Chapter 36

Basically, the children there were fairly kind. Sometimes they shouted suddenly or spoke roughly, but that was only because they had never been taught better, not because there was malice in it.

‘I should dress her up nicely and sell her off to some wealthy family.’

As the years passed and her body grew, Yvonne came to understand the meaning of those words.

That for adults, marrying a daughter off into a wealthy household was the easiest way to make money.

But whether it was a gambling den, a brothel, or a marriage, being sold off was not all that different, so she still lived in hiding to avoid the men sent by the Earl.

Time passed quickly, and Yvonne spent three years there. The boss turned nineteen, and several of the other children also grew old enough to live independently, yet none of them left. Yvonne, now eleven, was no longer pushed into housework as she got older, but sent outside to work, and she handed over the money she earned to the boss without complaint.

The rule there was that to maintain communal living, everyone had to share the money they made.

Sometimes there were children who argued with the boss, saying it was unfair, but all in all, it was a fairly peaceful life.

Then one day, strangers began coming to the building where they lived. Whenever adult men with a dangerous air visited, the boss would take them outside and speak with them for a long while. And when those suspicious men left, several of the children would be gone.

When everyone asked where they had gone and why, the boss replied indifferently.

“I sent them to be adopted by noble families.”

“Really? Boss, send me too!”

“If you listen well to me, I’ll send you to a noble house so you can live grandly.”

The boss strutted before the whining children who said they were jealous, but it was also what made Yvonne begin to suspect the boss and his group.

Because nobles who despised even their own blood as illegitimate would never take in street orphans and raise them as their own children.

Yvonne had grown up in a neighborhood where women pregnant after being toyed with by nobles drifted in. She had overheard many things in the noble houses she had gone to with her mother, and as she grew older, she naturally came to understand the nauseating behavior of nobles as well.

Around the time she began to suspect the boss naturally like that, Yvonne slowly started keeping her distance from him and the group that followed him.

About a month later, the boss suddenly disappeared. At the same time, men she had never seen in her life stormed into the building.

The startled children ran in every direction, and chaos broke out. But the men paid no mind to the building’s complicated structure and grabbed the children by the napes of their necks as though driving rats, dragging them away.

“They said there’s a labor shortage at the Ruby mine, so this works out well.”

It was fortunate that she had always been ready to leave at any time. In the confusion, Yvonne barely managed to escape, taking only the brother and sister she had been looking after.

Fortunately, they were not caught, but the problem was how bleak their means of survival had become. Once again, they found an abandoned house and made it into a new shelter. Enduring on the little money they had left, she found whatever odd jobs she could and earned money however she could.

Then, by luck, she got kitchen work at a tavern between Valley Lane and Operen.

She lied that she was fourteen though she was only eleven. Perhaps because she was taller than others her age, the owner said nothing.

She worked over twelve hours without a day off, but she was happy because she could earn money honestly.

Still, as time passed, people’s gazes became uncomfortable. Whenever she went out to the hall, the subtle looks of adults pleasantly drunk on alcohol would follow her. Compliments like saying she was pretty as a doll or would become a beauty when she grew up felt less pleasing than unsettling.

That was because the older girls she had lived with, those three or four years older than her, had always told her to beware of molesters.

A few days later, Yvonne chopped off her hair, which had reached her waist, up to just below her ears. She darkened her skin by smudging black charcoal on her face, blackened her eye-catching platinum hair with ash, and hid it under a beret.

Once she looked exactly like a boy, the sort of attention she used to get noticeably decreased.

It happened one day. Yvonne had gone out on an errand for the owner’s wife when she sensed someone following her and fled without thinking. It was a man who had been looking at her strangely for months.

“Hey, you.”

The instant she heard the rough voice, a sharp pain spread through the back of her head.

It happened in the blink of an eye. The man, after striking Yvonne on the head, dragged her into a dark alley and threw her down right there. The moment the hand of the man, reeking strongly of alcohol, touched her face, the horrified Yvonne resisted with all her strength.

“Aah! Let go of me!”

The hand of the heavily drunk man yanked roughly at the buttons of her top. With the other hand, he frantically fumbled open the waistband of his pants, and his eyes gleamed strangely.

“F*ck, you’re damned young, but you still get my mouth watering. Did you think I’d give up on you just because you cut your hair?”

