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Hilde is a few months short of a Mastery in Healing when she and Hans are recalled by their father. Honestly, she’s surprised he’s let them stay this long. Camilla and Stian had been recalled two years earlier when Camilla managed to become a Journeyman Weaver a bit ahead of schedule. Granted, Hilde had managed to reach Journeyman around the same time, but her skills are knowledge based and don’t require the innate creativity that Weaving of that level requires.
She’s glad she got to stay later and learn more, even if it means she missed Camilla’s wedding and it’ll be harder to find her good marriage prospects at her age. Camilla’s sparse letters have indicated that she’s happily settled into being a first wife for one of the younger Holders.
Her teachers, on the other hand, are borderline enraged that she’s being denied the chance to get her Mastery and are sending her home with all the materials needed to study for the Mastery exam and promised to send a female Master Healer out to test her for it when she indicates that she feels ready to take it. They have opinions of the average Holderkin that she really doesn’t agree with, but she understands why they think that way, having met Talia a couple times and having learned how she was treated growing up.
Hans is a bit irritated too, because he still had a year left on what he was learning and his teachers have sent him home with books too and he’s not nearly as good at reading as she is. She has a feeling it’s going to take him longer to work through his two books than it’s going to take her to finish working through the six books and three journals she’s being sent home with. It won’t stop him, because he’s determined to make his own Holding successful, but it will slow him down a lot.
“Hildegard, are you paying attention?” her father asks with a hint of irritation.
She jerks her gaze up from his desk, dragging her thoughts to the present and meeting his gaze. “No, father. I’m sorry. What were you saying?”
He looks mildly exasperated with her. “I was saying that you’ve had two good marriage offers. I will allow you to choose between them. Conrad Frederickson’s first wife has died and he’s offering you the position, as none of his current wives have the appropriate skills. He desperately needs a living heir. He’s sired a number of sons but childhood illness, accidents and bandits have managed to kill all of them. You also have an offer from Nicolas Arminson to be his second wife. He is much closer to your age and also has no sons as of yet. I asked Meryl and she tells me that Conrad’s wives say he is a kind man and Nicolas’ first wife has no complaints about him as of yet, but they are newly married.”
“They offered for me?” she asks in disbelief. She’d thought that at best, she’d become a third wife.
“Yes. Nicolas appears to believe it is a bragging point and as such would encourage you to use your skills. Conrad, I believe, is mostly focused on having a healthy heir, but he said specifically that he would not restrict you from using your skills as a Healer,” he tells her.
Hilde frowns slightly. Nicolas having a new wife and offering for her immediately after marriage doesn’t strike her as a good thing and neither does him wanting her to be a bragging point. “Which one would you recommend, Father?”
He smiles at her question. “I’d say Conrad. A head wife position is more prestigious than a second wife and he is a good man, proven to be able to sire sons. He is older, though, and I’ll understand if you choose Nicolas, as he is closer to your age. He seems like a decent enough sort.”
Well, she knows what her mother would say. “I will accept Conrad’s offer, then.”
Her father looks surprised, then pleased with her choice. “Very well. I will convey your choice to them.”
~
Conrad, it turns out, is a decent looking man with smile lines and stress lines, a few years older than her father. He looks relieved to see her, as if he’d thought she might run away from marrying him.
Hilde has no problem saying her vows to him, though. If nothing else, she trusts her father’s judgement. After the vows, she accepts his light kiss easily, even though it is her first kiss. She appreciates the lack of pushiness.
After that, he turns her over to the women for the celebration and goes with the men for their own celebration. To her surprise, his wives are very welcoming to her. She’d thought that at best, they’d tolerate her for her position, but they seem genuinely glad that she married Conrad. His second wife even tells her outright how glad she’ll be to have Hilde filling the head wife position instead of struggling with it herself. It’s all very heartening.
That evening, Conrad is gentle with her and she quite enjoys her first time, which she takes as a sign of good things to come.
~
Morning brings breakfast with the wives, younger daughters and a few older women, including Conrad’s mother. Apparently, he inherited his father’s wives as the only son. The older women are just as friendly and grateful to have a head wife as her fellow wives are. She feels quite odd about it, since as a kid with her looks she’d have been lucky to be taken as a fifth or sixth wife and she’d never considered that her new healing skills would catch more than a third wife offer.
