The Orphan Princess (2)
Naturally, even if I had fully grasped the deaths of my biological parents back then...
"Are you suggesting Our words carry no weight, Prime Minister?!"
"P-Please calm yourself, Your Majesty..."
The furious great-grandmother shrieking right before my eyes showed not the slightest hint of cooling down.
To my baby ears, it simply sounded like high-volume, rapid-fire English, but judging by the state of the room, this was no ordinary squabble.
"Mother, how many times must I tell you! What happened to Albert and Hélène was merely a tragic accident! An accident! Did you not hear the reports yourself? A dreadful outbreak of influenza swept through Sandringham House, claiming servants as well—"
"Silence, Edward! Was it not enough that you killed your own father? Now you have murdered your son as well?!"
"Mother!!"
"Grandmother..."
"Y-Your Majesty..."
Hold on.
Did the Queen just drop an absolute bombshell...?
If not, there was no other reason for this colossal stateroom to plunge into such a suffocating, pin-drop silence.
"Did you do it because that poor girl was a Roman Catholic? Or was it because she came from the French royal house, and you feared an alliance with France would bring us too close?! Or was it that you simply dreaded turning Prussia into an open enemy?!"
"I beg of you, Mother...! I was the one who championed their union more ardently than anyone! And just how long do you intend to dwell on Father's passing?!"
"You wretched boy, do you dare—"
The atmosphere had turned utterly toxic. Screams and accusations were flying back and forth despite the presence of a delicate, newborn infant.
Hey, decibel levels this high are going to ruin my hearing...
"Prime Minister! Speak up! Was it not the Conservative Party and the Marquess who opposed their marriage most bitterly?!"
"Your Majesty, forgive me, but how could your humble servant ever harbor malice toward the late Prince and Princess...?"
Watching my great-grandmother and grandfather pointing fingers and screaming at the top of their lungs was hardly wholesome entertainment for a newborn. I had already been fighting back tears, and this chaotic circus pushed me straight past my limit. At this stage, my infantile nervous system possessed zero emotional regulation.
"Waaaah—!!"
"...Your Majesty, as your loyal subject, I humbly implore you. The funeral arrangements have not even commenced, and displaying such unrestrained passion before the young Princess cannot be wise..."
The moment I unleashed a full-throated, ear-splitting wail, the tumult in the room finally began to ebb. Peeking through tear-soaked lashes, I could see both my great-grandmother and my grandfather—or so I assumed him to be—softening their postures just a fraction.
"...Let us revisit this matter later, Mother. The child is present."
"Be quiet, Edward. Henceforth, 'Victoria' shall reside with Us at Windsor Castle."
"...Y-Your Majesty...?"
I blinked through my tears. Victoria? Did she just refer to Victoria?
Was she talking about herself in the third person? My grasp of spoken Victorian English was still far too rudimentary for seamless comprehension, but the moment those words fell from her lips, every pair of eyes in the room darted frantically between the Queen and me.
"Your Majesty, with all due respect, Her Ladyship the Princess—"
"If the Marquess wishes to surrender the premiership to Gladstone or Primrose, by all means, continue speaking."
"Mother!!"
Seriously, why must you people stage this family feud right in front of me?
Was this standard operating procedure for old-money chaebols in the twenty-first century, or was it just business as usual for royal dynasties throughout history?
At the very least, in all the romance-fantasy web novels I had ever read—even the grimmest, most angst-drenched tragedies where the heroine suffered relentless trauma—I had never seen adults screaming at the top of their lungs right in front of a newborn baby.
These bloody Brits and their rotten tempers... There was a reason YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels were always flooded with memes about British villainy, and why internet comment sections unanimously agreed that whenever history went sideways, Britain was behind it.
"Leave Us. All of you."
"...As Your Majesty commands..."
With what sounded like a royal dismissal, the gathering began filing out of the chamber in hushed, hurried steps.
"Come here."
"Y-Your Majesty..."
Only Rose, who was holding me, remained behind. Which naturally meant that I, nestled snugly in her arms, was trapped as well.
"...Let Us hold her."
