My little lecture on economics earned me a warm smile.
“I’ll give this a try, too.”
“Please do.”
And so the housemaids and I began to polish together using the camellia sap.
Needless to say, cleaning with camellia sap really took off with the housemaids via word-of-mouth. The fruit skin they’d previously just thrown out was now suddenly showered with attention.
Three cheers for recycling!
The place that had felt so lonely before, filled with nothing but cold vases and statuettes, was now bedecked with flowers. I borrowed a few from among the dozens in the flower beds out in the garden.
That splendid garden was designed by one person and was looked after by several apprentice gardeners and the head gardener: a handsome, but also somehow wolfish man.
He was called Bellis and was tall and burly, with square shoulders and sharp eyes. The way his ash brown hair was tied back gave him such a tough appearance that the first time I saw him, I mistook him for a guard.
Bellis worked out of the greenhouse. It was on the edge of the courtyard, just a short walk from the manor, and grew flowers that were out of season and rare varieties from foreign kingdoms.
“I, er, is it alright if I take some flowers to decorate with?”
“...sure,” he replied, looking down at me.
“Th-thank you!”
Getting flowers from Bellis for decorating became a daily ritual, even though I was kind of afraid of him.
Next was the laundry.
From the very first day I arrived at the manor, I was super impressed with their laundry prowess! Mastering their techniques was something I thought about a lot when I contemplated my future here, so I stuck to the housemaids like glue.
The personal maids tossed the dirty sheets to us in the laundry room. The same went for the sheets from the cottage. The linens from the servants’ rooms were left in a laundry basket in a corner of the third floor corridor, which was collected later. They did the same thing with their clothes.
Everyone trampled and vigorously massaged the laundry to wash it. I rather enjoyed the soap bubbles!
The maids did not miss even the tiniest speck of dirt. They rubbed the soap thoroughly over dirty spots, carefully removing the stains. The secret to keeping your whites white is this attention to detail!
Once the stains were completely gone, the sheets were wrung out by two people at a time and then hung outside to dry.
The drying ground was an unused spot between the manor and the grounds, so we did our best not to block the view when we were drying the laundry. It was one of the rare totally private spaces in the now odorless manor. Although it was essentially dead space, it got excellent sunlight, perfect for laying out the wash.
We took the freshly washed sheets from the baskets and used six people to spread them open: one at each of the four corners, and one per long side.
“What do we have to do after this?” I asked Mimosa while I stood by watching five girls spread a sheet. They didn’t need six people for that one.
“We’ll take out the wrinkles.”
“Take them out? Don’t you normally press them once they’re dry?”
By ‘pressing,’ I mean you fill a metal container-like device—it kind of reminds me of a pot—with charcoal to heat it up, and then you slide it over fabric so that the heat and the weight flatten out the creases. You use it when you want to make your sheets completely wrinkle-free, but apparently that’s not how they did it there.
“Pressing sheets can make them stiff, but we want them to feel nice against the skin, so we do things somewhat differently. We do press our tablecloths and napkins, though,” Mimosa explained to me.
Oh, so that’s why.
I watched the housemaids as she explained.
They shouted, “One and! Two and!” as they, all together, began to flap the sheet up and down.
The sheet made a soft but then crisp noise as it was puffed up, then snapped taut to force out the air beneath it.
Woah, it looks like it would be fun to bounce on that! Rolling around and laughing... Even though it was just a fantasy, I could feel my eyes sparkling at the thought.
“That is not a toy, Madam.” Mimosa scolded me with a look of envy from where she stood adjacent to me, as if my thoughts had leaked out of my ears.
“Okaaay. But how does that get rid of the creases?”
“The vigorous up-and-down flapping removes the creases. Unlike using an iron, we don’t press the fabric flat; rather, moving it through the air gets the job done more gently.”
“Ohh, so that’s how it works!”
That way, it had a better feel and texture! This really is a technique worthy of a duke! It sure takes a lot of effort and manpower, though.
I wanted to try flapping... I mean, smoothing the sheet, too.
Synchronizing my breathing with the housemaids’ and flapping the sheet was quite a challenge, but I had a good time.
That night I slept soundly on sheets that I had de-creased myself. They felt all the better for it!
Doing the laundry was tough work, but it was worth it. I really worked up a good sweat!
Cooking was next.
The head chef was a middle-aged man named Cartham. He was a cooking master, but there was also something... sophisticated and sexy about him.
Just how old is he? He looked to be past his late thirties.
He was a complete one-eighty from Bellis: a lady’s man down to the bone, the physical embodiment of sex appeal.