MFAWW 14

Chapter 14

“Even if the Bright Young Lady were a villainess hated by everyone, I don’t think she deserves to be blamed for things she didn’t do wrong.”

I didn’t want to criticize the Crown Prince, but my words came out sharply nonetheless. Whatever wrongs the Bright Young Lady had committed, at least in the matter involving the Second Prince and Countess Ollet, she was thoroughly the victim.

“Iris, you’re right. I truly feel sorry for the Bright Marquess’s Young Lady.”

“This is really…… Hoo.”

As anger rose to the top of my head, my temples throbbed. While I took deep breaths to calm the boiling rage, the Crown Prince spoke in a more subdued voice than before.

“If I were to make an excuse, it was the Empress who covered up Pavel’s wrongdoing. His Majesty the Emperor is largely unaware of this matter.”

“I know His Majesty hasn’t been well lately and hasn’t been able to handle state affairs properly. But I still don’t understand.”

Everyone was hush-hush about it, but it was common knowledge that the Emperor’s health was failing. Still, that reason alone wasn’t convincing.

Even if the Empress had conspired to deceive them, they weren’t fools—how could the Emperor, let alone the Bright family, know nothing? This was nothing short of a con artist’s scheme.

“Matters of imperial marriage are solely within the Empress’s authority. Even the Emperor cannot intervene recklessly. More accurately, it would be better to say he has no interest.”

“An imperial prince cheating on his promised fiancée is a serious issue.”

“It is. That’s precisely why they hid it so thoroughly.”

To cover up their child’s disgrace, they instead made the victim a scapegoat. The Empress, whom I’d never even seen, felt utterly despicable.

“In other words, for the sake of her own child, she sacrificed someone else’s perfectly fine child.”

“If His Majesty had known about this, Pavel would have fallen out of favor forever. The Empress couldn’t have allowed that.”

The Crown Prince, continuing with a shadowed expression, looked at me with a serious face.

“The Empress wants her bloodline to inherit the throne.”

That was also something I had anticipated to some extent. In the empire, when nobles remarried, this was a fairly common problem.

If the struggle for the head of a single noble house was fierce, then for the Emperor, the ruler of the empire, it went without saying.

“Do you know the Empress’s family?”

“I know it as the Douglas Marquess family.”

“You know your stuff.”

The Douglas Marquess family wasn’t quite on par with the Bright family, but it was still a fairly prestigious noble house. In fact, if you only considered the family’s history, it went deeper than the Bright family.

“The Douglas Marquess family is a great noble representing the southern region, called the empire’s breadbasket. They are landowners who possess fertile plains and are one of the families of the founding meritorious subjects. The current Douglas Marquess is the Empress’s cousin.”

“I see.”

“The Empress is an ambitious person. Originally, as the direct descendant of the previous Douglas Marquess, she should have inherited that position, but she couldn’t become the heir due to the conservative atmosphere of the family.”

Although the law had been changed to allow women to become heads of families, there were still many conservative nobles in the empire bound by outdated customs. That tendency was much more pronounced among the western and southern nobles.

“The Empress’s goal is to install Pavel as Emperor and subordinate the Douglas family, which sold itself to the imperial family, beneath her. She’s the type of person who would do anything to achieve that.”

The Crown Prince explained the Empress in a calm, measured tone.

“The Empress was able to quietly bury this matter because the Bright Marquess’s Young Lady had a poor reputation in the capital. On the other hand, Countess Ollet, who committed adultery with the Second Prince, was the flower of high society.”

The flower of high society was that curly orange hair? The capital nobles’ taste is truly awful. Well, what can you expect from eyes that can’t even tell people’s faces apart?

“Even if it were Countess Ollet, the Empress is not someone a young lady without even a title can dare to confront.”

The Empress, the pinnacle of the empire’s high society, and Countess Ollet, who had the Empress as her backing.

A rough picture formed in my mind. The Bright Young Lady was ostracized in noble society and couldn’t even receive proper protection from her family. For them, slandering the Bright Marquess’s Young Lady, who had already been branded a villainess, would have been easy.

“Still…… if this matter becomes known, the Bright family won’t stay quiet.”

From what I could tell, Duke Bright was someone who clearly valued honor. What would happen when he learned of this? He would never stay still. Marquess Bright also wasn’t the type to let things slide quietly.

“That’s right. Even at the time of the broken engagement, the enraged Duke Bright went to the Second Prince’s palace and caused a commotion.”

“Pardon? Duke Bright did?”

I opened my mouth in surprise at the unexpected words. Isn’t grabbing an imperial by the collar a grave offense?

“I wouldn’t have thought him the type.”

That Duke Bright? The old geezer who had glared at his own granddaughter with murderous intent for tarnishing the family name? I muttered in disbelief.

