Love (?) Letters (1)
A few days had passed since I began taking riding lessons from Dietmeier, and roughly a week had gone by since Ethan and I slew the King Serpent at Princess Seraphin's masquerade ball.
Judging by the rumors drifting down from the imperial palace, the incident at the masquerade seemed to be settling itself out more or less.
The investigation had begun the very night of the palace attack, and by now it was all but confirmed that the demons had been behind it. They were presumably digging into the finer details of the affair at this very moment.
Separate from the investigation, the funeral rites for the fallen palace guards and several servants appeared to have concluded over the three days following the incident. Even Princess Eleonore, who had been abroad attending diplomatic engagements, had rushed back to attend the memorials.
Beyond that, I couldn't say much for certain. I could only assume that Seraphin—the member of the imperial family who had witnessed everything firsthand—was spearheading the effort to tie up all the loose ends.
Well, the specifics had never been covered in the game's story, so there was little I could do about that anyway.
Come to think of it, none of the information I'd gathered so far had come from the game either. It was all simply rumors that drifted my way if I sat still long enough, or tidbits confirmed through the correspondence addressed to Ethan.
As his exclusive personal maid, sorting through the mail that arrived for him was, after all, part of my duties.
Back when he was still the old Ethan, a letter or two about some worthless political marriage arrangement would have been the extent of it.
But given his little moment of heroism, quite a lot of mail had been flying in from every direction since the masquerade incident.
It started with an apology letter from Lizzie of the Auguste family, followed by a friendly greeting from Orion saying he'd like to build a closer acquaintance, and on top of all that, letters from various noble ladies now seriously inquiring about Ethan as a prospective fiancé.
I'd expected as much to some degree, but apparently showing his face at an official function had done wonders for his image.
After all, whispers had quietly circulated that Ethan Blackwood was the stunted, pig-faced brat of the Blackwood ducal house. In fact, shortly after he first awoke from his curse, a veritable parade of people had come by the estate just to gawk and confirm it with their own eyes.
Even that had been limited to power-hungry frontier nobles twisting their own daughters' arms toward him via marriage correspondence—and that was it. Not once had a young lady herself ever written saying she wished to meet him in person or hoped to court him.
"Not a bad haul today either, huh."
Looking at the envelope sealed with a heart-shaped wax stamp, I could feel the sender's brazen intentions seeping right through the paper before I'd even broken the seal.
And so there I was, carefully slicing each stamp off with a letter knife and checking the contents one by one. My apologies to the young ladies whose love letters were getting pre-read by someone other than their intended recipient—but it's my job, so what can you do?
In truth, only about ten percent of these letters ever made it into Ethan's hands. For the rest, I would read through them, summarize the gist, and explain it to him myself.
...Just to be clear, in case anyone was wondering—I was absolutely not cutting these out of jealousy over other women flocking to Ethan. I simply handled them because he had no time to sit and read every single one.
At this point, my job extended to even penning "polite replies" to the noble ladies who'd sent them. Ethan was flat-out swamped between sword training and his etiquette classes.
The mere thought of what flowery language I'd have to deploy to reject this next one made my head swim.
"...The Barbork count family—hmm, they weren't a completely irrelevant house in the story, so I should set this one aside and show it to Ethan. ...Baron Verco's family? Now where on earth is that?"
No matter how sheltered and green a young lady might be, I couldn't believe a baron's daughter had the gall to send a love letter so boldly proposing marriage.
Naturally, letters like that could only receive a blanket rejection.
The idea of the young master of Blackwood—one of the most powerful ducal houses—getting engaged to the daughter of some baron family nobody had ever heard of was simply beyond common sense.
Well, technically Harold's wife Tanacia was from a frontier viscount family if you wanted to nitpick, but that marriage came with its own story—they'd met at the Academy and fallen in love the proper way.
Besides, even if I did show it to Ethan, the odds were overwhelmingly good that he'd refuse anyway. Only recently he'd had me write a rejection letter in response to what was presumed to be a friendly exchange letter from a duke's daughter, no less.
Granted, since the sender was a duke's daughter, that particular reply was drafted by Ethan himself rather than ghostwritten by me.
The conversation we'd had about it two days prior had gone more or less like this:
"Here are all the letters from the high nobility, Master Ethan."
"Ah, right. Thanks for sorting them again today, Lilith."
"...And the correspondence over here consists of letters from daughters of viscount families and below. Shall I draft rejection replies as I did before?"
"Yes, please take care of that side too. I should count myself lucky my maid knows how to read and write."
With that, Ethan had pulled out the one letter from the Brimton ducal family's daughter among the stack and reread it.
Thinking it might just become his fiancée after all, I couldn't help but test the waters a little.
"The Brimton daughter comes from a fairly prestigious house, if I recall. It was a letter of friendly acquaintance rather than an outright marriage proposal, as I remember it—but even if Your Grace has no interest in marriage itself, might it not be worth meeting her once?"
