Merryknowe Bakery
and Tearooms was the most visited shop in the tiny village, which wasn’t a
point of pride – not when the village was dying a slow death from lack of
visitors and actual inhabitants.
It wasn’t the prettiest village in
Wiltshire and Rachel Brown tried to bring some elegance to the window of the
bakery with her baked goods.
Sometimes she made cupcakes with
pink iced roses or chocolate eclairs with satiny icing but today she had
cream-filled butterfly cakes on the silver tray.
She watched the man and his child
walk away from the shop until they were out of sight and she felt herself turn
red when she remembered the way he’d looked at the bruise on her cheek. It’s not what you think,
she had wanted to say to him.
She knew people thought it was a man
who did this to her, but it wasn’t a man. Rachel had never been close enough to
have a man touch her in passion or anger. There was no way she could even meet
a man, not with what she had to do every day. She was a slave to her existence.
Her routine was exactly the same day in or out.
Wake at four in the morning. Do the
baking. Help upstairs. Wash and dress. Serve in the shop. Clean up the shop.
Make dinner and clean up upstairs. Go to bed at nine and then do it all again
the next day.
She had one day off a week where she
had to do all the week’s washing and do the hoovering and order for the shop.
She had to mop the floors downstairs with bleach and soap flakes and then she
had to go through the accounts and make sure everything added up.
Maths was never her strength as a
child and still now, numbers made her head fuzzy unless it was in direct
relation to a recipe. But she had to get the accounts right, or she would be
punished and the bruise on her cheekbone was testament to this fact.
Rachel pushed that memory out of her
head and thought about the little girl who had come into her shop with her dad.
She was so sweet, and Rachel wondered where her mother was, but she looked
happy and well with her russet-coloured curls, sweet denim pinafore and green shoes.
Rachel wished she could have shoes as pretty as the little
girl’s.
At twenty-five years of age, she
knew she looked older than other girls she had gone to school with. She hated
the drab clothes she was told to wear, and the way her hair was lank and thin
and pulled into a tight bun because it was how she was told to wear her hair,
even though her scalp ached at the end of the day.
She hated the shoes she wore. Mother
ordered them for her from the pharmacy because she had flat feet and was
susceptible to heel spurs. They were rubber-soled and they sometimes made a
squeaking sound when she walked and then she was yelled at for being too loud.
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