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needing to take the air in the courtyard, where the players are at practise again, and Olwen replied, “Yes, my lady,” very cynically. Lady Horsley went with them, I think, but she moves quietly so sometimes you don't realise she's there at all.
    After a short time I thought I had finished. Nick looked at what I had done and announced that it was “passing excellent for a novice!” So I was very pleased.
    I noticed Sarah had left a little pile of broken sugar ribbons by the high stool she had been using. All the concentrating had made me hungry, so I wandered over to the pile of sugar ribbons and picked one up to nibble on it.…
    Suddenly someone swooped up behind me and knocked it out of my hand. I swung round to see who it was and found it was Mrs. Teerlinc. I was so surprised I just stared.
    “Really, Lady Grace, do you not like your life?” she asked, and she was almost shouting, which is most unlike the way she usually is—so friendly and kind. So I stood there, staring, with my mouth open.
    She took my wrist gingerly. “Look at you!” shesaid, more gently. “Your hands are covered with paint.”
    Well, it was true, they were—unlike Mrs. Teerlinc and Nick and the other limners, I had somehow managed to get my fingers as covered with yellow paint as I normally do with ink.
    “I—I'm sorry, mistress,” I stammered. “I'll wash them at once, but I really don't think I got my gown dirty—”
    “No, no,” she said, smiling a little. “It is not your kirtle I worry about, my dear, it is you. Did you not know some paints are poisonous? Above all others, the yellow paint made with orpiment. If you eat it at all you could become ill or even die. Never, ever eat or drink while you are painting.”
    I was amazed and then thought I'd better curtsey in case she wouldn't let me paint any more. “I'm sorry; I didn't realise. I won't do it again,” I said.
    “Good. Now go to Nick and he will show you how to clean your hands properly.”
    I went to the corner of the Workroom where Nick was busy pounding ceruse white again.
    “Is it true?” I asked him. “Are paints poisonous?”
    “Most of them are,” he replied. “Some of them are quite deadly. It depends what kind. It would amaze you to know the strange things they makepaint from. There is a yellow colour I have heard tell of that is made from the urine of cows fed on a special kind of leaf in the Indies.”
    That didn't surprise me, knowing Ellie as I do. They sometimes use ten-day-old urine to clean clothes in the laundry. It makes you think twice about wearing your shirts, really it does.
    “But that's not poisonous,” I pointed out, “only nasty.”
    “True, but white paint, made with mercury, sends alchemists mad,” said Nick, looking very serious. He waved the pestle to show me the white fragments on the end that he was grinding fine. “It is so poisonous, the grinding must be done perfectly. And the yellow colour you were using is made with orpiment, which comes from volcanoes and is deadly. It is sometimes used to poison rats, for it has no taste or smell.”
    Then Nick made his voice sound deep and ghoulish. “Why, if you accidentally swallowed some of it, you would become sleepy, sick, and dizzy. Soon you would be vomiting with a taste of metal in your mouth and terrible pains in your belly, so you would feel as if you had eaten a rat alive, that was gnawing its way out of your stomach.…”
    “Ugh,” I said, and shuddered.
    “… and then you would fall into a deathlike sleep and die,” Nick finished, looking triumphant.
    After that, I paid attention when he showed me how to clean my hands carefully with a rag, and then rinse my fingers with nasty-smelling turpentine, and then wash with lye and water until my hands were pink.
    It sounds horrible to die of orpiment. It's a good thing Mrs. Teerlinc was so quick.
    Hell's teeth! I have just realised it will soon be dinnertime and I must go. The players are still in the courtyard. Now