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Chapter 5: Learning
Sansa woke to the familiar sounds of a maid bustling around in her chambers and the unfamiliar feeling of rough fabric under her skin.
A straw mattress. Why was she...
She shot upright with a cry and heard one in return.
"My lady!" the little maid in her room exclaimed, hand on her chest. "By the Seven, did you just scare me!"
The maid looked familiar.
"Who are you?"
"Name's Betsy, my lady," she answered promptly. "I was your maid sometimes back in Maegor's. But when the master asked me if I could recommend a good maid and a cook for his new household and to take care of his... of his..."
"Mistress," Sansa supplied helpfully.
"His lady," Betsy continued, "well, I was all for it. I also told him there'd be no need to hire a cook for only two people and most times only the one and that I could be very well do all the work especially since it's not that big a house and I never liked it in the keep anyway and..."
Sansa held up a silencing hand.
"I think I understand," she said. "Would you mind giving me a minute?"
Betsy nodded and curtsied respectfully and then made to leave the room but turned at the door.
"Just so you know, I prepared warm water in the kitchen for you to wash with and I made breakfast and..."
"Betsy..."
"Yes my lady, I'll leave, I am sorry."
When the door closed behind the girl, Sansa buried her face into her hands.
But after last night, she had no tears left. And no clue how to go on.
One step at a time, Clegane's deep voice was in her thoughts. Even though his was the last voice she wanted to hear right now, it was the voice she always clung to after an especially trying night with Joffrey.
She clambered out of bed, wincing at the soreness between her legs. And at the memories the pain woke.
Worse than with a whore.
Tears threatened again. She had given him the one thing everyone had always told her was the most valuable gift she had to give a man and he had sneered at it.
She had suffered and bled, had done everything he had asked of her, no matter how humiliating, and he had found it less pleasant than the services of women who spread their legs for everyone who cared to pay them.
And it couldn't have been because she had not really known what to do. She was not so innocent that she didn't know that men took their pleasure from women regardless of their consent or participation.
What had she done so wrong that she couldn't even achieve what all other women could, even against their will?
Staring at her bloodshot eyes in the mirror over the washbasin, she decided she needed to talk to someone or she'd go insane.
…
Betsy was all too happy to talk.
Sansa wasn't sure she even needed her to be there for her incessant prattling, but she found the girl's effusions soothing.
Betsy did her hair, helped her to get dressed and served her a hearty breakfast. After a while, the girl's unbridled enthusiasm for having the running of the little household was starting to get infectious.
Since apparently "the master" had given Betsy money to make all the purchases Sansa thought necessary, they were soon discussing what needed to be bought.
Although she didn't want to spend the Hound's money on herself - especially not after last night - Sansa couldn't help admitting that her wardrobe was severely lacking, even for a kept woman.
The grey dress she had worn yesterday - and was dressed in right now - was the only one that wasn't too short or too tight and while Betsy promised to see if something could be done about the other dresses she owned, there was a general consensus that she needed at least one simple dress for everyday wear.
The matter of buying feather mattresses, beddings and linen for the bed was more controversial. While Betsy thought it the height of unnecessary luxury, Sansa just couldn't imagine spending one more night on a scratchy, lumpy straw-mattress.
After much back and forth, pointing out that "the master" would be used to that sort of comfort from his lodgings in the white tower finally did the trick.
Grumbling, Betsy cut back at some pots and kitchen implements she had wished for.
Then she decided that with all the errands to run and dinner to be prepared in order to be ready when the master came home, she had to hurry and was out of the door before Sansa could hold her back.
She slowly stood and walked through the house.
Worse than with a whore.
That was what she was now, she thought. A whore. She had taken Clegane's gold for new dresses and a feather bed and the food Betsy would put on the table tonight.
Gods bless Betsy's heart for acting as if she was still a lady, but she knew she wasn't.
Her steps led her up to the bedroom, where she spent some time staring at the bed as if it was an enemy.
Worse than with a whore.
The more she let that insult echo through her thoughts, the angrier she became.
She was a highborn lady. She was well educated in the arts of conversation and etiquette. She could embroider a piece of cloth with the finest silk thread, had been taught to run a household a hundred times as large as this one. She knew how to read and how to calculate numbers; how to treat minor wounds and common illnesses. She had been taught history and could name all the important houses of Westeros including describing their banners.
She would not concede something that seemed as simple as pleasing a man between the sheets to women who had not even learned how to read.
If this was something that could be learned, if this was now the life she was expected to lead, she would excel at it.
Sandor Clegane, she vowed, would never again prefer another woman's services over hers.
…
Unfortunately, her heroic vow all too soon threatened to crumble under the weight of reality.
