Episode 30
Cedric Osmond was born the second son of the Count Osmond family. His elder brother, the first son, died of illness when Cedric was seven, so in practice the role of eldest son fell to him. Had his been an ordinary family, an honorable title and fortune alike would have passed to him. Yet what was actually handed down to him was nothing but the enormous debt the family had accumulated since his grandfather’s time.
When he turned eighteen, the Count and Countess Osmond died of illness one after the other. Only then did Cedric belatedly realize that his family had been on the verge of collapse.
Despite graduating from the academy with fairly respectable grades, he could not easily extricate himself from the immense debt that had slowly ruined his family since his grandfather’s time. Such was the era. When he asked fellow nobles for work, they merely laughed at him, asking how someone of noble birth could even think of working. When he bowed his head and begged those who were not nobles, the treatment he received was even more wretched.
The businessmen of common birth, who had harbored an inferiority complex toward Cedric simply because he had been born a noble, only satisfied themselves by humiliating him. They never helped him. Regrettably, everyone around him was like that.
Just as Cedric himself once had, his young sister had no idea that the Osmond family had already fallen as far as it could. Cedric never told his sister the truth. Just as his parents had never told him.
When even the few relatives who had pitied and helped him washed their hands of him, the situation became even more miserable. Robert Bloom appeared then. The son of the coachman employed by the Osmond family—Robert Bloom, who had bowed and scraped before Cedric since childhood while secretly admiring him. It was him.
Having fortunately dabbled in the tobacco business and come into a great deal of money, Robert willingly took in Cedric, who had once been his young master. He paid not only Cedric’s sister’s overdue academy tuition but even her boarding fees, and he lent Cedric money so he could pay off the debts that were most urgent.
Robert helped Cedric and breathed hope into him, then proposed some inexplicable partnership. He good-naturedly whispered that Cedric should do business with him and slowly repay his money. Cedric had no other way.
For every business plan Cedric, who had studied economics diligently in his own way, brought to him, Robert rejected it time and again, saying it was unrealistic. Then he took Cedric to an old lady who liked handsome faces and told him to wait on her. Not long after Cedric began keeping the old lady company and catering to her whims, Robert was able to lease land from her at a fairly reasonable price.
Yes. From the beginning, that had been Robert’s purpose in using Cedric.
Sasha Grayson, the heiress with a rather innocent-looking impression, was likewise nothing more than a target Cedric needed only to win over. Robert, however, thought differently. Robert wanted to end this trifling money game with Sasha Grayson’s immense fortune.
Robert proposed it to Cedric.
“Seduce that woman and marry her. Then let’s kill her.”
The sole objective had been the enormous fortune she had inherited. Even now, thinking back on it, it had been a truly crude and absurd plan. Robert was good at saying all the right things and may have had some aptitude as a businessman, but he had no talent to speak of as a great schemer. The plan was clumsy, and Cedric, who carried it out, was no different.
Cedric recalled Sasha Grayson’s face as she had calmly said that she knew all their plans and rejected him. It had been only for an instant, but Cedric had no choice but to keenly notice the hint of pity that appeared on her expressionless face.
The pity made him feel even more miserable. Apart from feeling ashamed and embarrassed, after being driven out of the mansion like that, Cedric never wanted to see Sasha Grayson again.
The surroundings were thick with tobacco smoke. Cedric looked around with empty eyes. At every table, heavy smokers had taken their seats one by one and were puffing away. Bloom, seated across from Cedric, held a cheap cigar in his mouth and exhaled a sourer, more foul stench than the cigar itself.
And the noise was no better. The greedy tavern owner had packed the tables tightly together, so even if one simply sat still, the lewd jokes and all manner of idle chatter from the tables behind and beside them came drifting in of their own accord.
“Well, shit. Another bust.”
As soon as Robert Bloom saw his cards, he chewed on his cheap cigar and muttered in dissatisfaction. The man sitting beside Bloom grinned soundlessly. It was obvious how the game was going.
“Bloom, why did you call me here?”
Cedric, who had been quietly watching their card game, asked. A server who had been watching Cedric from afar with a meaningful gaze placed a glass of beer in front of him at just the right moment, winked, and walked past.
Without even touching the beer glass, Cedric stared steadily at Robert. Robert half-listened to Cedric’s words while looking at his cards, then snorted as if dumbfounded.
“Do I have to have some special business to call you?”
“……Not necessarily.”
“If I don’t call you out, you just hole yourself up at home anyway, don’t you? Cleaning that old dump of a house, polishing your mother’s portrait, bawling like some brat.”
It was an insult laden with blatant contempt. The man who had been sitting beside Robert and enjoying the card game eavesdropped on their conversation and snickered. Then he glanced at Cedric and sneered once more.
“If you didn’t call me here because you had something to say……”
“……That woman.”
It was just as Cedric was trying to conceal his shame and rise from his seat with composure. Robert, still not even looking at him and only staring at his cards, spat the words out.
“You heard the rumors. Seems pretty serious. She said she’d accept an apology and went off to that backwater, leaving us hanging, and now it looks like she really has gone and fallen for that bastard.”
“……The Grayson matter is already over, Bloom.”
“Already over? It isn’t over for me.”
