Episode 77
He must have seen wrong.
He had only glimpsed her, and his eyes had played tricks on him. Wasn’t that quite common? Mistaking a stranger for someone you knew simply because some part of their features looked a little similar.
That was what he told himself, trying to shake it off. But the afterimage imprinted on his retinas left him feeling strangely uneasy.
Merlot slowly turned his head. It was just as he composed himself again and carefully looked inside the bars.
Bewilderment flickered across the face of the woman lying near the bars.
She had recognized him.
For an instant, Merlot almost screamed without realizing it.
……It was impossible.
Something that should never have happened had happened.
That woman lying there with her chestnut hair in complete disarray, that woman barely clutching a bloodstained blanket with fingers as withered as bamboo skewers, that woman whose face was so deathly pale it would not be strange if she collapsed and died at any moment—
Surely.
Surely she could not be Rose, the woman Ezekiel had been searching for so desperately.
❖ ❖ ❖
After the miscarriage, an unexpected change came over the way people treated Lizan. Not every prisoner changed their attitude, but some of the female inmates who had experienced childbirth began to show her a subtle sympathy.
“What, you’re just going to leave a girl who lost her baby and ruined her body like this? Give me something to cover her with. You can lend it to her for a bit and take it back if she dies, can’t you?”
A middle-aged woman snatched dirty blankets from the other prisoners and wrapped them around Lizan’s body.
No one touched her rations anymore, either. The first bowl of soup, the warmest food available, was given to her. When bread or potatoes came out and she struggled to eat them, someone would pour her more of their own soup and trade food with her.
On the first day she was allowed to wash, the women completely surrounded Lizan. Accustomed to life in the camp, they were experts at making use of the brief time when water was permitted. The women undressed Lizan and scrubbed her body with cold water.
“Just think of it as roughly washing off the worst of the filth. It’s winter anyway, so the water’s too cold to wash for long.”
“Still, isn’t it better than summer? In summer the food spoils fast, there’s stench, fleas, and every strange infectious disease going around. Honestly, summer prisoners have it the worst. Aside from the cold, winter’s the cleanest and most livable.”
One woman swiftly took Lizan’s clothes and scrubbed them hard. The soap they had been given was of poor quality, so the blotchy bloodstains did not come out completely, but it was better than continuing to wear filthy clothes.
“From now on, try not to dirty your clothes if you can help it. Even if you wear them carefully, it still won’t be enough. Tsk.”
Even while washing Lizan and laundering her clothes for her, the women moved busily and finished bathing themselves as well.
While waiting for her clothes to dry, Lizan wrapped herself tightly in a blanket and sat leaning against the wall. She had not yet recovered enough strength to support herself properly, but she could not keep lying in the largest spot forever, inconveniencing everyone else.
Lizan buried her face in her palms and coughed in small, broken sounds. Whenever her throat was irritated, pain like a knife slicing through it followed, so she had to be as careful as possible even with a single cough.
Unfortunately, it was winter, and colds were going around. Even wrapped in several layers of blankets, the camp in midwinter was terribly cold. And since everyone slept huddled together to fend off the chill with body heat, if even one person coughed, everyone would be infected by the next day.
“Drink it while it’s warm. There’s no other medicine here.”
The middle-aged woman set a lukewarm bowl of soup down in front of Lizan. Lizan stared silently at the woman who had gathered blankets for her and taken care of her food.
Perhaps sensing her gaze, the middle-aged woman looked back.
“What?”
Lizan hesitated. She wanted to ask why the woman was helping her, but there was no way to ask. Her voice still had not returned, and there was a high chance the middle-aged woman could not read.
After thinking for a moment, she pointed to herself with a finger. Then, one by one, she pointed to the soup and the blanket as well.
“You’re asking why I’m helping you?”
Remarkably, the middle-aged woman understood Lizan’s simple gestures. The woman shrugged.
“Because you’re a bit like my daughter.”
Ah……. I see.
Lizan nodded. The middle-aged woman was old enough to be her mother.
She must have seen her daughter in me because we’re around the same age.
“I don’t mean you look like her.”
Lizan was about to accept that simply and warm her cold body with the lukewarm soup when the middle-aged woman continued bluntly.
“My daughter lost the child in her belly too. Stillborn. While her husband was beating her.”
Lizan opened her mouth soundlessly.
“Aren’t you curious why I ended up in here?”
As Lizan floundered, unsure what expression to make, the middle-aged woman twisted her lips into a brief smirk.
