Wanda the Swan at the fig tree
“You need to be more careful where you put your hands, letter writer.” He jerked reflexively away from both the bushy red-leafed fruit tree and the woman on the other side of the low fence. The redhead from his first day in the square had chopped her hair to shoulder length and turned it to the color of a river on a moonless night. She looked nothing like a whore today, more like one of his sisters or his mother in the picture from her wedding day.
She seemed pleased by his reaction. “There are plenty here who won’t warn you and won’t blink before they cut your hand off for you,” she said, companionably, offering a little friendly advice with her menace. “And just because they can’t afford a good steel knife don’t think they go unarmed. Little girls here stay up half the night to put an edge on something you would throw away as worthless. Friend of mine, a pocket thief, uses bits of broken glass, smoothed on the back and razor sharp along the edge. She favors blues and greens and wraps the handle end in tar and cord and wears them dangling all around like jewelry.
“I don’t see how she keeps from slicing off some live bits of herself.” She said that as if the puzzle of it had never occurred to her before.
“You live here?” he asked with a gesture that took in the tall stone house, its gardens, and enough unused space to hold two of Scofflaw’s market squares.
She had the grace to blush. “You might say that I am making a delivery. You do your work sometimes in people’s homes, don’t you? Somebody says: Scrivener, come and write a letter for my Auntie, for her secretary’s taken off to Fairport on the packet, wanting to be there to watch her brother’s wife in labor.” It was a perfect mimicry of the errand he had just finished, and close enough to the reason that he wondered if she knew what had brought him to this more elegant side of town.
“I might live here. I might live someplace like this. There are girls from city families who work for their own reasons. I could be one of those. But this is actually as public a house as Feather’s Tickle. Ask around about the Good House.
“There are some things you can learn. You don’t think that we all live in the house, do you? Believe me, even you would want to have some time away from twenty girls, not mentioning the Mister and the paying guests.”
He felt all sudden like the first, no second, night away from home. His father thought he’d learn to be a scholar, along with losing that inconvenient curse. His mother said good-bye and meant forever, sure that what the priests at the father house could do for him would not mean that what they returned would be her son. That night he learned that it was mother who was right, though no one touched his body. They took every thing from him that he was certain of, and gave him nothing in return so that he crept back to his cot and hid beneath the blanket in the dark of wool while all the others went about the day. He curled into a bean and slept and dreamed in shapes and colors unrelated to the normal world, with a smell of something like dirt burning. He could almost smell the wool and burning now.
