Chapter 5 In Which Gretsella Surveils the Terrain
In Which Gretsella Surveils the Terrain
After Gretsella was fully dressed in her own clothes again, and Bradley fully and joyfully engaged in planning the welcome party, Gretsella decided to make a more complete survey of her new domain.
She started at the bottom, in the kitchen, which she thought ought to be considered the most important part of any house.
One could easily do without a sitting room—indeed, being able to honestly claim that an unfortunate workplace accident had caused one’s sitting room to sink into a flaming sulfureous pit was just the ticket for warding off a sudden infestation of guests—but no self-respecting witch could do without a kitchen.
A witch needed a nice, clean, modern kitchen for making potions.
And pies (when protected from the prying eyes of members of the public, who were better off believing that witches subsisted on midnight mists and salamander tongues). Gretsella did like a nice piece of pie.
As soon as Gretsella made it into the kitchen, she could tell that there was something gravely amiss.
The entire atmosphere of the room was wrong.
A large kitchen should be hot and loud and full of people rushing around through banks of good-smelling steam and getting cursed at by the head cooks and burning their hands on scalding pans and generally suffering enormously for the sake of quivering aspics and golden loaves of bread and roasts dripping fragrant grease all over enormous mounds of crispy potatoes.
This kitchen had the screaming, rushing, and suffering, but all of this seemed to be in service to nothing but chaos itself.
As a philosophically wicked witch, Gretsella approved.
As a witch who looked forward to a nice supper in the evenings, she didn’t approve in the slightest.
There were a number of figures prominent to the scene.
The one who first drew Gretsella’s eye was propped against a barrel in a corner near the stove.
He was pale and long and thin, and bundled up with an old-fashioned kerchief tied around his neck, as if he were suffering from a chill.
He was smoking a large pipe in a way that suggested the effort exhausted him.
A nearly empty bottle of wine stood at his right elbow, while at his left sat a shorter, stouter man with whom he was engaged in an extremely languorous game of whist. Around these two bolted a number of young women and younger boys, all pursued by a large woman who kept shouting things like “Is that what you call a clean pot?” after them.
At one point, one of the young boys tripped over the thin man’s legs, and one of the girls lifted the boy to his feet and hurried him along as if he’d tripped over a tree root.
It seemed, in fact, as if everyone in the room were doing their best to pretend that the thin man wasn’t there at all—except for the large woman, who kept casting scornful glances at him and then sighing like a dog lying down on a rug.