The others were not so easily convinced.
I presented it as already done: my bag was packed with much more practical clothes than I'd traveled in a year before, and with vials of the perfumes I'd made, as I was of a mind to sell some. Pearl, who was not guileless, but who had never in her life been bothered to lie, said I had told her the night before that I intended to go with Father, and that she thought a younger person on the road with him was wise.
Flint, now closer to twelve than eleven, proposed that he should be the one to go, as he was very nearly the next man in the family. Glover, as an actual adult, looked torn but said nothing, for which I was grateful; my family needed him more than they needed me. Father would have none of it: he could go on his own, with Stewart, and they would be fine. The argument—if everyone else voicing an opinion while I remained silently steadfast in mine could be called an argument—went on for some while, until the sun threatened the horizon, upon which I said, "We'll be losing daylight soon. If you don't take me with you, I'll walk along behind."
I saw Father take in the possibility of restraining me, mostly with a glance at Glover, and, as quickly, reject the thought. I could not be kept tied up for weeks, and he concluded, correctly, that once I was released no one would prevent me from walking alone to the city, a journey vastly more dangerous on my own than with them. He said, "Very well," and in no more than another twenty minutes, Beauty was hitched to the wagon, which had its cover tightly drawn, Stewart's horse was tied to the tailgate, and we were on our way.
I soon learned that riding alone was vastly colder than riding in a wagon bundled with eight or nine other people, but considerably faster. To stave off both boredom and cold, I walked often, though I could not keep up with Beauty's less-laden pace as easily as I'd walked with her a year ago. On the other hand, I could walk much farther and faster than I did a year ago, and found a certain joy in pushing myself to keep up with the big horse. Stewart, who seemed to regard me as confounding and perhaps alarming, came around to my determination by the end of our journey, and joshed with me as easily as he might have one of his men. I was sorry to have the city's profile come into sight, and shocked, as we entered its gates, to realize that its sounds and smells, which had once been an unobserved backdrop to my life, were now unpleasantly loud and profound to me.
Stewart, watching my face, released a sympathetic chuckle. "I feel that way every time I come back from the sea, lass. After this past year, the worst sail of my life, I swore I'd never set foot on a ship again, but half an hour in town made me reconsider it all, despite everything."
"There are so many people," I said, a little wonderingly. They had a method to them, streams of passers-by going one way or another, but eddies and stops were created by sudden encounters, and the whole of the pattern had to shift and accommodate those changes. Children disrupted it all, going where they wanted, and voices, bells, wheels, beasts, all came together to create a cacophony that made my skin twitch. We passed through the chaos to the Crossroads, that inn which a year ago had not been good enough for my sister Pearl, and took two rooms that Father paid for with coin earned from his hunting.
We bathed that night, me in my room and the men in theirs, and in the morning, dressed as well as we could be, we went first to the docks to see the Spidersilk and its crew, and then, having assessed the cargo, Father went grimly to the bank.
Left to myself, I could have—perhaps should have—returned to the inn to wait like a dutiful daughter. Instead, thinking of the people I knew we owed money to, I went to the dressmaker whose sympathy had clothed us after the fire, and offered her eight vials of perfume as payment.
A wonderful combination of scorn and greed lit her eyes when I made the offer: in the city commerce was done with cash, not trade. But perfume was expensive, and mine was exquisitely scented, with a base that warmed to the wearer and made it unique to them. She tipped a drop of one against her wrist to test its scent and inhaled, then did her best to school her expression into disdain. But she took the offer, and with it, information worth more than coin: gossip. The Gryce family had returned, at least in part, and the youngest sister had lowered herself to engage in perfumery and trade. That knowledge would be worth as much as the perfume itself, if not more: people would come for weeks or months to have gowns made by her, just so they could hear in person about my rough hands and country dress.
The Noble, where we'd stolen blankets and pillows, would not be so easily put off. I visited cloakmakers and cobblers, inviting them to the Crossroads to see the furs we'd brought, furs that in our village we could trade for goods, but which in the city would be bought for cash. More than one tradesman leered at me, which they never would have dared to do a year ago, but several sent a journeyman to the inn to inspect our wares anyway. Father had tanned them well, and we had a handsome variety of fox, beaver, and rabbit, and a wolf skin from a solitary beast who'd thought our chickens were for his benefit.
That night it snowed, a thick white blanket muffling the city sounds, and in the morning nearly all of the journeymen returned, ploughing through the snow with their feet. One or two came with their masters, and they all, journeymen and masters alike, made offers on the furs. I sent the unaccompanied journeymen back to their masters with instructions to take me seriously, and by late evening—thanks in part to snow falling incessantly throughout the day, and the potential of a long cold season ahead—they had engaged in bidding wars that drove the prices up as far as the market would bear. The highest buyers left cards with me, asking that I come to them directly if we should return next year with more furs.
On the third morning, cash in hand, I waded through the snow to visit the management of the Noble, and with as much grace as I could present, paid them for our accommodations a year earlier, the materials we'd taken, and added noticeable but not offensively large percentage on top of that to make certain they had no interest in pursuing us toward a debtors prison. The jowly gentleman who ran the establishment looked at the pile of coin and, with business-like sincerity, invited us to stay with them at the Noble at any time in the future.