Sansa needed someone to teach her the secrets of her new profession and she had determined to look for one such person on the Street of Silks. She was soon to discover, however, that as freely as most of those women shared their bodies with every man who paid them - oftentimes not even caring to take their business away from public scrutiny - they were surprisingly unhelpful when approached by a woman.
Exhausted from wandering around and hearing one impolite rebuff after another, she finally knocked on yet another door of a brothel that at this time of day was closed.
A bleary-eyed woman opened the door, clearly just roused from a too short sleep.
"We don't need another girl here," she snapped - a sentence Sansa had heard more than once this morning - and was about to close the door, when Sansa suddenly was fed up with having yet another door closed in her face.
She quickly planted one of her feet into the doorway.
"I am not here to offer myself," she said, trying her best to sound like her mother. "I am here to offer money in exchange for your help."
The woman's eyes clouded with something that looked like fear.
Quickly, she stuck her head out the door, looked left and right and then pulled Sansa into the house rather ungently.
"Who sent you?" she hissed.
"No one," Sansa answered, puzzled she'd be asked such a question.
The woman took a step back and eyed her critically, while Sansa took off the ugly cap she was wearing to hide her hair.
"Dress almost fooled me," she said. "You're a highborn one, ain't ye?"
Sansa nodded.
"If it's an unwanted bairn you want to be rid of, girl, you're at the wrong place," the woman said, supressing a yawn. "Old Maggie two houses down does things like that."
Sansa's stomach dropped. So far, the thought that what he had done could plant a child inside her had not even occurred to her.
'Stupid, once again,' she thought dejectedly.
"I only did it once, last night," she said slowly, only belatedly realizing she was trying to defend herself to a woman of ill repute.
The woman looked her up and down for a moment.
"Might not be too late then," she said. "Go to old Maggie and let her give you some moon tea."
Sansa fell silent, still mulling over the possibility of becoming pregnant. Then again, hadn't the Hound spilled his seed outside her body?
"Anything else?" the woman demanded impatiently.
"Well, that wasn't what I have been coming here for," Sansa said, finally finding her voice again. "I came because it was... unpleasant."
The woman gave her an once-over again, her lips quirking slightly at the corners.
"It's supposed to be unpleasant the first time," she said, chuckling. "Thought they teach you highborn girls at least that much."
Heated embarrassment crept up Sansa's cheek. This plan had been a horrible idea. She had no idea how to even ask what she really wanted to know.
And now she stood here in the ill-lit corridor of a brothel, confronted with a whore who quite obviously would rather be sleeping off whatever she had done last night and found herself struggling for words as if she was a simpleton.
"No, what I meant was... he... he put something on me, to make the way easier for him. Something that smelled of camomile and lavender..."
"Mag's finest," the woman muttered, looking surprised and a bit more alert than before.
"But still afterwards he was angry and seemed so dissatisfied and he said... he said..."
As if remembering the humiliating scene wasn't worse enough, repeating Clegane's words to this woman who was of the profession Clegane seemed to have only slightly more use for than for herself seemed impossible.
"What did he say?" the woman prodded, clearly intrigued now.
"He said it was worse than with a whore," Sansa said, looking at her feet.
The woman was silent for a long while, but when Sansa dared to look up and see how much she had offended her, she looked somewhat amused.
"Come with me," she demanded and turned to lead the way.
Sansa trailed after her through a public room that still bore the signs of raucous going-ons from the night before. Half-empty pewter cups stood on the tables, some of them knocked over with their content spilled on the tables and on the floor, women's undergarments lay strewn on the chairs and benches and in one corner a man slept with his head on his arms, having apparently spent the night here.
The smell the establishment gave off was a nauseating mix of sour wine, unwashed bodies and stale ale.
How anyone could willingly seek out such a place to find amusement was beyond her.
Sansa carefully picked her way through the room, meticulously avoiding the puddles of unidentifiable liquids on the floor.
"Name's Sibyl, by the way," the woman said when she opened a door to her to let her in.
"Sansa," she replied, just in time swallowing her last name before it spilled out. "Sansa Snow."
"Aah, that explains it," Sibyl said and then plopped down behind a rickety looking desk, strewn with all sorts of papers.
"Brothel's mine," she explained, indicating the papers. "More paperwork than one would think, 'specially ever since the dwarf's penny."
Sansa vaguely remembered the uproar that had reached even her ears when Tyrion Lannister had decided on a special tax for whoring to pay for Joffrey's wedding. Sansa shuddered involuntarily at the thought how close she had come to end up the dwarf's wife.
Somehow, word of Tywin's plans had reached the Tyrells just in time and after a lot of ugly words had been exchanged, Tywin had to call off the wedding as not to anger his allies, much to her own and even to Tyrion's visible relief.
