Chapter 44 – How to Treat a Duke

Robert looked at Sasha as she climbed into the carriage with swollen, puffy eyes. The Vinoche family, who had come out early in the morning to see her off, waved their hands at her with deep feeling. In order not to miss the train, the carriage soon set off for the station, and once the surroundings grew quiet again, only the occasional rattling noise sounded loudly. In the awkward silence, Robert was the first to speak.

“What happened to your eyes?”

“What do you mean?”

Sasha feigned innocence, but it did not work.

“They’re swollen. Can you even see properly with eyes like that?”

At Robert’s words, Sasha touched around her eyes and felt eyelids as thick and puffed up as a winter quilt. Come to think of it, perhaps her field of vision really had narrowed a little.

“I’ve never been apart from my family for this long since I was little. Now that I’m actually leaving them, I got scared and cried a little last night.”

Should he believe her, or not. Robert considered it briefly. Sasha was doing her utmost to avoid his eyes with a face that plainly hoped he would let it pass. Robert looked at her, then slowly turned his head toward the window. The carriage was still rolling along Manolie’s narrow, uneven roads.

When they arrived at the train station and Sasha received the ticket, she asked in surprise,

“Am I going in first class too?”

At that, Robert wondered what kind of man Sasha took him for.

“What, did you think I’d put only you in third class by yourself?”

Startled, Sasha shook her head. To Robert, Sasha looked like someone who had never once even thought about what sort of seat she herself would be riding in, whether third class or first. Like someone who had delayed thinking about the day of leaving Manolie for as long as possible.

That might not be entirely wrong. Perhaps this woman was sitting here feeling as though she were being dragged off to Laurent. Robert’s stride quickened. Sasha hurried after him in little steps to match his pace.

Not long after, the train that would take them as far as Illemang stopped at the platform. For the first time in her life, Sasha had the curious experience of boarding not third class, but first class. The inside was much the same in structure as what she had once glimpsed long ago on the train to Illemang when she was running an errand for the Marquise.

“You shouldn’t lean your body so far out the window like that.”

Robert warned Sasha, who had been leaning out of the train window up to her waist while looking around the station. The wind blowing in from outside made her sky-blue ribbon and orange hair flutter before his eyes.

“Why not? In newspaper illustrations, they’re always leaning out like this.”

Holding onto the window frame, Sasha turned back with a puzzled expression. Without saying much, Robert stretched out his arm and pulled her body away from the window. The train seemed to be about to depart and had begun moving slowly.

“I only didn’t know. If this is improper behavior, then I won’t do it.”

The woman, shrinking her shoulders, stepped back uneasily away from his hand. Robert lightly clenched his empty hand once, then lowered it.

Once the train departed, Sasha, perhaps relaxing, began admiring the scenery outside and asking all sorts of questions out of pure curiosity, as though she had forgotten that not long ago she had confessed to him and been rejected. Over that image came the memory of her voice trembling faintly.

‘That I like you.’

It seemed Sasha had decided to forget the memory of that day. To erase the failed confession. As though it had never happened from the beginning. A correct decision. Robert almost felt he ought to applaud and praise her for it. He had no particular intention of objecting. So why did it irritate him so much.

“Sasha.”

Robert cut off the woman who had been asking questions without pause like a skylark. Her words halted, and the woman, lips half parted, quietly looked up at him. In her once-innocent green eyes a faint ripple stirred. Like a mark that the memory of that day had carved into her, impossible to erase. Only after confirming that did Robert feel a slight sense of satisfaction.

“That’s enough, go back to your seat. You shouldn’t go wandering around carelessly on a moving train and end up falling.”

It was a gentle voice. Gentle enough that one might forget he was issuing a firm order. Sasha hesitated, then soon agreed with what he said. Robert opened the second door in the corridor. Sasha waddled along carrying her travel bag. Since the train had already departed, it was hard for her to keep her balance from time to time.

The first-class compartment was smaller than the sleeper cars sometimes found on luxury trains. It did not need actual beds, since it took less than a full night to travel from Manolie to Illemang. Instead, there were large cushioned seats set facing each other, big enough that one could lie down sideways on them.

The window, made of two panes joined together, was wide, and thanks to that Sasha could stick herself right to it and look at the passing scenery as much as she wished. Beneath the window hung a simple table like a shelf, and near the entrance there was also a place to set luggage. If converted into a regular passenger compartment, it looked large enough to seat six people comfortably, perhaps even eight.

