Ostracism Just Isn't Right, You Know
"Ostracizing people just isn't right, you know, desu wa."
……………
Once I'd figured out the maids' pecking order, the study—and the rest of the mansion along with it—became a dull place for lessons and a fascinating place for observation all at once.
Every morning, the sound of footsteps would come down the corridor in front of the study. The first to arrive were always the maids of minor noble birth. They fetched the day's lesson materials from the storeroom, pulled the weighty leather-bound tomes from the shelves, dusted them off, and carried them over to the window side. Those were the books whose titles Katerina had long since forgotten—and they were, as a rule, the very books I would be studying that day.
Next came the maids of merchant stock. If I inclined an ear toward the sounds drifting from the small anteroom beside the study, I could make out the clink of teacups and the bustle of refreshments being prepared. They chattered away without pause even while they worked, and sometimes a burst of laughter would escape through the door.
What genuinely surprised me, though, was Katerina's hearing. If she truly focused, she could catch most of the maids' small talk through the closed door—though if they dropped their voices to a whisper, it was beyond her.
Last of all, the commoner maids handled a whole medley of odd jobs. Corridor sweeping, hauling supplies, the laundry—they worked together, helping and leaning on one another, and from long hours spent side by side, something like a little community had evidently taken shape among them.
A village…… no, a factory floor.
It was like watching a miniature of the modern workplace. On the surface, all peace and harmony, but underneath ran the tangled webs of human relationships—who was friendly with whom, who avoided whom. Those threads were starting to become visible, one by one.
Then one day, I happened to witness a rather peculiar scene from the study. A commoner maid, still new enough that the green hadn't worn off, was hauling a mountain of laundry all by herself.
Her name was…… Bielka, was it?
Thanks to my diligent eavesdropping on the maids' chatter, I'd learned that Bielka came from a farming family in Count Radomir's territory, in the southern Black Soil Region of the Grand Duchy.
She was of perfectly average height, but her figure was a little—no, quite a lot—no, no, let's be honest, magnificently, monumentally well-endowed.
Ah, "well-endowed" is putting it politely. To be precise, it doesn't mean she's big-boned, it means…… ahem.
It means her bust and her hips are enormous. That's what it means.
Anyway, that's exactly right. Bielka, the maid with the pale-pink hair, was the possessor of a pair of colossal breasts, as though the goddess of fertility herself had descended into the mortal world.
A preference for busty women is a near-universal human constant, found in virtually every culture—but here in the North, that preference ran a notch or two more intense. In other words, Bielka's body was, for the men of the North, the very ideal of feminine beauty incarnate.
Bielka had one more distinctive feature: a face absolutely brimming with innocence. Of course, most people who crossed paths with Bielka couldn't drag their eyes up to her face anyway—they were too busy darting glances downward, specifically at the pair of spheres attached to her chest that dwarfed her own head—so it's not as if most of them had ever gotten a proper look at her expression.
Tsk. What a pack of idiots, these men.
……Wait, hold on. Am I feeling jealous right now?
Don't be ridiculous. This is nothing more than the contempt I feel as a rational modern man, watching fools leer at an innocent maid's chest. Purely intellectual contempt, obviously.
In any case, Bielka was a maid who somehow always got saddled with the hardest work alone—and yet always wore a bright smile while she did it.
"Bielka, it must be terribly hard, doing that all by yourself?" a maid nearby asked. There was no genuine concern in her voice. There was, shall we say, a faint trace of mockery mixed in instead.
"Oh no, it's not hard at all!"
Bielka, for her part, answered brightly even to the jab. She seemed entirely unaware of what the other girl's tone had actually meant.
Hmm……
Around that time, a guard passing down the corridor gave Bielka a long, lingering look—and then walked straight into a pillar. The expressions of the other maids who witnessed it twisted, ever so slightly.
Ah……
It gradually became clear what was happening among the commoner maids. One overwhelming country girl named Bielka was throwing the entire ecosystem of the commoner staff into disorder.
So the other maids are banding together against the invasive species that suddenly appeared in their habitat…… like, what, native wildlife?
