Disclaimer: I own nothing recognizable from Ashita no Nadja.
In a Forgotten Attic
There was something oddly addicting about that attic room.
Contrary to what she would say later, when Rosemary had first been brought to the Gonzales manor to work, she hadn't expected much. She had expected only three things: kind coworkers, a certain amount of work that would be expected of her, and kind employers.
The first expectation was brutally shot down on her first day there. She greeted the other maids with a smile, and they looked back at her warily, as if she couldn't be trusted. No one smiled and asked her to do things. Instead, random people snapped orders at her. "Go put your bag in your room and get changed into your uniform! Then run downstairs and help out in the kitchen."
Her first day away from Applefield, Rosemary cried herself to sleep.
The next morning, she couldn't bring herself to face the maids, manservants, butler and housekeeper again. Leaving her room in the servants' quarters, she crept down the hallway. At the end of the hallway, she opened the door that led out into the main stairway...and quickly shut it again when she saw the housekeeper standing there, scolding one of the other maids who slept in the same room as she for not knowing where Rosemary was.
Rosemary fled down the hallway in the opposite direction. She reached a rickety staircase, and it was only her fear of bumping into the gardener—or one of the gardeners, since a house like this one probably had more than one—that stopped her from going down. It turned out that the staircase went a great deal further upward than she had thought. There were no exits off the dark, narrow spiral staircase. It just seemed to go further and further up, and there were fewer and fewer windows....
In the darkeness, she crashed into something solid that gave way in front of her. A door, she registered.
But the room was dark. There was a small amount of light coming from the opposite end of the room, and shadows seemed to move across that light eerily.
With a terrified squeak, Rosemary backed away and raced back down the staircase. She would rather face unkind people than eery ghosts any day.
The housekeeper scolded her harshly for being late. Rosemary cringed and apologized with her eyes cast downwards, but the housekeeper still assigned her extra work. Her second expectation had crashed and burned as well by the end of the day, for even when she was too exhausted to complain any longer, she was told to stop being so slow at her work, because she had not even completed a regular day's work yet.
By the time all the other maids had gone to bed, Rosemary was simply too tired to continue with the work that was left for her to complete. So she took a candle, and snuck back down the hallway of the servants' quarters, careful not to wake anyone.
She crept once more up the staircase, and at the top, took a deep breath and pushed open the door.
Rosemary nearly laughed with relief. It was just a mirror on the other side of the room.
Convinced that no evil ghosts were out to get her—and a little disheartened that she was apparently doomed to bear the current treatment she was receiving from the other servants—she turned and was about to leave. But as she turned, something strangely glittering in the candle light caught her attention.
It was a bead on a gorgeous piece of cloth that was sticking out of a chest. Rosemary walked towards the chest as though it were some magnetic force that pulled her that way, and opened it. The cloth was a corner of the skirt of a gorgeous ballgown. Were there really people so rich that they could afford to throw this all away in the attic? Rosemary thought in wonderment, and reached to touch the gown.
Placing the candle on the floor, she pulled the gown from the chest and held it before her, examining herself in the mirror. Why, she realized to her astonishment, if she wore this, she would look just like one of those duchesses at the parties! Giggling to herself, Rosemary looked at herself with the dress in front of her from head to toe in the mirror, as though to .memorize every detail of the way she imagined she would wear the dress.
By the time she left the attic, Rosemary was feeling giddy, and she was her old self once again as all manner of girlish fantasies about princesses and princes and gowns and glass slippers filled her mind. She was no different from anyone else, and she would do the work expected of her starting the next day.
When she woke in the morning and set to work with the other maids, the housekeeper turned sharp eyes to her and began to scold her for failing to complete the tasks alotted to her the previous day. Rosemary stood meekly in silence, taking the lecture. But it brutally slaughtered most of the enthusiasm with which she had begun the day, and what enthusiasm and willingness remained was slaughtered twofold when she slipped and broke an expensive vase.
Rosemary then met the Mistress: a beautiful, smartly dressed lady who looked right through Rosemary, referring to her as "a maid" as she proceeded to scold the housekeeper. But she wasn't about to let this shatter her last little shred of hope. She grasped for an explanation: the Mistress was just doing this to show her the gravity of what she had done, Rosemary told herself.
The first chance she got, she escaped once more to the attic, and was digging through the chest before she knew it. She pulled out another dress, and looked at herself in the mirror. Yes, she told herself, I could very well be the Mistress's daughter. The Mistress could not have ignored her out of spite or uncaringness. It was discipline, and she would have to do her best for the Mistress.
The next day, slipped as she stood polishing silverware, and the polish made an ugly smear on the tapestry on the wall. The Mistress again scolded the housekeeper and ignored Rosemary, and the housekeeper threatened to fire her if she didn't pull her act together.
That day, Rosemary threw off her maid's garments and put on a dress in the attic. When she beheld herself in the mirror, all the new doubts were cleared from her mind once more. But I'm more beautiful than a mere duchess—I'm a princess! Who would dare defy her but the lowly servantkind, who couldn't possibly see who she truly was?
She remembered the games she had played at Applefield, where she was a princess, dearly loved, who was lost at birth. Nadja would always be her knight in shining armor who came to rescue her from the terrible, coarse world of commoners. Perhaps when she had initiated those games, she had been uncovering a buried memory—a little lost shred of her life. Maybe she was a lost princess, and-
No, it sounded ridiculous. Rosemary sighed, and removed the dress. She should leave, she told herself. She should get back to her duties and forget the old dresses in the chest.
But as she closed the door behind her, on some level, she knew that she would be back before long.