Faciens Ludum on Alumni

Maeve Kelleher

July 08, 2020 11:42 AM

Faciens Ludum by Maeve Kelleher

The kitchen was full of fragrant steam, steam which carried with it two of the most distinctive scents of winter: sweet cinnamon and cooked apples. It was a warm, comforting scent, like an immensely soft blanket and mug of tea on a snowy day, a scent that made Maeve want to smile even as she wondered where the notes of fir and nutmeg and indoor fires that should accompany it were. Even without those notes, though, the kitchen smelled unmistakably of an evening around Christmas, or at least late autumn.

It was seven-thirty in the morning in September.

"Cooked enough, do you think?" asked Mrs. Pierce, peering at a saucepan on the stove.

"They have cooked thirty minutes?" squeaked an elven voice.

"Yes," said Mrs. Pierce, looking at her wristwatch. "We have about thirty seconds to pull it if we don't want it to go to thirty-one...." The lady of the house's pretty face twisted with annoyance as she picked up her wand and quickly levitated the saucepan - no, saucepans; one was behind the other – off the stovetop. “This is why I don’t like cooking,” she added, seemingly mostly to herself as she twitched her wand again and Summoned over spoons, which began stirring the contents of the pans vigorously. “With Potions, you know how long, exactly….”

“You do not have to do it, Mistress,” said the elf, somewhat reproachfully.

“This time I do…thank you for helping me.”

This was one of Mrs. Pierce’s quirks, one that Maeve still sometimes realized was a bit odd: the woman was near-unfailingly polite to her inferiors. It had been surprising enough to hear words like ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ directed toward herself, but she might have become more accustomed to that had Mrs. Pierce not been that way to everyone and everything which did her some service: another lady who passed her a tray, an elf, a delivery boy, a goblin from the bank – it seemed to make no difference.

Of course, that eccentricity paled beside some of the other things Maeve had realized about her mistress in the five years she had worked here. As she liked her position, though, she refrained from mentioning them to anyone, and tried not to think about them too much.

“I’ll be with you in a moment, Maeve,” said Mrs. Pierce, her eyes still on what appeared to be an attempt at applesauce. “I don’t want to take my eyes off this….”

“It smells like it’s going well, ma’am,” she offered, and was rewarded with a bright flash of a smile.

“Good to hear,” she said, and then returned her attention to the applesauce.

She wondered if Mrs. Pierce remembered telling her about a previous run-in with the difference between cooking and brewing potions. Apparently, in their school days, Mr. Pierce had had a great liking for baked goods, which had prompted the then-Miss Bauer (Maeve knew Mrs. Pierce’s real name – it was Alicia – but somehow, it had never occurred to her to use it, even in her own head) to attempt to make brownies for his birthday one year. Apparently, they had looked more or less right, but Mrs. Pierce had been ”fairly sure brownies weren’t supposed to make cracking sounds like that. Well, I knew Mr. Pierce was always more talented with charms than I was – I’m good with fire spells, but…apparently a bit…too much so for baking. I should have stuck to my strengths and Transfigured some apples or something.”

This recollection made Maeve look around the kitchen a bit more dubiously…and then her eyes fell on the book propped open on a stand.

It was not unusual to see books and papers in this house which were written in symbols which Maeve could not read. She had never studied ancient runes in school, and knew even less about ancient languages. Mrs. Pierce, however, apparently had a liking for them; she had once mentioned that she barely remembered a time when she hadn’t known Latin, and decent portion of her library seemed to be in runes or at least some form of Not English. When Maeve had come to work here, she hadn’t even been able to tell one from another. After five years, though, she could at least recognize one script from another, even if she was still entirely ignorant of their meanings, and the odd squiggles on the page facing her now - squiggles she did not think were particularly well-represented in the library - looked very like those she had seen on a very old, very fragile piece of parchment lying on the table she had assumed Mrs. Pierce must have been sitting beside That Day, immediately before she had….

“I highly doubt there’s anything magical about it,” said Mrs. Pierce, very softly. Maeve’s eyes jerked back to her mistress, who was looking directly at her now, her expression unreadable but her dark eyes even sharper than usual.

“Of course not, ma’am,” she said, flustered.

“Just a traditional thing,” the taller witch continued, turning gracefully back to her saucepans. “For the boys...My father’s people came up with it, apparently. Eating an alphabet, carved into bits of fruit and dipped in honey. I doubt it means much, especially now that I’ve, er, cooked it all down a bit, but it certainly didn’t hurt me.”

It was Maeve’s turn to stare, though she suspected her expression would be quite readable, should Mrs. Pierce turn around again. She had never once, in five years, heard Mrs. Pierce mention her real father.

Or at least, the first time she had ever heard her mention her real father directly. A single, indirect comment presumably about him which Maeve wasn't supposed to have heard, however, was one of the things she'd found out in her position that she made it her business to pretend had never occurred.

