The young servant girl, who’d appeared at the door wearing a terrific amount of rouge—something that had never graced her cheeks till that morning—insisted on playing the game. Ignoring the loaf of bread that Blythe left on the ground about three feet away from her, she simpered, twirled a curl that had escaped her mobcap, and turned her body left and right in that maddening flirtatious thing that girls engaged in. False coyness, Blythe thought, now annoyed by the possibility of losing a sale.
“Oh, come now, Master Blythe,” she cooed, that false coyness now turning a little emphatic—or was it desperate? All Blythe knew was that her girlish twisting had taken on a kind of urgency so that she looked more like a rouged spinning top. “Why would you let a poor, helpless girl come out in the cold to pick up a loaf of bread?”
“Because it’s closer to you than it is to me.”
That much was true enough. The loaf of bread sat forlornly on the ground five feet from Blythe. There was clearly a two-foot difference in distance, the advantage being the girl’s. Blythe might only be fifteen, but he considered himself cleverer by half, and that difference in distance was done on purpose.
“Why, I’ve never heard of such a thing—a boy leaving something for a girl to pick up. That’s not very polite or gentlemanly.”
Blythe scowled. So much for politeness, and she was one to talk! Two days straight, she’d practically molested him where he stood weighed down with his baskets, trying to make a humbler than humble living selling Molly’s damned bread. The girl had forced his hand in this, and that morning, Blythe not only did his math, but he also took care to set the loaf down on the ground on his arrival at the house, knock on the door, and then run just to the point he’d calculated was necessary for his virtue’s sake. The past few moments had been spent with her cajoling him into giving her the bread correctly and “like a proper young gentleman”, not force her to retrieve it like a trained dog.
“I’m not interested in politeness,” he retorted, pointing at the loaf. “Just the money. All you need to do is pick that thing up and leave the money on the ground. Then we can both call it a day.”
The girl finally stopped her twisting and frowned, this time resting her hands on her hips. “I’ve never had this much trouble with Miss Molly.”
“That’s because you never tried to do unspeakable things to my sister, especially offer to marry her.”
“And? What’s wrong with a bit of flirtation? I’m a girl, you’re a boy, we’re the same age. What are you so afraid of?”
Blythe stared at her. “The unknown,” he said and then pointed at the bread loaf again, this time with greater urgency. “Now are you buying that or not? Other people are waiting for their loaves, and I don’t have time to play stupid love games.”
The girl paused for a moment, considering. “Oh,” she said at length, her frown turning into a broad grin that lit her face up with the intensity of fifty glowing hearths, though that also made the rouge stand out all the more in sickly hues. “I see that you’re the type of boy who takes his time with things! How sweet of you!”
Was she being purposefully thick? “If you don’t want the bread, go back inside, so I can take it back. I’m sure there are dozens in Upchurch who’ll be too happy to claim it,” Blythe said, flailing.
“Oh, look, you’re blushing!” the girl cried. She even clapped her hands, delighted. “What an adorable boy you are! I can eat you up!”
“For God’s sake, not again,” Blythe groaned.
As it turned out, there was no need to fret over the danger of his flesh being torn off his bones by insane, infatuated girls. The servant—a Harriet, it turned out—took so long trying to entice Blythe into being hers that a furious cook was forced to step in, drag her away by the ear, and finish the long-delayed transaction with Blythe. Spittle flying all over as she cursed useless servants up and down and left and right, she was nevertheless stiffly polite toward Blythe, thanking him and sending him off without much ceremony.
By the time Blythe limped home, he’d sworn to himself that he’d never sell a single loaf to households containing flighty old men and desperate virgin servants of any age. That, unfortunately, meant losing about half of his current customers, but at that point, he’d already stopped caring. For one mad moment, he actually wondered if his technique was terrible, not having consulted Molly regarding what lines to say to get people to cough up money for food.
That mad moment lasted a good five seconds, and he was back to his old sulky, reasonable self, convinced that the problem lay in others and not him.
* * * *
“Tomorrow being Saturday, we’ll both be at the market with Mrs. Pugsley,” Molly said as she nibbled on bread and cheese, while Blythe practically breathed in a small plate of shepherd’s pie.
It was a small token from the kindly and generous Mrs. Stringer of Periwinkle Cottage. She’d always been that way, according to Molly, adding a small surprise to her few coins in exchange for the bread. She’d given Molly some pudding in the past; for Blythe, it was a small portion of shepherd’s pie from the previous day’s lunch. Considering all the grief he had to endure to make it to Periwinkle Cottage with his innocence and his sanity intact, Blythe decided that he’d damned well earned someone’s leftovers, and Molly let him have all of it while satisfying herself with something light.
