Chapter 7

“Of course you wouldn’t. That’s precisely why I’ve come to make you a proposal you’ll find appealing.”

Count Nockton, who had flared with anger moments ago when she called him Father, fell quiet and listened to her words.

He had likely softened at hearing her say she would agree to the marriage willingly.

“A proposal. Do I have any need to hear a proposal from you?”

Count Nockton asked with sharp eyes. Ellen held his gaze and opened her mouth carefully.

“You do. I’ve made up my mind this time, so getting me to do as you wish will take considerable effort. However.”

Ellen paused briefly and looked at him. She could feel him listening with an attentiveness that wasn’t like him.

“If you hear me out, you stand to gain a great deal, Father.”

“A great deal.”

He was already seeing quite a return as it was. The marriage fee would put enough money in his hands to buy a decent manor without blinking. For the price of getting rid of such a lowly thing, it was a rather excellent sum.

“Hmm.”

He stroked his beard with greedy eyes.

The mention of a great deal likely meant he was willing to hear what she had to say. Ellen parted her trembling lips.

“Whatever you’re receiving in exchange for selling me, I’ll make sure you get at least three times that amount.”

“What? And how exactly would you manage that?”

The Count scoffed openly.

Three times the amount, from a girl barely scraping by on meals in an attic. She must have lost her sense of her own situation after being unconscious for two days.

“It’s simple.”

Ellen smiled calmly and laid out her thinking.

“I raise my own value.”

With confident eyes, Ellen explained her plan to raise her own worth in careful detail. The Count stroked his beard and listened. It was a better plan than he had expected.

“You’ve used your head rather well for someone like you. But it sounds plausible enough to the ear. Is there any guarantee you can actually pull it off?”

“Of course.”

The Count was speaking dismissively, but he was still continuing the conversation with Ellen. That itself was proof he found her proposal at least somewhat interesting.

Ellen loosened her tightly clenched hands and took a moment to steady her breath. What she was about to say next was what truly mattered.

Noble daughters of the Empire made their formal debut into society through a debutante at the age of seventeen. But Ellen, now nineteen, had only barely set foot through that door at the very start of this year.

The Count had never had any intention of holding a debutante for his half-blood daughter. Ellen, for her part, had simply lived the life given to her in silence, not even hoping for such a thing.

The problem had arisen when Duke Shurn began to set his sights on Ellen. Facing the prospect of being sold off to a duke nearly seventy years old, the debutante she had never cared about in the first place became even further from her mind.

But this time was different. A proper procedure was needed.

Not because she wanted to experience the sweet debut stage every young lady dreamed of. It was to raise Ellen’s value, or more precisely, to make Duke Shurn lose his head and bid everything he had.

Ellen intended to use that as her bargaining chip with Count Nockton.

“I need to hold a proper debutante.”

“What are you talking about.”

She had just said she would get him at least three times the amount from Duke Shurn, and now she was suddenly talking about a debutante.

The Count’s voice rose a pitch.

“The last birthday party of Prince Kayul, you had me attend to show me off to Duke Shurn.”

“And?”

“In truth, that alone was more than enough to make my presence known in society.”

She recalled what her half-sister Tera had spat at her before the return.

Something about how she had the nerve to show her face, having not only used Tera’s dress for her debutante but lured a man away on top of it.

Even thinking back on it now, it was utterly absurd.

It wasn’t as though she had wanted to wear Tera’s clothes. She had simply followed the Count’s mocking command, delivered with a sneer, that someone like her should be grateful to even get a taste of what a debutante felt like, even if it was far above her station.

So she had put on the dress Rosie, Tera’s maid, had tossed at her like charity, and stood in a remote corner holding her breath like a forgotten sack of grain, and that had been the whole of it……

‘Does simply crossing paths with someone in a hallway count as shoving your face in front of them?’

After being kicked by Tera that day, she had overheard the whispering of Tera’s maids and learned the truth.

The man her half-sister had her eye on had caught one glimpse of her and fallen into a fever.

On top of that, she had also heard that the men who had seen her at the party that day had been talking about her quite a bit among themselves.

Ellen relayed that fact to Count Nockton with an even expression.

“Even tucked away in a corner, barely making your presence known, and still it came to that.”

The Count had sent Ellen to a secluded spot arranged with Duke Shurn, using the maid who had accompanied her that day.

“That’s right. I was in the far corner the entire time.”

“Yes. I suppose you would have been.”

Ellen’s words were unlikely to be false. Even without Tera, anyone who had attended the party that day could confirm it easily enough.

The Count looked Ellen over carefully. It was the first time he had ever examined his daughter’s appearance with such attention. He had been consistently indifferent to Ellen until now.

Even in a worn-out dress, she was strikingly beautiful.

‘Tera’s clothes wouldn’t have even fit her properly. The dress must have been too large.’

