TBMRB 15

Chapter 15

The person who came outside with me today was Betty.

Betty and I exchanged a glance, then, without either of us needing to say anything, we started running toward the direction from which Dietrich’s scream had come.

Several other servants who had been in the garden had reached Dietrich before us and were surrounding him.

That white-clothed figure sitting on the ground was Dietrich, right?

“What happened! What is it!”

“Oh my, Lady, you’ve come.”

“What happened?”

A familiar-looking gardener repeatedly exclaimed in distress as he examined Dietrich’s ankle from different angles before answering.

“Young Master seems to have hurt his ankle a little…”

“Did he fall? Is he badly hurt?”

“Yes. Judging by how badly it’s swollen, I think we should call the physician and have him examine it properly. Goodness, what are we going to do?”

He fell?

But it was already afternoon, and it hadn’t rained recently, so the path around the riding track was completely dry.

His shoes had only been made a month ago, and they were already well broken in and fitted comfortably to his feet.

The path wasn’t slippery, and his shoes were in perfect condition…

“Ditty, are you okay?”

“It’s nothing.”

You call that nothing?

He had screamed incredibly loudly just moments ago.

He was only pretending to be tough because there were people around.

“For now, one of you go and call the physician sent by the main family. Someone else should carry Young Master back to his room.”

Betty quickly took charge of the situation, and the largest man there hoisted Dietrich onto his back.

I bit my lip and followed behind them.

Only after Dietrich had been laid down in bed did I finally get a chance to properly examine his ankle before the physician, who had gone out, returned.

I wasn’t a doctor, but in my previous life, examining people who had gotten injured while exercising had been my job.

Not only was it red and swollen, but there was also a faint bluish discoloration.

It looked like he might have injured the bone as well.

“It’s really nothing. My knee just hurt a little today, so I made a mistake.”

Despite the pain being severe enough to make him break out in a cold sweat, Dietrich continued pretending to be fine.

His knee hurt?

“Why did it hurt?”

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t fall or bump it somewhere?”

“No. I haven’t been getting into accidents lately. But my knee has been hurting for several days.”

His knee had been hurting even though there was no external injury.

If he had suddenly grown several centimeters, I would have suspected growing pains, but Dietrich hadn’t grown particularly tall lately.

And it wasn’t as though I had been making him exercise excessively either…

I looked at Dietrich’s knee, then at his unusually round and shiny face.

‘Could it be that?’

There was only one reason I could think of.

“Ditty, did you eat something without telling me?”

Dietrich’s recent weight gain had been suspiciously dramatic.

I couldn’t know his exact weight because we didn’t have a proper scale or an InBody machine, but judging by my own visual assessment, he seemed to have gained at least four kilograms in a month.

‘If he gained that much weight that suddenly, no wonder his knees hurt.’

There was only one thing that could make a seven-year-old child gain that much weight in a month.

He was eating something behind my back.

And if he was gaining weight this rapidly, it had to be something packed with sugar.

“W-What do you mean, what did I eat!”

He did eat something.

Dietrich flinched and tried to move his leg, then grimaced as pain shot through his ankle. But I crossed my arms and refused to back down.

Dietrich looked at Betty as if asking her for help.

“Did Betty tell her?”

“No, Lady! I’ve been right beside you the entire time!”

That was true.

Had the servants assigned specifically to Dietrich given him something?

Or perhaps the kitchen servants?

That meant someone had taken advantage of Nanny being less attentive and stuffed Dietrich with foods that were nothing but high-calorie, nutritionally unbalanced carbohydrates.

“Aren’t you going to tell me?”

“Ugh… Th-that’s…”

“Yasmin gave me pie, cake, and cookies… She said I was too young to eat too much of that stuff, so she would give it to me secretly, and told me to keep it a secret…”

“When did she give it to you?”

“Every night before bed. B-But I also hid some cookies for you without Yasmin knowing! Open that drawer over there!”

I opened the drawer of the bedside table next to Dietrich’s bed.

Inside were several cookies that had become dry and brittle on the outside.

Judging by how much chocolate, marshmallows, and dried fruit had been stuffed into them, they looked like snacks that would send anyone’s blood sugar skyrocketing just by looking at them.

