I came to the good Robert and Virginia Archibald quite young by today's standards. For more than a decade in their service, I garnered much more than a plate of food and a bed in which to lay my head. This is my life, my tales of growing up, a journal penning my becoming a woman in every sense of the word.

Not all are stellar in memory as they once were, but others stir a remembrance that is yet able to warm as well as a good brandy.

Not only was it improper, by standards set by the men of my time, for a woman to partake in pleasure of a social nature, it was forbidden as a house servant to speak of such trysts. Oh, accepted so it is that, in private, we women are expected to enjoy those moments of passion created for purposes of marriage, but before then, what? God help me, why is it that men are the only passionate beings on earth? Or is it what society at the time wanted us to believe?

Most would consider me of spinster age at the time of these writings. At seventeen, I was unmarried and betroth