Count Nockton thought of Tera’s build and looked Ellen over again more closely. The longer he looked, the more beautiful she seemed.

“You’ve come up with something rather useful for once.”

Had he known sooner, he would have arranged the debutante himself. To raise the value of goods, you had to display them somewhere visible and negotiate from there.

The corner of the Count’s mouth rose. He was thinking that if he assigned her a maid, taught her the necessary noble etiquette, dressed her up properly, and put her on display, he could sell her for a far better price.

“With that in mind.”

Ellen brought out the words she had carefully prepared.

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

A formal debut into the Empire’s social scene was done in one of two ways.

Attending the spring ball hosted by the imperial family, or participating in the banquet of the Grand Holy Council held at the great cathedral in the capital.

Ellen had decided to depart for the capital today, in preparation for the upcoming imperial ball.

Once she arrived there, she would never have to return to this house again. That single thought alone made her feel like she could breathe a little easier.

“It’s time to depart, Miss.”

“Yes, Hess.”

She had expected to have almost nothing to pack. But Hess, who had been packing since dawn, had produced three bundles. Ellen looked at the enormous bags by the door with wide eyes.

“What is all this.”

Hess was the maid she had asked the Count to assign to her exclusively until she went to the Shurn ducal family.

Looking back on life in the imperial palace, having someone she could rely on completely had been essential. Thinking of what lay ahead, it was even more so. The road before her was not one she could navigate without an ally.

‘Hess was the only maid in this household who ever showed me any kindness.’

She would secretly leave her own portion of hard bread for Ellen when Ellen was crying from hunger, and once, when Ellen was bedridden with influenza, she had quietly slipped a bundle of herbs she had gathered herself under the door.

“Since you woke up, Miss, the Count has been looking after you quite well. So there ended up being more to pack than I expected.”

“……That’s not quite it.”

She couldn’t bring herself to say it was an investment to sell her off at a higher price.

Ellen gave up on explaining and followed the servants carrying the luggage. The body that had been in poor shape when she returned had improved considerably after ten days of good food and proper rest in a decent room.

“Oh, Miss. The knight has arrived.”

“So he has. Right on time.”

She descended the long staircase to the entrance on the ground floor and found Deriel standing there. With a leather pauldron and a sword at his hip, he looked genuinely like a knight.

‘Deriel agreed to help with the matter involving Duke Shurn, at any rate.’

Ellen had used the Empire’s poor public safety as her reason and asked for a knight to protect her during the debutante period.

Of course, there was no chance of a knight being spared for Ellen. The Nockton county was not financially well-off, and the knight order was run on the bare minimum of personnel needed to guard the manor and manage the territory.

Ellen had introduced Deriel to the Count as a squire knight, along with the explanation that he was someone who had helped her on the day she ran away.

‘I said I used the emergency medicine I had secretly taken with me to treat Deriel’s injuries.’

Since she had never left the manor on any day other than the day she ran away, the Count believed her and readily produced a contract.

In truth, finding a knight to hire temporarily for the debutante period was no easy matter, so the reason hadn’t been particularly important to the Count.

“He really is beautiful, isn’t he.”

“Isn’t that an odd way to describe a man, Hess?”

“But there’s no better word for it.”

“Well, I suppose you’re right.”

Deriel had presented a single condition for the contract.

Ellen would need a guardian during her time in the capital, so for the duration of the contract, he would become Ellen Nockton’s legal representative.

Count Nockton had paused to think. Ellen was still nineteen, and yes, she was of an age that required a guardian. That was precisely why he was hiring a knight and sending her to the capital.

He himself couldn’t leave the territory with so much piling up. And there was no chance his wife would take Ellen along. A woman who regarded Ellen like vermin would never volunteer to be her guardian.

‘That might happen when the sky falls.’

The man’s words weren’t wrong on any count. But a legal representative. That meant acting in place of all legal rights, and something about it nagged at him.

Even so, he couldn’t send her to such a major event without any guardian at all. He had to be prepared for any contingency.

In the end, Count Nockton had his chief chamberlain draw up a consent document and added his signature. Under imperial law, the legal representative was the father, so consent was needed to transfer that authority for the duration of her stay in the capital.

[The representative may not enter into contracts that disadvantage Ellen or cause changes to her family status.]

The Count read through the clause written in the consent document and set down his pen.

Just in case she tried to use the legal representative authority to wriggle out of marrying Duke Shurn, he had taken precautions against any such contingency.

On top of that, he planned to have the coachman traveling with them double as a watchman over Ellen.

The Count looked at the completed contract and smoothed out the furrow in his brow. The period was limited to her time in the capital, he had included a clause for anything suspicious, and he had assigned a watchman on top of it, so his mind was considerably more at ease.

He never realized there was an unexpected twist lurking within that very clause.