Lottie’s house has, understandably, not changed in the last week. A little more prepared this time, I think of it as cosy. There’s a lot of warmth hiding in plain sight. One of Gwen’s socks is sticking out from under an armchair, and most of the blankets are girly shades of pink and blue but with a couple in other vibrant colours, and there’s a watercolour painting on the wall (unframed, unsigned) that, for whatever reason, I know Lottie painted.

The more I look, the more I see. A mark on the wall like someone played with a crayon, scratches on the table from the many meals eaten there, chips on the tea cups, a tea spoon that’s tarnished and been cleaned several times and with a faint stain of tea stuck to it.

It reminds me of my bed back home—at the manor—and the tear in the curtain that I made to check for maids when I was, what, seven? I’m sure they’ve noticed it by now, but it’s still there. Maybe I should fix it myself when I go home for Christmas, sorry, winter break.

Losing myself to such thoughts, I pull myself back to the present.

Lottie and Gwen are sitting with me at the table, all of us sipping at our teas and water. I wanted to come here in the first place because I have things I want to say to Lottie, so I guess I should think about that, ready myself.

But she beats me to it, telling Gwen to go do her Sunday school homework. Once Gwen is in the lounge, Lottie speaks softly, barely loud enough for me to hear her.

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t notice until we came back home,” she says, and she pulls something out of her pocket: the handkerchief I gave Gwen. “We, we can’t accept something like this. I know you mean well, and we really do appreciate the gesture, but the world isn’t so simple a place.”

She has trouble looking at me, slides the slip of cloth over to me.

I loosely pick it up, turning it around so the embroidery is showing, and I show it to her. “Do you like it?” I ask.

It takes her a second to find her words. “Oh yes, it’s absolutely beautiful. Even around the edges, it’s so well stitched, so much care put into it. I imagine your father had a skip in his step the whole way home, eager to give such a gift to you.”

Smiling, I put it back down on the table and slide it back to her. “I sewed it myself.”

“You didn’t!” she says, covering her mouth. Then she looks between me and the handkerchief. “That little miss Nora I knew learnt to sew so neatly?”

“I have a decent talent for spirit magic, so that helped as well,” I say.

She gasps again. “Magic as well?”

It’s funny, just last week she told me I hadn’t changed. “Yes.”

Her wide eyes quickly give way to a more tender expression, her gaze falling back to the handkerchief. She softly asks, “Is it bad of me to feel a little proud?”

“Ah, like I’m your daughter?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” she says, chuckling behind her hand. “But I suppose.”

This is… my turn. “No, it’s not bad of you,” I say, and then pause to take in a deep breath. “Besides, it’s also the case that I’m proud of you.”

“Miss?”

I don’t know what face she’s showing me, afraid that if I look I’ll lose my nerve. “By my age, you’d already been working hard for a year. Leaving your home to live in a strange place and work for strangers day after day…. And you treated me well, cared for me. I fondly remember the tea parties we had. And after all that, you married and moved to another new place and had a child, and, well, you’re still as kind as ever.”

It came out a lot messier than I planned. But, you know, my feelings are messy. A tangled web of memories and emotions that aren’t as simple as “maid” or “friend”. Well, given our age difference, maybe “big sister” fits better than “friend”.

But I also didn’t come here to force my feelings onto her.

“What I mean to say is, ‘Thank you for all you’ve done for me.’”

I stand up, still without looking at her, and walk to the doorway to the lounge.

“What homework do you have?” I ask Gwen.

She looks up from her book, her big eyes settling on me, only to decide she’d rather stare at the book. “R-reading.”

“Oh I love reading, will you read aloud to me?” I ask, coming into the room and sitting down on the armchair.

Raising the book a bit higher, she mumbles, “Really?”

“Of course!” I say, no hesitation.

She peeks over the top of the book. I smile sweetly. “Okay,” she mumbles.

“You’ll have to speak louder—I can’t hear very well on weekends.”

“O-okay,” she says.

I cup a hand behind my ear. “A little louder, please.”

“Okay!”

“Ah, that’s good. Right, so you tell me, what’s that book got to say?”

Her hands tightly grip the edge of the book. “The tale of the good… sam, samamitan.”

“Samaritan,” I say.

“S-samaritan.”

“That’s it, keep going.”

The next ten minutes or so minutes slowly pass until she reaches the end of the fable. Or are fables with animals? Parable? Whatever. I shower her with praise while she hides behind the book, and then I ask if she has any other homework to do and she shakes her head. So I ask what she wants to do.

It only takes her a second to decide, and she runs upstairs, coming down so quick I worry she’ll slip. I greatly empathise Lottie for what I put her (and the other maids) through in this moment.

Since Gwen doesn’t tell me, I have to inspect what’s in her hand for the answer to my question. It’s a linen fabric in a wooden hoop, so coarse I can easily see the threads and the gaps between them. However, what she’s showing me isn’t that, but what’s on the fabric.

“Cross-stitch?”

She nods, clutching it tight.

“Oh that’s wonderful. What are you making?” I ask, trying to discern the shape.

“I’m making a gweenfinch,” she says with a slight lisp. Frowning, she tries again. “Greenfinch.”

Leaning closer, I really stare at the design that, well, I guess is at least green. “Is it going well?”

