Night Duty
I woke from a deep, unhurried sleep and found it was ten in the morning.
I would have liked to lie there a little longer, but Euphemia would not stop squirming in my arms, and that made it impossible. I told her to keep still. She only threw the words back at me and thrashed, as if to make a show of it.
"Even a worm wriggles when you step on it. What do you expect from a person? If you've got a complaint, let go of me and then sleep."
Living with me, she seemed to have taken the measure of how far she could push without real consequence. Even so, I thought it did no harm to break that frame now and then. I sent the maids away and stepped into the bath with her.
I had already shown her every inch of me when our bodies were joined, and yet a woman, for some reason, finds the nakedness on display in a bathroom unbearably shameful. Euphemia was no different. She had grumbled without end—that I was petty, that I was small-hearted, that I was sly and perverted. Of course, the moment I drew her into my arms in the great tub where fragrant oil had been loosened into the water, that prattling mouth snapped shut.
"Wh-why do you have it standing..."
It did not last. Before long she grew restless and spoke in a very small voice.
"Y-you said you wouldn't lust after something like me at all hours..."
There were no maids in the bath itself, but they were waiting beyond the door. If I took her, the raw sound of it would surely leak outside. That was why she was keeping her distance.
"Well. A bath makes the cleanup simple, so..."
I let the sentence trail away, the object left out.
Euphemia shook her head hard and lurched upright in my arms. Did she mean to show off her figure? Water ran down the groove of her spine, and the pale, full backside—just the right size to fill a hand—looked indecently ripe.
"Ah!"
I had no intention of letting her flee to the far corner. As she tried to move forward I caught her slender ankle and held it fast. She lost her balance, staggered, and barely caught herself, stopping with her torso half bent in an awkward crouch.
It was hard to believe she was twenty-one. Her sex, filled out past plump into a soft, heavy ripeness, gleamed where it held the water mixed with fragrant oil. Above it, a shyly closed chrysanthemum caught my eye.
"Putting your backside in a man's face is a bit much, even between husband and wife. Hardly modest of you, Euphemia."
She flinched. The sigh of relief died as she grasped the situation at last; color flooded her face and she turned. Both openings, above and below, clenched tight in the same startled instant, and the sight was well worth seeing. A faint smile touched my mouth. I knew exactly how that smile would look to her, so I deliberately left the corner of it lifted.
"Don't get me hard for nothing. Come here quietly and sit."
"Euphemia."
"I'm coming... I am!"
She came back to my side throwing up spray on purpose. Water leapt in every direction, as if it were speaking for her, and soaked my face without mercy. When she reached me and saw the water dripping from my chin, she seemed to think she had gone too far, and hesitated without sitting.
Standing right in front of me like that—did she truly not know where a man's eyes would fall?
I swept my wet bangs back and spoke flatly.
"Color and shape are both beyond reproach, so sit. How long do you mean to keep showing me that place as if you want me looking?"
She dropped down in a panic, and I had to wipe the splash from my face all over again.
"Euphemia. Don't wear a man out."
"If we'd washed separately, none of this would've happened..."
Her voice had gone noticeably flat. I drew her gently into my arms. She had not a thread on her, and we were in a tub full of warm water; wherever skin met skin, it clung with naked frankness.
"D-don't pant like that. Y-you keep jabbing my navel..."
"Be quiet and stay still. You're noisy."
I let a little displeasure into it and tightened my hold. She patted at my back as if she could not breathe, but in time she seemed to understand that even that was pointless. The strength went out of her, and she leaned into me at ease.
In the lavish bath, nothing sounded but the two of us breathing. No—there was another sound. From Euphemia's breast, pressed close, a faint heartbeat reached me. Thump. Thump. And that beat, following a mind and body as they slowly settled, began to fall in with my own.
It was nothing, really. And yet with my eyes closed in the warm water, holding a woman whose heart kept time with mine, I felt something in me being quietly healed.
"Nnh..."
When I gave a light bite to the earlobe of the woman whose face was buried in my shoulder, the heart that had steadied began to race again at once. It gave me the illusion that I ruled the most important part of her. Her heart.
Euphemia El Lorraine Ruerug.
Yes. She was mine. Not to be handed to anyone.
......
Had I let myself be too drunk on it? I drove out Perzen's self—the will that had swallowed my mind like a tide—came back to myself, and let her go. We still had to wash.
"Today... you said you won't come back?"
"That's right."
Over a late breakfast—lunch, in truth—I told Euphemia how the day would go. She said nothing.
On a day without me, would she feel the freedom of bonds undone? Or, passing the night alone in this vast house, would she feel a vicious loneliness? People are social animals whether they wish to be or not. Like it or not, it was I who had shared warmth with her every night, as if to make her understand she was not alone.
Either way, it hardly matters...
Still, I hoped for the latter. When the meal was done I rose and went in to the Academy.
