an embroidered screen, adjusting the shoulders of her marigold-dyed dress.
She is brown-haired and green-eyed, Katherine is, fond of reciting odd bits of poetry, though she never remembers where it comes from. Maeglin does not like her because she always purses her lips at him like she has eaten bitter leaves. Also, she moves Alma’s things about.
“Feeling lonely?” she says from the corner of the room where she bends over a small mirror set on a dressing table, applying a bit of rouge to her lips. She has stolen Lieselotte’s tin—sixteen-year-old Lieselotte, the latest addition to the rooms above the dining area of the tavern. “That’s not likely to change, in a house of women like us.”
“Why?” Maeglin asks. There is a funny feeling in his stomach, like he’s swallowed a ball of yarn, and it is unravelling inside him and twisting all around.
Katherine tucks Lieselotte’s rouge away under her own sleeping chemise, and then she blows out the candles near the bed.
In the darkness, she laughs. “I can’t imagine carrying a child in my belly for nine months. What would I do in all that time I wonder, and what price would your mother make me pay?”
The door creaks open, and in the hallway gloom, Maeglin can see Katherine’s tall, strong silhouette.
“Lord, I’ve heard blood-curdling tales of Thuringwethil from Lavinia. What was she thinking, bearing you?”
The door shuts, and little Maeglin is left alone.
If only Lieselotte would come and sit with him, to stroke his hair as she sometimes does when she thinks he is sleeping, but she is too pretty and too kind so of course other people want to see her every single night.
Maeglin breathes quietly, and, reaching out with one hand, he strokes the rough wooden floorboards beneath him. He listens, hoping to hear the tavern’s faint, poorly tuned piano playing a mix of sweet and offkey notes, but Lieselotte must have already attracted attention, and no one else has her skill.
Maeglin cries himself to sleep.
-
When Maeglin sleeps, his dreams often turn into nightmares. In these, his mother tells Maeglin that she has another son, and that he is much smarter and stronger than Maeglin will ever be. In these, Lieselotte pushes him away when he is crying, or Lavinia says that Katherine is right and that Maeglin is a wretched, ugly little creature that should have been left on someone else’s doorstep.
Sometimes the nightmares consist of his eyes being stuck tight so he cannot see. Sometimes the tavern burns down. Sometimes a dancing funnel whirls outside of his window, and when this happens he starts awake shivering, pressing his ears with his hands to protect him from the howling wind. This dream is rarest, because it is not a dream at all, but one of his earliest memories.
Maeglin, in this memory, is in a forgotten town in a flat land. The sky swells and pales into ghostly green, and he—tiny, lost, trembling—peers out at it from behind slatted wooden steps.
He is under some sort of porch or paneled walkway, and wind roars fiercely, a wild beast, flinging about straw, paper, and a few ragged slats of barn siding or store roof.
Why is he here, in this awful storm? He does not know, but in escaping from the violent and unusual wind, he must have scratched his knobby little knees against the rocky soil underneath him, for his trousers are torn and blood rises to the surface of his skin.
“Kae,” he weeps, “Kae!”
No Kae comes for him, but just as the wind roars itself into a higher form of monstrosity, Maeglin, between his tears, spies a berry-red ruffled skirt swishing down the steps in a flurry, and then black and cinnamon hair obscures his view, and someone wraps their arms all around his little body, and he is pressed to the ground underneath a heavy weight.
“I have you, niño,” Alma whispers in a husky voice, right in his ear. He can hear her even above his own terror, even above the snarling hunger cry that wails about them. She smells like cigarette and lilacs—she will always smell like cigarette and lilacs.
Maeglin still feels a desperate desire for—for—for a voice that never talks but sings sweetly. For Kae. Kate. Kate is her name. Was her name, in this memory.
“Madre de Dios,” Alma prays, and something cracks that is not thunder, and the only thing Maeglin remembers after this is the way she screams, and the wet warmth of the blood his trembling fingers find trickling down her cheek.
Maeglin never knows anything more about the phantom Kate, save for the fact that she was but the first in a small line of women charged with his safety, but often over the years in a different land, in the dingy cramped room that is his shelter from the world, he curls up lonely as anything in a pile of blankets, a shadow among steadier shadows, and he pretends.
