Chapter 3.6
The Marquis murmured as he looked at a nearby argument between a customer and a shop attendant.
“It must be hard when someone from the nobility is doing that kind of work. Other people’s eyes aren’t kind.”
“Mm…”
“These are people who were being told how distinguished and privileged they were, just a little while ago. And now they’ve neither power nor money, and they’re scrambling. You can imagine how pathetic that looks to common folk.”
He said it with a mild cynicism and looked away. She was performing as Rozalia, but those were words Azelin herself had heard over and over, from then until now.
The wider world she had stepped into when she fled the greenhouse had not been consistently kind. She had never once regretted running, but there had been hard, miserable moments.
So she was all the more grateful for the umbrella the Marquis had left her with. It seemed to say: you’ve left the greenhouse now, so you have to accept everything that comes, but if it ever gets too cold and exhausting, it’s all right to rest.
She had deliberately thrown a cold remark at him and waited for his response.
“If that’s how you see it, Rozalia, I respect it, but I don’t feel that way myself.”
“…What?”
“Either way, they’re struggling. Trying to escape where they are.”
“Doesn’t it look pathetic?”
The Marquis paused for a moment, brow slightly furrowed, then smiled quietly and took her hand.
He pressed his lips lightly to the back of it, and he smiled like a child playing a small trick.
“I like it. Everything that struggles to survive by any means it can, it’s pitiable and beautiful exactly like that.”
“…..”
“And right now I’m struggling in front of you, begging you to love me.”
The back of her hand, where his lips had been, burned like a fresh scald. His warmth lingered there stubbornly, refusing to leave. Azelin shivered as his full affection hit her.
He was still the same. Consistent as he had been at that first meeting, a person like a downpour.
He appeared when you least expected it, and drenched you with an affection so large you couldn’t escape it.
She knew that the downpour of affection wasn’t meant for her. And still Azelin couldn’t dodge the feeling soaking through her whole body.
In that moment, not even the umbrella he had given her was of any use.
She noticed, with a start, that the heartbeat that had been running fast with fear had changed, moved into something different. A dizzy, ominous premonition shook through her.
She had the feeling that she wouldn’t easily escape the clinging, wet emotion seeping into every part of her, like a cloth already soaked through.
* * *
“I have to do something, don’t I?”
Curled up in the middle of an absurdly large, plush bed, Azelin stared hard at the ceiling with a grave expression. Just the thought of his face brought back the pleading look he’d had as he appealed to her, and her heart picked up.
Stay still, she told herself severely, pressing a palm flat against her chest, but the rapid pulse running through her underneath it was unmistakably excitement.
“That’s impossible.”
Until now, she had always believed that this kind of excitement, this giddy hammering, was something that happened to other people.
She had more or less given up the idea that she would ever feel anything like it in her life…
And then to feel it at such an unexpected moment, toward such an unimaginable person. Someone had once told her that love wasn’t chosen, it arrived like an accident, without warning.
“Exactly. This is a natural disaster.”
With a sigh, Azelin dragged her reason back up from where her first love had pushed it.
She made no assumptions about it being returned. The person in question didn’t even know who she really was, and was already in love with someone else.
The one consoling thing was that Rozalia showed absolutely no sign of accepting him, but even so…
“Not a chance. It is impossible, right?”
It wasn’t hopeless pessimism, it was a clear-eyed assessment.
Right. First loves never worked out.
Azelin decided to hold the feeling carefully and end things in a way that wouldn’t hurt herself too badly. Perhaps being able to spend even a week with him was the lucky part.
‘I had wanted to see him again someday.’
She still hadn’t asked him why he acted that way back then. Before she ever came to wear Rozalia’s face, he had been someone out of reach, someone she had no connection to and no way to approach. But the luck of meeting Princess Rozalia had led her here after all.
Maybe a first love like this isn’t so bad. Maybe it’s not such an unfortunate connection, she thought, and steadied herself.
Azelin stepped down from the bed and planted herself at the desk. She wrote out a quick letter to Rozalia.
Given the Marquis’s sincere, genuine feelings, so different from anything Rozalia had warned her about, she needed new instructions on how to proceed.
Asking what attitude to take toward a Marquis who was thoroughly, sincerely in love with her, in terms entirely unlike what Rozalia had described, Azelin’s letter was pressed into the hands of a quiet helper in the early hours before dawn and carried to the Princess.
And as the helper disappeared quickly into the darkness, there was a gaze watching the retreating figure without a sound.
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