But when she said this to Milchah, one of the old servant women, she only laughed. “Foolish girl,” she said. “No man ever knew whom he was marrying, and no woman either.”

“You may not know what kind of spouse they’ll be, but at least you should know if they have a missing nose or something.”

“What difference does it make? Two days after the wedding, his bride might be set upon by a lion and be so badly mauled that she has no nose, and no ears either, and then what, does he send her away?”

“Some men would.”

“It takes a lot more than that to make a good man send away his wife.”

“There won’t be a lion.”

“Oh yes there will,” said Milchah. “Not the kind that growls. The lion of days, that nibbles at you and paws you every hour like a cat playing with its prey, but so gently that you don’t feel it until one day you look at your husband and he’s as sunburned and wrinkled as leather that got soaked in the rain, and you suddenly realize, I must look like that, too.”

“But that’s different. A husband and wife go down that road together.”

Milchah looked at her with a sudden intensity. “Not always,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

Milchah hesitated, then shook her head. “I’m an old woman, and I forget which stories are fit for children and which are not.”

“I’m not a child, and I can hear anything.”

“Compared to me everybody’s a child, and some stories are not worth hearing.”

“I’ll go through the camp telling lies about you,” said Rebekah.

“You’re such a baby,” said Milchah. It was an old game between them, which never changed, even after Rebekah took her place as mistress of the household.

“I’ll tell them that you always add too much salt to the pot because you’ve completely lost your sense of taste.”

“I’m not going to tell you anything important, foolish girl. But I did once hear a story about a bride who secretly taught her children to make offerings to a god that her husband hated, and one day he caught her and was so angry at the deception and the disobedience that he divorced her on the spot and drove her out of the camp.”

“If that’s a warning, you can be sure that’s precisely what I would have done if they had made me go ahead with my marriage to Ezbaal.”

“Make of it what you will,” said Milchah. “It’s time for my nap.”

“What? Have I made you angry? Really, not just playing?”

“I’m always annoyed when young fools only hear what they want to hear.”

“I heard you, Milchah, I always listen.”