BPOTWC Chapter 7

Maximilian checked the northern wall, then gave up sleep entirely and rode straight through to dawn, making it back to the manor in a single night.

Even he couldn't understand why he was rushing this badly.

One of the knights following him had smiled slyly and said, "Well, I suppose Her Ladyship will be waiting for you," but Maximilian found nothing in himself that agreed.

From the very start, there'd been no chance she'd wait up for him. The uncomfortable look on her face, every time they happened to cross paths, made that much plain.

And yet he pressed on toward home.

He could have just told himself that he wanted to—left it at that. Instead he went digging for a proper excuse.

'Understood. But you'd better come back quickly, all right? You did promise everyone a banquet.'

Quentin's words made for a convenient shield.

Right. He'd promised them a banquet.

He muttered that to himself, for no reason he could account for, and gripped the reins tighter.

He arrived at the manor in the earliest hours of dawn.

Since he had sent no word ahead, only a few servants came scrambling to the entrance to meet him.

He was not a man who fussed over appearances, so he handed off his coat without ceremony and stepped inside.

Word must have reached her in a hurry, because his wife came rushing out as well, her face still creased with interrupted sleep.

"Oh—oh, you've come."

Naturally, there was nothing in her tone that resembled welcome.

"Yes."

A year apart, and still there was nothing much to say. Not that there'd ever been much to say between them, anyway.

That she had managed the castle properly in his absence was clear from the entrance hall alone.

Maximilian considered, for a moment, whether he ought to thank the small woman standing barely as tall as his chest—and then thought better of it, and closed his mouth.

No sense making things more awkward than they already were.

"Well, then," he said quietly, and turned to go.

"Ah—um—!"

For once, it was she who called him back.

In the whole of their marriage, this had scarcely happened before, and he stopped short, faintly thrown.

"……?"

"Ah—the child—"

Her voice had dropped so low that Maximilian had to bend at the waist to catch it at all.

"Please help her. …… I'm sorry."

"May I answer this question, Your Grace?"

Just as Clarisse asked this, her amber eyes wide and round.

Maximilian looked over what the child was wearing, and where she stood, and understood exactly what his wife had meant by help her.

"Y—Your Grace!"

The maid, spotting him a beat too late, went white as paper.

'That maid…….'

Maximilian remembered at once that she was one his wife had brought from her own family, the House of Count Darlington.

She had never left his wife's side, which was likely why he remembered her face at all.

'…….'

A tangle of feeling rose in him all at once.

His wife's own maid—that she was that kind of… creature.

"Oh—there's been a misunderstanding, Your Grace. I was only asking whether you might have brought back a guest of some kind……"

The maid bowed low, offering her excuse.

"Is that so."

"That's truly all there was to it. And yet the young miss carries on like I'd asked her something dreadful—as if I were in the wrong?"

"She is not a young lady. She is a prisoner."

At that answer, Betsy's head came up, beaming.

The Duke called her "young miss" only because he troubled himself to look after her—but Betsy hadn't the slightest hair's worth of intention to treat some fallen kingdom's leftover princess as anyone above her.

And since the Duke plainly showed her no particular pity either, Betsy felt sure of it—he'd trust his wife's own maid before he'd trust her.

"Yes, just so. Some no-good scrap left over from Grezekaia. A defiant little thing besides—she's given me no end of trouble. I was just about to knock some manners into her, right here——"

Betsy could not finish the sentence. She had to bow her head lower still, because the Duke's gaze had gone suddenly, sharply cold.

Only his eyes upon her, and already she felt she could not breathe.

"You think the law's a joke?"

"Y—yes……?"

"Clarisse Lennon Grezekaia must survive, healthy, to eighteen."

He gave the wretched room one brief glance, then turned his glare back on Betsy.

"And yet I find her in a room with no fireplace. If the prisoner catches a chill and something happens to her, will you climb the scaffold in her place?"

"No! I never meant to do this myself……"

A flash of quick wit struck her.

"It was—it was the Duchess who ordered it this way!"

"……."

The Duke said nothing.

He only pressed her beneath his gaze with a weight darker still.

"The—the Duchess…… gave me the order……"

She seemed to grasp at once that he did not believe her, and her voice began to shrink smaller and smaller.

Maximilian gave a light gesture to the knights who had followed him in.

"Take her to the dungeon."

"Y—Your Grace!"

Betsy startled and screamed.

But he paid no attention, and calmly recited her offense.

