“What’s that camera?”

“……”

“There’s a camera from the same manufacturer at the Babineau residence in Lutes.”

“……”

“Do you like taking photographs?”

“……Not particularly.”

The boy answered reluctantly. The large, box-shaped camera had belonged to his stepfather Damian. It was also a keepsake his mother had cherished desperately while she was alive.

“But what does it say on it? I thought I caught a glimpse of it the other day.”

“……”

The boy couldn’t readily answer Cora’s question. There was indeed a word burned into the leather cover of the camera, but he didn’t know what it meant.

“Did I see it wrong?”

The girl tilted her head.

“I don’t know either.”

“You don’t know?”

“I can’t read.”

Cora swallowed at the boy’s reply. Then she fidgeted with a curling strand of hair and asked.

“……Why?”

Cora’s father Mathieu sometimes sat his son François down across from him at family dinners and told him various things. It was usually praise for the Emperor’s achievements. At those times, Cora Babineau would sit nearby and listen to her father’s embellished boasting without much feeling.

Mathieu Babineau was greatly stirred up, saying that thanks to the Emperor’s gracious decision some years ago, the great majority of Gallian citizens could now read and write. With the proclamation of the Elementary Education Act, schools where anyone could receive equal education had been established in every region, and the national illiteracy rate had plummeted sharply.

“Are there no elementary schools in Cappera?”

“……”

“I heard that your grandmother used to teach the servants here……”

Villa Efrysia was a place that high-ranking figures from all walks of Gallian society came to visit in a steady stream. Renowned figures leading the fields of politics, economics, culture, and the arts from across the continent, not just Gallia, came flocking as well.

For that reason, the former Countess Babineau had instructed that servants hired for the villa receive at minimum a basic education at an elementary school. There could be no inconvenience whatsoever in receiving the distinguished guests who came to call on her.

As a result, the villa’s servants and maids could read without difficulty not only the names on the letters and cards guests handed over, but also the various messages written within. It was not uncommon for them to pass around the secret love letters exchanged between guests and snicker over them.

“I am not a servant of the villa.”

The boy answered firmly. Cora looked at him with an expression of incomprehension.

“Even so, wouldn’t it be more convenient if you could read and write?”

“……”

There had been countless opportunities to learn letters. But the boy was skeptical about everything. Simon Fournier had made persistent efforts to teach the boy to read and write, all to no avail. Time and again, the boy had thrown the basic grammar books and notebooks the old man bought him into the incinerator.

Refusing to learn letters was a kind of defiance. Not being able to read or write would cause no inconvenience to a handyman who did little more than handle the villa’s waste and run errands. That was what he told himself.

But there were times he wanted to read that thick, dull-looking book. He was curious about the meaning of the word burned into the camera’s leather cover. It was a desire born from the longing, curiosity, and resentment buried deep within the boy.

“I’m staying here for reasons of my own, but I’ll be leaving soon.”

“Where to?”

“……”

“Where are you planning to go?”

“That’s……”

He fell silent. He had made plans to leave the estate as soon as possible, bullying Simon into it, but he felt pathetic for how he kept putting it off.

Until then, the only reason he had hesitated to leave was the old man, who stubbornly insisted he wanted to be buried in Cappera when he died. And a month ago, a second reason had been added. He couldn’t deny that Cora Babineau, who came here every day and sat quietly beside him before leaving, had a hold on his feet.

“What does it matter to you where I go, Miss?”

“……What?”

“I am not a sl*ve of the Babineau family. I mean that I have no need to report my whereabouts to the master. I’m sure you understand that.”

Even so, he was not naive enough to speak his true feelings honestly. The boy kept up a pretense of indifference and said something unkind that he didn’t mean. He didn’t know how to speak kindly.

“No, that’s not what I……”

“Then what? You’re well-off enough, so are you thinking of giving me money?”

“……”

Cora was flustered.

Money, she could give him if he needed it. Two or three rings from her jewelry box would be more than enough to set the boy up with a rented room anywhere. But that wasn’t what she wanted. What she wanted was something more…

Confusion stirred and fluttered in Cora Babineau’s blue-green eyes. It was a feeling she couldn’t explain precisely even to herself. The girl did not yet know the name of that bewildering emotion.

“I will. I can help you. I promise.”

One thing was clear, regardless. She wanted the boy to stay at the villa. And she wanted to go on seeing the boy who stayed at the villa.

“……What did you say?”

The boy looked at her, baffled by her unexpected answer.

“But there’s a condition.”

“What……”

Cora lowered her gaze and tapped the tips of her feet a couple of times. She had made up her mind, and now she gathered her courage.

“Will you spend time with me like this, just the two of us?”

It was an entirely improper request for the child of a noble in the Emperor’s favor to make of a foreign handyman who couldn’t read. It was also unsuitable for a woman of higher standing to make of a man of far lower station. Even so, Cora Babineau’s voice was clear, without a trace of impurity.

A quiet wave of blue-green sound rolled faintly into the still garden and receded. The boy, his expression composed, asked Cora a question.

“Why would you go so far for someone like me?”

“……Because I can’t do anything else.”

A higher wave struck where the last one had pulled back. He swallowed the seawater again.

“You look lonely. You’re always alone.”

“……”

“So am I.”

The last sentence she spoke was barely more than a murmur to herself. But the boy caught the whisper turning on the tip of Cora’s tongue with quiet alertness. Cora’s family, the Babineau Count household, was not, in truth, a well-regarded one. The reason was that her grandfather, Robert Babineau, had not been born into the nobility.

Even so, Robert had been able to rise to the rank of Count because he was a capable businessman with a remarkable instinct for reading the times. Beyond that, his wife, Beatrice, who was far above his station, a woman from the Pyatakov family, a powerful political dynasty and wealthy landowners of the Empire of Rus, had also been a firm support for Robert Babineau.

Robert, guided by Beatrice’s counsel, had poured an enormous fortune into the Emperor’s coup. The glorious present of Bonaparte III, who at the time had been nothing more than a collateral branch of an imperial family long exiled to a foreign land, was the result forged by Marquis Arnaud Lacroix’s scheming and Robert Babineau’s funds.

The coup succeeded, and Bonaparte III, elected president in a national referendum, finally rewrote the constitution, declared Gallia an empire, and made himself Emperor. The first bill the Emperor stamped with his seal and passed was none other than one concerning the rewarding of those who had contributed to his rise.

With that, the Lacroix Marquis family was granted the Schwaben estate, and Robert Babineau achieved the remarkable feat of becoming a Count. Not long after, Robert Babineau died, and his son Mathieu inherited the title. That was the short lineage of the Babineau Count family.

Decades earlier, the nobles who had survived the bloodshed of the Gallian Revolution by holding their breath and finally returned were bound tightly together by their own sense of solidarity and pride. There was no chance such people would look favorably on the upstart Babineau Count family.

Children who had heard their parents’ gossip were crueler than the adults in shutting Cora Babineau out. Her introverted and rigid personality gave them further reason to exclude her. The only time they bothered to pretend to welcome her was when the accomplished Eugène Lacroix escorted her.

Not long ago, over dinner, Eloise Babineau, François’s birth mother, had suggested sending the listless Cora to Cappera, where the climate was mild, to recuperate for a while. She added that the Babineau family physician had recommended a change of environment.

In a few months, Cora Babineau would likely be left alone at Villa Efrysia. She sensed, too, that she would only be summoned back to the capital once a marriage had been arranged. Cora Babineau was a satellite drifting in lonely orbit around her family.