“It seems Duke Bright has taken quite a dislike to you.”

“My first impression was the worst.”

“Haha. But this is true. He grabbed Pavel by the collar, shook him, and slammed him onto the marble floor. After that, he received two months of confinement for the crime of injuring an imperial.”

“Surprising…….”

Truly surprising. Duke Bright’s score went up just a tiny bit in my book. Still, it’s still in the negative, though.

“What kind of person is Count Ollet?”

“He’s the kind of person who would lick even the Empress’s toes for the sake of advancement. He became a count from a viscount based on the achievements of his grandfather, so his family’s power is lacking compared to more established houses.”

“So there was a political deal between the Empress and Count Ollet.”

“Probably. Duke Bright is far from politics, and Marquess Bright is the head of the neutral faction. From the Empress’s perspective, the Ollet family was more convenient than the Bright family, which didn’t move according to her will.”

Feeling my throat dry, I downed the lukewarm tea in one go. I had expected it, but the more I heard, the more suffocating my chest felt. The more I understood the situation, the more things I still couldn’t comprehend.

“First…… I want to hear the answer I didn’t get to hear last time.”

Now it was time to hear the answer I had missed due to the aide’s interruption. It felt like that would finally resolve the questions I’d been carrying all along. Feeling the tension rise, I opened my mouth.

“How exactly did the Bright Young Lady become so famous? What were her misdeeds that everyone in the capital—nobles and commoners alike—came to know about them?”

“That’s because of the newspapers.”

The Crown Prince answered as if he’d been waiting for the question. I had expected a detailed explanation of when, where, and how the Bright Young Lady had committed her misdeeds, but his answer was very concise. Yet his tone carried the conviction that his answer was correct.

“Newspapers?”

“Yes.”

“Why would that…… Ah.”

My bewilderment was brief—I roughly understood what had happened. Newspapers were dailies compiled from extra editions that were published three or four times a week, and they had been trending in cities for the past few years.

The advantage of newspapers was that they were cheaper and easier to obtain than books, and they provided the latest information. Additionally, since they covered news from various fields such as politics, economy, and society all at once, they were also popular in our territory.

However, our territory didn’t have the resources to produce newspapers, so our butler would go to neighboring territories once a week to buy several days’ worth of newspapers at once.

“At first, most newspapers covered specialized fields like politics and economy or were official gazettes issued by the state, but since ten years ago, anyone has been allowed to run a newspaper company. Currently, there are over twenty comprehensive newspaper companies in the capital alone.”

“That’s a lot.”

Come to think of it, there was a newspaper company at the entrance of the alley leading to the café. Even in a large provincial city, there were at most two or three, so considering the size of the capital, over twenty seemed excessive.

“Like any other business, newspaper companies operate on money. Only when there are people buying the newspapers do advertisements come in and operations continue. For that reason, every newspaper company is desperate to sell even one more copy.”

“……Surely the Bright Young Lady’s misdeeds were published in the newspapers?”

In response to my question, the Crown Prince answered with a bitter smile instead of words. That was answer enough.

“It’ll be faster to show you than to explain.”

When the Crown Prince raised his hand, a bundle of newspapers neatly piled in the corner of the café floated over to me. As I caught them in a daze, I saw headlines written in large letters.

“Bright Young Lady, drunk and causing a disturbance at the New Year’s party, gets kicked out?”

It was strong from the start. Struck speechless, I looked at the Crown Prince, and he gestured with his chin as if to tell me to look at others as well.

“Bright Marquess’s Young Lady, climbs the central plaza spire in a suicide attempt due to shock of broken engagement…….”

The next article was even stronger. With trembling hands, I picked up another newspaper. As expected, the front page was also about the Bright Young Lady.

“Bright Young Lady, pushes Countess Ollet into a pond at a garden tea party? Well done.”

Judging by the timing, she must have pushed her after finding out she was having an affair with that prince—Pavel or whatever his name was. I nodded in satisfaction.

“Countess Ollet deserved to be treated like that.”

“Even so, this incident only amplified the voices criticizing the Bright Marquess’s Young Lady.”

“Because people didn’t know the inside story.”

If people had known that Countess Ollet had committed adultery, the criticism would have been directed at her. It was already in the past, but for some reason, it left a bitter taste in my mouth.

“Let’s see……. Heartless villainess, sneaks into a restricted hunting area and injures a knight. Bright Young Lady, tries to pretend she’s lost her memory to avoid taking responsibility, gets caught and becomes the laughingstock of everyone…….”

I examined each newspaper, which numbered at least several dozen. The headlines about the Bright Young Lady were all sensational, regardless of which newspaper it was. Just the titles were enough to roughly guess the contents, and my brow furrowed.