The Abandoned Duchess Seems to Want a Peaceful Life - Chapter 6

Chapter 6: Past Life and Present Life

From the townhouse in the royal capital to the Oldrand ducal territory, it was a journey of about two weeks by carriage.

On horseback it could have been shortened, but the marriage of a high-ranking noble's daughter was not so simple. With some twenty carriages for the luggage alone, and over forty counting those for the guards and servants, the procession traveled with the preparations, escorts, handmaidens, and attendants appropriate to her family's standing, so its progress naturally became very slow.

As mentioned before, there was distance between Melfina and her family, but the trousseau and dowry were prepared as befitted a daughter of the House of Marquis Crawford. Without such formalities in order, the house's prestige and credibility would suffer, and a plain trousseau would also be an insult to the ducal house receiving it.

Being jostled in a carriage for long hours was honestly trying, but when the journey was past halfway and she had just begun to feel relieved, the party ran into trouble: a long spell of rain. In this world, not every highway was properly maintained, and that was especially true of the stretches between territories. No lord wanted to spend his own money maintaining the border with another domain when putting the budget into his own capital led directly to tax revenue, so it naturally turned out that way.

For long journeys by carriage, schedules were drawn up in advance with leeway for trouble like this. On the other hand, the wedding of two great houses could not be postponed, given the schedules of the nobles attending and the high clergy presiding over the ceremony. Melfina's large party continued on, slowing its pace.

And, as the result of pushing too hard, an accident occurred.

While traveling along a highway at the foot of a mountain, they were caught in a landslide.

Fortunately they avoided a direct hit, but the horses pulling the carriage panicked and the carriage toppled onto its side. Melfina, inside, suffered no serious injury, but she struck her head and lost consciousness for a while.

At that moment, her memories of her previous life came flooding back, and she remembered that the world she had lived in until then closely resembled the game she had played in her previous life.

—This is the world of Maria of the Kingdom of Hearts!

Maria of the Kingdom of Hearts was an otome game set at court, revolving around the saint "Maria," who one day arrives from another world. It included domestic and foreign policy strategy, magical medicine, and light mystery elements, and which capture targets you could pursue changed depending on the route you chose.

The scenario was solid and it was reasonably fun even in Light Mode, but the knowledge it demanded varied by mode (Normal Mode, Hard Mode), and it was often joked on online forums that if you played Hard Mode, by the time you cleared every route you'd be a trivia king.

In the game, Melfina von Oldrand was the villainous young lady who stood in the heroine's way on the route of Alexis von Oldrand, one of the few dukes in the country and also a margrave.

Strictly speaking, she was a duchess, so calling her a "young lady" was odd, but even when Maria descended upon this country two years later, Melfina would still be only eighteen, about the age of a high school student in the Japan where she had lived in her previous life, so she was probably called a young lady on purpose.

On that route, Melfina lived away from the ducal territory, at the townhouse in the royal capital. In this country (Hearts was of course not its official name; it was called the Francesca Kingdom), Melfina was the highest-ranking woman apart from the royal family, and because she stayed in the royal capital without returning to her territory and actively showed her face at the royal family's balls, she was picked to be the court tutor of Saint Maria, the saint sent down by the god.

In the game, Melfina was a character who treated Maria, a saint but of commoner birth, lightly, and sneered, "Can't you even do this?" After the story entered Alexis's route, she turned fierce jealousy on Maria and set up life-threatening bullying against her, the saint, and when it was exposed she fell from power.

Alexis threw divorce papers at her. Her own family, the House of Marquis Crawford, completely abandoned the daughter who had harassed a saint. After the still of Maria, who had melted the heart of the Ice Duke Alexis, nestled against him, a single line stating that she was sent to a harsh convent in a land where blizzards raged all year round was the entire end of the villainess Melfina.

—Melfina was certainly a spiteful character, but now that it's my own body, I find I have plenty to say.

In the game, Melfina was a strong-willed woman, warped and fond of luxury, but she was still a duchess from a marquis's family. A noble marriage was also a contract between houses. Since the church basically forbade divorce, if Melfina had harassed a saint, her husband Alexis too should properly have been held jointly responsible.

