That Miserable Goodness
That flimsy, so-called goodness. That cheap, nauseating sense of duty that he might have sired a child. As if that sort of thing could ever be an excuse....
Fifth-floor corridor of the Grand Duke's Castle.
In the holiest sanctuary of the mansion, a place so private that only the Arteta Grand Duke family—and even then, only with the head of the house’s permission—was allowed to set foot there, the sound of an unwelcome guest’s footsteps rang out with infuriating confidence.
“My, this room is quite cozy and lovely. Thank you for your consideration, Your Grace.”
Led by Grand Duke Gareth, Helena, who had been assigned a vacant room at the far end of the fifth floor, smiled sweetly and spoke in a voice so soft it might have belonged at a ladies’ salon.
Rebecca, watching the scene from behind, had long since burned to ashes inside.
Her husband had brought another woman into the castle.
Worse, he had brought her not to the third floor, where the guest rooms were, but all the way into the private quarters of the fifth floor, where their daughter Veronica breathed and slept.
“......Well, now that the room has been shown to you, I should be going downstairs.”
Gareth cleared his throat, studiously avoiding Helena’s gaze, then turned in haste.
“They said Veronica, Sir Bayle, and Sir Karin are in the training yard below, so...... I ought to go see how our daughter’s training is coming along. It has been a long time since we’ve seen her.”
Without even properly reading Rebecca’s expression, Gareth tried to flee this awkward, suffocating space.
But then—
“Oh? The training yard?”
Helena, who had been looking around the room, trotted forward and clung right to Gareth’s side.
“I’ll come too, Your Grace! I’d love to see our Veronica learning the sword.”
“......!!”
Our Veronica.
That word, dripping from Helena’s silky, oily lips.
The moment that shameless woman dared to attach a possessive to the noble Grand Duke’s daughter, a child Rebecca had borne in agony.
“Kuhh....”
A rough, unrefined breath choked in her throat.
Her heart thrashed as if it would smash through her ribs and burst out of her chest.
“......Your Grace.”
Rebecca could endure no longer.
Grab—!
“Gah!”
With a violent motion, Rebecca reached out and seized Gareth’s thick arm just as he was about to head for the training yard.
The Grand Duke’s massive body jolted to a stop.
“M-my lady......?”
“Isn’t there something you should say to me first?”
She stared only at her husband, Gareth.
“I kept hearing our daughter’s name come out of that mouth of yours, and I didn’t want to hear any more of it...... That’s why I sent her away to the training yard on purpose.”
The veins in Rebecca’s hand stood out white.
“And yet you think you have the right to go see Veronica with that woman at your side?”
“R-Rebecca......!”
Gareth, who had never before seen his wife radiate such murderous rage, could say nothing.
Fully aware of his own wrongdoing, he could not bring himself to meet her eyes and bowed his head low instead.
“Come with me. Now.”
Even with Helena watching plainly before her, Rebecca dragged at her husband’s coat as though the dignity of a Grand Duchess could be thrown to the dogs.
The hulking duke, too ashamed to resist, was hauled by his wife’s slender hand straight into the couple’s bedchamber.
Bang—!!
The bedroom door of the ducal couple slammed shut so hard it seemed about to splinter, then locked tight.
After husband and wife disappeared inside the room, only Helena remained alone in the wide, silent fifth-floor corridor.
“.......”
Even after witnessing the Grand Duchess’s fury firsthand.
Rather, a sly, almost delighted smirk touched her lips.
“Hmm...... this won’t be so easy.”
Helena muttered as she ground the heel of her shoe into the carpet where Rebecca had just stood.
So the famous only daughter of Count Pirla, the brilliant prime minister who once wielded the Empire like a puppet, still has some fire in her. Even with her husband dragging another woman home, she doesn’t look cowed at all. She’s not the kind to step aside quietly.
But even as she clicked her tongue, she did not look the least bit shaken.
Carefully, as if handling something precious, Helena laid both hands flat over her lower abdomen.