Apparently, Conrad’s mother was not the head wife, who has passed on and is apparently not missed at all, and she and Clara, Conrad’s second wife, have been struggling to fill the head wife position for the last few months since Hannah, Conrad’s head wife, died with their very limited knowledge of reading, writing and arithmetic. It is apparent they miss Hannah a great deal more than Conrad’s father’s unlamented head wife.
As much as she hopes she can utilize her healing skills for the community, this is something time consuming that is much more urgent. First on her list to do is to check everyone in the household’s health. Second is to tackle the accounts and supplies. Third is to teach everyone how to read. And fourth is getting a medical herb garden set up.
Well, okay, she needs Conrad’s permission to teach everyone basic reading and math, but she doubts he’ll object. And she’ll probably need his help getting some of the herbs for the garden. And she’ll definitely have to consult him on the accounts and supplies once she’s made sense of them. And she might need to set up a room to work on making medicines, if they don’t already have something like that.
Before she can do any of that, however, she’s confronted by Caecilia, Conrad’s oldest unmarried daughter. At nineteen, the poor thing is almost as old as Hilde herself is and has an even more unfortunate face. She’s also the only one who was visibly unhappy to meet Hilde.
“Just because I’m ugly, doesn’t mean I’m useless!” she says a bit aggressively. “I have useful skills.”
Hilde regards her evenly for a moment, then seeing the girl’s growing nerves, finally speaks. “Would you like to learn to read and how to make medicine? If you want to marry, I’m sure that would get you a better bride price.”
Caecilia looks baffled. “You think someone will marry me?”
“I don’t see why not. And if you think you can handle the position, I’ll train you to be a head wife,” she offers, even though she has a lot to learn about that herself.
“Really?” Caecilia lights up. “Hannah always said I was too stubborn for that.”
Her lips twitch. “Stubborn is a good trait in a head wife, as long as you remember to take the needs of others seriously, not just your own opinion. But you’ll have to learn how to behave. You can’t act out if you get frustrated. You have to know when to push and when to be patient.”
“Then, if you’ll teach me, I’ll learn. I swear I will. I’ll be the best student you ever could ask for,” Caecilia promises.
“Excellent. I’ll teach you, Clara, Adele, Lina and Conrad’s mother how to write and figure, and you can teach the littles. I’ll teach you other things as we go, which you won’t need to teach the littles. Do you want to learn basic healing or no? You’ll still be expected to do your normal chores,” she decides.
Caecilia looks conflicted. “Can I learn the head wife stuff first?”
“Of course.”
~
Conrad is baffled when she brings up teaching most of the household how to read and do math. “Why? I’m pretty sure most of my daughters don’t have the right temperament to be a head wife. And Hannah specifically told me Caecilia wouldn’t be a good one.”
“Why not? It’ll bring their value up for bride prices and ensure that if something happens to the head wife, it won’t be a situation like you’ve been dealing with for the past few months. Also, there are skills that can be taught or improved if one knows how to read from text books. And knowing how to count and do basic figuring can only be a useful thing in supporting a head wife,” she proposes.
“I see.” He taps his fingers on the desk thoughtfully. “Well, that’s certainly a revolutionary idea. I don’t know how well it will go over with the other men, but I do see your point. I’ll allow you to teach them basic reading, writing and arithmetic. Just enough to be useful without being a threat to a head wife. I haven’t heard your argument for allowing Caecilia to learn head wife duties.”
“I honestly think she’s more suited for it than I ever was. Stubbornness isn’t a bad trait in a head wife as long as it’s tempered with wisdom. I think teaching the littles will teach her patience, and she certainly has determination. She’s also willing to speak her mind, a trait that could possibly work against her in a second or third wife position. If nothing else, it gives her a chance of being offered marriage in the first place, which I understand she’s not had much in the way of offers for,” she explains.
He scowls. “I’ve had a couple offers for her. From men I wouldn’t trust with a newborn lamb, much less my daughter.”
She winces. “Well, hopefully this will get her better offers.”
