Episode 7
“In any case, isn’t laundry the work you’ve been assigned?”
Her heart seemed to drop with a sickening lurch.
I see. It could look strange. Rose quickly understood. This man did not know what she had done. To him, she was nothing more than a maid who did the laundry. There was ample room for it to seem like excessive interference.
“Who told you to do this nonsense?”
“……No one told me to.”
“No one told you to, yet you’re imitating me. Does that mean you intend to mock me?”
“No.”
“Then?”
“…….”
“I suppose you pity me?”
Ejekail pressed her again and again. The man left the rest unsaid, but in Rose’s ears, his meaning sounded complete.
I suppose you pity me, someone like you.
I suppose you pity me, how dare you.
As the tension stretched taut, Madam Serva cautiously stepped in to shield Rose.
“Rose is not that kind of impudent young lady. From what I’ve seen over the past few days, it’s rare to find someone as kind and diligent as she is. She truly must have wanted to be of help to you, Master.”
“If she wants to help me, she shouldn’t be clumsily mimicking me. She should stay out of my way.”
She could feel his mood plunging lower and lower by the second. Rose lowered her gaze. Ejekail was not someone an explanation would work on. Nor was she in any position to dare explain herself.
She bowed her body low and apologized.
“I was wrong. I will never make this mistake again. Please forgive me.”
Madam Serva glanced at Rose. It seemed the girl had tried, in her own way, to understand the difficulties of serving a blind master and adapt to an uncommon situation, but in doing so, she had touched a very unfortunate spot.
“Yes, Rose. If there is ever another mistake like this, I will send you away from the manor.”
Deliberately scolding her sternly, Madam Serva blinked at Rose as a signal. Then, on purpose, she used the form of address from his childhood to change the atmosphere.
“Young master. They say lunch is ready. You should go at once.”
“Don’t presume to overstep in front of me.”
Leaving behind that brief warning, the man strode away.
Rose, who had stepped aside so as not to hinder his path, stared at his retreating back.
When she drew in a deep breath, the lingering scent he left behind seeped in with it. Sleeping tea, wine, and the smell of medicine. She had smelled it so often that now it felt like his shadow.
The sleeping tea was something Madam Serva herself had ordered to be brewed strong and brought to him every night, out of concern for the man who could not sleep well. But the man, finding no calming effect in the tea, lived by constantly drinking wine and medicine. Every time Rose went to the bedroom to collect laundry, she saw the maid in charge of cleaning clearing away empty wine bottles; the amount was truly tremendous.
“Is it all right for him to drink this much?”
So at one point, she had stopped Madam Serva as she passed by and asked. Madam Serva let out a deep sigh and shook her head.
“How could it be all right? In the past, he never drank at all. He said a soldier must not have a muddled mind. He disliked alcohol so much that even during the war, when he received it as supplies, he gave it all away to those around him. But after his eyes became like that, he changed completely.”
“……Ah.”
“But we couldn’t stop him. He was suffering too much. The mental shock was one thing, but he said his injured eyes made his brain throb. When he tried to gouge out his own eyes, even his subordinates rushed in and struggled desperately to hold him back……. In any case, in the beginning he couldn’t sleep even a little. Only after he began taking medicine mixed in did he regain some stability.”
“It’s…… fortunate that the medicine works.”
“I truly think it’s fortunate. If not for laudanum, how could he have endured that terrible pain? Still, I’m worried because it’s getting harder and harder to obtain laudanum. Until now, because Lord Ejekail is a soldier, we’ve been receiving military-issued laudanum through his subordinates, but so much of it was consumed in the war that even the army seems to have difficulty procuring it in large quantities.”
Laudanum, with its excellent calming effect, was a common painkiller used widely.
Rose hid her cold hands behind her back and secretly kneaded them. Whenever the subject of Ejekail’s blindness and pain came up, her heart tightened every minute, every second.
“……I heard as well. That as soon as the war broke out, all the laudanum in circulation was collected and sent to the front……. But the war is over now.”
“Even though the war is over, there are many soldiers suffering from aftereffects of service. No matter how much money we offer, we can’t buy it.”
“Have you tried finding another painkiller?”
“No other medicine works at all. He has to take laudanum for it to be bearable.”
Even as he could not endure a single day without strong wine and opium, the man still maintained the bearing of a soldier born to it, with discipline in every movement and long strides.
Yes, he had not yet completely lost himself.
Though it was limited to the first floor, whose layout he had fully grasped, Ejekail moved without hesitation, as if he could see. Rose had heard from the other servants just how much effort and hardship had gone into his being able to walk so nonchalantly like that.
