House of Shadows(12)
She turned back to the House, walking along the alley to enter this time through the small kitchen door.
Whispers instantly surrounded her. The keiso were all still abed, but two of the deisa, Lily and Sweetrose, were sitting at the cutting table, sneaking sugared nuts from a batch the cook had made. The girls had their heads tilted together. Their smiles were knowing, their voices smooth.
There was a new girl, Leilis gathered, attending at last. She must be a beauty, to judge by the spite she’d engendered so quickly in the deisa: Mother had paid a thousand hard for her, one of them murmured, and she already old, seventeen at least, and completely untrained. By the time she was bringing in a profit she’d be in debt to the House for twice what Mother had given for her. She wouldn’t earn out until she was forty years old, if ever. Lily and Sweetrose shared the satisfied tone that came from the assurance that they were going to earn out their debts while they were still young and beautiful.
Leilis stepped past the deisa and began to clear up walnut shells. Sweetrose made room with an air that suggested she shifted out of Leilis’s way only by chance; Lily gave Leilis a glance that combined wariness, resentment, and disdain and did not move at all. Only the cook gave her a welcoming nod. Leilis returned the nod and took the nut shells out to the midden heap.
Then it was back in and around to the banquet chambers where clients were entertained, to polish the low tables and the silverwork on the carved doors and, especially, the floors. Endless polishing: The women and girls of the House went softly shod, but clients wore boots on even the finest floors.
The whispers made their way to Leilis once more while she was in the last chamber. They had strengthened as the keiso at last began to come out of their rooms and join in the life of the house. The rumors were carried through the air along with the sharp scent of the wood polish, running along the keiso galleries and through the servants’ narrow passages. The new girl had hair spun out of the dusky fall of twilight. Her skin was flawless, the soft color of the best Enescene porcelain. The curve of her throat… those fine delicate bones… Even her tears scattered like pearls, and her face did not blotch when she wept.
The new girl might well be tearful, thought Leilis. Though probably she feared the wrong things and for the wrong reasons. New girls always feared Mother, feared the senior keiso. But any new girl should instead fear the whispers that spread among the deisa. Those were the girls who would like to see a rival fail and sink into obscurity or mere servitude within the House.
Curiosity drove Leilis down from the keiso-trodden regions of the House to the laundry to see if the laundry maids needed extra hands, which of course they always did.
“Have you seen the new girl?” one of the laundry maids asked her. The maid was a tiny bit of a thing, too plain to dream of ever taking a flower name of her own. Her thin little voice was wistful. “More beautiful than the stars over the mountains, they say. Mother paid two thousand hard cash for her and would have paid twice as much. You should go see if she’s truly so beautiful and come tell us, will you, Leilis?”
The maid, tucked away in the laundry, could not herself run up to see the new deisa. Few of the residents of Cloisonné House moved as freely as Leilis between the public and private regions of the house, between the servants’ areas and the keiso galleries and halls. Not that anyone but a laundry maid was likely to envy Leilis her unusual freedom. It was assuredly a poor enough trade for keiso glamour.
Leilis made a noncommittal sound and took a set of the very best silk sheets up to Mother’s apartment.
Narienneh was speaking with the embroiderer, who was showing her an overrobe embroidered with a frothy lacework of white and pale pink. “She’d look like an apple blossom in this,” Mother said, waving a dismissive hand at the froth. “Like an entire orchard. Something innocent is what we shall want, a clean design, something almost plain.”
The embroiderer nodded, sketching quick patterns in charcoal for Narienneh to examine. Leilis slid past into Mother’s bedchamber and made the bed, then came back out to the front room. She snipped the faded flowers off Mother’s white roses and tidied away the clutter of discarded paper the embroiderer had produced. The embroiderer gathered up a rustling stack of sketches and went away.
Mother sighed and sat down at the table in front of the window. But she did not gaze out the window at the river. She lowered her head against her hand, pinching the bridge of her nose and looking, now that she was alone, uncharacteristically frail. Mother’s hair, braided up into a crown on the top of her head, was flawlessly white, but her age was not what lent her this unexpected air of fragility. It occurred to Leilis to wonder for the first time how much Narienneh might really have paid for the new girl. Could it have been so much?