My parents divided the silver coin I’d brought home precisely in half: one half for daily expenses, one half set aside for my future dowry. The more I brought to a marriage, the better a man I could choose, they added. I cared more about a meat pie right now than about a future husband, but even with half the coin, there was enough on the table to chew on happily.

The lady would probably find this laughable, wouldn’t she? Though I’m eating quite well now too. Maybe I’ll grow as tall as her and get as strong.

I wondered whether the lady was as strong as an ox because she ate like one, then patted my full stomach and went to bed.

Regrettably, the day that question got answered came sooner than I expected.

“I hear you take food home when you leave?”

“Yes, that’s right, Miss.”

“What do you take?”

“……Well, I never asked for it. From the first day, someone just started packing it for me on their own……”

“Did I ask why you take it? I asked what you take!”

The lady snapped and yanked my hair where my head rested near her feet. It stung, but it wasn’t unbearable.

Even while pulling my hair, she kept pressing me without pause: what do you take, what tasted best? I tried to figure out why she was asking.

She’d been treating me like her right hand lately, so maybe this was a reward, a big generous spread?

No, stupid Marilyn! Are you still hoping for that from the lady? She’ll obviously just order the staff to pack everything I mentioned except the things I named.

After that useless internal debate, the conclusion I landed on was to list foods that had been reasonably good but nothing I’d be heartbroken to lose. It had only been a little over a week since I’d started coming to the manor, so the list fit on two hands.

The lady listened to me recite it as though I were reading poetry, which was unlike her usual self. Her eyes were the same blue as mine, but hers held a light that made mine look grey by comparison, lake-colored irises with my reflection caught in them, and noticing that made my ears go red and my feet start to fidget.

That face could corrupt even a girl who only liked boys. Miss, you have a great deal to answer for beyond just your personality…… While I was drifting into foolish thoughts, the lady gave an order.

“Go out and call Eva.”

Every food I could name was crowded onto the small table that usually held only a vase or a teacup. It wasn’t a dining table, so the dishes were packed in with no space between them. The reason she hadn’t gone down to the wide dining room and had it set up here instead was obvious.

To torment me. And as if to prove it, there was no chair for me.

Not that my suffering ended at the lack of a chair.

“What are you doing? Sit.”

She couldn’t mean on the table, so she must mean the floor. I sat down where I was, and the lady’s face twisted again.

“Who told you to sit there? Do you still not know your place?”

I scrambled up at the irritated words she threw at me while glaring at where I’d sat across from her, and went to the spot where I usually sat when she wanted someone to play with, right beside her legs. Her expression smoothed over immediately.

She rested her left hand loosely near my chin and with her right picked up a fork, cut a bite-sized piece of kidney pie, and put it in my mouth. She fed me so matter-of-factly that I briefly suspected she’d had something unbearably awful prepared, but the crisp pastry and savory, salty meat that hit my tongue put that thought to rest immediately.

Next came a piece of beef seared in butter and topped with basil sauce, and after that the asparagus and mashed potato with cream that sat alongside it as garnish. Nothing in my mouth was anything but soft. It was so good I nearly cried. Maybe I could revisit this memory the next time the lady tormented me or hit me, and the tears would finally come.

The lady watched me chew, and once I’d swallowed, she held a tulip-shaped crystal glass to my lips. Apricot juice. The sweet fragrance and tart flavor made my mouth water with every sip. She kept tilting the glass as I swallowed, keeping pace with me.

After I finished the glass, a spoonful of white stew came next. The warmth against my cooled mouth was pleasant. It tasted of chicken and tender green beans. After that, a spoonful of clear mushroom broth with a deep, rich fragrance.

I want to just pick up the bowl and drink it…… the thought vanished the moment a salad with plump shrimp was put in my mouth. I was swallowing food in a daze, and only once my stomach was reasonably full did I realize the lady had been staring at me the entire time.

The distance between our faces was closer than I’d expected…… and eating like that in a frenzy must have looked quite graceless…… piecing it together one thing at a time, the lady’s gaze on my chewing face became intensely uncomfortable.

“Miss, you don’t have to keep feeding me.”

“Why? Does it taste bad?”

“No, it was wonderful. It’s the best food I’ve ever eaten.”

A sincere apology to my mother, who’d cooked for me my whole life, but since her ears couldn’t reach this place, I let myself be honest.

“Then why?”

“I’m…… I’m a servant. What you’ve given me already is more than I deserve.”

“I’m doing it because I want to. What does deserving have to do with it?”

Even at the sharp retort I kept hesitating, and the lady’s face hardened at once, making no effort to hide her irritation. When I still didn’t give her the answer she wanted, her patience ran thin and her breathing grew louder and more forceful.

Then her expression brightened, the look of someone who’d just had a good idea, which in the lady’s case almost always meant something bad for me, and I had to work to keep my face from crumpling.

“So what my sweet friend is saying is that you can manage perfectly well on your own?”

“Yes, Miss. Exactly!”

The lady stood with a strangely flushed expression and walked with long strides to the end of the table, grabbed a fistful of gingerbread, and threw it on the floor. Several golden-brown pieces of gingerbread rolled limply across the red carpet. What is she doing. What a waste.

“What are you waiting for?”

“Pardon?”

“You said you didn’t want me to feed you and you could eat on your own.”

She spread her silk-gloved fingers and pointed at the gingerbread on the floor.

“Eat.”

“The bread that fell on the floor?”

“Yes.”

I kept my eyes fixed on the fallen bread, and the lady’s face, without my even having to look, was no doubt full of that peculiar anticipation. Since we’d met, she’d clearly spent nearly half of every day thinking about me, yet she didn’t seem to know me well. Perhaps because her interest in me only ever arose from the narrow slice of my suffering.

By now, instead of feeling humiliated or angry at her outrageous words and actions, I felt a desire rising and cresting inside me to smash her expectations to pieces. I let that desire lead me, walked forward under her gaze following at my back, picked up the bread in full view of her, and chewed it with great deliberateness.

The lady seemed to think eating warm gingerbread that had fallen on a carpet swept and scrubbed every day was a tremendous humiliation, but I was someone for whom not being able to eat dry bread that had rolled across a dirt floor was the greater tragedy.

I blew off the light dusting of dust and it tasted no different from new. Savoring the sharp sweetness, I reached for the next piece, and my wrist was snatched in an instant.

“Don’t eat it!”

“But you told me to, Miss……”

“And now I’m telling you not to!”

The lady stamped every last piece of gingerbread she’d thrown flat under her shoe, fuming.

She was more than a head taller than me and half a head broader, and even being the same gender, she looked genuinely threatening. The thought that she might actually want to stamp me flat like that sent a chill up my spine for no good reason.

Having ground every piece of gingerbread into the carpet, the lady dropped onto the sofa, breathing hard. I’d been frozen in place watching her, and now I felt a powerful premonition that I needed to get back in her good graces, or the days ahead would be even harder.

The lady couldn’t have missed that Marilyn had eaten the fallen gingerbread precisely to defy her expectations. Come to think of it, the lady hadn’t touched a single bite of food this whole time, too busy feeding her. If they’d each just eaten on their own, none of this would’ve happened. Why go to all that trouble……