Poetry of the Damned
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 11: A Lead in It
He came home early — the grounds had let out ahead of time, some matter of the yard being needed — and the house was quiet, the downstairs empty, no one about; and being full of his news and pleased with the rare free hour, he went up the stairs two at a time to find his wife.
She was in the bath. He had the door half open before he’d thought, and what he saw stopped him in it: the two of them, his wife back in the warm water and the girl crouched bare beside the tub with oil bright on her hands and more of it on Vinda, the pair of them close in the steam — and his mind did with it what a mind does, took the picture and made it the thing he’d have wished it to be, two girls and oil and the warm dim room, to his liking entirely, just the sort of scene the men told each other about over the late wine as though such things were had for the asking.
“Merko!” Vinda came up out of her ease like a cat off a lap. “Out — get out — a woman can’t take a bath in her own house — out, you great oaf, and shut the door!” And then, reading his face and laughing despite herself, exasperated: “And get your mind out of the mud while you’re about it — it’s not what your great daft eyes are making of it. She’s oiling me for the feeding, that’s all, you have to ready them or it’s agony later, every woman knows it — and she’s bare because she’s not about to soak her one shift doing it, same as any day of the week. It’s washing, Merko. It’s the dullest thing in the house. Now out.”
He heard the words. He took in perhaps one in three of them — feeding, bare, every day — and what they did was not the leaving they were meant to do but the opposite; and he laughed and put up his hands and performed the chastened husband, sorry, sorry, going — granted her the small kingdom of her bath because it cost him nothing and pleased her to rule it, and a man could be generous with a thing he wholly owned. He went. But he looked once more on the way, a last unhurried look at the girl where she crouched frozen and eyes-down waiting for him to be gone — and found, with a mild surprise that he turned over and put away for later, that she was worth looking at.
He had not especially thought so before. He thought so now.
The girl came down soon after to see to the dinner, dressed and silent, and Vinda followed in her gown with her colour up, scolding him fondly all the way down the stair, and the moment passed as such moments do.
“You’ll forgive me the once,” she said over the soup, mollified, “but a girl needs the one room. Kara has me in that bath every blessed day now — it’s the only thing that answers, the oil and the warm and her hands, or I’d be one great ache from morning to night. You’ve no notion what it’s come to, Merko, this carrying. The early part was — well.” She coloured, pleased with the memory. “The early part was its own reward, and you’ll not have heard me complain. But that’s gone off now, and what’s left is just the weight of it, and the only way I’m fit to be a person — fit to be a wife to you at all — is she works me into it. Gets me comfortable. Gets me happy.” She said it lightly, lovingly, a wife crediting her good fortune, and did not look at the underneath of it, because the underneath was not a place she went. “So you may thank her, in your way, that you’ve a cheerful wife to come home to and not a groaning one. Which reminds me — eat up, and we’ll see about the rest of it after. I’ve not gone off everything.” And she told him, frank and easy, what she’d taken to doing for him now that the other way was grown awkward, and what he might do for her in turn — and he was very glad to hear it, and did not ask, and she did not say, exactly how the returning of the favour was managed; it was managed, and that was a married couple’s business, and the soup went cold while they settled the shape of the evening.
“But you came home early,” she said, catching it at last. “You never said why. What’s happened?”
“The best thing.” He set down his spoon. He’d been holding it through the soup, half afraid to spend it too soon. “The club. We’ve stopped talking, Vinda. We’ve decided. We’re going to do something — set the thing right that the high command hasn’t the wit to — and they’ve asked me to take a lead in it. The working end of it. When the time comes it’ll be my hands on the doing.”
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