Read Online The House with Blue Shutters by Lisa Hilton - Free Book Online Page B

it was too expensive to pay one of the women. They had hauled the sheets and clothes down the hill in the barrow and pushed them back up again twice a day, soaked and heavy, to dry and air in the breeze of the yard. Sophie said it was the only time the hateful wind ever came in useful. Oriane liked pouring the blue into the vat, it made the sheets and her father’s shirts so white that you had to squint to look at them in the sun, and she was proud to smell the fresh scent of iris root as the wind beat it about the yard, hiding the smells of the chickens and goats.
    At the chateau, there was a proper indoor laundry room, and Oriane poured soda instead of blueing into the copper, which Cook said didn’t get the soiling out so well as blue, for all it was more modern, but then perhaps the d’Esceyracs were not so dirty as the people in the village. On Monday, Oriane rubbed the wash with soap, and brushed at any stains, then screwed the fabric into long sausages and left them in two cotton bags submerged in the rinsing vat overnight. Next morning she filled the ash bag at the fireplace and placed it
    in the bottom of the copper, which she lined with a fresh sheet. She filled the boiler with three buckets from the well, and when it bubbled she used the long wooden scoop to transfer it to the vat for the first washing. There was a plug at the top of the vat from which the water could run down a funnel to be re-heated in the boiler and scooped back, and that was the most difficult part of the work, plucking it out before her hand was scalded. While she waited for the water, the clothes had to be rubbed against the ridged side of the vat, stooping and kneading until her arms ached and her kidneys stabbed with pain.
    When the water ran clear, the wash was ready for bleaching, and then it had to be rinsed three times, hot, cold and cold, transferred between the two tubs with great care so as not to drop it on the sodden stone floor. Oriane worked barefoot, so that no dirt was trodden into the laundry room. Though it was hard and made you breathless, she liked the heat and the steam because afterwards her face felt so clean when she splashed it with the cold fresh rinsing water, though Amélie and Cathérine teased her and said she would grow a red porous nose like Camille Lesprats.
    Madame’s things had to be done separately, in the china sink, and they were put to dry in her own linen cupboard, off her dressing room, so that no one should see. The silk underwear was washed with a dilute solution of
Savon de Marseille
, and Oriane poured lavender essence that Cook distilled at the end of August into the rinse. At first Oriane had felt nervous, handling such fine things, but she saw after a while that sometimes they were marked with little spots of blood, or rims of grime, or other things, and though Oriane would never have said so to the other girls, it was comfortingto think that the Marquise was just like everybody else. You learned things, washing. For instance, Monsieur and Madame did not sleep in the same bed like ordinary married people, they had separate rooms, but Oriane knew when Monsieur had visited Madame in the night, and whether he had stayed to breakfast with her, since he took coffee whilst Madame liked her chocolate in the morning.
    Oriane sat down to lunch with the others at eleven o’clock. Cook served everybody at the long table in the kitchen, she said there was no point in doing separately for maids and men these days, though Clara had to be sent up with a tray for herself.
    ‘Herself ’ was the nurse who looked after the Marquise’s baby, little Charles-Louis. He was a lovely little boy, with fat red cheeks, staggering about in the nursery, sucking on a worn yellow bobbin from which he was inseparable. Everyone thought it was a shame for him, his mother leaving him alone so much when he was just two, but no one felt sorry for herself, Mademoiselle Cleret, who was from Paris and gave herself airs. ‘It’s