No More Than The Beginning

The remark it had tacked on at the end was obnoxious, but the smile never left Dong-hui’s face. She had come away with a whole 800p of Hidden Points.

This time I’m definitely getting the Inventory expanded.

Whatever temptation came her way, she told herself, she would expand the Inventory first, come what may. She was still turning the plan over, giddy with it, when Scrooge went on with his account of the finances.

How much money was left just now did not trouble her in the slightest. Money she could have in whatever quantity she liked, simply by fetching jewels over and trading them, and she felt certain there was a great deal more to be earned from here on.

“And so, to see the road passing below Morta and Enol through to completion, we anticipate a further 200 gold at the very least.”

Scrooge watched the lord’s face as he reported it, worrying what he would do if she flew into a rage over how much the works were costing. However much money had come into the estate, 200 gold was no small sum in Grace.

Contrary to his fears, though, the lord answered with hearty good cheer.

“Never mind the cost of the works. Build me a road so sturdy it will never break down however long it is used. A road that will not wash away in the rain, that will not throw up dust, level and broad. The sort of road that will take two or three carriages passing at once without the least trouble. Understood?”

The treasurer had been drawing up the plans himself, and think as he might, he could not feel sure the Grace estate would ever have any use for a road that broad and that long. The money being poured into the works was no trifle either, and whether a toll on it could ever earn that back was anyone’s guess.

Reading the peculiar look on Scrooge’s face, Dong-hui grinned and went on with her explanation.

“The road will be no more than the beginning. Even now I hear a great many merchants go the long way around our estate to reach Heron. Think about it. If they take the road we build, the merchants have to pay a toll, true, but they cut their time down sharply. To them, time is money. And a merchant who has to carry fresh goods quickly will need that road all the more. Not only that, there would be clean, excellent lodgings to break the journey at, and all sorts of places to rest, eating houses and the like. It means our own estate’s residents get any number of ways to make a living that are not farming.”

From what she had seen when she studied the map, the Grace estate sat at a key crossing on the way through to the Middle Continent.

“M-my lady.”

Scrooge’s mouth fell open as though his jaw would come loose, and he marveled. Her ladyship had changed, yes, but he had never dreamed it went this far. His fingertips trembled with excitement and expectation.

“Treasurer.”
“Yes, my lady.”

Scrooge answered with a sniffle, overcome. The tip of his nose had gone redder than before. Nor was that all. The hand holding the financial documents was quivering.

“Are you cold? Why is your hand shaking like that? You hardly seem old enough yet for shaking hands.”

She asked with her eyes on his trembling hands, thinking she had better get the other parts of the supermarket opened up soon and bring back at least one pair of warm gloves.

“It is not that, my lady. It is only that I am so very moved. I truly did not know my lady thought of the estate’s residents to such a degree. My lady!”

The fervor in Scrooge’s gaze was more than Dong-hui could take, and she looked quietly away.

“Until the day I lie down in my coffin, I shall do my utmost to serve my lady.”

Scrooge bowed deeply from the waist.

— Crack!

“Urk!”

Out of the back he had bent so deeply in his emotion came a savage sound of bone knocking against bone. The mellow smile he had bowed with twisted for an instant, but he patted his back a few times and slowly straightened up.

— Cra-a-ack!

“Ow, my back!”
“Are you all right? You haven’t thrown your back out, have you?”

At the worried question Scrooge broke into a bright, easy smile, as though he had never felt a twinge in his life, spread his arms for her to see and worked his back this way and that. Each time he did, there came a crack, crack.

“S-stop that! Don’t move your back!”

Dong-hui tried hurriedly to stop him, but Scrooge moved his back a few more times, gave a crisp smile and left the study.

“Will he be all right? That was an awfully loud sound.”

The moment Scrooge was out of the study, the status window flashed up again as though it had been waiting for exactly that.

“You’re only giving me numbers? If it’s multiple choice, there ought to be something written next to them.”

“It isn’t all decided already, is it?”

The status window pretended not to have heard and repeated itself word for word. Dong-hui puzzled a moment over which number to pick, decided it probably made no difference, and settled on number one.

