The Wizard of London by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online Page B

threshold.
    But
today Mem’sab was only reading a book, and looked up at Nan with a smile
that transformed her plain face and made her eyes bright and beautiful.
    By
now Nan had seen plenty of ladies who dressed in finer stuffs than
Mem’sab’s simple Artistic gown of common fabric, made bright with
embroidery courtesy of Maya. Nan had seen the pictures of ladies who were
acknowledged Beauties like Mrs.Lillie Langtry, ladies who obviously spent many
hours in the hands of their dressers and hairdressers rather than pulling their
hair up into a simple chignon from which little curling strands of brown-gold were
always escaping. Mem’sab’s jewelry was not of diamonds and gold,
but odd, heavy pieces in silver and semiprecious gems. But in Nan’s eyes,
not one of those other ladies was worth wasting a single glance upon.
    Then
again, Nan was a little prejudiced.
    “Come
in, Nan,” the headmistress said, patting the flowered sofa beside her
invitingly. “You’re doing much better already, you know. You have a
quick ear.”
    “Thankee,
Mem’sab,” Nan replied, flushing with pleasure. She, like any of the
servants, would gladly have laid down her life for Mem’sab Harton; they
all worshipped her blatantly, and a word of praise from their idol was worth
more than a pocketful of sovereigns. Nan sat gingerly down on the
chintz-covered sofa and smoothed her clean pinafore with an unconscious gesture
of pride.
    Mem’sab
took a book of etiquette from the table beside her, and opened it, looking at
Nan expectantly. “Go ahead, dear.”
    “Good
morning, ma’am. How do you do? I am quite well. I trust your family is
fine,” Nan began, and waited for Mem’sab’s response, which
would be her cue for the next polite phrase. The point here was not that Nan
needed to learn manners and mannerly speech, but that she needed to lose the
dreadful cadence of the streets which would doom her to poverty forever, quite
literally. Nan spoke the commonplace phrases slowly and with great care, as
much care as Sarah took over her French. An accurate analogy, since the
King’s English, as spoken by the middle and upper classes, was nearly as
much a foreign language to Nan as French and Latin were to Sarah.
    She
had gotten the knack of it by thinking of it exactly as a foreign language,
once Mem’sab had proven to her how much better others would treat her if
she didn’t speak like a guttersnipe. She was still fluent in the language
of the streets, and often went out with Karamjit as a translator when he went
on errands that took him into the slums or the street markets. But gradually
her tongue became accustomed to the new cadences, and her habitual speech
marked her less as “untouchable.”
    “Beautifully
done,” Mem’sab said warmly when Nan finished her recitation.
“Your new assignment will be to pick a poem and recite it to me, properly
spoken, and memorized.”
    “I
think I’d loike—like—to do one uv Mr.Kipling’s,
Mem’sab,” Nan said shyly.
    Mem’sab
laughed. “I hope you aren’t thinking of ‘Gunga Din,’
you naughty girl!” the woman mock-chided. “It had better be one
from the
Jungle Book
, or
Just So Stories
, not something
written in Cockney dialect!”
    “Yes,
Mem’sab, I mean, no, Mem’sab,” Nan replied quickly.
“I’ll pick a right’un. Mebbe the lullaby for the White Seal?
You
mustn’t swim till you’re six weeks old, or your head will be sunk
by your heels
—?” Ever since discovering Rudyard
Kipling’s stories, Nan had been completely enthralled; Mem’sab
often read them to the children as a go-to-bed treat, for the stories often
evoked memories of India for the children sent away.
    “That
will do very well. Are you ready for the other lesson?” Mem’sab
asked, so casually that no one but Nan would have known that the “other
lesson” was one not taught in any other school in this part of the world.
    “I—think
so.” Nan got up and closed the parlor door, signaling to all the