She took a spell on the copper boilers, ramming the stewing garments under the bubbling surface, and noted that in this place without weapons of any sort she was using a heavy stick about three feet long.
She enjoyed the work, in a dumb kind of way. Her muscles did all the necessary thinking, leaving her brain free. No one knew for sure that the Duchess was dead. It more or less didn’t matter. But Polly was sure of one thing. The Duchess had been a woman. Just a woman, not a goddess. Oh, people prayed to her in the hope that their pleas would be gift-wrapped and sent on to Nuggan, but that gave her no right to mess with the heads of people like Wazzer, who had enough trouble as it was. Gods could do miracles, Duchesses posed for pictures.
Out of the corner of her eye Polly saw a line of women taking large baskets from a platform at the end of the room and stepping out through another doorway. She dragged Igorina away from the wash trough and told her to join them. ‘And notice everything!’ she added.
‘Yes, corp,’ said Igorina.
‘Because I know one thing,’ said Polly, waving at the piles of damp linen, ‘and it’s that this lot will need the breeze . . .’
She went back to work, occasionally joining in the chatter for the look of the thing. It wasn’t hard. The washerwomen kept away from some subjects, particularly ones like ‘husbands’ and ‘sons’. But Polly picked up clues here and there. Some were in the keep. Some were probably dead. Some were out there, somewhere. Some of the older women wore the Motherhood Medal, awarded to women whose sons had died for Borogravia. The bastard metal was corroding in the damp atmosphere, and Polly wondered if the medals had arrived in a letter from the Duchess, with her signature printed on the bottom and the son’s name squeezed up tight to fit the space:
We honour and congratulate you, Mrs L. Lapchic of Well Lane, Munz, on the death of your son Otto PiotrHanLapchic on June 25 at
The place was always censored in case it brought aid and comfort to the enemy. It astonished Polly to find that the cheap medals and thoughtless words did, in a way, bring aid and comfort to the mothers. Those in Munz who had received them wore them with a sort of fierce, indignant pride.
She wasn’t sure she trusted Mrs Enid very much. She had a son and a husband up in the cells, and she’d had a chance to weigh up Blouse. She’d be asking herself: what’s more likely, that he gets them all out and keeps them safe, or that there’s going to be an almighty mess which might well harm us all? And Polly couldn’t blame her if she went with the evidence . . .
She was aware of someone talking to her. ‘Hmm?’ she said.
‘Look at this, will you?’ said Shufti, waving a sodden pair of men’s long pants at her. ‘They keep putting the colours in with the whites!’
‘Well? So what? These are enemy longjohns,’ said Polly.
‘Yes, but there’s such a thing as doing it properly! Look, they put in this red pair and all the others are going pink!’
‘And? I used to love pink when I was about seven.’9
‘But pale pink? On a man?’
Polly looked at the next tub for a moment, and patted Shufti on the shoulder. ‘Yes. It is very pale, isn’t it? You’d better find a couple more red items,’ she said.
‘But that’d make it even worse—’ Shufti began.
‘That was an order, soldier,’ Polly whispered in her ear. ‘And add some starch.’
‘How much?’
‘All you can find.’
Igorina returned. Igorina had good eyes. Polly wondered if they’d ever belonged to someone else. She gave Polly a wink and held up a thumb. It was, to Polly’s relief, one of her own.
In the huge ironing room, only one person was working at the long boards when Polly, taking advantage of the temporary absence of Mrs Enid, hurried in. It was ‘Daphne’. All the rest of the women were gathered round, as if they were watching a demonstration. And they were.
‘—the collar, d’you see,’ said Lieutenant Blouse, flourishing the big, steaming, charcoal-filled iron. ‘Then the sleeve cuffs and finally the sleeves. Do one front half at a time. You should hang them immediately but, and here’s a useful tip, don’t iron them completely dry. It’s really a matter of practice, but—’
Polly stared in fascinated wonder. She’d hated ironing. ‘Daphne, could I have a word?’ she said, during a pause.
Blouse looked up. ‘Oh, P . . . Polly,’ he said. ‘Um, yes, of course.’
