65.
Margaret clicked her tongue when she saw my face growing grim in real time.
Then, as if trying to change the mood, she shifted the subject.
“Come to think of it, how are the antidote ingredients coming along? Have you managed to obtain any?”
“I’ve gotten almost everything I could buy with the money I had on hand.”
“Oh?”
“……Though they’re only common ingredients that can be found on the market.”
The problem was the handful of rare ingredients that couldn’t be obtained even with a fortune.
Having no other choice, I had even gone to an information broker, but there had been no particular gain.
I didn’t like the fact that the only person I could rely on was an old man whose thoughts I couldn’t fathom.
But for the time being, there seemed to be no other way.
“From the rumors I heard, I thought you would have been busy, but it seems you still ran around everywhere in the meantime.”
“Rumors? What rumors?”
“Our third young master caused quite an interesting commotion at the party.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“If it has nothing to do with you, then I have nothing more to say.”
“…….”
She seemed to have figured it all out anyway, but it was an uncomfortable topic, so I skipped over it.
“So now that I’ve let you hear what I wanted to talk about, just as you wished, I believe there’s still something I’m due to receive.”
“…….”
“If my memory isn’t wrong, that includes the answer I failed to hear last time because of an unwelcome guest.”
“Goodness…… Aren’t you expecting too much for a single session of love advice?”
Though she said that, Margaret finally set her knitting down on her lap.
“Then may I assume you’re ready to answer my two questions?”
This time, Margaret nodded without another word.
“‘The Heart of Merinis.’ It hasn’t appeared on the market even once in the last twenty years. What must I do to obtain it?”
“If you go to the underground black market, you may perhaps be able to find it. Even if you are fortunate enough to discover it, you would then have to be fortunate enough to win it at auction for a price an ordinary person couldn’t afford even after working their entire life.”
“…….”
“Of course, if that’s impossible, then perhaps seeking out an antique collector would be one way.”
I asked at once.
“What is the name of the collector currently known to possess the ‘Heart of Merinis’?”
“Is that your second question?”
“……Yes, let’s make it the second.”
Resolving that next time I would ask a clear question from the start, I nodded.
“The previous viscount of the Paraton family. That is the ‘Heart of Merinis’ that was won at a public auction twenty years ago.”
“Previous?”
“Yes, he died ten years ago.”
“Then after that, the whereabouts of the Heart of Merinis…….”
“Are unknown.”
“But there must be a presumed location.”
At my burning gaze, Margaret slightly raised the corners of her mouth, as if telling me not to worry.
“……Even when astronomical sums were offered, that man never sold it anywhere for many long years. How do you intend to persuade him, Baron?”
Even money won’t work?
That was fine.
I didn’t have any money to speak of anyway.
“Answer me first.”
“It is presumed that the last heir of Paraton inherited the ‘Heart of Merinis.’ However, as it happened, ten years ago, that very year…….”
“You’re not about to tell me he died too, are you?”
“He did not die. He merely disappeared ten years ago. And that was how the whereabouts of the ‘Heart of Merinis’ vanished.”
“…….”
“However, no one knew that the heir had a beloved lover. Or perhaps she had simply been forgotten.”
“…….”
“And…… not long after the war broke out, they say a certain man appeared in that woman’s hometown and began acting as her guardian.”
“……And yet no one in his hometown has realized that man’s identity all this time?”
“Because there was very definite proof that he was someone else. What do you think? Has the secret I told you served as a satisfactory answer for you, Baron?”
I sank into the sofa and groaned softly.
“If even money is impossible…….”
By what means could I obtain what I wanted from the other party?
If I could find out what that person truly wanted.
Then perhaps I might be able to find a clue.
After all, everyone had a weakness.
“But what happened to the woman afterward? Did she live happily?”
Margaret looked at me for a moment, then smiled.
“Why are you smiling?”
“I was thinking that you truly are honest, Baron.”
“…….”
“Of all the many things you could wonder about regarding a woman whose face you don’t even know, you’re curious about whether she was happy.”
Having nothing to say, I changed the subject more smoothly than before.
“At this rate, I don’t know when on earth I’ll be able to obtain the antidote.”
“Well, I think it would be enough for you to know that no one asked you to obtain the antidote, Baron.”
I let out a weary sigh.
“But these ingredients…… How in the world were they gathered so quickly?”
No matter how powerful a duke’s family was, it couldn’t have been easy.
