Episode 81
“Ah, the famous redhead. I have heard the rumors.”
Levian laughed briefly.
“But a woman for Major Valdemaera… Well. I tried buying off prostitutes a few times, but they all threw up their hands, saying there was absolutely no opening to approach him. They say he has little interest in women.”
“Prostitutes simply weren’t to his taste.”
There were men who went through life pretending to be lofty and indifferent, not knowing how good women were, only to awaken to it belatedly. As Akenaus saw it, they were the sort who had only grown in body and age, but were woefully late and lacking as adults.
“True enough. If there had been rumors about a woman, I would have chosen a prostitute who looked somewhat like the women he had met before. But with not even a whisper going around, I had no idea whom to send.”
Seeing signs that Levian was being slightly persuaded, Akenaus added in an impassioned tone.
“The woman he’s searching for now—he’s probably planning to push through marriage with her, whether his family opposes it or not. That’s why he took the diamond from me. A rare treasure that almost never even appears at auction. Men who used to act indifferent toward women go even madder once they get a taste for it, don’t they?”
“Of course, if that wooden man is so smitten with a woman that he would even consider marriage, she would have many uses, so it would be best for us to have her in our hands…”
With a faint groan, Levian pressed his temple.
“The problem is that we have far too few clues. How are we supposed to find a woman with only the information that she has red hair and green eyes? Even Major Valdemaera himself is making a great uproar throughout the country searching for her. For us, it would be like being told to find a needle in a desert. Finding an actual needle would be easier. They say that even those people, if they are unsure, simply load the woman off to the mansion and have Major Valdemaera confirm it himself. How are we supposed to pick her out?”
Akenaus’s lips twisted into a sly smile. That was true. From the standpoint of the Davisians who had crossed the border, there would be many restrictions and no particular method available.
But Akenaus was a Valdemaera. At least within Astrie, he could use his head better than the spies.
“What if there is a way?”
“…You’re saying there is a way?”
Curiosity settled over Levian’s face.
Akenaus nodded.
“He met that woman in Derosa.”
Ezekail had met that woman during the most miserable and wretched period of his life. If she was a woman who had been with him through the hardest time, would she not be someone he could never forget?
That was why, now that she was not by his side, he was turning all of Astrie upside down and fretting over even a trifling letter she had left behind.
It had not shown much because of that detached face that rarely changed expression, but thinking back on it now, the man had surely been tremendously anxious and uneasy. Akenaus could read, as clearly as if it had been painted, Ezekail’s desperate inner feelings when he had tried to get the woman’s handwritten letter first, even at the cost of letting Akenaus go.
“Then that means there is someone in Derosa who has seen that woman’s face.”
Someone who had taken charge of Ezekail when he rolled in as a cripple and had protected and supported him until now. And moreover, someone who had carried Ezekail on her back and raised him in his childhood, and so had a special bond with him.
Such a person still remained in Derosa.
Serva, the elderly head housekeeper who had been the man’s nanny, would certainly remember Ezekail’s woman.
Akenaus’s eyes gleamed chillingly.
“We just need to bring that old woman from Derosa.”
❖ ❖ ❖
Sunk in a hazy half-consciousness, Ezekail moved his lips. Then he called the name that had become a habit.
“…Rose.”
The longing he had endured had been far too long. No matter how many times he called and called, this thirst was not quenched.
Ezekail groped for Rose’s hand covering his forehead. No, he tried to grasp it.
“Rose?”
His hand clutched at empty air.
She had definitely been with him all along, but suddenly he could feel nothing. For an instant, his soul plummeted into the depths. With a dizzying shock, Ezekail’s eyes flew open.
“Rose!”
Only after he had unconsciously shouted her name in a ringing voice did he come to his senses.
“Damn it.”
The shadow of the hazy hallucination lifted. While he had been submerged in a dream of phantoms, the sweet night had ended and reality had arrived. The pale gray light leading from dawn into morning was brightening the surroundings.
Ezekail swallowed a curse. Happy hours were always far too short.
“Rose.”
The heartless woman had hidden herself again. She had been like mist when she appeared, but she vanished even faster.
Feeling as though he were playing hide-and-seek, Ezekail swept his gaze around the bedroom. But Rose existed nowhere. It had become part of his routine of late. When night came, he borrowed the power of the drug to faintly taste her shadow, and when morning came, he struggled with an unfailing sense of loss.
