Point of Hopes (3 page)

Rathe nodded back, and turned to Mailet. “Then let
me talk to Asheri, Master Mailet, and we’ll go.”

Asheri was waiting in the stable doorway, a thin,
brown girl in a neatly embroidered cap and bodice, her skirts
kilted to the knee against the dust. She listened to Rathe’s
instructions—fetch Ranazy from the Cazaril Grey where he was
eating, and then tell Monteia, the chief point who had charge of
Point of Hopes, what had happened and bring back any messages—with
a serious face. She caught the copper demming he tossed her with an
expert hand, then darted off ahead of them through the main gate.
Rathe followed her more decorously, and then gestured for Mailet to
lead the way.

Mailet’s house and workshop lay in the open streets
just off the Customs Road, about a ten-minute walk from Point of
Hopes. It looked prosperous enough, though not precisely wealthy;
the shutters were all down, forming a double counter, and a
journeyman and an older apprentice were busy at the meat table,
knives flashing as they disjointed a pair of chickens for a waiting
maidservant. She was in her twenties and very handsome, and a knife
rose into the air, catching the light for an instant as it turned
end over end, before the apprentice had snatched the meat away and
the knife landed, quivering, in the chopping board. He bowed
deeply, and offered the neatly cut chicken to the maidservant. She
took it, cocking her head to one side, and the journeyman, less
deft or more placid than his junior, handed her the second
carefully packaged bird. She took that, too, and, turning, said
something over her shoulder that had both young men blushing and
grinning. Mailet scowled.

“
Get that mess cleaned up,” he
said, gesturing to the bloodied board. “And, you, Eysi, keep your
mind on your work before you lose a finger.”

“
Yes, master,” the apprentice
answered, but Rathe thought from the grin that he was less than
chastened.

Mailet grunted, and pushed past him into the shop.
“Young fool. And the pity of it is, if he makes a mistake with that
trick, it’ll be Perrin who loses a finger.”

“
How many people do you have here?”
Rathe asked.

“
Four journeymen, two boys and two
girls, and then a dozen prentices, six of each. And my woman and
myself. She’s co-master with me.”

“
Do they all live here?”

“
The apprentices, of course,”
Mailet answered, “they’ve two big rooms under the roof—with a
separate stairway to each, I’m not completely a fool—and then the
senior journeymen, that’s Perrin whom you saw, and Sabadie, they
each have a room at the head of the stair. And Agnelle and myself
live on the second floor. But Mickhel and Fridi board out—their
choice, not mine.”

The door that gave onto the main hall opened then,
and a dark-skinned woman stepped through, tucking her hair back
under her neat cap. She was close to Mailet’s age, and Rathe was
not surprised to see the keys and coinpurse at her belt.

“
Agnelle Fayor, my co-master,”
Mailet said, unnecessarily, and Rathe nodded.

“
Mistress.”

“
You’re the pointsman?” the woman
asked and Rathe nodded again.

“
Then you’ll want to talk to the
girls,” Fayor said, and looked at Mailet. “They’re almost done, I
don’t think it’ll cause any more stir if he does.”

Mailet grinned, rather wryly, and Rathe said, “I
take it the apprentices were upset, then?”

Mailet nodded.

Fayor said “They didn’t know she was going to run,
I’d stake my life on that.” She looked at Mailet, seemed to receive
some silent signal, and went on, “We’ve had prentices run away
before now, everyone has, but they’ve always told us first, given
some warning.”

“
Not in so many words, you
understand,” Mailet interjected. “But you know.”

“
Did Herisse have any special
friends among the apprentices?” Rathe asked, “A leman, maybe?
Somebody she might’ve confided in?”

Fayor’s mouth turned down at the comers. “I don’t
hold with that. It causes all sorts of trouble.”

“
You can’t stop it, though,” Mailet
said. It had the sound of a long argument, and out of the corner of
his eye, Rathe saw Fayor grimace expressively. “And it keeps their
minds off the opposite sex.” Mailet looked back at the pointsman.
“Sabadie would know if she had a leman. You can ask
her.”

“
Thanks. I’d like to talk to her.
But right now, can you give me a description of Herisse?” Rathe had
his tablets out, looked from Mailet to Fayor. The two exchanged
looks.

“
She’s an ordinary looking girl,
pointsman, pretty enough, but not remarkable,” Fayor
began.

