Chapter 15

In the end, Hazel was unable to bend her father’s will, as a person of Holdland, to obey the command of His Majesty the King. The column she had written was shoved away into a corner of a drawer.

As Hazel looked around, Agatha’s voice reached her.

“Your room is on the east side of this floor, Miss. I would ask that you use the east staircase whenever possible, and refrain from using the central staircase.”

“May I ask the reason?”

Madam Agatha showed a slight sign of hesitation. Rather than avoid the awkward subject, Hazel quietly waited.

As though she could not help it, Agatha opened her mouth.

“From the west side of this floor to the center is the private space of the Marquis and Madam. Their private chambers are there, as well as the Marquis’s study.”

“I see.”

Now she understood why Madam Agatha had hesitated to explain. The Marchioness, who had loved her dead daughter dearly, must have declared that she did not wish to see the sight of Hazel.

The Madam, who had been leading Hazel toward the entrance hall, came to a stop. Her gaze was directed outside the drawing-room window.

“It seems he is arriving. The Marquis does not ride in automobiles. When you go out with the Marquis as well, Miss, you will be riding in a carriage, so it would be best for you to know in advance.”

As if proving her words, there came the clatter of hoofbeats.

Behind the roadside trees flaunting their green leaves, a carriage drawn by two horses approached along the winding road. It seemed to Hazel that she could even hear the crack of the coachman’s whip from the front of the carriage as it cut the air.

Agatha’s words made Hazel halt.

“Marquis, this is Miss Hazel.”

“Yes.”

The old Marquis’s voice was low and steady. Unable to lift her eyes, Hazel bent her knees in greeting.

“I am Hazel Ben…… Fitzroy, Marquis.”

“Glad to meet you.”

She slowly raised her head.

The Charles Fitzroy Hazel had imagined was an old man with fully white hair. Considering his age, her imagination had not been entirely wrong.

But the Marquis Fitzroy she actually faced only looked somewhat older than her father. His appearance, more like that of a middle-aged businessman, suited his weighty voice well.

After gazing quietly at his adopted daughter, the old gentleman supported himself on his cane and headed for the entrance first.

“Call me Father. It will look better to others.”

Leaving behind only those words.

* * *

Someone abruptly spoke up.

“I hear public opinion toward the royal family keeps getting worse.”

“And what is the problem this time? Did the Prince cause another new incident? How long has it even been since the ‘glass slipper’ affair?”

‘Glass Slipper’ was the recent nickname Bukata society had given Hazel Fitzroy. Looking down below, Kyle raised the champagne in his hand and wet his lips.

The conversation went on.

“Killing ‘Glass Slipper’s’ brother was only the tip of the iceberg. Yesterday, apparently he was caught making advances on a friend of Princess Leslie.”

“My goodness, but the Princess is only fifteen? Whose daughter was it? Her parents must have nearly fainted.”

“It seems the Princess has some friends from rather unremarkable families around her. Before the matter could grow, they say he more or less bought off the parents with money. How could that be the only incident buried that way. ‘Glass Slipper’ was the unusual case.”

A faint smile appeared at the corner of Kyle’s mouth and vanished without a trace in an instant.

‘The slander against the royal family is getting more and more severe. Should I be grateful they consider me one of their side?’

A newly rich man, a businessman worth watching, one who occupied a large share of the business pages of the newspaper practically every other day, and yet almost no favor was ever directed toward him.

The cause lay in Kyle’s ambiguous position. His status was too base for him to belong to the noble faction, yet he was too much the target of Eliya Strauss’s hostility to be considered one with the bourgeoisie.

If the nobles were to show him favor, Peter Strauss’s face would flicker before them, mocking that if nobility had another word, was it beggar? And if the bourgeoisie were to reach out first, Eliya Strauss would glare at them with eyes ablaze.

Living among such people, he thought, he had survived tiresomely well. Beside him, as though he heard nothing at all and only looked down through the railing, a middle-aged lady approached, dragging her skirt behind her.

“It has been a long time, Mr. Strauss.”

“Madame Sinclair.”

