Hannah: Daughters of the Sea #1 by Kathryn Lasky Page B

strange. And it be your job each evening when the family is having dinner to scurry up here and start a fire in it to warm the room, so it be nice and toasty when Miss Lila comes to bed.”
    “And what’s that tiny little bed?” Hannah asked as she caught sight of an exact replica of the larger bed with the same canopy, even down to the miniaturized version of the embroidered flowers.
    “That’s Jade’s bed.”
    “Who is Jade?” Hannah wondered aloud.
    “A cat. And she’s not that small for a cat. She’s a big, fat thing. And that, my girl, is one of your first lessons.”
    “Yes?”
    “No one except Miss Lila ever touches Jade. None of her sisters. Not Mr. or Mrs. Hawley. Not Miss Ardmore, the governess. No one. But it be your job tobring a pan of milk up for Jade when you come to light the fire. Now come here and help me.”
    Daze began with a rapid-fire list of instructions. “Take these to the laundress for immediate ironing. Miss Lila likes her chemises and combis arranged in stacks of four in the middle drawer. So when you bring them back, remember, stacks of four. Line up her shoes in her closet according to this chart.” Daze handed Hannah a carefully drawn diagram that had a small drawing of each shoe and showed the order of where it was to go on the shoe rack in the large closet that was as big as Hannah’s room. “And never, never ever touch the figurines. Only Miss Horton is allowed to dust them.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “I told you, she’s strange…bit weird in the head.” Daze looked up and tapped her maid’s cap.
    “I heard someone say she was high-strung.”
    “That be one way to put it, I s’pose.” Daze turned her back and began sorting through petticoats.
    “Are the others that way, too?”
    “No. Pretty normal for girls so rich and spoiled.Clarice is very sweet, but she takes holy hell from Lila just for being so pretty even though she’s three years younger.”
    “And what about Henrietta?”
    “Oh, Ettie?” Daze laughed. “Ettie’s something else!”
    “What do you mean by ‘something else’?”
    “Ettie’s just nine. Bit of a tomboy. Look, dear, I ain’t got no time to go explaining them to you now. You’ll see they all be as different as can be. But you gotta be careful of Miss Lila.”
    As soon as Hannah had delivered the clothes to the laundress, she came back up to the nursery. Daze was on her knees, surrounded by boxes with labels on them. “Do you read?” she asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Good, that will be helpful.” She laid her hand on a stack of boxes to her left. “These are the people boxes.” She began to unstack them. One label said UPSTAIRS MAIDS, HOUSEMAIDS, AND DOWNSTAIRS MAIDS. Another said COOK, MR. M, SCULLERY . Then there was a box with the word FAMILY on it. Another box waslabeled FIRST-FLOOR CARPETS AND PAINTINGS . There were at least twenty boxes filled with the furniture, decorations, and people figures, all part of the household at 18 Louisburg Square. They put the plump doll with the gray curls and cap in the kitchen at the range. That was Mrs. Bletchley. Then they hung up all the pots and pans. Next they slid the miniature wine bottles into the racks in the wine cellar and stood Mr. Marston in front of them.
    For Hannah, the dollhouse was an education. In the brief time she had been at number 18, there were many rooms she had not even seen. For three hours, Daze and Hannah dusted, polished, and sorted out all the contents of the dollhouse. They began hanging the pictures in the downstairs rooms and putting out the Oriental carpets that sparkled like tiny jewels. There was even a set of the vases, but the paintings on the vases were crude in comparison to the real ones downstairs. The crashing waves had a rigid geometry and the tails of the sea creatures seemed to droop, devoid of energy or power. It was as if the artist had tried to reducethe entire ocean and its creatures to a single drop of water.
    “Oh, dear, here’s poor Dotty.”