"She has broken the law and defied a royal order, and now she casts a false charge upon her own mistress besides."

"……!"

As two knights caught her by either arm, another servant, just returned from the garden, came forward to hand the Duke a filthy pouch.

It was the very one Betsy had flung out the window a short while before.

"It was lying beneath the window, Your Grace."

The Duke took it, his brow creasing as he fixed his glare on her once more.

"…… And on top of that—did you mean to kill my guest?"

"Y—yes?"

A guest.

She only blinked, uncomprehending, and the Duke held the pouch of pebbles out to her.

"A guest."

"That's—that's gravel, Your Grace."

"No. It's Mallangie."

"Sir?"

"Four of them make up one Mallangie."

The Duke added this as though pointing out a matter of some importance.

Betsy, of course, understood not a word of it.

"Take her away."

At the Duke's order, the knights dragged the struggling maid off toward the dungeon.

The household's mood turned grim, almost menacing, after the Duchess's maid was punished.

The servants wondered whether the Duke might hold the rest of them to account as well, for failing to stop Betsy's outrages.

If nothing else, he was a man who genuinely valued the keeping of law and royal command.

But he punished no one besides Betsy.

Instead, the very first thing he set himself to was improving Clarisse's circumstances.

He assigned her a trustworthy maid, Rosalie.

She had begun her service at eighteen and was now, this year, a veteran of fifty-two.

The Duke had once tried to make her head housekeeper of the manor, but she had insisted, of her own will, on remaining an ordinary maid.

"This child is a prisoner. There's no need to attend her as you would a young lady."

The perceptive maid smiled gently and answered her master.

"Yes, but even so, a small child needs a grown-up's hand."

"Just so. And as for her clothes……"

He looked Clarisse's worn dress up and down.

The sleeves hung loose, the fabric thin—more than enough for her to catch a chill, or take a fall.

'To have her dressed in such a thing.'

Maximilian felt a certain relief that he had hurried home when he had.

If a child this small had endured even two days of Sheridan's cold in nothing but this, she was bound to have fallen ill.

Sensing his worry, Clarisse spoke up at once.

"I'm fine!"

Clarisse didn't want to trouble the man who'd spared her life over something as small as clothes. It'd only be a bother to him, after all.

"I'll need to get her something good and fluffy-furred, then."

"Is—is that Sheridan's prisoner's uniform?"

"Mm. Something like that."

The Duke frowned briefly, lost in thought.

In truth, a fur-lined coat was nothing like a prisoner's uniform.

But if he gave a child this susceptible to cold an actual prisoner's uniform, she would freeze to death long before she turned eighteen.

"That's the sort of thing it is, yes."

He decided simply to leave it there, and nodded.

What mattered was not what she wore, but that Clarisse's treatment here be made unmistakably clear.

"You will be held prisoner here, a captive of war, until you are eighteen."

He gave the warning so that she would not forget the fact, whatever else happened.

"I'll behave quietly. I won't have a birthday party."

Clarisse answered with the terms already agreed upon between them, and the Duke nodded, satisfied. He had no objection to a clever child.

"Good. Nothing can be allowed to happen to you before then."

After that, Maximilian provided Clarisse with what could only be called "a prison in which she might grow to eighteen without incident."

The room—so undeservedly grand it left her mortified with gratitude—sat close by the Duke and Duchess's own chambers; a child's room that would, under ordinary circumstances, have gone to whatever son or daughter was eventually born into the ducal line.

"It's—it's far too grand for me. It's more than I deserve, Your Grace."

"Consider its true nature."

The Duke calmly explained his reasoning for choosing this particular room.

"It sits two floors up, which prevents you from escaping through the window."

"I won't run away."

"Even so, having taken charge of a prisoner, I must prepare for every possibility. And the second-floor corridor is guarded by soldiers at all hours."

The Duke, looking pleased with himself all over again, took up more of the firewood heaped at the room's edge and fed it into the fireplace.

The fire caught and roared higher, throwing off warmth.

"Which is to say—this room is, without question, the most perfect prison Sheridan Castle has to offer for the housing of a prisoner."

"A perfect…… prison."

Just as Clarisse was murmuring the phrase after him, Rosalie arrived with a thick cotton quilt and held it out for the Duke's inspection.

He felt the quilt himself, then gave a nod.

"Better to switch it for something lighter. It would hardly do for her to be crushed under a heavy quilt before she's turned eighteen."