……………
"Hmmmm……"
Self-study period. I sat at my desk, sinking into a complicated tangle of feelings.
It wasn't that I couldn't understand the other maids' jealousy at all. Not that I envied Bielka's figure—absolutely not—but for every woman except me, and especially among the maids, looks were surely one of the most important forms of currency.
Worse still, thanks to her presence, there was now an unmistakable, observable phenomenon of male attention quietly pooling in one direction. Even just watching Bielka for a moment made it obvious how the guards and the male servants looked at her.
……Hold on. Am I actually defending the maids right now?
What Bielka was suffering through was, in modern terms, workplace ostracism. Whatever the reason, isolating and excluding one member of a group is wrong. Modern person or pre-modern otherworlder—surely that's just common sense.
And yet, for some reason, I could also understand how the other maids felt. Which was exactly the problem.
No, this won't do. Why do I keep thinking in circles like this?
I shook my head quickly. My thoughts must not be contaminated by Katerina. From somewhere deep inside, something like a protest rose up—'I would never do something so petty as jealousy, desu wa!'—but regardless, these were definitely Katerina's thoughts creeping in.
After watching a while longer, I found Bielka's situation was worse than I'd assumed when I first noticed her. Come mealtimes, the maids all gathered in the servants' hall in the basement to eat together—but Bielka was almost always out running errands during meals, so much so that even I noticed it daily. That, too, was almost certainly a product of the ostracism. The laundry was the same story. While the other maids split the work and helped each other, Bielka always carried the heaviest loads alone.
How am I supposed to fix this?
Even in the modern world, workplace bullying is nearly impossible to resolve nicely. In most cases it ends only when one side—the victim or the perpetrators—transfers departments, quits, or leaves entirely.
"Well then…… I suppose I'd better think this through, desu wa."
Muttering to myself, I rested my chin on my hand. If I wanted to solve the problem, I needed to review every possible option first.
Option one: relocate Bielka somewhere else. But the maids' workforce was a single organism. They divided the same chores and ate at the same hours. How exactly was I supposed to pluck Bielka out alone and post her somewhere?
What about dismissing the maids doing the bullying? First, it would be hard to pin down who the ringleaders even were. They never tormented Bielka openly enough to leave proof—they simply nudged her to the margins, a little at a time, and quietly assigned her the harder jobs. So do I expel not just the ringleaders but every maid under suspicion? No—that would be an even crueler punishment.
Option two: broker a reconciliation. Frankly, this one had no grounding in reality whatsoever. Reconcile with whom, and over what? They dislike her because of how she looks. How do you "reconcile" people over that?
And finally, option three: punishment. Not dismissal, but something lighter. That would only make things worse. It might look solved for a week, but the other maids' resentment toward Bielka would simply keep piling up underneath.
"Uuugh, what on earth am I supposed to do……"
No amount of thought produced an answer, and in the end I seized my head in both hands.
"Lady Katerina, it seems the studying isn't going well today."
Eliza asked, arriving just then with the tea. One look at her, elegant as ever, and a good idea suddenly struck me.
"Eliza, there is something I would like to discuss with you, desu wa."
Okay, how do I even explain this? The subtle politics among the maids? A textbook case of workplace ostracism?
"You know that new maid, Bielka? The other maids seem to be making her life miserable……"
The story of Bielka, the new maid.
"That girl has an absolutely tremendous chest, desu wa. I have never once seen a person with a single bosom bigger than her own head.
Ah—excluding enormously fat people, of course."
Her monstrous figure.
"And the other maids won't even let her eat, and they make her do all the hard work alone, so…… you see, I've watched them ostracizing her."
How she was being quietly isolated and burdened with all the drudgery.
"So I came up with three possible solutions, you know.
First, send Bielka somewhere else.
Second, make peace between Bielka and the other maids.
Third, reprimand the maids who bullied her……"
And how I'd racked my brains over all of them without reaching an answer.
"But none of the three seem any good at all, desu wa. Do you have a better idea, Eliza?"
Having somehow sputtered my way through the whole explanation, I looked to Eliza for advice—and saw her expression shift in a most peculiar way.