“Vylis willing,” he agrees.
Hilde doesn’t correct him by pointing out that might be more Eisa’s domain. “I would like to create an herb garden for making medicines, fenced off to keep the littles out of it. Is that okay?”
“Of course,” he replies without hesitation.
“I might need help getting ahold of some of the particular herbs,” she warns.
“Make a list. I’ll take care of it.”
“Thank you,” she says gratefully. “I’d also like to turn the unused room in the right wing into a medicine making room. I would need a couple counters made, along with some storage cupboards. Preferably with a sink. And a small fireplace.”
He raises his eyebrows. “That’ll be expensive, but if you can write out the dimensions of what you want, I’ll order the tables and cupboards from the carpenter. If it’s the room I think it is, it should be possible to have a small fireplace and sink installed. But don’t take this as an invitation to redecorate the entire house.”
Hilde blinks at him in puzzlement. “Why would I do that?”
“Right. Not Hannah,” he mutters under his breath so quietly that she barely hears him.
Oh. It’s not that she minds his mistake, but poor Conrad. There’s no way she can adequately replace his first wife in his heart and she won’t even try, but she’ll do her best to be a capable and amiable head wife.
~
The books are, frankly speaking, a mess. Clara and Conrad’s mother, Mina, obviously can’t do math past 5+5 and all the figuring is in small increments like that. Not to mention some of the misspellings and the borderline illegible handwriting one of them has and the other isn’t much better. She has to ask what some entries are and there are a few that none of them can decipher. It takes days to redo the math alone and she has to sort the entries as she goes.
Needless to say, the numbers do not match the totals that Clara and Mina had come up with. And that’s not even counting the mystery entries that she can’t assign to one category or another.
So, she has to go through all their stores and recount what they have and refer to Hannah’s accounts to find how much they actually need and the difference between the two that they need to work towards. That alone is going to take weeks. And in the meantime, she has to take time to assess the garden for if they need additional variety to their diet, plan the herb garden and teach Adele how the new herbs are cared for and teach Caecilia, Clara, Adele, Lina and Mina both math and reading.
It's a lot and she’s exhausted at the end of each day. And she knows that everyone in the household is doing their best to be helpful and not cause problems she has to address, because she simply does not have the time to direct people as a head wife should. Or help with the regular chores. Most of which she has little skill in to begin with.
Fortunately, Caecilia picks up arithmetic quickly and is soon able to help her go through the stores, counting what they have. It still takes a couple months to finish sorting out the books and assessing what they have vs what they need to survive winter. Unfortunately, they’re behind on weaving and a few other things, without Hannah’s help. Fortunately, it’s not insurmountable, despite her inability to fill the hole left by Hannah’s death with her own lack of skills, and Conrad assures her that he can afford to supplement any shortfalls this year.
She does have to ask Clara and Caecilia and one of Conrad’s father’s wives to teach finer weaving skills to a couple of the younger girls who show promise, to make up for her own miserable skill at weaving. At least she can recognize skill when she sees it, due to living with her cousin Camilla for years.
Caecilia has improved enough at figuring to begin having half-hour-a-day teaching sessions for the littles. She’s also improving reasonably well at reading and writing, though not to a standard of being able to teach it yet. Hilde is more than satisfied with how well she’s doing with those and absolutely pleased at how quickly she’s picking up how to apply those to head wife duties.
By the time Hilde’s caught up with everything, Conrad has made sure the renovations to the spare room are finished. She is able to start making remedies for the usual winter maladies and common sicknesses beyond the very basic ones Adele knows how to make. It is clear by this point that Caecilia is not interested in learning anything beyond basic remedies that Adele has long since taught her, but Adele proves to be quite interested in learning to make medicines and what they are used for. Fortunately, she kept her early textbooks, so she can lend them to Adele to learn aside from what she teaches her directly.
Though she has to relegate Adele to only working on the harmless ingredients once she comes up pregnant. Clara and Lina are also in various stages of pregnancy and it’s something of a miracle that Hilde isn’t with child yet, but that can probably be attributed to the stress.