“I killed that son of a bitch, worse than a dog. In my daughter’s place.”
This time, Lizan truly had no words. She thought that, at this moment at least, it was fortunate her voice would not come out. If she had been able to speak, she would have had to clutch her head over what she ought to say.
Yet when she imagined how the middle-aged woman must have been eaten away inside after killing her son-in-law to avenge her daughter and grandchild, only to be imprisoned in the camp, her chest ached. Lizan pressed her dried lips together again and again.
The middle-aged woman looked at her in disbelief.
“What’s this? Who’s worrying about whom? I can endure this place well enough, and I’m on the healthy side, so I’ll probably survive until they send me to labor. But you—Valdemaira will never let you live.”
She knew that. She knew it very well.
Lizan silently lowered her gaze.
“Now that we’ve washed you and can see you properly, you’re quite pretty and young. You looked so much like a ghost before that I never even noticed what you looked like.”
Another woman naturally chimed in and asked,
“True. Are you around twenty, then?”
When Lizan nodded, long sighs rose from all around.
“What a waste of youth. You don’t seem especially troublesome, and you’re calm enough. If you’d just tried to live an ordinary life, you would have managed well enough, so how did you end up tangled so cruelly with Valdemaira……? Did you really love him?”
Love.
Love…….
Lizan gripped the chipped soup bowl tightly with both hands.
Love, was it…….
“Do you know who ruined my eyes?”
In truth, to speak of such a thing, the first button had been fastened wrong from the very beginning.
“All you have to do is give me your heart. Just like now.”
And yet, at some point, her heart had begun to pound uncontrollably,
“When my sight returns, the first thing I’ll see is your face.”
and because of it, at another point, even as she wandered through bottomless terror,
“Meeting you was the greatest luck of my life.”
by the time she came to her senses, there was already no way out. She was floundering, sunk in swamp-like emotions.
If she were being honest, even if she could never reclaim her real name, she had wanted to stay by his side as Rose. ……For a time, she had harbored that wish. Though she knew she should not, shameless as it was.
“Perhaps it’s Akenaus’s child?”
That was why she was being punished.
“You must have had grand dreams because of your pregnancy. What a pity you won’t get to fulfill them.”
She had cried so much that day.
She had not cried when she drank the poison, and even when she lost the child, though she had writhed in pain, she had not shown tears. Yet the effort she had forced herself to endure had collapsed in a single instant, leaving even herself bewildered.
She did not know why she was like this. Though she quickly pushed the memory out of her mind, another sob caught like a thorn. Lizan forced down the tears that had clogged her throat.
The taste of tears was bitter and fishy. It made her stomach turn. Ezekiel had probably looked at her that day and thought she was revolting too.
“What, are you crying?”
“I guess she really did love him. Well, that must be why an unmarried girl suddenly ended up with a child.”
“Good grief. Maybe it’s because you’re young, but you truly knew nothing of reality. Everyone knows the eldest son of that family chases women and lives debauchedly. Why on earth would you give him your heart?”
Reproaches poured out noisily. Lizan hurriedly wiped her stinging, burning eyes with the back of her hand.
Now was not the time to cry. If she showed tears here, the man she had loved would become Akenaus Valdemaira.
She hated that. The man she had truly loved was someone who could not be compared to a person like Akenaus Valdemaira. He had never been servile in the face of his brother’s injustice, he was always impressive in his confidence because he believed in his own ability, and he had tenderly loved her across the barrier of status.
“Don’t you know even after what happened to you? Even if that man dies, he won’t die in a camp like this. He’s noble Valdemaira, after all. If he dies, they’ll quietly deal with it inside the family. It’s an insignificant thing like you who gets dragged to a place like this and disappears without a trace.”
“Even if you’d given birth to the child, do you think that great family would ever acknowledge it as their blood? You would’ve been disposed of along with the baby.”
“From the look on his face that day, he didn’t even know you were pregnant. It’s not as if he had time to grow attached, so why are you even crying?”
They were harsh words, but she knew they were meant, in their own way, to comfort her.
Lizan leaned her feverish head against the wall.
There were feelings one only realized after they had passed, just like the existence of the child she had recognized only after losing it.
Happiness was especially like that. She had passed through those days without knowing they were good, and only when she looked back did she realize anew how truly happy that time had been.
Why hadn’t she known then?
That the time she had spent at the northern mansion, when she had been able to love him, had been the last happiness granted to her.