Improvements
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
When the strange woman appeared, Maude was in the buttery, speaking with the clerk of the kitchen about his latest round of purchases. He went to market too often, she thought, and was too extravagant for the types of meals he produced. She would, if he did not modify his expenditures, have to fire him.
He would be the first servant she fired since her husband died.
The very idea filled her with dread. She had run the household since her marriage ten years before, but her husband had handled the money, the hiring and firing of servants, and the overall management of the large estate.
Now she managed it in trust for their only child, a son who was still in swaddling. Still, some duties made her hands shake.
. . .