D Cornish - The Lamplighter

He had led her from place to place without complaint and with an ever-sinking feeling and the sharp jabbing of an overfull bladder. Joyful relief had come only when he finally showed Threnody to her own newly appointed cell where her luggage waited for her. While she changed to a lighter's harness, Rossamund made a quick dash for the jakes and returned in time for her to emerge with a wrinkled nose.

"Ugh! The stench of too many boys, too close together," she said.

Rossamund stayed mum. He had spent his life with too many boys, and it had made him insensible to any such odor. "Come along," he said instead, and guided her up to the dim, high-ceilinged mess hall in the rear quarters of the manse, where a roll of drums declared middens was about to be served. There the other prentices arrived as a mass and, as they lined up, stared in open wonder at this newly presented lantern-stick before them.

Threnody went forth now in a rich, elegant variation of the gear of a lamplighter: silken platoon-coat, quabard, long-shanks, galliskins and a black tricorn sitting prettily upon her midnight tresses-all of the finest tailoring, as sumptuous as that of any of the Master-of-Clerks' flunkies. The other prentices, by comparison, looked like drab weeds.

Threnody ignored them all as she had ignored Rossamund. In their turn the boys kept unashamedly at their gawping, some turning puzzled looks on her fortunate companion.

Rossamund felt anything but fortunate as he received their middens meals, served by two short, fat cooks from the pots hanging in the gigantic fireplace at the farther end of the room. Steaming with faintly appetizing smells, the larger pot was, as always, full of skilly, a savory gruel of leftover meat; the smaller with vummert, a mash of sprouts and peas.

Threnody scowled at the food, at the cooks, at the boys and at the hall as she sat at one of a pair of long tables that filled the mess.

"Are… are you all right, miss?" Rossamund asked cautiously, painfully aware that she had just occupied the usual seat of a less-than-friendly lad known as Noorderbreech.

"Yes." Threnody's voice cracked a little. "No… What care is it of yours-"

"Look here, miss, I…," complained Noorderbreech, leaving his place in the line of unserved boys. "Look here, normally I sit there."

Threnody did not move, did not even give a hint she had even heard.

"And-and that would be my apple," Noorderbreech insisted.

A look came into Threnody's eye that Rossamund recognized-a haughty, dangerous look. She glanced at the fruit mentioned, which sat on the table before her. It appeared to be the same as all the other apples placed evenly along the benches for the prentices to take away with them when the main meal was done. Threnody picked it up with a study of feminine grace. "This apple, do you mean?" she said, and bit into it deliberately, daring Noorderbreech to retaliate.

The lad puffed himself up as threateningly as he might.

Uncowed, Threnody crunched away as happily as if she were on a vigil-day hamper. Every boy-and the kitchen hands too-held their breath.

"Give me my apple, girly," Noorderbreech growled, "and go take yer place at the far end. This is where we sit."

"This apple?" She took another bite. "You mean this apple, don't you?… Have it then!" The apple flew the full length of the bench in a well-aimed arc. It landed with a crack and a hiss right in the midst of the hottest coals of the fire.

Everyone became very, very still. Some even stopped chewing.

Rossamund wanted to shrink in on himself.

"I'll sit where I like and eat what I please, you loose-jawed bumpkin," she hissed with such vehemence spittle flew.

Wide-eyed, Noorderbreech stumbled back, mouth agape as if he were trying hard to prove Threnody's insult true, finding for himself a vacant place at the far end of the other bench.

The prentices sitting near Threnody shifted away, afraid or glaring. No one other than Rossamund dared put himself too near. Angry mutters began to stir. Rossamund did not know what to say and fixed his attention on his food, avoiding every other eye in the room.Yet the filling of stomachs finally took priority even over so shocking an event as just witnessed. The hubbub of general chatter and the patter of forks and spoons on plates swelled once more.

Threnody made to eat as if naught was wrong. "Who can eat this glue?" she snarled eventually, pushing the slopping pannikin of skilly away in disgust. "Must everything be against me today?"

"Against you, miss?" Rossamund dared after a few pensive chews.

"I save us from the ambush of those ungotten baskets," she suddenly fumed, floodgates inexplicably let free, "and all Lady Dolours can dwell upon is the possibility of bad things that never even happened! We were thrown about inside the drag, tumbled roughly in its wreck, and Dolours so unwell she was scarce capable of fighting. What else was I supposed to do?"

Remembering the startling and dangerously incompetent effect of her wild witting, Rossamund could not quite see how Threnody had done any more than make a bad situation worse. The way he remembered the play of things, it had ultimately been Dolours who had saved them all, the lamplighters included. Indeed, given that the prentices had dispatched two of the horn-ed nickers themselves, Rossamund figured a little more gratitude might have been shown. Still, he held his tongue: he would not gainsay a woman in her distress, especially not one as fiery as this. She had done her bit, and had not flinched from the fight-and none should fault her on that. This girl had passion. All she needed was practice.

"I reckon you did as boldly as you knew to, miss," Rossamund said matter-of-factly.

She gave a little start, as if this was the last encouragement she expected.

"You saw me take on those wretched bugaboos, then?" she said.

Felt, more like. "Aye, miss."

"I'll not shrink from the fact that I did not defeat them alone. Oh no," she declared with a flourishing wave of her hand, "my sisters and I did it together, mastered and destroyed the nickers."

Rossamund thought on the valiant fight the calendars had made as a troupe. "It was a genuine, heroical spectacle, miss," he said. "I've never seen such a thing as happened last night."

"So it was, I know.Yet they made me apologize!" Threnody seethed. "They made me apologize to that… that pompous muck hill."

By "apologize" Rossamund could only assume she had been made to repent of her clumsy, ill-advised witting; and by "pompous muck hill" she meant Grindrod, the lamplighter-sergeant. He thought she might consider herself fortunate not to have been made to apologize to the lampsmen and prentices as well-it was their lives she had endangered.

"Yet it was we who were refused at Wellnigh!" She balled her fists.

"Hardly seems fair, miss."

"Hardly, indeed! Pannette dead! Idesloe dead!" the girl continued. "And Dolours insists we make amends like your lot were the worst done by! To think I actually wanted to join in with you clod-headed blunderers!"

"Don't count me in too quick with the clodheads or the blunderers, miss," he replied.

"Well, since you are but half the size of all the other boys I suppose it would be hard to do so."

Rossamund blinked at the sting of her insult. He knew he was undersized: his embarrassingly truncated fodicar was continual evidence. Dumbstruck and mortified that those near might have heard her, he realized she was no longer even paying him any mind. Instead she was looking up over his right shoulder. Rossamund became aware of the looming of somebody there. He looked up to find Arimis Arabis at his back.

The oldest, most worldly-wise of the prentices, Arimis Arabis was top of the manning lists-both by letter fall and ability. The frankest shot with a fusil, he also considered himself handsome. Though Rossamund could not see it, a gaggle of dolly-mops in Silvernook confirmed Arabis' self-approval every Domesday, following him about on his jaunts about town and giggling at everything he uttered.