“Are you awake?”
A servant who had heard Ezekail’s shout hurried over and knocked on the bedroom door. It seemed they thought he had called for someone by shouting instead of using the bellpull.
“May I come in now and make the bed?”
Ezekail instinctively reached for the remaining Rothernum, then withdrew his hand as it was and covered his throbbing forehead.
“…Prepare the bath.”
His head felt heavy. It was a headache no medicine could possibly settle. It seemed he would have to hope cold water would cool this heat.
A new day begun without Rose was already unbearably tiresome.
“It seems Akenaus is still moving together with the spies. They say it is convenient that he is easy to distinguish because he wears an eyepatch over his injured eye.”
Recently, the greatest interest of the 37th Regiment was the current situation of Akenaus, who had made contact with the Davis spies.
“He must look just like a pirate, doesn’t he?”
No sooner had Mongkam delivered the latest news than Feder burst into snickering laughter.
“An eyepatch on that precious face of his—he must be so furious he’s ready to keel over. I’ll be honest, whatever else one says, that face of his really is hard to deny.”
There was reason for such talk. Even while Akenaus was constantly compared with Ezekail in every move he made, he had bewitched countless women with that one splendid outer shell of his. Among them were women who took interest in Akenaus as a substitute for Ezekail, whom it was difficult to meet privately, but that, too, had been possible in the first place because the two brothers resembled each other.
“An eyepatch…”
Amid his subordinates’ noisy chuckling, Ezekail alone drew up another memory.
On nights when the moon rose, before they went out for a walk in the garden, Rose would wrap a handkerchief over his eye and make him an eyepatch. Her hands would carefully, ticklishly brush his eyes and hair, and he liked the feeling so much that sometimes he would deliberately make her tie it again under the pretext that the knot was loose.
Now, no matter what topic came up, every memory led back to Rose. If this was an illness, then there was no case more severe.
“Still, it seems he received an examination. They noticed he had secretly brought someone in, so later they made contact and confirmed his identity, and it turned out he was a doctor. They say he first asked whether his eye could be healed, and the moment he heard that no doctor could treat an eye struck by a bullet, he flew into a violent rage.”
“Since you recovered perfectly, Major, he must have expected that he, too, would somehow find a solution.”
Ezekail’s mouth tilted in a faint smile.
“A pointless expectation.”
Looking back, he had been fortunate. Because that woman had changed her mind and fled after splashing the poison only into his eyes instead of putting it in tea for him to drink, he had been able to receive treatment. And based on his own experience, he had inflicted permanent damage on Akenaus’s eye.
Even the fact that he had overcome the past like this was ultimately thanks to Rose. If he had not recovered his eye through her sacrifice, he would still have been raging over the method that woman had used to rob him of his honor and pride along with his sight.
“Ah, Major. What has become of that woman? I heard you met with her a few more times afterward.”
Mongkam changed the subject.
Ezekail answered as if it were nothing.
“Every time I went, she was lying down, claiming to be ill.”
“Did you manage to interrogate her?”
“There has to be something I can do for that. Since that day, she has become completely mute.”
“She kept vomiting blood even on the day we caught her, so something must be seriously wrong with her, no?”
Feder tilted his head in puzzlement.
“Isn’t it the poison that made you suffer for so long, Major? Since she simply gulped that down, there is no way her throat could be fine. Then how about taking a doctor to her once? That woman needs to speak for us to question her about anything, doesn’t she?”
“Mongkam. That woman is a prisoner. You’re suggesting we summon a doctor for a prisoner and let her receive treatment?”
Ezekail cut him off in one stroke.
It was treatment beyond her station. It was not as though she had been unjustly imprisoned, and her suicide attempt had merely been a sudden incident she had brought upon herself. If their side went so far as to bring in a doctor and care for her, there was room for it to appear as though they were giving special treatment to that woman. To a woman who, as if injuring Ezekail had not been enough, had continued to toy with him while sneaking about and hiding from the eyes of the pursuit squad.
The one who should be disappointed and afraid in the current situation was that woman, not them.
Mongkam soon realized his mistake as well.
“Because the situation is somewhat unusual, I judged wrongly. I apologize.”
“We don’t need that woman’s testimony. The information we have grasped so far is enough.”
Ezekail dismissed it emotionlessly.