Episode 72
Why on earth had something like that suddenly happened?
Sasha simply could not understand it. Only belatedly did the tension leave her, and she felt emotion surge up inside her. It squirmed from the back of her throat, made the tip of her nose sting. Then tears welled up until the world before her blurred.
They were, in the truest sense, tears of relief. Yet at the same time, they were anger with nowhere to go, and grief. If there had been an immediate cause, at least she could have blamed it, demanded guilt from it. The man named George Butler had been a disaster. A bolt of lightning that had circled around her without even a hint of warning, then suddenly struck her down. A disaster with nowhere to place the blame.
Revulsion came surging in after that. More than anything, toward herself. After more than ten years of having her desires cut away, the moment she tried to have them belatedly, it felt as though the world was punishing her. As if she were being punished for harboring desires beyond her station, and, not satisfied with that, living while lying to people.
“Miss Grayson.”
Isaac called her again. But when she showed no sign of even hearing his voice, this time he cupped her cheeks and gently turned her toward him. Her eyes, as she looked at him, were brimming with tears. Isaac silently watched her for a moment as she shed tear after tear without making a sound, her teeth clenched, then called her name once more in a calm voice.
Drip. Drip. Her tears fell ceaselessly onto the back of Isaac’s hand.
“Breathe.”
Isaac said to her. Only then did Sasha realize she had been holding even her breath.
The breath that had been trapped slipped out between her parted lips.
“The tension just left me.”
Sasha murmured belatedly, as if making an excuse for the state she was in. Isaac nodded as though he understood everything.
“Are your fingertips tingling?”
“Are you a doctor?”
At his question, which sounded like he was checking on her, words less gentle than usual slipped from Sasha’s mouth without being filtered. Isaac did not seem particularly bothered.
“I’m not a doctor, but I know how to calm someone down at times like this.”
“…….”
A slow light returned to Sasha’s eyes, which had been fixed somewhere in melancholy. Sasha blinked with a dazed face, tears streaming down even faster and in greater amounts than before.
She could clearly feel Isaac’s large hands holding both her cheeks. They were warm, and by no means soft. Not only his palms, but every joint of his fingers was covered in calluses. Yet Sasha did not feel particularly uncomfortable. Rather.
……Rather.
“Breathe slowly. Don’t let yourself be buried in any thought.”
Just let it blow away, he whispered to her in his rough, low voice. Sasha slowly breathed in and out as he guided her.
After the rough palms, she felt something coarse touch her cheek. Sasha quietly lifted her head. And she watched as the man, far larger than she was, carefully wiped her cheeks with a handkerchief.
As if to say, I’m all right, she took his hand.
“How did you know to come?”
It was a question following the one from earlier. After asking how on earth he had known to come there.
It was a question asked under the entirely natural assumption that he had somehow known this would happen. Isaac was not baffled. He answered calmly.
“I overheard some men talking at the courthouse. Probably friends of your cousin.”
Jeffrey Grayson again.
Sasha’s face went cold, as though she was sick of him in every possible way.
Isaac continued.
“Lately, whenever I go to the courthouse, I run into a lot of unsavory men. There have also been far more people coming in after getting tangled up in assault cases. In any case, the point is that they were talking about your cousin. That your cousin was egging some man on, and, above all.”
Isaac recalled one of the men babbling while imitating Jeffrey’s manner of speech.
“Tell me.”
When he was unable to bring himself to say it, Sasha spoke to him with a composed face. Isaac slowly blinked once.
“Your cousin said he hoped you’d learn to be a little afraid of men. I suspect he may have encouraged that lunatic for that purpose.”
“…….”
When Isaac finished speaking, Sasha tightened her jaw and closed her slightly parted lips. Learn to be afraid of men? In a way, it was so blatant that a hollow laugh escaped her. Jeffrey Grayson, who had been slapped by her that day, had been biding his time against her and had finally made his move.
