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“If you wish, you could be their maid. If you wish. You’re not obliged. But it would give you a trade, and a safe place.” He was surprised at himself, taking any trouble over her.
“What would I do?”
“You would take them their breakfasts in the morning and help them wash and dress. You would clean their rooms and wash their linen. You would walk out with them when they wanted to go out, you would carry things for them and run errands. You would help them change their clothes in the evening and put them to bed at night. I suppose you would mend their clothes and arrange their hair.”
“They are babies? Little girls, who need help to dress and eat?”
“No, they are young ladies,” he said. “They are…” He thought for a moment. “Thirteen and twelve years old.”
She looked at him with the straight gaze of a young man, as if breeches made her honest in a way that a young lady in a sea of silk and lace and petticoats could never be. “No, I won’t do that.”
“You would be paid,” he told her, more hesitantly. “If you do well, you could go into service, and work your way up.”
“Up where?”
He laughed, but then realized it was a genuine question. “Up to another position. With a young lady of higher rank. And then up again. While you worked hard and pleased people you would rise.”
“No,” she said simply.
“But what else can you do?” he asked her.
“I am one of the People,” she told him again. “We are not born to be servants; nor slaves.”
“They’re not the same thing at all—” he began.
“Would you serve a young lady?” she demanded.
He laughed awkwardly. “Well, really, I could not.”
“A young gentleman? Fetch and carry for him, get him dressed, put him to bed? Spend your life in making him comfortable, as if he did not have hands and feet to fetch and carry for himself?”
“No!” he said. “I would not. But I am—” He broke off.
“You’re an Englishman,” she named him. “You have pride in your milk skin. You have pride in your wealth. You have pride in the things that you know, and no interest in the things that you don’t. You would serve nobody, because in your heart you think that nobody is above you.”
He could not disagree.
“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” she said gently. “But you must know that I am proud—just like you. I am proud of my brown skin and my hair as black and straight as an icicle. I too think that nobody is above me. You are an Englishman—and that seems a very great thing to you; but I am a child of the Dawnlands. To me, that is better.”
“The English are the greatest nation in the world…” he started. He could not explain to her the thousands of ships at sea, shipping cargo all around the world, guns to Africa, slaves to the New World, cotton and sugar on the homeward leg, goods to the Americas. His own hugely profitable trades in India: cotton, tea, silk. “You know nothing about my people.”
“You know nothing about mine.”
“But what will you do?” he demanded, as anxious as if he was the one alone in a strange country. “This is a hard city for young women. My uncle says you can’t go back to your home, that your tribe are all dead. How will you live if you don’t make money?”
She flinched as he called them a tribe, a dead tribe. “It’s not a hard city for me. Nowhere is hard for me but winter.”
“What if someone attacks you?”
She hid a smile. “No man puts a hand on me.”
“Oho? You can fight?” He meant to tease her; but the grave look she gave him told him that she could fight to the death.
“It is true, there is no home for me to go back to,” she conceded. “I shall have to find a way to live in this old world, this world of sunsets.” She paused for a moment, as if she realized what she had said. “Ah… it is an old world of sunsets.”
“All this about the dawn means nothing!” he exclaimed.
“It means nothing to you.”