The memory of that dreadful, secret encounter in the Duke Gawain’s mansion in the capital—when she had lain with Duke Gawain beside the unconscious Grand Duke.
For all she knew, the belly she was stroking might not hold Gareth’s child at all, but the seed of Duke Gawain, who would become the true power behind Arteta.
“Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter.”
Helena smoothed her stomach and smiled with arrogant satisfaction.
“Let her struggle and bare her teeth all she likes. In the end...... this will be my place soon enough.”
The title of the Grand Duke’s concubine.
And if the child she bore was eventually born as a son of the Arteta Grand Ducal House.
Then Rebecca, who had never produced a son and had long been scorned by the capital’s nobles, would be naturally cast aside, while Helena, under Duke Gawain’s protection, would reign as mistress of the North.
With no guide leading her, Helena straightened her back as though she were already the mistress of the castle.
“Then let’s go and see our Veronica train—who might even become my child someday.”
She lifted her skirts with graceful delicacy and, savoring a victor’s ease, descended the fifth-floor stairs and walked lightly toward the training yard.
* * *
“......Rebecca.”
Gareth stood motionless in the middle of the bedroom, calling out in a voice so small it seemed to be shrinking into itself as he looked at his wife’s back.
At that instant—
Whip—!
The moment Rebecca turned, her right hand flew through the air.
Smack—!!
Rebecca’s slender palm struck Grand Duke Gareth’s broad cheek with a vicious crack.
“......!!”
She had hit him so hard that her own hand swelled red, and a clear handprint bloomed on Gareth’s cheek as his head snapped to the side.
Yet Gareth did not rub the stinging skin, nor did he flare in anger. He only lowered his gaze to the floor, his face devastated.
“Speak.”
Rebecca’s shoulders trembled violently.
From both eyes, the tears she had held back began to fall, drop by drop.
“Who is that woman, exactly......? Why did you bring her into this fifth floor, beyond the fourth floor where only the bloodline of the Grand Duke is meant to stay!!”
Rebecca seized Gareth by the collar as though she meant to tear it open and cried out.
“Don’t tell me...... Don’t tell me it’s what I’m thinking. Tell me it isn’t, please! Tell me Duke Gawain tricked you, and you were too foolish to know any better, and just took in some pitiful maid! Please, say that!”
Even as she shouted at him, Rebecca inwardly clutched at her shattered heart and prayed, again and again, that it would not be true.
The man she knew was a stubborn fool who cared for nothing but his family, a gentle husband who loved her more than anyone in the world.
But—
“......I’m sorry.”
That single sentence from Gareth cruelly shredded the last thread of Rebecca’s hope.
“I...... I made a vile mistake in the capital.”
Mistake.
At that word, Rebecca’s breath stopped.
The strength slipped from her hand still clenched in his collar, and her fingers fell away.
“......A mistake?”
Her lips parted in stunned disbelief.
“How...... How could you make a mistake? How could you possibly make the mistake of taking another woman in your bed!!”
You, who were so tender.
You, who loved Rebecca and me so dearly.
You, who protected me to the end even though I could not bear you a son.
How could—
Rebecca hurled the question with more than betrayal in her voice; it was laced with a deep, desperate disbelief.
But then.
That grief-stricken accusation struck Gareth Grand Duke’s one and only raw nerve.
In Gareth’s mind, Rebecca’s cry warped and twisted into something else entirely.
How could you? How could I?
As if he, a man who had lived as a eunuch for ten years because his body refused to function.
As if she were saying that he had no right to make such a mistake with another woman....
It was a wound to his pride.
The shame of not having been able to hold his wife for ten years, the loss of his manhood.
The complex he had swallowed down in silence while enduring the nobles of the capital mocking him to bring in a concubine, now tangled itself with his wife’s anguished cry.
Veins bulged in Gareth’s eyes for an instant.
Shame twisted into rage.
“Yes! I did make a mistake! But how can you speak to me like that!”
Gareth suddenly raised his voice.
“After ten years......!!”
“......!”
