Tapping the board with a finger, he continued: “It’s not much to go on, but since you don’t know the name of your home country it’s better than nothing. I’ll check around town and see if someone more knowledgeable than me might know.” He then put the board away, careful not to smudge the poorly drawn outline.
“Thank you.”
He shook his head and then tilted it. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any money?”
She checked her pockets, and was unsurprised to find them empty. Anxiously Caroline replied, “Sorry, but no. I promise I’ll work though!”
“Right.” He rubbed his jaw, giving me a sweeping look. “But no one would ever hire someone dressed as you are so…”
“I-is that so?” She could totally believe that, based on the nasty looks she got earlier.
Thio rubbed the back of his neck, sitting down again, muttering quietly to himself as he did. He seemed to be having an internal struggle.
“Thio?” Caroline asked timidly, touching his knee lightly.
He jumped and looked into Caroline’s wide trusting eyes. His heart felt prickly with both guilt and annoyance. His day had been bad enough as it was, this extra stress was not helping him any. At the same time, his ethical and moral standards wouldn’t allow him to ignore a person in distress.
“You’ll need a change of clothes then. At least one to start you off with.” He gave up on giving up on her. It should be simple enough to get her some clothes and a job, and from there she should be fine.
He hoped.
“I’ll get at least one change of clothes for you. They won’t be anything as nice as what you’re wearing though.” He warned her. Even if outfit looked scandalous by his country’s standards, it didn’t stop him from noticing the quality of what she wore. The stitching and color and different kind of cloth, especially the shoes, were obviously finely crafted.
It seemed to him she was from a wealthy household. He had a lot of questions he wanted to ask, but he set them aside to focus on something practical: getting her something less outrageous to wear.
He took out his measuring string and did some rough measurements to figure out how much cloth he needed. While doing so he discovered she had no idea how to sew, much to his chagrin. It wasn’t uncommon for men to have no sewing experience (not him, of course, since he made all his own clothes), but he’d never met a woman who didn’t know. That meant he’d need to buy a pattern too. He felt like crying at the amount of money he was about to spend.
After he was finished, he firmly commanded her to stay indoors and to ignore any visitors. He was pretty sure some of his more lazy gossipy neighbors had already seen him bring her into the house. That was bad enough. If she answered the door to his house like she belonged there, dressed as she was, the rumors would be exponentially worse than they likely already were.
Luckily it didn’t take a long time to get the cloth or the pattern. He wanted to die a little on the inside when he saw the clerk raise an eyebrow at the pattern being bought. He’d have to make this outfit fast and get the girl set up with a job quickly at this rate. It wouldn’t take long before the store clerk and the gossipy neighbors got together and started creating even more outrageous rumors.
He quietly cried over his steadily decreasing reputation. It’d taken him years of hard work to get it to where it was now, and just by thoughtlessly helping a girl it was being shredded.
No good deed goes unpunished, he thought with a great deal of bitterness.
Caroline, meanwhile, snooped unabashedly while Thio was out ruining his reputation for her.
She peeked in every basket and bag, even poking the bed and looking underneath it. As she’d suspected, Thio was a very organized person. He even separated his socks from his underwear. Or at least she was pretty sure that was underwear; they were too thin and lose to be regular pants based off what she’d seen in town. (Though they looked nothing like underwear she was use to seeing.)
If Thio had walked in and seen her holding up his underwear, examining them closely, he’d have died twice in one day from embarrassment.
Moving on from undergarments, she discovered some other things as well: he owned a bar of soap and a washing cloth, but he had no indoor plumbing. This perplexed her quite a bit. Was there no plumbing at all or was it just the poor who didn’t have it? In either case, that bode ill for her. She didn’t have a penny to her name, which meant if she cleaned something she’d have to do it by hand. And she had no idea how to go about that.
And what about toilets?
Even though plumbing and toilets had only images with no names in her mind, she absolutely grasped their importance. Having to live without those two things seemed horrible.
After stressing over this for a few minutes, she settled herself down and firmly set the whole problem aside. No matter what the reality was, she’d just have to deal with it. It seemed better to just let the stressful things come when they would and deal with them then, rather than compounding the problem with worry.
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Though there was no electric lighting, she found a strange lamp hanging from the center of the ceiling. She understood that without electricity, there needs to be a candle, oil, wood, or coal. But the lamp had no space for any of that. If it hadn’t been so obviously shaped like a lamp, she might of mistaken it for something else. But, no, it was clearly a lamp. A lamp with no way to be lit.
She was staring at it in deep bafflement when Thio came back.
His face was a bit strained, as if he’d gone through something stressful.
Feeling guilty, Caroline immediately rushed over and offered to help carry what he’d bought.
Shaking his head, Thio shooed her away. “It’s not heavy, let me just set it down on the bed.”
After doing so, he went over to a bag that had a small sewing kit. She already knew what was in there, having snooped so thoroughly while he was away.
“Are you going to make my outfit right now?” That surprised her. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
He gave her a long, skeptical stare. “Have you done ANY kind of sewing before?”