‘It’s amazing what Daphne knows about pleat lines,’ said a girl, in awe. ‘And press cloths!’
‘I am amazed,’ said Polly.
Blouse handed the iron to the girl. ‘There you are, Dympha,’ he said generously. ‘Remember: always iron the wrong side first, and only ever do the wrong side on dark linens. Common mistake. Coming, Polly.’
Polly kicked her heels for a while outside, and one of the girls came up with a big pile of fresh-smelling ironing. She saw Polly, and leaned close as she went past. ‘We all know he’s a man,’ she said. ‘But he’s having such fun and he irons like a demon!’
‘Sir, how do you know about ironing?’ said Polly, when they were back in the washing room.
‘Had to do my own laundry back at HQ,’ said Blouse. ‘Couldn’t afford a gel and the batman was a strict Nugganite and said it was girls’ work. So I thought, well, it can’t be hard, otherwise we wouldn’t leave it to women. They really aren’t very good here. You know they put the colours and the whites together?’
‘Sir, you know you said you were going to steal a gate key off a guard and break his neck?’ said Polly.
‘Indeed.’
‘Do you know how to break a man’s neck, sir?’
‘I read a book on martial arts, Perks,’ said Blouse, a little severely.
‘But you haven’t actually done it, sir?’
‘Well, no! I was at HQ, and you are not allowed to practise on real people, Perks.’
‘You see, the person whose neck you want to break will have a weapon at that moment and you, sir, won’t,’ said Polly.
‘I have tried out the basic principle on a rolled-up blanket,’ said Blouse reproachfully. ‘It seemed to work very well.’
‘Was the blanket struggling and making loud gurgling noises and kicking you in the socks, sir?’
‘The socks?’ said Blouse, puzzled.
‘In fact I think your other idea would be better, sir,’ said Polly hurriedly.
‘Yes . . . my, er . . . other idea . . . which one was that, exactly?’
‘The one where we escape from the washhouse via the clothes-drying area, sir, after silently disabling three guards, sir. There’s a kind of moving room down the corridor over there, sir, which gets winched all the way to the roof. Two guards go up there with the women, sir, and there’s another guard up on the roof. Acting together, we’d take out each unsuspecting guard, which would be more certain than you against an armed man, with all due respect, sir, and that would leave us very well positioned to go anywhere in the keep via the rooftops, sir. Well done, sir!’
There was a pause. ‘Did I, er, go into all that detail?’ said Blouse.
‘Oh, no, sir. You shouldn’t have to, sir. Sergeants and corporals deal with the fine detail. Officers are there to see the big picture.’
‘Oh, absolutely. And, er . . . how big was this particular picture?’ said Blouse, blinking.
‘Oh, very big, sir. A very big picture indeed, sir.’
‘Ah,’ said Blouse, and straightened up and assumed what he considered to be the expression of one with panoramic vision.
‘Some of the ladies here used to work in the upper keep, sir, when it was ours,’ Polly went on quickly. ‘Anticipating your order, sir, I had the squad engage them in light conversation about the layout of the place, sir. Being aware of the general thrust of your strategy, sir, I think I have found a route to the dungeons.’
She paused. It had been good flannelling, she knew. It was almost worthy of Jackrum. She’d larded it with as many ‘sirs’ as she dared. And she was very prou
d of ‘anticipating your order’. She hadn’t heard Jackrum use it, but with a certain amount of care it was an excuse to do almost anything. ‘General thrust’ was pretty good, too.
‘Dungeons,’ said Blouse thoughtfully, momentarily losing sight of the big picture. ‘In fact I thought I said—’
‘Yessir. Because, sir, if we can get a lot of the lads out of the dungeons, sir, you’ll be in command inside the enemy’s citadel, sir!’
Blouse grew another inch, and then sagged again. ‘Of course, there are some very senior officers here. All of them senior to me—’
‘Yessir!’ said Polly, well on the way to graduating from the Sergeant Jackrum School of Outright Rupert Management. ‘Perhaps we’d better try to let the enlisted men out first, sir? We don’t want to expose the officers to enemy fire.’