I saw Margaret pause as she was about to pick up her knitting again.
I quietly stared at her.
“……Rohwinas. You said you weren’t the one who made the antidote, didn’t you?”
“…….”
“I remember very clearly the morning the rumor spread far and wide. The news that he had taken the antidote spread almost that same day.”
“…….”
“In truth, when I met him only a few days later, he had become a completely different person, so it couldn’t have been an entirely false rumor.”
How had he been able to take the antidote so quickly?
Had someone prepared it in advance?
If so…….
Who?
I stared straight at Margaret.
“If you weren’t the one who made it.”
“…….”
“Then who on earth did?”
Only after a long silence did Margaret answer.
“It was not our family.”
Not the Kanesion family?
“Then?”
“I cannot tell you.”
“…….”
There had been something that had bothered me all along.
Rare ingredients that even money and power had limits in obtaining.
An antidote presented the moment the incident was exposed, as though it had been prepared in advance.
I sensed it instinctively.
This was the second clue.
And perhaps there was someone who would know more certainly than anyone else about it.
‘The person who drank the antidote.’
* * *
The tent flap fluttered.
Margaret, who had already received her second visitor just today,
greeted him without even showing surprise.
“Young Master.”
“…….”
“I’ve been seeing you often lately.”
“…….”
“Did you hear?”
If the baron had not happened to be lost in thought and distracted, Rohwinas would surely have been discovered long ago.
Yet, as if by fate, he had not been caught and had succeeded in overhearing everything.
And now he was here.
Rohwinas quietly came over and sat across from Margaret.
A strange atmosphere had wrapped itself around him.
Margaret lamented, briefly, that the family’s third young master, whom she had watched for so long, had come to wear such an expression before she knew it.
“I’m going to ask you questions now.”
Pretending not to hear, Margaret bent at the waist, took several medicine bottles from the drawer, and pushed them onto the table.
“This is this month’s supply of sleeping pills.”
“…….”
“Wasn’t this what you came all the way here in person for?”
Rohwinas looked at the medicine bottles on the table and recalled the insomnia that had visited him every night without fail for the past four years.
He was used to it now.
Every month, every year, he had taken sleeping pills with their potency raised little by little.
“I told you last time as well. You don’t need to come all the way here yourself. You could have an adjutant fetch them for you……”
“Margaret.”
“If not, young master, was there another reason you came to find me in person?”
“You talk too much, Margaret.”
Almost no one knew of Rohwinas’s insomnia.
It was partly because he had hidden it perfectly, but also because even he himself had not fully grasped the state he was in.
His cheeks, which had seemed unusually gaunt over the past few years; his sharpened gaze; his impatient temperament……
Even though all of it had long been pointing to a single thing.
Rohwinas repeated himself once more in a dry voice.
“I’m going to ask you questions now.”
“…….”
“If you can’t say, all you need to say is that you can’t. Understood?”
Margaret nodded.
“Understood.”
“Did you enter into an oath with the Baron?”
“I cannot say.”
“Did the Baron tell you something about the love potion?”
“I cannot say.”
“Is it true that someone drank the potion this time as well?”
“I cannot say.”
“Is the Baron…… looking for an antidote?”
“I cannot say.”
“He was definitely looking for one.”
“…….”
“Then does that mean the Baron was not the one who made them drink the potion?”
Margaret quietly closed the mouth that had been about to answer, “I cannot say,” once again.
Perhaps, to this question.
“…….”
She could answer.
And so Margaret said,
“In my judgment, yes.”
Rohwinas stiffened at that moment.
It was like watching an iceberg, unable to withstand that one small crack, finally crumble apart.
Yes.
Inevitably, or perhaps at long last.
“But there was a witness.”
“Young master. Just how much do you trust that witness?”
“…….”
“Have you checked again?”
The witness after they escaped the grasp of his father, the Duke.
“…….”
Margaret was a retainer of House Kanesion.
In other words, the moment the interests of the Duke and his bloodline diverged,
she had to choose whom she would serve as her master.
‘Well, something like a truth you’d have been happier never knowing, perhaps?’
But if he was not happy.
Margaret became curious what choice the young Kanesion before her would make.
Though she still did not know what could change with a mere possibility like that.
‘There’s nothing to choose. What meaning is there in happiness that isn’t wholly mine? I’d rather know and be miserable.’
Perhaps.
The Baron’s words that day might have been right.