made my first match when I was thirteen, but it was so easy, I don’t know if I should even claim credit for it. Make no mistake, I charged a fee. I never let qualms get in the way when money is involved.
We had only just moved to Bajas, my sisters and Jobau and I, and taken over the derelict tavern on the skirts of town, near the water but not too near, for Plazensa required an ale cellar. The villagers still looked at us with some suspicion. We weren’t local. We spoke Oc, but our accents were different. We came from the city of Carcassona, and we weren’t a fishing family. And then there was Jobau. Mamà had charged us to look after him, keep him out of the way, and prevent him from provoking others. Plazensa grew skilled at fermenting just about anything, and we followed Mamà’s orders by keeping Jobau drunk.
The fishwives especially distrusted Plazensa, who at sixteen stood tall and buxom, with the thickest head of long black curls this side of the Pirenèus Mountins. I didn’t attract much notice, but Sazia did. At nine, she wore boys’ trousers and wandered up to villagers offering to tell their fortunes for a penny. She made people wonder. They wondered all the more when Sazia’s predictions about where the fisherman would net the greatest haul proved right again and again.
Plazensa said we should call the tavern the Three Skylarks. Sazia suggested the Three Pigeons, and it stuck. “After all,” she said, “you might bake a pigeon into a pie, but never a skylark.” All that summer as we patched and painted the tavern, and Plazensa scolded me for not doing enough to help, I watched out the window as the goat-cheese man’s daughter, Lisette, sat in her parents’ back garden, uphill from us, eating plums and stitching something in her little cloth book. To this day I can’t think of her without picturing her sticky mouth and stained embroidery.
I wasn’t the only one watching her. A goosenecked young ome, Martin de Boroc, spied on her daily through the shrubs that divided her gardens from ours. How she never saw him says much about her great stupidity, but as I say, matchmaking is nothing more than paying attention.
Martin de Boroc’s father died at the end of that summer, leaving him his fishing boat, ensuring Martin would starve neither himself nor any future wife to death. So finally, one day, when I could no longer bear the suspense of wondering whether he would, for the love of Santa Sara, show his face to Lisette through the trees, I knocked on Lisette’s parents’ door.
Paul Crestian, Lisette’s papà, kept his flocks of goats in an enclosure that stretched behind both of our homes. He stored his cheeses in his damp cellar. It is a fattening occupation, tasting every batch of creamy cheese to make sure it is just so. He answered the door and frowned at me over his round belly. “Oc?” he said. “You are the new girl from next door? The plain one, with the pretty older sister and the little duck of a younger sister.”
I bowed. “That is right. Do you want to see your daughter married?”
Paul Crestian made the sign of the cross, then glared at me. “Why are you asking?” His brows lowered. “If your old paire thinks he can wed Lisette, he can think again.”
I worked hard not to laugh. “No,” I said. “Jobau doesn’t want to marry your daughter. But Martin de Boroc does. Do you have a dowry for Lisette?”
“What kind of a father do you think I . . .” His eyes bulged at me. “Why am I telling a little toza my affairs? Off with you!”
“Martin de Boroc will make a fine living now that he has his father’s boat,” I said.
“Fish,” growled the shopkeeper. “They’re a slippery business.”
“I will negotiate the marriage,” I said, “for ten silver shillings, and a leg of moton.”
“Ten silver shillings!” roared Paul Crestian. “I don’t need help from a little—”
“Don’t forget the moton.” I ran to the waterfront.
The tide had come in, and Martin de Boroc had just finished mooring his boat. He carried a net of fish slung over his shoulder. Most had given up the struggle, but one still flopped desperately against the cords.
“Martin,” I said, “do you want a wife?”
His mouth hung open. “Not one your age!” He tried to push past me.
I planted my palm against his chest. “What would you think,” I said, “of Lisette, the goat-cheese man’s daughter?”
He went limp. So did the fish.
“What would I think of Lisette?” he whispered. His eyes grew cloudy, like a fish’s once it’s been dead a few days. “Maire Maria!”
I wondered what he saw in that sticky face, but it was no concern of mine. “For ten shillings, and a pair of fat red mujọl fish, I will speak to Paul Crestian for you, and tell him he should be thankful to you if you were to ask for his daughter’s hand.”
