Chapter 34

A boy who had lived in a world different from hers.

When he had said that with such a serious face, Yvonne had felt her heart, which had not known a single day of peace in the three years since she had been shoved into a harsh world, beat heavily.

It was relief. That boy, who gave her the feeling of relief second only to the mother who had left her, had even hooked pinkies with her in a promise that did not suit his exacting nature. That if they met again as adults, he would take her as his bride.

It was a promise fifteen-year-old Carlisle had made to eleven-year-old Yvonne.

She only learned seven years later that the boy’s full name was Carlisle Polshared.

The moment Yvonne saw Duke Polshared, whom the dreadful Earl had thr*st at her as a marriage partner, she recognized at a glance that he was that very boy she had met in childhood.

Then why is it that you do not remember me.

I came all this way with the hope that someday I would meet you again.

‘Rene, look. If you place the bird here, then this whole background becomes a beautiful sky.’

When she closed her eyes, even within memories that had now grown faint, she could see a woman smiling gently.

Before her name became Yvonne, the beloved mother who had given her the name Rene. Rachel.

The world of beautiful colors that spread across the canvas on the worn easel with her was Yvonne’s very first memory.

The little window that shook as if it would break even at the vibration of a carriage passing far away.

The thin walls and hallway floorboards, so slight that you could tell even when a neighbor had returned.

The old door made of wooden planks, whose rusty latch creaked at night and yet protected mother and daughter.

The rich smell of charcoal and the scent of paint.

The memories left in her five senses moved vividly, as though each were returning to its proper place in a painting, drawing up the memories of those days.

* * *

Yvonne was born in Operen, the most run-down district in all of Aerondo.

Operen was the place where all the lowest and filthiest kinds of people gathered. Beggars, swindlers, criminals, pr*stitutes, and people the other districts of Aerondo would not even acknowledge. Into such a district, at some point, women began to drift in after being deceived by men’s sweet words, made pregnant in exchange for giving over their bodies, and then cast aside.

Those who had become filthy rich on the gold and wealth of the New Continent spent money like water and indulged in pleasure, seeking out women as one of those pleasures, and naturally, discarded women and illegitimate children overflowed. At one point, there was even a joke in Aerondo that it was harder to find a nobleman without an illegitimate child than one with one.

Rachel, the mother who gave Yvonne life, had also been one of the women who had innocently fallen for a man’s false affection.

Though she was a commoner, Yvonne’s mother had a talent for art and was praised as a painter whose works moved people deeply, such an outstanding talent that she was even offered the chance to study abroad in another country. Her path ahead had seemed bright enough that several nobles supported her.

But unfortunately, the man she met at a banquet she had been invited to was Earl Bernard Sellus, who already had a fiancée and yet seduced her shamelessly, and in exchange for three months of a sweet dream, she was abandoned while carrying his child.

Denise, his fiancée at the time and now the Countess, did everything in her power to cut off all the support Rachel had been receiving. Through her schemes, Rachel was eventually buried in the art world under the misunderstanding that she had seduced a married man for patronage.

In an instant, the promising painter was branded with the disgraceful name of a vulgar pr*stitute, and there was no one willing to take her in out of pity for her circumstances. Even so, Rachel did not give up the child, and fled Denise, who tried to kill the baby in her womb, hiding herself away in Operen.

Though it was a place marked as one where only those living the most miserable lives in Aerondo gathered, to Rachel it was a cozy home with her dear little daughter. To Yvonne as well, who was born there, Operen, where she had lived with her mother, was her hometown and a place filled only with happy memories.

Rachel, who had given her the name Rene, far from hating her young daughter, who was all but the reason she had to give up her dream, loved her dearly.

Those were warm days when she sat on her mother’s lap, eyes shining as she watched a world of many colors slowly come to completion across the canvas. Her mother, who earned money by helping juniors with their major works or painting illustrations for postcards, always smelled of charcoal and paint.

“Rene. Watch carefully. If you hold the brush upright here and dab it lightly with water. Ta-da, it becomes a castle.”

“Wow. It’s a princess’s castle!”

