The Mate He Gave Away novel · Chapter 31 of 40

Chapter 31: The Naming

The old woman with the pipe was waiting outside when we came out.

She'd heard all of it through the wall. The whole lane had.

"Gates are shut," she said. "Shut for you."

"Yes."

"Not for the sheets." She took the pipe out of her mouth. "Ravenscar Hall changes its linen every morning at dawn. Who do you think carries it up?"

At first light the washing steps were full of women.

Twenty of them, with baskets on their hips, piled high with clean white sheets.

They went up the river path under the walls in a long line, the way they had every morning for a hundred years.

At the top was a low iron gate in the rock, black with damp.

The water gate.

A single guard stood behind the bars, yawning.

"Linen," said the old woman.

"I've got orders. Nobody comes in today."

"Then the queen's guests sleep on yesterday's sheets," the old woman said. "And when the queen asks why, I'll tell her your name. I know your mother."

He looked at twenty laundresses.

He opened the gate.

We went in among the baskets.

Me with my son tied against my chest under a sheet. Agnes with my daughter under another.

The laundress beside me with her red hands on her basket and her jaw set.

Then the midwife, and the physician on the sergeant's arm, and the man from the bridge with a soldier holding his elbow.

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