“Er…”
“That’s what I thought. You’re more likely to waste cloth and thread trying to help. Just have a seat.”
With a forlorn look on her face, Caroline sat back down on the stool. She watched him take out a small piece of paper and unfold it. She could see a very basic clothing pattern written on it. After studying it carefully, he unfolded one of his bolts of cloth and began to measure and pin. Once he was done, he took out his metal scissors and started cutting. Between cutting, fitting, and sewing, it took almost two hours to complete both the dress and the shirt.
While he concentrated, he didn’t talk much. For her part, Caroline watched quietly, afraid that interruptions from being chatty might cause him to lose track of what he was doing and ruin the outfit.
And then he was done. He stretched his arms and back in one big movement, to get the kinks out. Lifting up the two garments, he asked, “What do you think?”
“Oh, that’s nice!” She lifted up the simple shirt he’d made. “Much better than what I could do.”
“Since you can’t do anything sewing related, I’m feeling a bit insulted.”
Caroline chuckled slightly. “I didn’t mean it like that!”
“Do you know what kind of design you want? ”
“Design?”
He tapped on the embroidery around his collar.
“Oh. Is that required?”
Raising an eyebrow, he explained, “I mean… I suppose you could technically go without it. But people would look down on you for it.”
“Is that so?” She scrunched up her face, not really understanding. “I don’t really get it, but if it’s important I better have one. How about we just do one like yours?”
Thio gaped at her in open astonishment, before shaking his head hastily, his ears turning red.
“No, no—that’s not—I can’t———think of something else!”
“But wouldn’t that be easier for you to…”
“No.” He replied flatly.
“A-alright then.” His rejection was so adamant it left her a little surprised. She thought about the designs she’d seen women wearing. “How about a simple flower?”
Looking relieved, he nodded. He embroidered two flowers on the collar of her shirt and another two on the bottom of each sleeve. Even though he’d been adamant about not doing a design like his own, she noticed the small flourishes he sewed in looked strikingly like the main design on his own shirt. (It seemed to be a mountain motif.)
Did he not realize what he was doing or did it not matter? She was tempted to ask, but it seemed a touchy subject so she let it drop.
Once he was done, he handed over the shirt and the dress to her. He then left his house to give her privacy to change.
The shirt was straight forward but the dress was a little awkward. She’d seen dresses with buttons on the back and side in town, but the design he’d used was a wrap around. After several failed attempts, she managed to get something she thought looked decent and would stay.
“I’m done!” She called out as she opened the door and stepped outside.
He blinked several times at her appearance before managing to squeeze out, “You look nice.”
And indeed she did. Her foreign clothes had been much too tight and revealing, to the point that he legitimately didn’t know how to classify her in his mind. Having no place to put her appearance, he’d simply chosen to ignore it. Now that she was in “normal” clothes, her lose shoulder length brown hair and round golden brown eyes stood out more appealingly.
And because the clothes were properly modest, he could actually look at her entire body without feeling like he was being naughty. She had a sturdy body with average features (being neither too thin or too curvy). Her pale skin suggested she’d lived a sheltered life, out of the sun.
“You think so? It’s your hard work!” She then twirled in her dress, laughing as she did.
It was a childlike behavior that almost made him smile, until he got an eyeful of leg. He hastily grabbed her arms to stop her movements. There should have been some pantaloons under there but he’d seen enough to know there wasn’t anything. Was she not wearing any underwear underneath that dress?! Thinking about it, would those pants have allowed for pantaloons? He didn’t want to have to sew underwear too!
“Just, er, just let’s not do that, alright?” Thio’s entire face had turned red at what he’d just seen. He hastily glanced around and was relieved to see he’d been the only person who’d been watching. The total lack of understanding on her face made him feel despair.
He’d rushed to get this dress completed, but he now found himself facing an entirely different problem: this woman had no sense of modesty at all. Even if he found her a job, there was an alarmingly high chance she’d do something risque without meaning to and get herself in a bad situation.
With no father or relatives to protector her chastity, any scoundrel could come along and claim anything and ruin her honor. He had no idea what he was suppose to do about that very real danger. He couldn’t claim she was his sister, since everyone in town knew who he was, and a distance relative wouldn’t work since too many people had seen her in those foreign clothes.
He lamented greatly that he hadn’t thought anything through when he’d brought her into town initially. He was still upset from the news earlier and it’d caused him to be half-witted. As things stood right now, Caroline and he were both facing an uphill social battle.
This all passed through his mind in a matter of seconds. Hastily he pushed her back into his house and closed the door.
“Hey, is there anyone you know nearby? Extended family? Friends? Acquaintances even?”
“Nope. Never been here before. If I had family from a place like this, I’d definitely had heard about it.”
“I thought as much…” He muttered in a low voice. He’d asked in desperation, knowing what the answer would be. A wealthy lady with a muddled mind. Had she been traumatized or had she suffered some strange accident? Or was she just naturally an exceedingly flighty person?