Though I experience a small amount of relief when a maid arrives for me the next day from Hartson lands, since they didn’t have the time to assign me one with the suddenness of the wedding before – she doesn’t get treated much better. Jay Rosewind has to navigate the household without protection, and she’s terrified that someone might think it a good idea to poison her.
I wish I could comfort her, and say otherwise. She’s a reminder of home, and something for me to latch onto when the hate radiates. My husband, Desmond, barely talks to me at all at night. We sleep stubbornly at the end of the bed, and I’m usually the one who retires to bed first. After our first, strange night, where maybe we shared a little more than we intended, he finds excuses to stay away. He’s busy attending to things, busy socializing with his friends, busy with everything but me. And it’s lonely, demeaning, and makes me feel like I’m nothing to him but some bug. Some thing he’s forced to share his bedcovers with.
Some husband and wife we are.
I gave up my life to save my clan. This is my choice. This is my fate. I just have to learn to deal with it.
Perhaps I could report the hostility of the household to Desmond, or to his father. Maybe they’ll do something about it. But I don’t want to give into that weakness. To go crawling to one of them, and to ask them to curb their servants. The servants will know instantly where the request comes from. They’ll find other ways to continue their passive aggression.
They always do.
Days bleed into weeks. The hostility doesn’t relent. The bed still feels cold, even sharing it with another body. The head servant in particular, Ethel Endmore, seems to absolutely loathe me. I know she’s the one responsible for my bland dinners, my suspicious drinks, and for the fact that several of my clothes, when gone for the wash, have been ruined. Leaving me with only two sets left, and a fear of being targeted if I go to a tailor, even if I might be wearing the Claymore colors. I also found one of my three Hartson sashes cut to shreds, prompting me to hide the other two, and my jacket.
“I just don’t get it,” I say to Jay, who cuddles with me on the bed, after spending five minutes sobbing into my shoulder. Ethel had screeched at her for not cleaning the toilets correctly, and made her go over them with a toothbrush, drawing the ire of the master of the house, who had been delayed in his bathroom visit. “I’m the only thing stopping these people from being murdered in their beds by the Graves. Why are they risking everything like this?”
I swallow thickly. Since they’re not overtly abusing me, to where I have physical wounds, and since the servants always act all sickly nice and innocent with the Graves, I don’t really have any solid evidence for my treatment. It probably would be a little much if I went to them and reported all the problems. I’d rather not have my family killed because I cracked over something so petty. Danny and Morgan seem a little sympathetic to it, because they know what pressure I’m under. They scowl at the servants who barely skip the line between mild aggression and outright violation of the marriage terms.
But it’s not enough.
“B-because they’re stupid, cruel, twisted monsters,” Jay whispers into my neck, clinging hard, dark hair mixing with my blonde. “I miss home, and my family. I miss people actually liking me for who I am.”
I rub the back of her head, remembering how my mother used to do this when I was young. Wondering if she learned it from her mother, and how far back it must go, to comfort another. “Me too, Jay. Me too.” I take a deep breath, not wanting to say these words, but knowing I must. “If you want to go back home, we can arrange it. I know I will miss having someone I can relate with, but it makes no sense for the both of us to suffer.”
“That’s not how it works, miss,” Jay says. She draws back from me, wiping her eyes, looking a little stronger than before. She’s younger than me. By four years. Servants have to start young, to give them room later for marriage. “I’ve been assigned to you. It will be a great dishonor to our house if I leave you to the wolves.” She glances outside, as if frightened of being heard.
“I hope they’re paying you a decent amount of money then,” I say.
“It’s not bad,” she admits. “But I could do without the comments from the other servants. The only ones who don’t snap at a Hartson are the ones who weren’t originally from Claymore lands. The kitchen matron, she was a Tielman. There’s others like her, too, who don’t really get the hate.”
I perk up slightly at this. I admit, in my time here, I’d been so focused on the singular hatred of the Claymores, that the notion that there were people who didn’t give a shit aside from Morgan and Danny had been dim in my mind. Of course I knew there were people not embroiled in our feud, but… I’m in the middle of my enemy’s household. I walk the corridors, the red velvet carpets, the blue and white painted rooms like a ghost, trying not to draw too much ire. The cook in the kitchens didn’t seem hateful. Annoyed – but perhaps just from the annoyance of being interrupted, rather than specifically because I happened to be Hartson.
“Any change in things?” Jay asks then, after sitting up and organizing herself to look smart and collected. She stays in the rooms next to ours, in a smaller servant arrangement that keeps her away from the main, basement rooms the rest of the servants sleep in.
“No change,” I say, and she nods. She asks out of curiosity of the relationship between me and my… my husband. She wonders, like me, I suppose, when the kind facade ends and the monster underneath is revealed. Though admittedly, to be fair, I’ve not seen anything particularly monstrous from any of the Claymores so far. They seem like ordinary, spiteful people, and it disturbs me to consider that thought. They shouldn’t be ordinary. But they are. And brainwashed.
A tentative knock on the door draws me out of our conversation to see one of the kitchen servants knocking. The older matron. The Tielman? Her eyes are sunken in, pasted in droopy, bulldog features. She still wears the typical kitchen uniform, with a stained white apron. “Miss,” she says, bowing in a rather bored way, “I’ve been sent to inform you that you’re expected to dine with your husband today at four. There are some important guests coming, and it would do well to make sure you’re presented in your best form. And wearing your husband’s sash.”
A hot surge of irritation ripples through me. Wearing my husband’s sash. Wearing the wrong colors. I keep the anger in long enough to nod. “It will be done.” I’m rather proud of my restraint. Perhaps she sees something in my expression, for one of her thick eyebrows raise.
“It’s just colors, miss. It’s not the worst thing you’ll be doing in this place.” She plucks at the blue and white sash she wears, draped over one shoulder and side, rather than the belt, like others do. “If it makes you feel any better, it’s what’s in your heart that matters.”
“Mm,” I say. A deft nudge from Jay reminds me that I should probably extend additional courtesies to the matron’s friendliness. “Don’t you find it difficult, being here?”
“It ain’t so bad. I still get to visit home, as you will, I’m sure. Perhaps I miss some things… but I’m happy with the role I have, and the husband I have, too.” She perks up with a sly grin. “You don’t see him much about the place, because his job takes him everywhere. He’s a good man.”