Chapter 3
“Franz. Giving charity is like preparing a purse that never runs out of treasure in heaven.”
Right in front of us, no less!
When the children heard they were coming, they got excited.
“When the Duke comes, we can eat thick soup and big bread and almond cookies! And we can rest for three whole hours!”
But I hated it! Lion! Leopardi! They clearly satisfied their sense of superiority by helping the poor and wretched.
They regarded sponsoring this convent like a ticket.
A ticket to the kingdom of heaven! Those greedy ones wanted to sit in high seats even in heaven!
‘…They should at least know. How we are living here.’
I wanted to tell them that they were buying a different ticket. I thought that at least if they knew they had bought a different ticket, the truth of this convent might be revealed. So one day, I attempted an accusation.
I opened the window and shouted at the Duke’s only son, yes, the boy in good quality clothes I could never wear even if I died and came back to life, who was walking alone in the convent’s back garden.
“You are hypocrites!”
At that, the boy looked up at me with a surprised expression.
It was the first time I had focused on the boy, whom I had only glanced at from a distance, so intently.
‘What?’
With platinum-blonde hair that shone almost white in the sunlight and honey-colored eyes, the boy had the face of an angel from the chapel paintings. He had probably never experienced hunger in his life. His build was slender, but it was clear at a glance that he was tall and well-proportioned.
‘How can someone be this pretty? And he’s a guy.’
He was incomparable to us, who had grown up wilted in the shadows. A lily-like boy carefully raised in the Mother Superior’s greenhouse.
“What? Hypocrites?”
The boy asked me with a bewildered expression.
“Yes, hypocrites! Your house sponsors this convent! Your house will go to hell because of it! All of you! Read this!”
And I threw the stone with the paper tied to it, the paper where I had secretly written down the reality of this orphanage whenever I could, hiding from the nuns.
“If you’re going to sponsor, know what you’re sponsoring!”
The boy opened his mouth with a shocked expression, then picked up the stone and raised his head again to ask me.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Sophie!”
After telling him my name, I added.
“Not that you’d know anything about someone like me!”
The boy stared at me intently.
“No… I know you.”
Then he said this.
“Can you come down and tell me more?”
Hearing the boy’s words, my mind went blank from shock for a moment.
‘He knows me? What does that mean?’
I couldn’t quite understand the boy’s words. Because I was simply one among the countless orphans here, among the sheep.
That was when it happened. I heard the footsteps of nuns in the corridor and hurriedly shut the window and went back into the room to hide. My heart felt like it would burst.
‘I did it anyway!’
That was how I accused them! The nuns’ hypocrisy! The orphans’ miserable reality!
On the paper tied to the stone, I had written in detail the names of the children who had died and what the convent did to the orphans. That because they had no parents, the convent starved the children to the brink of death and made them work to the point of death. And that when a child died, without even tolling the passing bell once, they dug a pit, buried them there, and acted as if nothing had happened.
Until then, I disliked those lion house people, but I thought they were being deceived. That they were victims, not accomplices. After the Leopardi boy took my note and left, for a while I thought lightning would soon strike this convent.
‘Please let our lives change.’
Afterward, I really prayed earnestly. That like divine punishment, the convent’s horrific deeds would be exposed, that the nuns would be punished and the orphans would receive somewhat better treatment… Perhaps I had hoped that the boy with platinum-blonde hair and lion ears, the young lord of House Leopardi, would come as God’s messenger and save us.
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