“Yeah!” she says, grinning.

“Lot’s of fun?”

She nods enthusiastically and I worry for her neck.

Reaching out, I pat her head. “You keep it up and I bet even the king will want you to make him something to hang up over his bed.”

This time she giggles, and it’s just too adorable. Joshua was a very cute baby brother, but I’m feeling rather envious of Clarice who has both a little brother and sister.

“Will you show me how you do it?” I ask, patting the side of the armchair. She steps forward and I lift her up, sitting her on the armrest next to me. “What do you do first?”

Compared to her reading, she babbles fluently. It’s funny to me how similar she sounds to Lottie. Their manner of speaking is similar, and then there’s one word now and then that she says exactly like Lottie does.

“Nora, are you listening to me?”

The way she says my name is one of those words. I giggle, covering my mouth with one hand, and hug her with my other arm, nearly pulling her over. “Yup!”

She giggles as well.

“Okay, so then,” she says, going right back into her explanation.

I nod along.

Silence settles after a while, her focus on stitching finally overcoming her chattering mouth. I’m happy to just watch. Every stitch is a challenge, needle shaking as she lines it up with the gap between threads. I started sewing when I was ten and I’d been writing for five years, so my fine motor skills were good. Even then, I only really got into sewing at thirteen, practising every afternoon I could.

Pulling me from my thoughts, Lottie speaks up. “She begged mama all Sunday to teach her to sew, so papa bought her some linen, and I asked a friend to blunt a set of needles.”

“Is that so?” I say. Lottie giggles at something, so I look over and ask, “What’s so funny?”

“Mistress often said that in just the same way.”

Ah, my mother does like to say that, doesn’t she? I guess I’m not the only one feeling nostalgic.

Standing up, I let Gwen slide down—I’m not entirely sure she even notices the change, still so focused on her stitching. Then I walk over to the door, Lottie stepping back so we’re both in that short hallway.

“I… should be going,” I say.

Though I wait for her to offer to walk me to the river like last time, she instead says, “There’s a little time, isn’t there? For talking.”

I don’t want to smile, embarrassed at how happy those words made me, but my lips aren’t cooperating. “Sure.”

So we’re back in the kitchen, Gwen in the lounge, and another cup of tea is in front of us. I’m not sure if that’s Lottie being polite or out of habit. I don’t mind, the cheap blend of tea sweet thanks to the company.

Lottie looks uncomfortable, I guess because she doesn’t know what to say, maybe. I start. “So, tell me about Mr Grocer.”

A laugh nearly escapes her, settling into an embarrassed smile of her own. “Well, his name is Greg, and I don’t know what else to say.”

“How did you meet? Did you drop your handkerchief in town one day and—”

“No, nothing like that,” she says, interrupting my fantasy. After gathering her thoughts, she continues. “We grew up together, but we were like oil and water, always bickering. Then… I’m not sure how to explain it. It’s like I had an image in my heart and, without it changing, one day I looked and saw someone different where he stood.”

My tone light, I say, “Now who sounds like my mother.”

She chuckles at that. “I’m sorry, but that’s how it was. When we bickered, I started to find myself smiling, and he’d always have some excuse to come over when I went home for Yule.” She lets out a sigh, her eyes seeing the past in her teacup. “He told me on my seventeenth that he was saving and trying to get a job that could support me. Two years later his cousin retired, asked him to take over the shop, and that’s when we married and moved here.”

My heart melts, teeth ache from the sweetness. Leaning closer, I quietly ask, “And how is he as a lover? Gentle, or a bit rough, or….”

She takes one look at me and then bursts into a laugh. “Miss Nora,” she says, highly accusative. “I didn’t expect you to grow into a lady interested in such things.”

“That’s all well and good, but you haven’t answered my question.”

“I have no intention to discuss such a thing with a young maiden,” she replies, barely keeping her expression straight.

Well, at least I tried, excited for my first time having a real bit of love talk. (My sister’s stories obviously never went any further than furtive glances and the tamest innuendo.)

“So we can talk about it when I am married?” I ask.

She looks at me only to glance away. “Are there any boys you’re interested in?” she asks.

I narrow my eyes, letting her know I know she’s dodging the question again, but I leave it for now. “No.”

“Is that really the case?”

“Yes.”

Lightly chuckling, she picks up her cup and then has a sip. “That’s more like the miss Nora I expected.”

I’m irritated by her words again, and I have a better grasp of it this time. It’s like… I’m upset that the distance between us is different, that I want to think of her as a friend while she seems to want to think of me only as the child of her old employer.

I wonder if this is the same feeling that upset Cyril.

Anyway, now that I better know why, the irritation fades quickly. I mean, I am only the child of her former employer. I was only a child when she knew me. It would be strange to think you’re friends with an adult just because you were on good terms when they were a kid.

But things can change.

“Please, just call me Nora. Or, now that I think about it, Ellie. Yes, please just call me Ellie.”

It takes a few more words, but she agrees on Ellie (face heavy with reluctance). We talk a little more, but about nothing important. When it’s time for me to go, she insists on walking me to the river again and I accept. Then comes the hardest part: convincing Gwen to call me Ellie. She has a hundred and one questions why my name has changed, but I have the walk to convince her.

So my eventful Saturday comes to an end.