At least she finally has time to restart her healing studies, though far less time per day than she’d devoted to them in Haven. Surprisingly, Conrad allows her to correspond with her brother Hans, Camilla, her female friends and teachers in Haven and even the local Healer, though he insists on reading every letter to and from the Healer, for propriety’s sake. She doesn’t mind. All they’re discussing is healing anyways. Occasionally they exchange supplies as well.
As winter approaches, she counts herself well stocked on remedies, even if an epidemic should break out and she has to help other families with it. Sure, she’d run out in that case, but she wouldn’t be tending most of the patients herself. The other families would have their own basic remedies and supplies. She can always make more and teach others how to make more and in worst case, get more supplies from the local Healer, even if he has to send a Herald to Haven for more.
Hopefully that will happen never, but it’s best to plan ahead.
~
Notes Section:
Hilde’s health check found one of the younger girls to have a vitamin C deficiency/bleeding gums/tired/bruises easily and she forcibly added broccoli, potatoes and berries to the girl’s diet, somewhat to the girl’s dismay. Turns out the girl had been picky about what she ate and no one had really taken notice because she was sneaky about it. Hilde was very firm with her, so she complied with the new diet despite her distaste and was surprised to find herself feeling better. She later expressed interest in learning how diet affects health, which Hilde was happy to teach her once she had the time.
Hilde had to have some berry bushes planted. Hannah did not like berries and had the few they had before that ripped out. Since she had to start from scratch, she had hedges of several different types of berries installed. Conrad was pleasantly surprised at the resulting addition to their diet.
The herb garden for medicines took longer and she had to teach Adele how to safely tend and gather them, since a number of them are poisonous. Adele oversees the gardens and is always having the littles help her with everything.
Lina oversees the horses and cows and the littles who help her tend them and keep them healthy.
Clara oversees the weaving and cooking and the older girls who do a lot of it when Adele or Lina are too busy to help. They do still help her though.
The littles start helping out one way or another by age 6. Everyone works hard. They can’t afford not to. Plus, they probably have to provide food for the hired help, even though they don’t interact with them.
I’m not sure how young Holderkin men marry, but it’s older than the girls. Probably 16-21 on average. So, Hannah would’ve been somewhere between five and ten years younger than Conrad. Clara’s a few years younger than that. Then Adele another few years younger. And lastly, Lina, who is probably around Hildegarde’s age of 21.
Even by the standards of marrying at 15 instead of 12, Caecilia and Hilde are old to have not been married yet. Caecilia, at 19, actually has a wider variety of skills than Hilde and if she’d been taught to read/write and do basic figuring, she’d have been a head wife four years ago. Unfortunately, Hannah just regarded her as impertinent and refused to teach her.
All of the other girls are fourteen or younger, the older girls having been married off already.
Pretty much everyone is expecting Hilde to have Caecilia sent to the convent, since keeping on a daughter without marriage prospects is usually just not done. Thus, Caecilia confronting her. Everyone is pleasantly surprised when she doesn’t consider it.
Caecilia gets a good offer from a desperate younger man after Conrad ‘casually’ mentions multiple times that his daughter is finally being trained as a head wife and has the basic skills down. It’s an offer for second wife, but the actual position of head wife, because his first wife’s father straight up lied about her meager education and miserable skills and she’s fifteen and floundering, doing her best and frequently breaking into tears at the end of headache inducing days where she barely accomplishes anything.
She finally begged him to find a different head wife, after attempts to teach her better math and reading basically failed, probably because she has some sort of learning disability. She’s pretty and sweet and can do most of the basic chores, but she knows her shortcomings and doesn’t want to disgrace her husband with her failures at running his household.
Her husband, by this point, knows she’s right and really needs and wants a competent head wife, but he also doesn’t want someone who will be cruel to his first wife. He’s desperate enough to heed Conrad’s example and approach Conrad for his daughter and her skills. Conrad is happy to accept that offer and Caecilia is straight up thrilled to get a good offer at her age.
Nothing here is meant to imply that Holderkin women are not subservient to men in their culture, because they very much are, but the head wife is the most interactive point of contact with the man of the house outside of bedroom activities and meals. There is a separate dining room where Conrad can eat with his friends if he has any over, without interacting with any of the women or littles beyond being served food.