In turn, the Tyrells had to vow not to marry her to anyone without Tywin's or the king's consent.
She had never felt more like a sack of grain haggled over by greedy merchants than that day, but even so, relief had been prevalent.
She'd asked Clegane once who it might be she had to be grateful to for her timely deliverance from that particular fate, but the Hound had just angrily grunted something about "sodding idiot who doesn't know what's good for him" and she had never asked again.
If it hadn't been for Dontos Hollard having been found days before swimming in the harbour bottom up with a slit throat, she might have been inclined to think the former knight her saviour, but as it was, his identity remained a mystery.
"So," Sibyl resumed their conversation. "Your man wasn't too happy with you, I gather, and you wanna change that?"
Sansa nodded again.
"Can't see how that should be profitable to me, even if you pay me," Sibyl said, lazily leaning back in her chair. "Might lose a good customer."
Sansa could see her point and was just thinking how to convince her of the opposite, when something seemed to occur to Sibyl.
"He used Mag's grease, you said?"
"I don't know if that is what it's called," Sansa answered.
"That's what it's called. Old Mag has once been a whore, too, she has a few tricks up her sleeve. And that grease is one of the finest," Sibyl explained conversationally. "But there's just the one man I know of who uses it so regularly as to carry it around with him," Sibyl went on, staring off into space. "Some think him considerate, but I guess he just prefers cunts to be wet and ready, which doesn't come naturally what with the way he looks."
Sansa wouldn't have believed it possible to feel even worse about last night than she already did, but apparently, she had been wrong. She bit back a tart reply that this had nothing to do with his face and everything with quite a different part of him.
Sibyl's attention turned to her again.
"So the Hound has found himself a pretty little mistress," she said with a broad smile. "And the 'Crippled Kate's' stands to lose its most generous customer."
She threw her head back and let out a throaty laugh and still cackled with ill-concealed glee when she turned her attention to Sansa once again.
"Am I right?"
Sansa contemplated for a while if it was smart to give the woman that much information, but since she had already figured it out herself, she saw not much sense in denial, especially since it seemed to further Sibyl's inclination to help her.
"Yes."
"In this case, girl, listen up."
Sansa sat up a bit straighter, just as she had back when her septa had spoken in serious tones to her. She didn't try to think about what it said about her that now instead of a septa, she listened to a woman who made her living selling herself.
A woman with dirty blonde hair that was mussed from sleep, red blotches on her cheek that might have been paint a few hours ago and eyes rimmed with black, most of which was smudged and would have given her a ghoulish look if not for the lively green eyes, bloodshot but clear, with which she held Sansa's gaze.
"I expect you to feel bruised and sore after what happened, especially with a man like him," she said almost kindly. "Go to Old Maggie after we're done here, she can give you something in which to bathe your cunt so it'll heal faster and everything you need to prevent getting pregnant."
That Old Maggie seemed to be a veritable cornucopia of all things to do with carnal relations, Sansa thought sourly and with a sigh nodded her consent to doing as she was bid.
"He... did not spill inside me," she felt obliged to supply for honesty's sake.
Sibyl arched a badly painted eyebrow in apparent surprise.
"Be that as it may," she finally said. "He might not think of it every time and you'd do well to be prepared."
She turned and rummaged through some chest until she had apparently found what she was looking for and put a little statue right in front of Sansa. Made from some black, exotic wood, it was smooth and polished to a sheen.
Only it wasn't a statue, it was a wooden representation of a man's… appendage.
Swallowing her misgivings and the urge to just turn from her foolish mission, Sansa eyed it critically. She might not have gotten a good look last night, but...
"It's not very accurate."
Sibyl chuckled.
"How so?"
"There are more veins, here," she said, indicating the places with her index finger. "And it's way too small."
Now the woman laughed openly.
"Heard as much about the infamous Hound," she said, still amused. "But trust me, girl, most men would be glad to have as much as this."
…
Sansa came home from her outing with her head full of advice, but was distracted by the mouth-watering smell of freshly cooked food that emanated from the back of the house.
Sneaking into the kitchen, she had a look at what seemed to be a sumptuous dinner being in the making.
"Are we expecting guests?"
Betsy gave her a withering look.
"We," she said, stressing the word, "are expecting the master to be here tonight and I won't have him think badly about my abilities as a cook. He should have no reason to regret hiring me."
Sansa sighed. Seemed like she was not the only one afraid of underperforming.
Her mood darkened quickly, however, when she remembered that unlike Betsy, she already had disappointed "the master".
For the last time, though, she thought, straightening her back.
...
tbc
*Note: The name of the brothel "Crippled Kate's" is borrowed from "Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt". Novigrad is my reference for a densely populated medieval city like King's Landing.