Chapter 146
He pressed his fingers to his forehead, let out a low laugh, then snapped his eyes open chillingly.
“She must have slipped in during the night.”
Excuse me, this is a memory screening and you’re all having private conversations I can’t hear?
I had no idea what was going on, but despite the gravity of his reaction, he didn’t actually take any particular action.
Then, several days later, on a dawn when rain drizzled steadily.
A single carriage arrived at the manor.
It carried my mother, Countess Beatrice, cradling an infant.
Uncle Claude lounged against the sofa in the parlor, idly flicking his pocket watch open and shut as he regarded her.
“You’re asking me to save this child? I’m not a healer.”
“Marquis. They say our Kido… has only three days left.”
Tears streamed ceaselessly down my mother’s pale cheeks.
“I once went to the Order, having heard they were conducting research into saving lives. I was desperate, willing to try clinical trials, any means or method to save her. But nothing worked at all. I can’t let my baby go like this.”
Uncle sighed at the sight of my mother’s desperation, tilted his chin, and asked her:
“Is this child mine?”
“Pardon?”
“I’m asking why I should take responsibility for saving someone else’s brat. I can’t fathom why you’ve come to me specifically. It’s not as though I can defy heaven’s decree.”
At his cold words and imperious tone, my mother shook her head through her tears.
“Someone else’s? She’s your n-niece, Marquis.”
“We share blood, yes, but I’ve never exactly felt brotherly affection toward Count Beatrice. He falls far too short to be treated as an elder brother. I’m also surprised to learn his reproductive capabilities were functional.”
Rainwater dripped from my mother’s wet hair.
Seeing her jaw tremble, Uncle rose from his seat and strode over to her.
He picked up a towel, dried her damp hair, and offered a perfunctory smile.
“Do you use sandalwood?”
“I’m sorry? Yes. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. You simply remind me of someone I know.”
He dropped the damp towel onto her lap and asked:
“Madam, are you prepared for the possibility that this child may spend her entire life bedridden like an invalid? If she fails to awaken even a single ability, she’ll be a lifelong burden and a disgrace to the family.”
“That would never happen. She is more precious to me than my own life.”
“Precious, because you risked your life to bear her. Isn’t that right, sister-in-law?”
Uncle’s scarlet eyes, having delivered those loaded words, settled on the infant who was barely managing to draw breath.
“Leave the child. You may go.”
“Would you like to hold her? This is her first meeting with her uncle, after all…”
When my mother held the swaddled baby out to him, he recoiled with an expression of pure revulsion.
“I don’t like children. Set her on the sofa and be on your way.”
My mother looked back and forth between the baby and Uncle with sorrowful eyes, then stood and left the room.
***
After the Countess Beatrice, my mother, departed, I looked down at the infant on the sofa. It lay there neither crying nor moving.
Its downy pink hair, its tiny fragile body, its deathly pale face, goosebumps prickled across my skin.
It looked like a dead child.
But wait, that baby was me, right?
There was no way I’d died.
Poor baby Kido.
I murmured to myself, stung by a pang of sorrow.
Given that I had no memories from around this time, I must have been hovering between life and death.
Uncle Claude, having plopped the baby unceremoniously on the sofa, sat on the opposite end and glared at it.
“Looks like a baby rat.”
The uncle who used to call me ‘my darling, adorable, precious little bunny’… his first impression of me had been ‘baby rat.’ I was in shock.
Was this really the same doting uncle who’d held me as though I’d break at a touch and dissolve at a breath, showering my face with kisses?
After glaring at the baby for a long while, he summoned the butler.
The old man, arriving with sleep still clinging to his face in the small hours, took one look at the infant and his eyes flew wide.
“Oh, how precious. Whose baby is this? Let me see… she looks quite like you, Your Grace. You didn’t secretly…”
He couldn’t bring himself to ask ‘have a child out of wedlock?’ and instead scooped up the baby, rocking it gently.
Uncle drained his wine glass and nodded.
“I didn’t know either.”
“Pardon?”
He set the glass down with a sharp clink, swept his hair back, and furrowed his brow deeply.
“Didn’t you whisper in my ear the other day? The rumor that Count Beatrice is impotent, and that the Countess resorted to a cuckoo’s egg[1]?”
“Yes, but there’s a strong possibility it’s baseless gossip.”
“I believe that cuckoo father is me.”
I gasped.
At the bombshell revelation, the butler made the same sound I did and clapped a hand over his mouth.
Marquis Claude Farsene, my uncle… was my biological father?
Translation Notes
[1] ↩
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