Despite that premise, the reason Alexis could divorce Melfina and be united with Maria was that the church recognized divorce for white marriages alone. A white marriage: in other words, in the original game, Alexis and Melfina had never once shared a bed as husband and wife.

Why that was had not been explained in the game. There had been depictions of Alexis disliking Melfina, the spiteful, luxury-loving noblewoman he had accepted reluctantly in a political marriage, and she had vaguely assumed that was the reason, but having actually married Alexis as Melfina, she understood the real one.

Probably Melfina, too, had not been from the start the woman she was in the game, harsh to others, looking down on people, and overbearing. Even though she had not been loved by her parents and unkind rumors had dogged her since childhood, Melfina had at least strived harder than anyone to be worthy of her high status as a marquis's daughter. Just as she herself had been before her memories returned, she must have married with the wish to find happiness in her new home, even having given up on her family.

Alexis had trampled so easily on that wish of Melfina's, which was close to a prayer.

The Melfina of the game, too, was told that he would not love her, that the ducal title would go to his nephew, that she could live anywhere she liked, and surely it was then that her heart broke for good. The restraints that had bound her so tightly came loose, effort began to seem foolish, and though she lived in luxury, her heart was never filled. Gradually she came to keep her balance by lashing out at others and looking down on them, asking why they couldn't even do that, whether they weren't simply not trying hard enough...

And then, jealous of the heroine, who so easily received the affection that had never been given to her, she was ruined.

It was a terrible story even if it were someone else's, but this had happened to her, and was the future that might have come.

Now that she had regained her memories of her previous life, she wanted neither the love of the parents who had pushed Melfina away for their own selfish reasons nor Alexis's love. If they were going to do as they pleased, Melfina had the right to do as she pleased too.

"I was surprised when Cedric turned out to be the bodyguard knight, but if he's a knight of Oldrand now, that means he'll inherit his count's title before the heroine appears, doesn't it?"

In the game, Cedric was the captain of the Royal Palace Knights and also the head of a count's house. Why he was in Oldrand now she did not know, but there must be some circumstance.

"For now, if I stay away from the royal capital for these two years, I should be able to avoid the route where I become the heroine's tutor. I've also gained the lord's position as a precaution, and the famine is coming, so if I say my lord's work is keeping me busy, I shouldn't be forcibly summoned."

If Maria entered Alexis's route, it would end in divorce, but since the post of lord of the Enkar region had been received through a formal written transfer, it should not be taken away from her even after the divorce.

Even if she went back to her family, a divorcee, and a noble daughter who had been unable to bear a child in her first marriage at that, her value would be not merely zero but negative, nothing but a scandal. The most likely outcomes were that she would be handed down through her family as a second wife to a lower noble or a powerful merchant, or put in a convent with a better environment than the one on the condemned route.

Going into a convent was not a bad thing. In a convent with some financial leeway, people lived modestly and brewed liquor and made and sold sweets, or wrote books that survived for posterity, leading a cultured life. At the very least, a nun in a wealthy convent lived a much better life than commoners or peasants.

—But I absolutely refuse to serve the god of a world like this.

Now that she had regained her memories of her previous life, she could clearly understand how unreasonable Melfina's life had been. If a god existed, she could not imagine adoring or revering such a being.

So what should she do? She had a written promise that she could do as she liked. She had no obligation to quietly agree to a divorce, so in that case she would take plenty in alimony, and separately she needed a new status to serve as a reason not to go back to her family.

That was acquiring the ownership of the lands including Enkar Village; in other words, becoming the lord of a small territory.

In a world with a class system, having a title and property meant a reasonable degree of security. By regaining her memories of her previous life, she had become able to look at the life of Melfina von Crawford objectively. She cared nothing for her troublesome family or her husband's house. That was her honest feeling at the moment.

"In case the whole territory gets taken from me, I should save up some cash. If I'm divorced, the dowry's lands and mines will probably be taken back by the House of Marquis Crawford in the end anyway... If it comes to that, I could run a bakery selling white bread in the royal capital and at least manage to live."

Even that was impossible without capital. She had to build assets she could freely use as soon as possible, so that she could survive even if everything was taken from her.

The life of Melfina von Crawford had been one hardship after another from the moment it began.

But she would carve out her future with her own hands.

She would never accept her fate and weep.