Maybe he isn’t alone, waiting for his odd array of caretakers to return from their work. Maybe someone sings to him while he untangles thread and yarn, bends cheap jewelry back into shape, or plays with the rag doll Lavinia stitched for him after scolding him for digging into her little iron chest of things.
Maeglin hums along with the illusion he has created, and sometimes he pretends that the voice he does not hear is the mysterious Kate, who would not leave him even in death. Sometimes, he pretends the voice is that of his mother, who leaves him again and again, and never with a gentle kiss.
Maeglin is a sharp little lad—despite all his pretending, he knows his mother does not love him as he loves her.
Never once in all his nine years has she sidled up to him, quiet and nervous-like. She does not slip her hand into his, does not pat at his knuckles, ghost-like, does not whisper that she has missed him so much.
“I must be on my way again soon,” the fearsome Thuringwethil says, bending a dark brow at him. “I’ve bestowed an extra fifteen dollars upon Lavinia for your meals—mayhap you will gain height and a portion of meat on your bones by the next time I behold you.”
He tries so hard, eats everything Lavinia puts before him, even when he spies kind Lieselotte with a bloody lip and a bruise on her collarbone, crying into Alma’s crooked shoulder. He wants so very much to offer her his last few bites of a rare and delicious bread pudding, but he cannot displease his mother. He cannot.
Besides, he is a little uncertain of Alma. When she saved him from the storm, shielding him with her own body, she paid a price—she injured her left shoulder, and had been struck so hard against the head by a part of the uprooted wooden porch that after a while her sight left her almost entirely. Maeglin has felt unease over this ever since he heard the whole story. Alma lost so much because of him, even her home, for once the blindness set in she had been sent with young Maeglin far away to live under Lavinia's rule. How could she possibly not hate him?
Alma sometimes tells him not to concern himself, saying, in her unique raspy voice, “If you had been crushed in my stead, chico, your mother would have skinned me alive.”
Lavinia always agrees with her.
“More than your remaining little finger would have been forfeit, sure as day,” she says. “Madame Thuringwethil doesn’t like to lose what is hers. Anyhow, don’t seem to have harmed your business at all, and the fools what come to you pour out their secrets all the more for pity and comfort.”
Maeglin supposes he should be reassured, but sometimes he catches Alma following his movements with her clouded eyes, and he wonders.
Maeglin, then, avoids Alma. He endeavors quietly to be a worthy son. He lets Lieselotte cry her eyes out, and he helps carry the washing out into the fenced-in backyard without complaint, hoping it will make him stronger. For three months he says he is hungry when he is not, and he checks his height against the wall behind the door (making sure Katherine is never around—she always laughs at him in ways that curdle his stomach and his thoughts). He is rewarded for his efforts and cruel sacrifices with a new half inch that has nothing to do with the growth of his dark hair, but even this is not enough.
When his mother sees him next, she tells him to straighten his back and to look directly ahead. He eagerly complies, but by the press of his mother’s lips, by the coolness of her scrutinizing glance, he knows her to be disappointed.
Maeglin is only nine at this time, but he traps his tears behind his eyes with unusual fierceness. He trembles, but he must not tremble. He lowers his chin and imagines Alma’s prettiest ribbon, the long dark blue one, drawn tight all about him, holding his shivers together so that he might seem strong before his mother.
“Look at you,” she says, and her tone is not entirely displeased. “A runt you remain, my little mole, but at least you have my looks.” She reaches out with long fingers and gently—gently!—flicks them down the ridge of his nose. “One could be enchanted by your eyes, if only you knew how to use them.”
This, Maeglin feels, is what it must be like to be struck by lightning. This is what it is to know a mother’s love.
He is very grateful.
-
“Gratitude,” Lavinia tells him, forcing a potato into his hand, “is neither here nor there when it comes to living. I’ve seen what being grateful does to a girl’s head. No, hold the knife like this, or you’ll be peeling your own skin.” She adjusts Maeglin’s grasp, her nine fingers rough and merciless.