Blythe barely spared her a glance. “What, are we supposed to sell her potions as well?” He really would rather not. Mrs. Pugsley, whose offerings appealed to the old and infirm, was good at putting up with annoying and cantankerous customers. That was something Blythe was plain unwilling to subject himself to on a Saturday, especially after all those early morning ordeals putting up with annoying and cantankerous customers, himself.
“No, silly. We’ll be there to sell our cakes.” Molly took another bite of her cheese-topped slice of bread, chased that down with a drink, and then leaned forward to regard Blythe with a light of excitement in her eyes. “There’s been a huge demand, according to her last night, and she and I decided that it would be best for us to be at the market with her, selling more of our cakes. I’ve been thinking more about it, and I figured that selling cakes only once a week would make people crave more, and they’d want to buy more than one on market day, which is always good for profits. What do you think? Is that clever?”
Blythe just shrugged, his attention back to his food. The subject of cakes never really interested him.
“Blythe, I thought you heard what Mrs. Pugsley said last night.”
He sighed and glanced at his sister again, this time sparing her a black scowl as he swallowed his food. “I’d have bothered to listen had I not been starving to death. Not much, if anything, makes its way in here when my stomach’s deprived of a proper meal.” He tapped the top of his head. “Besides, when I saw that she was bent on talking about servants and squires, I decided that it was best to ignore the rest of the evening and pretend I was somewhere else.”
“Well, at least you’re making up for your hunger now. I hope that shepherd’s pie was good.”
“Heavenly.”
Molly grinned. “I know that Mrs. Stringer goes to the market every week with a servant. If she sees you there, she might be driven to even more pity and buy you a hot meal.”
“I’d rather she take pity on me and bring me something she cooked. Come to think of it, I hope she’d take pity on me and take me in as a foundling. By the way, if you sell a lot of cakes, does that mean I won’t have to sell those stupid loaves of bread anymore?”
“Nice try, Blythe.”
“Well—I suppose it doesn’t hurt.” Blythe finished his meal in sulky silence.
For the next couple of hours, Blythe helped his sister clean and wash before being allowed to spend the afternoon “being an idle pup” with Jack.
“Lord, you’re well on your way to turning into a productive member of society,” Jack said, disdain dripping from every word.
For that afternoon’s entertainment, they’d decided to pass the time lounging about a local suicide’s grave, which was conveniently located at the crossroads linking Upchurch to the rest of the world. After standing next to the sad, neglected mound that marked the remains of a long-forgotten farmer’s daughter, they eventually decided that not much fun could be had in observing a grassy, oblong mound. From there, considering the tiny amount of time it took them to contemplate a suicide’s tragic history (two minutes at most, possibly three), they took to wandering around the nearby heath to see if they could gather wildflowers.
So for the next several moments, buoyed by their cleverness, Blythe and Jack walked back and forth, carrying wildflowers and placing them along the grave’s periphery, outlining it with some color. Blythe, for his part, was bored out of his mind, but he really had nothing else to do with his time.
“You know, I’m hoping that we’d sell enough of Molly’s cakes to afford stopping that ridiculous morning bread ritual.” Blythe shrugged as he stepped back from the grave, eyeing it as an artist would eye a masterpiece in the making. “In fact, I wouldn’t mind it if we just kept to the market and sold everything there.”
“Then why didn’t your sister think about this before?”
“Because she didn’t have competition selling bread at such a horrible time of the day. I mean, what sane person would go out before the sun rises just to sell bread?”
Jack cackled as they turned around to while more time on the roadside, heads bent, eyes searching for nothing in particular. Blythe had claimed a slender, broken tree branch and was using it to poke shallow holes into the ground.
“What do you want to do?” Jack asked after a moment’s silence.
“I don’t know. Never really thought about it. I suppose I’m too old to just hang about like this, but I’m also too young to be tossed into hard work like Bertie’s.”
Blythe sighed as that fact sank in, and for a moment, he wondered if he was somehow being unfair. Molly, after all, had begun working at fifteen, and annoyingly enough, she’d taken to baking and sales extremely well. Abnormally so, if he were to be really honest about it. She’d even once declared that this was her calling, and she couldn’t think of a life doing something else.
As for Bertie, he’d discovered his calling at a later age after his first job—seventeen, in fact—but the end result was the same. He saw that he had both the talent and the passion for woodwork, which showed in his commissions, and his employer was more than thrilled to have Bertie work for him as his top wood carver. As with Molly, Bertie couldn’t see himself doing something else.
Blythe couldn’t help but feel a touch resentful toward the fact that he remained in the dark as to his purpose in life. Several times, in fact, he wondered if there was something wrong with him because life—his future—should be as plain and clear as it had been with his siblings. But it hadn’t been, and he still remained in the dark as to what he wanted and what talent, if any, he had.
Blythe made a face as he jabbed a deep hole into the ground. “Maybe there’s something wrong with me,” he muttered.
