RBSP 10

Chapter 10

The Windsor family’s townhouse was always quiet—desolate, even. Not a single visitor crossed its threshold, and true to Karl’s nature, he kept a minimal household staff. Only the townhouse steward, an aide, and a handful of servants lived there quietly.

Yet even those few servants had recently begun to realize that things were taking a strange turn.

“It really is strange.”

During a brief moment while Karl stepped away, the servants gathered together. Every single one of them wore a serious expression as they brought up the rumors they had heard.

“Lady Gloucester’s letters have completely dried up, too.”

Karl’s fiancée, Gloria, used to send a letter once a week out of pure obligation. Karl, in turn, would send a perfunctory reply once a week as well. It had been an unbroken routine ever since their engagement began.

“Every time the postman comes and goes, the Junior Duke gives me this intense side-eye—I feel like I’m going to die!”

Karl’s aide, Russell, shivered with a disgusted grimace.

“He glares at me as if it’s my fault the letters aren’t coming! I’m genuinely losing my mind here.”

“To be fair, the Junior Duke has gone too far all this time. What kind of nobleman doesn’t properly escort his fiancée to a single party?”

The head cook, Meryl, nodded in agreement. Meryl had been in charge of the townhouse’s kitchen ever since Karl’s father, the Duke of Windsor, was himself a junior duke.

Having looked after Karl like a son, she was particularly outspoken.

“Doesn’t Lady Gloucester have a bad reputation, though? And I heard Count Gloucester is a complete freak, too.”

A young maid who had joined the staff only recently tilted her head and asked. Meryl immediately barked at her in reprimand.

“She is the future mistress of this house! Mind your tongue, girl!”

“Eek!”

As the maid hastily clamped her hand over her mouth, Meryl finally let out an authoritative huff of satisfaction. Yet the other servants seemed to share a similar line of thought.

“Surely Lady Gloucester isn’t planning to dump our Junior Duke… is she?”

“Oh, come on, impossible. Whatever the case, given Lady Gloucester’s current reputation, how could she possibly find another marriage prospect right now?”

“Actually, I heard something from a friend a few days ago,” whispered a maid with braided red hair. “She works as a maid in the Viscountcy of Langs, and she said she accompanied her lady to the Railway Bureau event.”

She lowered her voice further. “And she saw our Junior Duke and Lady Gloucester having a fight.”

“What?!”

Russell and Meryl shouted at the exact same time.

“No one else saw them, right?! Why are you only telling me this now?! What if an article gets published?! If I fail to suppress a scandal again, I’m fired!”

“Good heavens, what are we to do with Master Karl?! Why on earth is he picking fights with a noble lady—and his own fiancée, of all people?!”

Faced with Russell and Meryl’s rapid-fire barrage of panicked questions, the maid stood there with a blank, dazed look.

“Th-Thank goodness, my friend was the only one who saw them! It was in a secluded corridor, and she only caught a brief glimpse right as the argument was ending.”

“Well… I suppose if an article were going to break, it would have hit the presses already.”

Russell let out a long, ragged breath of relief.

Previously, Karl hadn’t cared in the slightest about what kind of news was published, but recently he had begun intervening with an almost obsessive persistence.

Back when the scandal with Baron Kent’s daughter broke, Karl had merely tossed the newspaper aside. But lately, whatever he had overheard at the ball had set him off—demanding to sue the press immediately, ranting about how incompetence allowed such scandals to run rampant, and raising such a violent fuss that Russell had nearly been driven to exhaustion.

If Karl had only expressed his concerns earlier, Russell could have taken immediate action. Because he had brought it up after the damage was already done, Russell had nearly died of a massive headache.

If this argument had made it to the papers as well… Ugh. He didn’t even want to imagine it.

“Master Karl didn’t actually have an affair with Lady Kent, did he?” Meryl asked, narrowing her eyes.

Russell frantically waved his hands in denial. “Not a chance! In the first place, he didn’t really attend that tea party—he just dropped by for a moment. He didn’t exchange a single word with the Baron’s daughter; the photos were just cleverly taken. Besides, they’re only engaged, so it wouldn’t even count as an affair!”

“Either way, she is the woman who will become the mistress of this house. I can’t help but feel sorry for her.”

Whenever Meryl watched the self-centered Karl, a troubled expression invariably washed over her face.

Having watched him since he was a child, she knew Karl was not a bad person at heart, but he possessed a flaw: he could never be honest when honesty was needed, and he could never hide his feelings when concealment was required.

“When autumn comes, we’ll truly have to start preparing the mistress’s quarters. Knowing full well how things stand, I simply don’t understand why he acts so cruel.”

“W-Well, Mrs. Meryl, you know how it is. Back in school, boys would always pick on the girls they liked. It feels exactly like that.”

Russell let out a quiet chuckle. It was a joke permissible only because Karl was nowhere in sight.