Lavinia has been in the employ of Maeglin’s mother for longer than he has been alive. She can barely read her letters, she often complains about the inconvenience of a child living among whores, but she is sharp as a needle and has, as Katherine says, “the most practical mind this side of the Mississippi.”
She is not nearly as occupied with daily work as the other women are, and thus she often lends a hand in the kitchen of the tavern below. Today, she had brought a bucket of potatoes up to the women’s rooms and plunked it down in front of Maeglin, who had been curled up in his corner, braced against his neat bedroll and the wall, dozing off over an incomplete sock.
“You may set that aside,” Lavinia had said sharply, though there was a glint of amusement in her eye. “You’ll likely have to unravel the whole thing after supper anyway. But that don’t mean you should have idle hands—I’ve never approved of idle hands.”’
Maeglin had thanked her for the task, because the women had raised him to be polite, but perhaps Lavinia had sensed that he was not thrilled with the work.
Maeglin pulls up a stool now and sits with the bucket between his feet. He dislikes being idle as well, and the sock was giving him a headache. However, while it will not be difficult, he simply does not care about carving up tubers. There is nothing pretty about a potato, however pleasing it might taste, slathered in butter and sprinkled with a pinch of salt. He wishes he might for once be given something interesting to do.
Lavinia is rambling on about gratitude. She does not seem happy today. Maybe this is because Lieselotte has a bad headache and is sitting in Alma’s chair by the un-shuttered window, catching a lazy breeze that sometimes drifts in, sometimes catches on the sill. Lavinia has given her a damp cloth to cover her eyes, but she also gives her darting glances from under her furrowed brow.
Maeglin has been on the receiving end of those glances before—Lavinia is nettled and ready to prick someone, but the question is, whom.
Maeglin hopes she is not angry with Lieselotte, for the girl bought him a little cake a week ago, a precious sugary white cake that she saved up to buy from the general store on the other side of the street, because she said she was grateful to him for shaking her hand every night like a real gentleman.
“Vinna,” Maeglin whispers, reverting to the piece-name he once called her by, hoping to soften her. He clenches the paring knife in his hands. “Why are you upset?”
Maeglin is perceptive, has learned to sense the moods of the people around him, young as he is. What he has not learned, or what he has not accepted fully, is that the women around him will not always answer his questions in ways he can understand.
“Nothing is wrong, why would anything be wrong?” Lavinia grumbles. “It does not matter to anyone, I reckon, that Alma has slept poorly for days. Doesn’t matter that she been pulling more than her fair share of the weight, as long as the little princess here can waste herself away over a lowdown skunk of a man what offered a tumbleweed dream.”
“It isn’t a dream,” Lieselotte murmurs, and Maeglin hears the wobble in her voice. “It was a promise. He said—he said last June that a year—that would be enough and I’d never have to—”
Lieselotte begins to cry, pulling her small feet up onto the chair so that she can curl her arms around her skirt and bury her face in her knees, the damp cloth falling into her lap.
Maeglin freezes, gazing upon her in dismay. He wants to drop the potato, drop the knife, let it clatter to the floor where it will, he wants to run to Lieselotte and climb onto her lap like he used to when he was but a few years younger. He can’t bear to hear any of the women cry, which they do from time to time, except for Katherine, who claims she has never cried in her life, being of stronger and prouder stuff than anyone except for a lady called Queen Cleopatra, but Maeglin has learned several lessons in his life.
One of the lessons he hates most is that he cannot always comfort the people who care for him. Especially if he hears one of them crying in another room, whether they sound pained or sorrowed, he must sit quietly in his chair, or return to sleep in his bed blankets, or carry on with his daily tasks, and later and only later when he finds them quite alone and unoccupied may he sneak up to them, tugging their sleeves or wrapping his little arms about their waists, so that they might know he wishes their hearts peace.
It is better this way, because sometimes a man will still be in the room, and whether they are silent or scolding, they do not appreciate Maeglin’s intrusion. Sometimes, even the women will lash out at him, harshly berating him for not staying hidden away as he has promised again and again.
“Oh, a promise,” Lavinia says, but her voice is less sharp than before. “Promises are as useless as gratitude.”
