gnimaerd | Fic: The Lady and the Blacksmith's Daughter (pt.1 of 3)

Title: The Lady and the Blacksmith's Daughter
Rating: PG
Characters: Gwen, Morgana
Genre: Gen, friendship
Summary: The story of how Gwen became employed as Morgana's maid, and how their relationship progressed into friendship; first part of three.

A/N: Written for the Gwen Battle fic challenge, beta-ed by

clanne .

The Lady and the Blacksmith's Daughter

Morgana was in the kitchens, screaming.

She was ten years old; a red faced, pink-eyed, wild haired demon of a child, who thrashed and swore and spat as her nursemaid begged her to calm herself.

But this particular orphan was long past the point at which she was in control of her own actions. Her howls were ragged with grief, her balled fists flying against anyone who dared get too close, her entire body wracked with hysterical sobs –

“I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” The only intelligible words that managed to get past her lips, each assertion of hatred more vehement than the last, “I hate you! I hate you! I want my old – ” a cough “ – nurse back! I want my home back! I want my father back!”

The last screamed with such desolation that Gwen was given pause.

She was under a table and, like most of the other staff, trying to ignore the commotion so that she could keep scrubbing the floor, for the kitchen overseer was want to crack her knuckles with a willow rod if she stopped for any other reason than that she was finished.

There was a crash, as the child tipped a great platter of dirty crockery off a table and onto the floor – upturned a chair, kicked a cupboard and then began to throw herself against it so violently that Gwen began to fear that she would injure herself.

“Mistress! Mistress Morgana, please!”

Her nurse’s meek protestations were so inadequate that it might have been comic had the situation not been so obviously dire.

Morgana was screaming again – wordlessly, frantically screaming – the kind of feverish, animalistic sound that tended towards making superstitious people claim possession.

Gwen was not a superstitious person.

The king’s new ward was about to do herself or someone else a serious injury, and no one was trying to stop her.

So the young kitchen maid did the first, most sensible thing that she could think of. She got up from under the table, pushed her soap-wet hair out of her eyes, picked up her bucket of freezing, dirty water, and upended it over the screaming child.

There was a single moment of stunned silence.

Morgana had promptly stopped shrieking, in order to stand perfectly still, her mouth and eyes agape as the water continued to run through her hair and drip into a fast-forming pool about her feet.

Her nurse seemed no less flabbergasted.

Gwen looked about her, nervously, then set the bucket down.

When it became apparent that the entire kitchen was waiting for someone to say something, she stepped forward.

“Now – now – look,” she began, as firmly as she could, “you ought to be ashamed, making such a spectacle of yourself. I’m sure you’re a… a perfectly dignified, proper young lady – and – and your father wouldn’t like to see you being such perfect little… banshee. I know that you must be awfully upset but that’s no reason to… to make yourself so sick. Now – here – ” she snatched up the cloth from the nearest table, roughly dried off the girl’s face and then wrapped the sheet about her shoulders. “You come and sit here – in front of the fire – and dry off and calm down and then I’m sure your nurse will take you upstairs to change your clothes, alright? And no more of this nonsense. You can cry all you like – but you shouldn’t go about destroying things that aren’t yours. It’s very rude.”

And, much to everyone’s surprise, Morgana nodded, and meekly allowed herself to be led over to a chair by the fire where she sat quite perfectly still for nearly an hour.

Gwen lost her job the next day. There was no given explanation – a kitchen girl of barely thirteen years of age could not expect one – but Gwen did not have to think too hard to suspect that her treatment of the king’s ward might have had something to do with it.

She traipsed back home to her father, tearful and ashamed, for what few pennies the job in the castle had earned her had been enough to pay the rent on their house on time; enough for a little extra food – and now her father would start skipping meals again when business was slow in his smithy, so that she could eat.

It felt worse, somehow, that he wasn’t angry with her. That he was more concerned that she was upset – taking her on his knee as he hadn’t done since she was much younger, and patting her back as he hushed her. Telling her not to be so concerned, for it was only money, and she would find other work.

But Gwen didn’t.

The job in the castle had been a favour granted by one of the older kitchen maids; now she could not get another job in the castle, and there were few people in the town who were willing to take on someone so young and unskilled. She had no formal training except at her father’s craft, from having watched him, and no self-respecting blacksmith would take on a young girl as an apprentice. She was not strong enough, they said. It was not suitable work for a woman, they said.

Gwen helped in her father’s smithy instead, counting money and seeing to customers and stoking the fire. She ran all about the town finding good food that was well-priced, trying to make sure their money lasted outside of the tournament season, when her father received most of his business. She tried to cook good meals.

