39.
“Related to the heretics?”
“Yeah. But strangely, it looked familiar.”
“Then you’d better draw it before you forget.”
Jaka took paper and a pen from his breast pocket and handed them to me.
“You carry things like this around?”
“If you want to attend to someone properly, you have to be this prepared.”
“I guess your experience as an imperial palace attendant hasn’t gone anywhere.”
I grinned and placed the paper on the swaying carriage sofa, then began drawing in wobbly lines.
Jaka, who had pressed close beside me to watch, frowned.
“……What are you drawing right now?”
“It’s the pattern.”
“A newborn baby could draw better than this.”
“I’m doing my best, you know?”
In the end, Jaka snatched the paper back from me.
Apparently, it would be better if I described it and he drew it himself.
And that was true.
“……That’s right, that’s exactly what it looked like! Yeah, and at the bottom, make this part a little thinner—yes, that’s it!”
On the paper Jaka handed back, the very pattern I had seen was drawn with perfect accuracy.
He had even asked about every detail I’d missed and filled them in one by one.
“Aren’t you pretty good at drawing?”
“Drawing?”
Jaka shrugged as if it were nothing.
“Do you want to learn how to draw? What do you think?”
“Ah, no thanks. Too much trouble.”
“Learn and draw me.”
“……Draw you, Baron?”
“Draw Julie too! And other people!”
“It’s bothersome. I don’t want to.”
I pestered him a few more times before giving up.
“Ah, what a shame. I thought the day had finally come for sunlight to shine upon this poor barony, where the only portrait in the mansion is one of my great-grandfather.”
I wasn’t being serious, but it was certainly rare.
Leaving aside my father’s face, which surfaced only faintly in my mind, I truly knew absolutely nothing about my mother.
If this wasn’t the result of growing up alone in a bleak mansion without a single portrait, then what was?
In any case, while Jaka was letting my words go in one ear and out the other, he scribbled something on the paper and showed it to me.
“Have you ever seen something like this?”
“It’s a necklace.”
I raised one eyebrow.
“Where did you see it before drawing it?”
“Why? Does it look familiar?”
“No, it’s not that it looks familiar. It’s just a necklace I know.”
“……A necklace you know?”
“Yeah. I even know where it is.”
“Where is it now?”
Holding the drawing of the necklace up to the sunlight, I said casually,
“It should be in the second drawer of the innermost dresser in my room.”
“…….”
Jaka fell silent, like someone who had heard an answer he hadn’t expected.
“What’s wrong? Didn’t you draw it because you knew?”
Thinking about it carefully, I didn’t think I had worn that necklace even once since Jaka arrived.
“……No, I was just surprised. I only drew it roughly, but you’re saying it actually exists.”
“Come on, didn’t you just catch a glimpse of it while tidying my room, and it stuck in your memory?”
Once I said it, that seemed quite likely.
“You really must have talent. You’re observant, too.”
“Talent for what?”
“Drawing!”
“That again.”
Jaka, looking fed up, snatched the drawing from my hand and rolled it up.
An antique-looking necklace, with a jade-colored gem set in the center—beautiful, though not terribly expensive.
There was no way I could have mistaken it.
Because it was the only keepsake left to me by the woman called my mother.
* * *
Rumble, crash!
As if insisting that it was the height of the midsummer rainy season, the sky poured down rain day after day.
Thanks to that, I had been stuck in the mansion for several days.
My wound had almost completely healed now, and I was enjoying the last of my leisurely days, sprawled comfortably on the sofa.
Through the sheets of rain, I saw an errand boy crossing the front yard.
I was watching without much thought when I saw Julie go out to meet him.
The errand boy bowed his head repeatedly, and Julie untied her coin pouch and took out gold coins……
I shot upright.
For Julie to hand over such a large sum without hesitation, something must have happened!
When I rushed out into the hallway in a hurry, a cleaner who had been dozing off with a duster in hand woke with a start.
With the sound of them coughing and swallowing back dry coughs behind me, I went to the entrance, but the errand boy was already gone, and only Julie remained with a strange look on her face.
“What’s going on?”
“Ah, well. You know the medicine we’ve been buying for your wound, Lady Asha?”
“Yeah.”
“We happened to learn the market price, and it turns out the price we’ve been paying all this time was far too cheap.”
Julie sighed as if it were giving her a headache.
“So we became suspicious that there might be some sort of intention behind it and started purchasing from somewhere else……”
“And?”
“The place we had been buying from before sent an errand boy.”
“What did they say?”
“They asked if we couldn’t buy from them again, saying they’d lower the price even more.”
“Without saying why?”
