[Year 20XX, Martius V, Spring]
'The Lady has changed.'
That was my genuine thought after a few days of serving her.
My name is Jane, and for the past sixteen years of serving Lady Josephine, never have I seen her so relaxed and timid as she was now.
Ever since I started working here at the duchy as a child, I had always pitied the young lady, because she would always try her utmost best, but her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Konrow, never paid attention to her.
They would never gaze at her, always focusing on Lady Adele like the rest of the people in the mansion.
Some days, I could see Lady Josephine staring blankly while they all ate together, and at times she would silently sob in her room when she thought no one was listening.
Eventually, she started bullying Lady Adele, but her actions always backfired, and she would then be ostracized and made into an outcast in the upper mansion, and I know what she did was wrong but I also couldn't say it was entirely her fault either.
Secretly, I had always disdained the Duke for neglecting her, and even after everyone abandoned her, I still stood by her side, and I intended to keep doing so.
A few days earlier, the Lady fell down the stairs.
"Lady!" I rushed to her and saw that she was bleeding profusely. "Lady, snap out of it!" She was spinning and kept stumbling.
"W-what...?" she muttered before falling unconscious to the floor.
"Lady!!!" I immediately ran through the wing to the main mansion and rushed to the infirmary.
I opened the door and screamed, "The Lady needs help!" and despite their reluctance, I dragged the doctor to the spare mansion and had him treat the Lady.
'What a spineless doctor,' I thought, watching him drag his feet the whole way there.
I watched as he worked on Lady Josephine, applying bandages and using his limited healing spells, and I stood close enough that he couldn't just do a half-hearted job and leave.
"She'll be fine," he finally said, sounding more annoyed than anything else. "Just make sure she gets plenty of rest."
I nodded, and the tightness that had been sitting in my chest since I found her at the bottom of the stairs finally loosened a little.
As he left quickly, I turned my attention back to Lady Josephine, and her face, which was usually tense and filled with something hard that I never quite had a word for, now looked peaceful in her sleep, and I found myself wondering what had changed.
When the Lady woke up, I immediately rushed to her side.
"Ah, Lady, please don't move too much. Are you okay?" I asked.
"I'm fine, Jane. I can handle it," she replied, and I paused for a moment because her voice sounded so normal, and I didn't really know how to describe it except that the Lady would have been greatly irritated by something like this before, and yet here she was, perfectly calm.
"Anyways, Jane, where is my breakfast?" she asked.
"Huh? Are you really my Lady?" The words came out before I could stop them.
"Oh, right, I remember. I kinda dislike that thing." She paused for a moment. "It's fine though, I'm hungry after all."
"Oh?"
"Yes! I'll get it right away!" I rushed to the kitchen and brought the Lady a simple porridge, and when I arrived back I thought that would be the end of it.
"This isn't enough! Get me some more, Jane. Also, bring me some fruit! And bring me some tea!"
I stood there for a moment trying to understand what I was looking at, because she had eaten the porridge I brought her in less than thirty seconds, and I had never in sixteen years of service seen the Lady eat like that.
When I think about it now, that was probably the moment I stopped worrying about evil spirits and started just accepting that something had genuinely changed about her.
For a few days, I kept finding small excuses to ask her questions, just to confirm it wasn't some kind of act, and she answered all of them with ease.
We were out on the balcony one afternoon, the Lady enjoying her tea and me doing what I had been doing lately, which was finding polite ways to interrogate her, and at some point she had noticed and invited me to sit down and have tea with her, which was something she had never done before.
"Who was your crush, my Lady?"
"If I remember correctly, it was Prince Peter?" she replied, tilting her head a little as if she was genuinely trying to recall it.
"Why are you doing that, Jane? Have some," she said, offering me a macaroon and pointing it at my face.
The Lady nowadays is kind, and I don't know what happened, but for some reason she had changed for the better, and I didn't want to question it too hard in case it went away.
"Jane," she said, holding my hand. "Thank you for taking care of me. Will you stay by my side until the end?"
For some reason, I felt something prick behind my eyes.
"Yes!" I replied, and I meant it wholeheartedly.