Previously
Aracella settles into the Vandermeer mansion with only Audrey, meeting the new staff including a suspicious blonde maid named Rosalyn. Despite her marriage, Aracella maintains her old routine, working at the Magic Tower and dining weekly with her family, where she shocks her mother by declaring she will not have children.
Seeing that someone had taken the bait, Rosalyn seized the opening and kept pushing.
Rosalyn whispered under her breath.
Her light voice, swaying like a fox’s tail, possessed a knack for sowing hostility, suspicion, and unease in others.
Rosalyn broke off at just the right moment, sensing that pushing any further might make them question her motives.
Though she lapsed into a somber silence, the maids began murmuring among themselves with fervent interest.
The prevailing sentiment among them was that if Aracella was merely passing through and destined to leave soon, there was no reason to offer her their true loyalty.
‘Good. I’ve planted the doubt. Now the next step is to provoke her temper and widen the rift.’
Surrounded by the whispering maids, Rosalyn sat at the center of the circle, a malicious glint flashing in her eyes.
Aracella was in the habit of eating breakfast regularly.
It had been part of her routine since childhood; the household of Marquis Hugo never skipped the morning meal.
Even if lunch or dinner were taken outside, breakfast was non-negotiable.
And so, every morning, she made her way to the dining hall of the Vandermeer Mansion.
The servants bustled between the kitchen and the hall, attending to their mistress’s meal.
Until the incident occurred.
While serving tea after the meal, Rosalyn spilled some across Aracella’s dress.
Every maid’s gaze snapped toward the commotion. Audrey rushed over to check on Aracella, while Rosalyn dropped to her knees, trembling.
Though she appeared terrified, she was laughing on the inside.
Nobles were notoriously quick to fly into a rage over the slightest servant mistake, and Rosalyn was counting on that habit.
The spilled tea had never been an accident; it was a deliberate ploy to provoke Aracella.
Once the scene played out, she would shed a few tears to rally the maids behind her, leaving them convinced that Aracella was cruel.
That way, what little standing Aracella had managed to maintain would crumble in an instant.
Rosalyn made a show of pressing her forehead nearly to the floor in exaggerated remorse.
She knew this would make her look all the more pitiful to the watching maids, cornering Aracella and stoking her temper even further.
Excessive groveling, after all, could be infuriating in its own right.
Rosalyn waited eagerly for her mistress to snap, and finally, she heard the scrape of a chair moving.
Aracella rose slowly to her feet, leaned down, and placed a hand on Rosalyn’s shoulder.
Aracella’s face was utterly blank, making her feelings impossible to read.
Rosalyn wondered inwardly, keeping up her trembling facade.
Aracella offered a faint smile, leaving Rosalyn to stare up in bafflement.
She had braced herself for fury, yet the lady seemed completely unbothered by the blunder.
Gently brushing back a lock of her flowing purple hair, Aracella helped Rosalyn to her feet.
Rosalyn stood there dazed, blinking.
Aracella offered a smile warm enough to melt hearts.
Audacious though her words were, her striking beauty made it impossible for anyone to object.
Rosalyn bowed, a deep sense of frustration churning in her chest.
In this scenario, she was the only one who came across as an incompetent fool who had made an embarrassing blunder.
Her plan had been to receive an excessive punishment, casting herself as a poor, mistreated maid.
Instead, Aracella had emerged looking gracious and wise.
Retreating to a corner of the dining hall, Rosalyn bit her lip in vexation.
Had Aracella shown even a flicker of anger, Rosalyn would have provoked her further to escalate the scene.
Yet that cool, detached reaction left her with nothing to exploit.
As time passed, every one of Rosalyn’s attempts to bait Aracella fell flat.
No matter what mistake she made or what she said, Aracella brushed it off with total indifference.
Rosalyn began to fear that continuing along this path would only make her look clumsy and inept.
While she racked her brain for a new scheme, her eyes fell upon Audrey.
Watching Audrey walk away with that stern look, Rosalyn bristled with annoyance—and then had a sudden realization.
‘That’s it!’
