In Victorian England slums, the oldest and quietest girl of four trying to keep a roof over her family's head accepts a job with an odd staff and mysterious employer. Until she finds out all the maids before her are dead and she must face a mystifyi...
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"Forgive me then master I must have been born broken for I have no further explanations to present you."
"Look at me then, in my eyes, not forward like you were taught to do," he said annoyed of my proper behavior.
"Why sir?" I asked slowly raising my sight until it met his eyes for the first time and they struck me like what I imagined the shores of hot places far from England were supposed to be like. An ocean blue mixed with radiant green and the lines of the ray of a warm early sun and even then through them he was undefinable. And those eyes were far too precious for such an improper man to wear, and for someone as lowly as me to maintain contact with.
"Because you treat me as if I am a sort of monster you are under obligation to serve Miss Stewart and how do you suppose I like it when I pay so generously? If you want to run off like the other maids do be courageous enough to admit it for I cannot bear the seed of ungratefulness in my house."
The master was too observant he had seen right through my nervous servitude and laid the truth with no sense of propriety as it was to be expected.
"I apologize for the discomfort I have caused you sir." I blinked to see if this was some horrible nightmare but when I opened my eyes it was still happening.
"So you do not deny it? You are frightened by me."
"I... Do not deny it master," finally I could look somewhere else as he too diverted his gaze towards the wall with both his hands crossed in front of his face.
"And how may we undo this Miss Stewart?" He sat in front of his dinner plate and put the wine cup to the right though it had been half emptied.
"I do not believe it is within your power to do so sir," was my honest response, a man could not alter for the sake of it, I did not believe so at least.
"Why would you say such an unnatural thing? Are we not humans? Are we not capable of apologizing and forgiveness? Or are you saying you are not capable of forgiving offenses Miss Stewart?"
The master lost whatever little temper he had and shot up from his seat leaning on the table towards me. He waited for a reply but I no longer wanted to be open with my employer, the employer Mrs. Hall had warned me not to tangle with, and so I returned to the moral guidelines.
"Do you wish to be served the last course sir?" He took a while staring at me as if he could pounce on me for not answering him, then decided his course of action.
"Throw it out for all I care."
The master's superiority grew in his chest and he drank the last of the wine and left the soup untouched beating down the wood beneath his feet as he walked upstairs. The waste of food he left me with was unforgivable so I wrapped it up and went out into the cold until someone in the street accepted the food. What a horrible night it had been, the master's face, his voice, every moment in his company replayed in a nightmare I suffered in through the night. His savagery created an evil shadow of who he was, it accompanied me through the night.
