• • •
Karigan returned to her bed chamber with nothing to do, and she welcomed the respite. Everything that had happened, all the revelations over the last twenty-four hours, had left her numb. She tossed her hat and veil aside, sprawled on her bed, and stared at the ceiling. She worked everything through her mind once more: Arhys, Amberhill . . . If—when—she returned home, the first thing she’d tell King Zachary about was Amberhill. He must not trust his cousin.
She wondered about the ghost of Yates. She wondered why he had appeared to her. She’d had enough experience with ghosts to know that they did not appear without reason. What would compel him to come across time and the veil of death to her?
If there was one facet of her day that made her smile, it was learning about Cade’s aspirations to be Arhys’ Weapon. He was beginning to show depths that she had not expected, and she looked forward to their next training session. Still, all that she had learned since she’d been in this time did nothing to reveal the purpose of the gods. Why was she here? Maybe there was no purpose, maybe she was arbitrarily deposited here, but she did not think so. There was too much connecting to the past, her past, for it to be a coincidence.
Karigan could only ponder these things over the following days, which were, essentially, quiet and left her to brooding. She saw little of the professor or Cade and received no invitations to join them in the old mill. She spent hours with Raven, grooming him and tending the healing lash wounds on his hide. The air was too noxious, Luke explained, for even the horses to go for a run. And it was true—a cloud had settled over the city, and she was not at all disposed to open the window in her room. The sulfurous air made her cough and her eyes water. Cloudy, the cat, had not appeared at her window for a visit anyway.
Some of her time was taken up by a visit from Mistress Ilsa dela Enfande and her coterie, there to create an evening gown for her attendance at Dr. Silk’s dinner party.
“It shall be my latest, most daring design,” Mistress dela Enfande declared. “Dr. Silk is known for inviting only the most fashionable of the Preferred to his engagements.”
Karigan could only sigh. She had no choice in the matter so she gave in to her fate, as well as to the capable talents of Mistress dela Enfande.
She managed to avoid Arhys for the most part, although during the assault of Mistress dela Enfande’s assistants and their measuring tapes, she caught Arhys peering through her cracked door, scowling. Likewise Mirriam kept her distance and remained aloof. It was mostly Lorine who attended Karigan, and she’d gone from formal back to her former quiet but friendly self.
One afternoon while Karigan sat by her window, boredly gazing at another day’s vaporous clouds—hazing even the wall of the neighboring house—Lorine came in with clean linens, which she proceeded to store in the wardrobe.
“How often is it like this?” Karigan asked. Unable to ride, unable to do much of anything, she felt like a landlocked sailor in a storm.
“We once had a full month of it that I can remember,” Lorine said thoughtfully, a folded sheet forgotten in her arms. “That was when I was still . . .” She trailed off, gazing into space.
“You were still what?” Karigan asked quietly.
“I was still a slave in the mill. The air in the mills can be bad enough with all the cotton fibers flying about, but the smoky days made everything worse. The weak among us would sicken, even die. We still had to work, you see, no matter what the air was like. But that was just one of a thousand hazards in the mill.”
And here Karigan had been going mad confined to the indoors to avoid the bad air. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Lorine shrugged. “For what? You did not make slavery.”
Karigan had not made slavery, but she’d done nothing to stop it either. It was easy to forget, in the comfort of the professor’s house, how hard others labored. “Do all the mills use slaves to do the work?”
“As far as I know, miss. I heard that many years ago there were small shops that made cloth goods, owned and run by free folk, but they couldn’t compete with the big mills that came in, so they went out of business.”
Lorine finished what she was doing and closed the wardrobe doors. She prepared to leave, but Karigan called her back.
“Yes, miss?”
“How was it you came to work for the prof—er, my uncle? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want,” she added hastily.
“It’s all right,” Lorine replied. “I don’t mind telling you.” She cleared her throat before continuing. “I—I’d had an accident at the mill.” She touched the ever-present scarf covering her hair. “I wore my hair back, always, but it didn’t always stay tied. A bunch of it got caught up in the belting attached to one of the looms I tended. Tore out a large piece of my scalp.”
At Karigan’s sharp intake of breath, Lorine said, “I’m sorry, miss. It’s indelicate of me. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Please, don’t stop. I’m sorry—you must have suffered terribly.”
“The mill I belonged to, if you could not work, you were disposed of one way or another, sold off, or thrown out like garbage. I lost a lot of blood and was insensible. They left me out to die among the day’s corpses, to be picked up later by the rubbish cart. I guess my master did not want to waste money or time on my healing.”
Karigan shuddered, not able to even imagine what Lorine must have gone through as a slave in such conditions.