They don’t understand her as I do, I think, shifting uncomfortably on the narrow bed. That is the trouble. How can they, when they know nothing of Gabor? When they haven’t seen Lord Nadasdy peel her smile from her face with his vicious grasp?
I lay there for hours, awake in the dark with my mind spinning. Burning like a stray ember in my bed.
Thinking of how I can show her that I understand.
Chapter Seven
The Toil and the Brace
I’ve worked hard all my life, by my mother’s side. Since I was little, I helped her tend to our hearth, grind her medicines, pull babies and dress wounds and do whatever else was needed to help the sick. At home, I wrangled my roughhousing brothers, cleaned and swept and baked, butchered animals when we had the luxury of meat.
None of it could have prepared me for the accursed drudgery that is a scull’s daily lot.
My main job is to scrub, which comes as no surprise. I clean mostly the floors, hunched over on my knees to scour the castle’s cold, begrimed stones. But I am also responsible for scrubbing the cavernous cauldrons that steam in the kitchens and the laundry, and the soiled serving platters that ferry delicacies to the lady’s table three to five times a day, depending on how often she and her retinue are feeling peckish.
As Krisztina promised, the end of my first day finds me dog-tired, swaying on my feet. I barely remember eating a tasteless dinner with the rest of the servants before collapsing fully clothed into my miserable bed, comforting myself with thoughts of the coin I will send home to my family before the month is done. Much less than I would have made as the lady’s chambermaid, but still more than they would have had otherwise. When I wake before dawn, I’m so sore that it seems unbelievably cruel that I should be expected to do it all again. In that respect, the second day is even more demanding. My knees are already tender from kneeling, my hands beginning to crack from the harshness of the lye we use to wash everything. My back feels like it must be a column made of the red-hot metals my father pounded with his blacksmith’s hammer. Even my scalp aches from how tightly Mistress Magda demands we keep our hair braided beneath our caps.
It all puts me hugely out of sorts.
“It gets better, Anna, you’ll see,” Ilona soothes, noting my grim-faced look as we half wrestle, half drag a cauldron that must weigh more than both of us combined outside for a thorough scrubbing. “I was plagued by aches and pains the first few weeks, myself, but you do get used to it. And you get stronger.”
“And will I sprout hands like hooves, too, do you think?” I grouse, unable to help myself. “To help withstand all this stinking lye?”
When her sweet face sinks and she bites the inside of her cheek just as Klara does, I feel so pained for snapping at her that I bend over backward like a contortionist to apologize. Ilona’s dauntless cheer puts me to shame. She hums under her breath as she works, a tuneless but endearing drone, and her smile is always ready, no matter how dreary and taxing our work. She is too good for this life, I often find myself thinking—especially when I see the lady’s overindulged maidservants swanning by, groomed and cossetted and more like ladies themselves than help. It makes me seethe over the unfairness of our respective lots.
And yet, I find it isn’t the arduous labor that grinds on me the most, but the sheer, dragging boredom of the days. None of the menial tasks set before me even begin to challenge my mind. I’m used to full and unpredictable workdays, being called upon to treat ailments that even my mother sometimes doesn’t recognize. Now the most challenge that I come across is a pot so stubbornly encrusted that I’m forced to scrape at it with my fingernails, cursing poisonously under my breath. Nothing relieves the crushing tedium, not even the nightly chitchat in our cellar quarters. I could not care less about the other sculls’ dim-witted sweethearts back home, and while their talk of family stirs my heart, it’s my own kin’s plight that looms large in my mind. I find that I’ve precious little sympathy to spare.
Even if I had any to go around, it isn’t commiseration that my fellow drudges need, it’s more coin and less work. I can do nothing about that, either.
But what I can do, I find, is tend to their bodily wear and tear.
“Would you let me look at that for you?” I ask Krisztina one day, noticing the way she favors her left hand. We’ve been sent outside to pound the dust and dirt out of one of the castle’s splendid bearskin rugs. It’s much more pleasant to tread on, I think sourly as I batter the thick fur, than it is to maintain. “I might be able to ease the strain.”
She grimaces, rolling the offending wrist back and forth. “I doubt the good lord himself could do anything about it, short of cleaving it off for me and have done with it. It’s been keeping me up at night, aching fit to fall off—so maybe all I need do is wait to be free of it.” She snorts, then peers at me curiously. “Why, what is it you think you could do?”
I twitch one shoulder in a shrug. “My mother is the village midwife,” I say. “I know a bit about medicine.”
She grins mischievously, waggling her patchy ginger eyebrows. “Is that so? Shouldn’t a midwife’s daughter know that a sore wrist is no sign of being with child?”
I chuckle at that, shaking my head. “She sees to folks’ other ailments when she can, too,” I clarify. “I learned at her knee. Nothing too complicated, just the odd ache and twinge,” I hasten to downplay, remembering the trepidation on Zorka’s face when the lady called me a witch in front of her. No need to sow rumors here, where they might grow into nasty weeds to trip me.
Krisztina considers the offer a moment, the rug whip gripped in her good hand. “All right, then, might as well. Surely your tinkering can’t make it any worse,” she decides.
She allows me to examine her hand over our midday respite. I turn it over, marveling as I always do at the intricate truss of tendon and bone, the modest miracle hidden under a roughened layer of her pale, freckled skin. I run my fingertips searchingly over the splay of her hand, pressing at tender spots and pulling her fingers tight, until her muffled hiss assures me that I understand.
“Does your hand go numb, or tingle here?” I ask, sweeping my fingertips over the base of her thumb and then up toward the first three fingers. When I close my eyes, I almost imagine I see the pulsing flare of the inflamed filament throbbing beneath her skin, where it spirals around the central spoke of bone.
“Yes!” she exclaims, cocking her head with surprise. She’s gone pale under her cinnamon spatter of freckles, clearly pained by my examination, but she hasn’t uttered a word of complaint. “How did you know? Sometimes I beat it against my thigh to get the blood flowing again, but on the worst days, it turns so dead I can scarcely feel it.” She casts me a searingly hopeful look. “Can you fix it, do you think?”
I squeeze the fleshy pad under her thumb, working out the strain, and her eyelids flutter with relief. “Some things are soothed by a simple tonic or poultice, but I’m afraid this isn’t such an easy fix. I can rub it for you in the evenings, if you like,” I offer. “Sometimes massaging the shoulder, arm, and wrist will grant relief. But what it really needs is rest.”
“Oh, well then,” she jokes, but I can sense the tremor of fear beneath. If it progresses enough to incapacitate her, how will she work? Like me, she has a gawping legion of mouths to feed back home. “I’ll just ask for a fortnight of leave, shall I? Tell Mistress Magda I need to put my feet up, physician’s orders.”