Impossible [Part 1]
Hannah’s POV
‘Waahh— Billy tore my clothes—’
‘No, Lily is the one who ruined my sand pile first!’
‘It’s not Lily’s fault! Harry told her to do it.’
‘Don’t tell on me, Mary!”
‘Be quiet, all of you! I can’t study like this!’
‘Waa— Hannah nee-chan, Mike nii-chan is mad at us—!!!’
Before coming to work in the royal capital, every day passed in such a lively manner.
Me, the eldest daughter, and Mike, one year my junior. A little younger, the twins, Billy and Harry. And one year younger still, another pair of twins, Lily and Mary.
Mike, unlike me, was an intelligent child and was taught to read and write at the church. Because my parents worked from morning till night and Billy, Harry, Lily and Mary were still young, it was my job to take care of them. By being frugal, we somehow managed to survive.
One day, my father hurt his lower back and couldn’t work like he used to anymore.
Mike quit his studies at the church and started working to replace Father as the breadwinner. But he was not good at physical labor and couldn’t match Father’s abilities.
The children had grown up and weren’t as much of a handful as before, but their appetite had grown too. They just hadn’t reached the working-age yet.
My mother worked more than before, but it wasn’t a high-paying job in the first place. And so, slowly but surely, our family began to drown in poverty.
Mike, who used to be praised as a clever child at the church, often got yelled at and scolded at his physical labor work and gradually lost his smile. Our mother, too, was not home most of the time.
My little brothers and sisters were lonely because they couldn’t see Mother, and Father was always apologizing.
I, too, sacrificed my sleep to do some repairing work, but a countryside like this didn’t have any commissions that could make up for our expenditure.
We had been able to live normally, albeit modestly until now, but…
♠♠♠
I quickly came to the decision to work at the royal capital.
Fortunately, I was good at sewing, and after hearing that seamstresses were immediately offered jobs in the royal capital, I scraped some money together for the carriage fee and went. It has been a few years since I came to work in the capital.
When I first saw the royal capital, my heart thumped with excitement at the thought of working somewhere with loads of fascinating people… though that didn’t last.
……nobody was willing to hire me.
I was confident with my own skills…… but even then…
‘Seamstresses were immediately offered jobs’ was just a lie.
I only learned of this at a later time, but I had come to the royal capital during the end of the social season when many seamstresses were temporarily dismissed unless they had considerable skills.
The Kingdom, with it’s thriving trade, relied on imports for most fabrics other than silk, which could be supplied domestically. Wool and linen mainly came from the Empire in the form of ready-made clothes, so when the social season was over, orders of custom-made silk dresses dropped sharply and many seamstresses would get retrenched.
High-ranking nobles and rich people did tailor their clothes from linen and wool fabric, but those families, with their exclusive tailors and seamstresses, had no vacancies.
The processing of fur and the like was the job of specialty workers, not tailors or seamstresses, so that kind of work would not be entrusted to someone like me.
I came to the capital at the worst possible time.
Even though I was thinking of going home, I didn’t have money for the carriage fee.
What I had on hand was only the money for today and tomorrow’s meals, which I wasn’t even sure would be enough.
The royal capital’s dazzling and glittering shopping district felt like a place of despair as I stood paralyzed in place for hours. If the shopkeeper I worked for now hadn’t called out to me, I would have spent the cold winter in the slums.
If I entered the slums once, it would definitely be hard to find a job again as a seamstress.
What could I have done in this weather that would only turn colder without even a job? Sending an allowance to my family was nothing but a dream.