‘
Tall for her age, though,” Mailet
added, and Rathe noted that down, glancing up to ask, “And that’s
twelve, right?” Mailet nodded and took a breath, frowning with
concentration. “She has brown hair, keeps it long, but neat. Not
missing any teeth yet. Brown eyes?” He looked at Fayor, who
sighed.

“
Blue. She has a sharp little face,
but, as I said, nothing out of the ordinary.”

“
What was she wearing, last time
anyone saw her?”

“
Last time I saw her, she was
wearing a green skirt and bodice. Bottle green, the draper called
it, and it’s trimmed with ribbon, darker. She had the same ribbon
on her chemise, too, she liked the color. And that’s probably what
she was wearing when she went missing, her other clothes are still
in her room,” Fayor said. She spread her hands.” I don’t know what
else I can tell you.”

Rathe closed his tablets. “That’s fine, thanks.
Right—can I speak with Sabadie now?”

Mailet nodded. “I’ll take you to her. Mind the shop,
Agnelle? And make sure Eysi doesn’t hurt himself with his fancy
knife tricks.”

Fayor muttered something that did not bode well for
the apprentice, and Rathe followed Mailet through the door into the
main hall. The room was filled with the sunlight that streamed in
through the windows at the top of the hall, and the air smelled
sharply of vegetables. A dozen apprentices, conspicuous in blue
smocks and aprons, stood at the long tables, boys on the left,
girls on the right, while a woman journeyman stood at the center of
the aisle, directing the work from among baskets of peppers and
bright yellow summer gourds. Another journeyman, this one a woman
in the black coat and yellow cravat of the Meteneran magists, stood
toward the back of the room, one eye on the clockwork orrery that
ticked away the positions of the suns and stars, the other on the
sweating apprentices. From the looks of things, the piled white
seeds and discarded stems, and the relatively small number of
baskets of whole vegetables, the work had been going on for some
time, and going well. The journeyman butcher turned, hearing the
door, and came to join them, wiping her hands on her apron. Rathe
was mildly surprised to see a woman in charge—butchery was
traditionally a man’s craft—but then, the woman’s stars probably
outweighed her sex.

“
Just about done, master,” she
said. “We’ve another two hours yet, and this is the last load for
Master Guilbert.”

Mailet nodded, looking over the hall with an expert
eye. “I brought the pointsman—his name’s Nicolas Rathe, out of
Point of Hopes. Sabadie Grosejl, my senior journeyman. Can you
spare Trijntje to talk to him?” He glanced at Rathe, and added,
“Trijntje was probably Herisse’s closest friend.”

“
She’s not much use to me today,”
Grosejl said, rather grimly, and Rathe glanced along the line of
girl-apprentices, wondering which one it was. She wasn’t hard to
pick out, after all: even at this distance, Rathe could tell she’d
been crying, suspected from the hunch of her shoulder and the way
she glared at the pepper under her knife that she was crying
still.

“
I’d like to talk to Sabadie as
well,” he said and the journeyman hesitated.

“
Go on, I’ll take over here,”
Mailet said. “Fetch him Trijntje when he’s done with you, and then
you can get back to work.”

“
Yes, Master,” Grosejl answered,
and turned to face the pointsman, jamming her hands into the
pockets of her smock beneath her apron. She was a tall woman,
Leaguer pale, and her eyes were wary.

“
So you’re in charge of the
girl-apprentices?” Rathe asked.

Grosejl nodded. “For my sins.” She grimaced.
“They’re not so bad, truly, just—”

“
Young?” Rathe asked, and the
journeyman nodded.

“
And now this has happened. Master
Rathe, I don’t know what Master Mailet told you, but I don’t think
Herisse ran away.”

“
Oh?”

“
She liked it here, liked the
schooling and the work and the people—she didn’t tell Trijntje she
was going, and she’d have done that for certain.”

“
Was she Trijntje’s leman?” Rathe
asked.

Grosejl hesitated, then nodded. “Master Mailet
doesn’t really approve, nor the mistress, so there was nothing said
or signed, but everyone knew it. You hardly saw one without the
other. If she’d been planning to run away, seek her fortune on the
road, they would have gone together.”

Rathe sighed. That was probably true enough—runaways
often left in pairs or threes, either sworn lemen or best
friends—and it probably also told him the answer to his next
question. “You understand I have to ask this,” he began, and
Grosejl shook her head.