“Tsk. What good is a grand posture if he’s utterly useless?! A man ought to know how to cherish a woman’s heart.”

Meryl recalled the few times she had seen Gloria Gloucester.

A breathtakingly beautiful lady with golden-brown hair and crimson eyes. Even to Meryl, who knew little of noble society, Gloria was a striking and exceptionally lovely young woman.

Yet, after seeing her sit endlessly in the drawing room during an official visit—waiting for Karl, who refused to come out, with hollow eyes that expected absolutely nothing—Meryl had found herself constantly worrying about her.

“I only hope neither the Master nor the Lady ends up getting hurt.”

Meryl’s anxiety deepened. Russell, however, brushed it off casually.

“They’re going to get married anyway. They’ll be living together for decades to come—what difference does a mere four years of neglect make in the long run?”

His thinking mirrored the comfortable, careless logic of his master: Since we’re bound to marry anyway, it’s fine to take her for granted. That attitude did not sit well with Meryl at all.

“Acting like that, what woman in her right mind would ever love him?”

At Meryl’s sharp rebuke, the surrounding maids nodded in agreement. While Gloria’s reputation among the servant class wasn’t particularly glowing either, their evaluation of Karl’s behavior was far harsher.

“Russell! Russell!”

Not long after the servants had gathered, a voice calling for Russell echoed from a distance. There was only one person in the entire townhouse who would ever raise his voice like that. Turning pale, Russell instinctively bolted toward the study.

His intuition was spot on. If he had arrived even a single second later, he might have lost his stable employment on the spot.

“Russell.”

Even a casual glance made it abundantly clear that his master was in an exceedingly foul mood. Perhaps it was due to the invitation held in his hand.

“This invitation.”

“Ah. Are you referring to the invitation sent by the Second Prince for the railway maiden run ceremony?”

Recognizing the envelope, Russell answered promptly. Then, his mind began racing at top speed. What could possibly be the problem with an invitation that arrived weeks ago?

“…Am I attending alone?”

Karl’s words, spat through a deep scowl, were structured in a way that defied everything in Russell’s existing mental database.

“It is my understanding that it was issued as a family-wide invitation,” Russell replied smoothly, drawing upon his honed skills as an aide. “That is why I inquired with the Duke and Duchess at the estate regarding their attendance. They mentioned it would be difficult to travel to the capital for this event, so only you need to attend, My Lord.”

“If it was issued as a family-wide invitation, doesn’t that make it even stranger?”

Despite Russell’s explanation, the deep crevasse between Karl’s brows showed no signs of smoothing out.

“May I ask what you mean by that…?”

“Look here, Russell.”

Karl irritably jabbed the corner of the invitation against the desk. Anyone else would have treated an invitation from the Royal Family with utmost reverence, but this was classic Karl behavior.

“That’s not what I’m asking.”

“Then…” Then why on earth are you picking a fight with me?! The words nearly burst past Russell’s throat.

“Is… my fiancée attending?”

After venting his temper all on his own, Karl finally brought up Gloria himself, affecting an indifferent, detached tone as if speaking of a total stranger.

Russell, however, was not flustered. His master always checked whether his fiancée would attend an event before deciding whether to go himself; it was a completely standard question.

“I have been informed that no invitation was sent to the Gloucester family.”

Though he took a lot of flak, Russell was quite competent. He had already looked into that much beforehand.

“Therefore, she will not be attending.”

“Why?”

This response, however, took Russell completely off guard. Karl had never once asked a follow-up question like that before.

“Pardon?”

“She will soon become a member of the Windsor family. Why was no invitation sent to her side?”

It was an un-Karl-like question. Displaying such fierce possessiveness toward his fiancée was utterly uncharacteristic of him.

Was there something wrong with his breakfast this morning? Yet Karl had eaten his usual breakfast of a single apple and chicken. The head cook, Meryl, was exceedingly strict, so there couldn’t have been any issue with the ingredients either.

“Could it be that Ian doesn’t know she’s my fiancée? That bastard would certainly be capable of such a thing.”

Russell refrained from pointing out that no matter how free-spirited a prince might be, there was no way he didn’t know his own cousin’s fiancée. There were far too many other points to address first anyway.

“The reason Her Ladyship is not attending is because you did not invite her yourself, My Lord.”

“What?”

Karl’s frigid gaze locked onto Russell. Though the knees-buckling pressure made Russell flinch, his mouth showed zero sign of stopping.

“An engagement is not a marriage. As long as her surname remains Gloucester, she requires your invitation, My Lord, in order to attend under the name of Windsor.”

Karl stared at Russell in silence. The gaze scanning him was colder than a northern winter wind.

“Why didn’t I invite her?”

“Pardon?”

“No… never mind.”

Leaving behind a statement that made it impossible to tell whether he was asking Russell or questioning himself, Karl clamped his lips tightly shut.

Left trapped in the middle, Russell could do nothing but nervously shuffle his feet in place.