He usually eats with his wives, though. At least breakfast and supper. Lunch he often takes with him to eat while watching the sheep and taking care of them as needed, in between fighting off bandits.
He has little interaction with his daughters, outside of arranging marriages for them. Partly that’s culture and partly because running a sheep farm and fighting off bandits takes a lot of time. He still cares about them enough to want to arrange marriages where they’ll be treated well by their respective husbands. His wives also discuss the children with him, so he knows bits about their personalities and skills. He’s had five sons so far. Two lost to childhood illness, one to accident and two to bandits.
Conrad’s father’s wives do help out as much as they are able, as well, so Conrad’s wives aren’t totally overwhelmed by their duties. They are in their sixties and seventies, though. His father had six wives and five of them are still alive. He was the only son who survived past infancy, so he inherited all the wives.
Strangely, Clara, Adele and Lina all have boys this time around and when Hilde finally has a child, it’s a boy, too. So, the family kind of feels like she’s a lucky charm. She, of course, is always on top of any illness in the family, so all the boys survive early childhood.
Hilde’s first patient outside the family is Alfons Bastionson, second son of Bastian Antonson, who is still underage and contracts lockjaw/tetanus. The family is a more than a little desperate because they know lockjaw is inevitably fatal without immediate, extremely skilled care and sometimes even then.
They don’t contact her until they understand what it is, which is quickly, but still firmly riding the line of ‘almost too late to treat successfully at their level of tech’ so she has to have him moved to her home so she can treat him 24/7 with a combination of wound care, antibiotics (basically penicillin), muscle relaxants, sedatives and Healing magic to help support his respiratory system and neutralize the specific toxin caused by the bacteria that cause lockjaw. It takes a couple months before he is recovered enough to return home and a good year of weekly appointments for follow up care to recover enough to not need further care.
Needless to say, that feat proved her skill enough that men are willing to send their women and littles to her for treatment. Though of course the men and of age boys go to the local Healer instead, just due to customs against women being alone with men not of their family. It also goes a long way towards convincing the community at large that any child with a decent amount of Healing gift should be properly trained as Healers, even if that means sending them to Haven for training. And results in a couple children being sent to her as apprentices, though not immediately.
The fact that she, her brother Hans, and her cousins Stian and Camilla all trained in Haven and came back without having changed their beliefs radically, nudges the door open for the community to be less hostile (slightly) to outsiders and sending their children to Haven for other types of training besides Healing. Hilde’s ‘quirk’ of teaching all the women and littles in her household how to read and figure is written off as a weird but probably harmless response to Conrad’s dilemma after Hannah died and further written off as potentially useful when Caecilia solves a similar dilemma for her new husband. Gradually it becomes very useful as women realize they can share recipes and patterns, and teach the theory basics of cleanliness, wool preparation, spinning, weaving, gardening, diet, healing and food prep to littles who are just barely old enough to start learning or older children looking to learn a new skill. Over time, Conrad’s wives and daughters write little guides and recipe books. As the daughters marry out, these spread to other families.
Eventually, the convent picks up on it and the head nun writes out tales of Eisa to have the women read to their daughters/fellow wives, with the approval of the head priest. The priests recognize that since they have to let the Heralds teach the kids the laws of the land, religious propaganda in written form is a useful tool to sort of counteract any ‘radical notions’ that knowing the laws might bring about. And if the tales happen to encourage record keeping as a mark of a good wife, but not learning for the sake of being better than men, well. Yeah. Very biased, but to be expected in a religion with a subservient goddess-wife. Also, sneaky of the head nun to encourage just enough literacy to make communication within a convent of women forbidden to speak easier and to make convent-approved recipe books so they’re not stuck with whatever subpar cooking skills come along.
I was going to write out the incident with Alfons, but then I realized I don’t understand enough to write it convincingly and I was dreading writing it. Meh. Sorry about that. I hope this fic isn’t too much in the way of ‘telling’ instead of ‘showing’. It just randomly demanded writing. I kind of skimmed over things that were important but not particularly interesting to write out.
I should probably quit writing notes. I have the feeling they may be as long as the actual fic at this point.