Episode 13
“On the battlefield, even when you were struck by bullets, you never once asked for painkillers….”
Just as he had on the battlefield.
He clenched his molars and endured the pain without letting out a single groan.
How could he be so composed?
Rather than being impressed by the inertia forged by countless frustrations, she felt sorrow. It was cold and bitter.
Just because he did not speak of it, just because he did his utmost not to show it, just because he had suffered many times before, did not mean it did not hurt….
She wished she could share that pain with him. Instead of merely watching in a daze like this, she wished there were something—anything—she could do.
The fact that the person who had sinned and the person suffering for that sin were separate people, and this time spent watching the scene unfold right before her eyes while being reminded of her past wrongdoing, kept abruptly stealing her breath away.
Rose tugged at her sleeve. It was to wipe the sweat from his face. But after taking a single step closer, she gave up. Her wavering shadow seemed as though it might interfere with the examination.
Rose’s gaze, which had been fixed blankly on Ezekiel, dropped to the floor. And the moment she discovered the tips of his fingers trembling faintly, she realized what she had to do.
Rose quietly knelt beside him. She wrapped her own hand around the man’s, whose knuckles had turned white from the force he was exerting. Sensing her hand, the man added his powerful grip. His rough strength made the joints of her fingers knock together and throb, but Rose did not show it. Something like this was surely nothing compared to the pain in his head, which must be no different from a battlefield.
Her palm grew damp in an instant.
Each second stretched on endlessly. So long it felt like eternity.
With her breath drying up in her throat, Rose waited for the doctor’s examination to end. The doctor, who was more tense than the patient, finished the examination after several minutes and turned off the lamp.
Then he fell silent.
Ah.
Rose had already read the answer in the doctor’s reaction.
At times, nonverbal expressions held more meaning than verbal ones. His wavering pupils, unable to meet the eyes of her, who was present as the maid assisting Ezekiel’s every movement; his awkward posture; the way he swept the tools he had brought back into his medical bag without even using them further—all of it plainly hinted at the result of his diagnosis.
After gazing for a moment at the man’s face, which was tightly contorted in the aftermath of pain, she folded back her cuff and wiped away the sweat trickling down.
The silence continued for a while longer.
“How long do you intend to keep your mouth shut? If the examination is over, answer me.”
At last, Ezekiel spoke.
Though he was drenched in sweat, his voice alone was dry, as if nothing had happened.
The doctor hastily opened his mouth.
“Ah, yes. That is to say….”
That is to say.
It was an expression rarely attached to positive news. Moreover, it was also a dangerous preface that tended to make an introduction long-winded. Having learned from experience just how much doctors twisted around simple results that could have ended with yes or no, Ezekiel added a warning.
“I’ll say this in advance. Don’t dress it up in pleasant words and talk in difficult, complicated circles until I get a headache trying to decode it. Report only exactly what you saw and judged.”
Startled by the weight of an officer for whom commands had once been daily life, the doctor blurted out the conclusion first.
“In, in my opinion, there appears to be no hope for these eyes.”
It was an ending that did not stray from expectations. It was also the answer that had been repeated countless times until now. Still, there was no helping the fact that the effort of enduring that pain was made shabby in an instant.
“Damn it.”
Ezekiel chewed out the curse in a low voice.
At once, the air in the drawing room turned cold. Even the small sounds of daily life vanished all at once. It was only natural, since he was the one who led the atmosphere of the mansion.
In the man’s expression, sunk coldly down, Rose read signs of a sharp, blue rage.
The flustered doctor fidgeted and squirmed in his seat. It was obvious he wanted to escape the drawing room at once. Rose, too, understood the frightened doctor’s feelings to some extent. If it were a thin, pretty-faced man like Akenaus, perhaps it would be different, but an officer as exceptionally large and cold-looking as Ezekiel gave off a threatening impression even with a mere narrowing of his eyes. Enough to make one shrink in advance at a short curse and set one’s heart pounding of its own accord.
No… that was not it.
Rose corrected herself.
The comparison was wrong. Akenaus was a man who commissioned the murder of his own full brother with a smiling face. In terms of being sinister and dangerous, he was a cut above. Before he lost his sight, Ezekiel had been a wonderful person even in the memory that had brushed past her briefly on the battlefield. He had been a knight who, upon discovering the schoolgirls trapped in the school, immediately turned his horse around and came to save them; a gentleman who, out of concern for the young girls afraid of men, had kept his subordinates in line.
He could not even be compared to the cowardly, petty Akenaus.
If someone absolutely had to be harmed, Akenaus would use others and stain another person’s hands with blood, but Ezekiel was the sort to step forward himself and bring it to an end.
But now, it was only a meaningless assumption. The current Ezekiel was in a precarious state where, far from standing against Akenaus, he barely had the strength to look after even his own body.
