Thendara House by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Author:Marion Zimmer Bradley [Bradley, Marion Zimmer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Science Fiction, Usernet, C429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 0886772400
Publisher: DAW
Published: 1983-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

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CHAPTER FOUR

Magda was beginning to feel restless, almost claustrophobic; the women were friendlier, even Rafaella, but she was so tired of being indoors; sometimes she would step into the garden just to breathe the air of freedom. Even, she thought wryly, if the air of freedom smells a little too much of the stables!

She was still wearing castoffs from the box of outworn clothing, but tradition demanded that she must make herself a full set of clothing before the end of her housebound half year. She understood, after a fashion, why this was so - women of the upper classes, coming to the Renunciates, were accustomed to wearing clothing made only by the labor of servants and others, and it was necessary that they should know the cost of their labor. Keitha, on the other hand, enjoyed a chance to sit and sew and was now covering the neck and sleeves of her new undertunic, with daintily embroidered butterflies. Magda envied the ease with which she did it.

“Oh, this is restful for me,” Keitha said. “At any moment Marisela may summon me out to attend a confinement, so I will rest and embroider while I can - “

“It is not restful for me,” Magda said, biting her lip as she stabbed her finger again with the needle. “I would rather muck out barns than sew a single seam!”

“That is obvious from your work,” said Keitha, examining the stitches with a critical eye. “What was your mother thinking of!”

“She was a musician,” Magda said, “and I do not think she could sew any better than I can; she was always busy with her lute, or with her translations.” Elizabeth Lorne had played nine instruments, and had collected over three hundred mountain folk-songs of Darkover. Magda, who had little musical talent, had not been close to her mother, though in these last months she had been more and more aware of how like her mother she was, absorbed in her work, craving something to do for herself. She wondered, now when it was too late to know, what her mother’s marriage had really been like. She had surely not let herself be consumed in David Lorne’s career among the Terrans but had always done her own work…

‘’ My mother said I must never ask a servant to do anything for me that I could not do for myself,” Keitha said. “Otherwise a lady is slave to her own servants. Now I am grateful for it, though I do not like to work with horses. But Marisela says I must learn to attend to my own horses and saddle and tack, because a midwife is required to go by law to any woman within a day’s journey who has need of her, and farther if she can. And Marisela says I may not always have serving men or women to look after my animals for me.”

Magda smiled a little; Marisela says had become the most important words in Keitha’s vocabulary. Magda

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