"...Hm? Ah, this letter? I appreciate the advice, but I'll be sending a firm reply to this one too. We're both busy people, and drawing a clear line is better than forcing time out of our schedules and giving her false hope for nothing."
"...I see."
"...What's the matter, Lilith? Don't tell me you're interested in my fiancée position?"
"As a servant, the correct answer would be to claim I harbor no such curiosity... But if I'm being honest, it's not as though I have none at all."
"R-really, Lilith...?"
Why was he suddenly so baffled that I might wonder who his fiancée would be?
Isn't that a perfectly natural question for an ordinary servant to ask? She might, after all, become the wife of the very person you serve.
At any rate, I genuinely was curious, so I gave my honest answer without bothering to deny it.
"Yes. As your exclusive maid, it's only natural to wonder who will one day become the lady of the house."
"Ah, ah... so that's the kind of interest you meant..."
"But Master Ethan, if you would refuse even a marriage letter from a duke's daughter... might it be that you have someone of even higher station in mind as a romantic prospect?"
"...What is that supposed to mean?"
"The thought occurred to me that perhaps you've taken an interest in Princess Seraphin, so I felt I had to ask. True, I only saw her behind a mask last time—but even through that mask, her beauty was breathtaking. With a status and appearance like yours, Master, you might well be able to pursue a serious relationship with someone of her caliber..."
"N-nothing of the sort, Lilith! There is nothing between me and Princess Seraphin!"
That's what he said with his mouth, but who knows what he harbored in his heart.
I mean, it was Seraphin we were talking about. Unlike Lilith, who merely ranked within the top three of the user popularity polls, Seraphin was a character whose beauty was literally official—canonically stated to be gorgeous, full stop.
She possessed a beauty on an entirely different fundamental level from Lilith, who among the nobility at best earned the appraisal of "a fairly decent-looking maid."
That was why I'd asked, half-wondering whether Ethan, having actually laid eyes on her that day, hadn't been utterly enchanted by her. The answer that came back was colder than I'd expected.
"I'll agree that Princess Seraphin is a great beauty, but that's not why I'm avoiding an engagement."
"Is that so?"
"I'm not taking a fiancée because I have a different goal. Others may misunderstand if they like, but I'd at least like you not to, Lilith."
"...Understood. If you say so, Master Ethan, I shall refrain from speculating further about your reasons for not taking a fiancée."
"Right. Thank you, Lilith."
I had no idea what this "different goal" of his was, but he'd denied it was Seraphin with his own mouth—hardly something I could argue with by saying, actually, I think it is.
And so the engagement talk Ethan and I had wrapped up two days ago concluded on that note.
Reviving the memory of that day, I worked my way through the rest of the correspondence that had arrived for Ethan, letter by letter.
Could it be that he's interested in something like a love marriage instead of a political one?
A political marriage between noble houses was, by definition, a union dictated by mutual interest and nothing more.
In practice, though, it wasn't at all uncommon for students at the Academy—even nobles—to marry for love.
The most representative example was the one I'd just mentioned: Ethan's father Harold and Tanacia. And if Ethan had grown up inheriting his father's temperament, maybe he'd developed a bit of a romantic notion about it too.
Blood will tell, as they say—so perhaps Ethan, too, was entertaining some fantasy that unlike a political marriage, only someone he'd come to know through genuine courtship could earn his true love.
Well, whoever Ethan dates and whoever he marries is really none of my concern.
...Still, family pedigree matters quite a bit, so she ought to be at least a certain size, so to speak. At minimum, the daughter of a count's family, I'd say.
And looks matter too. Ethan's face hardly needs to bow its head anywhere, so surely she should be pretty enough that no one calls him the lucky one—wait, reverse that—at least pretty enough not to be called beneath him. She didn't need to be a peerless beauty on the level of Nathalie or Seraphin, but at the very least she should be sub-heroine tier.
And personality counts for quite a lot as well. Someone with Lizzie's calculating, transactional nature felt a touch unsettling. A high-maintenance type like Katharina would be utterly exhausting as a fiancée. Someone as sweet and agreeable as Isabel would be ideal, honestly.
But as long as a candidate met these minimal standards, it genuinely didn't matter to me who became Ethan's fiancée. It wasn't as though I'd be spending the rest of my life doting on him anyway.
I was sorting through the day's correspondence with those thoughts drifting through my head when I came across a letter bearing a decidedly bizarre name.
"The Viscount Peschinar family...?"
What was with this strange, awkward-sounding family name?
The surname had an off-kilter feel to it, as if it didn't belong in a medieval fantasy setting, and my head tilted of its own accord.
And yet, far from being a name I'd never heard before, something about it itched at the back of my mind.
The fact that it gave me this feeling meant that at some point, somewhere in the game, I had seen a character bearing this surname.
If it was one of those half-baked names that felt like an anagram cobbled together from existing words—then surely...
"Oh."
There it was. I remembered. The Viscount Peschinar family.
No wonder the name had struck my ear as odd the moment I read it.
For the simple reason that the Viscount Peschinar family was a fictitious house—a family that did not actually exist anywhere in this world.