Everyone feigned weeping. Dulsia took Tess’s icy hand and led her up the caravan steps.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Dulsia, closing the door and bustling past Tess into the tiny, colorful room. “Gen told me what you are. In fact, she bet me that you would ‘take the coward’s way out,’ meaning you’d come in rather than tell her lads where to stick it.” She smiled, her eyes crinkling. “But I don’t think it was cowardly at all. I think you’re being rather brave.”
Tess, dazed, sagged into an armchair draped with green and purple scarves. The room took up only half the caravan; the rest was behind a locked door. The walls were painted with oddly suggestive flowers, the ceiling hung with fancy lanterns. There was a feather bed with a tidy quilt upon it; cupboards, from which Dulsia took a teapot and cups; and a tiny table where she set them. A little iron stove muttered to itself in the corner. The kettle had just reached a boil.
“I thought you could use some tea,” said Dulsia, winking conspiratorially.
Tess took the proffered cup, hot in her cold hands. Her fear was dissipating—indeed, the damaelle up close could have terrified no one, so plump and cuddly was she—but still Tess jittered as the dregs of panic drained out. The cup clinked against her teeth.
Dulsia divided the money into five piles on the bedspread. She clucked her tongue at the button and stuck it down her bodice. “For me and my brothers,” she said conversationally, putting three stacks of coins into a wooden box beneath the bed. “One for the future.” This went into a metal strongbox in the cupboard. “And one for my comrades-in-bed, the red ladies of Segosh, who aren’t as free as me.” This last went into a leather bag, behind the locked door.
“Now,” said Dulsia, returning to the bed with a flounce, like a young girl. “We can have tea at the lads’ expense, but I’d prefer to have earned my money. I assume, gauging by your wariness, that you’d quite balk at my usual services for ladies, but I can answer practical questions if you like, or massage your poor, hunching shoulders. I see you carry your troubles there.”
Tess knew she should scorn such a disreputable person—bad enough to be drinking her tea—and yet her back and neck ached terribly, now that Dulsia mentioned it. Tess was surprised to find herself tempted.
Her mother and brothers had said she’d end up a harlot, and Tess had known—everybody knew—that it was a fate worse than death. And yet here was this woman, who seemed…she seemed fine. She seemed kind, and Tess knew from experience that kindness was hard to manage if you were filled to the brim with bitterness.
Dulsia shouldn’t exist. Tess had questions; the only way to ask was to stay a bit longer. “You may rub my back, but don’t touch the rest of me,” said Tess, holding up a warning finger.
“Never,” said Dulsia firmly. “Unless you ask it.”
Tess lay on the bed with her jerkin off (though not her shirt). Dulsia’s strong fingers moved the hills of Tess’s shoulder blades, exalted the valley of her spine, made the crooked straight. Sometimes it hurt, and Tess cried out; Dulsia paused until Tess bade her continue.
“All your sorrows are bound here. I can feel them,” said Dulsia sagely, proceeding with a gentler touch. “Don’t be surprised if you weep. I’m warning you in advance.”
Tess finally worked up the courage to ask: “How did you end up a…a whore?”
Dulsia’s hands grew heavier; she didn’t like that word, or didn’t like remembering. “When our father died, he left us this cart, a horse, and nothing else,” she said. “My brothers thought to join the army, or sign on as private guards. They meant to sell their bodies, and possibly their lives, and we would be separated. I couldn’t bear it. So I said, what if you were my guards, and I was the one who sold her body, and nobody died?
“It seemed simple, but nothing ever is.” Dulsia kneaded like a cat. “I’d naively stepped off a cliff, expecting to walk on air. I went to Segosh, hoping to apprentice—like any baker or ribbon maker—and was nearly entrapped. The ladies there are contract-bound to unscrupulous bosses. The law won’t protect them; they fear for their lives. I was lucky to get away.”
Tess remembered the money Dulsia had put away. She must be buying out contracts, freeing her sisters in town. Tess wriggled a hand into the pouch at her hip, grabbed the first large coin she found, and handed it over. The damaelle stared, as if she didn’t know what it was for.
“For the red ladies,” said Tess. “To make up for that button.”
Dulsia smiled then—all dimples—and put the coin down her bodice. “Thank you,” she said, resuming work on Tess’s neck. “I know how fortunate I’ve been. We’ve found some modicum of independence on the road; I’m not suffering, like my sisters.”
“But isn’t the work…terrible?” said Tess into the pillow. “Doesn’t it take a toll on you?”
“Of course it does, just as pounding roadbed takes a toll,” said Dulsia. “Even a painter, spreading his own heart upon the canvas, gives it up for money and weeps afterward. There is no pain-free path, sweet girl. Choosing is what makes life bearable. Every month, my brothers and I count our money and decide whether to quit. When I can’t do this anymore, they’ll have a turn supporting me. They talk about opening a ribbon shop.”
It was such a delightfully incongruous image that Tess laughed, and then Dulsia’s thumbs on either side of her spine found a pocket of tension that almost brought her to tears. This backrub had her bouncing between extremes.
“I couldn’t have survived without my brothers,” Dulsia was saying, “or without friends like Gen watching out for us. She gets hers for free, forever, in gratitude.”
Tess turned a skeptical eye. “What could you possibly do for a woman?”
“Are you being nosy, or are you requesting something specific?” said Dulsia, pausing with her hands below Tess’s rib cage.
“Neither,” said Tess hurriedly. “But our part in…marital relations”—she felt supremely ridiculous saying that to Dulsia—“is all duty and pain. St. Vitt repays our endurance of it tenfold, provided we keep faith and don’t stray, and thus the bitter trials of womanhood are worth something, in the end.”
“Dear little virgin—” Dulsia began, a smile in her voice.
“I’m not a virgin,” said Tess. “Truly. I’ve borne a child. I know what goes where, and why, and so I know that there’s nothing two women could possibly—”
“There’s something crucial you seem not to know. A woman may take as much pleasure from relations as a man,” said Dulsia. “She may even do this on her own, no man required.”
And then she told a tale so outlandish that Tess’s mind rebelled and rejected it. There was no such thing as a nupa—Tess couldn’t even translate the word into Goreddi. It had to be a lie.
Tess would have hotly refuted this nonsense if the damaelle’s skilled hands had not, at that very moment, reached the tightest and most terrible of her muscles, the fibers of her lower back.
Where Tess had hurt, exactly, excruciatingly, when Dozerius was born.
The memory had been locked in her back, like coins in a strongbox, like a prisoner in a dungeon, and pounding roadbed had bound it tighter. Feeling the same hurt again set the memory free. Pain sprouted across the ready ground of Tess’s body and bloomed: pink clover pain, bright buttercups of sorrow, flaring poppies of agony.
Violent sobs, like barking, burst from her throat. She could not hold them back, or she’d split down the middle.
“What is it?” cried Dulsia, pulling her hands away, but too late. Tess was wrecked on the rocks of memory, and there was no returning from this. She shoved the damaelle’s hands aside, clutched her jerkin to her chest, flung wide the door, and rushed out into the blinding sunlight.
Her workmates looked up from pounding roadbed and burst incongruously into cheers, until they saw her face.