After some months, she finally found work as a seamstress in the dress-maker’s on the same street as her father’s smithy. It was tiring, boring, thankless work that gave her a terrible ache in her back from spending so many hours hunched over her work, and her fingers developed blisters and bled from the constant yank and pull of the rough material she had to work with. Her employer, though kind-hearted, was strict and spent a great deal of time hovering over Gwen’s shoulder shrieking in outrage every time she went crooked or lost a stitch.

But the money was well enough – even a little better than she had made as a kitchen-girl – and after the first few weeks she began to feel as if she knew a little more about what she was doing, and her seams no longer went crooked so easily, and her employer did not hover so constantly. Gwen wrapped her hands in her sleeves at home, so that her father would not noticed the sores and blisters, and smiled and nodded when he asked her, a little anxiously, whether she enjoyed her work.

This job served well for several years after that. The work was not always constant – sometimes the dress-maker (an elderly woman who had never married) didn’t need her; sometimes she could not afford to pay Gwen. Sometimes she lost her temper and shrieked at her for hours on end. But Gwen knew she was lucky to be employed at all, for the uncertain climate and several wars with neighbouring kingdoms were making money increasingly difficult to come by. She was aware of more and more people looking for work – a steady stream of young boys asking if her father needed an apprentice, an assistant or a skivvy.

Little children began to turn up at the doorstep of their home, their eyes big in their thin faces, clothes worn and patched and never quite fitting, asking if she wanted anything cleaning or an errand run for a penny or two.

Sometimes Gwen did not have the heart to turn them away; sometimes she simply had to – for she had nothing to pay them with.

The winter that she turned seventeen, the dress-maker finally let her go permanently. She was growing too old to work, and was moving to stay with her sister and her family on the other side of the town – and anyway, she had not had the money to pay Gwen what she was due in several weeks. She gave her what she was owed in spare cloth instead, and Gwen could not tell her how much more desperately she needed the coins.

In years gone by, she might have been able to trade linen for food – but not any more.

Gwen began to help in her father’s smithy again. They missed the money, but Gwen was more glad than she could say to be able to keep her father company during the day again.

She thought briefly of getting married. The butcher’s son from two streets down called on her a few times and brought her flowers and trinkets and said sweet things. He was very kind – and she lingered a little over him. But if she married him, she would have to live with him and his family in what was already an over-crowded house, for he had seven younger siblings and his parents and grandparents and an uncle or two all living there already. And though they were all perfectly decent people, Gwen could not imagine being comfortable in such a place.

She preferred the sparse comfort of just her father and herself. The quiet and the peace of it. She did not want to be the wife of a butcher’s son: it seemed altogether too ordinary a thing to be – and besides, she didn’t love him.

So she eventually stopped receiving the butcher’s son’s trinkets, and told him to go after Widow Charlotte’s niece, instead, for she would be a better wife than Gwen. The butcher’s son married neither of them and skulked around the end of her street for a few months after, but Gwen knew she could have none of him.

She was helping in her father’s smithy again, one bleak February afternoon, when the girl appeared.

She was a great deal taller than when Gwen had last seen her; her face was thinner and her limbs leaner, though her chest and hips had swollen in preparation for a fast approaching womanhood. Her hair was longer and better brushed. Her dress was plain but she was given away by the cloak, which was deep purple, velvet and lined with fur.

No commoner was going to be wearing such a garment – let alone the supple leather boots with such delicate silver clasps.

It was most definitely Morgana – fifteen years old now, by Gwen’s estimation – and starting to be quite beautiful, in a slightly coltish, uncertain way. She moved with the air of one who was unsure of what to do with her arms and legs – as if they had outgrown her without her knowledge and now she was struggling to adjust.

“Hello?” Her accent was crisp and clear and delicately lilting. She stood in the doorway of Tom’s forge with her chin lifted defiantly, as if she were waiting for someone to question her presence there.

Gwen’s father paused, abruptly. “Can I help you, my lady?”

“I’m looking for a girl,” the young noblewoman replied, a little haughtily, “older than me but not by much. Have you a daughter named Gwen?”

Gwen, hidden in the back of the smithy, felt her heart freeze as she peered out. Was the noblewoman angry? Had she held a grudge against Gwen for all these years? Had she come to exact some horrible revenge?

None the wiser, however, Tom was nodding. “Guinevere? Yes – she’s here – Gwen!” He called her, and Gwen took a deep breath before appearing, hastily wiping off her sooty hands on her apron. “There’s a lady asking for you.”

Gwen smiled, nervously, and dropped a curtsy.

