Armand’s First Letter. Amelia’s First Letter.

Bois-de-Bas, Armorica
15 January 1018

Dear Journal,

The snow lies thickly around our home and around the green. It is deep midwinter once again, and the quiet is broken only by the voices of my daughters.

Mama is on her way home to Yorke on the Amelie, taking her maid Roman with her, and thereby reducing the crowding here considerably. Though I am not at all sure that Roman might not return after having seen Mama safely home. For all her fine words about avoiding the menfolk, I believe her to have been much taken with Bastien, and he with her; and though she is of the serving classes, social class is of far less importance here in the colony. Or, at least, it is of little importance here in Bois-de-Bas. Mont-Havre has its Old World pretensions, but out here the townsfolk look to one’s character, not to one’s antecedents.

Amelie’s general store and my forming shop are quieter than they were in the fall or will be in the spring, especially now that we are delivering the larger orders as a matter of course. The winter snows are no obstacle to a Tuppenny sky-wagon! And so the townsfolk have less reason to dare the snow and the cold. A few come by every day, make a small purchase or two, and stay to chat a while; everyone wants to get of the house once sometimes. But for the most part people stay by their own firesides, and who can blame them?

The forming shop is especially quiet. Amelie sells necessities, but there little urgency about formed goods. We did a brisk business in warming blocks as the fall turned into winter, but those who can afford to buy them have bought them.

Jacques-le-Souris still spends much of his day there, sitting by the stove and chatting with whoever is behind the counter, but he has few cronies sitting by him in these days of extreme cold. Not none, but mostly the widowers who live alone.

I’ve been spending my mornings in the shop, working with Jérôme on basic forming. There is a tension between us, I am afraid: he wishes to learn the theory and I wish to teach him the practice so that one the day the theory might do him some good. And so we have established a routine: he does what I ask for the first half of the morning, and spends the rest of the day engaged in his own trials and studies. Among other things, he has been copying my notes on the mathematics of forming. I have let him do so with some trepidation: he is in theory a member of the Former’s Guild, but that is something of a fig leaf.

I have made a sky-chair available to him, as it is rather a slog to get here from Madame Pelletier’s boarding house, and in the mid-afternoon he has taken to sending an hour or so wandering the town and the environs in it, wrapped in a heavy coat and rugs. Just where he goes and where he stops I have no idea, but he is becoming a familiar figure to the townsfolk; and is, I think, respected. He is distant, and perhaps a bit severe, with those he does not know, but he is also polite to everyone, and of course he is from the mother country.

After our morning sessions I leave Luc or one of the journeymen behind the counter and toddle off to the wagon-works, using a sky-chair rather than my goat-cart, for I fear the snows are too deep for poor Patches. I do my work; and then, when I return, the house is warm and rings with my daughters’ laughter.

One day follows another, quiet day after quiet day of family, of work, of routine, of just simply living. I came to Armorica seeking my freedom, my fortune, and adventure; I don’t believe I ever knew that this simple round was what I most wanted.

Next letter

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Photo by Steffen Lemmerzahl on Unsplash