Chapter 7

“Miss, is this all the luggage?”

“Yes. Tell the Dean I wish the bedding to be handled as a donation.”

When Lottie answered the polite question from the woman named Anna with ease, the footmen divided up Lottie’s trunks and lifted them. N-not Dean Sir, but the Dean… at wording they could hardly imagine from the Lottie they knew, her roommates’ eyes widened as though they would split.

Once the footmen had given a final check to the place where Lottie had stayed for five years and left the room, what remained was Lottie, now wearing a cape and hat made of expensive wool silk instead of her cadet uniform jacket. Anna had skillfully helped her into them, having brought them separately.

She looked every bit the equal of any female student from a noble family.

“Joanna, Marian, Lavender. Thank you for everything.”

Come to think of it, the commotion outside the wide-open window had grown even louder. It was the sound of a crowd gathering at the appearance of the footmen serving the master of Heartfield Mansion.

So the heir was a woman?

I guess a Volfman is here……!

Who on earth was it?

“I’ll contact you.”

With that noisy uproar as the background, Lottie smiled.

It was a calm smile, the smile of someone who knew that she herself was the one at the center of all that stir.

That was the figure of Charlotte Volfman, the sole heir of Heartfield Mansion, who had stirred up the world eight years ago.

***

Heartfield Mansion.

Several decades ago, the founder of the Volfman Barony, a remarkable figure who entered the royal capital of Reum alone and built Silver Wolf, now the greatest trading company in the Kingdom, came to own the largest mansion in the vicinity of the royal capital.

The origin of the mansion went back to the late years of the previous dynasty, when Duke Hartwell, who was said to have enjoyed power surpassing that of the royal family, built it to display his authority. And through the hundreds of years that followed, as dynasties changed, politics overturned, and economies shook, there was one sole truth that remained in Reum… if one wished to know who the richest person of the age was, one need only raise one’s head and look west, where Heartfield Mansion stood.

Since its ownership had changed a total of thirteen times up to now, and each time it had broken the previous record for the highest sale price, the amount the late Baron Volfman paid when he acquired Heartfield Mansion also captured public fascination as the highest single real-estate transaction in recorded history.

And ten years ago, there was once again an event that drew everyone’s attention to that mansion. It was because of the succession issue of the late Baron Volfman.

It was Baron Volfman who had risen above the rank of Baron through sheer wealth alone, by extending his trade networks beyond the Kingdom and seizing control of the continental market. His fortune, including Heartfield Mansion, shares in Silver Wolf, and the properties he owned both within and beyond the Kingdom, was estimated at tens of millions of Silom.

In an age that still honored the very wealthy with the title millionaire, the appearance of a multimillionaire.

The problem was that the goddess of fortune who had allowed him to build that transnational wealth smiled upon everyone except his children. Though the Baron had raised the trading company while living a very busy life, he had still carefully had four children in total, three sons and one daughter. Yet the three sons who had helped him in his work died first.

At that time, the situation was not altogether terrible. His three sons had all done their part in life and left grandchildren behind. However, the late Baron Volfman’s five grandchildren died one by one due to such causes as a kidnapper’s mistake, a carriage accident, a fall during holiday travel, an infectious disease, and being sacrificed in place of the Baron during an assassination attempt aimed at him, and the situation grew dire. Then the Baron, who collapsed from the shock of his last remaining granddaughter taking an assassin’s bullet in his stead, was given a terminal diagnosis.

The only heir he had left was his youngest daughter, who had married out early and was considered such an outsider that she was treated as though she did not exist.

When the news became known, all attention inside and outside the Kingdom turned to the succession problem of Baron Volfman. More specifically, to the fate of the vast fortune he had built.

Would the youngest daughter, whose life or death was uncertain, appear.

Would he divide his shares among the elders and executives who were said to be his right and left hands.

Would some blood relative unknown to the public, such as a collateral relation or an illegitimate child, appear and seize that luck.

Day after day, every newspaper page poured out estimates of Baron Volfman’s assets, gossip concerning his youngest daughter whose whereabouts were unknown, and interviews with people claiming to be his illegitimate child or some distant relative. At the same time, whether in ladies’ salons, gentlemen’s social clubs, commoners’ cafés, or pubs, anywhere people gathered was noisy with talk about the next master of Heartfield Mansion.

