Curse or a Blessing

Chapter Seven: The Man from Far Away

After getting a nice pail of milk and leaving it for one of the stable hands to find, the next few hours seemed to drag by uneventfully for Sarcelle.

She'd chosen to start peeling and processing the ginger roots she'd picked a few weeks before when she'd had more vitality. The white oak table in the center of her work shed smelled like earth and musk, mixing with all the other wonderful scents that permeated every square inch of the place from the bottled, jarred, and hanging herbs, flowers, and poultices. The whole left wall was covered in built-in shelves filled to the brim with jars and bottles, most filled with green and red and silvery powders of all sorts and others completely empty. Different herbs were hanging to be dried spread out around and above the shelves. If any from the village stepped into this room she'd be burned for sure, she thought with dark mirth. But it gave her peace, and that was what she really needed right now.

She lost sense of time and self as she focused her whole mind on the work, letting her fingers and the repetitive movements of peeling ginger take over. She did not know how long she'd been going for when she'd peeled the last one and put it in the pot on the table besides her. Looking down at her red and raw fingers, she knew it was probably longer than she should have been there. Quickly and carefully as she could, she packaged the skins for later. She lugged the heavy pot full of now naked ginger fingers and placed it by her personal hearth with a huff of breath, promising herself she'd come back after dinner that night and finish boiling the tea. Ginger tea was so good for soothing a wide spectrum of illnesses such as sore throats or tummy aches. She'd wanted to leave a huge batch with Mr. Winthrop, an old widower who always seemed to be catching illness like honey caught flies, so that the man didn't have to worry if and when hid next illness hit.

The idea of leaving her patients after all these years of earning their trust and learning all their needs... it saddened her more than leaving her home and her father. They were where her heart truly lay these years of her youth, and now with womanhood she'd have to leave them. She'd not prepared for this because she'd never thought it would happen. Like an idiot, she'd lived in a fantasy that things might stay as they were forever. But had she not watched the lives of those around her change daily, sometimes in drastic ways? How had she been so naive as to believe she could escape that fact of life? She couldn't, and now she was paying the price for her folly.

Upon arriving back at the main house she'd found a group of women, some who were maids of the household and others whom Sarcelle recognized as prestigious widows of the town. They all rushed her as soon as her feet stepped in the door, silk and underskirts rustling. Mercy, but she was overwhelmed with more female attention than she had ever experience in her entire life.

One of the women, a fifty year old widow named Matilda with a bumpy and sharp face, grabbed her hands and turned them about. She clucked her tongue and the others tsked at the state of them. Others were messing about with her untamed curls, the neckline and edge of her sack of a dress, and probably every edge and curve of her body. It felt like there were hands and eyes everywhere, probing and sticking and testing.

Sarcelle was trying to remain calm under the assault of what felt like all the judgement she'd ever received in her life happening all at once. She could feel her heart trying to punch it's way out of her chest, like a little bird trying to fly away. The overstimulation made her want to fly away, made her want to step out of her skin and run as fast as her feet would take her.

"Oh my, what are we going to do with this," she heard a voice say, almost as if from underwater.

"Looks like we've got our work cut out for us," another voice said.

"Maeve, be a doll and get the bath ready," a haughty female voice intoned. "She surely could use it."

And then they were pushing and pulling her towards somewhere. She couldn't tell as she stumbled along because she'd closed her eyes and was trying desperately to get a reign on her erratic breathing. In, one two three, out, one two three four five. In, one two three, out, one two three four five. It was all she could seem to focus on.