A chilling wave of gooseflesh broke out all over her body. He was a pedophile. Even if she had not learned much living in the back alleys, she had still seen and heard a great deal. She should have just kicked a bastard like this in the groin, the same way she had often ended up brawling with boys.

But her body, which had only ever worried about getting hit before, did not obey her thoughts when faced with the danger of r*pe.

As terror swept over her frozen mind and her whole body stiffened rigid, the man sneered disgustingly.

I have to run.

Alarm rang through her head. Just as she managed to move her stiff hand and felt around the ground, lifting a stone she found.

Suddenly, bang! A gunshot rang out.

“Aaagh!”

The man, who had raised his upper body and was hastily undoing his pants, screamed. Yvonne, wincing at the shrill scream, soon saw his shoulder covered in blood and opened her eyes wide.

Yvonne tore herself away from him, howling like a dying animal, and pressed her back against the wall. Her heart pounded so hard it felt as though it would drop out.

It was a place where gunshots rang out every other day. It was nothing strange for some unlucky passerby to get shot and collapse. It was even common to see adults fighting in so-called turf wars until blood poured out.

So there was no reason to be newly shocked by a gunshot and a lot of blood. But Yvonne’s heart was still pounding fiercely as she looked toward the end of the alley.

The one who had fired the gun to save her was not an adult, but a boy. White smoke rose from the revolver in the hand of the boy standing with the bright sunlight behind him.

That was the moment Yvonne first met Carlisle.

* * *

“You piece of trash.”

The boy lowered the gun he had been holding skillfully and spat the curse at the man, who was thrashing and bleeding profusely. Then he glanced at Yvonne pressed to the wall and held out a white handkerchief he took from his coat.

“Are you okay?”

“Uh…. Uh….”

Still dazed, Yvonne suddenly came to her senses and looked at the handkerchief he offered. It was pure white and soft, without a single speck on it.

“I think you should wipe that off.”

When she only stared at the handkerchief, the boy said it while gesturing with his eyes toward the back of Yvonne’s hand. She nodded and quickly wiped the blood off her hand first. Even while straightening her disordered clothes, Yvonne could not hide her bewilderment.

It was the first time a stranger had ever helped her. That was something that had never happened once in Yvonne’s life.

Yvonne looked at the boy who had suddenly appeared. For a moment, seeing only his tall height and frame, she had thought he was an adult. But looking more closely, he was only a boy, just a few years older than she was.

It was also the first time she had seen a boy younger than the boss handle a gun so skillfully.

Yvonne suddenly remembered the time the boss had shot a shop owner with a gun. In that instant, she snapped fully alert.

“Come here. We have to run before the constables come.”

“What? There’s no need for that. H-hey, wait!”

The boy had tried to say something, but Yvonne grabbed his hand first and ran. Having been forced by the boss’s orders to keep watch before, she was confident in her running, if nothing else.

By the time they had run for quite a while and she looked back, the boy was bracing a hand against the wall and panting for breath.

The face that had been coldly calm even after shooting a grown man was now flushed red from running. After catching his breath for a while, the boy suddenly looked around at where they were and shouted,

“Are you…crazy?”

Why is he doing that.

Yvonne looked at the boy, puzzled, as he suddenly got angry. She had just saved him from possibly being caught by the constables, and yet his eyes seemed truly angry. Suddenly realizing she had not thanked him, Yvonne opened her mouth.

“Oh right, thank you for helping me back there.”

Perhaps he had not expected to be thanked, because the boy hesitated, then softened his voice as though sorry for having raised it.

“It’s enough that you’re not hurt. That area back there is dangerous, so it’s best not to go there if you can help it. Men like that go after weak women and children whenever they see them. If you absolutely have to go, bring an adult with you.”

“Uh. Okay.”

The boy, who was lecturing her as though he were an adult even though he was a child himself, looked around again.

“Anyway, where is this? How could you drag me all the way here without asking? I’ve gotten lost.”

“If it’s the way, I know it well. If you want to go back to where we were, I can take you.”

“Go back there? Didn’t you hear what I said? What are you going to do if you go to a place like that and run into another dangerous person? I guess you’re still too young to know, but what that man was trying to do to you back there….”

The boy, speaking hurriedly, shook his head as if he could not bring himself to explain any further.

“No. Anyway, it’s dangerous, so go home right now.”

“But I live there. If you walk five minutes from the tavern at the entrance to Operen, that’s where I live.”

“You live there?”

At those words, the boy looked at Yvonne as if he had been shocked.