It’s Bathing Day Again, And It’s How Emily Knows Another Couple Of Weeks Has Passed, Give Or Take. 

It’s bathing day again, and it’s how Emily knows another couple of weeks has passed, give or take. 

Her sense of time is still a blur, but there’s the unmistakable flow crisp of icy air replacing the moist scent of rotting leaves, and the chilled metal of her doorhandle bites at her fingers as she grabs it. And she knows it must be the Month of High Cold.

And she would climb up and push the metal shutters in the dusty corridors to see if the snow has covered the metal cat outside, if it has covered the roofs and the gardens and the round terrace on her right, or if it’s a windy, dry, snowless kind of winter, but a woman in dusty overalls and a heavy little suitcase came in with the madame some weeks before that, and fiddled with the old broken lock, and before Emily could even move to get up, the door slammed and the rusty old key turned, scraping at her spine.

Today one of the girls turns the key inside the lock, sheepishly, a stack of towels under her arms, and against the darkness of the freezing hall Emily sees the faint glow of the girl’s breath, a ghostly little cloud around her mouth. Emily sways, getting up from her spot, and feels a dull hit of embarrassment against her throat, at the aching weakness of her knees, of moving around so little when she used to be running around the Tower’s gardens for hours and could climb the hightest tree if only her governesses would let her. Could run and run and get scratches on her laquered shoes from running so much, almost as fast as Corvo, and she would be chastised for returning back to her studies all sweaty and red-faced and her voice hoarse and raw from the chilly air outside, and now she could barely get herself to follow the girl down the stairs, each step echoing painfully through her soles.

She wonders, briefly, if she could be so weak because she’s falling sick. 

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