The Complete Farseer Trilogy. Robin Hobb

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       THIRTEEN

       Smithy

      The Lady Patience established her eccentricity at an early age. As a small child, her nursemaids found her stubbornly independent, and yet lacking the common sense to take care of herself. One remarked, ‘She would go all day with her laces undone because she could not tie them herself, yet would suffer no one to tie them for her.’ Before the age of ten, she had decided to eschew the traditional trainings befitting a girl of her rank, and instead interested herself in handicrafts that were very unlikely to prove useful: pottery, tattooing, the making of perfumes, and the growing and propagation of plants, especially foreign ones.

      She did not scruple to absent herself for long hours from supervision. She preferred the woodlands and orchards to her mother’s courtyards and gardens. One would have thought this would produce a hardy and practical child. Nothing could be further from the truth. She seemed to be constantly afflicted with rashes, scrapes and stings, was frequently lost, and never developed any sensible wariness toward man or beast.

      Her education came largely from herself. She mastered reading and ciphering at an early age, and from that time studied any scroll, book or tablet that came her way with avaricious and indiscriminate interest. Tutors were frustrated by her distractable ways and frequent absences that seemed to affect not at all her ability to learn almost anything swiftly and well. Yet the application of such knowledge interested her not at all. Her head was full of fancies and imaginings, she substituted poetry and music for logic and manners, she expressed no interest at all in social introductions and coquettish skills.

      And yet she married a prince, one who had courted her with a single-minded enthusiasm that was to be the first scandal to befall him.

      ‘Stand up straight!’

      I stiffened.

      ‘Not like that! You look like a turkey, drawn out and waiting for the axe. Relax more. No, put your shoulders back, don’t hunch them. Do you always stand with your feet thrown out so?’

      ‘Lady, he is only a boy. They are always so, all angles and bones. Let him come in and be at ease.’

      ‘Oh, very well. Come in, then.’

      I nodded my gratitude to a round-faced serving-woman who dimpled a smile at me in return. She gestured me toward a pewbench so bedecked with pillows and shawls that there was scarcely room left to sit. I perched on the edge of it and surveyed Lady Patience’s chamber.

      It was worse than Chade’s. I would have thought it the clutter of years if I had not known that she had only recently arrived. Even a complete inventory of the room could not have described it, for it was the juxtaposition of objects that made them remarkable. A feather fan, a fencing glove and a bundle of cattails were all vased in a well-worn boot. A small black terrier with two fat puppies slept in a basket lined with a fur hood and some woollen stockings. A family of carved-ivory walruses perched on a tablet about horse-shoeing. But the dominant elements were the plants. There were fat puffs of greenery overflowing clay pots, teacups and goblets, and buckets of cuttings and cut-flowers, and vines spilling out of handleless mugs and cracked cups. Failures were evident in bare sticks poking up out of pots of earth. The plants perched and huddled together in every location that would catch morning or afternoon sun from the windows. The effect was like a garden spilling in the windows and growing up around the clutter in the room.

      ‘He’s probably hungry, too, isn’t he, Lacey? I’ve heard that about boys. I think there’s some cheese and biscuits on the stand by my bed. Fetch them for him, would you, dear?’

      Lady Patience stood slightly more than arm’s distance away from me as she spoke past me to her lady.

      ‘I’m not hungry, really, thank you,’ I blurted out before Lacey could lumber to her feet. ‘I’m here because I was told … to make myself available to you, in the mornings, for as long as you wanted me.’

      That was a careful rephrasing. What King Shrewd had actually said to me was, ‘Go to her chambers each morning, and do whatever it is she thinks you ought to be doing so that she leaves me alone. And keep doing it until she is as weary of СКАЧАТЬ