Lieselotte continues to sob quietly, and Lavinia suddenly scrubs at her hands with the apron that
hangs from her neck, and her own lips quiver.
“Silly girl,” she says. “Silly girl.”
Maeglin looks from one woman to the other and back again.
Maybe Lavinia is not so angry after all, or maybe she has packed so many feelings inside herself that they all mush together. She is old, Maeglin thinks, with such lines on her face as she has, She wears her dusty hair tied back in a knot more often than not, and never bothers to tighten it into curls, as the younger women do.
(Lieselotte will sit for a whole hour brushing and oiling Alma’s rich locks, though Alma never asks this of her. Lieselotte will also slip away at times, running off into the world that Maeglin is not allowed to explore, and when she comes back she will stick wildflowers in Lavinia’s hair, and ignore all of her scoldings.)
Maeglin carefully empties his hands, setting the potato and knife in the bucket. He steps toward Lieselotte, then looks behind him for approval. Lavinia’s jaw works back and forth, but when her eyes fall upon him, her shoulders fall and she nods. These simple movements seem so slow, so weary.
Maeglin is too small and insignificant to stand against the cruelty of the world, but nevertheless he pads quietly to Lieselotte’s side and pats at her knee.
Wordlessly, she unfolds and pulls him in toward her heart.
-
Maeglin is not often happy, but he is not always unhappy. Any time he is given the opportunity to create, he seizes the chance fiercely.
When he is very young, likely to tumble about and endanger the whole tavern and all its upstairs rooms by knocking over melting wax candles, he is given tasks like polishing silver, snapping beans, untangling un-dyed yarn. He builds fences and bridges with the knives and spoons—he knots the yarn into pretty white-grey flowers. He plays in the dirt, on the rare occasion he is allowed out of doors, and draws trees and mountain plovers with kindling he steals from the woodpile. As he grows older, however, Lavinia decides he needs learning.
She obtains a piece of slate for him when he is about seven, and he spends long days repetitiously copying his letters and puzzling over arithmetic. Lavinia charges Katherine with his schooling, since she claims to a variety of pretentions, but Katherine does little but make him cry.
After a day when Katherine has insulted him to the height of the forbidden sky and back, Maeglin flees the room and, instead of making his way to the downstairs kitchen, where he is sometimes allowed, or to the yard back of the tavern, where he is only allowed with supervision, he walks desperately down the narrow hall, tripping on a crumpled red woven rug. He bangs on three wooden doors, scraping his fists.
“Lieselotte,” he cries through his tears. “Where are you?”
Instead of the soft-spoken girl he wants so badly to answer him and hug him, Lavinia flings open the door of her private bedchamber and snatches him up by the back of his threadbare shirt.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she says harshly, and she hauls him back to his own shelter, which suddenly feels much more like a prison.
Maeglin forces himself into silence, partially for fear, partially because he knows his tears will avail him nothing with Lavinia.
Besides, Katherine has moved from sitting on the bed to relaxing in Alma’s cushioned chair—a great offense, in Maeglin’s eyes—and she is smiling strangely.
“I should give you such a hiding,” Lavinia scolds, but she only shakes him by the shoulder, reminds him of his boundaries, and tells him he will have to go without dinner. Then she orders Katherine away, and Maeglin is left alone.
He is bitter inside, eating himself up with hunger and with some sharp-toothed creature that makes him wish Katherine had stayed in the room after all. He doesn’t know what to do with that latter feeling, so he pulls a small dark wood box with simple engraved vines from under the large bed.
It is Katherine’s. Inside, atop faded purple velvet, sit a necklace and a few rings. Maeglin takes one of the rings, a dull metal thing, set with a green stone.
A corner of his mind that he didn’t know existed echoes with a very mean thought—what if he buried the ring in the yard one day when he was supposed to be helping with the washing? That would make Katherine sorry.
Maeglin slides the box back under the bed and wriggles into his pile of blankets. He lies there for some time, turning the ring over in his fingers, feeling its weight and coolness, and his resolve slips away. He wonders if he should make a present of it instead. Not to Lieselotte, who did not come to his rescue, but maybe to Alma. Maybe he wouldn’t feel so strange around her, if he could give her something nice.