“One cup of coffee, the morning paper. And?”

When the attendant knocked and asked whether they needed anything, Robert ordered coffee and a newspaper. Then he turned toward Sasha as if asking what she would have.

“I’m all right. I don’t need anything yet.”

Still adjusting to the unfamiliar situation, Sasha shook her head. Her throat was a little dry from being tense since morning, but ordering something for herself to drink in a place that was not a cafe felt strange.

“Lemonade.”

Robert finished the order for her on his own. The attendant looked back and forth between the gentleman in a fine summer suit and the young lady in a clean white blouse. He seemed curious what their relationship might be.

“Is there some problem?”

It was because the two companions gave off an odd sense of incongruity. Too awkward to be lovers, too tense to be relatives.

“No. I will bring your order shortly.”

The attendant quickly erased his curiosity, smiled politely, and withdrew. In order to carry out smoothly the requests of the only passengers who had reserved first class on the short route to Illemang.

* * *

The train to Illemang rattled along the tracks. It stopped at several stations along the way, but as they were country villages without many passengers, it did not remain long. At last, as the train that had been running without pause crossed a high bridge from which the scenery below the mountains spread out clearly, Sasha gathered the courage to ask the man sitting opposite her,

“When we arrive in Laurent, from then on should I address you as Duke of Guienne?”

At the unexpected question, Robert raised a brow. Far off, the trail of pale smoke released by the racing train could be seen. He folded the newspaper he had been reading, set it down, and tilted his head.

“Do you even know how to address a Duke?”

Something about the faint laughter in his voice made it sound as though he were mocking her, and Sasha felt a little hurt. Robert looked silently at the woman, who seemed to lose a little more of her spirit with every bit of distance they put between themselves and Manolie, like a fish dragged onto land, and said,

“Use whatever form of address is comfortable for you.”

After thinking for a long while, Sasha carefully attempted a new title.

“Your Revered Ducal Highness?”

The man, wearing a faintly mocking smile around his mouth, advised her,

“At least now I can be certain you’ve never addressed a Duke before.”

Embarrassed by such a sharp reaction, Sasha admitted honestly,

“In truth, you are the first Duke I have ever met.”

“What an honor.”

Reacting in exaggerated fashion as if it were some astonishing fact, Robert made her even more self-conscious and turned his head away. Sasha thought that meant the subject had ended there. So in the end she still had not gotten an answer about how she was supposed to treat him. Well, once they arrived in Laurent, she could observe how others addressed him and use that as a guide.

However, Robert, who had his arms folded and was looking out the window, suddenly brought up the same subject again much later, as if it had only just occurred to him.

At a moment when Sasha had already assumed the matter was over.

“In public places, treat me as a Duke, Sasha. But outside of that, it doesn’t matter if you treat me as you do now. Once you begin moving in Laurent society, you too will need somewhere to breathe.”

At first Sasha did not understand what he meant. After turning the words over in her mind several times to make sure she had heard correctly, she asked carefully,

“Are you saying that in Laurent, you will be the place where I can breathe?”

Robert did not deny it. His response threw Sasha into a whirlpool of confusion. Why would he say something like that? After rejecting her confession?

“Why? You said you didn’t like me.”

“I said I had no intention of going beyond this with you.”

Robert corrected Sasha’s words. He attached the distinction as if there were some important difference between the two, but Sasha could not understand him at all.

“But didn’t you have a fiancée?”

“I was never engaged, but it is true that there is a woman who will soon marry me.”

He corrected her once again. It was, again, some subtle difference she could not see the meaning of. She wondered whether he was playing with words, but that did not seem to be the case. Watching the woman who did not know what to do, Robert suddenly leaned forward as if the entire direction of the conversation amused him. At the distance where their noses nearly brushed, Sasha froze in place.

“Even so, what does that have to do with you? It’s not as though I’m saying I mean to do anything with you right now.”

His lowered gaze lingered for a long while at the ends of her full lips. Quietly studying the way they had reddened from being worried between her teeth, he leaned back against his seat again as if his interest had cooled. In that strange atmosphere, Sasha watched part of the solid moral order of Manolie, something she had believed in without the slightest doubt, crumble little by little. By the strange moral order of Laurent, which seemed as though she would never be able to understand it at all, and yet which from now on would be the new order she had to adapt herself to in that city.