Main Menu (edit)
Random Average Blogpmwiki.org |
One corner, two corner, and tucked. The bed was made, on to the next. She paused a moment in the hall, leaning against her cart. It held the dirty linens in a sack below, and the clean ones were piled on top. Shifting her weight a moment, from one foot to the other to give her a chance to curl her toes and stretch her calf muscle out. Her feet hurt, too many years of working on them she would think for a moment, before pushing that thought aside as it reminded her of her first job at the inn, from before she became the upstairs maid. She glanced both ways down the hall, making sure no one was watching her as she lifted her arms up above her head and stretched them as well. She always felt nervous stretching like that, vulnerable; another holdover sensation from her first job at the inn. That was the seventeenth bed she had made today, from the stack of clean linens on the cart she had another nine to go. The count of beds to be made seemed to vary from day to day. She had tried to count them herself in the past, but never got quite the same number. She used to think she was stupid, she had been told that many times in her first job, but later thought she must have just been getting distracted and loosing count, and then finally gave up the counting altogether and decided it was just another small quirk of the inn. She liked the word ‘quirk’. Not enough people used it anymore. She missed the older and more poetic speakers of the rather ugly language that is English. She hadn’t been very good at making beds when she first got the job. It had taken her a while of practice to figure out how to lay the sheets out straight so they didn’t wrinkle as she tucked them in. Some years ago though she had been surprised, a guest had stayed, he had been a soldier of some sort, and he had showed her how to make a bet so tight you could bounce a shiny piece of metal on it. She had liked that and had practiced at it until he was satisfied with how taunt the sheets were. He had given her his shiny piece of metal then, smiled at her, and shot himself with his service revolver later that day. She didn’t remember him very well, but she still had his shiny piece of metal in her apron and made sure to keep the sheet corners tight enough to bounce the piece of metal off of it if she thought to try. The bed never seemed to be slept in, a big four poster bed with lace and gauze draperies around it. The room itself smelled vaguely musty. She had directions for this room. Make the bed every day but leave an extra blanket and pillow upon the chair. The chair seemed used, someone slept in it nightly, but never the bed. She was a little disappointed in that, she spent effort making sure the sheets were tightly tucked on every bed she made, but whether someone slept in it or not, it was another small portion of her debt paid off. One bed after another. The gray tabby cat leapt up onto her cart as she finished her daily rounds. The cat was missing an eye and she had for a while taken to calling him ‘Old One-Eye’ before the laundry lady, who had been there for a long time but not as long as she had been there, overheard her and in her thick accent told her not to use that name in front of the guests because it might offend one of them or confuse them as to who she was speaking to. The laundry lady was a strange one. She had come in out of the snow one night back when, her accent so thick to be almost impossible to be understood. The girl who had worked at the front desk then, she was several girls before Sarah and had left one day with a guest and not returned, Sarah too would be gone one day, or had already left because of something to do with her head, it was hard to remember or understand some days, time seems to pass but slowly when everyday is the same routine, but the girl who had been at the front desk then had been able to understand only a few words that were said and put her to work doing the laundry. The cat had been here even then, though it had both eyes back in those days and wasn’t quite such a fat cat at the time. He hadn’t had much competition for a while and had put on a bit of weight. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, he would grow lazy and placid for a while and comfortable in the inn he had made his home in. Then one day he would find himself challenged once more and the inn would be filled with hisses and the unseen batting of paws from the shadows, the old grey tabby fighting for territory and dominance once again. He had lost his eye in one of those fights ages back, but apparently had gained no wisdom from it and had gone to growing lazy and fat once more. The carts wheels rolled silently along the runner in the center of the hall. She was taking a back way to the laundry room, avoiding the often busy front halls. A family had come to stay for a while, and the kids were having a merry time exploring the inn. Cute children, but they made her sad in a way because she had never had any of her own. Lily and Evelynn both had children, but she, the middle sister, had never had any herself. So she took the back hallways through the inn to avoid them. The halls weren’t always open, but one of her favorites had