“I don’t know about you, but I aim higher,” Jack said, following that with a characteristically derisive snort. “I’m not selling anything at that confounded market. I’m not planning on getting rich that way—takes too long.”
Blythe laughed, swinging his branch left and right without aiming for anything. It gave a particularly interesting “whoosh” that Blythe found to be mildly amusing.
“You idiot. How can you gain riches without working? You’re not exactly an heir, are you?”
“No, but I believe in luck.”
“Oh? How’s luck been treating you so far?”
“Not too well, but I’m patient.”
The two stopped several yards away from the crossroads. Blythe, for his part, wasn’t aware of the distance, having been absorbed in his thoughts for some time, his conversation with Jack nothing more than a vague, peripheral thing. The boys stood and gazed around them as the clouds of adolescent daydreams vanished, leaving them blinking against the harsh glare of familiar and too-real surroundings.
“How much longer do you think you’re going to wait?” Blythe pursued, this time allowing himself to stare out at the windswept countryside in fixed, glazed bliss.
“As long as it takes.”
“That’s stupid. What if luck never comes?”
“It will. I know it will.”
Blythe snorted, blinking away the bit of fog. “You’re pretty sure of yourself.”
“I’ve always been a gambling man in a sense. Mama hates it, of course.”
Blythe shrugged and turned around to redirect his steps back to the cottage. “I should go home. There’s nothing to do here, and I’m bored.”
“Upchurch is a boring town.”
“It is. It’s like a curse, being born to this godforsaken patch of land. I wish something exciting happens.” The thought of the coming days turning out to be as brain-numbingly dull as that one depressed him. That the alternative was dragging his reluctant self through the empty streets of Upchurch before the sun rose only made him wonder what kind of life had been determined for him.
As they sullenly retraced their steps, the boys continued to heap all kinds of abuse on Upchurch as well as their lot in life—though Jack always took care to qualify the curse of his dull peasant existence with the confident hope that he was bound for greatness without once breaking out in sweat under the heat of the sun. They eventually reached the town square, still complaining, but this time, their shared vitriol was aimed at the gleaming carriages that rumbled all over, expertly negotiating their way through foot and vehicle traffic by smartly dressed drivers.
“Look, it’s that carriage again!” Jack breathed. He’d stumbled to a halt, shooting a hand out to restrain Blythe.
The impressive vehicle was stopped before a milliner’s shop. With an awed cry, Jack hurried forward, taking care to stop behind the carriage so as not to attract the driver’s attention.
“Lord, look at this beauty!” he said, his eyes wide as he slowly walked around the back. “Someday, Blythe, I’ll be riding inside one of these.”
Blythe scrunched up his face as he stared at the vehicle, mystified by his friend’s admiration. As far as he was concerned, a carriage was a carriage was a carriage, all polished wood and pretension for all of Jack’s breathless praise, with each rich carriage looking not much different from another. Even the handsome team of horses looked no differently from other handsome teams of horses.
He looked around a little nervously. Rich folks never liked the idea of dusty peasants like them breathing on their precious boxes on wheels. When he saw that Jack had begun to run his fingers over the polished wood, he hissed, “Jack! Stop that, or you’ll get into trouble!”
“What about? I’m just touching—didn’t take me two seconds to do it!” Jack retorted, though he did pull his hand away as though burnt.
The door of the milliner’s shop suddenly swung open, and out sailed a small group of fashionably dressed young people. Three ladies and one man chatted among themselves. A very young man—more like a boy—took the rear as he led an older gentleman toward the waiting vehicle. That last pair conversed with each other independent of the others, but they still exuded the same amount of good spirits, alternately talking and laughing in low tones. The older man surely was the father of the younger, judging from the fondness each displayed toward the other. The gentleman also appeared to be suffering from some form of physical disability or illness because he moved slowly and leaned on his son’s arm.
The small group made for a picture of perfect contentment and obvious wealth. The driver jumped off his seat and quickly opened the carriage door with a smart bow.
The three young ladies entered first, laughing and teasing each other. Then the older gentleman was helped inside, followed by the young man and then the boy. Surely they were all related to the gentleman, Blythe thought, if their behavior toward each other was any indication. Brothers and sisters, most likely, though they could also be cousins.
Those were thoughts that were vague and fleeting at best, and Blythe had quite forgotten about them within seconds because his mind had fixed itself firmly and squarely on the boy who entered the carriage last. He appeared to be Blythe and Jack’s age at least, though more likely older by a year or so, and Blythe found himself observing that boy more keenly and with some amazement.
The carriage soon jerked into motion and rumbled off, and Blythe watched it vanish around a corner, feeling a touch mystified by his sudden and intense interest. The feeling, like those earlier lazy daydreams, however, was gone in an instant, and Blythe was soon following Jack through the busy square, again lost in conversation with his friend as they picked up where they’d left off in heaping scorn on the awful drab life of an Upchurch resident.