"Fifteen of them...! Every one of them but a single student came to me and insisted the desks and chairs in the lecture hall be replaced at once!"
The moment I arrived I went to the department office and faced the administrative assistant I had brushed aside yesterday. He was near tears, and the complaint spilled out of him at once. A low-ranking clerk of the imperial administration; that was surely why he had been posted here. Noble children, their houses at their backs, had taken turns pressing him to correct their discomfort on the spot. The strain must have been no small thing. He said only that they had offered their suggestions meekly, but those suggestions had likely been something close to violence—words used, ever so quietly, to bear down.
"What's your name?"
"A-Alphonse, sir..."
"Right. Alphonse. From now on, if any of them ask about replacing the desks, tell them to come to my office themselves."
"Ah... ah..."
That he might use my name as a shield. For Alphonse, it seemed moving enough to bring tears.
"And... before you send them to the office, would you mention that my wife designed those desks herself?"
"What?"
"No need to wonder about it."
"Y-yes, sir..."
Puzzlement stayed in his eyes, but he worried over it no further. Simply being free of students coming to him about the desks would be happiness enough. I turned and started for the faculty office on the fourth floor.
There was nothing elaborate in the order I had given him. Euphemia was plainly wearing thin under the boredom, and I had been thinking of taking her on later as an assistant for the classes and keeping her beside me. Turn the ill will of the students who hated the fixed desks onto her, and give her as much of the work that faced those students as I could—attendance, notices of cancelled lectures, exam proctoring, the small labor of preparing a class—and some of them would snap at her. She would not be a professor. An assistant who handled only the supplementary tasks would be the easiest person to bite.
She was, of course, the wife of Brutein's second son, so at first they would watch their step. Give them a pretext that they need not, and that would be the end of it. The clever ones would believe that a man devoted enough to adopt desks of his own wife's design could never let her mistreatment pass in a blur...
Let them believe it. That's enough.
Euphemia, knowing none of this, would have her pride scraped down as far as it would go and come lamenting to me. Hear that lament in moderation, coax her, soothe her—two birds with one stone, was it not? Wicked, yes. But to a villain, wickedness was simply wisdom.
Hoping Alphonse would play his part and play it soon, I arrived before the office and found Lizzie there, a corpse under Enslavement pushing her wheelchair.
She caught the sound of my steps as well, turned her head, and our eyes met at once.
"Do you have business with me, Lizzie Paul Liana Claudia?"
It was the fourth floor of the main building, but it was not as if no one passed through. The way she had trembled then, as if in a fit, at the sight of me must have been because the two of us had met with no one else around. Only a guess—but this meeting made it certain.
"I came... to make restitution."
"Restitution?"
"You never said you'd take the suit jacket back..."
"I don't need it. Go."
"No."
Shirt, trousers, and jacket are a set. When I returned home that day I had disposed of the shirt and the trousers as well. Taking the jacket back would mean nothing.
"Lizzie Paul Liana Claudia. When I got home that day, I threw out the shirt and the trousers too. So if you truly mean to make it up to me, those as well..."
"I'll do it. So please tell me the measurements."
"Do you say that knowing the suit is from Azalea?"
Azalea—where tailors called first-rate handled only the finest cloth, and accepted nothing but commissions. Even a commission was impossible unless one was a member. Its name needed no defense: it alone supplied the imperial garments worn on state occasions. What, then, must such a thing be worth?
Even with the money, House Claudia, not yet bound to House Alfred, could not step through Azalea's door. If she asked Uriel to do it in her place, Uriel would grant it. From the look of her now, she did not want to hold her hand out that way.
"Even so...!"
"Fine. If you mean to be stubborn, do as you like."
I opened the office, went in, took a sheet of paper, wrote the exact measurements, and gave it to her.
"There is no deadline. If you change your mind along the way, you needn't make restitution at all. Give it a little time and I will have forgotten the matter completely, so you needn't worry."
"E-even if you forget, Professor... I will make restitution. I will."
She tucked the paper into her bosom and turned the chair. Watching her back, I forced open a mouth that did not want to move.
"Lizzie Paul Liana Claudia."
"Your leg. Is it all right?"
She glanced back. In the violet eyes that met mine, the feeling was plain. A vicious loathing, and contempt.
"What you just said... I'll pretend I didn't hear it."
The door shut.
Yes. A clumsy apology, at this point, was never going to take with her. I had said it knowing it would mean nothing.
The Marquisate of Brutein—a house that has always walked the middle path. That tradition, carried down through a long age, is an overwhelming worth that brightens Brutein's nobility. It cannot be damaged. If anyone tried to soil it, even Jeremiah, head of the house, would surely stand against it.
But...
My name now was Ruerug. For a noble, a justification is a weapon more important than armor. Thoughts of one kind and another multiplied, on a quiet afternoon.