“
No, she wasn’t pregnant. That I
can swear to. Mistress Fayor makes sure all the girls take the
Baroness every day.”

“
But if it didn’t work for her?”
Rathe asked. The barrenherb didn’t work for every woman; that was
common knowledge, and one of the reasons the guilds generally
turned a blind eye to the passionate friendships between the
apprentices of the same gender. Better barren sex than a horde of
children filling the guildhalls.

Grosejl hesitated, then jerked her head toward a
child of six or seven who was sweeping seeds into the piles of
rubbish at the center of the hall. “That’s my daughter. There’d
have been a place for her, and the child, if she was pregnant. More
than there would have been with her family.”

“
A bad lot?”

Grosejl shrugged. “Useless, more like. I met them
once. The mother’s dead, the father drinks, the other two—boys,
both of them, younger than her—run wild. I don’t know where they
came up with the indenture money. But Herisse was glad to be away
from them, that’s for sure.”

Rathe paused, considering what she’d told him. They
all seemed very certain that Herisse Robion was no runaway, and
from everything they said, he was beginning to believe it, too. And
that was not a pleasant thought. There was no reason to kidnap a
butcher’s apprentice—or rather, he amended silently, the only
reasons were of the worst kind, madmen’s reasons, someone looking
for a child, a girl, to rape, to hurt, maybe to kill. He could see
in Grosejl’s eyes that she’d thought of the same things, and forced
a smile. “There may be a good explanation,” he said, and knew it
sounded lame. “Can I talk to Trijntje now?”

“
Trijntje!” Grosejl beckoned
widely, and the girl Rathe had picked out before put down her knife
and came to join them, wiping furtively at her eyes with the corner
of her sleeve.

“
This is Trijntje Ollre, pointsman.
She and Herisse were best friends.”

“
She was my leman,” Trijntje
interjected, with a defiant glance at the older woman. “And
something’s happened to her, pointsman. You have to find her. I’ve
money saved—”

“
I’m looking into it,” Rathe said.
“We can talk fees if there’s extra work to be done.” And there
won’t be, he vowed silently. I don’t take money from poor
apprentices. But he had learned years ago that telling people he
didn’t want their money only bred more distrust and uncertainty:
what kind of a pointsman was he, how good could he be, if he didn’t
take the payments that were a pointsman’s lot? Rathe dismissed that
old grievance, and took Trijntje gently through her story, but
there was nothing new to be learned. Herisse had gone to bed with
the others, and had risen early and gone out, missing breakfast,
but had not come back when Mailet opened the hall for work. She had
taken neither clothes nor books nor her one decent hat pin, and had
said nothing that would make Trijntje or anyone else think she
wanted to run away.

“
We were planning to run a workshop
together,” Trijntje said and gave a hopeless sniff. “Once we’d made
masters.”

That would probably have come to nothing, Rathe
knew—he remembered all too well the fierce but fleeting passions of
his own adolescence—but he also remembered the genuine pain of
those passing fancies. “I—we at Point of Hopes—will be treating
this as more than a runaway,” he said. “We’ll do everything we can
to find her.”

Trijntje looked at him with reddened eyes and said
nothing.

Rathe walked back to Point of Hopes in less than good
humor. Trouble involving children was always bad—of course, by law
and custom, apprentice-age was the end of childhood but at the same
time, no one expected apprentices to take on fully adult
responsibilities. Herisse had been only in her second year of
apprenticeship; she would have had—would have, he corrected himself
firmly—six more to go before she could be considered for
journeyman. It was still possible that she’d simply run away—maybe
run from Trijntje Ollre, if she, Herisse, had grown out of that
relationship, and been too softhearted, still too fond to end it
cleanly. Twelve year olds weren’t noted for their common sense, he
could see one running away because she couldn’t find the words to
end a friendship…. He shook his head then, rejecting the thought
before it could comfort him. Trijntje had spoken of their plans as
firmly in the present tense, though that could be self-deception;
more to the point, the journeyman Grosejl had treated the
relationship as ongoing, and she, if anyone, would have known of an
incipient break. He would ask, of course, he had to ask, but he was
already fairly confident of Grosejl’s answer. And that left only
the worst answer: if Herisse hadn’t run, then someone had taken
her. And there were no good reasons—no logical reasons, reasons of
profit, the understandable motive of the knives and bravos and
thieves who lived in the rookeries of Point of Sighs and Point of
Graves—to steal a twelve-year-old apprentice butcher.