“Has anything happened? Since leaving the palace you are … nervous?” I? Nervous? Never. Just because I gripped my armrest in frustration and tapped it with my index finger, she simply assumed I was nervous. What a rookie mistake.
I was honestly frustrated. The king watched me, the churches watched me and most wanted me to vanish into thin air because the character I presented openly definitely didn´t fit in their way of dealing with things … at least I was somewhat immune to their approaches though. I still couldn’t risk a single scandal if I wanted to run everything smoothly.
And so, I could only plan my next moves meticulously, which required a lot of thinking. This was also probably the reason why Hannah assumed I was nervous. I somehow had to get most of the churches on my side which wouldn’t be easy at all. I would need to give them a huge incentive to act for my sake … maybe I could endager myself and force them to safe me? Additionally, I had to be wary of the king, the underworld which would notice us more and more, my image as the saint …
“Nah, everything is alright. When are we there?” Hannah opened the curtains along with the window and put her head through the gap. Shortly afterwards, she was back inside and closed everything again.
“A few minutes.” And so, we waited while the guard captain probably cursed his way through the traffic jam. Our destination was obviously the eastern slums, where I was tasked with helping to rebuild everything. Since the last time I was there, not much has changed in all honesty. Outside of the usual borders, there were quite a few makeshift tents Mary provided, but beyond that, I could see that the progress of cleaning up everything was rather slow.
Frowning, I stepped out of the carriage, walked towards the front and gave the guard captain a rather thick booklet. As soon as he opened it, he opened his eyes wide, and then looked at me as if I was crazy.
“Milady … this will cost way more than what was collected from the other nobles three days ago. Are you sure you … you want me to oversee it, don’t you?” He asked while opening his eyes wide.
“Yes. The funds are already secured, so don’t worry if you go a bit over the budget.” I claimed happily.
“We would need a lot of craftsmen for this …” He said and already flipped the first page over, looking at the plan I designed with Mary to reconstruct the eastern slums from the ground up.
“The way I see it, this place is full of young men who waste their time. Let´s give them a future, shall we?” I asked. Naturally, we did need to keep costs somewhat low. We couldn’t ask all the craftsmen in the royal capital to help us out after all … that would cost a fortune.
“You want untrained men to build houses?” The guard captain asked in worry.
“We already hired around a hundred carpenters who will arrive tomorrow … so feel free to start hiring people for manual labour and send everyone you meet here where the carpenters will begin their training.” I explained swiftly.
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“As you wish.” He neither wasted any time asking about my security, nor about the feasibility of rebuilding everything, but this time better. But that’s what I liked about him. He did what I wanted and that was it. As the guard captain already stomped towards the slum, we waited on a small patch of grass for our order. Instant delivery sadly wasn’t a thing yet, and the caravan we wanted seemed to have gotten stuck in traffic as well.
Either way, there were quite a few humans already gathering around us. They were mostly women, children, but also a few old men who sat on the grass with me and Hannah … and we chatted. Even Hannah found a few conversation partners who were … less racist than the rest. In any case, I was swamped with peasants who wanted to talk to me. Apparently, the news about my selection as the saint even reached this place, which I honestly didn´t expect. None of them could read, or even buy a newspaper in the first place, but apparently, some did have cleaning jobs inside the city, where the news about me circulated quite fast.
“Hey, do you want to play chess?” I asked a random boy of around thirteen years old. He looked surprised but then shook his head dejected.
“I don’t know the rules, Milady.”
“It´s fine, I´ll teach you.” I said, stood up to retrieve a chessboard with a few simple figures from our strangely untouched luggage and placed it on the ground between us. I gave my best to converse with the others as I taught the child how to play chess. These conversations were mostly about their difficulties, worries, and strangely enough, their faith. Some even felt sorry but nonetheless informed me they were atheists, to which I could only smile wryly and emphasize I had absolutely no problem with that. I was there to help, regardless of their faith and that was something that needed to get into their damn skull.
But it still stuck to me. The population in the slums was largely unreligious, probably because they had more worries than anyone else … except me of course. But anyway, they simply had no incentive to believe. They couldn’t spend half a Sunday in the church, there was no societal pressure to pray, nothing. The churches simply didn´t value them enough to send a priest out, or even build a small church there. From an economics standpoint, this was completely right, but from a religious perspective? I didn´t know.
Well, it didn´t matter to me. What mattered though was that people looked up to me. And they certainly did as ten carts, full of food rolled down the street and halted right next to us. Even though I could hear quite a few hungry stomachs, nobody tried to steal anything which did baffle me quite a bit.
Shortly afterwards, two of the guards accompanying the convoy heaved a large iron pot down and prepared everything to lay a fire beneath it. Satisfied, I heard even more stomachs as a few cooks started cooking some sort of stew. It was a relatively simple dish, but for the people here, it was definitely more than enough. Going by their emaciated bodies, they certainly ate way too little and probably didn´t see this much food in a long while.
I just started my tenth game of chess with the boy as the first bowls were passed around. Naturally, I declined, but the boy in front of me certainly didn´t. Instead, he let an even younger girl, who looked over my shoulder the whole time, play with me. Needless to say, she lost the first round, but I let her win the second one, all while I talked with a beardy man about the reconstruction of their home. He was apparently one of the people the guard captain hired and was more than interested to get to work. His little daughter nervously looked around, holding a simple dirty cloth in her hands. This man wanted to give his child a chance in life and I understood that. I wanted to do the same after all.
That day, we didn´t achieve much. Well, we did feed hundreds of hungry mouths, but we didn´t do anything productive, except gaining popularity. But that was all Lucy White needed.