Maester Amadou emerged from the dining hall at a slow walk, supporting an elderly serving woman. The old dame was clearly rattled and unsteady on her feet; one of her hands was streaked with blood from where she had taken a gash.
He guided her across the room toward us. Bee became practically refulgent. No trading vessel’s captain could have appeared as ecstatically delirious at seeing land in the wake of a mastripping storm.
But he was not looking at Bee.
“You are just the one to know what to do, Maestra Madrahat,” he said in a mild accent tuned with a musical soporiferousness. “The ancilla needs medical attention. She has cut her hand on the crockery.”
The old woman turned a glazed look up to his face. I wasn’t sure if she was infatuated or in shock from blood loss. Yet, after all, she looked old and weary and pale, and if Bee had known what I had just been thinking, she would have kicked me and I would have deserved the kicking.
“If she had not clumsily dropped the tray, she would not have cut herself,” said the maestra ungraciously.
Maester Amadou smiled the comment into oblivion. “While it was indeed she who dropped the tray, it was not the ancilla’s fault, maestra. I had a leg stretched out in an inconsiderate fashion. The ancilla stumbled over my rude foot.”
The old woman gave him a startled look, which only I noticed because both Bee and the maestra could not take their eyes off his smile. He was not a particularly tall young man—he was barely taller than I was, although it was true I was tall for a woman—and he looked extremely well in his fashionable clothes, a tailored dash jacket of indigo cloth and a patterned kerchief tied at his neck in the informal style known as “the Buccaneer.”
“If a physician could be called, maestra? Perhaps someone to sit with the ancilla until the physician arrives so she does not faint? I would do it, but I think it is not allowed for men to enter the kitchen, is it not?”
“It is not, indeed!” said the maestra. “To mingle so freely! Well, I will just take her back there and let one of the cooks sit with her until a physician can be brought from the women’s hospital.”
“In recompense for my inconsiderateness,” he added, “my family will reimburse any fees required by the physician as well as the cost of replacing the broken dishes. I am sure the ancilla will be back at work as soon as she is able and that her position will be held open for her given that the fault was all mine.”
Bee sighed audibly.
The serving woman flushed to the roots of her silver hair.
Even I was mildly impressed by this daunting performance, beneath which Maestra Madrahat was entirely drowned. She retreated as if on an inexorable outgoing tide, bearing the injured ancilla with her.
Maester Amadou politely addressed his comments to both of us.
“Are you coming in?” he asked without a trace of self-consciousness in the face of Bee’s smile, which would have rendered unconscious any other young man. “There is room at the table with my sisters, if you would have in your heart the willingness to share our benches with us.”
I saw by Bee’s blush that we would accept and we would be pleased and we would eat our luncheon sitting at the table of Maester Amadou and that afterward, for the next week at least, I would hear his praises sung and spoken all day and whispered of into the late hours of the night in our shared bed until clawing off my ears would seem a less agonizing fate.
However, as I was the eldest Maestressa Hassi Barahal, even if by a mere two months, it was my place to accept or reject the invitation on behalf of myself and my dearest cousin.
“How kind, but”—Bee’s dainty foot pressed down on my left slipper and began to really squish my little toe—“ah! Of course we would be delighted to join you.” She eased off. I forced a smile as my toe throbbed. “Is there still yam pudding? It’s my favorite.”
6
Bee was floating, and I was brooding, when we departed the academy midafternoon after our seminars. My shoulder ached under the emotional weight of the purloined book within the schoolbag. Its pages were silent because closed, but my mind was howling with questions.
Did my father write this monograph on lying Romans? And if so, why had no one ever told me of it? Why was there no copy in our house? But these were only stepping-stones to the brink, where the edifice on which my tender life trembled as on a knife’s edge. One question rose time and again whenever I was troubled enough to brood over the man whose miniature portrait nestled in the locket I wore at my neck and whose journals graced his brother’s parlor, or over the woman who had left no portrait and only a handful of remembered words in my heart.