It was a moment when the unpleasantly loud din of the tavern felt like a blessing. Only the man playing cards with Bloom raised an eyebrow for a moment, as if wondering what they were talking about, but soon urged Bloom to hurry up as though he had lost interest.
“I never forget when I’ve been done over. At the very least, I’m going to wreck that bastard’s arm the same way. And I’m going to humiliate that woman too, the one who treated us like uninvited guests and drove us out.”
“Bloom.”
Cedric called his name once more, as if to dissuade him.
“Just leave the matter of Miss Grayson here. You know it too. Miss Grayson is the one holding our weakness. She heard the conversation we had that day from that captain. And yet she turned a blind eye by simply sending us away.”
“You naïve bastard. You think she just let us off? That woman must have something bothering her conscience too, so she buried it.”
“There’s no hope on that side anymore. Miss Grayson no longer wants anything to do with me.”
The man who had been playing cards with Robert was now simply letting their conversation go in one ear and out the other. He clearly thought it was nothing more than trivial gossip about a love affair. Cedric felt deeply relieved by that.
“Ah, shit.”
When the man revealed all his cards, showing his yellow teeth, Robert threw down his own cards. He then irritably took coins from his coat and handed them to the man as though tossing them at him.
The card game was over, but Robert still approached his conversation with Cedric in a careless manner. He spat out the cigar he had been holding in his mouth, then irritably bit down on a half-smoked cigarette stuck in a nearby ashtray and inhaled.
“Cedric Osmond. You pathetic bastard.”
Acrid tobacco smoke flowed from Robert’s mouth. He looked Cedric up and down and clicked his tongue.
“Is that the only way you know how to squeeze money out of someone? If she marries that bastard, then you dig up weakness on his side. Ah, that Fincher bastard has enemies everywhere. I bet if I so much as spoke up, bastards willing to help me would line up. There are more than a few people he’s beaten and humiliated after losing his temper.”
“If you’re going to keep clinging to that side purely out of revenge, it would be better to look elsewhere.”
When Cedric replied, Robert laughed as if he could not believe what he was hearing.
“Where elsewhere? Then go seduce some rich widow right now.”
“There are ways to earn money besides resorting to methods like that……”
“You keep going on about something else, something else.”
Clack—without warning, Robert reached out and seized Cedric’s fine-featured face. Robert’s rough hand dug into Cedric’s pale cheek. He did not loosen his grip, as if he meant to crush Cedric’s jaw in that very hold. Cedric endured the pain tightening his lower jaw until it ached.
“I don’t expect anything else from you, you bastard. Just know your place and think about how to put that pretty face of yours to good use. Don’t get above yourself and try using your head.”
Instead of stiffening his expression in humiliation at Robert’s rebuke, Cedric quietly lowered his gaze to his own knees. Because he had clenched his fists there several times already, the sleeves near his knees were badly wrinkled.
Cedric Osmond, nothing but a face.
He, who had once been counted among the promising talents at the academy, was sitting in this shabby tavern, enduring harsh tobacco smoke and noise. Each time the helplessness and revulsion he had tried so hard to bury threatened to rise thickly within him, Cedric thought of his only family—his younger sister.
Every time, he thought of that child and swallowed this humiliation.
“Think of your sister, Cedric.”
And Robert knew Cedric’s inner thoughts as if he could see right through them.
For a moment, an awkward silence flowed between the two men. Robert Bloom, who had once trailed after Cedric, desperate to become one of his connections somehow, was now in a position to order Cedric around as if he were the superior one.
It was because of money.
Purely because of money. Because of that damned money, which had driven Cedric’s father to his own death and had even sent his inherently sickly mother away too early.
“Hey. You think I’m doing this just for myself? I’m doing it so both you and I can get ahead. In the end, I’m the one making a way for you to pay me back, aren’t I? Where else would you find a person like that? If it had been that bastard Tommy, he’d have sold you off to the coal mines already.”
Robert spoke smugly as he exhaled tobacco smoke again. Cedric looked at Robert’s scarred face with an expressionless gaze.
The shackles of debt. After losing both his parents, the family had already collapsed completely. Since his grandfather’s time, the family finances had been steadily falling into ruin. By the time Cedric belatedly realized that fact—by the time he realized the family did not even have enough money left to pay for the next semester’s academy tuition—it was already far too late.
“Yes. You didn’t sell me off to the coal mines.”
Cedric looked at Robert calmly and muttered inwardly.
Instead, you sold me to people.
Had Robert not used him to his heart’s content, putting this fairly tolerable appearance of his forward and making him sell smiles to people?
“…That’s right, be grateful. You bastard.”
Listening to Robert speak without the slightest trace of embarrassment, Cedric quietly pressed his eyes shut, then opened them.
The faces of people who must have been born into nothing but wealth came to mind. The faces of those who had inherited only abundance, without ever needing to agonize over their family’s wretched financial state as he had. Among them was Sasha Grayson as well, whom he and Robert had set out to lure in.
“……Do you really think she covered up our affair because she has something shady behind her?”
“Besides that, the rumors have been very strange. Hmm. I heard something, you see.”
Cedric asked without even expecting anything, and Robert answered, disregarding him.