Read Online Tale of Elske by Jan Vermeer - Free Book Online Page B

she could change things. For had she not changed everything?
    Almost, she reminded herself, changed everything to her death. And now Elske noticed that while, like any Volkaric man or woman, she did not fear death, she would, like any Trastader, prefer to live. Her further safety was up to her, Elske thought, as sleep finally overmastered her.

    WAKENED BY THE DOOR—OPENING— and somebody entering the room, Elske sat up in a room filled with sunlight. She had slept well into the morning.
    A red-faced Trastader girl, wearing an apron over her dark dress and a white kerchief around her hair, stood at the foot of the bed, her arms full of cloth. Elske waited for her to speak. The girl stared.
    This went on until Elske moved to get out of bed, setting her feet on the floor.
    â€œOdile says you’re to dress and come down. Into the cook room.” Her message delivered, the girl left the room.
    Elske bent down to see out the windows.
    Black bare-armed trees grew up out of the snow, and grey stones made a low wall at the end, and beyond that stretched a river so shoreless it had to be the sea, Tamara’s sea.
    â€œOh,” Elske said, aloud alone, and “Oh,” again.
    That morning the sky shone so clear and so blue that the sea sparkled deep and bright, blue as the tiny bellflowers that appeared in the brief Volkaric spring, and bluer. Blue as only itself, the sea shone back at the shining sky, outside her window.
    Elske laughed out loud. But she could not linger. She dressed and followed the stairways down to the entrance hall and then followed her nose.
    The large cook room was filled with the odor of bread and porridge. A thin woman stood at the long wooden table, her knife raised. The carcass of a rabbit lay before her, skinned, its guts removed, the head and paws chopped off. The woman had blood on her hands.
    â€œYou’ll be the girl,” she greeted Elske. She didn’t wait for any response. “I’m to feed you and then take you to the master. That’s Var Jerrol, in case nobody told you, and I’m Odile, housekeeper for the Var. His wife is so worn out by childbirth that she is dying of the coughing sickness, so there are the little girls to look after. Do you know anything of children?”
    Elske said, “I only know about babies.”
    â€œWhat, how to get one?” Odile laughed, loud and short, like a dog’s bark, and drove her knife into the shoulder of the rabbit. “How old are you? Are you bleeding yet?”
    â€œThis is my thirteenth winter and no, I am not.”
    â€œIt’ll be any day, from the look of you, and what’s your name? Sit, I’ve porridge.”
    Elske sat on the bench and the woman dipped a bowl into a cauldron set on the hob, then set it steaming down on the table. Elske took the spoon the woman gave her, and ate.
    After a bite, “Good,” she said, and it was. Porridge was food to fill a belly, and keep it full. “Elske,” she said, between mouthfuls. “That’s my name.”
    Odile cut the rabbit into pieces which she dropped into a second, smaller cauldron, then swung it on a metal hook back over the open fire. “That’s done,” she said. “And you’re fed. Now you go to Var Jerrol. I’ll warn you, you’d better tell him whatever’s true. He’ll find you out easy as breathing if you lie to him, and that’ll be the end of you.”
    So openness would be her safety, here in Var Jerrol’s house, as much as it had been what kept her safe among the Volkaric. Elske followed Odile to a chamber off of the entrance hall. When she entered that room, she saw the Var sitting straight-backed in a chair, and he was busy with the many papers opened out in front of him. Shelves on the wall held leather boxes, and squares were on the walls, most colored, one blank. The man was writing.
    Elske went up to one of the colored squares, to look at it more closely. This was