One Who Repays a Debt (3)
“Y-You… you wretched little—!”
The head maid lunged at Rachel, letting loose an unhinged shriek. “It was you! It was you all along! You scheming bitch—!”
She reared back and swung her hand toward Rachel’s cheek with all the spite she could muster. Yet this time, her fingertips failed to graze so much as a stray lock of hair.
Rachel had casually reached out and caught the woman’s wrist in midair.
“Head Maid.”
At the low, steady murmur, the head maid flinched involuntarily.
“I believe tolerating your insolence once was quite generous enough.” Rachel peeled back her lips in a placid smile, her teeth gleaming. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
It was a chillingly sharp smile—predatory, like the bared fangs of a beast poised over prey.
Confronted with the nanny’s icy demeanor, the head maid clutched her throbbing wrist and stumbled backward in terror.
“Well then, Head Maid.” Rachel smoothed her skirts and maintained her pleasant expression as she gestured toward the door. “The way out is this direction.”
Once again, her guidance was impeccably, mercilessly polite.
“Countess.”
Countess Pelin Catarina stepped out of the 3rd Prince’s Palace, her personal knight falling into step beside her. After checking that they were well out of earshot, the escort spoke in a subdued voice.
“How should we dispose of the head maid?”
His tone was unfailingly courteous, even if the question itself carried lethal intent.
“Leave her be.”
“Milady, but…”
“For a creature like her, returning to the gutters she crawled out of is a far crueler punishment than death,” Pelin replied flatly. “There is no need to make unnecessary work for ourselves.”
Fabricating a suspicious death and staging it convincingly was an irritating chore. Besides, one never knew when a discarded tool might prove useful again. Lowborn wretches driven into a corner will do anything to survive, after all.
Pelin snapped open her silk fan, concealing the smirk curling the corners of her lips.
“Instead, ensure her silence is absolute,” she commanded, her voice dropping to a steely murmur. “Not a whisper of this matter must reach the ears of Her Imperial Highness the Second Consort, let alone the Empress or the rest of the nobility.”
If word leaked out, both she and the Second Consort would become the laughingstock of imperial high society. It was common knowledge that Pelin served as Helena’s right hand.
“Truly, I am so mortified I can barely lift my head.”
At the end of the day, Pelin herself had handpicked that wretched head maid. For the woman not only to embezzle funds so brazenly, but to get caught red-handed—it was an intolerable disgrace.
Pelin clicked her tongue in disgust. “This is precisely why brainless fools are a thousand times more irritating than clever vipers.”
“Understood. Shall we plant another informant in the 3rd Prince’s Palace, then?”
“Another?” Pelin let out a scoffing laugh. At one time, she had worried the Third Prince might grow into a thorny obstacle, but those fears had proved entirely unfounded. He was nothing more than a timid, helpless brat whose sole possession in the world was his imperial bloodline. Even today, the moment he heard of her arrival, he had cowered behind the excuse of an illness and sent his nanny down to face her. The boy had not changed in the slightest.
“Forget it. It is high time we stopped squandering our attention on that penniless prince.” She smiled coldly, recalling the face of the former nanny who had once caused them such annoyance. “Now that that meddlesome Lady Konrad is dead and buried, there is no one left alive to whisper ambitious nonsense into his ear.”
“As you command.”
“Ah, right.” Pelin paused on the stone steps, struck by a sudden thought. “Did you locate that maid?”
The knight lowered his head in apology. “My apologies, milady. We have not found her.”
“Still nothing?”
“Yes. We discreetly questioned the staff based on the servant’s description of the woman who handed him the parcel, but we could find no trace of her.”
Pelin’s brow furrowed into a tight knot.
The mysterious maid who had delivered the head maid’s secret ledger to the countess’s townhouse had operated with eerie discretion. She had passed the ledger through an ordinary manservant, accompanied by a terse note declaring that she could not stand by and watch the head maid betray the countess. At first, Pelin had suspected a trap, but the handwriting across the records matched the head maid’s ledger with flawless precision. There had been no room for doubt.
If she claimed to be doing it for my sake, she must either know me well or have sought to earn my favor in the head maid’s place.
Yet contrary to Pelin’s expectations, the maid had never shown her face. It was as if she were desperately guarding her identity from the world.
Had she desired a reward, she would have presented the ledger to me in person. Or at the very least, stepped forward today.
The more Pelin turned the puzzle over in her mind, the less sense it made. For what conceivable motive had that maid unmasked the head maid’s corruption, orchestrating her downfall while refusing to claim any spoils?
“Shall we broaden the scope of the search, milady?”
“Hmph. And turn the entire imperial palace upside down? Don’t be ridiculous.” Pelin inspected the tips of her manicured nails dismissively. “Do you have any idea how many dark-haired women in maid uniforms walk these corridors?”
The knight kept his head bowed in silent concession.
“Furthermore, the servant said she wore a deep hood pulled down over her brow. How could you hope to catch someone whose face you have never even seen?”
“I am deeply sorry.”
Leaving the apologetic knight behind, Pelin gathered her skirts and stepped into her carriage. “Return to the townhouse.”
“Will you not be calling upon Her Imperial Highness the Second Consort before departing?”
“No need. I shall see her in two days’ time regardless.”
Pelin considered the grand banquet slated to take place at the Radcliffe Marquessate in two days. It was a celebration held in honor of the newborn nephew’s birthday, an occasion the Second Consort was guaranteed to attend. Breaking today’s news could easily wait until then.
