Episode 28
When she looked at the man named Isaac Pinscher, certain nameless lacks she had never realized she possessed
seemed to burrow into her, as if asking to be noticed even now. Well, she did not know exactly what feeling it was.
Even so, the more she spoke with him, the more she felt some corner of her chest growing hollow.
He was not an especially admirable person in terms of character. If anything, he belonged to the rather clumsy and unstable sort. And so Sasha, without quite meaning to, found him rather easy to deal with. Yes. To put it more bluntly, she found him rather easy to handle.
Yet the more she spoke with him, the more Sasha came to like him. She thought she wanted to look after him when he acted clumsy, and though she did not realize it herself, she thought he was rather cute. At the same time, his attitude—more innocent than she had expected, even favorable toward her—began to prick at her conscience all over again.
What, exactly, should these feelings be defined as? She could not define them. They were simply a tangled heap of all sorts of things. Sasha did not know how to give names to such complicated emotions. She had grown up in an environment where she had never even felt the need to do so in the first place.
Still, there was just one thing she was willing to admit. She liked him quite a bit. Simply as one person to another, if not for these complicated circumstances, she thought he was interesting—no, entertaining—enough that she would have wanted to become friends with him.
Sasha and Isaac left the lake behind and took the road back toward the village. They stopped midway to return the horse, then walked straight along the field path leading to the village.
The rain began to pour down suddenly then. It was the sort of shower common in this season. At first, it was only enough to dampen their faces like grains of sleet, but the raindrops grew heavier and heavier.
“We should go down.”
Just as Sasha tried to go back down the hill path they had climbed, Isaac reached out, took her by the shoulder, and gently turned her around.
“Wet grass is even more slippery. It would be better to go this way.”
So Sasha walked in the exact opposite direction, led by Isaac. After they walked down a gentle slope, a road paved with gravel soon appeared. Isaac’s arm was still wrapped around Sasha’s shoulders.
Only then did Sasha realize that her face was far less wet than before. Like a human umbrella, using his house-sized body to nearly cover her, Isaac led Sasha onto the village road. After walking a little farther, they came upon a church.
“There’s no one here.”
Isaac said as he opened the door, in a tone that made it seem as though he had been here often. When Sasha peered inside through the open doorway as he had said, it was indeed very quiet. He explained in a low voice that, except for Sundays when services were held, people only came and went in the morning, and the place was mostly empty.
Only after hearing Isaac’s quiet explanation did Sasha step into the church. The moment she took one step inside, the thought belatedly struck her: What am I doing here?
“No, we shouldn’t be doing this here. I need to go back to the major’s residence. The carriage must have arrived.”
“Wait.”
As Sasha tried to go back out, Isaac’s hand blocked her path. It seemed like a reflexive movement. Of course it was. He was, after all, a soldier who always had to move before anything else.
“I have something to say.”
Isaac belatedly pulled his hand away from the door as if he had been burned and spoke. Sasha silently turned her head and looked at him.
Isaac was soaked through. Anyone could see he was drenched, as though he had taken twice as much rain in her place. When Sasha found her gaze fixing, without her realizing it, on the solid lines visible through his wet shirt, she rolled her eyes away and looked at the wall decorations.
It was a clumsy gesture that the usual Isaac would undoubtedly have noticed, but Isaac had no room to care about it at all.
“…Have you found one already?”
After agonizing over how on earth to begin, no, over what words he should begin with, Isaac asked that first.
“A husband.”
Isaac blurted that out first, then hurriedly added the rest. Isaac felt a little like dying.
Unconcerned with his agitation, Sasha looked up at him with a face that seemed, at a glance, composed. When her eyes met his thick Adam’s apple, she lowered her gaze. Through the gap in his open shirt, a chest that was, in many ways, impossible to ignore entered her view, so she quickly lowered her gaze again.
Then.
“No.”
Sasha quickly lifted her head and looked him straight in the face as she answered. Her face was flushed to an absurd degree. Sasha, too, felt a little like dying.
“Then you’re in the middle of looking?”
“…Yes.”
Isaac asked, and after hesitating, Sasha answered that she was.
“Then are you doing that to other… people as well?”
