Episode 10
“Rose, move your quarters to the first floor today. From now on, don’t do any other work in the mansion. Attend only to the master.”
It was only a single sentence, yet the arrangements proceeded with a speed that made it seem as though everyone had been waiting for it.
Madam Serva even offered Rose the adjoining room connected to Ezekiel’s bedroom by a bell cord as her new quarters. It was situated so that opening just one door led straight through.
Overnight, her position had changed from a laundry maid to the master of the mansion’s personal attendant.
“Then I’ll have to find someone new to take over the laundry in Rose’s place.”
Madam Serva braced a hand on her knee and struggled to rise. At the sight of her heavy, labored steps, Rose instinctively moved to support her, but the madam lightly pushed her arm away.
“Rose, I will no longer give you any orders. You mustn’t concern yourself unnecessarily with me or the other employees of this mansion, either. The only person with the right to give you orders, and the only person you need concern yourself with, is the master.”
The click-clack of the madam’s cane receded into the distance.
Rose turned awkwardly to look at Ezekiel. She had only sent him a glance, but as if he were a man who could see, Ezekiel jerked his chin.
“Read the mail.”
It was his first order. Rose answered in a slightly awkward tone.
“Yes, master.”
The moment he heard her reply, he corrected the form of address.
“Major. Call me Major.”
As though he had read Rose’s bewildered thoughts, Ezekiel added,
“The word ‘master’ doesn’t suit your manner of speaking.”
A moment ago, when Rose had recalled the battlefield and addressed him as Major in that low, composed voice, Ezekiel had felt a sharp sensation race down his spine. It felt similar to the day he had drunk wine laced with laudanum for the first time in his life.
A shock, or perhaps a thrill.
Moreover, perhaps because she had only attended school while studying until now, Rose clearly gave the impression that she had never been employed by anyone before. She had a tendency to pronounce the word “master” with a certain unfamiliarity.
Rose repeated herself with the title he had corrected for her.
“Yes, Major.”
It sounded much better. Ezekiel nodded.
The large envelope lay abandoned where Madam Serva had left it. As Rose picked it up, a sudden concern arose in her.
“Is it all right for a civilian like me to read mail sent by someone connected to the army?”
At her question, Ezekiel snorted.
“If it were military confidential, they wouldn’t have let it pass through someone else’s hands in the first place.”
Ah, that made sense. If it were truly important, the person involved would come and speak privately with Ezekiel in person.
“Check the seal first.”
Ezekiel instructed. Rose placed his fingers on the wax sealing the mouth of the envelope. His well-shaped thumb carefully traced the raised pattern stamped into the wax. The hand that followed the design was remarkably delicate.
“It is indeed from Moncam.”
At the name Moncam alone, Ezekiel declared that it was a search report.
Search. Rose turned the word over in her mind.
A search for what?
A corner of her heart abruptly went cold. Forcing down a faint premonition, she broke the seal.
“This is Moncam.”
The letter began with a brief greeting, then moved on to its main business from the next paragraph.
“……I am looking into the ‘beautiful woman in her late teens to early twenties with chestnut hair and hazel eyes’ that you mentioned. I secretly made contact with the employees of the Valdemaera mansion and described her appearance. They say there are three or four among the mansion’s employees who resemble that description somewhat, but all of them have clear alibis for that day.”
Her ominous premonition proved exactly right.
The letter was an interim report from his subordinates, who were tracking her movements.
“However, we obtained testimony from an employee in charge of kitchen work that an unfamiliar woman entered the mansion that day and helped out. Because she kept her eyes lowered and quietly blended in among the others, they could not be certain whether her appearance matched the description, but they said they vaguely thought a pretty newcomer had arrived. The problem is that this woman seems to have vanished after that day.”
It was a passage that pointed precisely to her. For an instant, her heart sank.
Afraid that signs of her agitation might show, Rose stopped speaking for a moment and steadied her breathing.
“What is it?”
Ezekiel was quick-witted. As befitted a man who had learned to rely on instinct while rolling through the battlefield.
Rose deliberately let out a dry cough.
“I’m sorry. My throat caught for a moment.”
If she told him the woman he was looking for was reading the letter right in front of him……
“Continue.”
What would happen?
“They assumed she had caught Akenaus Valdemaera’s eye and been taken away. Apparently, such things happen frequently within the mansion. Women who deliberately enter as maids in hopes of becoming his mistress and acquiring a fortune, that is.”
“They thought she might have caught Akenaus’s eye……. Yes, she was that sort of woman. Accurate.”
