The Abandoned Duchess Seems to Want a Peaceful Life - Chapter 11

Chapter 11: The Handmaiden's Circumstances

"Lady Melfina, may I have permission to speak?"

While she and Cedric glared at each other, neither giving an inch, Marie raised a hand slightly. When Melfina nodded, "Go ahead," Marie turned her pale blue eyes straight on her.

"I too am in His Grace's employ and serve Lady Melfina, but would it be possible for me to leave the service of the ducal house and change jobs to work for you here?"

"What—Marie, you!"

"Cedric, Marie is speaking with me right now."

As a knight he would not do anything like grabbing at a woman, but the sheer force of his anger was something. Marie, however, did not spare Cedric a single glance and kept a cool expression.

She hadn't expected Marie to say such a thing, and couldn't gauge her intent. She had sensed faint goodwill from Marie, but proposing a change of employer was another matter entirely.

"Marie, I hate to say it, but I can't recommend that. Being a servant of the ducal house means you must have a quite reputable guarantor, doesn't it?"

Anyone serving in a noble household needed, to a greater or lesser degree, a guarantor of sound standing. If the employer was a ducal house, it was not unusual for the person to be related by blood to the nobility.

Leaving her post as the handmaiden to the duchess, hired by the ducal house, to serve Melfina, lord of the Enkar region. Lord she might be, but the Enkar region was literally at the edge of the country, a territory still in the middle of being opened up. Put kindly, it had nothing but room to grow, but its master was the head of a small frontier land that a puff of wind could blow away.

The size of the house a servant served was directly that servant's status. A handmaiden in a ducal household held a position from which she could even hope for a lesser noble as a marriage partner.

Marie answered Melfina's words in a quiet voice.

"Lady Melfina. My father was a retainer of the former Duke, and my mother was his second wife, nearly thirty years his junior. When my father stayed at the ducal house, he always brought my mother with him, they say. And so I was born."

Marie's hair was a very, very pale blonde. Depending on the light, it could even look silver.

The narrow, cool eyes, the pale blue of her irises. It was strange that she hadn't noticed until she was told.

—She looks like him. Like Alexis.

Marie must have understood that Melfina had realized it; what rose to her face was a bitter smile, tinged with old resentment and quite unlike her.

"My father already had two sons and a daughter by the wife before my mother. I suppose I was not particularly needed at my family home; I spent time with my parents until I was five, and a year after my younger brother was born, I went into service at the ducal house as a handmaiden apprentice, where I was given the chance to learn education and etiquette.

Even after leaving home, I had occasion to see my mother and my younger brother now and then, but with my father, when I went into service, I was only told to serve the ducal house faithfully, and nothing more."

She did not say it outright, but anyone would understand, having been hinted at this far.

Marie was the former Duke's illegitimate child, and Alexis's half-sister.

It was not only her looks; her composed features, which showed so little expression, and her cool air shared much with Alexis.

It was not unusual for daughters of nobles and lesser nobles to go into service at a house of higher standing to learn manners, but they generally started around the rank of senior maid apprentice. To be treated as a handmaiden apprentice from the start was proof of how specially she had been regarded.

A handmaiden is a woman who serves the daughter or the lady of the house. Nominally she looks after her personal needs, but in essence she is closer to an assistant, a being set apart from ordinary servants.

She is like an older sister who assists a younger sister bearing a noble's responsibilities, and depending on the noble house she serves, she may even be treated almost as a young lady of the house.

What was more, the House of Oldrand had long been without a lady of the house, since the former Duke had not remarried after Alexis's mother died, and Alexis himself had stayed single until marrying Melfina only the other day.

To have taken her in as a handmaiden in a house with no lady to serve meant that, illegitimate though she was, they had wanted to guarantee her a life close to that of the nobility.

And so Melfina could also understand why Marie had been chosen as the handmaiden of Melfina, who had newly come as the wife of the head of the house.

Unofficial though it was, Marie had been the person closest to being the lady of the House of Duke Oldrand.

"I understand the circumstances, more or less. But that makes me all the more unable to see why you would leave the ducal house."

"My father and mother are both dead, my brother lives in the royal capital, and I am estranged from my half-siblings who inherited the family. I have served the ducal house for over ten years, so I don't think leaving now would disgrace my guarantor."

"That's not what I meant..."

If Alexis had kept treating Marie as a handmaiden just as in the former Duke's day, he must have meant to treat her as a half-sister.

Assigning her to Melfina was probably not only meant as a model and a watcher for the lady of the house. He might also have intended that if Melfina moved to the townhouse in the royal capital, Marie would have the chance to see her younger brother, or would accompany Melfina in and out of the royal palace.

Marie was in the bloom of her youth, possessed of the cool beauty peculiar to the north, and held the position of handmaiden to a duchess. She might well catch the eye of a noble or civil official who frequented the palace, and for a noble with any sharpness it would not be hard to look into her connection with Alexis.

And thinking about it that way, Cedric was in the same position. His family was a line of Counts Palatine, and the royal capital was, if anything, close to home for him. As Melfina's bodyguard knight going in and out of the palace, it would have been easy for him to keep up contact with his family.

—Surely not even Alexis imagined that Melfina would take the two of them and settle down at the edge of a frontier like this.

