“Tidying it…… of course.”

Had it been a joke? If he had only thrown out a suspicious remark to test her, then he clearly had no idea how much pain a frog feels when it’s hit by a stone.

Lisa looked at him differently now and glared. She couldn’t dare voice her grievance, so a glare was the best she could do. She was furious, but proving her innocence was awkward too. He had never directly accused her of theft.

“I need to finish cleaning.”

She struggled to pull free, and Renato let her go with a slight push, the way one discards a card that has served its purpose.

The movement as he turned and disappeared was swift and silent as a wild animal. He moved with a relaxed ease that was somehow as fast as a run.

Her skirt swayed in the empty space he left behind. Lisa felt as though she had been bewitched by a malevolent ghost. The only trace of the unsettling stranger that remained was the smear of finger marks on her forearm.

* * *

The watch chain clinked against the ornate wrought-iron banister.

Renato paused briefly, the way one does at an air raid siren. That small, unremarkable sound became a trigger, and the moments of contact with that woman scattered white through his mind. It had been an entirely trivial, inconsequential situation, yet he found himself turning it over without meaning to.

By nature he almost never made mistakes. Leaving the pocket watch on the table had been entirely deliberate. The tedious teatime with the predictable young lady interested him far less than the woman who seemed to find every encounter with him excruciating.

The intention was simple. He had left the watch behind as a pretext to return later. The thought that a theft might occur had never crossed his mind.

Lisa had clearly been in the middle of cleaning. He had only looked at her, and she had panicked on her own, her hand trembling around the watch.

‘She gets under my skin.’

The memory of his late birth mother surfaced, cleaning in her maid’s uniform. The image of her stooped, worn back and her frostbitten feet flickered past like a lantern slide.

What set Lisa apart from his mother was that this woman had defiance hidden inside her.

Contrary to the household’s outward reputation, it seemed the family ran their servants quite harshly, and yet here was a cat with a fierce spirit, claws tucked away, crouched and waiting. Who had taught her to think that way? Was she simply born with that temperament? Whatever the reason, life must be considerably difficult for her.

The violet eyes that had glared at him, burning with suppressed indignation, refused to leave his mind.

Lisa had jumped to the conclusion that she was being suspected of theft, so he had simply read the atmosphere and nudged it along. An ordinary servant would have felt relieved once the misunderstanding was cleared up and let it go. But she had unexpectedly glared at him for a moment. Behind the aggrieved expression, her self-respect stood quietly upright.

She had caught his interest from the very first impression, and she was indeed unusual.

That must be why his eyes kept finding her.

Because of Lisa, the winter he was meant to spend at the Maldini household was shaping up to be more troublesome than he had anticipated.

* * *

“Why does that girl have absolutely no warmth about her?”

Sheila, the head maid, stopped by the study the following day and erupted immediately. She had been delivering this particular criticism for years, so Lisa gave her the response she was looking for.

“I’m sorry.”

“If you can’t be friendly, at least smile. And do something about your hair.”

Sheila pinched her in the side without hesitation.

“……Yes.”

The servants who attended the family directly were generally well-presented. They wore their hair in neat, pretty braids. The atmosphere here was clearly different from the kitchen, where practicality came first.

Lisa took off her head cloth and smoothed down her loose fringe. Sheila watched, then clutched her chest as though she might expire from frustration.

“Never mind. I’m only wasting my breath.”

There was more to Sheila’s irritation. The greeting Lisa had given the tutor earlier had apparently come across as cold. Compared to her cheerful, chatty predecessor, Lisa was clearly falling short.

She had thought she introduced herself politely enough, but perhaps she should have added a few more words at the end. Forcing a smile or producing small talk was genuinely difficult for her, and that made it an unsolvable problem.

A smile is a form of courtesy, they said. If she wanted to keep this easier post, she would have to smile diligently from now on. Lisa steeled herself and consciously pulled the corners of her stiff mouth upward.

“Is this all right?”

“That’s the best you can do?”

“H, how about this?”

She was uncertain how the expression looked to others when she opened her mouth enough to show her teeth. It felt a bit foolish to her. The forced expression on her pale face was like a clown caked in white powder.

Sheila also gave her detailed instructions on handling valuables and warned her repeatedly not to make mistakes. By the time they finished, she had missed lunch by a wide margin. Lisa hurried down to the kitchen.

Her brother, who had been fixed like a fixture in the corner of the storage room sorting ingredients, waved his stained hands in greeting. The moment they were face to face, she heard his empty stomach growl. She had specifically told him to eat first since she would be having a late lunch every day from now on, but getting food on his own without anyone to smooth the way clearly hadn’t been easy.

As usual, they gathered their food into a single bowl each and perched on the corridor windowsill. Lisa ate to fill her own hungry stomach while watching Raoul stuff pieces of bread into his mouth before anyone could interfere.

After eating, she tidied herself up. She said it was the head maid’s instruction and got a generous amount of hot water from the kitchen. The only rooms with hot running showers were the family’s bedrooms and the guest room; all the servants heated their own water, so the state she had been in until now was unavoidable.

She washed properly for the first time in a while and spent a long time combing her hair. She had learned how to braid it nicely from Anna, the previous attendant of the study.

Her deft hands picked it up quickly. She spent quite a while fixing her hair in the reflection of the window glass, and felt a hostile stare boring into the back of her head. It was only natural that Anna, who had been displaced to other duties, wouldn’t be pleased with her. That was something she would have to endure.

“You’re young, so you only clean the study for now, but you know that alone doesn’t count as pulling your weight, right?”

“……”

“My job is looking after Miss Smila. That means her bedroom, her atelier, the music room, all of it. There are plenty of separate errands too. The rest is all my responsibility, so it’s a bit much for you to be acting like you’ve got the better end of the deal here.”

“……Yes.”

She had caught Anna boasting to people nearby a little while ago. She said that in exchange for being taken off study duty, she had taken on some of the head maid’s tasks. In the same breath she had also complained about being busier.

Lisa found it unpleasant that there was an unspoken hierarchy among the servants and that one had to navigate it carefully. Thinking that way was probably why she kept ending up isolated.

“I have an errand to run right now, and the head maid told me to sort the receipts too.”

Anna muttered to herself, then shot a glance at Lisa. The meaning in her eyes was transparent, and Lisa had no choice but to understand.

“I’ll go in your place.”

“Would you?”

The way color flooded back into Anna’s face so instantly left Lisa briefly speechless. Just where was this errand that it warranted such a reaction?

Beyond the window where her neatly braided hair was reflected, the wind blew hard. After days of dreary skies, heavy clouds had finally settled in.

The cold seeping through the gaps alone was enough to make her shiver. Like that man who had blown in like a gale earlier.

A letter was pressed into Lisa’s hand.

She couldn’t understand why anyone would send a letter by hand when a postal carrier would do, but she was told not to go prying into things that weren’t her business. Anna pressed her index finger to her lips and whispered.

“This is a secret you can’t tell anyone. I’m asking you to go because Miss Smila trusts you.”

She had to go to the neighboring comital family’s estate, separated from them by a wide pasture. The recipient of the letter was the count’s son, Marsimo.

The cattle pasture carved into the hillside was no small expanse, and the slope was quite steep. Under normal circumstances it would have been better to take the stagecoach even if it meant going the long way around. But catching the coach in time would make returning the same day impossible, so she took the shortcut.