The Serving Girl // Book 2 in the Rosie Grey series

Chapter Thirty-Four

"You went to sleep early last night," Esther said as we prepared for the workday ahead of us. "You were dead to the world when I came up."

"Must've been tired," I mumbled.

"Can't imagine why. I don't suppose washing dishes is all that tiring." Esther shrugged her shoulders at me, jammed her bonnet on her head and left the room.

I finished twisting the end of my hair up and pinning them in place as her footsteps retreated down the stairs and to the kitchen. I dropped my hands to my sides and sighed loudly, glancing back at the cane that I had left against the bed the night before. Without that cane, my life would have been so much easier, and I certainly wouldn't on the receiving end of backhanded comments from Esther. I always thought she was far too sweet to do such a thing, but it looked as though even the nicest people had their limits and Esther's had been pushed far too many times. More often than not by me.

When she had come up to bed that night, I had pretended to be asleep, but I was far from it. I held Robert's letter tightly in my hand and replayed what it said over and over again in my mind to try and make sense of it all. None of it made any sense to me and I doubt it would no matter how many times I read over the letter. Even if I committed the entire thing to memory, I doubt I would have been able to understand any of it. I spent most of the night just laying on the bed staring at the wall, but it did nothing. I only ended up exhausted when Miss Jenkins woke us up.

Before I had been on the fence about leaving, toying between the idea of staying and enduring whatever else Mrs Ealing had to offer but the letter changed everything. If anyone else were to find it, if Mrs Ealing were to find it, I didn't know what she would do. There was little doubt in my mind that she would have somehow managed to twist the letter and put the blame on me, as though I had somehow coerced him into writing it. I knew that wasn't true, it had never been true, nor will it be and yet part of me felt it may have been. Robert had said that his feelings developed because I treated him as a person and not a boss.

If I had just treated him like I did Doctor Ealing, then none of this would have happened. For once, this was a hole I had dug myself into and the only way to get myself out would be to leave. Before, I had wanted to stay because of Robert, now I was leaving because of him. It was the opposite of what I wanted to do.

"Rosie, hurry up!" Miss Jenkins called up the stairs as I put my bonnet on and limped across the room to the cane. Personally, I didn't think I needed it but I needed Doctor Ealing's clearance before I could stop using it.

"I'm coming!"

I tucked the letter into my dress pocket and left the room, abandoning the cane and opting to use the bannister instead as I made my way down the stairs and to the kitchen. When I entered the kitchen, Esther was finishing up her breakfast and Miss Jenkins was beginning to prepare the breakfast trays for the family. I was late.

"There you are! I thought you might have slipped and knocked yourself unconscious or something," Miss Jenkins said. She pushed a plate of scrambled eggs and toast towards me as I approached the table.

"Sorry, I got distracted," I said.

"By what?"

"I'm not entirely sure."

Miss Jenkins regarded me with a small tilt of her head and furrowed eyebrows, not entirely sure of what I meant. I didn't know what I meant by it, but it was the only thing I could come up with seeing as I couldn't tell her what really distracted me. Although I had completely made up my mind as to what I planned to do in the future, telling them was something I still had to deal with, and I wasn't ready to cross that bridge just yet. Despite all the places I had left in the past, I had never had the opportunity to say goodbye to anyone. Not my brothers, not Isabel, not even my own mother. How does someone say goodbye if they had no practise?