It was shameless and stupid, but now the light of battle was in Blouse’s eyes. Polly decided to fan it, just in case. ‘Your leadership has really been a great example to us, sir,’ she said.
‘Has it?’
‘Oh, yes, sir.’
‘No officer could have led a finer bunch of men, Perks,’ said Blouse.
‘Probably they have, sir,’ said Polly.
‘And what man could dare hope for such an opportunity, eh?’ said Blouse. ‘Our names will go down in the history books! Well, mine will, obviously, and I shall jolly well see to it that you chaps get a mention too. And who knows? Perhaps I may win the highest accolade that a gallant officer may obtain!’
‘What’s that, sir?’ said Polly dutifully.
‘Having either a foodstuff or an item of clothing named after one,’ said Blouse, his face radiant. ‘General Froc got both, of course. The frock coat and Beef Froc. Of course, I could never aspire that high.’ He looked down bashfully. ‘But I have to say, Perks, that I have devised several recipes, just in case!’
‘So we’ll be eating a Blouse one day, sir?’ said Polly. She was watching the baskets being stacked.
‘Possibly, possibly, if I may dare hope,’ said Blouse. ‘Er . . . my favourite is a sort of pastry ring, d’you see, filled with cream and soaked in rum—’
‘That’s a Rum Baba, sir,’ said Polly absently. Tonker and the others were watching the stacked baskets, too.
‘It’s been done?’
‘’fraid so, sir.’
‘How about . . . er . . . a dish of liver and onions?’
‘It’s called liver-and-onions, sir. Sorry,’ said Polly, trying not to lose concentration.
‘Er, er, well, it has struck me that some dishes are named after people when really they just made a little change to a basic recipe—’
‘We must go now, sir! Now or never, sir!’
‘What? Oh. Right. Yes. We must go!’
It was a military manoeuvre hitherto unrecorded. The squad, coming from different directions on Polly’s signal, arrived at the baskets just ahead of the women who’d proposed to take them up, grabbed the handles and advanced. Only then did she realize that probably no one else wanted the job, and the women were only too happy to let idiot newcomers take the strain. The baskets were big and the wet washing was heavy. Wazzer and Igorina could barely lift one basket between them.
A couple of soldiers were waiting by the door. They looked bored, and paid little attention. It was a long walk to the ‘elevator’.
Polly hadn’t been able to picture it when it had been described. You had to see it. It really was just a big open box of heavy timbers, attached to a thick rope, which ran up and down in a sort of chimney in the rock. When they were aboard, one of the soldiers hauled on a much thinner rope that disappeared up into the darkness. The other one lit a couple of candles, whose only apparent role was to make the darkness more gloomy.
‘No fainting now, girls!’ he said. His mate chuckled.
Two of them and seven of us, Polly thought. The copper stick banged against her leg as she moved, and she knew for a fact that Tonker was limping because she had strapped a washing dolly under her dress. That was for serious washerwomen; it was a long stick with what looked like a three-legged milking stool on the end of it, the better for agitating clothes in a big cauldron of boiling water. You could probably smash a skull with it.
The stone walls dropped past as the platform rose.
‘How thrilling!’ trilled ‘Daphne’. ‘And this goes all the way up through your big castle, does it?’
‘Oh, no, miss. Gotta go up through the rock first, miss. Lots of old workings and everything before we get that high.’
‘Oh, I thought we were in the castle already.’ Blouse gave Polly a worried look.
‘No, miss. There’s just the washhouse down there, ’cos of the water. Hah, it’s a climb and a half even to the lower cellars. Lucky for you there’s this elevator, eh?’
‘Wonderful, sergeant,’ said Blouse, and allowed Daphne back. ‘How does it work?’
‘It’s corporal, miss,’ said the string-puller, touching his forelock. ‘It’s pulled up and down by pris’ners in a treadmill, miss.’
‘Oh, how horrid!’
‘Oh no, miss, it’s quite humane. Er . . . if you’re free after work, er, I could take you up and show you the mechanism . . .’
‘That would be lovely, sergeant!’
Polly put her hand over her eyes. Daphne was a disgrace to womanhood.
