Ilona rubbed her cold hands together, trying to get some warmth into the delicate bones of her fingers, cramped from the labour and covered in small wrinkles from the cold water.

‘Let me see?’ Swallow asked quietly, holding out her own hands, worn and used to the work so that she had no need to rub the kinks out of them.

Ilona picked up the undershirt she had been washing and passed it over, careful to keep it above their twin tubs of water so that the drips would not go onto the floor, even though it was only the rough stone floor of the laundry room. She had been scrubbing the same shirt for so long, trying to remove all traces of dirt from it the way that Swallow had shown her, but she knew full well that the other girl had managed to wash at least three nightdresses and a couple of shirts within the same space of time. There was a quiet tension within her as Swallow examined her work, looking it over with a careful eye and frowning intently.

‘You’ve done alright,’ she said after a moment, though she surreptitiously added it to the pile of clothes that she was still working on, and Ilona heaved a sigh.

‘I’m lost with all of this,’ she said, feeling miserable and useless. ‘I’ve never learnt any of it. I’ve hands for painting, not for washing.’

Though it might have been easy for Swallow to take offence at that, to tell her that there was nothing wrong with her hands either and that she might have been good at painting if she had been born into the gold class and had ever had a chance, she upheld her sympathetic tone and tried to help her instead.

‘Think of it as if it is painting, then,’ she replied, getting back to work on another piece of clothing. ‘You use water to get your colours onto the painting, right? In this kind of work, we’re just using water to get the colours off. That’s all the difference is.’

Ilona nodded, though she remained a little unconvinced, and picked up the next shirt in her pile. They were not her family’s clothes – not yet; she was only to be trusted with the uniforms of the servants since she was so new at this whole thing, but in time she knew she would be expected to work on the fancier dresses and undergarments and shirts and trousers, the ones that needed real care for their fine fabrics. The ones that had once been hers. She sighed a little, feeling the way that the material of her new uniform still scratched uncomfortably at her skin, and tried to focus on what she was doing.

She was glad at least to be alone with Swallow in the stone laundry room. Bare and utilitarian, it served its purpose well, but it was not a place that others would want to come unless they had cause to. They had the space to themselves, therefore, and it allowed them to work in a kind of companionable quiet, rather than having to endure the stares and whispers of the other servants who worked in the main part of the house, and for that Ilona was grateful. Until now she had relished attention, desired the way that everyone would look at her when her father threw a ball and she entered the room on her mother’s arm, but this kind of attention was another thing entirely.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said at length, after a few minutes more of sloshing the shirt around uselessly in the cloudy, cold water.

‘Don’t worry. It’s your first try, you will get the hang of it in time,’ Swallow began, but Ilona cut her off.

‘No, I mean for landing you in this situation. If I had not done... what I did, you would still be stoking the fire in my room and laying out nice clothes for me to wear, or else fetching my horse from the stables for me. Not scrubbing away on your knees in this dungeon of a room.’

Swallow half-laughed, and threw her a look. ‘It’s true, my work was more comfortable before. But don’t imagine I avoided this even when I was your maid. We’ve all got to muck in together here or else nothing gets done at all, and with the way you used to ride that horse I was always scrubbing mud off your nice shoes and the hems of your dresses. It’s only been three years since I was your maid, remember, and I’ve been working here since I was old enough to do anything at all, so this kind of thing is what I’m used to.’

Ilona chuckled quietly to herself, a more rueful sound than one of mirth. ‘Yes, I was always terribly inconsiderate when I went riding, wasn’t I? I was just showing off, you know. The other nobles always splash right through the streams and the mud, especially the Lords’ sons. I just thought it was a great bit of fun – I never thought of you having to get it all clean afterwards.’

‘How long were you...’ Swallow trailed off, and looked at her guiltily. ‘Forgive me, my lady, for thinking to ask, but...’

‘How long was I with Griffin?’ Ilona replied, her voice coming out strange on that word, as if it belonged to someone else. ‘You don’t have to call me my lady any more, we’ve been over this. And it was... it was a little over a year, I suppose.’

‘That long?’ Swallow burst out, surprised enough to stop working for a second and stare at her. ‘I never suspected! Well, we guessed it in those last few months I suppose, but... a year? All those times you snuck off to the garden and we thought you were studying outside, I’ve no doubt. I did often think, now it comes to my head, that you’d come back a little happier, and sometimes your clothes would be all creased as if – but forgive me again, I’m out-stepping my bounds. It’s just so strange for you to hide it all this time!’

Ilona smiled, almost feeling a little proud of what she had managed to keep secret for so long. ‘It was difficult, yes. I wanted so much to tell someone else about how wonderful it all was. But as soon as he was gone from me each time, it was as though a secret door came down on that part of my life and I was back to being the other kind of me again, and I could not even dream of discussing it. I thought of telling you, but I knew you would be in trouble too if Papa ever found out.’ She frowned a little to think of her father again, but tried to push it aside and focus a little harder on scrubbing the shirt in her tub.

‘Was it really wonderful?’ Swallow asked, and there was some kind of strange hope in her voice. Ilona looked at her through new eyes, and realised that the older girl had probably never experienced any kind of romance – how could she, with so much work to do every day, and always having to keep out of sight as much as possible so that the daily running of the house did not disrupt the lives of the people in it?

‘It was,’ she replied, and though the thought was painful to her, she pursued it for Swallow’s sake. ‘I know they say you’re not really old enough at sixteen to know what love is, but I fell for him that summer, I truly did. And I loved him... no, I love him, enough to risk all of it.’

‘I can’t imagine how you even met. The field hands are supposed to keep to the fields, after all,’ Swallow replied, going back to her work suddenly as if remembering that she had stopped, and Ilona followed suit.

‘I’ll tell you, if you like,’ she replied after a moment of consideration, and Swallow’s eager nod was all the encouragement that she needed to steel herself and go ahead. She spoke despite the ache at the back of her throat that seemed at times determined to overwhelm her voice and drown it instead with the grief that she had spent hours already fighting against.