been open for a while recently and was still there today. The hall was quiet and secluded, the doors each had murals painted upon them, all uniquely their own. But it was the names that made her most curious, “Amelia”, “Genevieve”, “Marguerite”, and several more. She wondered what the hall had been before it became part of the inn, where the doors had once led too and who had lived in them before. Had it been bedrooms for some family blessed with many daughters, or were the names originally the working names of girls in a brothel. The cart rolled into the laundry room, the old grey tabby leaping away as the steam escaped out the open door, the cat never liked the room much as it was too hot and too damp and far too noisy for to sleep well within the rooms walls. The laundry lady was absent, likely off making up more soap for the linens to be cleaned in, and so she had to wrestle the heavy canvas sack of linens off of the cart herself and onto the pile with the other sacks from previous days. It seemed at times as if the pile never grew or diminished, that it always had the same number of sacks despite the way that sometimes the room dwarfed the pile and on other days the pile brushed the ceiling. Another ‘quirk’ of the inn she thought, one which had long ago grown to be commonplace to her. She turned back to the cart to wheel it back to its spot in the corner, where tomorrow it would be stacked with clean linens again, just enough for all the beds, and another empty canvas sack would be beneath it. A note was resting atop the cart. The notes she received, from time to time, she always approached with trepidation. For one thing, she never saw who left them though she had her suspicions about who it may be who leaves them behind. Most were simply reminders, an accounting of. But she had just received one of those, not too long back and it seemed strange to get another so soon. Though, she admitted to herself once again, time does pass strangely when every day is much like another. This note, however, read differently: “The young man in the room with the green carpet and the painting of Theodora’s husband and the young lady in the room with the tapestry covering the three spy holes failed to receive their ‘wake-up call’. Sarah was to have arranged this, but is unavailable at this time. The task falls to you. It must take place today.” Her debt was figured in a way that she was certain wasn’t how such manners were normally handled. It was given to her as a simple number, not a monetary amount but the number of beds remaining to be made to pay the debt off. The debt hadn’t always been figured this way, her first job at the inn had involved her being in the beds of the male guests rather then simply making them, the number had been much smaller then but still of a respectable size. She hadn’t liked it though, the way it made her feel or the way the guests looked at her. On the whole, she was much happier working on her feet, regardless of how much they hurt, then upon her back. Though she wondered at times how the exchange rate between beds to be made and men to be bedded had been figured. She didn’t get notes like this one very often, rarely more then one every few years, and she wasn’t sure at first how to respond to it. Usually Sarah, or whoever the girl at the desk was at the time, dealt with manners such as this. It was part of their job, not hers, and she lacked the experience to know quickly how such a thing was to be handled. The note clutched in hand, more of a fist really though she wouldn’t realize how crumpled the note was until she got to her destination, she hurried through the back halls to the room she liked best in the inn. She had heard it referred to once by theman with the strange piece of glass over one eye, as the ‘Writing Room’. She couldn’t ever remember his name, she wasn’t good with names having never had one of her own and understanding the importance of them, but it was hard to forget a man with a piece of glass over one eye. She couldn’t remember if he had always worn the strange piece of glass, and she had always felt it would be rude to ask. But she was certain that it glowed at times. The room made her both happy and sad. She loved to read, the guests who never seemed to stay in this room for long always left such wonderful stories behind them when they were gone. But when there was someone here, and they were working at their writing, she rarely got a chance to make the rooms bed which was her job afterall. But most of all about the room she loved the view, being able to see across the hills to the orchard. The room hadn’t been vacant long, she had heard the last few words being written of the most recent occupant’s story, and from over hearing him talk it had sounded like he had written of her sister Lily and the orchard. This was her first chance to sneak in to the room since then and enjoy the view, and the day was too foggy to see anything except to tops of the trees. She loved her sisters but didn’t get to see them often. Lily rarely left the orchard these days, but she had memories of long ago, when it hadn’t been an orchard really but rather a beautiful garden with flowers of all varieties and just a couple of apple trees growing