Episode 31
“Heard what?”
In the end, Cedric could not overcome his curiosity and asked.
Robert answered as if he had been waiting for it.
“Yeah. That granddaughter doesn’t seem to get along all that well with her uncle’s family, you know? From what I hear, she’s gotten on that duchess’s bad side. Remember Kenin, the one we met last time? That bastard was trying desperately to get in that woman’s good graces too, but at some point he just cut off all interest.”
She was a woman who had never lacked for suitors in the first place. Cedric spoke as though he was not particularly surprised.
“With rumors going around about her and that captain, he probably gave up hope.”
“No. From what I hear, it was because of the duchess. How would I know all the details of what goes on among the high and mighty? But anyway, after asking around here and there, it’s true that the number of people trying to find some way to get a line to that woman has gone down.”
Cedric sighed. Robert was now digging into the Grayson family to the point of obsession.
Having been born and raised in a noble family of some standing, Cedric knew all too well how troublesome it was to get entangled in the scandals of the great nobility.
Cedric recalled Sasha Grayson from the last time they had spoken. He remembered the face with which she had stared at him, looking somehow terribly tired, gazing at him dryly without even the slightest flutter of excitement or tension he had expected.
“So what are you going to do?”
Cedric asked Robert with a sigh, and Robert said, “First, I’ll have to find out more.”
It seemed his desire for revenge was greater than expected. Cedric found that extremely exhausting.
And unexpected opportunities always came without warning. They always did. Regardless of good or evil, opportunities always came even to people like Robert.
A great commotion broke out near the entrance, and Cedric and Robert’s conversation was cut short. Cedric watched expressionlessly as a man in shabby clothes was beaten.
With a loud crash and clatter, a man who looked impoverished at a glance rolled across the floor. Cedric looked with weary eyes at the group beating the man. They were a gang that openly ran scams and extorted money from innocent victims.
Judging by the look of it, the man had fallen for their trick and squandered every coin he had brought. Cedric watched without expression as the man lay face down, covering his head with the backs of his hands to protect it from the kicks raining down from above. Robert, sitting opposite him, cackled as though watching some entertaining sporting match.
“What are you doing?”
When Robert rose from his seat, Cedric spoke urgently, as if to stop him. But Robert did not even pretend to hear and walked toward the direction where the man had fallen.
The group that had been beating the man had long since spat and scattered, and the man, who had not only lost all his money but had been thrashed as well, was still curled up on the floor. Robert pulled him to his feet and brought him over to the table where they had been sitting. Then he handed him the beer Cedric had not touched.
“Mister, just how bad are you at games?”
The moment the man grasped the glass with his bruised hand, he threw it into his mouth and emptied the beer on the spot. Robert’s mocking words seemed not to reach him at all.
“Try these too. Looks like you haven’t eaten in days.”
Robert grabbed a handful of peanuts from the plate before him and tossed them at the man as though scattering them. It was an act anyone would have found humiliating. But the man did not care. With a rather calm expression, he shelled the peanuts and diligently put them into his mouth.
Robert, who had meant to half toy with the man and perhaps confirm how pathetic his card skills were, quickly lost interest when the man paid no attention to his words and focused only on the peanuts. He openly poured the whole bowlful of peanuts in front of the man, piling them into a mound.
“Let’s finish what we were talking about.”
Robert soon lost interest in the man and spoke to Cedric. Cedric looked at the man with an uneasy expression, but soon nodded reluctantly. The man truly seemed to be preoccupied only with eating peanuts.
But the conversation, as it had from the start, ended only in baseless speculation and plotless scheming. In any case, the conclusion was the same. Robert wanted revenge on Isaac Pinscher, who had ruined his arm, wanted to humiliate Sasha Grayson in the same way she had humiliated him, and wanted to wring money out of her by any means possible.
Cedric’s words—that she already knew about their scheme and so forth—failed to get through to him, just as they had before. Robert was blinded by revenge alone.
But since they had no plan to speak of at present, the conversation gradually wandered off track. It reached the point where they were prattling on about how luxurious the Dilton mansion, where they had briefly stayed, had been, and how suffocating it had felt when the servants there had watched them while pretending not to.
Cedric wanted to end this fruitless conversation as soon as possible. He simply wanted to leave this tavern filled with noise and stench as quickly as he could.
That was when his eyes met those of the man who had been chewing peanuts the entire time. The man had already received Robert’s glass as well and emptied two beers, and with his gaunt face flushed red, he looked at Cedric with half-unfocused eyes and grinned.
“Ah, pardon me. I was wondering if you were truly a man.”
His manner of speaking was quite gentle. Yet, because of the drunkenness dissolved into it, it was also half-slurred and drawn out.
