Evelyn locked the door behind him, and then the silence and emptiness enveloped the room. She loved the day time with all the people coming and going and John’s company. She sighed as she thought about what was left for the day: dinner, chores, and bed. 

While she cooked a simple stir fry skillet dinner over her wood burning stove she also boiled some drinking water in the kettle and the dish water in her large cast iron pot. 

When the kettle whistled she poured herself some hot water and put a single tea leaf in her water. With how expensive tea was she had to be careful with her usage of the tea leaves. She pulled the pot off the stove temporarily while she ate, and then put it back on. 

Scrape the plate, use what was left of the dishwater to give the plate and utensils a quick rinse, and then it was dunking time. She grabbed her tongs and carefully dunked each dish in the pot of boiling water before putting them on a rack to dry. 

After that, she closed off the stove’s oxygen intake to choke out the fire and made her way down to the bathroom under the stairs. Bathrooms weren’t like what she had in the old world since running water was much more difficult to create. She did have thoughts on how to create a pipe from her rain barrels to a bigger water collection tank that would one day then connect to the bathroom, but those were thoughts for when she had more money built up and could afford to attempt some small modern conveniences that she could sort of remember learning in school. 

But for now she lived with what this world had invented which was a weird mix of a tiled room where you bathed yourself and the water drained into the ceramic toilet bowl in the ground, which used pressure to flush it into the sewer system under the  town. The toilets basically worked similar to how you could flush with a bucket of water when the power went out in her old world. She’d heard in Europe and some other countries that toilets were still just flushed by pouring water in the toilet bowl until the pressure made it flush.

The other difference between these toilets and the ones she was used to were the fact that they were in ground squat toilets like they had in Asia. It made sense with the way water drained to a channel that drained into the toilet, but it was still weird. 

She used a cloth to wipe herself down with water and apply soap. By then the water in the pot had cooled off enough for her to pour it over herself, and she could hear the toilet next to her flushing as the water poured in. She would probably want a proper bath at the town’s public bath the day before the festival since it had been over a week since she’d been there. 

Lady Elizabeth had a private bath they’d filled every day with warm water they’d boiled on a stove. That was luxury reserved for those who didn’t have to haul water. The public bath sort of had a facsimile of running water through a tank system filled by buckets from the well, and the water was warmed by fires underneath. It’s part of why the bath cost so much. 

The public baths made her think the world she was in was most similar to the era right before the fall of Rome. There was even a large empire south of Asala that had brought baths to Asala, but due to internal strife and the difficulty involved in crossing the southern mountains had eventually abandoned Asala.   

She changed into her night clothes and finished up cleaning the shop and her small apartment above the shop. 

She fell into bed exhausted, and as she fell asleep she could hear the pattering of rain on the tile roof. Her last thoughts were wondering how long the rain would last and how many people would be visiting her shop two days before the festival. 

The next morning it was still raining. She didn’t want John to be left out in the rain, so she quickly changed into her simple working corset and dress, and ran down stairs to unlock. Then she ran back up the stairs, fried up two eggs, ate and then rushed back down. 

She breathed a sigh of relief. No one had shown up yet. The rain would probably make business slow. Oh, and today was her day to take care of the community chickens and collect the eggs. Joy. She looked out at the easy going down pour drenching the town. She’d wait until John got in to man the shop and then she’d go release the chickens. 

The door opened, and John came in underneath a drenched oil skin rain jacket. He pulled it off and hung it on the coat rack next to the door that Evelyn had bought for the express purpose of keeping wet stuff from dripping all over the rest of her shop. While it made people happy to take off their wet jackets, she’d realized she could do anything about the wet boots. She’d just be mopping up the extra water a lot today.

John was standing still near the doorway staring at her like she’d grown a horn or something.

“Your hair is really long,” he stated and Evelyn felt highly embarrassed as she realized she’d forgotten to put up her hair. 

Her slightly wavy brown hair was long enough she was almost sitting on it. Trimming one’s own hair was difficult, and going to a place to get your haircut was expensive. She quickly braided up the long hair, grabbed a ribbon from under the counter, and twisted her hair up in a bun that she tied off with the ribbon. 

“There we go. I wanted to make sure I didn’t leave you standing out in the rain so I was rushing this morning,” she told John who still hadn’t headed out to the greenhouse like he normally did as soon as he came in. 

His expression looked quite serious, and Evelyn wondered what he was thinking. It was the norm for women to wear their hair up, so maybe he was thinking she’d been indecent with it down or something. 

“Your hair is really pretty. You should wear it down when we go out to enjoy the festival,” he said and then clomped off to the greenhouse with his cane clicking against the floor while Evelyn sat there stunned.

A blush slowly built on her cheeks and she hid her face in her hands trying to cool it. Had John just complimented her and asked her out in the same breath? They had talked about going out to look at the flowers and to enjoy the evening festival activities after the shop closed, but previously she thought of it like just two coworkers going around together to help the business and because they didn’t have many other people to hang out with. 

That’s probably all it still was. The compliment followed by the mention of the festival had just sounded odd next to each other.  

The chickens! She grabbed her own oilskin and leather boots and headed to the back. The easiest way to get to the chickens was through the green house. 

“If anyone comes in, can you take care of them? I’m in charge of chickens this morning,” she said as she rushed through the greenhouse to the back.

“Sure,” she heard John’s response right as she slipped out the door and ran down the path to the chicken coop that was shared by the shops in this area. A quick unlatch of the door, checked the egg boxes, grabbed the five morning eggs, and she was running back for the shop. 

She stopped to breathe inside the door of the greenhouse. 

“No one’s come by. It will probably be a slow day,” John told her while she panted just inside the door and pulled off her raincoat. 

“That’s good. Plenty of time for me to finalize our crazy schedules for tomorrow and the day after,” Evelyn said.

The morning was quite slow with only one person showing up. By lunch she had the schedules finalized and she’d realized they would be starting almost two hours earlier than normal opening the day of the festival. She had to give John a key. She took a deep breath. She hadn’t known him that long, but he seemed trustworthy and also seemed to really care about the plants in the shop. 

She’d talk to him over lunch.