Chapter 20
Episode 20. You are pure in my body
Compared to the days when I lived with my eyes closed and ears shut, I found myself strangely attuned to the outside world these past few days.
This morning.
Klaud admitted that he had lost the virginity he had carefully guarded until the age of 24—an age that would be considered an old bachelor in the capital, Cielo. In reality, it wasn't so much that he had guarded it, but rather that he had been unable to get close to women.
"It seems the mistress didn't just knock the master down once."
"It really seems like those two hit it off."
"Why on earth?"
"They must be a good match! It's so embarrassing every night."
"I saw you all sneaking around the door, giggling without sleeping! Don't pretend to be innocent!"
Klaud naturally interpreted the chattering of "Why on earth?" as meaning they couldn't understand why a man like Klaud would pick at something like a withered crow.
He should have heard the maid's side of the story, but Klaud was already incapable of normal thought.
Only his inflated self-justification dominated his gleaming head.
'Yeah, why me?'
But unlike the first night, when he was a monster consumed by pain, or when he was drunk, yesterday he was completely sober, and the memories before he passed out weren't jumbled.
He covered his scarred cheek with his hand, where he felt no sensation.
That woman's presumptuous lips had touched it.
'Even if I accept the medicine, am I supposed to believe the bullshit about a person's intimate warmth being a prescription?'
But the effect was too powerful to deny this series of unbelievable nonsense.
He had spent two nights, including the first night, without pain or nightmares.
Was it just sleep?
The fact that the pain, which he couldn't escape even after swallowing a near-lethal dose of sleeping pills, had noticeably decreased was also true.
A picture that only someone as frivolous as Lancelot Lev would imagine unfolded in his mind.
'As the pain subsides, her hidden desires are revealed, and she releases all that pent-up energy on me, so I can sleep well?'
If only he could remember, he wouldn't feel so wronged.
What kind of trick did she use to make him not even remember a passionate and fiery night that everyone else knew about?
He wasn't stupid enough not to know what that woman meant by "a person's intimate warmth."
'Did I really sleep with 'that'?'
Klaud yanked open the curtains he always kept drawn and stood askew.
He made sure to stand close to the wall next to the window so he wouldn't be seen from below.
The chattering voices stopped abruptly, and the woman who had been unsettling him was walking around the garden.
Her neat face showed little expression as she stood near the garden trees, fiddling around a small patch where she had planted culinary herbs.
"What's she so busy with?"
The master, who usually lounged in his rocking chair, staring at the ceiling or closing his eyes, had gotten up on his own two feet, pulled back the curtains, and was even looking out the window.
Butler Gustav, admiring this unfamiliar sight, faithfully replied, "She wants to tend to the garden."
"I was talking to myself."
Embarrassed, Gustav wore the same helpless expression he had when he answered his master's absurd question about whether he had spent the night with his wife yesterday, and weakly said, "Yes..."
"That's something the servants do."
Gustav replied, "Yes..." again, then flinched at the chilling silence.
"Yes-?"
"Yes...?"
"How are you managing the servants?"
Since when did you care about such things? It's been a while since you've been walking around yourself.
In reality, it was just a way to vent his anger, finding fault without really caring.
Gustav, well aware of his prickly personality, apologized without complaint.
But Klaud's gaze didn't linger on Gustav for long, instead wandering back to the window.
He was either upset, disturbed, or both.
Gustav, making assumptions based on Klaud's temperament, was suddenly startled to see Klaud abruptly pull the curtains shut as if he were about to tear them down.
...Surprisingly, Klaud's face was very red.
"Tell her I'm sleeping."
"Yes."
"Get out."
But who was he supposed to tell that to?
Gustav received the familiar order to leave and exited the bedroom, but couldn't help but wonder belatedly.
Yuan was weaving through the busy servants, carrying two pieces of firewood from the storage room.
Two fairly large logs were just the right amount to carry without being noticed.
"What are you doing?"
"Ah, Butler."
But then she ran right into Butler Gustav, who was loitering in front of her bedroom.
The butler looked back and forth between the firewood in her arms and her face with a bewildered expression, then took it away as if snatching it, his face turning pale.
A slightly sullen look appeared on Yuan's face, and he quickly explained, "I'm not taking it away, but rather telling you to leave this kind of work to the servants."
"Everyone seemed busy..."
"No matter how much work there is in the house, taking care of the mistress is the top priority."
Yuan looked at the butler with a dazed expression.
Gustav started lecturing for a while, then suddenly seemed to remember the reason he had come here, and cleared his throat with a startled expression.
"You didn't bring much luggage... I'll send a maid to pack your things."