They were so poor that they barely eased their hunger with hard bread and thin soup, but Yvonne was not troubled at all. She was happy every single day, receiving all the tender love of her caring mother.

But that joyful and happy time, when they laughed while watching new buds sprout on dry winter branches and slowly turn into thick green leaves, lasted only eight years.

Unable to leave her little daughter behind and even having the price of her work bargained down, Rachel pushed herself day and night painting to excess, and in the end she fell ill with a terrible sickness. She had given birth alone in the dead of winter while facing the cold wind, failed to properly nourish herself, and overworked herself, so lasting even eight years was almost remarkable.

Even in that district, where women in circumstances similar to Rachel’s sold their bodies to raise their children, her mother sustained their lives to the very end with money earned from selling paintings. What she gained at the end of that desperate life was illness, and she passed away without even having the chance to properly use medicine.

‘Rene, go find your father.’

Perhaps she had sensed something, though she had never once spoken of her biological father before, and so on the night before she left, Rachel handed her a letter with the address of the house where the man called her father lived.

But even the next day, Yvonne did not move an inch from her mother’s side. She did not want to go to a father whose face she had never seen even once.

She simply cried there, not even knowing how time passed, and endured alone for several days.

She was still too young to properly understand what death even was. One morning, after spending several days holding onto her unmoving mother like that.

The creaking door at last collapsed under someone’s kick. The moment the startled Yvonne hid under the bed, unfamiliar men strode into the house.

“Ugh. What is this awful smell.”

“Judging by the smell of the corpse decaying, it appears she has been dead for quite some time.”

The two large men who had appeared out of nowhere had rough faces like the men who sometimes shouted and fought outside the window. Then behind them, a dressed-up man carrying a cane entered at a leisurely pace. The jewels on the many rings crowded onto the fingers gripping the cane’s handle sparkled brightly enough to light the inside of the room.

Twisting his mustache, he frowned as he looked over the cramped interior where even three grown men could barely fit.

“She hid herself well enough all this time, and in the end she died anyway.”

The man kicked aside the old household things at will and spat out curses. He hurled cruel *buse at Rachel, saying that because she had secretly given birth to and raised the child she had been told to get rid of, this was the trouble he had to go through.

Only then did Yvonne realize that this man was the father her mother had spoken of.

“Isn’t this better, actually. If she were alive, she’d just make another scene like last time, saying we absolutely couldn’t take the child.”

“That’s true. Just thinking about how she made a fuss, saying not to touch her brat when she was the one who gave birth without permission, still makes my blood boil.”

Even though she heard the conversation between the man called her father and the other man, the young Yvonne could not fully understand their words. She only stared at the fallen door that had protected her and her mother for so long.

“Get rid of it at once.”

The sight of the two men approaching the bed jolted her back to her senses. Yvonne, who had been crouching on the floor by the bed, sprang out at once and threw herself over her mother lying on the bed.

“No! She’s my mother.”

“What the hell is this!”

At the sudden sight of something like a bundle of cotton popping out from the floor, the men flinched and stepped back. Then, realizing it was a little child, they called for the Earl.

“M-my Lord, Earl.”

The Earl, who had been smoking a cigar in one corner of the room, only then noticed Yvonne and furrowed his brow. Even at her young age, Yvonne could tell that the emotion in his eyes was a negative one.

An unpleasant gaze. It was contempt.

Because it was similar to the way the women in the beautiful mansion she sometimes followed her mother to had looked at her.

‘This child is the Earl’s child, then.’

Whenever they all asked that and looked at her as though she were something profane, Yvonne would hide behind her mother’s skirt.

But while her mother worked, she had to wait quietly by herself. Each time, the women would chatter away regardless of the child’s presence. They would say it was all because she had been born that the man called the Earl, her father, had cast her mother aside.

Earl.

Through the mansion she entered with her mother, she knew what nobles were. But the nobles there felt more frightening to her than the dangerous and filthy people of Operen.

And now the man called her father wore the same eyes as those women, beautiful as if they had stepped straight out of a fairy tale.