Part 6
After a couple of weeks, I got used to wearing heels and a corset. But I longed for just one day without them. I even got accustomed to sleeping with my hair in rollers, since that’s the only way I could ensure that my hairstyle met Aunt Agatha’s impeccably high standards. My mother and sister (often accompanied by fiancé Bertrand) would visit once a month or so. Other relatives were also infrequent visitors which added to my daily workload considerably. I’m down preparing breakfast, up changing their bedding, down clearing up after breakfast, then it’s time to start preparing lunch. Thankfully Agatha does most of the cooking (I’m a bit clueless in that department) but I do all of the peeling, chopping, and clearing up afterward.
I often tell myself that we don’t need Agatha’s inheritance, but with an incomplete education and my prospects of going to university slowly slipping away… I wonder what else I’d do for gainful employment should I decide to leave. If I told a prospective employer what I’ve been doing since leaving my academic endeavors… I doubt they’d be impressed that I’d been mostly doing woman’s work. I suppose I could try for an apprenticeship as a tailor maybe. With servitude comes plenty of sewing so I’ve had to learn how to sew. Agatha has been patient with me and claims I’m quite nimble for a boy, which I found most encouraging. Aside from enjoying it, tailoring does have a higher social status than gardening or laboring, those being the only other transferable skills I’m gaining from this experience. My best bet is to try to get myself to university… but that’s a long-term plan. The only thing stopping me is my mother who’s busy spending the money Father put aside to send me to university, and my great aunt who’s still breathing. I wouldn’t be surprised if she lives long into her eighties, by which time I expect I’ll have spent so long-wearing only feminine attire that my genitals will have shriveled away and my chest will have sprouted breasts. I’d like to believe that we don’t really need Agatha’s inheritance, but as the weeks and months pass by… the more I realize that we need it more than ever.
One weekend, Uncle Rupert and Aunt Beryl came to stay. I discreetly asked after Rebecca’s well-being and Aunt Beryl told me she’d married a sailor. Uncle Rupert berated me for mentioning her name. “That selfish girl should have put her family before herself… but after everything we’ve done for her, she turned her back on us.” he spat. “She could be lying dead at the bottom of a ditch for all I care!”
I tried to explain that it’s not easy being at Aunt Agatha’s beck and call all the time, but they weren’t interested. I guess Aunt Beryl has some empathy for the situation her daughter was in, but she seldom shows it. Rupert on the other hand, being a typical chauvinist thinks a woman’s work is easy and Rebecca couldn’t hack it because she’s a ‘spiteful, lazy whore’. He clearly resented me too… since I’m the one who’s securing what he sees as his inheritance for my mother. He never used my name and always referred to me as ‘the maid’, and I assume Rebecca must have told her father about having to demonstrate the cleanliness of the chamber pots because he insisted that I do just that! I know they’re spotlessly clean but having to run my finger around the inside of the pot then having to stick my finger in my mouth always made my stomach churn.
Agatha did give me a meager weekly allowance which I mostly spent on soap and stockings. Agatha insisted that I buy silk stockings and claimed that the cheaper and more hard-wearing Rayon alternatives were for whores and harlots only. She also insists on me wearing seamed stockings too… probably for no other reason than to berate me when my seams aren’t perfectly straight. Whilst silk certainly looked and felt better, I’d have been happier wearing Rayon stockings as at almost half the price, would leave me a little money for an occasional treat.