Thinking back, hadn’t he been far too quiet? The arrogant Jeffrey Grayson was the sort who would not even pretend to reflect, even if his parents told him to behave. It had been strange that he, already thoroughly infuriated, had not replied after receiving the letter Sasha sent.
“Are you certain of what you heard?”
“Yes.”
“You said you didn’t know their names. Do you think you’d recognize their faces if you saw them?”
Isaac was silent for a moment. Then he faintly recalled the faces of the men who had looked up at him, pale with fear, when he had driven them into a corner almost threateningly.
“Probably. It was my mistake not to properly learn their names. I was simply too busy interrogating them because it seemed something might happen to you, Miss Grayson.”
“……Never mind that. Just the fact that you came put me at ease. Thank you for coming, Captain Pinscher.”
Sasha still had her cheeks buried in Isaac’s palms. She carefully took his hand, then drew her cheek away and lifted her head. Their eyes met once again. The man’s blue eyes. The eyes that, when she met them in that moment, had been suffocatingly cold, and yet had also given her relief.
Now, they comforted her more gently than anyone else could.
“I really don’t know why something like that happened.”
“……How long had you been exchanging letters? With that bastard from earlier.”
“It must have been quite some time since we started exchanging them. But they were always only formal letters asking after one another. George Butler wasn’t even on the guest list Grandmother made for my birthday party, so he couldn’t attend. Instead, he sent a long letter congratulating me on my birthday.”
As Sasha counted back, she suddenly nodded with a look of realization.
That was right. That was when those one-sided gifts of flowers had begun.
“None of this is your fault. You simply had the misfortune of getting caught by a madman.”
“Of course. It’s certainly not my fault. Lending that madman a single handkerchief can’t possibly be a crime. ……I was simply unlucky, and he set his sights on me.”
Perhaps it would have been better if George Butler had approached her for her money, plainly and obviously, like Cedric Osmond or Robert Bloom. Sasha thought about it for a while, then gave a hollow laugh. Either way it was the worst, but it was laughable that she found herself thinking Cedric’s side had been preferable.
Sasha took the handkerchief Isaac had given her and quickly wiped away the dried traces of tears.
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to lose my mind just because I borrowed a handkerchief.”
At Sasha’s muttered words as she continued putting herself back together, Isaac looked at her as if he were utterly dumbfounded.
“Thank you for comforting me. Thanks to you, I’ve calmed down a little.”
“No. I’m the one who should apologize for coming late.”
“No, Captain Pinscher, you weren’t responsible for this in the first place.”
At Sasha’s cold, clear-cut words, Isaac’s face stiffened slightly for a different reason. But unable to let it show, he merely clenched and unclenched his large hands where they rested on his thighs.
“I should get up and go soon. I also need to find out what that passage is, and how many people knew about it.”
“It didn’t look like a service passage used by the servants. I suspect it may have been something passed down among the successive owners of the mansion. The interior certainly didn’t look like some sort of storage room; strictly speaking, it looked like a conference room or an office.”
Isaac, who had quickly surveyed the surroundings and gathered information in a short time, spoke as though rattling it off. Then he looked at Sasha and said this.
“The previous owner, your grandmother, Miss Grayson, probably knew about it. She would have told your cousin, of course, and you as well, Miss Grayson.”
“…….”
“Did she not tell you, Miss Grayson?”
It was a question without malice. It was a question that contained the most natural doubt to arise, so it surely had no intention of pricking Sasha’s conscience in particular.
Sasha listened to his entirely reasonable deduction, yet instead of answering right away, she stared intently at him.
“No.”
Acting was supposed to be her specialty. It was what she had done for more than ten years. She had lived almost her entire life playing the role of someone else, so she had truly been confident in it.
Sasha let her gaze drift vaguely toward the floor, avoiding the blue eyes that looked straight at her.
“I wasn’t told.”
And now, she let flow along with it a lie that pricked her conscience.