Before he can make a final decision, pale and golden Lieselotte slips quietly in the door. She goes to Maeglin immediately, and sits on the floor next to him, her blue silken dress puffing up underneath her. It was a gift from one of her lovers, she told Maeglin once. Today, Maeglin does not tell her that the back is not done up quite right.
“I heard, you, zaubermaus, and I wanted to run to you at once,” Lieselotte says, patting the top of his head carefully, like he is one of the angry stray cats that hiss their ways about the dusty streets outside the tavern, scratching at closed shutters and doors. “What could I do though? A vulture flew into my room and grasped my wrist in his talons. He would not let me go until I had sung him three songs. Did you cry all this time?”
Maeglin shakes his head mutely. He wants, suddenly, to seem strong, like Lavinia or Alma or, yes, even Katherine. He thinks of the last time he saw his mother, and the way her mouth drooped in distaste when he wept at her departure.
“Ah, you are growing up,” Lieselotte says, wise as a crow even if she does not have Maeglin’s black hair.
Maeglin knows crows are wise—Lieselotte tells him stories every now and then. Once when she is too ill to work, once when she is showing him how to crush berries for a dye, and once when she suddenly decides to teach herself basket-making and invites him to come sit in the sun-burnt yard with her to keep her company.
She tells him of the difference between crows and ravens, and curses softly in German when she cannot weave her straw tightly enough.
“Leave off that and your black birds, soiled dove,” Katherine says nastily, “and come be of real use to the house.” She stands over an open fire and a large steaming kettle in the far side of the yard, her back to the tall wood fence, her sleeves rolled up and sweat dripping down her face. The supply store has not received a shipment for two months, and so soap must be made.
Maeglin frowns, his long-set dislike of Katherine swelling like a bee-sting, but Lieselotte only laughs and waves a handful of stiff straw at her.
“Kate,” she says, because Katherine thinks the shortening of names is inelegant, “boiling water and lye and animal fat is a difficult undertaking, and you know Lavinia does not want me to do anything that could injure my hands.” She does not raise the dainty things in the air, does not flutter her ten healthy and whole fingers, though Maeglin thinks Katherine would have if their situations were reversed.
Lieselotte alone has not suffered the hurt that Lavinia, Alma, and Katherine share. Maeglin hopes she never shall, but it seems that the work his caretakers do is quite dangerous. He is glad that Lavinia always makes a point of protecting Lieselotte’s fingers. He has even overheard her telling his mother how important they are— “Katherine is all right, and no one forgets Alma, but Lieselotte, she’s the girl what draws in the fools of all ages with her golden hair and her piano. The men tell her damn near everything, because to them she is an angel.”
Maeglin doesn’t know what an angel is, but when Katherine throws her stirring spoon on the hard ground, he scrambles up from his criss-crossed position at Lieselotte’s feet.
“I can help,” he offers, even though he thinks Katherine hates him, even though he knows lye can hurt one almost as badly as fire if it has not been changed enough. (Maeglin has never been afraid of fire, even after he tried to catch candle flame in his little baby hands, burning himself.)
Katherine glares at Lieselotte, but she motions Maeglin over to her. “Here,” she says, snatching up the long stirring spoon and shoving it at him. “Keep at it and don’t stop until it looks dark brown and ropy. I’ll be back with salt for the hardening.”
She wipes her forehead with her arm and stalks away, and Maeglin stirs and stirs until his arms ache into numbness. He can feel the blood in his face, the way he flushes from the heat, and Lieselotte tells him to leave the kettle and let Katherine deal with the consequences, but Maeglin doesn’t.
The work is difficult, but it makes him feel like he might actually have a place with the women, and that maybe, just maybe, Lavinia will one day give him more freedom. Maybe one day, his mother will be proud of him.
(Maeglin gives the ring to Lieselotte after all, but the girl only shakes her head.
“No, you imp. It is not right to steal possessions without a thought. Katherine had that from her grandmother—go put it back.”
Overwhelmed by a hot and wretched wave of shame, Maeglin hurries to obey.)