Certain bitter pills are far easier to swallow when one’s mood is elevated by wine and praise.
Pelin sighed inwardly, dreading the delicate diplomacy required to appease Helena’s notoriously fickle, volatile temperament. “I am exhausted. Depart at once.”
“Yes, Countess.”
With a crack of the whip, the carriage bearing Countess Catarina rolled smoothly out through the palace gates, carrying on as though nothing out of the ordinary had transpired.
“This makes no sense! It’s utter madness!”
“What does?”
“Why me?! Why on earth would someone like me be made head maid?!”
Catherine, the freshly appointed head maid of the 3rd Prince’s Palace, clutched her head with both hands and let out a breathless wail. “I’m merely the daughter of a countryside viscount! Why! For what possible reason did His Highness appoint me to run the entire palace?!”
“Did His Highness not explain it himself?” Rachel replied calmly, folding her hands. “He said you were the only maid he truly trusted.”
“To be precise, he said he liked how well I simmered his beef stew!”
“And to be even more precise, Her Majesty the Empress heard word of the previous head maid’s disgrace and took note of your unwavering loyalty to His Highness.”
The ears of the imperial palace were as swift as they were merciless. Even though the disgraced head maid had walked out on her own two feet, the sordid details of her dismissal had already rippled through every corridor before sunset. Inevitably, the gossip had reached the Empress Palace.
For the Empress—a woman who had never spared a passing glance for the neglected Third Prince—to intervene personally and confirm Catherine’s promotion was no random act of charity. She had a clear objective.
Countess Catarina is the Second Consort’s right hand. Now that the spy she planted in the Third Prince’s estate has been ousted, the Empress sees an opening to claim the territory.
Currently, the court was divided into two fiercely contesting factions locked in a war of succession: the coalition backing the Empress’s son, the First Prince, and the faction rallying behind the Second Consort’s son, the Second Prince. Caught in such a high-stakes standoff, the Empress and Helena were naturally bitter, irreconcilable adversaries.
Not to mention the generational bad blood that has festered between their noble houses for decades.
The Empress simply could not stomach the idea of Helena continuing to hold sway over the 3rd Prince’s Palace. Rachel tilted her head, observing Catherine as the young woman paced back and forth in utter despair.
Still… I cannot entirely fathom why the Empress chose Catherine of all people.
If her aim were merely to keep Edwin under surveillance in place of the Second Consort, dispatching a trained operative from her own retinue would have been far more logical. Instead, the Empress had deliberately promoted a low-ranking maid who had openly defied her superior’s orders just to sneak warm food to a forsaken prince. It was a puzzling move, to say the least.
“Oh, Nanny,” Catherine asked, suddenly snapping out of her panic. “When are you going to return that spare uniform you borrowed from me the other night?”
“Ah.”
Right. I completely forgot about that.
“Nanny?”
“…Well, the truth is, I lost it.”
“What?! You lost a whole uniform?”
In truth, Rachel had incinerated and buried the garment rather than misplaced it, but she could hardly explain that. “I apologize. I will purchase a new dress to replace it.”
“Oh, forget it. Where would you get the money for that, Nanny?” Catherine glanced down at Rachel’s modest, worn attire with open pity, letting out a heavy sigh. “Besides, a head maid can’t go around wearing a standard maid’s uniform anyway. It looks like the very first thing I’ll have to do with my wages is commission a formal head maid’s dress.”
Unlike regular housemaids, the head maid was the face and dignity of a royal palace. Her station demanded refined, structured attire—funded entirely out of her own pocket, of course.
“Still, I suppose there is one silver lining to all this madness. All those intolerable people cleared out on their own.”
Following Catherine’s sudden elevation, a natural purge had swept through the domestic staff of the 3rd Prince’s Palace. Terrified that they might be implicated in their former mistress’s embezzling ring, the majority of the main building’s senior maids had quietly resigned and fled. In their absence, the maids from the annex who had toiled alongside Catherine were brought in to manage the main residence.
It was a vast improvement. The annex girls had already been doing all the heavy lifting behind the scenes while the senior maids took the credit.
Thus, against all odds, a serene normalcy settled back over the 3rd Prince’s Palace—peaceful in a way it had never experienced before.
They certainly look lively today.
Leaving Catherine to chatter anxiously beside her, Rachel turned her attention across the courtyard toward the royal siblings. Romping through the warm spring sunshine, Edwin and Emilia looked remarkably like a pair of joyful puppies tumbling in the grass.
As Rachel watched them with a faint, softened gaze, she absently ran a hand through her hair—and paused. When she drew her fingers away, a faint smudge of black residue clung to her skin.
More than a week had passed since that night, yet stubborn traces of charcoal dust still lingered in her dark locks. She had assumed the grime was confined entirely to the uniform she had burned.
She was dusting off her hands with an irritated frown when Catherine’s voice cut back into her thoughts.
“Nanny! Are you even listening to me?”
“Yes.”
“Then repeat what I just said!”
“To be frank, I wasn’t listening at all.”
Wilted under Catherine’s theatrical scowl, Rachel relented with a sigh. “What were you saying?”
Catherine leaned in close, checking both directions before lowering her voice to an conspiratorial whisper, as though unveiling the deepest state secret in the empire.
“Well… I heard this directly from the servants working over at the Emperor’s Palace. They say the single most renowned figure on the entire continent is currently staying as a guest in His Majesty’s palace!”