“Is that why you’re alone?” Rosalin asked eventually, brown eyes squinting searchingly. “You got no ring on your finger. No husband. You left him because of how he treated you?”
Silver didn’t answer. She merely dropped her gaze and looked away. Sometimes silence and the right reaction worked better than vocalised untruths. Spoken lies had a way of coming back to bite people. This wasn’t a lie, however. This was merely allowing the washerwoman to come to her own conclusions, to believe what she wanted, to create the common ground for herself.
“He’s not a bad man,” Rosalin eventually said with a deep sigh. “He’s just… set in his ways.”
“He was good to you at first,” Rajana guessed. Arranged marriages were much more uncommon this far North, suggesting that Rosalin had chosen to wed the man herself. “Gentle and kind. He treated you well, he made you feel like the only woman in the world. Special. Loved.”
The woman dropped her gaze down to her tea. A precise guess then.
“But over time, things changed,” Rajana pressed on softly. “Now, you suffer the indignities, the broken promises that it will never happen again, the pain, the spite, the resentment, in the hopes that one day the kind man, the good man you so dearly love will return to you.”
“I don’t love him,” Rosalin spat hotly. “Not any more. I’ve wanted him gone for years!” She paused, eyeing Rajana again. “I guess that means you’re not a witch after all, though, else you’d have known that already.”
“I’m really not,” Rajana smiled wryly. “I’m just a traveller who happened to be having a very bad day and drinking alone because of it.”
“He likes the drunk ones,” Rosalin harrumphed.
“I imagine so. It’s easier to get what you want from someone who’s not thinking straight.”
“You’ve had a lot of experience with that?”
“A woman travelling alone; I’ve had my fair share.”
Rosalin sucked on her lower lip for a time, peering down at her tea again. It was almost gone now, just dregs remaining. Rajana put her own empty cup down carefully upon the wooden surface, her gaze never leaving the older woman across the table.
“Look, I’m sorry about the tomato,” Rosalin said at length, a knot in her deeply furrowed brow.
“It’s alright,” Rajana offered an easy forgiveness for what was, to her mind, a trivial incident. “A wife acting in defence of her husband. That’s to be expected. You were standing by him, as is your duty. You’re a good woman, Rosalin, to do so in spite of everything.”
“Still, it wasn’t right,” Rosalin huffed unhappily. “He don’t deserve defending these days. I should have known he’d started it, but they were all talking about curses and witches and then he started going on about how he was feeling sick and couldn’t get out of bed and I just thought…” she trailed off with a somewhat sheepish expression which quickly turned into a scowl toward the door. “He’s been having me on, hasn’t he? Lying about all of it to get my sympathy! I’ve been waiting on him hand and foot!”
Rajana wasn’t given the opportunity to reply. Rather, Rosalin pushed her chair back with such force that the pained screech of wood scoring wood almost made her teeth ache. She watched as the shorter, heavyset woman clenched her fists and strode toward the exit with a face like thunder and a determination fit to challenge mountains.
She smiled to herself, leaning comfortably back in the chair as she basked in the heat of the flames. That had gone better than expected, and quicker too. It wouldn’t solve things immediately, of course; the rumours had already had several days to take root and the truth always travelled that much slower. Lies were easier to swallow, especially amongst those more willing to believe out of superstition and xenophobia.
Now, she surmised, Rosalin would go home, force her wayward husband out of bed and to admit the truth. Word would get around that he’d been faking it. No one gossiped more than fishwives and washerwomen, after all. This, coupled with Curnden’s attempts to smooth down the bristles on the guardsmen, should soon bring matters back in hand and down to the more acceptable level of background distrust for those of a clearly foreign appearance. Meanwhile, Scanie’s penchant for creative story-telling and the rumours she had planted around town should serve as a perfect distraction for the townspeople.
The biggest concern now was whether or not the husband would strike back. Perhaps it was time to send Scanie to the East after the others. There was no need to get the girl caught up in any potential unpleasantness.
