74. Then Tessa
THEN: TESSA
Ihad taken on an apprentice, a girl of only ten, too young for the work but clearly miserable with her lot in life as the oldest of a brood of children with an exhausted mother and a father who ruled with his fists.
But I had set a dislocated shoulder and put her other arm in a splint.
When her mother, the wife of a sharecropper from Carver, brought her to me the second time, I paid for her to stay, as Magda had once paid for my sister and me.
I did not even know her name when I took her in, as she did not speak.
In the first weeks of her living with us, she had found an orphaned fox kit in the woods and informed us, via writing with a stick in dirt, that the fox was named Daisy and that she would like to go by Fox.
I had declared that this was confusing and should be the other way around, but Avery had shushed me.
Though she was a hardworking little thing and often confused by Adelaide’s dudgeons and entitlement, she warmed easily to my niece. As opposite as they were, they found a friendship with each other. When the girls were old enough, my sister and I took them to the summer tinker camp.
Fox was desperate to go and had been asking me for the last few winters.
I had a suspicion that her family, hailing from Carver, might visit the campgrounds, see her, and want to reclaim her.
Her mother had never visited and, selfishly, I was grateful for it.
I did not want to surrender the girl I called apprentice but now treated like a daughter.
We never discussed her prior home or her parents.
I had once offered to visit them in Carver on her behalf, and she had violently shaken her head.
“It is your choice, of course,” I had said.
Rowena assured me that the likelihood of such a coincidence was slim. And so we put the girls on the backs of our horses and went.
The tinker wagons were arranged in a large circle as in winters past, half tents erected like lean-tos on the sides of many of them.
Music from a fiddler could be heard. The odds-and-ends traders had their wares spread out on quilts and old rugs.
A new cobbler wagon we did not recognize drew our attention and, both of us having growing girls, we visited that first. The tinker cobbler would make shoes custom, but he also had a selection of ready-made boots in common sizes and many secondhand children’s shoes.
As we looked at shoes for the girls, I noticed his neighbor was not a tinker I knew.
Next to the cobbler’s tent was a smaller wagon with a lean-to tent on its side and stacks of crates that looked like candles resting in hay. A full-bodied woman, tall and thick in her chest, sat on a stool and chatted with a customer in her tent who was smelling each crate.
“I’m in need of candles,” I said to Rowena. “Let’s visit that tent next. I hate making them myself. I never got the knack of it.”
Maybe she’ll want mother’s moss in exchange, signed Fox.
“Such a good little businesswoman,” I said to her. “Pick out your new shoes. Make sure they’re a tad bigger than your feet. You grow like a weed.”
When Fox smiled up at me, I looked away, pretending not to be moved by her happiness at secondhand shoes.
“Are you in need of mother’s moss, madam?” I sang out to the chandler, stepping into her half tent with Fox on my heels. “We’ve plenty of tins.”
The candlemaker looked up from peering into one of her crates.
She was a handsome woman, big, near to imposing. Her russet hair was in a fat braid, and she wore a straw hat. She was clothed in an old tunic and breeches tucked into boots.
“You must be the midwives of Sheridan. I am called Tessa,” she said, her face breaking into a smile as she stood and reached out to shake my hand. This was a common greeting or sign of agreement amongst the tinkers, and I had always liked it. It suggested friendship and respect.
I shook her hand and sniffed the air. “I am Robbie and this is Fox. Have you been with the tinkers before? I do not recognize your face, but your candles smell familiar.”
She pointed over at a wagon painted a vibrant blue. “Eliza used to sell them for me. But the rent on my shop is too high, so now I have a market stall in winter back in Eccleston. And I suppose I’ll come here for the summers.”
“Oh that is a shame,” I said. “We love the way your candles smell.”
The candles they make at the keep smell horribly, Fox signed.
“Ah, well, I like to leave the city,” the woman said, shrugging, her eyes on Fox.
“She says the candles our lord’s staff make are of tallow and have a foul smell sometimes,” I interpreted. “And I hate to make my own.”
“Well, I’ve no husband,” said Tessa. “No fear of getting with child. But my courses are irregular and painful. Eliza says the moss eases that for her. All my wares are made from either beeswax, wild nuts, or ground bayberry bushes. No tallow here.”
We began to discuss a fair trade. She was agreeable and easy to barter with.