After having the first floor emptied, leaving only the bare minimum of furniture necessary for daily life, he had walked the same lengths again and again—between the bedroom and drawing room, the dining room and corridors—hundreds of times, memorizing every length and width one by one. If objects were placed only in their designated spots, he could pick them up and use them by himself. Of course, delicate tasks required another person’s hands, but even so, he had not given up on himself to the point of needing others to wash him, feed him, and put him to bed for every single movement.
If possible, she had come to this manor prepared to become the man’s eyes, hands, and feet for the rest of her life. Though it had been under Akenaus’s intimidation, the person who had directly crippled his eyes was her. She wanted to take responsibility for as much as she could.
Now Derosa was her second hometown and the place where she would spend her life.
So don’t make any more mistakes. You must not be thrown out of this manor.
Steeling her resolve, Rose made her way to the laundry room. For now, she had to be of help by carrying out the work entrusted to her, step by step and with diligence.
The laundry room was always hazy with hot steam. As she wrung out the waterlogged laundry with both hands, Rose furrowed her brow slightly. She had thought the pain in her shoulder and wrist had been ominous for a while now, and before she knew it, they had swollen visibly. It seemed that when she fell and struck the floor with a crash, something had gone a little wrong.
Working while trying to soothe her aching wrist, she could not make much progress at all. If it had been yesterday, she would already have gone into the kitchen and eaten lunch by now, but because she had not finished her work, she still could not leave the laundry room.
“Rose, Rose, are you here?”
It was then. Suddenly, the laundry room door flew open.
“Goodness, look at all this steam. It’s suffocating.”
Then came a voice calling for her.
Submerged in the damp, hot air, Rose lifted her head. It was Anna. Anna was a fellow servant who had approached her warmly first, saying she had a younger sister around Rose’s age.
Rose answered loudly.
“Yes, I’m here.”
“Stop for a moment and come out quickly. There’s trouble.”
“What happened?”
“Well, just now…….”
From what she heard, a commotion had broken out in the dining room. The servants in the dining room were supposed to set the table and attend to him with proper timing, but today his nerves were particularly on edge. While they were busy watching his mood, someone set down a glass in the wrong place, and that became the start of the disaster.
Ejekail’s hand, reaching for the wine, grasped only empty air. The hand that could not find the glass wandered over the table for a moment.
At last, once he found his target, he immediately swung his hand. The wineglass flew as if skidding across the table and fell against his chest. The chilled red wine soaked his upper body. The startled servants screamed.
What happened next was as obvious as fire. Saying that everyone gathered there under the name of servants was nothing but a pack of fools, he overturned the table fully laid with food, and both the dining room and the man’s clothes became a complete mess.
“It’s a good thing Madam stopped him before it got any worse. We were floundering around all this time until Madam Serva told me to call you, so I came. She says to come to the bedroom and collect the wet clothes. Bring a change of clothes with you, too.”
After hearing the whole story, Rose secretly bit down on her lip. Somehow, it seemed that because she had run into him in the corridor a little while ago, his mood had been twisted thoroughly out of joint, and sparks had flown even onto innocent people.
Anna lamented.
“Honestly, I only work here because they pay so much. Every day in this manor is like walking on thin ice. Maybe I should ask to be sent to the laundry room too. It’s out of the way and quiet here, at least.”
Rose, who bore some responsibility for that thin ice, merely hid her troubled feelings behind a calm expression.
“Since I’ve been summoned, I should go at once.”
“You haven’t had lunch yet, right? Come by a little later. We haven’t been able to clean the dining room.”
After Anna delivered the message and returned to finish cleaning the dining room, Rose gathered the well-dried clothes and made her way to the bedroom.
She steadied her breathing and stood before the door. Knock, knock. When she rapped on the door, Madam Serva’s permission came in his stead.
“Come in.”
Rose opened the door. The sweet, bitter grassy scent peculiar to opium and the fermented fruit aroma of wine were the first to greet her. Even though the maids aired out the bedroom whenever it was empty, the master of the manor drank even more frequently than that, so there was never a day when the smell faded.
“I’ve brought clothes for you to change into.”
“Ah, Rose. You’ve come at just the right time. Will you help me?”
Madam Serva brightened and called Rose over.
“We need to help him change, but as you can see, my body is like this.”
Her cane clicked and clacked. Her bad knee was one thing, but with age, her shoulders had stiffened and curled inward, so the madam could not lift her arms beyond a certain angle.
“Yes, I will do it.”
Helping with clothes was something any servant did. Rose set the garments down and unfastened the buttons of Ejekail’s shirt one by one.
As she peeled off the shirt, soaked in red wine and clinging wetly to him, she unconsciously drew in a sharp breath.
Beauty and horror coexisted on the man’s body.