There Was a Brief Commotion - 2
Wiping out the Twilight Cult had made a great many people happy. I, however, was not among them. Right in the middle of clearing a mountain of overdue work, the Minister of Special Affairs had summoned me, and the pile of things still waiting on my desk had only grown higher.
Between Tanian's battlefield debut and the disciplinary reports, I had been so buried I had completely forgotten—I hadn't finished my backlog and then joined the strike on the Twilight Cult. I had simply been dragged out halfway through. Who was going to reimburse me for the time I'd lost?
"Nngh—! Nngh!"
"Five more minutes."
At least the subordinate currently welling up with crocodile tears was not the one I actually hated. I had been about to let him go—and then I saw the tofu in Section Chief One's hands, and something short-circuited in my brain. Only a saint of rare forbearance could have looked at that and stayed calm.
It wasn't detention. It wasn't even house arrest. It had ended with disciplinary reports.
Is tofu even a thing in a European setting?
The sudden appearance of that familiar hometown custom, in a situation I had never seen coming, nearly unmoored me. Or wait—did Western prisons hand out tofu on release day too? Not like I'd ever served time over there to find out.
The more I chewed on it, the hotter I got. If they thought I had already gone home, why were they carrying tofu? Had they planned to march straight up to the mansion and provoke me in person?
"Chief! From now on, please don't commit any more crimes! Understood?"
Section Chief One's line played on an automatic loop in my head. And of course he would deliver it, bold as brass, right in front of the servants and the staff. Predictable. That little bastard of mine.
"I still have a little work left, so I'll head back now."
"Ah. Good work."
Section Chief Three, whose survival instincts had sharpened considerably of late, tried to slip out as discreetly as possible. The way he desperately refused to look at Section Chief One—who was staring after him with round, betrayed eyes—was almost impressive.
Come to think of it, Section Chief Five was nowhere to be seen either. When something needed doing he always materialized without a sound, so it wasn't a problem—but I had no idea what he did with himself the rest of the time.
I had forgotten: the Ministry of Finance was a den of natural selection, where the sight of a colleague's weakness made everyone itch to sink their teeth in.
"Congratulations. I hear you've written another disciplinary report."
"Why is that news always the first to travel?"
In the time it took me to dismiss even Section Chief One and get back to work, the man who ruled the Ministry of Finance had already taken the lead in roasting me. For God's sake, act your age. The man was in his fifties.
Judging by how little time had passed, he must have called the moment the news reached him through the Ministry of the Interior. Stuck at a dull desk all day, he had finally found something to tease me with and seized it with both hands. Public humiliation was the Ministry of Finance's traditional sport.
"I told you, didn't I? That you'd end up tasting detention yourself."
The pure, unfiltered joy on the Minister's face made my teeth grind of their own accord.
He had said something like that, yes. Back when the Minister himself had been locked up, I had gone out of my way to visit, drop off some outside food, and mock him—and he had cursed me with genuine venom. At the time, I had never imagined it would come back around like this.
"How does anyone even get to detention? I was under the impression you'd need about forty disciplinary reports for that."
"When the subordinates you've got are bastards like you, how long do you think you last without writing them?"
"Oh dear. Such rotten luck with staff. If it bothers you that much, you should retire."
Back then, I hadn't known my own luck with subordinates was about to collapse into complete disaster. A subordinate at roughly my level would have been manageable even if there were ten of them—but instead I had been saddled with the once-in-a-generation miracle lineup of Section Chiefs One, Two, and Three.
But what could I do? Just as I had become a department head far too young, the section chiefs had become officers far too young themselves. The early days had been one catastrophe after another, and every last aftershock had landed as another visit from me to Disciplinary Affairs.
Come to think of it, this time it was that bastard Crown Prince's fault too. If he had just promoted people on a normal schedule, I would never have been stuck covering for green section chiefs and mass-producing disciplinary reports. One mind, one body, my ass. I wished he would vanish from in front of my eyes.
"Still, don't worry about it too much."
While I was mentally dissolving my one-mind-one-body pact with the Crown Prince, the Minister let out a short laugh and spoke again.
The "don't worry" suggested that if I really did head toward detention, he was prepared to cover for me. Fair enough. We had four years of history; he wouldn't just ignore me. And if I got locked up, it would be a nuisance for him too.
"If you do get detained, the count resets. You'd need another forty disciplinary reports before a second detention."
He was ignoring me. Four years, thrown straight in the trash.
"How very reassuring."
I swallowed the double-barreled curses that had risen all the way to my throat and forced the words out.
Truly helpful advice from a man with extensive detention experience. Thank you so much. I was almost tempted to gift him a sudden death by way of gratitude.
Damn it all.
