The Ledgers That Record My Idiocy

Even after she had thrown out that primped-up pretty boy, Dong-hui’s temper would not settle. What made her angriest was Chloe Grace’s stupidity. The deception had been there in plain sight, and still the girl had been so blind with love that she all but poured out everything she owned. If Chloe had been standing in front of her, Dong-hui would have wanted to rap her once on the head.

“Idiot.”

The feeling surging up in her put a hard edge on her voice.

“I’m sorry, my lady!”

Anna, who had been keeping close by Chloe’s side, blurted out the apology in a thoroughly nervous voice and bent at the waist. Dong-hui had been so drunk on a feeling entirely her own that she had forgotten for a moment there was anyone else in the room, and the voice breaking in brought her back with a start. One look at the helpless expression on Anna’s face and the heat went out of her fast. Angry as she was, she had no intention of taking it out on the wrong person.

“Anna, I wasn’t angry at you. So there’s no need to apologize. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

Dong-hui kept seeing another face surface through Anna’s: her own, squirming and reading her boss’s mood for fear of being fired from a part-time job. She wanted to put Anna at ease, so she drained as much force out of her voice as she could.

Anna was thrown. The lord’s moods had swung from one extreme to the other in so short a space of time, and she had no idea what she ought to say. Her lips only twitched uselessly. Speaking risked a blunder; staying silent risked looking impertinent. Both frightened her.

“I only said it because I’m angry at myself, for having been an idiot.”

“…I’m sorry.”

Told it was not her fault, Anna apologized anyway, out of habit, and lowered her head. Changed as her lord seemed, Anna still froze up in front of Chloe from time to time, her face going stiff.

Dong-hui could guess well enough how Chloe had been treating her all this time, and she resolved to be kinder to Anna.

“Anna. When Ray came before, did he bring Erma with him then too?”

Dong-hui asked it, working to scrub the edge out of her voice. Most of the force had gone out of it, but her feet had not settled, and they went on carrying her round and round the room. If she did not let the energy out somehow, even like this, she was going to get so disgusted with herself that she would want to throttle herself with the curtains.

Anna had been watching uneasily while Chloe circled the same patch of floor for a good while, and she answered now in a voice a good deal less tense.

“Yes. Lady Erma always came with Master Ray, and when my lady and Master Ray were taking tea or sitting down to a meal she would wait in the next room, or else join the two of you.”
“Insane.”
“I beg your pardon?”

The coarse word had come out of Chloe unfiltered, and Anna’s eyes went round. Dong-hui waved her hands hurriedly, sure she had startled her all over again.

There was far too much to keep track of, one way and another, and the tiredness rolled over her all at once. Still, she could not be careless with someone who had been hurt because of her. That the Chloe of then and the Chloe of now were two different people made no difference. In Anna’s eyes she was simply a difficult mistress, as changeable as the weather.

“No. Me.”

Dong-hui answered, thumping her chest with a fist as though she would die of frustration. Just then a knock came at the door.

“Come in.”

The knock had a good deal of weight behind it. From the sound alone Dong-hui was certain it would be Delma, and sure enough, the door opened on Delma. She must have known every last detail of all this, and the thought stirred a faint resentment. Could she not have talked Chloe out of it?

“Why didn’t you ever stop me? They tell me I even agreed to hand money over to that bastard Ray?”

Hit with a barrage of nagging the instant she walked in, Delma knit her brow, as though hard done by, and stuck out her lip.

“I did stop you. Many times over, at that. I even pleaded with my lady, and back then all you did was lose your temper.”

Reproach had come into Delma’s voice, and Dong-hui was more dumbfounded than ever.

“Many times? Don’t tell me I’ve already given that creep money?”
“Don’t you remember? You gave it any number of times, saying Master Ray needed the capital for his business.”
“A-any number of times! Oh my god, I’m going out of my mind. I was a complete soft touch. Do you happen to know how much I gave him?”
“The treasurer will know. He was terribly upset over it every time. Once Master Ray had carried the money off, he’d be laid up groaning for two days.”

The back of Delma’s neck went red, as though merely calling the old business to mind sent her stress shooting up.

“Aaargh!”

None of it was even something she had done, and still the shame came flooding in; Dong-hui scratched furiously at her head. Anna’s face fell at a hairstyle ruined in an instant, but there was nothing Dong-hui could do about it. Just now the only target she had to take it out on was herself.

If she tore at her hair until the anger had gone out of her, she would certainly be bald before the night was out.

Dong-hui took a careful look around the room that served Scrooge as both office and quarters. It was larger than she had expected, but every piece of furniture and equipment in it looked wretchedly worn. The curtains had taken the full brunt of the sun for long years and faded until it was hard to make out what color they had started as, and the bookcase filling one whole wall was packed tight with things that might have been ledgers, or records of some kind. The documents were bound in brown leather, and the older they were, the paler the leather. Even at thirty volumes to a shelf, there had to be a thousand of them at a rough guess.

