Skif knew where he was; the room used by the show-wife’s maid. He’d watched over the course of several nights when Kalink and his wife were at some party or other, knowing that the girl would have to stay up to help her mistress undress. The windows of the master’s bedroom might have fancy locks on them, but the maid’s cubby wouldn’t, and it was a guarantee that the maid’s room would give off right onto the master’s bedroom. That was one of Bazie’s first lessons when Skif began doing real work—the layout of the fancy houses.

The weak point in a house was always the personal maid’s room, or the manservant’s, but the maid was the easiest target. The personal maid—she had special status, because she had to be able to do more than just run errands. Fine sewing and embroidery, hairdressing, getting her mistress into and out of her fancy clothes and doing it unobtrusively—that was just the start of her duties. She might have to cook sweet and soothing dainties if her mistress was indisposed and the cook had gone to bed, she certainly had to be able to do a bit of nursing if her mistress was ill, pregnant, or elderly. Depending on where her loyalties were, she might be the master’s spy on his wife—or run discreet messages and make assignations with her mistress’s lovers. She had to know how to make and apply beauty treatments, even cosmetics. And she had to be available day or night, except when the mistress was out of the house and hadn’t taken her along.

All that required a room of her own, adjoining the master’s bedroom—or the mistress’s, if husband and wife didn’t share a bed. And since the last thing the mistress would tolerate was the ability of her maid to go sneaking off without the mistress knowing about it, the maid generally had to go through the master’s bedroom to get to the rest of the house. That prevented the maid from entertaining men in her own room, and greatly curtailed her ability to slip off and be entertained by them elsewhere. A good lady’s maid was something no woman wanted to lose, so it was worth the effort to keep her from the lure of masculine company.

After all, she might get married, or pregnant, or both. Then what would her mistress do?

Dismiss her, of course, and go on the hunt for another; this was a quest more fraught with hazard and emotional turmoil than the search for a new cook. One could train a new maid, of course, but then one would have to be willing to put up with a great deal while the girl was in training.