“Number one!”

Eggs.

Dong-hui could not gauge whether she ought to be pleased or disappointed, and after wavering over it she smiled. Besides, if she carried fertilized eggs over and hatched them, she might get a chicken farm out of it.

“Still, it’s something I didn’t have before. That’s good, I suppose. Thanks. Thank-yew.”

“My humanity was pretty decent to begin with. And the sun rises in the east¹ to begin with.”

Dong-hui scolded it in the tone of someone asking how it could not know even that much, and the status window edged a hand’s breadth closer and glittered blue.

“Really?”

Astonished all over again, Dong-hui stuck her head right out of the window and looked around. But the status window was right about her: she had very little sense of direction, and no amount of looking was going to tell her east from west.

She shrugged and turned back around, and the sight of the status window slipping hurriedly away left her furious.

“Why, that—!”

Dong-hui raised a fist as though to take a swing at it, and the status window hurriedly scrubbed the short sentence away and vanished from in front of her eyes.

Word came that some of the winter coats for the children were finished. Dong-hui ran the whole way there without stopping for breath, and the sight of them heaped up in a mountain delighted her so much that she clapped her hands.

“Good heavens! You made all of this already?”

In an age without so much as a sewing machine, it was hard to believe that fewer than ten seamstresses had turned out this many garments in so short a time. All told, the clothes they had made came to nearly fifty.

Apart from the few made up as samples, though, every one of them was small. Dong-hui glanced around her, and quick-witted Monel caught the lord’s unspoken question and answered it.

“We thought it best to finish the clothes for the youngest children first. From here on we mean to make coats for children of around ten.”

They had gone about the work on the understanding that the younger a child was, the less it could stand the cold. Tell Monel one thing, and she would grasp two or three more left unsaid, then get straight on with it; Dong-hui admired her planning and her drive from the bottom of her heart.

A coat of thick cloth would never be as warm as a duck-down padded coat or a fur one, but set against what the children were wearing now it would be a world better.

Dong-hui ran her palm carefully over the finished coats, as though they were the children themselves. Picturing the children delighted with their new clothes brought a smile to her lips of its own accord.

“It will be hard work, but bear with it a little longer. There are still a great many children left who have yet to get a coat.”
“Yes, my lady. We shall do our utmost.”
“How about we all take this afternoon off and go together to hand the coats out to the children?”

She wanted the tailors to put the clothes they had made into the children’s hands themselves and feel that it had been worth something. Quite apart from any reward, she was certain it would put great life into the work ahead, and that was why she asked.

“May we really?”

Monel asked it with her eyes shining. To judge by the look of them, the other tailors were all of one mind about it too.

“Of course. We’ll go to Morta and Enol, hand the children their clothes, and have something good to eat in the evening.”
“Thank you, my lady!”

Cheers went up here and there. Dong-hui meant to have a lavish supper laid on for the tailors, who had been shut up in that workroom all this while doing nothing but sew themselves half to death.

“My lady.”

She was looking over the tailors, well pleased, when Monel called to her cautiously.

“What is it?”

Monel still could not quite believe she was allowed to speak at all to a lord as far above her as the sky.

“Might I write to my friends and tell them to come and work at Grace Castle?”

Even as she asked, Monel was afraid of being shouted at, and her voice shook without her meaning it to. Part of it was that the work was more than they could manage, but it was also that she could not put her old workmates at the dress shop out of her mind, laboring night and day and never even paid properly.

“Of course. There is far too much to be done here, so tell them to come quickly. Board and lodging are free, needless to say. You know that?”

Dong-hui gave the answer with a slight wink, and a bright smile broke over Monel’s face. The moment the lord had finished, voices went up here and there saying that they would write to their friends too.

So this is how the talented flock to Grace.

She smiled contentedly, imagining the fashion district that might spring up somewhere or other in the Grace estate.

City of youth, holy land of fashion — Grrrayce!
Though wouldn’t Ha Dong-hui Street be rather good as well?

Just imagining it put her in a fine mood. At the heart of it, of course, would be engraved the name of Chloe Grace herself.