The Pearl Crucible - A Dardana Fenek Mystery - DARDANA ALONE (Part 3)

(Chapter 40 Part Three)

People think an awful lot of themselves, and by that I mean citizens, because I am not legally people, nor Barsina. They put themselves above the lowest of the low, and are happy to kick them in the face. Our sorrow and our suffering are, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, not on the minds of most citizens. Someone has to serve the tea, someone has to make the bed, someone has to take the bread out of the oven.

Someone has to refrain from murdering Petro Fortunato.

So if your hair doesn’t look good, or the tea is the wrong one, or the bread is too brown on top, it’s the girl that gets it, and maybe she’ll do better next time. I sympathize, to a point.

Or if it’s Petro Fortunato dead on the library floor, and you want to preserve the happy-happy picture of toff society, his servants get to take the fall.

I don’t sympathize at all.

Everyone likes their household run right, or their restaurant, or their agrivilla, and Lady knows labor’s expensive enough, and no one should settle for troublesome servants, particularly those who’ve been citizens. But to my mind, having been on one side and another, there’s such a thing as too much.

And this, I was thinking, was too much.