Chapter 38

“So then, Amelia. Your special charge attempted an escape and was injured in the process. Our kind warden, Mr. Elverna, was thoughtful enough to write and inform us that one may pay to extend his miserable life a little longer, or grant him rest at last.”

Amelia reached out and touched the letters on the tray at those words. She could feel the thickness of them. It wasn’t just a reply. There was money inside.

“Handle it.”

While Amelia looked at the two letters on the tray with a complicated expression, Owen spoke pleasantly. His manner was that of someone discussing something other than a letter entirely.

“It’s for my father-in-law, after all.”

Anyone overhearing the conversation would have taken it as Owen offering warm assistance to his wife’s father. But Amelia knew that cheerfulness carried a kind of cruel pleasure, the same delight a child takes in pulling the legs off a dragonfly.

Amelia swallowed a quiet sound and took the letters. Rather than carrying them on the tray as she usually would, she slipped them into her own pocket, because officially these letters belonged to the head maid Amelia, not to Owen.

The weight of the letters in her pocket made her fingertips tremble. It was not the amount of money inside that frightened her. It was the intent behind it. Warden Elverna would receive this money and keep the prisoner alive. But immediately after being kept alive, that prisoner would surely be given pain just short of death as punishment for the escape attempt. That was why Elverna had written the letter. Phrased with a certain elegance, the substance of it was: do you want him kept alive to suffer more?

Officially under Amelia’s supervision, Lea’s father Zebek Fell had been imprisoned on Edelent Island several months before Owen went to find Lea. The statute of limitations had not yet run out, and a lawful arrest and prosecution would have been entirely possible, but Owen had deliberately kept his arrest and imprisonment completely secret. Zebek Fell had been sent without trial to the most terrible prison in existence, the bleak island where prisoners reportedly attempted s*icide dozens of times a day. Not that there was anything to complain about. Amelia knew he was guilty beyond any doubt, and so did Owen, who had been the victim of his kidnapping. If anything, the fact that Zebek had been left as free as he had been for as long as he had was the strange thing, given Owen’s usual methods.

Amelia had found it strange as well. Sending Zebek to the harshest prison available was only natural. Denying him the chance for a trial was also natural. Owen might not have wanted the noise of publicly announcing that he had finally caught his own kidnapper and brought him to justice, out of pride. But Owen had arranged everything to appear as though it were Amelia’s doing, and the postman delivered Edelent Island’s letters to her. When Amelia asked about it, Owen had smiled and said:

‘Zebek Fell will be your responsibility from now on. He’s still useful to me, but he must not be known.’

‘What do you mean by that……’

‘It’s simple. It means the matter of Zebek Fell is something only you and I know.’

Owen had added one more thing to Amelia, who was looking at him with a puzzled expression.

‘Don’t be nervous. ……We already have a secret that only we share. Think of it as one more thing being added to that. Zebek Fell.’

After Owen said that, Amelia had no more nerve to ask further. She knew how much weight the secret she shared with Owen carried.

And so things had come to this. He had brought Zebek Fell’s daughter in, fabricated her identity, and married her, and then instructed Amelia not to let her know any of it. Just as Owen had said, Amelia had recognized Lea from the very first moment she saw her. How could she forget. Stepping down from the carriage, she had been just as shabby, just as frightened as she had been that day……

‘All right. I’ll do it. I’ll do what you say……’

Someone like me……

The voice of a young girl she had heard on the day she met Lea echoed in her ears, but Amelia pushed the thought away. She bowed her head to Owen, took the two letters from the tray, closed the door, and left. She looked at the two envelopes made to appear as though they had come to her, then tucked the official letter from the Edelent Island warden separately into her pocket and called the postman to hand him the reply containing Owen’s money.

Mrs. Colden caught a glimpse of this from a distance, fixed Amelia with a sharp look, and then disappeared in a hurry.

Good heavens! Look at that woman! She’s gotten completely out of hand!

Passing Amelia, Mrs. Colden made straight for the kitchen, the most talkative place in the house. Kitchen work was hard and there was always something being roasted or boiled, with endless small tasks to do alongside long stretches of standing and waiting, so the maids there were always glad for a new story.

“She came out of the master’s study?”

A maid stirring a thin sauce at the stove scoffed at Mrs. Colden’s words. She didn’t like Amelia either. Amelia had refused her request for a raise. The maid knew perfectly well it was because she had been caught pilfering some quality ingredients, but she felt Amelia had been far too cold about the whole thing. What she had done was practically a tradition among maids working in upper-class kitchens.

“I knew it! She must have gotten a proper scolding!”

“Exactly!”

Mrs. Colden laughed and agreed enthusiastically. Most of the kitchen maids disliked the strict Amelia, so Mrs. Colden spoke freely.

“Honestly, if only we had a proper mistress! Then that woman wouldn’t be able to carry on the way she does!”

The maid cooking porridge for the ailing Lea grumbled loudly. She thought back to the days when Lady Ellarod had ruled the house. The fall of that beautiful golden-haired duchess still made their master Owen seem frightening, but it hadn’t erased the awe they had felt for the glamour Lady Ellarod had brought to the title of Duchess of Tetias.

This foreign mistress, by comparison, had arrived on the very first day in a plain cotton worker’s dress, and had since been excluded from every gathering a duchess should rightfully attend, from social parties to dances, wandering the house like an old woman.

The maid clicked her tongue, picturing Lea’s plain and now gaunt appearance. She assumed the reason Owen didn’t take Lea to the opera or formal dinners, the way other husbands did, was because of Lea herself.

He married her for the money, but he must have too much pride to present a wife like that among all the fine noblewomen. The maid shook her head.

“Why on earth does the master give the head maid so much authority?”

“Ah, Mrs. Colden. You wouldn’t know.”

Mrs. Colden asked while helping with the work beside her, and the maid answered, stirring her ladle.

“Amelia was actually brought over from her family home by the current master’s mother, that is, the duchess before Lady Ellarod.”

“Oh? Is that right? I’d heard the master’s birth mother passed away young, but…… is that why the master trusts Amelia?”

“Well……”

The maid let the words trail off. Among the servants who had worked in the ducal household for a long time, there was a kind of unspoken rule, and what had happened after the death of Owen’s kind and gentle birth mother was exactly that.

After Owen’s mother died and Lady Ellarod became the new duchess, many servants had turned their backs on the young Owen. Everyone at the time had assumed Owen was finished. He had been nothing more than a powerless child with no support to expect from his mother’s family, the marquisate, and Lady Ellarod was a young duchess from a baron family that had amassed enormous wealth. Whose side would the servants take? Lady Ellarod was not a duchess stripped of all rights the way Lea was now. They had quickly aligned themselves with Lady Ellarod.

The servants who had been kind to Owen before were, once they took Lady Ellarod’s side, even colder and more callous toward him than the others. Needless to say, none of those servants remained in the ducal household now.

“Why? Please tell me. I’m still new here and there’s so much I don’t know. What if I make a mistake. Please! Won’t you?”

The maid hadn’t been rude enough to Owen to have been dismissed, but she had watched a friend in the kitchen get let go right in front of her, and her discomfort showed. Still, when Mrs. Colden kept pressing, the maid finally opened her mouth.