"Did you?" Iris moved closer, close enough that Mab could smell the lavender water she used on her wrists. "Because you don't seem to be moving very fast."
Mab's hands paused in the water. "The chargers will be done when they're done."
"That's not what Cook said." Iris was beside her now, looking down at the trough with the expression she used for the midden. "He said midday. And he said if they weren't done, he'd know who to blame."
Mab's jaw tightened. She picked up the sand again and worked it around the charger's edge. "Then he can come talk to me himself."
"Oh, Mab." Iris laughed, that light, tinkling sound she'd perfected somewhere around fifteen. "You know he won't. He doesn't even know your name. None of them do."
Mab flinched and hated herself for it.
"The delegation," Iris continued, examining her own nails now, "is from the eastern holdings. Very important. Lady Cresswick is beside herself with the arrangements. She's had me pressing linens since dawn."
Mab said nothing. She set the charger on the rack and reached for the next one.
"You know what I heard?" Iris leaned against the doorframe, settling the way that meant she had a point to make and an audience to make it to. Tibbs had frozen by the water barrel, trying to be invisible. "I heard the delegation brought a marriage offer. For Lady Elspeth."
Mab did not care about Lady Elspeth's marriage prospects. Lady Elspeth was seventeen and had never once looked at Mab directly. But Iris wanted a reaction, so Mab gave her nothing.
"Imagine," Iris said. "Being chosen like that. Having someone travel across the kingdom just for a chance to be with you." She let the pause stretch. "But you wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"
The charger in Mab's hands was clean. She set it on the rack and reached for the next one. Her hands were steady, her face gave away nothing, and the thing in her chest that wanted to crack open stayed where she put it.
"No," she said. "I wouldn't."
"Well." Iris brushed imaginary dust from her blue wool sleeve. "Perhaps if you ate a bit less of the kitchen scraps, someone might choose you."
She laughed again and looked at Tibbs as if inviting him to join her. He didn't. He was staring hard at the water barrel like it held the secrets of the universe.
Mab's hands kept moving. Sand. Water. Rim. The charger was already clean but she worked it anyway, because her hands needed something to do.
"I'm only trying to help," Iris said, in the tone that meant she wasn't.
"Of course you are." Mab set the charger on the rack with the others. Picked up the next. Her shoulders had drawn tight under the rough wool of her dress, and she made herself loosen them.
Iris pushed off the doorframe. "Midday, Mab. Cook was very clear."
She left. Her pattens clicked across the yard stones, fading toward the main house, and Mab stood with her hands in the cooling water and did not move until the sound was gone.
Tibbs let out a breath. "She's—"
"Don't." Mab's voice came out harder than she meant it to. She softened it. "Just don't."
He nodded and went back to the water barrel, and the scullery settled into its familiar quiet. The drip of the chargers on the rack. The distant shouting from the hearths. Annie's sniffling, muffled now, probably behind the flour bins where she always hid.
Mab worked the next charger. And the next. And the next.
She'd heard Iris's digs about her weight a thousand times. A thousand variations, really. Iris had been refining her technique since they were children together in this same kitchen yard, two girls with no mothers and no prospects, sorted into theirseparate tracks by some accident of face and figure that had nothing to do with either of them.
Iris had been pretty and thin, so she had been placed with the lady's maids. Mab had been neither, so she had been placed in the scullery because the scullery always needed hands and nobody looked at scullery girls at all.
Perhaps if you ate a bit less of the kitchen scraps.
The thing was, Mab didn't eat the kitchen scraps. She ate what everyone in the kitchen ate. The bread that was too hard for the hall, the pottage that was too thin for the table, the ends of things that nobody wanted. She ate less than Tibbs, who was thirteen and growing. She ate less than Annie, who was twelve and cried into her bowl half the time. She had always eaten less than her body suggested, because her body had never listened to what she put into it.
Hester had understood that. Hester had looked at her once, when Mab was sixteen and crying in the root cellar because one of the stable boys had said something about her hips, and said:Some bodies are just built for keeping. Yours holds onto everything because it doesn't trust the world to give it more. That's not greed. That's sense.
Mab had never forgotten it. She'd also never quite believed it.