-
The year Maeglin is ten, everything changes. There is the good, and there is the bad.
Lieselotte stops falling in love with the men who tell her pretty, empty things, or at least she stops telling Maeglin dreams about running away with them. Maeglin feels a little like he is watching one of Lieselotte’s plucked wildflowers wither in Lavinia’s hair, but he is also happy that he doesn’t have to think about losing his kindest companion. Lieselotte has never said she would take him with her, even though Maeglin thinks he might go if she asked.
Katherine surprisingly, grows less cruel in her passing remarks to Maeglin, or at least, she seems to not intend her hurts. She does not call him his mother’s name for him anymore, watching him closely to see whether he bites his cheek, and she does not bring him his dinner with extra salt.
Alma is the one who has grown more frightening. Lavinia always says she will not put up with nonsense, not with her girls or the men who visit them, but one night, when Maeglin is just falling asleep, a drunken man roughly pulls Lieselotte away from her piano downstairs, and Alma drives a knife through his hand.
Maeglin learns of this because Alma immediately guides shocked Lieselotte upstairs and forces her to lie on the bed above Maeglin’s bedroll. Maeglin hurries to light the oil lamp, follows
Alma’s instructions for retrieving a pitcher of water from the corner table. They sit there patting Lieselotte’s hands until Lavinia slams the door open and demands to know for what reason Alma has gone plumb crazy.
“El es una serpiente,” Alma says, her raspy voice thick with anger. Maeglin has never seen a wildcat, but he imagines they would be just as fierce.
“A mean rattlesnake bastard,” Alma continues. “He knows he is only allowed to come for me.”
Lavinia stares at her for a moment and then says, “So you stuck his fighting hand with a knife? That you do not have permission to carry?”
Alma grins horribly at her, teeth showing. “Sí,” she says. “So I stuck him. I always carry a knife.”
Lieselotte whimpers and turns her face into Alma’s knee, and Alma adjusts her so that her head is now in Alma’s lap. Lieselotte grasps Maeglin’s hand so tightly it hurts.
There is a noise from below, voices raised in anger, and suddenly Maeglin imagines any of the array of men he has ever glimpsed stalking down the narrow hallway now storming up the stairs. These are tall and lean, short and buffalo-stocky, bearded and baby-faced. The picture terrifies Maeglin, but less so than the sight of Alma with scarlet blood dotting her hand, fierce half-blind eyes shining beneath her black and cinnamon dyed hair.
“Good,” Lavinia says finally, and Maeglin breathes out with indescribable relief at the calm steadiness of her tone. “Continue to do so.” She leaves to see that the rattlesnake man is thrown out for good. She tells Alma that he will not be allowed to return, even though Alma says nothing can poison her, not even the most devilish reptile.
“Thank you,” Lieselotte whispers into Alma’s skirt, but Alma only chuckles.
“You know,” she says, patting at Lieselotte’s golden hair that curls about her ears, “I can only see shadows, and my aim was not good. I meant to stab him in the chest.”
Lieselotte cannot help but laugh at this, and Maeglin finds that—despite the heart that fearfully skips just offbeat behind his ribs—he cannot help but admire Alma.
When she asks for a cigarette, he scrambles off the bed to find one.
Good and bad, bad and good. The better goes like this.
Maeglin—though well-practiced at being silent and still in the upstairs room, doing whatever work is given him—begins to twitch day in and day out with the desire to move. He wants to descend to the dusty streets of town, wants to meet some of the strange people that walk there, with shining buckles and nickering bay and paint horses. He wants to follow Lieselotte to whatever far field she plucks her favorite blue-purple wildflowers from, but she refuses to tell him even its direction.
(Lieselotte has become very secretive these days. She snaps at Katherine even when Katherine doesn’t poke at her with needle words, and she often pulls Alma out of her chair to drag her into the hall, whispering low so that Maeglin cannot make out the conversation.)
Maeglin, then, turns to Lavinia, who has begun to suffer bouts of pain in her joints—rheumatism, she calls it.