“Pardon?”
“Following them around so much they can’t work, sending them letters, constantly… hovering around them…”
As Isaac spoke with some hesitation yet no filter, Sasha became a little embarrassed. She had thought she had kept a reasonable distance in her own way, but from his perspective, it seemed that had not been the case at all.
Sasha recalled how the three men she had kept in mind as candidates had all cut off contact with her in an instant. Had she told this man about that? She could not quite remember. As Sasha was pondering that, she noticed Isaac’s face had turned as red as a tomato. Truly red. As if it might burst at any moment.
“…Did you do the same to them? Talking about Miss Grayson’s circumstances… or meeting them regularly under the pretext of looking into it further…”
There was a fairly sharp edge to the look he gave her. Sasha silently gazed at Isaac. It felt as though she had returned to the day she first met him after coming here. Like back then, he seemed strangely on edge. He looked terribly anxious. He also seemed to have no composure.
“…No. That was only with you, Captain.”
“…”
“Because you were the only one who rejected me for an absurd reason like saying you couldn’t trust me.”
Sasha stared blankly at Isaac, then soon spoke calmly. Along with an answer that sounded as though there ought to be something special about him being the only one, she also gave him an explanation that seemed perfectly reasonable.
Isaac was silent. Then, though he had been avoiding her gaze for no reason a moment before, he met her eyes.
“Did the other… men all say they liked it?”
“I haven’t decided yet. And I didn’t bring it up with them in detail the way I did with you, Captain.”
Isaac, who had been unconsciously tapping the floor with the tip of his foot as if anxious, stopped moving.
“Miss Grayson.”
“Yes.”
“…Weren’t you worried I might tell the other men?”
It was a rather abrupt question. Sasha thought so.
Isaac looked at her with eyes more composed than before. They seemed somehow sunken.
“Will you honestly tell them as well that you’re marrying because of the inheritance?”
“…No.”
“You told me.”
“I told you because it was you, Captain.”
“So why?”
Drip, drip. Water fell from his wet hair. Sasha stared at the water dripping from his black hair and running down the bridge of his nose. Then she stared at his face, which somehow looked stubborn.
“I could tell the other men.”
“Will you?”
“…”
“You won’t.”
Sasha spoke calmly once more. At her tone, filled with a strange certainty, Isaac felt something twist oddly inside him.
“What if I go around telling all the other men?”
“Then things would become a bit difficult. But you won’t do that.”
When she drove the point in again with certainty, Isaac looked at her as if frustrated.
“You did something very foolish, Miss Grayson. You revealed confidential information to the other party as a condition for a contract and then left without doing anything to keep his mouth shut.”
“Well. I’m not a soldier, so I didn’t think that far…”
Sasha stopped speaking midway. And when she saw his face looking at her with eyes that somehow seemed stubbornly defiant, the words she had meant to say slipped right back inside her.
Patters of rain continued; the shower did not stop easily. The sound of raindrops striking the wooden church building kept echoing through the interior.
“So, you’re saying I should silence you?”
“…Yes.”
After Isaac unconsciously said, “Yes,” he thought to himself, What do you mean, yes?
But once the words had left his mouth, it was already too late.
“With money?”
At Sasha’s quiet words that followed, Isaac’s mouth closed into a hard line.
“How much do you need?”
Sasha, who had asked in a half-joking manner, flinched without realizing it. The man before her had a thoroughly crumpled expression. It was the fiercest face she had ever seen on him.
“It was a joke. I know very well that you’re not someone interested in money, Captain.”
He had been about to get angry at her for saying something so absurd, even as a joke, but at her words that she knew him well, his displeasure melted away in an instant.
Good heavens. He really did seem to have become… stupid somehow.
“Then what sort of price for your silence are you expecting, Captain? I’ll pay anything.”
“Anything?”
He, who had been looking at the floor as if somehow anxious, raised his gaze to look at her and asked.
His blue eyes, sometimes hollow and sometimes menacing, looked strangely innocent.
In truth, he was innocent. Yes. He was innocent.
“…Then let it be me.”
Yes. That was why, like this,
“Wouldn’t that be better?”
he was handing himself over to her without knowing anything.