“Wow… are these all financial records?”

Dong-hui tipped her head back and let her mouth hang open.

“Yes. They have been kept since the House of Grace was first founded.”
“How many volumes in all have you kept?”

Dong-hui asked without taking her eyes off the bookcase. Dust adrift in the sunlight glittered like gold powder.

“Two volumes a year. This year makes exactly the thirtieth.”
“So you’ve been treasurer a full fifteen years.”
“Yes. From the year my lady turned four, I took over the work my father had been doing.”

His father?

Standing in a place filled with the history of the House of Grace, looking about her, Dong-hui felt strange. She had slept here, eaten here, met people here, gone on completing quests here, and not once had she thought of it as a place that actually existed. Somewhere at the back of her mind she had supposed it would vanish the way it had appeared one day out of nowhere, as though the whole of it had been a dream. But the Grace records ran on for decades, no, for hundreds of years, and the sight of them brought her sharply to her senses. The Scrooge family, by the look of it, had served the House of Grace generation after generation. Something solemn settled over her, and Dong-hui’s spirits sank a little.

Scrooge, by contrast, could not stay in his seat for a second. The lord had descended on him without warning, and he went distractedly back and forth about the room, tidying.

“If my lady is coming, she might say beforehand that she is coming. Throwing a man into such a state every time…”

Grumbling all the while, he tapped the papers strewn over the desk into a neat squared stack and scrambled to gather up the rubbish scattered over the floor. He made only a few passes back and forth, and the room was clean in no time.

“I want to check how much money I gave Ray.”

Scrooge’s bustling stopped dead. Dong-hui had dropped into the chair at the tidied desk as she said it, and his eyes went wide enough to pop out of his head. The lord seated at a desk made for a thoroughly unfamiliar sight.

“All of a sudden?”
“Mm. I need to see just how stupid a thing I did.”
“Oh, God above! Thank you, truly!”

The profession of faith came out of nowhere, and Dong-hui knitted her brows and blinked at him.

“What’s this, all of a sudden?”
“My lady has no idea how I have longed for this day to come. My prayer has been answered at last.”

From the look on his face, Scrooge meant it.

“Congratulations on the answer to your prayer. Now then, will you show me the ledgers that record my idiocy?”
“Of course! I have set it all down in the most minute detail.”

There was something about hearing Scrooge answer in such high spirits that soured her mood a little.

Well, there’s no need to go writing it down in detail.

Chloe sat there with a put-out look on her face, and in front of her Scrooge opened out a ledger that looked to be a recent one.

“Wow.”

Quite apart from the stupid things Chloe had done, the ledger was ordered down to the last line, and the exclamation came out of Dong-hui by itself. Scrooge plainly had a natural gift for keeping books.

In an age without so much as Excel, bookkeeping this clean and this free of clutter.

One look at the ledger he had held out so proudly laid bare the reason the estate could not help being dirt-poor.

None other than Chloe Grace.

Chloe Grace, who had not a thing to her name and yet, mad with love, sold off even the few keepsakes her parents had left and carried them to Ray.

Chloe Grace, who called merchants up to the castle to buy presents for Ray while the estate’s residents were starving to death.

The crazy bitch poured oil on the fire and then stood there fanning it.

That was Dong-hui’s conclusion.

“How long have I even been seeing Ray?”

Dong-hui asked without lifting her eyes from the neatly kept ledger. The anger she had only just got to settle came bubbling back up.

A lord turning up out of nowhere to ask for the financial records astonished Scrooge quite enough on its own. What astonished him more was the sight of Chloe reading them and, to all appearances, understanding them.

Though, come to think of it, she added up the prices Gold Rich quoted for those jewels in the blink of an eye not long ago.

The lord went over the records closely, turning the leaves one after another, and Scrooge watched her with something like hope in his eyes. Judging by what she had done to the village of Morta, there might well be some remarkable ability in her that he had known nothing about.

“The betrothal was a year ago, and my lady has been following Master Ray about for a little over two years.”
“So I even chased after him, on top of everything.”
“Most ardently, my lady. And when Master Ray consented to the betrothal, by way of a thank-you gift…”
“I gave him the one villa that was left.”

Dong-hui said it glaring at the ledger as though she meant to burn it to ashes.

“Yes. I most certainly objected. Though I don’t know whether my lady will remember.”

Around the time of the betrothal ceremony with Ray, Chloe had behaved like a woman who could see nothing but him. She had gone about saying openly that the reason Chloe Grace existed was Ray. Thinking back on it, the sighs came heaving out of Scrooge all by themselves.

“She was even more of a crazy bitch than I thought.”
“I beg your pardon?”

Dong-hui had muttered it to herself, and it startled Scrooge into asking.

“Nothing, it’s nothing. First things first, I’m going to get back the money I gave Ray, and the villa with it.”

“Then my lady means…”