You Belong To Me

Chapter Milkman

'All things in life are like a good dairy product,
If not maintained properly they can
wither and curdle and become useless.'
the milkman...

There was no hope for it. Tremaine was not coming to his senses or anyone else's for that matter. He never saw her or spoke to Ali. He didn't send for her or ask her to dine or anything. She hadn't been assigned work or a position of any kind. She had no reason for waking in the morning, for dressing in her same raggedy dress. Ali was not missed anywhere or requested by anyone. She was beginning to see, in the moments alone at the estate, that she was nobody to anyone and no one cared where she was or what she was doing.

Those lowering revelations about herself made Ali certain that if she wanted to rise from the ashes of whatever situation she was in with her mind in tact, dignity trailing close behind, she had better get out of that house.

Tremaine didn't have any need of her. Not really. He was just satisfying some childhood infatuation with her. He had to have grown tired of the idea of her, Ali reasoned. She had made advances once. He'd rebuffed them, yelled at her and threw her from his room. That was so embarrassing she hardly thought about the moment with her eyes open. She had been sure that once he fulfilled his carnal want of her he would become aware of the situation; the help was staying in his house as a guest. It was more that petrifying to imagine that he no longer wanted her as she had once wanted him... long long ago when they were too young to understand.

She had tried to regain a position with the staff. He hadn't seemed pleased with that idea at all either. Ali found she was left with no choice but to leave without her small amount of money or a reference. She simply had to get away from there before she found another lowering thought in the back of her mind... like if he doesn't want you, who ever will?

She had devised a most brilliant plan. One that she was sure would work unless some divine intervention changed the way that things had been running in this castle of a home for as long as she could remember. There was an order to this place, a structured set of operations that were performed the same way every single time.

Every morning, for example, before anyone in this house was awake, the housekeeper woke the baker and the cook. The two of them would then get up and go downstairs to share a cup of cheap coffee and wait for the dairy man. He showed up well before the butcher who was always after the mailman.

The gentleman in question would drop of the loads of eggs, butter, milk and cream needed for their day. In this season, with most of the house away, the bulk of the dairy was milk for staff porridge, cream and eggs for breakfast biscuits and dinner desserts for the young lord. The milkman would stop for a small amount of small talk and, as always, decline a cup of coffee, before he was back on the road out of the front gates and off the property before first light. A few hours later the rest of the house would begin to stir and around midmorning the lord of the house would also rouse from his rest.

Everyone but her had a task, something that required them or someone that wanted to know what they were about. Ali had nothing and no one to look forward to. She didn't have work, friends, hobbies, not a single task. She couldn't stand the thought of facing another day staring at the lines in her palms. She decided that morning that when that milk truck pulled away from the back door that morning, she was going to be on it.

She dressed quickly. At around four o'clock she began her trek to the servants kitchen. Ali was as nervous as a kitten in a barn but she only had one shot at it and she couldn't afford to let her nerves show. She cringed physically at the thought of being in that house another day... just wasting away. She had never spent so much time in her life being idle. She literally did not know how to handle it.

The stairs to the servants quarters were door that seemed hidden from plain view unless someone was looking for it. That someone had to know it was there almost. Ali took the stairs one at a time and reminded herself that she only had one shot at this. If she were caught she would never be allowed in the kitchen again... not that she ever was those days.