After clearing her throat a few more times, Eloise pulled a chair over and sat by the window.

Though the room itself was chilly, her body trembled involuntarily from the cold creeping in from the window. Despite wearing several layers of clothing, the cold that penetrated through the window frame found its way between the collars of her clothes, stealing away her body heat.

“Hah……”

Her sigh turned to vapor and disappeared. It had been quite a long time since she’d experienced such a cold winter.

‘When I was in Feltham, winters were almost too warm.’

Winter would trigger an emergency in the Surberton household.

Though her illness was now cured, Eloise’s health would weaken even with slight cold during winter.

Because of this, when autumn arrived, Mr. Surberton would order firewood not only from Feltham but also from Camborne, stacking them abundantly in the storehouse.

Mrs. Surberton and Emily would prepare several sets of thick cotton-padded clothes, and whenever they saw Eloise, they would continuously dress her with scarves and outer garments until she became as round as a snowman.

Dressed like that, with firewood burning vigorously in the fireplace all day long, even with windows open for ventilation, the warm air would make her sweat.

Recalling those times, Eloise tightened her collar.

Thankfully, she had the thick clothes her mother had packed for her; without them, she would have truly fallen seriously ill, shivering through the night.

‘But attitudes change so quickly.’

After Ryan Wilgrave’s death was announced and his funeral decided, Sinclair began openly ignoring Eloise.

Then she sent a maid to say that another guest was coming, so please vacate the guest room. The maid said she would help, arbitrarily packed Eloise’s belongings into a bag, guided her to this room, and disappeared after practically throwing down the luggage.

While organizing her things, Eloise briefly went out to the corridor and overheard the maids talking.

“They said to serve her meals last?:

“She has no sense. Why does she keep clinging here when she could just leave?”

“Did she lose her mind? I heard she’s openly asking to be introduced to men from high society, of all things?”

The maids gossiped about Eloise for quite some time, unaware of her presence, before leaving to work.

“It’s not like I want to stay here.”

Eloise blew warm breath onto her hands, stiffening from the cold, and looked back toward the window.

It seemed her act of pretending to cling desperately to connections through others had worked properly. Now even Sinclair had begun to openly ignore her.

Thoughts and attitudes are connected. Since she started ignoring her, Sinclair had completely abandoned any suspicion that Eloise might be investigating her family.

‘That’s good.’

Eloise recalled the telegrams she had sent to Richard over the past few days.

As she had suspected, she received word that several of the missing books were code books. When she looked up the numbers Richard mentioned, complete sentences emerged, and those pieces of information were quite significant.

Feeling that was enough, Eloise had planned to leave Sinclair’s mansion. But Richard, whom she met at the Capital Council, held her back and pleaded.

“Could you please stay a little longer?”

“It’s… my friend says suspicious individuals around him have increased.”

Richard’s face was much more rigid than usual as he said this.

The army was deliberately not catching them but had assigned people to follow and monitor them.

“They intend to root them out completely this time. So…”

As Richard’s explanation continued, Eloise finally couldn’t hold back and asked about what was bothering her.

“I saw a funeral invitation arrive for Sinclair. So his… no, it seems impossible, but has Richard seen him?”

She couldn’t bring herself to ask if he had seen Ryan’s corpse. Saying the word “corpse” felt like truly acknowledging his death.

At Eloise’s question, Richard hesitated before shaking his head.

“Well… they recovered him, but others haven’t been able to see him. I’ve only heard that Baron Stanford is handling it…”

Without detailed explanation, feeling she could guess the situation from that alone, Eloise nodded without asking further.

Since then, she had been staying here as Richard requested, observing and reporting who was coming and going from the mansion.

Peering outside the window again, Eloise muttered to herself.

“My parents would be in an uproar if they knew.”

Lady Fairfax would be uncomfortable with her daughter leaving home to stay elsewhere.

If so, her parents would have set aside their business and come up to the capital to find Eloise. Lady Fairfax, disliking commotion, would have immediately informed them of her whereabouts.

Eloise briefly looked outside the mansion. What if she sent this last note to Richard and then immediately returned to Feltham?

If she entered distant Feltham and returned to her home, her surprised parents would rush to her. Though startled, they would immediately seat her in the warmest spot and make her drink tea. Then they would ask what on earth had happened, comforting her.

Eloise unconsciously pressed her tingling nose with her hand.

She was enduring in a place where no one cared about her, where she was set aside like a bothersome trinket, having left a place where everyone cherished and loved her.

‘Endure it, this foolish act. But…’

Eloise bit her lip.

This was revenge—the maximum revenge she could exact.

It was certain that Sinclair and those who frequented this place were stealing and passing on Ryan’s information. They must have also passed on information about Ryan.

Anger blazed in her eyes as she looked outside.

She wanted to grab a gun right now and run to the reception room where Sinclair and her so-called friends were gathered. She wanted to place the gun barrel against their foreheads and shout that they should pay for what they had done.

However, having never even killed a rabbit, Eloise couldn’t pull the trigger even in her imagination.

After indulging in the cruelest fantasies she could muster for quite some time, she came to her senses at the sound of a carriage entering from outside.

Eloise finished writing down the appearance and characteristics of the last arriving carriage on paper. She hoped that what she recorded and sent would somehow hinder them.

She saw a servant of the mansion, who had been watching the carriage with his eyes, closing the main gate. It seemed the mansion had no intention of receiving any more guests today.

Eloise folded the paper she had written and tucked it between the pages of a book. She would send it to Richard at an appropriate time.

Even though there was nothing more to observe, Eloise’s gaze wouldn’t leave the outside.

At the end of her line of sight, the black flag hanging in front of the mansion was fluttering.

Seeing that flag, the anger she had momentarily suppressed began to boil over.

‘How shameless.’

She recalled Sinclair wearing black clothes, pretending to mourn Ryan’s death.

At the same time, she also thought of her parents and Emily in Feltham, worrying about her.

As her emotions intensified, shadows fell across Eloise’s face.

The somewhat familiar feeling of helplessness quickly covered her eyes.

Just as her head was about to drop powerlessly, Eloise shook it vigorously.

“Pull yourself together!”

After scolding herself like that, she rose from her seat and approached the table.

There was no use in being depressed alone. To drive away the persistent distracting thoughts, Eloise took out her godmother’s old notebook that she had placed on the table.

“Where did I leave off?”

At first, she had read it half as a pastime, but as the content progressed, Eloise was becoming increasingly immersed in the riddles her godmother had left.

Moreover, the setting of the content was the very mansion she had inherited.

In her godmother’s notebook, “I” unravels the mansion’s secrets while solving riddles.

Initially, she had decided to ignore and skip over parts she couldn’t solve. But then it said [Look at the next problem found there].

Eventually, Eloise stayed up late struggling until she solved the riddle, and the next day, she went to the mansion, entered the room indicated by the solved answer, and obtained a piece of paper from the floor there.

She learned then.

That this mansion in the notebook was a massive tomb.

Since then, outside of the time she spent monitoring people coming and going from Sinclair’s mansion, Eloise devoted herself to solving the riddles in this notebook.

It was good because during that time, she didn’t have to think scattered thoughts, and it was the same now.

Eloise immediately immersed herself in the content.

Now, the “I” in the notebook had moved to the attic and was hiding in the mansion.

Reading that part, Eloise muttered.

“There’s a hidden room in the mansion?”