“After ten years of my body being broken and unable to hold you, after ten years! I...... I finished inside that woman!!”
“......!!”
The thunderclap of her husband’s obscene confession.
The instant that vulgar and brutal combination of words struck her ears, Rebecca’s mind simply stopped.
For ten years.
The man who had never once stood for her, his wife.
The same man who had left her to cry herself to sleep every night, saying it must be because she was not desirable enough.
That man had gone from impotent to virile the moment he saw a maid in the capital for the first time, like some rutting beast, and shamelessly spilled his lust?
As a wife.
As a woman.
It was the most humiliating insult she could ever suffer.
“Ah...... ahh.......”
All strength fled from Rebecca’s legs.
Like a doll whose strings had been cut, she collapsed to her knees on the cold bedroom floor.
Tears fell silently from her unfocused eyes, and soon a broken, wrenching sob began to fill the room.
“Hhhuuuugh...... hwaaaah......!”
Rebecca rolled to the floor, and only then did Gareth realize that he had, in the grip of his own inferiority, uttered madness.
He went white as chalk.
“R-Rebecca! I was mad! I said something I’ll regret until my mouth tears open—!”
Gareth hurriedly dropped to his knees and reached out, trying to wrap his arms around his wailing wife’s shoulders.
But—
Thwack—!
“Don’t touch me......!!”
Rebecca slapped his hand away with sharp, irritated violence.
“Don’t touch my body...... It’s disgusting...... I can smell that woman all over you......!”
Trembling all over, she staggered backward, desperate to put distance between herself and Gareth.
Meeting his wife’s eyes and seeing the unmistakable, vivid loathing there left Gareth breathless.
“My lady, please, listen to me. I never meant to let that woman steal my heart. It was just...... when I woke up in the morning, the water had already been spilled and......”
By nature, Gareth was a good-hearted fool, blind and loyal.
So, trying to tidy up this catastrophe, he added the single stupidest, most pathetic excuse in the world.
“The woman I’d taken might have been carrying my seed, after all. How could I have simply abandoned a woman who might be carrying the bloodline of the Grand Ducal House....... So I brought her here, only to take responsibility.......”
That flimsy goodness.
That cheap, nauseating sense of responsibility that the child might have been his.
“And that’s your excuse.....?”
She, who had been mocked by the capital’s nobility for failing to bear a son, while her husband had dragged a one-night maid all the way into the sanctuary of the Grand Duke’s house because he was terrified she might have his seed.
How...... how did I spend my whole life believing and loving such a fool?
Grinding her teeth, Rebecca barely managed to get back onto her feet.
Then, with unsteady steps, she went to the locked jewelry box in one corner of the bedroom.
Click.
Her trembling hands turned the key and opened it, revealing not glittering jewels but a faded old parchment letter, carefully folded within.
Five years ago.
The final secret message left behind by her father, Count Pirla, prime minister of the Empire, who had suddenly died of a heart attack brought on by overwork.
Rebecca gripped that letter tightly and turned back toward Gareth.
“Beware of Gawain.”
“......What?”
“That’s what Father secretly left for me before he died.”
“Your father-in-law....”
“Father suspected young master Gawain. And when he tried to uncover the truth, he died all of a sudden! I lost my father and, having no power to do anything about it, I held this letter in my arms for five years and lived my life in silence!”
Rebecca shouted as she flung the letter straight at Gareth’s face.
“And then you go to the capital and sleep with Gawain’s maid?! Do you think that’s a coincidence?! It’s a trap! That well-born younger brother of yours has set a filthy snare to drive me, the woman who couldn’t produce a son, out and swallow this Grand Ducal House whole!!”
Rebecca pleaded as though she were coughing up blood.
Please, open your eyes.
Your brother might be the one working in the shadows to bring ruin upon our family.
Get rid of that woman at once and interrogate Gawain.
But—
“Enough, Rebecca!!”
Grand Duke Gareth, without even looking at the letter that flew toward him, slapped it to the floor and roared in anger.