Chapter 6
Days drag on in Little Hangleton. Merope is unsure if she's simply used to a faster paced lifestyle, with lively loved ones and entertainment right at her fingertips at all hours of the night.
Wake, cook, serve, clean, sleep.
Sometimes, if she's careful, she sneaks.
It's easy to remember a man's schedule when punctuality is directly correlated to brutality.
A brute, her Father. Brutes, the men she lives with. Squalor, they create, when their haggard little home is simply a tired old thing with tattered wards hardly worth being tied to the oldestones buried deep beneath the earth. Merope doesn't think a single Gaunt has been able to feel the shack's oldestone as she has in centuries. It feels ready to be put out of its misery, like her old neighbor Don Carlos' sentient mop of a beloved thing. He'd wanted company, a strong young person to hold the crate and translate a bit as his shaking feeble hands lavished his dog with its last pets, gone until little Snow would guide Don Carlos to his heavenly home in three months' time, que se descanse en paz.
Little Hangleton is indeed small. Quiet even, in comparison, though Merope herself has no coin to hold up against the glare of the sun off the local church bell, she still remembers enough to know.
One day, while sneaking, carefully as far from the pub as possible on a day where many a men folk congregate to place their bets on some big race or some other such rot, really a waste of money in her own eyes but these people don't really understand how lottery works, let alone the people after them. All they saw was hope, chance, and disappointment in an endless cycle she doesn't really see the appeal in anymore, for all Merope at five would have killed to follow her kin in this endeavor.
She meets the sewist.
Merope does not know her name yet, only that she is to be addressed as Madame, and that her thin fingers work nimbly through any sort of string or yarn she's handed. Merope loves to watch her turn mangled clumps into masterpieces. Madame is kind enough to lend Merope undyed thread, a needle, and a wonky piece of scrap cloth that would have otherwise gone to cabbage. Merope sets herself up in a corner out of the way of working women and quietly listens to gossip as she familiarizes herself with a long held tradition in her family. She hopes one day to adorn the shoulders of her loved ones with birds in flight of fancy, and pouting peonies. Anything, really, so long as it suited the soul of the gifted.
Madame cannot teach her this part, teasing out the colors of the spirits, for muggles cannot see the delicate swirls and clashing flash of magic in this art. No, Madame is not even so much as a squib, though her hands work magic and rake in coin while doing so.
It takes a year, but eventually Merope is allowed tedious work, things Madame could and has done before, but why would she when for a simple small payment, given upon completion, Merope could spend an hour or so carefully hemming now that her own pudgy fingers are dexterous enough not to spill blood?
Madame favors Merope, and for this kindness Merope is absolutely certain Marvolo never learns of their association.
Not until it's too late to do anything about it.