Rose put strength into her trembling fingertips and read the rest of the letter.
“……Therefore, I plan to begin by investigating the women Akenaus Valdemaera has recently come into contact with. This concludes my report. In addition, I have procured four or five bottles of laudanum through the army surgeon and am sending them to you. On the battlefield, you never once sought painkillers even after being shot……. According to the army surgeon who issued the prescription, even your current dosage is already at a dangerous level. Would it not be best to call a doctor and receive an examination?”
“Useless chatter.”
Ezekiel replied curtly, as if his direct subordinate were standing right in front of him.
“The medicine?”
Rose tilted the envelope. Medicine bottles the length of a finger rolled out. As she placed the five bottles of laudanum one by one into his palm, her fingers lightly brushed his skin.
“Your hands are cold.”
It was because she had grown terribly tense. Rose clasped her hands together.
“Yes.”
“They’re almost like ice.”
“My body has always run a little cold.”
At Rose’s answer, Ezekiel recalled a fragment of a certain night past.
Under the suspicion that she might have entered with poison hidden on her body, he had torn off her clothes and searched her every inch. The body he had touched then had indeed been cool. The slender, neatly aligned bones, the faint body heat, and the subtle scent brushed hazily through his memory.
Ah, yes. While he drank down bitter liquor, he had also inhaled the scent of a woman’s skin that clung to his fingers.
Looking back, it must have been a rather harsh memory for Rose.
Ezekiel had encountered countless women over the course of the war. Some women were still alive, and some women were already dead. If there was just one thing they had in common, it was perhaps that they had all remained in the homes where they lived.
When war broke out, husbands and sons were forcibly conscripted. The privilege of leaving one child behind to carry on the family line was granted only to noble houses like the Valdemaeras. Commoners were all mobilized as soldiers, with the exception of newborn infants and the infirm elderly.
Women who had sent their beloved families off to the battlefield were terrified, yet because they waited for the families who might return someday, they could not bring themselves to abandon their hometowns. This was true whether they were women of Astrie or women of Davis. Even knowing full well that unfamiliar, menacing soldiers might do anything to them, they guarded their homes.
And most of the women who encountered soldiers were exploited and, in the end, shot to death. Even soldiers who had left behind their own wives and daughters rushed at other men’s wives and other men’s daughters with bloodshot eyes. There was even a village Ezekiel once found while moving along the front lines where all the women had been dragged out and massacred together. From girls of about ten years old to old women, their ages varied wildly.
Neither chivalry nor gentlemanly conduct existed on the battlefield.
Even men raised in good families with fine educations were not much different. Or perhaps they themselves acted nobly, never casting so much as a sideways glance at women, but they shut their eyes and covered their ears to the ordinary soldiers’ “hunting games” or “parties” that took place behind the unit. Some even encouraged them, believing that appropriate amusement served to relieve the exhaustion and excitement of the battlefield.
But one day, when a woman who had discovered the army pouring in hid her little daughter of five or six behind her back and burst into tears,
When he witnessed women who had seen the unit’s march take their own lives without even distinguishing friend from foe,
Ezekiel gave a stern order to the subordinates under his command that they were never to touch the women of occupied territories. He took particular care to make sure they passed through without plundering either their bodies or their possessions.
He had no intention of making excuses, but Rose was the first woman he had plundered. In other words, no employee other than Rose had set foot in his bedroom during his private hours. They were afraid of bearing the consequences afterward.
But Rose had entered his bedroom, which others avoided, and she had been plundered.
Plunder did not necessarily refer only to the body. Touching some part of the heart—humiliation, self-esteem, or fear—was also a form of plunder.
Rose, the woman who had appeared carrying the damp scent of rain and the cozy scent of laundry soap, had lain there with her body stiff as a board while he searched her, repeatedly forcing herself to steady her ragged breathing. She had not cried, but it would not have been at all strange if she had run away the very next day.
And yet she had endured the humiliation and remained in the mansion to work. According to Madam Serva, she was even a diligent and very good employee.
Because of that, Ezekiel had made a rough guess. This woman must be desperately poor, he thought.
It was an era when those who had become destitute because of the war were scattered as countless as grains of sand. In particular, the north, northeast, and east had been especially deeply clawed by the scars of war.
Yet Rose had testified at Milena Girls’ School that he had saved the students’ lives. It was an unexpected motive.
“Major.”
She was a woman who remembered a title even he sometimes forgot.
She was a woman who tickled his scars.
And so.
“How old are you?”
The question slipped out abruptly.