Our Estate Finally Has A Budget

The status window had sprung up out of nowhere, glittering. It blinked as gaudily as if colored bulbs had been strung along its border, and it was plainly in a very good mood.

It had come up as village 1, so villages 2 and 3 would be along in their turn as well.

There was money now, and there was a way. Something like fighting spirit caught light in Dong-hui, and her mood rose to match the blinking window’s.

Delma had been waiting in a state of high anxiety, and the moment Scrooge came outside she strode straight up and seized his arm hard.

“What is it? What on earth happened in there, that a boar of a man like that should go off grinning all over his face?”

Every time Gold Rich paid a call at Grace Castle, the estate’s coffers were emptied that much further.

She had always felt he carried off far too much money for what he left behind, but he said the price of a noble’s jewels swung wildly from one visit to the next, and she had never managed to press him on the details. Above all, if she took issue with Gold Rich and was struck by the giant of a man he always brought with him, she was fairly sure she would die on the spot.

All Delma had been able to do was watch Gold Rich’s grinning back recede, her eyes full of resentment. So the moment Scrooge stepped outside she had flown at him, and now she was doing her level best to pry the whole story out of him.

If her ladyship had been fleeced like a soft touch yet again, Delma thought, she would have that money back by whatever means it took.

But Scrooge, who she had expected to start foaming at the mouth and launch into a tirade on the spot, only stood there blank-faced, as though something had bewitched him.

“Butler!”
“Yes? Ah… yes. I am listening.”

Delma’s bellowing seemed to bring him round; a little focus came back into his eyes. He still wore the face of a man who had been hit hard across the back of the head.

“I am asking you what that man did to her ladyship before he left. Were you simply standing there beside her, watching?”

Nobody had called her in, so she had not even been able to go inside, which only made her frustration worse.

“It was nothing of the sort.”
“That is precisely why I said you ought to keep a proper… What?”

Delma caught up with what Scrooge had said a beat too late and stopped in the middle of her own sentence. Slowly, the life came back into Scrooge’s face, which had been as blank as a man whose soul had gone out of him.

“Wh— what is the matter with you?”

She did not say it aloud, but looking at his face, Delma could not help thinking: has the old fellow finally lost his mind?

Then, at last, Scrooge broke into a broad grin; he seized Delma’s hand as she stood staring so strangely at him, and cried out.

“1,100 gold!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Our estate finally has a budget!”

Even at that hearty, booming announcement, Delma’s face stayed as bewildered as before.

Scrooge went over what had happened inside again and again, never once tiring of the telling. Only after Delma had asked the same question eight separate times did the whole of it land, and she sank down where she stood and let out a long breath of relief.

“But… where in the world can her ladyship have got those jewels from? She surely has not stolen them from somewhere?”
“It did not appear to be that. Some other hidden inheritance, most likely. Our estate is saved!”

In all honesty, he did not doubt he could find out if he dug into it piece by piece. Scrooge decided to turn a blind eye. Besides, the Chloe he knew might be a fool, but she was not the sort to do anything wicked.

Midnight that night.

— Bong… Bong… Bong…

The pendulum clock out in the corridor struck twelve, and a blue light appeared abruptly in the empty room once more. A whole day out of doors had drained Dong-hui’s stamina flat, and she was already asleep, as though she had passed out.

The blue light shimmered above the bed, and the silver-haired man came through the middle of it, splitting it apart. Nothing about it resembled the daytime entrance, when he had been set down on the floor as though thrown there.

The status window that had spat him out was far smaller than usual, but the letters engraved inside it were clearer than they normally were.

“She may well give it up before long.”

He stood beside the bed, gazing down at the sleeping Chloe, and his voice was listless, without a trace of expectation in it.

Moonlight seeped in at the window and lit her sleeping face with a soft glow. That a woman dropped overnight into a strange place could sleep so soundly, so untroubled, struck him as absurd and unfamiliar both.

“The seventy-fourth.”

He answered the status window’s question in a voice with no rise or fall in it. Even as he spoke, his gaze would not come away from the woman asleep on the bed.

These several hundred years, a face he had looked at until he was sick of it.

So many human souls had passed through that small body that it seemed liable to wear away to nothing.

And why should this time be any different?

— Kirrik—, kirrikikik—.

The unholy wailing rode in on the wind, faint at first, then steadily clearer and louder.

