D Cornish - The Lamplighter

Grindrod was determined not to let the boys wallow in the aftermath. They were set to marching, stepping-regular across the Grand Mead and back, across and back, left, right, left… for what remained of that grief-struck day. "Good practicing for tomorrow morning's pageant-of-arms," as the lamplighter-sergeant put it. However, Grindrod was himself more irascible than usual, and bawled out even the slightest error. "Keep to yer dressing, ye splashing salamanders! I didn't stand out here hollering at ye for more than two months to witness this clod-footed display! Step-regular like I have showed ye! Swift and even!"

The Lamplighter-Marshal visited the prentices at mains. He told them that he had halted the prentice-watch once more, and spoke quietly to each member of Q Hesiod Gaeta. "It is a hard thing to lose a brother-in-arms, Prentice Bookchild," the Marshal said gently, pale eyes genuine in their commiseration. "Grieve freely, and remember well why it is we stand here against the wicked foe."

But what if the foe is one only because we make him so? Rossamund quashed the troubling thought.

"Lamplighter-Marshal, sir?" piped Smellgrove. "What happened to that butcher's wagon?"

The Marshal smiled. "Ah, those fellows hid scared in the Bowels till middens then went down the Gainway, very anxious to be gone-not like ye stout gents standing afore the front of stiffest dangers!" He looked at all the prentices with fatherly esteem. "Bravely done, my boys, bravely done!"

Every face, whether it had suffered trauma that day or not, beamed at him.

A double tot of grog was given out as a treat that night, an especial consideration to the boys who had suffered that morning.They all drank openly in memorial to Bellicos, and the eight quietly in thankfulness for their own survival.

"A confusion on the nickers!" Arabis boisterously cried the habitual toast.

It was repeated lustily by all but Rossamund, who barely murmured, "A confusion on the nickers," and then mouthed, and an end to my own.

Mains came to its end and evenstalls began. While the other prentices,Threnody with them, went to their confines to polish and prepare for tomorrow's full parade, Rossamund was required to present himself at the kitchen for his scullery punishment. He was given no dispensation for the terrible attack of the Trought. Exhausted, he stowed his hat, frock coat and weskit safely in his cell, put on a smock issued to all prentices for laboring duties, then hurried out.

Only four sharp turns from the prentices' mess hall were the enormous kitchens with their sweating, white daubed walls and high ceilings of intersecting smoke- and fat-blackened beams. Cookhouse, buttery, small-mill, scullery and slaughter yard were together run by the culinaire, a woman infamously known as the Snooks. She was stout and lumpy and not much taller than Rossamund, dressed in gray, with a puckered perspiring face, its age hidden beneath a trowel's worth of boudoir cream. Worse, her lips and jowls were pinked with rouge, making her look like an ancient kind of good-day gala-girl, such as those Rossamund had passed in less seemly parts of Boschenberg.

A near-mythic fear of her made pots-and-pans an excellent punishment for defaulting prentices. From her throne at the end of a long-scarred bench the Snooks glowered at Rossamund through thick double spectacles as he entered the steam, stink and sweat.

"Hark 'ee, another weedy lantern-stick sent by old Grind-yer-bones to do me dishes!" she cried at him above the clangor of chopping knives and stirring ladles. "Ye lads come to me so often I don't have any labors for me scullery maids to work," she added with a chuckle, a strangled wheezing gurgle.

Rossamund swallowed a gasp at the sharp, distinctly unpleasant odor of the kitchens. He had expected they would always smell sweet, of baking crusts and roasting sides: where Mother Snooks sat reeked more of fat and some acrid cleaning paste. "I've come for pots-and-pans."

"Yes, yes, I know that!" the Snooks snapped. "It's the only reason ye bantlings come to me." She squinted at him through fogging glasses, her lips pursing and puckering over and over. She took out a small, well-thumbed tally book and flipped many pages. "Let us spy on who we've got ourselves here," she muttered, running a stubby finger as if down a list. "Ninth of Pulvis… ninth of… Ah! Here ye be! Ye pasty li'l sugarloaf," she stated in small triumph, then looked hard and close at the page. "Oh." She gave Rossamund a quizzing look. "Ye're not the new girl, are ye?"

"Ah… No, ma'am." Then it occurred to him what she meant. A little glimmer of self-respect expired within. "I… I just have a-a girl's name."

The Snooks gave a strange, high snort and her gurgling forgery of a laugh. "Well, perhaps we should find ye a pretty pinafore to wear!" This made her laugh even harder.

Rossamund stood stiffly and waited for her to stop.

She wagged her head and dabbed at an oily tear. "The burdens some of us have to bear, eh?" she sighed. She marked the tally book with the greasy stub-end of a pencil and put the book away somewhere in her apron. Pointing into the confusion of the cries and the cooking she instructed him, "Off ye go-scullery's through there and down yon stairs. Philostrata is always ready for the help."

Rossamund rolled up the sleeves of his smock and made his way through the bustling kitchen. He passed the small-mill, where the pistor ground and pounded the flour in a great granite mortar ready for hasty pudding, the little treat allowed the prentices on Domesdays. His stomach gurgled. Some might have said it was bland stuff, hasty pudding, but as an interruption to the repetitive menu, it was a small ladling of bliss. Rossamund stepped aside as the furner stoked the ten-door oven that dominated the center of the great room, bumping into one of the baxters as she prodded and checked her baking breads.

"Oi there, pip-squeak," the baxter warned. "Best mind yourself, afore you wind up in one of me loaves!"

At last in the farther corner he found an oblong hole in the floor through which steam was continuously venting in churning swirls. The scullery cellar. Paved steps went down and Rossamund descended till he was standing by a line of scrubbers, great wooden vats brimful of frothy, near-scalding water. The rosy-faced scullery maids, arms up to elbows in suds, greeted him with singsong cheer. The head scullery maid, Philostrata, handed him a soap-greasy cloth. "Sooner to start is sooner to end." She pointed with a nod to a tub crowded about with unsteady piles of grimed crockery and smeared turnery.

Vinegar flies floated about the stack delicately.

Pots-and-pans!

The water was tremendously hot, but when Rossamund flinched, the nearest scullery maid chided him gently. "Don't be a mewling great babbie, now." She smiled. "You'll get used to the scald. Young lantern-sticks need to grow into hardy lighters."

Rossamund washed pots, pans, plates, griddles, saucers, fine Gomroon porcelain, dainty Heil glassware, sturdy mugs, cutlery and turnery. Sweat dripped from his brow and soaked his shirt as he scrubbed away the grease and washed off the spittles and scraps. The water turned into a foul, tepid soup that was promptly replaced with steaming new water poured from large coppers and made sudsy with great scoops of scarlet-powder. Scullery hands bustled about taking washed plates, drying them, hustling them off to be stored.

As the scullery maids worked they gossiped and griped. "… Did you see what she upstairs had delivered today?" one woman huffed with a ceilingward glance and a dripping poke of her thumb in the vague direction of the Snooks. "We only used to get the finest, but now she rules the roost. Acacia says she carts in this awful cheap wheat dust from Doggenbrass! She ought to know better!"