Early the next morning, when the sky over Greybridge had only just begun to lighten, the bakery downstairs had already lit its ovens, and the smell of black bread baking drifted slowly up through the half-open window into the apartment.
Elaine was still fast asleep. Raea had long since changed into her Tribunal uniform, and did not leave straight away as she usually did. She watched Elaine sleeping first. She had already been slipping quietly into Elaine's room to look at her on and off through the night, and still felt she had not looked enough.
Thinking of how Elaine had made her food with her own hands the evening before, Raea decided she ought not to let Elaine look after her.
In her eyes Elaine was the young master. Seeing to Elaine's daily needs was hers to do.
So she went into the kitchen, and stood in silence over a frying pan and a few eggs for a considerable while.
She was plainly not much good at any of this. The eggs had barely gone into the pan before the fat spat up at her and drove her back half a step, and by the time she had the spatula in hand again the edges of the whites had begun to blacken.
Raea frowned, turned the eggs over, made sure they were cooked through, and only then put them on a plate and cut two slices of black bread to go beside them. She had meant to warm the bread the way Elaine had done, but her attention wandered for a moment and a layer of scorch appeared across its surface.
She looked at it for a few seconds, and carried the breakfast to the table anyway. Having no talent whatever for cooking, Raea found it hard to judge whether what she had made was any good, but she ate her own portion regardless.
Only once it was in her mouth did she register the distance between Elaine's cooking and her own. Having forced her own breakfast down, Raea resolved that she would have to learn to cook properly.
Before leaving she took a dozen or so copper fen out of her purse and stacked them neatly beside the plate, then pulled out a slip of paper and wrote a few lines in a very tidy hand.
Breakfast is on the table.
If the money is not enough, you can wait until I am back.
Please do not go out on a whim, young master. — Raea
When Elaine woke, the only sound left in the flat was the clock. She came out of her room rubbing at her tangled silver hair, and saw the money and the note on the table at once.
"She even went and made breakfast..."
The corner of Elaine's mouth lifted slightly. She pulled out a chair and sat down, looked at the brown fried eggs with their scorched edges, and without thinking much about it took a bite.
Her jaw stopped almost immediately.
The edges of the egg were hard and bitter, the yolk was cooked dry, and the black bread had been toasted into something like a plank. Elaine chewed in silence for a good while before she could get it down at all.
"And this counts as breakfast..."
She said it out loud, and did not push the plate away. Instead she dipped the hardened bread in milk and worked through all of it, a little at a time.
The taste was genuinely not good. But thinking of Raea standing clumsily in the kitchen at first light struggling with all this, she found it was not, after all, entirely inedible.
When she had finished she put the plate and the cup together in the sink, counted the copper fen Raea had left again, and set them at the corner of the table with the note.
The money Raea had left was enough to cover a few days of the two of them living. But Elaine had no intention of being kept by her indefinitely.
Living here was imposition enough. If she had to wait for Raea to come home for the price of bread and vegetables as well, she would find it uncomfortable herself before long.
Elaine pulled the chair out and sat down again, laying the identity certificate, the remaining copper fen and a blank sheet of paper in front of her, and tried to set out where matters stood.
She had a legal identity. She had somewhere to live, for the moment. In the short term there was no danger of being taken away by the Judgment Tribunal as some sort of oddity. What was genuinely missing was an income to live on.
But this body of hers looked younger even than her age, and had far less strength in it than the old one, which ruled out mines and docks from the start.
Clerking for a chamber of commerce or a factory would at least draw on her experience managing the White holdings, but a young woman who had only just registered an identity, with no letter of recommendation, would struggle to be granted an interview at all.
As for making money out of modern knowledge, Elaine thought about it for a while and rapidly abandoned the more impractical schemes.
She knew the broad principles of steam engines and production lines and any number of modern goods, but knowing the principle did not mean building one from nothing, and whether she opened a workshop or reworked a machine, either would need capital far beyond a dozen copper fen.
Elaine slumped forward onto the table and pushed one of the fen about with a fingertip, watching it roll a short way along the grain before she put out a hand and stopped it.
"Find some kind of work I can actually do, at least."
Going on sitting here would not make anything fall out of the sky. She put the identity certificate carefully away, got up and went to the window. The shops along the street were opening one after another, and a fair crowd had gathered at the noticeboard by the bridgehead looking for day work.
Elaine watched for a while, and in the end put her coat on and pressed Raea's "do not go out on a whim" note back down onto the table.
Having a look around Greybridge hardly counted as going out on a whim.
Thinking about the outside world, she did privately want to impose on Viola one more time, given that she was the young lady of House Rosenfeld.
Except that Viola had already sorted the whole identity problem out for her, and Elaine genuinely could not bring herself to go and impose again.
The two of them had been strangers to begin with, and how to thank her at all was already a problem.
Elaine was just about to open the door when a faint scraping of metal came from the other side of the sitting room. The half-open window was pushed in from outside, a fine line with a silver grappling hook on it caught over the frame, and Viola swung across from the roof next door with her skirts pressed flat against her legs by the wind, very nearly kicking over the flowerpot beside the window as she landed.
She caught the pot quickly and straightened her long purple hair as though nothing whatsoever had happened.
"Good morning." Seeing that Elaine had been about to go out, she greeted her as if this were entirely unremarkable.
Elaine stood holding the door handle and looked at her for a while, and in the end could not let it pass.
"Do none of you Rosenfelds know what a door is for?"
She could not work out why this young lady's every entrance had to be so distinctive, why it always had to be the window.
"No, I only think that since this is an infiltration, one obviously can't use the front door. Obviously one goes in by the window." Viola coiled up the line and turned her attention to Elaine's face.
"So what brings Miss Rosenfeld here this time?"
Seeing Viola so thoroughly unbothered, the Elaine who had just been working out how to thank her rather lost her grip on it, and decided she might as well ask what the girl had come for first.
"Nothing serious. I've lost something."
Viola sat down in a chair to one side and held up her fingers in their white silk gloves, several metal rings still on them.
They were all Sacred Objects, and there were several gaps between them.
"After I got home yesterday I found two of my rings were missing. They aren't worth much in themselves, but the seal-issue numbers are engraved on the inside, and if somebody stole them and put them on the market, it could cause me a certain amount of trouble."
Her tone had noticeably more irritation in it by the end.
"I've been back over everywhere I went yesterday, and the likeliest place is the Red Vein Relief Society, or that street nearby."
In truth Viola suspected theft rather than loss. The Lower City held every sort of person, and running into a few pickpockets there was nothing out of the ordinary.
She raised her eyes, and for once did not put on the manner of a young lady giving an instruction.
"So... could you come back there with me? Going through things in a place like that on my own is a little strange."
Viola looked rather embarrassed about it, and then put her palms together as though begging Elaine outright.
She had even slipped out today without telling anybody, calling for neither the family carriage nor a servant.
Elaine looked at her and was silent for a moment. The refusal had reached her lips when it occurred to her that her legal identity was Viola's doing, and that if she would not help with this, she might as well pull up a chair and sit down to dinner with the animals.