The salon of the Marchioness Sinclair was a place of fusion. Reflecting her will, objects from the imperial era coexisted in this salon with the latest works of a furniture designer who had turned thirty this year. Their one and only common point was that every one of them was expensive and difficult to obtain.

Like the ornaments from various periods and nations, the Marchioness Sinclair opened her salon impartially to nobles, bourgeois, and new money alike. In one corner, there was even a rumor that she regarded Eliya Strauss as a rival.

The Marchioness Sinclair curved her lined eyes into a smile.

“Am I mistaken, or is the attendance at the salon especially high today? Usually only about seventy percent of the invitations I send are accepted. To gather guests with such effort and not even have enough seats for them—what an unqualified hostess I am.”

“You say too much. If it were your salon, Madame, even if everyone had to run for three whole hours, they would all come sprinting at full speed.”

“Thank you.”

The Marchioness Sinclair told him to enjoy himself and soon moved away to greet the other guests. It was for the sake of those who had come after dining elsewhere and were now visiting for light conversation.

Into Kyle’s sight as he looked down at the first floor came the person he had been waiting for.

The woman appeared holding the arm of an old gentleman. The moment he saw them, his brows drew together at the sense of incongruity.

“……?”

It took Kyle less than a minute to realize the cause of the oddness. The required chaperone for an unmarried young lady entering a social club was an elderly man—indeed, none other than Marquis Fitzroy himself personally acting as escort.

He kept watching the strange chaperone and the novice lady.

Hazel removed the hat she had worn and handed it to a servant, then took off her gloves with careful movements. The Marquis waited with a blunt face until his adopted daughter had put the gloves into her bag.

Only after that whole process was finished did the Marquis remain in place with his cane, as though waiting for someone. Because the two of them were standing right in front of the entrance, the guests, lost in conversation, seemed not to have noticed them yet.

The hesitant servant hurried off with quick steps to inform the hostess of the salon of her guest.

Soon after, the Marchioness Sinclair came hurrying from the dining-room direction, her trailing dress fluttering. She seemed ready to lead them straight into the middle of the drawing room at once, but the Marquis adjusted his hat and indicated that he would now return.

Hazel looked as though she had already expected her adoptive father’s cold attitude. Even as she took the Marchioness Sinclair’s arm and walked across between chairs filled with the strong atmosphere of the imperial era, she did not look back even once. The same was true of the Marquis, who had long since disappeared beyond the entrance.

“……”

After watching that entire scene.

Kyle moved the foot that had seemed rooted in place.

* * *

Her ankles, perched atop shoes at least a handspan high, hurt. Hazel erased the pain with a picture-perfect smile.

“Do not lower your head carelessly. Your worth is determined by you yourself.”

Recalling the Marquis’s words, she lifted her head.

“The etiquette of the upper class is the privilege of this world. Remember that you too are one of us.”

For an entire month, she had practiced wearing four kinds of undergarments and standing atop such shoes without wobbling.

Alice’s claim that these days one could get by with one proper undergarment and a dress over it was something that applied outside the Marquis’s mansion. The strict Marquis wanted his adopted daughter to display noble qualities in every respect.

Hazel obeyed exactly as the Marquis wished without complaint. Since the Marquis did not know what she had once been like, he would not know that the vitality and humorous smile she had originally possessed had vanished from his adopted daughter.

It did not matter. She had never thought she had a choice in the first place. Even watching the Marquis vanish like the wind after delivering her to Madame Sinclair, Hazel did not feel the slightest hurt.

Madame Sinclair patted her arm. Glancing toward the entrance as though the Marquis, who had left his daughter alone and disappeared, was truly disagreeable.

“It is lovely to meet you. I had been curious, and now I see your face at last.”

“It is an honor to be invited. Please take care of me.”

“The pleasure is mine.”

With keen eyes, Madame Sinclair looked over the woman who had stirred up Bukata society this summer.

She was a little taller than average, with slender arms and legs. The gray eyes set in her narrow face decided the impression of purity. In contrast to that, the natural curves of her figure, too natural to have been shaped by undergarments alone, caught the Madame’s eye.