Barbara Metzger by Cupboard Kisses

artless tales about her enormous family did a lot to cheer Cristabel, who found them especially intriguing since she had no relations of her own. Fanny was content to chatter on with only the slightest encouragement, to relate her kinfolks’ varied gory ends, until she remembered her self-appointed task and ran off to fetch a raspberry tart from the bakery, or a meat pastry from the butcher’s boy, passing in his cart. Anything to tempt Miss Cristabel’s appetite. Cristabel had won the younger girl’s instant loyalty by promising an increase in wages, for all the extra work, as soon as she had a chance to review her resources. In the meantime there was a gold coin, and the offer of reading lessons.
    “Won’t my mum be proud if I can send her some money in a letter!” Fanny exulted. “Of course, Mum couldn’t read it, but the vicar could tell her what I wrote. Too bad Uncle Hiram ain’t around anymore. He was book-taught at a charity school once, and they say he was even reading a newspaper when the house caught fire.”
    Boy was another new source of pleasure for Cristabel, although he was as different from Fanny as chalk from cheese. The lad was shy and untalkative, while Fanny was a prattlebox; he was born and bred in London, where Fanny was a transplanted farmgirl; and his family was…small.
    “Do you have any brothers or sisters, Boy?” Cristabel asked one morning while he was carrying in her bathtub, hoping to win his confidence enough to suggest he use it, without hurting his pride. Mostly she was curious what their names would be.
    “Yes’m.” It was a start.
    “Which, then?”
    “Two brothers. One sister.”
    “How lucky for you! I never had any. What are they called?”
    “Son’s older. Junior’s younger.”
    “I, ah, see. And your sister?” she asked, hating herself for such a dumb question.
    “Jane Ellen Maria Cassandra Ann.”
    “My goodness. And what do you call her?”
    “Sister.”
    “Oh.”
    Boy’s family was “gone,” according to him. Cristabel didn’t probe any further, fearing the worst and not wanting to remind the lad of any sadness. According to Fanny, however, the family had emigrated, involuntarily.
    “Pickpocketing. They left Boy behind because he was too slow.”
    Cristabel did not ask whether he was too slow for the boat or the family business.
    For all his reticence, Boy always had a smile for her, under the grime. And he cared about her, too, even before she asked if he wanted to join Fanny’s lessons. When he heard about her nightmares, he brought her a gift wrapped in a rag, or his second shirt; it was hard to tell which.
    “Bein’ alone’s scary,” he told her as she unwrapped the parcel, gingerly. Inside was a scrap of a kitten of that color cats come in when they don’t know who their father is. This one was particularly unappealing, or attractive, depending on one’s viewpoint, with a bent ear, a nose that couldn’t decide between being pink or black, and a tail like a wet snake.
    That night Cristabel’s bogeys had orange-yellow eyes and kept pinching at her. The next morning she was covered in flea bites, and the kitten went back to the kitchen, “because he missed his family too much.”
    On her foray to the kitchen she had been appalled to see Boy’s straw-filled tick under the table, making a comfortable cushion for a whole pride of scabby, shabby felines. Her mind was just too foggy to undertake bringing the kitchen to order right then, but she added it to her mental list. In the meantime she told Boy to fetch a cot down from the attic floor, for his bed.
    “And where do you think a payin’ customer is gonna sleep? On the floor?” Nick wanted to know, coming out of the pantry and scratching his back with a soup ladle. “Or ain’t we supposed to be interested in makin’ money anymore?”
    “If you are so interested in the paying customers,” she answered sweetly, “perhaps you should give up your bed.”
    It was a good thing she