After I was done with Margarete and Cristyne’s hair I was usually allowed just to nap for awhile because the servants hated having me working with them. It was wrong to them and it was wrong to me. I had grown up in a life of luxury and the hardship of a servant’s day was taking its toll on me. I cried myself to sleep usually and someone would wake me up around two.

At two I would go out and feed the sheep. At two thirty I would dust one of the parlors. The thing about having such a large estate and so few servants was that if I dusted one room a day, by the time I was done I would have to start all over again because dust would have collected in the first rooms again. There was always something to do and on the scale of things I could have been forced to do, I was let off the hook. I did not have to do the laundry or tend to the gardening. I did not have to go out and pick vegetables or get the honey from the comb.

And I did get one chore that I found I rather liked. I was to scrub the marble floors.