I had wanted to go home already, but today the urge was especially violent. Supposedly the trade-off for surrendering the mansion's freedom was that I wouldn't have to go into the office every day—and yet everything had twisted around so that I was commuting daily after all.
And somewhere along the way I had become the absentee host of a twisted underworld manor, inviting guests and then abandoning them. The staff and Irina would have come to the capital to play even without me, so that was fine—but Margareta was here because I had invited her, and that worried me.
I hope she's doing all right.
I needed to finish this work first, before I could take care of any guests at all.
Lately, even the smallest things looked almost painfully beautiful.
Karl's mansion.
Every window my gaze touched, every curtain, every flowerpot felt unbearably dear. This was Karl's mansion. This was the place where he and I would live together.
Once I thought of it as the home I would share with the man I loved, how could it not look beautiful? Even if it had been some shabby building out in the provinces instead of a mansion in the capital, I think I still would have been happy. I know I would have.
Of course, even by objective standards, Karl's mansion was an impressive one. Its original owners had been the Apsilon family, after all. And since His Highness the Crown Prince himself had bestowed it, the care taken afterward would have been no less careful.
That's Karl for you.
The pride filling my chest made me nod without thinking. A mansion was considered the easiest way to take the measure of its master's standing.
That His Highness had granted a residence like this meant he had properly recognized Karl's worth—and that Karl was maintaining it without incident meant that judgment had been correct.
And a mansion was never defined by its façade and scale alone. The skill and refinement of the servants who filled it often mattered more than the building itself.
In that sense, the servants of this house were outstanding.
"This is the first time the master has invited a guest for any reason other than work, my lady."
That was what the butler had said when we happened to pass each other in the hall.
"The mistress? Or—Madam?"
"For now, 'my lady' will do."
That was the whispered exchange between two young, adorable maids.
"The master has never taken the slightest interest in the gardens, you see. I'm relieved to find that you, my lady, have such excellent aesthetic sense."
And that was what the head gardener had told me last.
Wonderful. Truly, almost perfectly wonderful. They were so skilled at reading the future and preparing for it that I could not help smiling.
And discovering how thoroughly uncandid Karl was made me laugh as well.
Just how much has he been talking about me?
To my face he could be so indifferent—and behind my back, he had been speaking of me all along. There was no other way the household staff would already regard me as the lady of the house. Wicked man. He had refused the marriage talks and still kept me in suspense.
Honestly, until not long ago I had felt hurt. When the invitation to the mansion arrived, I had been so full of anticipation at the thought of living under the same roof as Karl that I could barely sleep—and yet once I arrived, he was nowhere to be seen from early morning until late at night.
Of course I understood. Karl was a department head—the head of the Audit Department, no less. My heart was not so narrow that I could not grasp how busy he was serving the Empire.
But when one day became three, then four, then five, resentment began to rise. I had been looking forward to this. I had even set aside Father's pleading for me to come home and chosen the capital over the duchy.
He was entrusting it to me.
But once I heard what the servants said, I understood Karl's true intent. This was not inviting me and then abandoning me. While work kept him away from the mansion, he had called for someone he could trust with it.
When a husband is away, of course his wife manages the house. Yes. Perfectly natural. Entirely natural.
The resentment I had felt toward Karl turned, somewhere along the way, into guilt. I had only resented him in my heart, never realizing he had trusted me with this.
"Ohoho..."
Alone in the room, with no one to hear, I could laugh out loud without shame.
I would do my best. For now it was only Karl's private residence—but once he became a count, there would be a domain to manage as well. As a countess, there would be a great deal I needed to oversee for a husband so often away from home.
I can do this.
I had lived my whole life so as not to bring shame to the name Valenti. If I could not even manage the basic accomplishments expected of every noble wife, the name Valenti would weep.
Of course, Karl and I were not officially husband and wife yet. In time we surely would be—but for the moment, the lack of authority was a problem. For all the staff's goodwill, I could not involve myself in the running of the house. I was still only a guest.
But people are a different matter.
Making contact with the other guests staying under the same roof was another story entirely. I would leave the mansion to its excellent servants and concern myself with the people. The ones giving Karl the worst headaches were surely the Baking Club.
With Karl gone, the staff had no real power to rein in the impulsive behavior of a foreign prince or a candidate for sainthood. But I was a duke's daughter. I did not outrank royalty—but neither was I so far beneath them as to be brushed aside.
With a courteous manner and a persuasive word of restraint, even a royal's movements could be checked. That was something I could do for Karl.
"The thoughts of the high and mighty are not so different from ours. Though now and then, surprising things do happen."
Something Karl had said during the term. He had been smiling when he said it, but the exhaustion in his eyes had been impossible to hide.
And unlike at the Academy, Karl was juggling Audit Department work on top of everything else. If the Baking Club pulled his attention as well, he really might collapse from overwork.
At least here.
I would lighten Karl's burden.