He gazed a while at the woman sleeping dead to the world, then flicked his fingertips toward the window. A light as clear and bright as his silver hair shot out through it, fast as an arrow.

— Fwip!

A moment later,

— Kweeek! Splat!

A dying shriek came, and with it the sound of something bursting open with a pop.

The man glanced out the window with no more than passing interest, stared at the hourglass on the back of his hand, and scattered away in blue.

All of it had happened exactly seventy seconds after he appeared.

The next morning Delma came to Chloe’s room expecting nothing in particular, and found the lord already up before she could wake her and getting ready to go out, which startled her so badly that she rubbed her eyes several times over. Perhaps she was seeing things. Perhaps she had simply not woken from her dream yet. None of it felt real.

“M— my lady?”
“Why are you so late? Come here quickly and do something about this hair. It’s so long I have no idea what to do with it.”

Dong-hui had been up at the crack of dawn and had even finished her bath, and she had been trying every way she knew to get her hair tied up. None of it went the way she wanted.

It isn’t as though there’s a decent elastic band — a limp ribbon is the best on offer, and how is anybody supposed to tie their hair up with that?

Her seventh attempt had failed like the six before it, and by now she could not bear even to look at a ribbon.

“Yes. I shall fetch Anna.”
“Do that.”

She had no idea who Anna was, but from the look of things she must be a maid kept on to help with dressing and hair.

But it was Delma who helped me yesterday.

Dong-hui tilted her head to one side and thought it over for a moment, then looked into the mirror again and combed her hair.

“She really is pretty.”

Her hair was still in disarray for want of a proper combing, and even so the face only grew prettier the longer she looked at it.

The dark brown eyes might have been made of melted chocolate, exactly the color of her glossy, lustrous hair.

White and unblemished, the face was a flawless oval, and the nose set in the middle of it was as perfect as the “after” nose in a plastic surgeon’s before-and-after. Her lips, red and lush as cherries even without a trace of makeup, were as dainty and charming as a single flower in bloom.

— Knock, knock.

“My lady, I am coming in.”

She had been deep in narcissism at the mirror for some time when the knock came, and Delma entered with a maid Dong-hui had never seen before.

The flesh around her eyelids was so thick it looked as though telling an open eye from a shut one would be a job in itself. Tawny curls sprang out here and there from under a demurely worn headscarf, coiling like springs.

“Anna?”
“Yes, my lady. I arrived only this morning. It was thanks to my lady that my mother’s funeral could be carried out without trouble.”

Ah — they’re swollen from crying.

Dong-hui felt sorry for having let her thoughts wander over those swollen eyes even for a moment, and she gave an awkward smile.

“I— I see. You must be tired. Sorry for calling you in first thing in the morning.”
“I beg your pardon?”

Anna’s eyes went round, like someone who had just been addressed in a foreign language she could not understand. She looked at Delma beside her and raised her eyebrows, and it was plain she had no notion what was going on and was working hard to catch up.

Through all of it, her hands stayed exactly where they were, gathered politely together in front of her.

“Once you have made this hair a little less unwieldy, you may go back and rest.”

“…Am I being turned out?”

Anna asked it with reddening eyes, as though she had only now understood what was happening. As the tears welled up, the small round bridge of her nose flushed pink.

The hesitation in the voice that asked it was so pitiful that guilt surged up in her before she could stop it. Dong-hui waved her hands hurriedly.

“No, it’s nothing like that. You just looked tired, that’s all.”
“No! I am not the least bit tired. I can work as much as you like. My lady, I have five younger brothers and sisters.”

A girl breadwinner.

Dong-hui’s heart ached with pity.

“I have not the slightest intention of dismissing you, so hurry up and tie my hair and then go and get some proper rest. You can start work tomorrow. All right?”

She spoke slowly on purpose, and she looked Anna straight in the eye so there could be no misunderstanding. The effort to sound as sincere as she possibly could must have worked, because little by little she could see Anna’s tearful look settle.

“Then may I really go on working?”

Anna asked, still rubbing at her pink-stained nose.

“Of course you may!”

Anna had been rattling off words like a machine gun stuck on rapid-fire, and at Chloe’s brisk, open answer she let out a slow breath at last and nodded. One drop of the tears brimming there finally rolled down her cheek.

Lord Grace. Lord Grace.
Just what kind of life were you living?