Scheming against Aracella had proved difficult because she rarely spent long stretches at the mansion.
To pull off a plot, the target needed to be present for everyone to witness any perceived fault.
Whispering about someone who never did anything objectionable amounted to harmless gossip that carried no real weight.
So Rosalyn changed tactics: rather than targeting Aracella directly, she turned her sights on her faithful maid, Audrey.
Without delay, Rosalyn began maneuvering behind the scenes.
Rosalyn smiled and nodded at Audrey’s words, but the moment she slipped away, she headed straight for the gathering area where the other maids lounged.
Her expression instantly crumpled into a mournful frown, and she let out a labored sigh, putting on a show of total exhaustion.
At those words, the other maids’ eyes went wide, and they crowded around, murmurs rippling through the group.
In truth, Aracella had merely said it was fine for them to communicate through Audrey, but as time passed, memories had blurred and her words had become warped.
With Rosalyn framing it this way, the maids began to believe the mistress had been holding a grudge all along.
Rosalyn managed a quavering voice, feigning deep gratitude.
Even on the walk to the annex, and all through the cleaning, the maids grumbled relentlessly about Audrey’s cruelty.
Once the work was finished, Rosalyn turned to them.
Thanks to that, Audrey remained completely unaware of what Rosalyn had been doing behind her back.
Yet this was only the beginning of the plan.
Rosalyn steadily cultivated an atmosphere of distrust, spreading rumors that Audrey was exploiting her closeness to Aracella to mistreat the other maids.
Rosalyn continued planting seeds of doubt and discord between Audrey and the rest of the maids, flitting between them with practiced ease.
Few were bold enough to confront anyone directly, and whenever someone showed signs of doing so, Rosalyn was quick to intervene.
In the end, Rosalyn achieved precisely what she set out to do.
Before long, bitter talk regarding Aracella and Audrey had spread among the staff of the Vandermeer Mansion, leaving Audrey utterly isolated.
It happened again.
Audrey narrowed her eyes at the maids who abruptly scattered at her arrival, clearly going out of their way to avoid her.
‘This isn’t the first time.’
At first, the staff at the Vandermeer Mansion had seemed normal enough, but lately they acted as if they were deliberately icing her out.
Audrey tried looking back on her own actions, but found nothing that could justify this treatment.
The maids shunned her without any clear reason, huddling together and leaving her entirely alone.
And it didn’t stop there.
Lately, small blunders had begun cropping up among the maids assigned to attend to Lady Aracella.
To Audrey, those mistakes felt deliberate, yet they were so minor that it was nearly impossible to prove anything.
Because the slips didn’t trace back to a single culprit, but rather rotated among several different maids, sorting it out was all the more frustrating.
When Audrey appeared carrying a laundry basket, the maids gathered in the washing area dispersed once more without hesitation.
Audrey’s gaze fixed on the blonde maid in their midst.
She had felt uneasy about her for some time. Audrey possessed sharp instincts, and something about Rosalyn had always sat wrong with her.
She had heard the Head Maid hired new staff specifically for Aracella, and the behavior of the maids assigned to the mistress was undeniably strange.
Yet without clear evidence, only suspicions, confronting them was out of the question.
Audrey let out a quiet sigh, handed the basket to the maid in charge of the laundry, and turned away.
The moment Audrey was out of sight, Rosalyn’s circle drifted right back together.
As Aracella’s personal maid, Audrey was not actually obligated to take on such heavy chores.
Yet to the resentful maids, she was merely an outsider who had arrived and started acting as though she ran the place.
Rosalyn wore a subtle, wicked smile; she had been the one to foster this resentment.
The resentment aimed at Audrey naturally bled into hostility toward Aracella.
Objectively speaking, Aracella had never shown Audrey any undue favoritism.
Even if she had, it was entirely standard for a noble lady to keep a trusted maid from her family estate by her side.
There was nothing wrong with it, yet the maids spoke as if it were a grievous offense.
Rosalyn began planting absurd notions in the maids’ minds.
At first, they had hesitated, but as time went on, more and more found themselves nodding along.
Everything was unfolding precisely as Rosalyn had designed.