It was something Cedric had heard all his life, ever since he was born and as he grew up, so he stared familiarly at the man for a moment, then sharply turned his gaze away. But when the man addressed him again, he had no choice but to turn his eyes back.
“You seem to know a great deal about noble people. Do you have connections in that direction?”
The man spoke slowly in a slurred voice. It was a tone that might even have seemed rather polite. Cedric turned back to the man and raised an eyebrow, while Robert snorted.
“If it’s a secret story about noble people, I know one too. My uncle told me, but he said I was to keep it to myself.”
The plain-looking man had possessed little presence until then. But the moment he said those words and smiled gloomily, Cedric’s expression hardened with an inexplicable sense of foreboding.
Robert, still looking uninterested, merely wrestled with his lighter and said perfunctorily,
“Go on, then.”
Then Robert called for a server. Soon, a bowl of warm sausages was placed before the man. The man devoured them greedily in the blink of an eye.
“From the look of it, you people are interested in those lords of the ducal house, aren’t you? Right? My uncle worked at an orphanage, you see. A place that takes in abandoned children and raises them. So, my uncle has dementia now, but sometimes he mutters old stories. I happened to hear it while I was beside him.”
The man spoke somewhat incoherently, as though pouring the words out.
As if it had been a very long time since he had held a proper conversation, he was terribly clumsy at opening the floodgates of a story. But whether Robert and Cedric were interested or not, the man chattered on excitedly.
“My uncle raised a certain little girl there. Said she was a memorable child. Pretty little thing, she was. More than pretty—she had the look of a child born noble. Anyway, my uncle said he was quite fond of her. Said he even gave her the name of a bird.”
When Cedric tried to rise from his seat as if to say he would be going first, Robert tapped the chair he had been sitting on with the toe of his shoe. Just sit quietly and shut up. That was what it meant.
“Ah, what was the name again? One syllable. An easy name to call. That was it. Anyway, that’s not the important part. You folks were talking about that ducal family, weren’t you? About fifteen years ago, there was a big accident in that family, wasn’t there? It was all over the papers, they say. The duke’s son and his wife died en masse with the coachman.”
Cedric swallowed Robert’s dismissive gesture and sat back down.
The man was spinning an obvious story. He was talking about that tragic carriage accident, the kind of tale anyone with an interest in gossip had heard at least once.
In other words, he was speaking of Sasha Grayson’s unfortunate past, one of the many reasons that had made her famous.
Cedric had heard the story several times himself and knew it well. The duke’s second son and his wife had died instantly in a carriage accident, and only their young granddaughter had survived.
“You know, because of that, only the granddaughter survived, but she went missing, didn’t she?”
“Missing?”
Cedric cut in, dumbfounded. He’s just making up nonsense. He was merely adding bluster to an obvious story everyone had heard.
But Robert continued to listen to the man while smoking his cigarette.
“Ah, was it not missing? Then… uh, what was it?”
The man scratched the bone of his eyebrow with a foolish look on his face. Then he muttered, “Missing, wasn’t it missing?”
“So anyway… they sent someone to the orphanage where my uncle worked, saying they were looking for that granddaughter, you see?”
“Who? Her Ladyship?”
Cedric snapped his head around. Robert was responding to the man’s absurd nonsense with surprising seriousness.
At Robert’s words, the man stared blankly at him with a stupid expression.
“Bloom, this is just nonsense.”
“Let him continue.”
Robert was openly cackling as he observed the man’s rambling nonsense.
Whether Robert was openly laughing at him or not, the man continued to spill out his own incoherent drivel.
“So, that child my uncle looked after. One day, he saw her holding the hand of some noble old lady.”
“…What, so your story is that the Grayson family’s granddaughter went missing in that accident and was in an orphanage for a while?”
When Robert even responded, Cedric openly furrowed his brow.
Regardless, the man shook his head with vacant eyes.
“No. That child was an orphan from the start. She had always been at the orphanage. But one day, he saw her like that, you see. How my uncle recognized her was…”
The man stopped speaking and stretched out the collar of his shirt. Then he exposed his bony collarbone.
“There’s a mark here, stamped in the shape of an X. A mark made by scissors. They say it’s a scar she got when she fought with the other children there.”
The man said that much, then, in the middle of chewing bread, slammed his head down onto the table and passed out. At the thud, everyone looked toward their table, but Cedric and Robert had no room to care about the gazes around them. They stared for a long while at the back of the man’s greasy head, and soon, as if by prior agreement, looked at each other.
Robert muttered,
“Cedric, what the hell do you think this means?”
Cedric did not answer. Because he was mulling over the absurd nonsense about her having been an orphan from the start, while recalling only Sasha’s face from the last time he had seen her, smiling in a rather elegant and gentle manner.