Free The Water Devil by Judith Merkle Riley

low at table. She would rather not eat at all than be seated too low. There's a lady of true gentility! I said to her, said I, think you of Dame Margaret, whom you know and who would make you welcome, and she said never, when a woman of rank gives her word, it is given. Pride, I say, that goeth before a fall—” Well, goodness. Madame. She certainly hadn't prospered since she'd walked away from giving French lessons.
    The girls, I noticed, had become very silent, and occupied themselves with a great show of kneading the bread.
    “Now, about that ink—”
    “You'll have it, Master Will,” I said, wiping my hands on my apron.
    Master Will's tall, raggedy form had scarcely passed out through the kitchen door when the girls lost their sudden and uncharacteristic silence.
    “Mama, pleeeeease don't bring Madame back,” said Cecily
    “She's much too mean, Mama,”Alison added.
    “She did a very good job of teaching you French, and she's not mean, just firm,” I answered.
    “She has too many rules. Being a lady is very tiresome,” announced Alison.
    “Yes, and she says ladies let boys win at games,” said Cecily.
“And
they always let the boy have the biggest piece on the plate,” said Alison.
    “And she said boys must speak first because they are cleverer than girls, and will grow to be men, and do worldly things. But Peter Wengrave is so slow, he doesn't even know his letters yet, and cries when the master beats him, and I knew my letters long ago,” said Cecily.
    “And, Mama, there's the fingers,” said Alison.
    “What fingers?” I asked.
    “The fingers to pick things up. First and third for this dish, first and second for that, don't touch with your little finger, and never put fingers in the sauce deeper than this first little bit. There's ever so many rules for fingers. I don't see why being a lady needs fingers and getting the smallest piece. Hands are more sensible.”
    “Alison, you cannot go through life snatching out the biggest piece of chicken and splattering gravy up to your elbows. You both are in need of a lot more manners than you have.”
    “Pleeeeease, no more Madame,” they chorused. I sighed. More of Madame would be just right. I suppose I just hadn't been firm enough.
    “You're in no danger of Madame,” I said. “She won't have us.”
    “Then we don't have to be ladies after all?”
    “No, you just have to be ladies anyway.”
    “We could be pirates instead,” suggested Alison.
    “Some pirate
you'd
be, stealing sweets—” answered her sister.
    “When I'm a pirate king, you'll be just a common sailor, because you don't even
know
what's good to take. You just climb all the time, and sit up in the pear tree dreaming.”
    “I do
not
—”
    “Girls, girls, you haven't kneaded the bread in the trough long enough. See? If you push it, it doesn't crawl back. That's how you know it's not ready yet.” I pushed at the dough to show how it lay there, all dead and not ready to rise. Then I poked at mine, to show them how it should spring back.
    “Eeuw, it's a giant
worm
—it's the innards of a
clam,
all alive—”
    “Don't prod at it like that, Alison. You have to treat it like a friend if you want it to rise nicely. And you, Cecily, don't pout. Sour girls make the bread sour and the ale flat—”
    “Yes, mama, and many girls have split from eating the dough.”
    “Cecily, don't be sarcastic—”
    “Lady, lady, come quick, soldiers in the street!” Perkyn the steward burst into the kitchen, his face alight with the news. Bread dough forgotten, we ran to the front door. Every soul on Thames Street was hanging out the windows. We could hear joyful cries as householders ran to hang out tapestries, tablecloths, and anything else handy from the upper windows as a sign of welcome. Down the street came the oddest parade in the world. A good two dozen pike- men and archers from Billingsgate Parish, packs on their backs, still wearing their leather brigandines, marched in ragged