Morgana smiled back – she looked just as uneasy – and back-stepped out of the doorway and into the street again. “I want to talk to you. Can you come outside?”

Gwen glanced hesitantly at her father, who only nodded, a bemused but encouraging smile turning up the corners of his mouth – so she followed the noblewoman outside.

Morgana stood under the eve of the smithy, a little off the street, her arms folded protectively across her chest. She looked completely out of place here, Gwen realised – and she was unaccompanied. Surely a noblewoman was not meant to just wonder into common sections of the town without a chaperone? Particularly when she did not know the town very well, for Gwen was certain that if Morgana made a habit of walking the streets of Camelot, she would know about it. The girl was hardly going to be easy to miss.

“You’ve proved difficult to find, do you know that?” Morgana enquired, with distinctly false levity. “There are eight blacksmiths in Camelot. This is the sixth one I’ve been to this week. I’m rather glad I’ve tracked you down at last.”

“I’m… sorry,” Gwen managed, unable to think of anything else to say. She was aware that she must be very grubby looking in comparison to Morgana – for she had been working at building up the fire in her father’s forge and knew that she must have soot on her face and certainly her clothes were covered in coal dust.

“That was all I could find out, you see,” Morgana went on, “that your name was Gwen and your father was a blacksmith. At first all I had was your name, actually – do you know how many Gwens there are in Camelot?”

Gwen shook her head, and Morgana smiled, biting her lip. “Too many,” she told her, “but then someone in the kitchens said they thought they remembered that you were the daughter of blacksmith – so I thought, I might as well start there. And here you are. Not as tall as I remember, but I suppose that’s be expected. I’ve grown a great deal since the last time we met.”

“Yes,” Gwen agreed. So far, Morgana did not seem angry, so much as she seemed uneasy. Despite the fact that she was standing still, she would not stop moving; shifting her weight from leg to leg, flexing her fingers, flicking her hair out of her eyes.

“I just,” Morgana began again, abruptly – paused, bit her lip – nodded to herself then went on, “I wanted to say. That I am sorry, that you lost your job in the kitchens. I know it’s years ago now but I didn’t know. Uther must have found out about the water from my nurse and… but anyway, now it seems like it’s my fault, so I wanted to come and see if you were alright. I would have – before – but… I haven’t really been here. Uther sent me off, for a while, to a convent to… I don’t know – grow up, I suppose. He didn’t know what to do with me when I was little. Then I came back, last month, and I asked what had happened to you. You kind of stayed with me, you know. I think you did something very good for me, even if it cost you your job.”

Gwen tried hard not to betray her shock. She blinked a few times, wondering what she should say. Morgana was a very alien creature compared to the people she knew – she looked sort of delicate here, in the wet street under the grey sky, all porcelain skin and grey eyes the colour of a clouded sky, her plain clothes fine and clean and new. Gwen had no idea what to say to her – how to act towards her.

“I know it’s probably a silly thing to suggest but,” Morgana was fiddling with a ring on her finger, “if you have nothing else to do I am… in need of a maid and… thus far most of the candidates have been… unbearably dense. I suppose you strike me as better than that.” She pulled off the ring and held it out to Gwen, “if you’re interested, come to the castle and find me – my quarters are in the east wing; ask someone, they’ll tell you. Show the guards the ring and say I’ve asked for you.”

“Thank you,” Gwen managed. The ring was heavy and cold in the palm of her hand. It bore a strange insignia – Morgana’s own father’s, she supposed.

Morgana smiled again, briefly, then nodded, stepping away, apparently satisfied that her conscious had been sufficiently salved. “I suppose I’ll see you later, then – I must go back, before Uther realises I’m missing and turns the kingdom upside down.”

She had disappeared into the crowd before Gwen had a chance to tell her that she seriously doubted that she would make a particularly good maid.

“What did she want?” Her father was waiting for her inside, looking expectant.

“She… she offered me a job,” Gwen told him, showing him the ring.

The blacksmith raised his eyebrows, “what kind of job?”

“Her maid, I think,” Gwen frowned. “I… I don’t know how good I’d be…”

“She sought you out specifically to ask you to be her maid?” Her father looked incredulous – and a little proud, “clearly you have a reputation, Guinevere.”

“Father…” Gwen sighed, “I can’t be her servant – I’ve never done anything like that before. She’s nobility – I mean, what if I did something wrong and she had me executed?”

“Don’t be silly, Gwen,” her father shook his head, “firstly, you would be an excellent maid; you already cook and clean and tidy and take care of me perfectly well – secondly, the nobility do not execute their servants merely for making mistakes.”

Part two is here.