History's Royal Highnesses StepMother

This is book 4/4 of the Cinderella Series by Oluwatosin Ojumu
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It might be hard for people to believe this, but I sincerely did love my stepdaughter, sweet little Cinderella, as surely as I loved her father! “What a good little maid she would make,” I always thought to myself. “What a fitting name for her,” I always thought to myself, “Cinderella; how at home she is among the ashes!”
 
I know that people might accuse me of nefarious intent in encouraging her to work for free in my home, however I truly had her best interests at heart. I've even caught some cruel whispers that I was taking advantage of her! However, nothing could be further from the truth! In my concern for her, as any caring stepmother, I wanted to train her for her likely future, and as realistically speaking, unlike my own daughters, she was never going to contract a good marriage, being as rough and unrefined as she was, (the poor motherless little thing!), the next best thing was to train her for her inevitable future in service. And what better way to train to be a maid than to actually be a maid?! And as for the question of payment, I am disgusted that anyone would even suggest that my relationship with my stepdaughter should be tarnished by anything as tawdry as financial considerations! So you see, I was truly working from only the purest and most noble intentions in my heart.

However, having already failed to display any ladylike delicacy whatsoever, even in that simple role of being a maid she failed. Everything we asked from her seemed to overburden her. She just could not manage to organise herself adequately to do the laundry and the cooking and the cleaning and the shopping and the darning and the dusting and the sweeping and the washing of walls and the washing of windows and the washing of floors and the fetching of water from the well or the stream, as I would expect any good maid to do.