“Do you not have a more novel answer?”
“Pardon?”
“Something other than that sickeningly clichéd diagnosis.”
Though he did not raise his voice, the energy that reached them was chilly.
“It’s strange. Not a single one of you leaves anything out; you all say the same thing. I can’t tell at all whether I’ve met dozens of doctors, or met one doctor dozens of times.”
The doctor looked back at Rose with eyes seeking help. But this situation was a first for Rose as well.
“Do you know what I find myself thinking more and more each time I hear an unchanging diagnosis?”
“…Major.”
“That I want to kill them then and there. Since I have to kill them, I imagine all sorts of ways in my head hundreds of times over.”
The conversation veered violently. The doctor’s complexion turned blue, mistaking it for a threat aimed at himself.
However, the person who truly ought to be frightened was elsewhere. Rose recalled the rumor she had heard through Anna.
Hadn’t there been a few doctors who, on occasion, packed their things the moment the examination was over and fled the mansion in a panic?
It certainly made sense. He was not the sort to explain the thoughts in his head in detail, and in the aftermath of his eyes being crippled, there was also a somewhat fierce edge to the way he dealt with people. It would have been more than enough to invite misunderstanding.
Moreover, for the doctors, each of them had merely made a single house call and left, but for him, similar situations had already repeated dozens of times. It was only natural that he would be sick of it to the point that his anger and imagination ran to extremes.
Only, Rose knew all too well who the true target was whom Ezekiel hated enough to want to kill.
Akenaus.
And Rose herself.
If he heard the same clichéd diagnosis from doctors every time, was it not only natural that he would be reminded, one after another, of those who had ruined his eyes and brought about this day? Just as he had said, the more he thought of them, the more he would have wanted to kill them, and as he imagined how he would kill them, he must have honed his hatred, layer by layer.
The fainthearted doctor did not remain in the drawing room for long. After fidgeting with a pale, ashen face the whole time, he made an excuse that anyone could tell was a lie and hurriedly disappeared.
Mrs. Serva, who had seen the doctor out and returned, clicked her tongue.
“He disappeared without even looking back, as if his tail were on fire. I almost wondered whether he had committed some crime.”
Well.
Rose denied it inwardly. On the contrary, it was because he had committed no crime that he was trying to run away before getting caught in an undeserved shower of sparks. Being able to run away without any sense of indebtedness, whenever one wished to run, was also a privilege of the guiltless.
That was how it appeared to her, guilty as she was.
“Don’t be disheartened. This doctor was utterly useless this time as well.”
Mrs. Serva’s consolation placed Ezekiel’s feelings above all else.
All of the doctors who had examined him had reached the same conclusion. That lost sight was like severed limbs, and there was no way to restore it to its original state.
So the one who had come on this house call had simply been one of the many utterly ordinary doctors with ordinary skill.
“The next doctor to come will be someone a little more famous. Come to think of it, I heard a rumor recently that doctors have been traveling around giving medical performances and promoting their medical arts. Who was that again….”
Mrs. Serva promised a next time.
Next time. So there would be another next time.
Swallowing the words that sat heavy in her stomach like indigestion, Rose quietly turned her back so that her expression could not be seen and tidied the drawing room.
What words could possibly explain this feeling?
Her insides were in turmoil. From the moment she faced the doctor until now, without cease. It felt as though some lump she could neither swallow nor spit out was lodged deep somewhere inside the pit of her stomach. Even breathing in and out until her windpipe hurt was useless.
It was a terrible suffocation.
Rose lowered her gaze. It was her own feeling, her own heart, and yet she was afraid to look closely inside it. To be honest, what frightened her more was that she seemed to vaguely know the reason.
The pain he had to endure in order to receive treatment made her heart drop with a thud, and yet, when it came to the doctor’s diagnosis that there was no way to save his eyes….
The instant she looked back on herself from just a moment ago, goosebumps suddenly rose over her skin. A light tremor ran through her hand. Of all times, it happened just as she was clearing away the teacup abandoned on the table. It was tea the kitchen had prepared for the guest, but perhaps because the mansion’s peculiar, dreary atmosphere had upset his stomach, the doctor had not taken even a single sip.
The teacup and saucer clattered together, and the overflowing tea wet the back of her hand. Fortunately, the tea had gone cold. Rose hurriedly wiped the back of her hand with the hem of her clothes.
“Rose, are you all right?”
Startled by the noise, Mrs. Serva looked back at Rose.
“Yes, it was cold tea, so I’m all right.”
She mumbled an answer, hoping it would look like a simple mistake. But the chill that had run down her spine left behind an eerie aftertaste.
That is to say, at the doctor’s diagnosis that there was no way to save his eyes….
Rose clasped her trembling hands together.
…On the other hand, she had felt relieved. She had.
Shamefully.