“Yes. Isn’t it strange?”
“It is strange.”
I thought for a moment, then brought over a piece of parchment and began writing a brief letter.
[Your Grace,
Thanks to you, I am recovering well.
How should I pay you for the medicine?]
What if I was wrong?
Then I’d simply be embarrassed, that was all.
If there had been something wrong with the medicine, I would have been out of my mind by now, so it couldn’t be that.
If it was a goodwill of unknown origin directed toward me, then there were only so many people it could be.
Besides, the duke had seemed concerned, of all things, about the fact that I had been injured during the hunting festival.
Around afternoon, when the rain had eased a little, I had the letter delivered.
* * *
It was, as always, a dull afternoon.
The aide gazed at his superior with an ambiguous expression.
Amid the gloomy rain clouds, the setting sun was already casting darkness.
His superior sat there looking little different from how he had when he came to work early that morning.
Isitan Gladineer.
Befitting that concise name, without even a middle name.
He was a man so flawless as to seem static, and so unwilling to show what was inside that it felt uncanny.
However, over the past few years, through countless battles fought at his side, the aide had come to realize something, whether knowingly or not.
Though it was hidden beneath the title of duke, the truth was that the essence of the man was extremely wild and rebellious—closer to a subversive element.
It was impossible to sense in him the identity of an upper-class man who conformed to tradition or authority, much less that of a person holding the highest power that sustained such a group.
Nor did he seem to have any will to enjoy power.
He did not like humans.
The rumors circulating in the world were probably largely because people had unconsciously sensed that cynical, chilling murderous intent of his.
However, contrary to the inner nature the aide had detected in him, the course he had taken over the past few years was practically the complete opposite.
His endlessly restrained bearing, and his indifference that never bothered to go against the prevailing tide.
The way he always behaved with a courtesy so proper it bordered on old-fashioned.
From him, all one could sense was endless immersion and meticulous effort.
What on earth was he going this far for?
At times, he looked like a figure in a perfectly arranged puppet show.
The reason the aide had silently remained at such a duke’s side was none other than because the duke was the benefactor who had saved his life.
If not for him, he would have died on the battlefield three years ago without even leaving an intact corpse behind.
That was why it was all the more unpleasant.
Because the first person the duke, who found people bothersome as a matter of course, had ever shown interest in was, of all people, that woman.
Just look at him now.
The aide’s gaze lowered slightly, settling on his superior’s fingertips.
The duke had been holding on to the same reply for dozens of minutes now.
A man whose hand moved perfectly well over official documents without the slightest emotion had been brought to a halt by a single, short letter.
All of this was because that woman had found out.
From the moment the duke gave the order to “secretly” interfere with the cost of the medicine, the aide had not understood.
“Secretly”?
From whom was he supposed to carry it out in secret?
The emperor? The other dukes who kept him in check with meticulous moves beneath the surface?
Or the rising noble factions around his own age?
None of them.
That woman, whose only merit was a somewhat pretty face when she smiled so brightly.
The aide had been forced to dispatch his subordinates and move so that that insignificant baroness would not notice.
So what if they displeased that woman a little?
The aide was dissatisfied with the duke’s current state.
“I missed you.”
“Very, very much.”
“The whole time.”
Those words, impossible to believe had come from the duke’s mouth, had all been said in front of that woman as well.
The duke missed someone?
Did that even make sense?
No matter how much he had fallen for her at first sight…
He could not understand how, if it were anyone else perhaps, someone like the duke could have fallen for another person at first sight.
Yes, unless he had eaten something wrong…
At last, the duke barely managed to complete a single sentence.
[Baroness, may I come and explain?]
The aide stole a glance at the sentence, then clenched his teeth.
Objectively speaking, and judging with the utmost reason, that woman might indeed feel displeased that things had been carried out behind her back without her knowledge.
But was that truly something the duke needed to rush over and explain in a panic?
When they were the ones who had paid out, all at once, several times the original cost of the medicine, out of concern that the medicine passing down the baroness’s throat might not be made from the finest ingredients on the market?
The fact that he had not done the good deed openly, but had instead used a trick in secret, was not so much because he had failed to respect the baroness as because he had been far too mindful of her reaction.
Just then, the duke threw the reply he had written into the brazier.
And so, written on the new sheet he unfolded was a different, brief sentence.
[You don’t need to worry about the cost of the medicine.]
He ought to have been delighted, since there was no longer any need to go and make excuses in such a pathetic manner, but
the aide tilted his head at an inexplicable sense of unease.
Surely the duke could not be a coward who could not even properly explain himself in front of the woman he liked.