And so, one year after Baron Volfman’s illness became known.

Silver Wolf Trading Company suddenly released a brief press statement.

It had found Baron Volfman’s grandchild and chosen that child as heir.

And from that day onward, Heartfield Mansion was completely closed off.

It was a measure that placed the heir’s safety above all else.

“Lottie? Come here, child. I am your grandfather. Would it be alright if I gave you the name Charlotte?”

That was how Lottie came to the capital.

Lottie, who had lost her parents to the epidemic that swept the Kingdom several years before and had been working as an errand girl at an inn in Ronda village.

Lottie had never imagined that she would have any connection to the much-rumored Heartfield Mansion. And no wonder, because Ronda village was a rural backwater hidden away even in the southern part of the Kingdom. She had vaguely sensed from what little she knew that her mother, who had supposedly run away for love after seeing only her father’s face, came from a wealthy family, but how could she have imagined that family was Volfman of Silver Wolf.

Naturally, a Lottie like that lacked the basic qualities expected of Silver Wolf’s heir, so it was only natural that Baron Volfman hid her existence while raising her as a successor.

The awkwardness between them, born of having not even known of each other’s existence for over ten years, lasted only briefly. The two of them, grandfather and granddaughter, grew close in an instant. The Baron did his best to pass on every bit of wisdom he had acquired to his granddaughter, and Lottie, receiving in abundance the love from above that she had never before known, grew into the proper young head of Heartfield.

But before even three years had passed since Lottie entered Heartfield Mansion, the goddess of fate beckoned to the Baron as well.

“The natural you. The one who recognizes you without knowing the name Volfman is your true person. While you are at the Academy, find many such precious people……”

Worried for the young granddaughter who would inherit everything from him at the age of sixteen, the Baron temporarily halted the succession process and put in place the safeguard that she would come of age at the Academy, and then he passed away.

‘Grandfather was right. If I had been introduced at once as the heir back then, I would have been completely fooled by people who acted differently to my face and behind my back, and everything Grandfather built would have been stripped away. Just looking at how nobles treat the written-exam students, their insides are all black.’

Lottie recalled the warm eyes of her grandfather, who during the nearly three years they had lived together had given her, with no reservation, all the love and insight he still had left despite his failing body.

The amber eyes her grandfather had that her mother resembled.

Those same eyes, shining the same deep gold as her own.

Everything Lottie had learned in both mind and body at the Academy over the past five years while hiding her status would become a great asset to her life as Baron Volfman.

Just as her grandfather had wished.

‘Once I get back, I should sort through the classmates I graduated with and pick out those worth hiring, then discuss them with the executives.’

Striding across the grounds now as Baroness Volfman, no longer hiding her identity, Lottie began to think through one by one the things she would need to do immediately upon returning to Heartfield Mansion as both the head of Volfman and the master of Silver Wolf.

Hey, isn’t that the entrance-exam girl?

They say she’s the heir of Heartfield Mansion!

The murmurs around her gradually grew louder, but they did not reach Lottie’s ears, so deeply absorbed was she in her plans for the near future, and instead scattered meaninglessly into the air.

‘I also need to start deciding on a marriage partner. Thinking of all Grandfather suffered, the more children I have, the better. I should have the elders recommend candidates and decide coldly, putting first the benefits they will bring to Volfman and Silver Wolf. Without putting in even a little personal feeling, and following only calculation and advantage.’

Because she was the head of Volfman.

There were dozens of servants attached to Heartfield Mansion and hundreds of lives tied to Silver Wolf.

There was no place there to put Lottie’s personal emotions.

There had been until yesterday, but now there was none.

‘Since I need to have many children, I suppose I should look a little at appearance too, if I think of the children’s faces.’

Once thoughts of producing heirs came to mind, the act of reproduction she had experienced for the first time last night naturally came to mind as well… but Lottie had to force herself to erase the face that rose with it from her thoughts.

For the past five years, Lottie’s dream had been to give birth to five in all, sons and daughters who looked only like Sebastian, to raise them without want through her wealth, and to reproduce and spread his beauty down through the generations.