"Luggage?"
Yuan's voice rose slightly.
Klaud had slept comfortably and hadn't looked for her the next day.
So, she had been pacing around the room with anxiety, and eventually ended up helping the servants with their work again.
She had shown him everything she could, but was she really going to be kicked out like this?
"Yes, you should formally move into the master's bedroom now. It doesn't look good to others if you stay in the guest room."
"I don't want to. No. What, what did you say?"
Yuan asked back with a slightly foolish expression.
Butler Gustav smiled faintly and chided her.
"And please, speak comfortably. I may be old, but I know well enough that you are my superior."
Gustav then said he would move the firewood to the new bedroom, bowed his head, and left.
Soon after, Monica and Canaria moved her simple luggage and belongings. Yuan followed the direction they were going.
The second floor, where Klaud's bedroom was located.
The huge room at the very end of that hallway.
"I hurriedly decorated it this morning. How do you like it, madam?"
Yuan was speechless for a moment, looking at the room where sunlight poured in through the large windows.
The white chiffon curtains welcoming the breeze swelled and shrank in circles, like Yuan's heart.
Every place where the light touched and didn't touch was filled with elegant and antique furniture, tapestries, and carpets.
Yuan was amazed once by the size of the bedroom, which was almost as large as Klaud's bedroom, and again as she looked up at the masterpiece that filled the high ceiling.
"This was Hille's idea. I didn't receive instructions to decorate an office, so I decorated this side room with various things."
Henna, who was even more excited, dragged the blankly standing Yuan to the side room attached to the bedroom.
There were medical books that she often borrowed from Hille, books on local herbal medicine, and small aluminum pots, mortars, braziers, droppers, transparent beakers, and so on.
It was a small laboratory just for her.
"Hille went out to the Central Rockenhardt commercial district this morning to buy these."
"Henna..."
"And this!"
Henna lifted a large walnut pie placed on a makeshift table, held it up high, and smiled brightly.
"I said it would be nice if your room smelled good, so Grandpa Ralph made a pie with walnuts he roasted in the fall! If the other kids see it, they'll make a fuss about why he didn't bake one for them, so he told me to secretly eat it with you. Hehe."
Henna, contrary to the chef's words, was only brewing Yuan's tea at a tea table that was decorated in a quaint way in one corner of the vast bedroom, her eyes shining.
Yuan repeatedly urged Henna to eat with her, and the two shared the still-warm walnut pie.
Yuan's pale face, which had been stiff with tension, finally flushed red.
It was the first time she had her own room since she was 10 years old.
When she was in Pellieresse, she shared an old room with Louise, and even that was hard to call a proper room because all sorts of people came and went.
"Can I decorate this place as I please?"
"Of course! The butler said he already called a merchant."
Henna's chattering voice. She chewed and swallowed the savory and sweet pie while bathed in the pouring sunlight.
Yuan finally had a place in this mansion.
Yuan enjoyed the warm and peaceful atmosphere, laughing and chatting with Henna for a long time.
And all the while, she felt an unbearable tickling sensation in her stomach.
"Hey. Let's talk."
It was exactly three days after their last night together that Klaud spoke to Yuan.
It was right after two merchants in fancy carriages visited the Black Manor, met with Yuan, and returned.
Yuan, who had been in the garden watching them disappear for a long time, heard the voice coming from the wide-open window and thought that what was coming had finally come.
Klaud, whom she looked up at diligently, looked more haggard than he had three days ago.
The shadows under his eyes, which had faded for a while, had returned to their original place, and his bloodshot eyes looked like balloons about to burst.
Yuan went up to Klaud's bedroom at his sudden call.
"I need to use you."
Before she could even sit down, Klaud stated his business first.
Just by looking at the scattered painkillers, his bloodshot eyes, and his trembling hands, she could tell what he wanted now.
In fact, Klaud had become as miserable as he could be from the pain that had been attacking him for three days.
During the period of resisting the nonsense and refusing to be fooled, his body, which had enjoyed comfortable sleep for the first time in 10 years, was different from before.
Clearly, even with the same pain as before, it felt twice, or even three times, as painful.
If he hadn't endured by stabbing the backs of both hands, Klaud might have already run into Yuan's bedroom two days ago and demanded that she immediately administer that damn prescription.
"Do you remember? The first night and the day after."
Yuan asked, even though she knew he wouldn't remember.
Klaud was silent for a moment, then nodded.
He thought it was a man's shame not to remember two nights that were so noisy that the whole mansion knew about them, but Klaud absolutely didn't want to reveal his weaknesses.
It might be better not to remember.
How much had that crow violated this hideous and pure body?