For a young lady born to a pleasure-loving marquis's wife and laughed at as being of dubious origin, it was certainly an unconventional move. Of course she cared nothing for Alexis's intentions, and whatever she felt toward the two of them, as for Alexis, she did not entirely fail to think it served him right that his plans had gone awry.

"Um, so, why do you want to change jobs?"

"I'm not cut out to be a handmaiden."

She had wondered if it was because Marie hated being treated as an illegitimate child, or found it stifling, but Marie declared it plainly.

"While the servant girls my own age worked until their hands were chapped, I was put in a servants' uniform and made only to watch, which made me uncomfortable. And I had no real wish to learn the manners and education of a young lady that I would never actually use. I had no interest in pretty dresses; I would much rather have worn cotton clothes, made friends, and bought snacks in town on my days off."

Both Cedric and I stared at Marie in astonishment.

Since they had met, Marie had been a beautiful girl with refined features and little expression, and for that reason the impression of coolness, of someone not easily moved by things, had been strong. Melfina had never imagined she was thinking such things inside.

"Besides, Lady Melfina, though you yourself don't mind, you won't let me do wet work. I know it's because you considered my being a 'handmaiden.'

And yet you yourself say there's no use putting on airs as a duchess here... I was envious of that."

"Well, there's nothing to be envious of, you know? If anything, for a noble wife, being told by her husband to do as she pleases wherever she likes is rather an insult."

"Treating someone who is not really the daughter of the house as a young lady, in name only, is also an insult to people of all different standings."

Among the servants, yet not a servant. Treated as a young lady, yet not one.

One couldn't know without being in that position, but in the sense of having no fitting place to belong, there might well be something in common with a wife her husband hadn't wanted.

"The day when I become a duke's daughter will never come. And even if I married into some noble house, in the end I would be in the position of a commoner servant whom a noble had graciously taken in.

And if, being a handmaiden, I married a commoner, it would lower the value of the ducal house's other unmarried servants... To me, all of that is a nuisance."

It could be dismissed as a luxurious worry.

This might be an otome game world, but it was a place where people really lived. Many commoners other than nobles were poor, and it was not rare for them to starve or die without being able to get treatment for illness.

A position where one wore fine clothes, ate good food, and even had the right to choose a wealthy man was by no means easy to come by.

But the sixteen years Melfina had lived told her that this alone was not enough.

Even living as a marquis's daughter with no connection to poverty, Melfina, unloved by her parents, had always been miserable somewhere inside. To shake that off, she had studied desperately and conducted herself as a noble woman.

Even if she could not win her parents' love, she had been thinking positively that she would put what she had learned to use in her new home, yet immediately after the wedding ceremony, the man who had become her husband had denied all of it.

The Melfina of the original had nothing left to support her but the pride that had so desperately held her up. And then there appeared before her the innocent, beautiful Saint Maria, who knew nothing of noble education or etiquette, yet was loved by everyone... even by the husband who had rejected her.

The groundwork that made Melfina a villainess had been cultivated by the people around her, everyone but Melfina. And yet the responsibility fell on Melfina alone.

In the original, the hero and heroine were united and the curtain fell on a happily-ever-after. But Melfina's life, forced into a harsh existence at a convent far away, went on from there.

Outside of Alexis's route, Melfina was a character with no particular role. Even "I" had no way of knowing that future, but had she lived as a pleasure-loving duchess who failed her duty to bear a child, indulging in society and luxury in the royal capital and gnawing on an unfulfilled heart?

What had Melfina felt, on Alexis's route, upon hearing that her husband and the saint had been united...?

"If that is what Marie wants, I don't mind. What position? A maid? Or do you have something else in mind?"

Besides maids, the women servants she could think of were nursemaids, governesses, and then cooks. She didn't need a nursemaid or a governess, and Marie must have known well that there was no demand for them.

For the first time, Marie wore a hesitant expression. She looked down at her lap once, glanced at Melfina, and then raised her face as if making up her mind.

"If possible, I would like to be Lady Melfina's secretary."

"Secretary..."

"I can read, write, and do sums. Since there was no one for me to serve as handmaiden, I helped with the work of the head maid and the butler, so I can keep ledgers and manage supplies. I want to help Lady Melfina, who is lord here."

"That would be... a huge help!"

She couldn't help leaning forward. It was unseemly conduct for a noble, but she was pushed forward and could not help doing so.

"I'll make your salary as close to what it is now as I can. I would very much like to have you, Marie."

"...Thank you."

Marie, who was always cool and nearly expressionless, smiled softly. Since her features were beautiful to begin with, when she smiled it was as if a white flower had bloomed.

"I will do my best to live up to your expectations, Lady Melfina."

"Yes, I look forward to working with you, Marie."

They looked at each other for a while, then at the same moment grew embarrassed and looked away.

For Melfina, who had never had a close friend of her own age and sex, it was a very unfamiliar but pleasant kind of bashfulness.

—Oh my, somehow the matter of Cedric has ended up left hanging.

Well, returning to the ducal capital or remaining with Melfina to devote himself to watching her was not something he could decide on the spot.

Cedric was by nature an extremely serious knight.

Surely, when told by the person he guarded to return to the ducal capital, he would not go so far as to resort to violence against those around her.

She would watch how things went for a while, and let him choose again then.