Chapter 56
Dragged off by Claude, who said he would make me the Duchess, I was subjected to… Well, not quite torture, but certainly physical and mental suffering on par with it. Only much later did I finally learn the detailed truth behind the death of Duke Clausewitz.
When I left the estate, the old man was still in good health, so I knew it couldn’t have been illness. I had already expected that Claude must have pulled some kind of trick.
My guess was only half right, and the reality was less than half the full truth.
“His Imperial Highness, the Crown Prince…?”
At the mention of such an unexpectedly noble title, I snapped awake, even though I was still half-asleep and sprawled in bed.
Claude’s explanation was as follows.
At some point, the imperial family of the Virol Empire began to keep the Clausewitz family—their most loyal dogs and weapons—under watch.
The loyalty that had been offered since the founding ancestor gradually faded along with their thinning bloodline, and as the headship of the family passed not by blood but by contract, even their pride had long since disappeared.
With the driving force of family honor gone, the new masters of Clausewitz filled that void with twisted ambition.
Not just the previous Duke, but those before him as well. Men who started from the bottom and rose to the top, every one of them twisted the family and its knight order to suit their own purposes.
In some ways, it was the perfect environment for secretly amassing power.
Most of the secret orders they received from the Emperor were confidential matters never made public. Since the methods for handling those affairs never surfaced, it wasn’t hard to deceive their master’s eyes.
In less than a hundred years, the Clausewitz family’s influence had grown to the point that even the imperial family could hardly control it. The more their power increased, the more the authority and ambition of the head of the family grew as well.
Like nobles above nobles, they who claimed to be the Emperor’s shadow started to act as if they were not a shadow, but the master, moving with increasing autonomy.
They collected the secret scandals of the aristocracy and things only the Emperor would know, then used them for blackmail or personal gain. They even got their hands on military secrets and diplomatic documents, trying to seize the weaknesses of the imperial family itself.
No longer content to be recluses behind the curtain, they sought to stand in the sunlight as the leading players. For power second only to the Emperor, and even beyond him.
Of course, a runaway horse can’t run wild forever. That all changed with the arrival of the young and forceful Crown Prince, in contrast to the current Emperor, who was somewhat indecisive.
The Crown Prince, to cultivate spies who could replace Clausewitz, created a secret organization disguised as a charitable project, gathering vagrants and orphans to raise.
“I grew up there too. I deliberately drew the Duke’s attention, and at eight years old, I was officially adopted.”
In other words, Claude had come here from the start as a double agent planted by the Crown Prince. He was dispatched to bring down the Duchy from within.
Claude said that I was an unforeseen variable for him. I was a person who first caught his interest, but someone he could not have.
“The moment I got close to you, it was obvious the Duke wouldn’t leave you alone. How could I possibly reach out to you?”
“Then, all those times you kept bothering me regularly…?”
“Well, all that ended up useless anyway.”
From the moment he and I got involved, everything started to unravel.
The Crown Prince didn’t look kindly on my presence, but the Duke was rather pleased, as if he’d found Claude’s weak point.
In fact, it was the Duke who suggested I seduce Claude in the first place… Wait, so in the end, I was just being played by both a power-mad Duke and a double-agent Claude?
Claude dismissed my complaint with a single snort.
“Unlike you, I was never anything but sincere with you. Not even once.”
“Well, same goes for me!”
Anyway, after all those twists and turns, Claude managed to fully establish himself as the young master of Clausewitz, even earning the Duke’s trust.
It seemed that the reason the precious young master of the ducal house always looked as if he were walking a tightrope was because of such an enormous secret.
As the Duke’s heir, year by year, Claude took command of the Black Bear Knights and turned the information guild and underground organizations, traditionally managed by the ducal house, to his side. Once he had fully grasped and seized control of all the power, he planned to purge the Duke.
His collaborator in all this was…
“It was the Swinden Duchy. The wedding day was supposed to be the day of action. But my foolish maid…”
Ah… so you could have at least given me a heads up.
“As for marrying another woman… Damn it. I decided to see just how far you’d go, and you really went all the way, didn’t you? I was planning to take you next, after dealing with the Duke, but you even ran away.”
So how is any of that my fault? I really did make the best choice available to me.
“But now you can’t leave. Your face is all over every guild there is.”
It feels like it was just yesterday that he threatened me with words like that.
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