Episode 114: Interview (Marj)

Uncle Artair reminded her to be good. He reminded her to keep her shoulders straight and not to get her dress dirty on the long walk to the palace. He reminded her to speak only when someone important asked her a question.

He reminded her what would happen if she didn’t get hired at the palace.

She would be mad.

Maybe angry enough to kill Marj.

He led her up to the back entrance of a building that looked like a giant house. It wasn’t all fancy or made out of stone like the Dells palace. It was just a house.

When someone called him, he led her into a really nice room with flowered walls and everything was made out of wood and very pretty. There was an old lady there in a grey dress and there were two other people who were a lot younger.

They all had kind faces.

Marj worried about what that meant. Did they have secretly angry faces when no one was looking?

She made sure her shirt was tucked in.

“This is the girl I spoke of,” Uncle Artair said to the old lady. “My niece, Marj.”

Everybody looked at Marj.

She felt like one giant freckle.

The younger lady smiled. Marj liked her skin, secretly: she really was one giant freckle. But then she remembered that darker skinned people were made out of dirt and weren’t good and were ruining the world.

She decided not to touch her, incase it would make her freckles grow bigger.

“It’s nice to meet you, Marj,” the younger lady said. “How are you today?”

She’d do anything to get that job. Anything. “Good,” she said. She smiled all the way from one ear to the other. “Thank you.”

“My name is Shea,” the dirt lady said. She pointed to the man and then the old lady. “And this is Bentley and Maeve. What are your favorite things to do?”

“I like cleaning floors and doing laundry and helping,” she answered dutifully. She knew how to be good.

“What about playing?” the Bentley man asked.

Everyone liked playing, but no one was going to pay Uncle Artair for her to do that.

But he seemed to want her to say she liked playing.

Unless it was a trick.

She looked down at her skirt. “I like to play when my work is done,” she answered. That should be good, because she always had more stuff to do so it was almost like saying she didn’t like to play at all.

The dirt lady looked at Uncle Artair. “What sort of situation are you hoping for? Full board or just day work?”

“Full board would be ideal,” Uncle Artair said. “We don’t have a lot of room for her. She’s a good worker.”

Not according to Uncle Artair’s wife. She didn’t like Marj at all.

“Is she your brother’s daughter or your sister’s?” the Bentley man asked.

“Ahh…Uncle Artair said. “More a good friend’s daughter, than a relative. My wife doesn’t want her in the house.”

The dirt lady nodded her head a lot, soft like a princess. “We understand,” she said. She looked at Marj. “Would you like to see your new room while they talk?”

“Yes please!” Marj almost clapped her hands. She was being hired!

It was such a relief.

Dirt lady Shea looked at Bentley man. “We’ll be downstairs. The room closest to the storage room.”

He nodded his head.

Marj practiced nodding her head. It seemed like it must be important here.

“I’ll see you in a little,” Bentley man said. “I’ll get those saddles out of there later today.”

Marj didn’t mind the saddles, but probably they were expensive and not something to let her near.

Dirt lady Shea started walking. Marj followed, with one more look at Uncle Artair, but he didn’t look at her at all.

Someday, she was going to leave a place and someone was going to be sorry she left.

“I’ll be a good worker,” she told dirt lady Shea. “I promise. I have lots of practice.”

“How many houses have you worked in before this one?” dirt lady Shea asked her.

She didn’t go down the stairs like she said, she went up some stairs and into a fancy hallway. So she was a liar.

“Just my dad’s,” Marj said. “Nobody liked me because of my freckles.” She felt like she could tell dirt lady Shea about this because she was a dirt lady and she would probably understand. “Do you have any chalk? Uncle Artair didn’t have any.”

“I may have some, and if I don’t I can find you some,” dirt lady Shea said. She walked up more stairs, into an even nicer area. “We require our younger employees to go to school. Will you be okay with that? We need to make sure you know things like reading and writing.”

School.

“Where?”

“School,” the dirt lady said. She hadn’t understood Marj’s question. “It’s a place to go to learn things, like the names of all the places in Nivern.”

“I know what school is,” Marj told her. “I mean, what school? I have a cousin in school, he’ll be mad if he sees me there and I’m not supposed to be there.”

“What school is he in?” she asked. “The one in the Dells?”

Marj didn’t even know there were other schools. What if she could learn how to be clever too, and not just the boys?

“Yeah,” she said.

She tried to make the excitement go away. Girls were for Maelchor, if they were even pale enough, and if they weren’t then they were for working.

“We can teach you here,” the dirt lady offered. “In Nivern.”

“I’ll learn,” Marj promised her. “My brothers are really smart and good readers too so I bet I will be.”

Annatto was reallllly smart. Orris wasn’t as smart because he spent all his time playing with Olida. And Basil…

Marj shivered.

“I bet you will be too,” dirt lady Shea said. She opened a door. The room behind it was beautiful.

It was like if a million princesses picked the best room in the world, this would be that room. Everything was little cream shamrock flowers and little green shamrock leaves, and a canopy bed with little strands of green shamrock-lace that hung down like a bead curtain all around it.

“Will this room be acceptable?” the dirt lady asked her.

She looked around, for anything to do, but even the fire grate lay empty.

“It doesn’t look like it needs to be cleaned,” she told the dirt lady. She hoped she wasn’t in the middle of some kind of test to see how good she was at cleaning, because this room looked perfect the way it was.

“Maybe we were thinking of different rooms,” Shea told her. “This is the one I was talking about. Do you not like it?”

The only room she’d talked about was the one next to the storage room, for Marj. Downstairs. With saddles in it.

This was not that room.

Liar. Dirt lady Shea was a liar.

“You want me to live here?” Marj asked.

She wondered if she told Aunty about the lying, if that would be good. Maybe it would make her happy.

“I hoped you would,” dirt lady Shea said. “If you don’t like it, I can find another room that is available.”

Marj loved it, but she also knew it was her job to love it.

“I love it!” she insisted. “I thought you wanted me to clean it.” She looked up at Shea, who had blue eyes like the evil queen, even though she had dirt skin. “If this is where I sleep, where does the princess sleep?”

“There are no princesses right now,” Shea said. She put her hand on her tummy, just like the Last Mommy did whenever she was thinking about her baby.

Marj hoped she was going to have a baby. Marj knew all about babies and how to keep them quiet so no one got bad headaches from them.

She almost said so, but they’d hired her to clean not to make babies be quiet.

“Too bad,” Marj said. She set her little rucksack from Uncle Artair’s on the floor. “What should I do now?” she asked.

“Can I show you around?” Shea asked.

Marj was on more familiar footing here. There would be a tour and then there would be work. She could do this. “Okay,” she agreed.

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