Chapter 19
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* * *
From a young age, misfortune seemed to follow Edith whenever she stepped outside. Crows would snatch her bread, she would trip and fall, she’d nearly get run over by carriages, she’d be taken hostage by fleeing criminals… Every kind of bad luck pursued her.
From a certain point on, she began refusing to go outside at all, staying only within the house. But that didn’t mean this estate was a safe haven.
Misfortune, as if it were natural, always existed by her side. While the threat to her life was less than outside, there was something else she found even harder to bear.
At first, her father, Viscount Moulton, merely neglected her without doing anything worse. The estate’s people also looked after her initially, but seeing her being neglected, they too gradually changed their attitude as if it were only natural.
They didn’t buy her clothes, so she wore the same few outfits in rotation. When she grew and needed new ones, she had to endure the Viscount’s sharp, critical glare and his words—“A parasite that only eats money”—with her small body.
The maids would roughly ignore her or only come to do their assigned tasks. For meals, she mainly ate the dry bread and watery, broth-like soup meant for the servants, not the rich food the Viscount ate.
Consequently, her scrawny, underdeveloped frame, short stature, rough skin, and hair made her look nothing like a noble young lady. You’d think at least one or two people in the estate might pity her or offer help, but strangely, everyone seemed to reject her.
“Hello, Young Lady? My name is Marie. From today, I’ll be serving you.”
The hardest time in Edith’s past began the year she turned fifteen, the day the new maid, Marie, arrived. Thirteen-year-old Marie was, unlike the other maids, sharp and cunning for her age. She diligently served Edith, earning sympathy and trust from others for her hard work, but it was all a calculated plan.
When they were alone, ignoring Edith and chipping away at her self-esteem was just the start. She would report every incident caused by the persistent bad luck clinging to Edith to the Viscount, framing it all as Edith’s fault.
As the Viscount, influenced by the trusted Marie’s words, began to see the neglected Edith as an idiot and a shameful disgrace of a child, his words and actions grew increasingly harsh.
“Why are you so mean to me…?”
As Marie’s behavior grew worse each day, Edith, taking courage from the fact that Marie was around her age—someone she couldn’t ask anyone else in the estate—finally asked the question.
“Just because I dislike you, Young Lady. It’s irritating to see someone who doesn’t even look like a noble young lady being treated as one.”
The thirteen-year-old maid, younger than Edith herself, answered with a smirk, one corner of her mouth lifted.
After that, whenever Marie framed Edith and reported her, the Viscount would often send Edith to the attic to “reflect.”
“Please… let me out…”
Inside the dusty attic, originally a storeroom, where not a sliver of light entered, Edith relied on a candle. Even that, when it went out, left her whispering endlessly in the darkness, waiting endlessly for someone to come.
With her body starved from lack of food and her emotions similarly parched, the young Edith prayed each time she was confined to the attic over those five years.
She prayed that she would just die. She prayed to be taken to her mother’s side—a mother she’d never seen but imagined from the portrait etched in her memory by the Viscount.
* * *
I felt the surroundings darken again and drifted through the abyss as before. Before I knew it, my face was drenched in tears, and my whole body broke out in goosebumps.
I felt it all—the despairing emotion of young Edith, ignored and wounded each time she pleaded for help despite the threats to her life.
The loneliness of always being alone in a corner of the estate, reading books.
The wretched misery of her stomach aching from the meager meals during her growing years.
The sense of betrayal and shame she felt from Marie.
Above all, when I felt that dry, terrifyingly emotionless wish to die from a child too young for such thoughts in the dark attic, and simultaneously sensed that tiny, hidden part of her heart that still yearned to be loved, a wave of agony washed over and consumed me.
Swept up in Edith’s suddenly revealed past, ‘I’ could feel myself assimilating with her emotions.
‘What can I do for Edith…?’
* * *
[Panic State Lifted.]
The game interface window appeared in her vision. As Edith, her body and mind now free, lifted her eyelids, no memories replayed this time.
But thinking nothing had happened was impossible—a dull ache throbbed deep in her lower abdomen, and the skin around her eyes stung.
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