Harmindon's Finest

Chapter 23 - New Experiences

•●•●•●•

This incident in the dreadful winter weather had many repercussions.

First and foremost of these: the very day after Malbeth gave me his cloak because I'd been to stubborn to make my own, I'd fallen so ill with what Lady Túrien later called winter fever that I couldn't even get out of bed for coughing, let alone return the cloak. Most of my days were spent sleeping, and nights tossing and turning, feeling more ill than I ever had in my life. So during my weeks of convalescence I grew so inanimate - and as a result, bored- that I'd played around with it, transforming it into something I could wear by removing a good five inches from the hem, the shoulder pads, and tightening the neck.

Then when I recovered, I began to wake from my fever and realise the enormity of what I'd done. I decided to make Malbeth a new cloak, simply because I finally had a new project to properly work hard on. My goodness, it had been so long since I had a new project that I gave it all my attention and rather shamefully neglected my actual customers shamefully.

I had to beg a set of measurements and patterns from one of the tailors from the Third Tier with a proper shop, and sacrificed quite a lot of my savings for the material - blue velvet, because he was from Pelargir, and I added silver wool cord fastenings too, because it looked nice. I even braved the angry, sour smelling tanner from down the street and haggled for hours to get the soft rabbit's fur I needed to line the cloak. He eventually gave me some for free that had been torn by a barbed arrow, that I patiently stitched up until it was as good as new. The result: a cloak that rivalled the one I'd seen King Aragorn wear as he saw his daughter back off to Harmindon after the Winter Council.

It did not work out as I had planned. Malbeth had tried so long and hard to refuse my gift, but I played innocent and pretended not to understand his protests until he had no choice to take it so that I would stop pestering him. Now, in mid-spring, when it was properly beginning to become warm again, the fool wouldn't take it off.

One morning, Malbeth and I were sitting on our usual place on the jagged stone edge of the well in the Court of Tarondor.

He was flushed pink as the petals that lay in heaps at the edges of the streets, trying as unobtrusively as possible to wipe his forehead with the very edge of his pristine cloak so as not to spoil the velvet. I was telling him about Miarka, shifting about as I tried to find a relatively comfortable position on the uneven stones.

"Then I heard Grandmother come - and she could not see her like this - so I threw Miarka out the window," I finished seriously, giving up on sitting more elegantly and tucking up my legs under my skirts to cushion my bruised behind a little more.

"Excuse me?!"

"I threw her out the.... never mind. You must understand, our house was so small she could not hide inside."

"Was she hurt?" Malbeth was listening with the same interested yet slightly scandalised expression he always wore when I told him stories about my past.

"Of course not! She's well used to that kind of thing. And it was the side window, the one that faced the dark alley, only two feet from the ground. And I did not throw her, as such - I helped her climb out."

"Then what?"

"Then Thekla and I used lemons to clean her hair, but all her black went too and we had to dye it back. How Grandmother never found out is a miracle."

"Do you know, that reminds me of the time Father had our stables newly whitewashed. I was - oh, around twelve or so - my sister Meleril and I were playing hide-and-seek. She ducked into the end box, squeezing herself against the wall to make sure she wasn't visible from the door - and only realised not only was the entire back to her dress ruined but her hair and new boots when Mother noticed, and gave her such a fearful scolding I was glad it hadn't been me! The dress could not be saved by the finest dressmaker, the boot boy spent ages at that fiddly soft leather and poor Meleril spent hours in the bath that night, trying to wash out that awful whitewash and wasting such a lot of hot water."