My lord has a room where rain comes when he asks for it.
He goes in dirty and comes out clean, and no man carries the water. No boy runs to the well twelve times till his arms shake. It simply falls, warm as summer, from a little iron flower in the wall, hot without a fire that I can see, as though the Lord Himself has been set to boiling somewhere behind the stone.
We wash at Eastertide. Once. The whole house shares the tub, eldest first, and by the time it reaches the babe the water is grey as the sky before snow. That is a bath. That is a year of dirt answered for.
He does this every morning. Every single morning, he stands in the falling rain and sings, and lets the warm water run off him onto the floor and away, gone, wasted, more water than my family drinks in a week, poured out for nothing but the pleasure of being wet.
I do not understand where the heat comes from and I have stopped asking. A thing that gives warmth without wood, and water without labor, and asks no prayer, no penance, no aching back, is either the work of angels or the other thing, and angels do not usually smell of flowers.
He steps out pink and clean and unafraid. No man should be that clean and owe nothing for it.
The bill will come. It always comes. He has simply not yet been told the price.