He gulped. “Ten silver shillings?”
I held out my hand. “Payable in advance. If Lisette has a dowry, you owe me ten more.”
He shifted his dead fish to his other shoulder. “I haven’t got ten shillings on me.”
“I’ll follow you home.”
I instructed Martin to present himself at Paul Crestian’s home the following evening, bathed and brushed, then went home with his ten shillings jingling in my pocket, and a gleaming red mujọl clutched in each hand. The first fish, I gave to Plazensa, who eyed it hungrily and ordered Sazia to find more fallen wood for the fire. The second, I took next door to the shopkeeper. Mimi, my housecat, followed me, mewling at my dangling prize.
“Martin de Boroc sends his regards, and your dinner,” I told Paul Crestian. “He plans to come visit tomorrow evening to discuss Lisette’s dowry. Make it a generous one, for a handsome, promising bachelor like Martin de Boroc can have his pick of wives.”
“To discuss Lisette’s dowry!” sputtered that girl’s father. “I’ve not given my consent. Why should I give my only daughter to a bony fish man?”
Mimi lunged toward the fish. The goat-cheese man snatched it high out of reach. “Daughter,” he cried, “can you cook well enough to get married? Prepare me this mujọl.”
Lisette wandered into view, sucking on a plum. She wrinkled her nose at the fish but took it away dutifully. That night I smelled roast fish coming from both of our ovens, though Lisette’s house had a slightly different aroma. I think she stuffed her fish with plums.
The next afternoon, I snuck a jug of Plazensa’s special ale out of our cool cistern and carried it over to Paul Crestian. “A present,” I said, “from our cellars, bought specially for you by Martin de Boroc. He’s a generous soul, isn’t he?”
The shopkeeper uncorked the jug and sniffed it. Its rich, malty scent filled the room. He took a foamy sip and tried to protest, then took another sip. Bajas was strictly a wine town, but Plazensa and her ale would soon change all that.
That evening I spied Martin de Boroc walking stiffly toward Lisette’s house. He’d attempted to smarten up his appearance. Lisette’s papà, I knew, would have finished Plazensa’s ale by now, and if it could lift Jobau out of the doldrums, it could soften up the cheese man.
Half an hour later we heard loud laughter from the Crestians’ maisoṇ. Plazensa looked up from caning the twine seat of a broken chair. “What’s going on over there?”
Martin de Boroc burst through the tavern door and poured ten shillings into my lap. Plazensa stared at him. Mimi rubbed against his ankles. Even with a bath, he still smelled of fish.
“What was that for?” my sister cried, when he’d left.
“Couldn’t say.” I then pulled the first ten pieces Martin had given me from my pocket and presented them to Plazensa.
“What are you doing?” my sister cried. “Robbing the church? Stealing from merchants?”
“Such a suspicious nature,” I tutted. “Martin de Boroc paid me of his own free will.”
A smiling Paul Crestian sailed in and presented me with coins and a leg of moton. He planted a wet kiss on Plazensa’s ruddy cheek, patted my head, and twirled out the door.
Plazensa leveled a pointing finger at me. “You’ve put a hex on the village men,” she said. “You’ve bewitched them into paying us for no reason. Teach me! Tell me how you did it!”
“I did nothing of the kind,” I said. “Pass me more twine. If we’re ever going to open this tavern, we can’t sit here gossiping.”
“Who’s next?” Plazensa wondered aloud, peering out the window. “Any other people coming to fling money or meat at you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But half an hour later the door opened, and in came Azimar de Carlipac, the shipbuilder, jingling a little sack of coins.
“Which of you is Botille?” he demanded. “I’ve got a daughter who’s due for a husband.”
And so my career began. Along with Plazensa’s enterprises, it fed my family. It kept me busy and needed by the entire village. To be needed is one way to be safe. The other is to have money. Given time, I’d have both. We’d uprooted and moved enough, we three plus Jobau. We’d found a new town every time he lost his head and his temper, or our petty thefts were found out. No more wandering. I would build a safe home for us, here in Bajas, with reputation and money to spare, one bashful bridegroom and one blushing bride at a time.