‘She gave him these every night, right before bed?’

No wonder Dietrich had been listening to Yasmin so obediently.

He was a good kid, but he wasn’t obedient enough to calmly go to bed early just because someone told him to.

“Nanny said you weren’t allowed to eat them.”

“Yasmin said Nanny was just too worried about everything. She said all the other cousins who live at the main family’s estate eat them just fine.”

“Did the kitchen servants give you them too?”

“Yeah. The new servants said they were popular in Kalena Castle, where the main family lives, and kept giving me delicious things, so before I knew it…”

So there was a general problem with the employees who had come from the main family.

Even knowing that Yasmin had already been warned by Nanny, they were still trying to tempt Dietrich with snacks behind Nanny’s back.

“That’s outrageous. They’re deliberately ignoring Nanny’s orders. We need to tell Nanny immediately!”

Betty was the first to explode in anger, even before me.

“Whenever they open their mouths, they go on about the etiquette of the main family and look down on those of us who belong to the branch household! Even when Madam passed away…”

Betty had been about to launch into an impassioned speech when she abruptly closed her mouth and glanced nervously between the two of us.

Come to think of it, this had happened before too.

‘When they came to collect Madam’s coffin last time…’

I vaguely remembered Betty being scolded severely by Nanny after saying something like that.

What had happened?

When Mother died in battle, both Dietrich and I had been deeply shocked.

So we had left all the minor matters to the servants. We were already struggling just to grieve.

I had only vaguely heard from the other servants that people from the main family had come, taken Mother’s coffin, and placed it in the main family’s ancestral tomb.

I didn’t know the details of what had happened before or after that.

“When Mother died, what?”

“Ah, no. I misspoke.”

“Tell me. If it concerns our mother, Baby Ella and I should know.”

I hadn’t realized it because Dietrich usually wore such a foolish expression, but when he furrowed his brows, his face looked surprisingly fierce.

Under Dietrich’s sharp gaze, Betty’s eyes darted around before she hesitantly opened her mouth.

“Th-the employees who came from the main family… They behaved rather rudely at the time.”

“They were rude?”

“They said a few things that were disrespectful toward Master and Madam. So… I and the other servants don’t really like the employees from the main family.”

I wanted to know exactly what they had said, but Betty absolutely refused to answer that part.

As if desperately trying to prevent us from pressing her further, she immediately steered the conversation back to Dietrich’s snacks.

“Lady, what should we do about this? Should I tell Nanny?”

Perhaps imagining the situation where Nanny would scold him, Dietrich’s face went pale.

But there was nothing that could be done.

If you enjoyed all those secret sweets, you should also endure the punishment that came afterward.

“Yes. Tell her everything. Don’t leave out a single thing.”

When Betty and I deliberately looked away from him in unison, Dietrich seemed to realize that no one was going to take his side.

His shoulders drooped.

“Everyone hates me…”

“I wouldn’t say they hate you.”

“You call that comforting me?”

He was the one who had caused all this trouble, yet here he was squishing my poor cheeks!

As expected, Nanny was furious when Betty told her what had happened.

Nanny summoned all the kitchen servants, including Yasmin, to the entrance hall on the first floor, and her eyebrows were raised so high they seemed determined to reach the heavens.

“Yasmin.”

I watched the scene from the staircase above.

“You brought snacks I had forbidden to Young Master without permission. Was this another one of your attempts to win Young Master’s favor?”

“…I’m sorry. I was thoughtless.”

“No. You weren’t being thoughtless. You deliberately ignored me and came up with a way to deal with the young masters of this estate however you pleased.”

“That is a misunderstanding, Nanny. I merely wanted to become close to Young Master quickly…”

“Yasmin, your duty is to serve as the Lady’s nanny. Why are you so eager to become close to Young Master?”

Exactly.

As expected of our Nanny, she went straight for the heart of the matter.

This was only my guess, but Yasmin probably had intended to become close to me at first.

In fact, she had already tried to stay by my side alone by scolding and excluding the other maids.

‘But I didn’t want that.’

I had clearly warned her not to disregard my personal maids or Nanny.