"Ueeh...?"
Before I knew it, I was hoisted out of Rose's gentle embrace and transferred directly into the Queen's lap. I couldn't explain it, but an ominous chill ran down my tiny spine, warning me that my future was about to look pitch-black.
"...To think the child destined to become the future Queen could be so dreadfully frail..."
"Waaaah!!"
Get me out of here, Rose! Save me!
I bawled and shrieked, desperately calling out to my maid, but Rose merely bowed her head in trembling reverence, glancing nervously between the Queen and me. I wanted to protest, to demand answers, but my underdeveloped vocal cords could produce nothing more than helpless infant babble.
And so began the utterly uncomfortable cohabitation between great-grandmother and great-granddaughter.
"Your Highness—! You mustn't run!"
"Uung... but Wose is such a noob at wunning..."
Three years had passed since that chaotic day. To be precise, it was now around February of 1895, in the chill of late winter.
Windsor Castle was a paradoxical place—vast, yet suffocatingly narrow. It was sprawling enough if you simply wanted to frolic across the manicured lawns or take a stroll through the royal gardens, but whenever I tried to sneak away and hide, the Queen's Guards and my personal maids would track me down like bloodhounds within minutes.
Still, there was a silver lining. Retaining the adult consciousness of a twenty-something man—one rapidly encroaching upon thirty—made picking up English remarkably swift.
Or at least, I hoped it was considered swift. I had simply found baby babble too bothersome and kept my mouth shut until I was three, which resulted in a flock of royal physicians swarming over me in a collective panic. To quell the crisis, I hastily began stringing words together on Christmas Eve of last year, finally putting an end to the medical frenzy. The unfortunate trade-off, however, was that my sudden burst of eloquence brought a legion of private tutors descending upon me like locusts.
...Which was precisely why I was currently sprinting through the palace gardens. The staff generally tolerated a thirty-minute recess for me to blow off steam, but the absolute second minute thirty-one ticked by, the guards would pinpoint my location with terrifying punctuality. Truly, life under royal surveillance was pure agony.
On another note, I had finally uncovered my full official name. Before, it had merely sounded like an indecipherable string of posh British syllables, but for someone with the vocabulary of a modern adult, deciphering it was child's play.
...Though my underdeveloped tongue still gave me a comically thick lisp, much to my chagrin.
Victoria Alexandrina Helena Mary Adelaide.
That absurdly elongated mouthful was my current legal identity. For the life of me, I couldn't comprehend why my name had to be Victoria when Queen Victoria was literally sitting right there on the throne.
Even back in Confucian Joseon, sharing a name with a reigning monarch was an egregious taboo subject to strict naming restrictions, which was why generation names existed in the first place. As a proud, thirty-seventh-generation descendant of the Gyeongju Choe clan's Chungnyeolgong branch, carrying an identical name to my elder relative felt like an unforgivable cultural violation.
Then again, what could a toddler do? The Queen herself had bestowed the name upon me.
"Whoa—?!"
"...Princess, you must return to your studies."
Lost in these grumbling thoughts while crouching behind an ornamental shrub, I was swiftly betrayed by the Queen's Guards, who had materialized like ghosts to point out my hiding spot to the maids.
Just you wait a century... You lot will be swarmed by tourists, relentlessly mocked and prodded, and immortalized forever in vertical Reels and TikTok clips...
"Make Way for Queen's Guard!!"
"...Princess, wherever did you learn such uncouth language...?"
"...Wose, can't we take just today off...?"
"Do you truly believe that is possible, Your Highness?"
Hmph.
I had tried to bark the command with as much toddler majesty as I could muster, but it had fallen completely flat. To treat a proud member of the British royal family with such utter disregard! When I reached adulthood, I swore I would summon Rose to a formal tea party and thoroughly embarrass her with proper aristocratic etiquette.
Speaking of Rose, I had learned a rather astonishing fact about her. Given how young she looked, I had initially assumed she was some unfortunate child laborer plucked from a textile mill, but she turned out to be the highborn daughter of a viscount. Romance-fantasy novels had not lied when they depicted the personal attendants of royalty as daughters of counts and viscounts; royal status truly operated on an entirely different plane.
