On the first morning, at precisely six o’clock, a housemaid knocked and told me I was expected in the east dining room.
He was already there, at the head of a table long enough for twenty people. A silver tray of food sat in front of him: eggs, sausage, thick slabs of buttered bread.
He didn’t look up.
“You will feed me,” he said.
I blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“My hands shake in the morning. The nurses I hired were incompetent. You are a nurse, are you not? Then nurse.” He finally turned those cold eyes on me. “Unless you find the task beneath you.”
There was something in his tone, a dare, a trap. I felt it the way you feel a trip wire against your ankle.
So I pulled up a chair, picked up the fork, and began to feed my husband.
He ate noisily. Messily. Crumbs and egg stuck to his chin, and he made no effort to wipe them away. I did it for him with a napkin, my face carefully neutral.
At the far end of the room, two maids watched, whispering behind their hands.
“Poor girl,” one murmured. “She won’t last a month.”
That was only the beginning.
The demands grew stranger and harsher with each passing week.
He made me kneel on the cold marble floor each evening to remove his shoes and wash his feet in a silver basin. They were swollen and discolored, scarred like his hands. I washed them gently, the way I would wash a patient’s.
“Does it disgust you?” he asked once, watching me.
“No,” I said.
“Liar.”