Rowena had been chatting away with the cobbler, her hand on the back of a sulking Adelaide already bored with the novelty of the tinker camp. When my sister finally followed us into the chandler’s tent, her eyes went to Tessa’s face.
Tessa looked up from a crate she had opened for me.
They stared at each other, unmoving, each taken aback by the other.
“Good afternoon,” Rowena said, breathless as if she had run all the way from Sheridan. She opened her mouth to say more but then shut it.
When Tessa stood up straighter and tipped her hat at my twin, a gesture she had not made towards me, I nearly groaned aloud. For I could see it plain as day. When I recounted it later that night to Jade, I said, “Trouble. That is trouble brewing in a shallow pot. It will boil over and burn us all.”
Avery said I was making a fuss. I said that I wished I was just fussing and not truly worrying.
The following day, Rowena arrived at my house without Adelaide.
“I have closed the apothecary,” she said, overly bright. “Let us go to the tinkers again. There were so many wagons I did not visit. Go into the forest and fetch Jade. And Fox, of course!”
“Where is Adelaide?” I asked, dubious, one hand on my hip while the other gripped a long rake for overturning soil. I stabbed it into the earth and leaned my weight on it, staring up at her, daring her.
“With her father,” Rowena rushed on. “If we go now we can—”
“If we go now, you can spend more time making eyes at the chandler.” I found myself irritated, as I had seen Tessa as a potential new friend.
And that irritation on top of my fretting over my sister’s obvious infatuation made me harsh.
Ignoring her embarrassment, I asked, “What do you hope to gain from this, sister? Because all I see is trouble.”
My twin had not even dismounted. She sat on her horse just outside the gate and looked down at me, brows drawn. But she was not angry with me. She was earnest, desperate, near to begging.
“I have to see her again.”
“Good rutting gods,” I sighed. “This way lies madness.”
“What way lies madness?” trilled Jade, climbing through the other side of the fence that bordered the forest.
I huffed. I had told her to come by if she was going to visit the tinkers so she could check to see if I wanted to go back.
“Oh, good day, Rowena,” Jade said. She was always hesitant around Rowena, Thane, and to an extent Adelaide. I believe she worried about their judgment of her, and even more so she was intimidated by Thane’s being the lord’s son.
In response, Rowena had never been unkind to her but had only nurtured a friendship at arm’s length. Now she called out, “Oh, Jade! Do you want to come visit the tinkers with us?”
Jade looked at me and grinned a little at my glower. “Oh, yes! Should I saddle up Zara, Robbie? You can finish up whatever you were doing.”
“Whatever I was doing,” I mimicked, throwing the rake to the ground and stalking into the house to put on breeches for riding. “I was turning over my godsdamn soil; that is what I was doing.”
Fox looked up from her book. She was in the rocking chair. I could have used her help in the garden, but that day she was so engrossed in her reading, I had told her to stay put.
“You’ll bar the door,” I said, pointing at her. “I’ll be home before dinner.”
Yes, I want to stay and finish this, she signed.
Jade mounted Zara behind me, and we rode for the outskirts of Carver, my friend and my sister conversing all the way as if they were the closest of companions.
Tessa’s eyes lit up when she saw Rowena, but she collected herself enough to introduce herself to Jade.
While Jade exclaimed over the beeswax candles infused with lavender oil, I crossed my arms and balefully watched Tessa explain to Rowena that though her family name was Tanner, she had found the stench of her parents’ business unbearable.
She had begun to make candles to combat the smell of animal flesh and the soaking of hides in urine.
Rowena nodded as if Tessa was telling a fascinating bedtime story about defeating a dragon.
“Are you seeing this?” I hissed at Jade.
Jade looked at me while bringing another candle to her nose and sighing. “They are so lovely. When Fox told me she didn’t like the way the keep candles smelled, it got into my head, and I can’t stand it now either.”
“They likely just use tallow, I wager,” Tessa said, having overheard.
“Well, they have to make them in bulk, don’t they?” I challenged her.
Rowena and Jade looked at me like I was crazed. The once-charged witch, abortionist, and outlaw who hated the church and kept folks’ banned books for them was suddenly defending the chandler practices of her accusers.
Tessa, gracious woman that she was, took no offense and nodded. “Oh, I understand. People need light in their homes. Can’t have flaming torches everywhere. Easier to make them cheap and with fat if you’re making them for so many. Your man’s a blacksmith, isn’t he? Does he make candlesticks?”