The elevator rumbled upwards, quite slowly. Mostly they passed raw rock but sometimes there were ancient gratings or areas of masonry, suggestive of tunnels long ago blocked—
There was a jerk, and the platform stopped moving. One of the soldiers swore under his breath, but the corporal said, ‘Don’t be afraid, ladies. This often happens.’
‘Why should we be afraid?’ said Polly.
‘Well, because we’re hanging by a rope a hundred feet up the shaft and the lifting machinery’s thrown a cog.’
‘Again,’ said the other soldier. ‘Nothing works properly here.’
‘Sounds like a good reason to me,’ said Igorina.
‘How long will it take to repair?’ said Tonker.
‘Hah! Last time it happened we were stuck for an hour!’
Too long, Polly thought. Too many things could happen. She looked up through the beams in the roof. The square of daylight was a long way up.
‘We can’t wait,’ she said.
‘Oh dear, who will save us?’ Daphne quavered.
‘We’ll have to find a way to pass the time, eh?’ said one of the guards. Polly sighed. That was one of those phrases, like ‘Well, lookee what we have here’, that meant things were only going to get a lot worse.
‘We know how it is, ladies,’ the guard went on. ‘Your menfolk away, and all. It’s as bad for us, too. I can’t remember when I last kissed my wife.’
‘And I can’t remember when I last kissed his wife, either,’ said the corporal.
Tonker jumped up, caught a beam, and chinned herself to the top of the box. The elevator shook and, somewhere, a piece of rock dislodged and crashed down the shaft.
‘Hey, you can’t do that!’ said the corporal.
‘Where does it say?’ said Tonker. ‘Polly, there’s one of those filled-in tunnels here, only most of the stones have been knocked out. We could get in easily.’
‘You can’t get out! We’ll get into trouble!’ said the corporal.
Polly pulled his sword out of his scabbard. The space was too crowded to do much with it except threaten, but she had it, not him. It made a huge difference.
‘You’re already in trouble,’ she said. ‘Please don’t force me to make it worse. Let’s get out of here. Is that okay, Daphne?’
‘Um . . . yes, of course,’ said Blouse.
The other guard laid a hand on his own sword. ‘Okay, girls, this has gone—’ he began, and then slumped. Shufti lowered her copper stick.
‘I hope I didn’t hit him too hard,’ she said.
‘Who cares? Come on, I can give you all a hand up,’ said Tonker.
‘Igorina, could you
have a look at him, and—’ Shufti began nervously.
‘He’s a man, and he’s groaning,’ said Tonker from above. ‘That’s good enough for me. Come on.’
The lone guard watched as the others were womanhandled on to the beams.
‘Er, excuse me,’ he said to Polly, as she helped Blouse up.
‘Yes? What?’
‘Would you mind giving me a wallop on the back of the head?’ he said, looking wretched. ‘Only it looks like I didn’t put up a fight against a bunch of women.’
‘Why don’t you put up a fight?’ said Polly, narrowing her eyes. ‘We’re only a bunch of women.’
‘I’m not crazy!’ said the guard.
‘Here, let me,’ said Igorina, producing her stick. ‘Blows to the head are potentially harmful and should not be undertaken lightly. Turn round, sir. Remove your helmet, please. Would twenty minutes’ unconsciousness be okay?’
‘Yes, thanks very mu—’
The guard folded up.
‘I really hope I didn’t hurt the other one,’ moaned Shufti, from above.
‘He’s swearing,’ said Polly, removing his sword. ‘That sounds like he’s okay.’
She handed up the candles, and then was hauled on to the trembling roof of the elevator. When she had a firm footing in the mouth of the tunnel she found a sliver of stone and stamped it hard into the space between the shaft wall and the wooden frame, which shook. It wasn’t going anywhere for a while.
Tonker and Lofty were already investigating the tunnel. By candlelight, it looked like good masonry beyond the clumsy attempt at walling it up.
‘It must be cellars,’ said Tonker. ‘I reckon they must’ve made the shaft not long ago and just walled up where it cut through. Could have done a better job, too.’