REBORN: SHE RULES THE WORLD

Chapter 2: The Servants’ Table

Chapter 2: The Servants’ Table

The laundry room smelled of lye and wet stone, and Mrs. Pruitt was waiting in the doorway with a wooden spoon in her fist.

“You’re late,” the housekeeper said.

She was a broad, red-faced woman who had been Diane’s creature for ten years and had never once been kind to anyone who could not repay it. The spoon had a darker patch near the handle. Evelyn knew exactly how that patch had been made. She had been the one bleeding.

“The east corridor floors, then the linens, then the kitchen pots. Madam’s orders.” Mrs. Pruitt smiled, thin and pleased. “And I hear you’ve been laughing this morning, wolfless. I’ll knock it out of you.” The spoon lifted.

Evelyn looked at the spoon. Then at Mrs. Pruitt’s damp upper lip, and the flush climbing her neck, and the tiny tremor in the hand that was trying very hard to look steady.

“Put it down,” she said.

“What did you say to me?”

“You’re sweating, Mrs. Pruitt.” Evelyn’s voice was flat and cool, like water in a stone basin. “Does hitting a girl with no wolf really take that much effort? Or is it the hatred? It must be exhausting, carrying all that around every day.”

The housekeeper’s face went from red to purple. “Why, you insolent little—”

“Go ahead.” Evelyn tilted her head. “Hit me. I’ll write down the date, the time, and who was standing here to watch. Dora, that’s you. Wave.”

Behind the sink, a thin maid of sixteen with a basket on her hip froze, wide-eyed, and did not wave.

“I’m keeping a list, Mrs. Pruitt,” Evelyn went on. “You’re on the first page. Picture it read aloud, in a room full of people who aren’t Madam.”

“A list?” Mrs. Pruitt gave a harsh laugh that cracked in the middle. “Who would read a list written by a girl like you?”

“Someone will.”

It was not a threat. It was said the way you tell someone it is going to rain. Mrs. Pruitt’s spoon sank slowly to her side. For a moment her eyes flicked, almost against her will, to the bruise darkening on Evelyn’s cheek, and to the eyes above it, which did not look like the eyes of a girl who would cry.

“Madam was right,” she muttered, backing out. “You’ve gone mad.”

“Perhaps. Mad girls remember everything.” Evelyn lifted the first sheet from the basket. “You’re blocking the light.”

The doorway emptied.

Dora let out a breath she must have been holding for a full minute. “Why did you laugh?” she whispered. “In the dining room. Everyone’s saying you’ve lost your mind.”

“Because it was funny.”

“What was?”

“Everything,” Evelyn said, and plunged her hands into the cold water.

The lye bit into the cracked skin of her knuckles. She had done this work every day for thirteen years, and her body remembered it with a dull, familiar ache. It was a body with no wolf to heal it quickly, no strength beyond what a girl of eighteen could scrape together. Every bruise would linger. Every blow would count. She would have to be smarter than they were, and she would need money, soon, more than she had ever needed anything. She knew, already, where she might find it.

But the work no longer felt like punishment. This time she was not enduring it. She was counting. Forty-one sheets. Nine steps from the sink to the line. The hour Mrs. Pruitt took her tea. The route the cook took to market. A house was only a machine, and for the first time she had been handed a look at all the gears.

She was on the nineteenth sheet when heels clicked in the corridor.

Marcy, Vanessa’s maid, swept in with a ribbon in her hair and her nose in the air, and held out one gloved hand without looking at anyone. “The key. Miss Vanessa wants her new room aired before supper.”

Evelyn did not look up from the sheet. “Mr. Hart said tonight.”

“Miss Vanessa says now.”

“Then Miss Vanessa can take it up with Mr. Hart.” Evelyn wrung the sheet out, hard, and water spattered across Marcy’s pale skirt. “I’m sure he’d love to hear his orders are being rewritten by a girl who wipes a sick woman’s nose for wages.”

Marcy gasped and brushed at her skirt. “You little—”

“Careful.” Evelyn finally looked at her. Flat. Unblinking. “Insulting me is free. Touching me isn’t.”

Marcy opened her mouth, closed it, and took a step back. She had come prepared for tears. Nobody had warned her about this.

“You’ll be sorry,” she hissed.

“I’ve been sorry for years. It’s the one thing I’m good at.” Evelyn went back to the sheet. “Midnight, Marcy. Not a minute sooner. Tell her that.”

The heels retreated at a much faster pace than they had arrived.

Dora stared at her. “She’ll tell Madam everything. Aren’t you scared?”

“Fear is expensive,” Evelyn said, reaching for the twentieth sheet. “I’m saving mine.” She paused, then added, without looking up, “Thank you for not waving. Next time, if someone asks what you saw, you tell them the truth. That’s all I need from you.”

Dora swallowed, and nodded slowly, as if someone had handed her something heavy and she had decided, after all, that she could carry it.

* * *

At noon the servants ate in the kitchen, and Evelyn ate with them, at the far end of the long deal table, because Diane had decided years ago that this was where girls like her belonged.

Nobody spoke to her. A footman sniggered into his stew. “They say the wolfless girl laughed herself silly in front of Madam. Perhaps she’ll bark next.”

Evelyn picked up her spoon. “Perhaps you’ll learn to chew with your mouth closed.” She did not even glance at him. “It would be a start.”

The footman went red. Someone at the table coughed to hide a laugh.

She ate the thin broth slowly, with a face as smooth as stone. Under her apron, against her hip, lay a small cloth-bound linen inventory book she had taken from the laundry shelf. Half its pages were blank. When the table emptied she slid it out, took the stub of a pencil from her pocket, and began to write in tiny, even script.

8:12 a.m. Struck across left cheek. R. Hart. Witnesses: D. Dawson, Vanessa.

10:40 a.m. Threatened with spoon. Mrs. Pruitt. Witness: Dora.

11:50 a.m. Key demanded early. Marcy, Vanessa’s maid.

A shadow fell across the page. Evelyn closed the book without hurry.

“What is that, child?”

Mrs. Alvarez, the cook, stood over her with a covered plate and her sleeves pushed to the elbow. She was a stout, silver-haired woman with flour on her cheek, and she was the only person in this house who had ever said Evelyn’s name without an insult attached.

“Inventory.”

“Of what?”

“Debts,” said Evelyn.

Something flickered across the cook’s weathered face. She set the plate down. On it sat a honey bun, still warm, with a stub of candle pressed into its top.

“Eat,” Mrs. Alvarez said. “And don’t tell me you don’t do sentiment. I’ve seen you eat worse.”

“I don’t do sentiment,” Evelyn said. She ate the whole bun anyway. She did not look at the candle.

The cook watched her with an odd, aching patience, and when the kitchen was empty save for the two of them, she bent low and spoke in a voice barely above a breath.

“Eighteen,” she murmured. “Your mother made me promise I would remember. And she left something with me, mija. For the day you turned eighteen.”

The pencil stopped.

“Not here,” Mrs. Alvarez said, her eyes sliding to the empty doorway. “The walls in this house have ears. Come to my pantry at eleven tonight.”

Evelyn’s heart struck once, hard, against her ribs. Midnight was her deadline for her mother’s room. Eleven was only an hour before it.

She closed her fingers around the pencil. Whatever her mother had hidden, it seemed she had not hidden it in only one place.