Chapter 9: Two Wives of the North Wing

"You can have the bed by the window," Isaline said. "It's colder, but the view's better."

Sidonie looked at the second room of the north wing suite, then at Isaline, and burst into tears.

"Don't be kind to me," she sobbed. "I can't bear it today."

"All right. That bed's damp and the view is a wall."

Sidonie laughed through it and threw her one case on the bed.

That was the seventh day.

By the ninth, the north wing was theirs.

They dragged the good carpets up from a shut room on the second floor.

Sidonie bribed a footman with a kiss on the cheek to carry them.

They stuffed the cracks in the window frames with stockings.

They lit both fires, every night, and argued about whose turn it was to fetch the wood.

The Margrave's soldiers carried the wood in the end, because it was faster than listening to the two women.

"Your feet," Sidonie said on the ninth night, with Isaline's bare foot in her lap. "They're blocks of ice. And look at your toes."

"Chilblains."

"Duchesses don't get chilblains."

"Duchesses in the north wing do."

Isaline made a salve that night on the hearth, from goose fat and a little crushed mustard seed and beeswax from a candle end.

Sidonie watched her stir it with a hairpin.

"Where did a count's daughter learn to do that?"

"I had a good teacher once."

"Who?"

"A woman who worked nights," Isaline said, and handed her the pot. "For your hands too. You've been carrying wood."

Sidonie held the little pot like a jewel.

Then she sat behind Isaline on the hearth rug and took the pins out of her hair.

"Hold still. I can't look at that knot one more day."

She brushed it out and curled it on a hot iron.

It was the only thing she'd saved from the steps.

"Your hair is the colour of a good fox," she said. "It's wasted on a woman who wears it like a nun."