“Lavinia,” he says one August morning. The two of them are down in the kitchen, shelling peas and kneading bread for the afternoon dinner. Or rather, Maeglin shells peas and does almost everything else under instruction. Lavinia sits very still in a rocking chair, kneading her own wrist and hard knuckles with her thumbs. Her knotted hair is entirely grey now, and she grumbles to herself almost constantly.
“What’s the good of hiring a new cook,” she says, “if all he does is eat wild berries better left for the birds? And giving some of them to Lieselotte as well. Fool boy, he deserves his nasty stomachache. But where does that leave the tavern for the day?”
“Can I ask you something?” Maeglin is always very polite to Lavinia, even though he has long learned that she will not carry out her threats of beating him with a wooden spoon.
Lavinia looks at him, squinting a little, and begins to rock her chair. “I should cut your hair again,” she says, “for you look shaggy as a wild foal.” She does not, however, say no, so Maeglin takes the silence for permission and carefully sets aside his chestnut bowl of peas. He stands up straight, to show the advance of his height, and pushes his sleeves up to the elbows, to show the youthful strength in his thin arms.
“I was thinking,” he says carefully, “that I could accompany you on your visits to the general store. I can help you carry your purchases, that is, and save you some pain from the weight of things.”
Lavinia tilts her head in some surprise, and opens her mouth to respond, but Maeglin, hoping to ward off a simple no, adds, “I can follow right behind you, and I won’t talk to anyone unless you say so, but please let me go with you. Please.”
He blinks hard, glad that his voice did not wobble one bit, and wishes that he were more certain of Lavinia’s answer. He cannot look directly at her, but instead fixes his gaze on the stove just behind her and to the left. The iron is polished black and the brass handle of the stove door gleams. The new tavern cook might have upset Lavinia, but he keeps the kitchen neat and tidy.
“Fair enough,” Lavinia says, to Maeglin’s surprise. She pulls a yellowed paper envelope from the pocket of her long white apron and takes a folded letter out of it. “Orders is changing anyway, so I can’t say as that your mother would object.”
“My mother?”
“Yes,” Lavinia says, rising from the rocking chair and stepping around her own pail of unshelled peas. “Your mother wants you to learn a trade.”
In the space of ten minutes, Maeglin’s life opens up in ways he had never thought likely. Not only is he now allowed to assist Lavinia when she must walk across the street and down two buildings to the supply store to make the tavern’s purchases, but he is also to be apprenticed to the town blacksmith, who has set up shop in an extension of the stable just back of the tavern.
The stable is in a convenient location for travelers, for besides the tavern’s upper rooms, an inn has recently been built next door over the charred remains of some ex-miner’s ramshackle shack.
“For the respectable folk,” Katherine says, “the ones who can’t be seen with the likes of us.” There is a prickle of a cactus in her tone, and she laughs and continues, “The trick’s on them, however, for Lavinia has her finger in that pie too. Very clever, Lavinia is.”
Whether through cleverness or sheer force of will, Lavinia makes arrangements with the blacksmith so that Maeglin will spend the morning and afternoon of every day in his employ, learning all the tricks of the trade.
The first day that Maeglin walks down the tavern’s back stairs and out into the yard on his own, he is all atremble. He has hardly ever spoken to a man before, and never has had a high opinion of them, and as he undoes the latch to the gate of the wooden fence, the worry strikes him that maybe he has seen the blacksmith in the dark hallway of the tavern. Maybe the blacksmith will be one of the men who make Katherine bitter, Alma unpredictable, Lieselotte sad, and Lavinia old.
Maeglin freezes in the rocky path between tavern and stable. What will he do, if this is the case? He cannot run back upstairs, whether to beg for protection or to hide in the bedroom that grows more cramped every day. If he does, he might never leave again. He needs to go forward.
Taking a deep breath, Maeglin walks down the path, touching the dried wooden slats of barn wall with one hand, grounding himself. There is a closed door, there is a window, here now is the back door of the smithy, swung open for air. All Maeglin can see inside is darkness, and all he can hear is the steady rhythm of metal striking metal.
Ah, now he sees flame, and a ring of bright orange, and leaping sparks. The shadowy silhouette of a man, bent and large.
The noise ceases, and a deep voice calls out, “Come in.”
Maeglin plunges into his future.