Please Forget Me - Chapter 354

‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾.

“Yes… there is nothing in this world more important than you.”

He had wavered between his conscience and me. In the end, he chose to abandon his conscience.

But he did not abandon it so completely as to rise to the position of the prime minister’s press secretary, nor to willingly write propaganda speeches or military anthems.

The reason he ended up writing what appeared to be a patriotic speech for the enemy was, in fact, because he loved his homeland.

I confessed that the so-called speech had originally been a love letter written for me, and I explained why Killian had been forced to use that letter as an example of a patriotic speech for his students. At the time, I hadn’t understood. But now, I didn’t even need to ask.

That earnest man, as a composition instructor, needed to present an example to his students. Yet he could not bring himself, not even falsely, to write words praising the enemy nation. So he used the love letter he had written to me instead.

One of his students copied that letter and submitted it to a writing contest. From there, it was transformed into a public speech and then into a military anthem. These were circumstances Killian had been determined never to reveal, yet I laid them bare before the entire nation.

The line “The distant land where I wander shall become your home” does not mean turning one’s back on one’s country, but is merely a conventional expression meaning that wherever one’s beloved resides becomes one’s home…

On my lawyer’s advice, I addressed in advance the possibility that certain lines, despite being part of a love letter, could be twisted to suggest that he was willing to abandon his homeland for love.

The line “Though my body may be in hell, my heart remains in heaven” simply conveys that life there was no different from hell itself.

Throughout the time he was trapped in enemy territory, he never stopped saying that we should return home.

The fact that he once spoke of living together as the Renner couple in the remote mountains of Eisenthal is something known only to Killian and me. I would keep silent forever and so long as Killian did the same, my account would remain an unquestionable truth.

In this way, I directly refuted the accusations of treason against Father Ackroyd that the military prosecutor and the press had been shouting day after day.

“Rupert seems to be desperately searching for you and me.”

Naturally, the Marquis did not simply sit back and take it.

At first, he scoured every mansion and villa owned by the Ackroyd family, trying to find me. But by then, I was already nowhere to be found.

When he realized he could no longer stop me directly, he tried to silence the newspapers instead. He filed lawsuits and applied every form of pressure imaginable. But the paper, whose largest shareholder was the Ackroyd family and which was enjoying unprecedented popularity and record sales thanks to my exposé, did not budge.

“Aristocrats never confront scandals head-on. That only adds fuel to the rumors. Instead, they pretend to ignore it with dignity while quietly applying pressure behind the scenes.”

I had expected the marquis’s response to end there, but I was wrong.

Statement from Marquis Mansfield

Unable to endure being called across the nation not “a descendant of Godwin” but “a thief who stole another man’s first love” or “a coward who abandoned his wife in enemy territory and fled alone”, he released an official statement under his own name.

With great composure and apparent rationality, the fraud claimed that I had recently been kidnapped by the Ackroyd family, and that I had been coerced by Lady Ackroyd into lending my name to a fabricated exposé.

“I don’t understand.”

I had read his statement prepared to refute every word, but the argument he chose left me genuinely confused.

“I expected him to say that I suffered a severe head injury, lost all my memories, and even developed mental illness, so that everything I revealed could be dismissed as delusion…”

That would have been the most effective way to undermine my credibility: turning me into a madwoman who knew nothing.

“Why didn’t he do that?”

“Because that would be the same as admitting, ‘My wife is insane. She’s gone mad over another man’”

“Ah… that would have damaged the Marquis’s dignity even more.”

After that, Dr. Loveridge also joined forces with the Marquis, publishing appeals demanding that his daughter be returned, filing a missing person report with the police, and staging an elaborate performance in which I appeared to have been abducted.

But when I appeared alone at a distant city’s police station, withdrew the missing person report myself, and then vanished once again, the so-called Marchioness Disappearance Incident ended in just a few days.

The one man I most wanted to break his silence, however, remained silent throughout the entire two weeks of turmoil.