Not that it mattered to me in the slightest.
I had zero ambition toward the crown!
Granted, my great-grandmother Queen Victoria kept me glued to her side, partly out of pity for an orphaned toddler and partly because I hadn't spoken until age three. But this overbearing affection was bordering on cruelty.
My grand bucket list included elegant afternoon tea parties with noble debutantes! I had assumed being a royal princess meant living a life of leisure, yet the only tea parties I had ever experienced were shared with Rose, Florence, and a circle of decrepit, stone-faced butlers.
I wasn't even permitted to set foot outside the castle gates. Talk about extreme helicopter parenting.
When I first realized I was an orphan, I genuinely feared my reincarnation was turning into an angst-heavy tragedy. After all, the market for romance-fantasy stories where a transmigrated heroine endured endless trauma and misery was quite substantial. But misery, my foot—the real problem was that they were pampering and monitoring me to an oppressive degree.
From what little I gathered, my biological father had been Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, and my mother an aristocratic lady from a French noble house. Since both had passed away before I was old enough to form memories, I had no clue where they had stood in the line of succession.
Ideally, I hoped to be nestled safely outside the top ten.
That way, I could collect a handsome royal civil list pension, lounge through endless tea parties, and live out a fabulous, lazy existence before peacefully expiring in luxury. Above all, I desperately wanted to visit Joseon. Sure, by the 1890s it was already stumbling under Japanese encroachment, but I still longed to step foot upon my ancestral homeland before modern history ran its course.
Since the British Empire of this era was the undisputed heavyweight champion of the globe—much like the United States in my past life—a royal princess requesting a tour of the Far East wouldn't be an impossible dream. Once I crossed the age of ten, I fully intended to demand a voyage to East Asia as my birthday present.
Lost in my daydream, I allowed myself to be hauled back toward the castle by Rose. Great-grandmother's rearing methods were... well, I hesitated to call it tender love. It was more akin to fanatical coddling. Through a modern lens, even renowned parenting experts would shake their heads and say, "Now, this is a bit excessive..."
To put it in perspective, the only people I had ever laid eyes on in my entire life were the Queen, my personal maids, the guards, ancient butlers, my grandfather, and a couple of great-aunts. Even my grandfather, who clearly doted on me, was strictly limited to a single one-hour visit per month. According to the formidable Queen, his private lifestyle was thoroughly scandalous and spending time around him offered no benefit whatsoever to a young lady.
My great-aunts, on the other hand, visited quite frequently—primarily because Her Majesty summoned them on a regular basis, which naturally brought them into my orbit. Viewed from that angle, my existence was rather pathetic. Whenever I attempted to read newspapers, decipher historical context, or dig through the library to determine my exact rank, the ancient butlers—those ever-faithful hounds of Her Majesty—would swiftly intervene and confiscate my reading material.
Yet, all of this led me to one comforting conclusion.
I had to be nothing more than Queen Victoria's youngest great-granddaughter. An elderly monarch doting obsessively over a tragic, orphaned toddler at the very tail end of her line made complete narrative sense. If I were actually an important dynastic heir perched within the top ten of the succession line, they would already be drilling me in statecraft and—
"Welcome, Princess. Commencing today, we shall begin your instruction in Monarchical Studies."
"...Bloody hell..."
In that instant, I desperately longed for the raw, visceral catharsis of my native Korean profanities. No matter how vulgar British curses might be, they utterly failed to capture the sheer, devastating shock of swallowing the Red Pill.
"Y-Your Highness!! Wherever did you pick up such dreadful language?!"
"...It appears Her Ladyship has received an exceedingly early education in the vernacular of the working class... Ha, haha..."
My very first encounter with my new royal tutor was an unmitigated disaster. And to make matters worse, I narrowly avoided a disciplinary swish from Rose's birch rod.
Trapped inside the fragile body of a four-year-old girl, I had never craved a stiff glass of whiskey and a thick cigar more in my entire life. So much so that I felt ready to snatch a cigar right out of young Winston Churchill's mouth.