in it. She had lived there then, with Lily and Evelynn and she had been happy. But then there had been the fight, and Lily and Evelynn rarely talked to each other anymore since Evelynn left with Lily’s husband, though marriage had been a much less formal thing back then and she wasn’t really sure if that was even the right word to use about it. Evelynn was off somewhere now, having babies and doing whatever it is mothers and wives do for their children and spouses. Lily still had the garden, turned orchard, and seemed happy; she had dallied with a few other men over the years but none of them ever stayed for long, as least as she reckoned things. The oldest two apple trees had grown to huge sizes since then, though one of them looked rather wilted and she had heard that it might have to be chopped down soon since it was apparently rotting at the core. But more trees had sprung up over the years until their was the orchard that could be seen from the window today. Still, her memories were of the garden and the paradise it had been back then, before he had come and had his fight with Lily, looked at her in such revulsion, and then left with Evelynn. Turning away from the window with a sigh, she unfolded the crumpled note that she held balled up in her fist and read it again. This was beyond her, she didn’t ever really meet the people who stayed here, and she had never truly felt comfortable with them watching her work since her first job at the inn. The few who ever stopped to talk to her either made her feel unclean or made her laugh or made her curious. One of her favorites had been an old man who hadn’t come to the inn for many years, she suspected that he wasn’t likely to ever return again, who had liked to call her ‘Alice’ as he said she reminded him of a curious little girl who followed a rabbit down a hole. She hadn’t understood at the time, but had liked having a name even if it hadn’t been her own. He had brought her a copy of the book on a later trip to the inn and it remained one of the few possessions that were truly her own. But this problem now wasn’t something that was going to be solved by her daydreaming about a book, or wishing she had time to read what had been written about her sister. She needed advice, but Sarah wasn’t gone and the other person she talked to at times was hard to find, he had a tendency to wander about the inn or disappear for days at time before showing up again. She wondered at times if she stayed in the room, if she could write a story as well, but had never risked it and wasn’t certain what she would right about if she had. She stomped her foot once in frustration, daydreams about reading and writing and old guests who hadn’t come for a while and she needed to be thinking about introducing these two before they checked out and nothing on a sheet of paper was going to help her with that. She blinked at her last thought, and then giggled. She turned back to the window a moment, waving to her sister in the far off orchard who couldn’t possibly see her through the fog, and hurried out of the room. She had never understood why he had looked at her with such revulsion. She wasn’t vain, but she didn’t think she looked that much plainer then her sisters did and many people had complimented her on her looks over the years. Some of the compliments she tried not to remember, they were the ones from her first job, tinged with avarice and lust more then sincerity of emotion. But still, she had never felt quite right about that and it had always been a bit of a sore spot to her. The man she had thought about asking for advice was the old man had taught her how to play his game once, he called the game chess. She didn’t think she was very good at it, but had surprised him once or twice apparently by playing poorly enough that she won. He had tried to get her to bet once, but the only things she really owned were too precious for her to want to part with. He had smiled at that, and told her that knowing that simply meant that she had won before she sat down to play. “Excuse me, is anyone here? I seem to have gotten the bill for the wrong room,” the young man was standing at the currently abandoned front desk. He was waving a sheet of paper in his hands, the bill for a room that wasn’t his own. “You too? They sent up the bill for the wrong room to me too,” the young lady approached him from behind, holding the bill for someone else’s room in her hands as well. She had arranged for them to get the bills for each other’s room, with no one at the desk to sort it out for them, they would hopefully talk and figure it out themselves. She couldn’t hear their voices anymore, they had stopped talking so loudly as to try to attract attention and were talking and looking at each other now. In a little bit, the man with that strange piece of glass over his eyes was going to offer them both a free complimentary night at the inn to apologize for the mix-up. She hoped they took it, since that would mean she had done her job well. Now though, the beds were all made, her job for the day was done. It was time to see if anything new had shown up on the bookshelves to read. Or maybe something old had shown up instead. The Apple Orchard - Hythian Wordcount: |