* * * * * * * *

Privately, Maeve didn’t see any real need to start the children on a formal program of study at this point. She had asked her own mother about it, and had had it confirmed that neither she nor her siblings had been introduced to such things before age six; Jimmy, for his part, had not shown the slightest sign he absorbed anything before seven, and had been nine before it had really stuck. As Jimmy was doing just fine today, despite not having been read to every single day as regularly as clockwork as a child (Jimmy wouldn’t have endured such a thing, she thought, though perhaps it was different for children whose mother had literally started the ritual when they were perhaps four hours old, with Babbitty Rabbitty, if she recalled correctly), it seemed apparent to Maeve that it was not really necessary to learn everything as fast as humanly possible.

Mrs. Pierce, however, was not someone who seemed more than vaguely aware of the concept of relaxing and letting something take its course. It was a bit unnerving, really, whenever Mrs. Pierce began to spend a tad too much time in the library, or taking several brief trips away from home; sometimes, these periods of intensity ended without incident, or with something like her announcing that she had drawn up a plan for kindergarten for the children, and sometimes – albeit usually not as dramatically as that – it was whatever had happened in the library the morning after Mrs. Pierce had come back from that abrupt trip to Munich with that unreadable scroll….

Maeve watched the children sharply though the morning, but they showed no ill effects from their invisible, presumed-dead grandfather’s family traditions, unless Nicholas asking five times if they were going to ‘make real houses’ counted. Since he had been asking this for days (a notion she could only assume he’d put together due to his occasionally visible, very much alive grandparents’ progress toward new living quarters; that houses came from somewhere seemed to fascinate him, and Maeve couldn’t decide if that was more or less strange than the year he’d spent an unreasonable amount of time in pretending to be a post owl), she didn’t think it counted as an ill effect. After all this anticipation, Maeve wondered if the actual itinerary was going to be a significant disappointment; the twins rarely saw their schedules change much, and in reality, aside from the abstract significance of starting to ‘do school,’ they were not really going to see them change much now. Mrs. Pierce had not liked it at all, but the books stated firmly that it was not good for five-year-olds to sit working all day, so the ‘curriculum’ consisted of ten-minute blocks, with breaks built in – that the coloring books were on topics from ancient history and that as much reading aloud while they played or colored as they would allow should happen was deliberate, but not the focus, apparently. Helpful if it was helpful, but the point was apparently both to minimize tantrum-throwing and to build in delays, after which the degree to which they remembered anything from the lessons could be evaluated.

”Everything needs a purpose,” Mrs. Pierce had muttered, mainly to herself, occasionally when reviewing the plans. Maeve merely hoped the mistress’ near-worship of efficiency didn’t make it too much of a blow when the children, being children, inevitably failed to stay exactly on script. There were back-up plans built in on the assumption they would need to do some things for longer than initially planned, but Maeve found it hard to believe Mrs. Pierce would really not take it as something of a disappointment when those plans needed use.

For now, though, they had a pair of little desks and a funny sort of slate with letters that could be removed and put back, and a script. There was something, Maeve thought to herself, a little absurd about the fact that Mrs. Pierce had gone to the trouble of Transfiguring one of the small collection of blank garments she kept upstairs (another of the woman’s oddities was that Mrs. Pierce only actually bought permanent clothes, generally from the Misses Ann, when she couldn’t get out of it; apparently, unlike the collections of manipulatives for the children this year and the two year’s supply of non-perishable foods and the supplies to keep those damned orchids alive, a variety of clothes was a waste of money when she had enough skill in Transfiguration to keep a modification of something from a lookbook intact for days if necessary) into a pretty, semi-formal day-dress for the occasion. It really did seem to add more gravitas to the situation than the situation really warranted, but that – like many things – was none of Maeve’s business.

“All right, boys,” said Mrs. Pierce. “There you go…now that you are big boys, and are going to learn to read and write, you each get to have your own desk, just like Daddy and I have. Isn’t that nice? Now, I know you can both sing your alphabet, but can you tell me what that is?”

She pointed to the little board, which was currently displaying the two forms of the letter a. Next would come a definition of what a letter was (“All letters stand for sounds”) and then came Maeve’s first part of the script: how a was a kind of letter called a vowel, followed by three recitations of the vowel song (a-e-i-o-u) before asking them to repeat it back, followed by the piece de resistance of the day: the introduction of the short vowel sound produced by the letter a, which would be reinforced by references to apples, a bit of chanting back and forth, and the first two lines of a poem which, hopefully by the end of the week, they would have finished, a poem all about short vowel sounds.

Maeve very much hoped that Mrs. Pierce’s book was not lying about the speed at which children would start to pick up the idea here and get to the point where actual reading occurred, because otherwise, they were in for a long few months.

OOC: Reference: “The Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading,” by Jessie Wise and Sara Buffington (though Alicia insists she is no ordinary parent, and Maeve, though eager to assert that she is quite ordinary, isn’t actually a parent.)

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