I waved at Eva standing in the doorway for a long time before finally turning away.

I’d taken a nap today. The lady had a foul personality, but she was beautiful in the way a doll displayed in a fancy city toy shop is beautiful. Eva had been kind. For a single day’s experience, none of it was so terrible.

Thinking of it that way lifted my mood considerably, and hunger crept in behind it. I tore off a large chunk of Eva’s bread, thinking I ought to come up with an excuse to give the lady for why I wouldn’t be back tomorrow.

Unlike the dark bread I usually ate, the kind that took long chewing to coax out any flavor, this white, soft roll had sweet dried fruit pressed into the crust and was stuffed inside with herbs and seasoned, fatty meat. Each bite melted on the tongue while the sweet and salty flavors of the fruit and meat traded off against each other, pulling the next bite out of my hands before I’d even finished the last.

The excuse I’d meant to think of, and the plan to save half for my parents, only came back to me after I’d finished the whole thing and had to drink from the river to wash it down. I stared at my full stomach, appalled at myself.

Has a demon taken up residence in my belly?

My parents, unaware that their daughter’s appetite had briefly overtaken her love for them, were simply and genuinely happy about the silver coin I’d brought home. That day I went from being their sweet, beloved daughter to their capable, sweet, beloved daughter, and I enjoyed the elevated status to the fullest.

The stew my mother made that night was good, but the meat in it was the scraps left after making broth, dry and without much depth. The meat in the bread had been so juicy it had run down my chin and I’d had to wash my face in the river for a while…… That night, I never did say I wouldn’t go back to be the lady’s companion.

It was for the sake of being a more dutiful daughter to my parents, who’d been so happy about the silver coin. No other reason.

Truly.

“Go fetch it.”

So I could endure it. No matter how long the lady made me kneel on the floor, unable to find an excuse to strike me when I’d greeted her properly.

Even when she deliberately left my legs numb enough to hurt and then made me go retrieve the shoe she’d thrown, I could endure it. Eva had said today’s snack was walnut pie loaded with cinnamon and sugar. That alone was enough to make me smile.

“Miss, shall I put your shoe back on for you?”

Holding the satin-ribbon-trimmed shoe carefully, I knelt in front of her and asked. My legs folded with an unavoidable groan, but I’d done everything she’d asked, and still the lady looked more twisted up inside than before.

“A boy like you can’t even handle that without whimpering?”

Not exactly something to say when she was the one who’d made me whimper in the first place. Was this really what it’s like being a companion? It felt closer to being an insult-absorber. In fact, the lady always spoke to me in a low, threatening voice. I’d long since concluded she disliked me, which made it all the more baffling why she kept calling me back, and that bafflement was its own kind of frustration.

Well, figuring out the lady’s intentions was never my job to begin with. To keep my expression from souring, I decided to think about something I liked. Walnut pie. Sweet walnut pie. Warm walnut pie.

“Go fetch it again.”

The lady snatched the shoe from my hands, just as I sat there with a compliant face and obedient expression while thinking about something else entirely, and threw it even further.

Right. Today I was neither companion nor insult-absorber. I was a dog, fetching whatever the master threw.

A dog…… a dog…… that dog of a lady.

Hobbling back toward her with the retrieved shoe, the dog of a lady watched me with that same angelic face of hers, looking thoroughly satisfied.

***

If anyone in the manor had ever asked my name, I would’ve said it’s Marilyn, and they would’ve asked why a girl had a name like that, and I would’ve answered.

Because I am a girl. I’m only dressed as a boy. From there, I could’ve explained why I’d had no choice but to wear boys’ clothes and made it clear I hadn’t been deliberately hiding my gender. But in this manor, not only did my name not matter, my gender didn’t either, so I was simply called the companion or that golden-haired kid who waits on the lady.

Since I was in no position to go around introducing myself to anyone, I ended up becoming the keeper of a secret I’d never intended to keep.

The lady, who spent half of every day with me, might have been expected to want to call me by name at some point, but I stayed so constantly at her feet, watching her expressions and gestures and moving before she could speak, that there were times I barely heard my own voice, let alone got called by name.

Not that I was saying I wanted to hear it. The lady only opened her mouth when she wanted to ruin someone’s mood.

“You’re not a eunuch, are you?”

“Pardon? What’s that, Miss?”

Of course, having grown up no differently from other children my age, I knew words like that, along with a whole string of other insults, but I had no desire to play along with the lady’s obvious attempt to provoke me, so I played innocent.

“I mean a boy your age who still has a smooth chin and a thin little voice.”

Is that so. I’d thought it referred to someone who couldn’t use what was between their legs, or could but couldn’t produce offspring. The lady had probably expected me to bristle at being called unmanly, but since I wasn’t a boy, it didn’t particularly sting.

Truth be told, for a village girl I’d been told often enough that I was pretty, so there was something faintly shocking about being taken for a boy just because I’d put on trousers and a shirt. Under those circumstances, the lady’s taunt didn’t wound me at all. If anything, it quietly fed a certain private pride.

“Don’t you have any backbone?”

The lady got irritated again at my continued meek nodding. She was probably still hoping for the sight of me trembling and crying with fear, something she hadn’t gotten even on the first day.

But Miss, forcing out tears is exhausting.

It was around the fifth day, I think. To give her what she seemed to want, I’d once bowed my head and pretended to cry. I held my breath to make it convincing, enough that I could feel the heat rising to the back of my neck and flushing my skin red. A little shameless, perhaps, but I added a gentle trembling of the shoulders, and it looked for all the world like someone unable to bear the humiliation and on the verge of tears.

Do this once and she’ll finally stop.

The lady grabbed my chin in an instant, confirmed my eyes were bone dry, and flew into a rage.

‘You dare deceive me?’

She stamped her feet and fumed, then drove the pointed toe of her shoe straight into my shin as I stood there not knowing what to do with myself.

‘Ow!’

I swear, that was the one time genuinely heartfelt tears nearly came.

One of the few things I’d learned in a week of coming and going from the manor was that the lady was its tyrant.

For reasons I didn’t know, there wasn’t a single adult in the manor who outranked her, and as a result she wielded something close to royal power within the confines of the estate. For the lady herself it was no doubt paradise, but for everyone beneath her it was a disaster, which meant I was one of the people suffering under that disaster, and I was far from the only one.

“Lady Heywood. You may do as you please with everything else, but you must write the letter.”

“What exactly do I do as I please?!”

With a tearing sound, a vase beautifully arranged with boxwood branches and peonies flew into the wall and shattered. She was clearly aiming for the butler’s head, and I broke into goosebumps watching her, but he was practiced enough to sidestep smoothly. He couldn’t avoid the shards, though, and blood trickled from behind his left ear. The lady saw it and still couldn’t contain her fury.

She probably wanted the vase to crack his skull open.

The lady spent her days tormenting me, or tormenting the maids and footmen, or tormenting the butler, and nothing else. What could possibly be so exhausting that she’d rage like this over being asked to write one letter…… If she was too busy to write letters, she could simply stop tormenting people.

I kept glancing between the butler and the lady, thinking useless thoughts.

I wondered whether I should intervene if the violence escalated, and whether my intervening would even help, but no answer came, and cold sweat just kept running down my back.