When the freezing winter winds sweep in [Novel] Chapter 1 – Setting the Sails

When a fierce wind rises to bar your passage at sea, should you collapse in despair and curse the gale, or cling to the hope that it will shift someday? I did not know the right answer, but what I did was trim the sails first—lest the winds swallow the ship whole.

Even if it meant breaking an unwritten rule of the nobility.

Nobles serve the kingdom; they do not work for money.

That was the bedrock of the order that sustained high society.

Many aristocrats coveted a post at court, and noble ladies occasionally tutored the children of peers or royalty, but their fortune was meant to flow from sprawling estates, not employment. Any noble who worked for bread rather than honor was viewed as a disgrace, an embarrassment gnawing away at the dignity of their peers.

Yet without bread, even the grandest noble would starve. The reason I, the eldest daughter of the Count of Toulouse, took work as a governess was just as plain: I had to earn money. It mattered little if they pointed fingers and whispered that I had cast aside shame and prestige to violate the unwritten law of our kind.

Traced back through the generations, the House of Toulouse was a historic family that held direct vassalage to the King. But as the years wore on and my father inherited the title, all that remained of our legacy was an estate so meager it was embarrassing to call it land, a modest manor, and a collection of a thousand volumes left behind by my grandfather, a scholar.

Even so, as modest landowners, we could have lived on without fretting over food and clothing. That is, if my father had not grown anxious over our family’s slow decline and made aggressive investments that went disastrously wrong.

When I was fifteen, Father mortgaged everything we had to buy shares in a trading company. Two years later, the company went bankrupt. Because of its massive scale, it was not only our family that was ruined; scores of nobles went into bankruptcy or suffered comparable losses.

Now the nobility faced a choice: bow their heads and enter the royal palace as salaried aristocrats, or be thrown out onto the streets. Our family began by selling off what remained of our land and Grandfather’s books.

Yet our misfortune did not end there. The failure of his investments preyed upon my father’s fragile constitution, ushering in another calamity. Unable to bear the shock of ruin, he fell gravely ill. Mother devoted herself to his care, but a year later, he passed away, leaving behind only a mountain of debt.

And then I realized.

‘It’s up to me.’

The only one who could save the House of Toulouse was its eldest daughter—me.

I persuaded my family to sell our manor, that money-eating monster, for we could no longer afford its upkeep. With the funds gathered, I brought my family to Franc, the capital. I believed there would be work in the city where the royal palace stood.

Still, where was I to begin?

Fortunately, Grandfather had left me an intangible inheritance: the knowledge gathered from his library. While he was alive, I had learned much from him, renowned poet and scholar that he was.

His connections proved to be an immense help as I searched for a resident governess position. I wrote a letter explaining my circumstances to one of the noble ladies who had been close to him, and through her, I secured a post caring for her granddaughter.

Even so, the position of a governess was precarious. Though I wanted to find fulfillment in teaching the child, my employer, the viscountess, looked down on me for working to earn money despite being of the same class, and the servants treated my presence with awkward unease. I belonged nowhere, hovering on the periphery.

That mood inevitably bled over to the viscount’s second daughter, my charge. At first, she acted like a tyrant in the schoolroom. But after Christmas, when she learned that I corresponded regularly with her grandmother, the marchioness, her attitude turned on a dime. The marchioness was known to send her granddaughters gem-encrusted rings and pearl necklaces for every winter festival.

I did everything in my power to instill every scrap of culture and knowledge I possessed into my first pupil, hoping that it would enrich not just her life in high society, but her life as a whole.

Three years flew by, and at eighteen, she made a triumphant debut into society. Whether it was owed to my instruction, her charming looks, or the dance lessons she had thrown herself into before her debut, the young lady managed to marry the eldest son of a family far grander than the one her older sister had wed into.

Pleased with the outcome, the viscountess lamented that she had not met me sooner, and introduced me to my next employer.

This time, the position was to tutor the duchess’s son.

‘Surely a ducal house could hire someone far better than me as a governess?’

Entirely ignorant of the court’s inner workings, I assumed at first that the position was simply to educate a young noble of a ducal family. But as I later learned, the Duchess of Ventadour was not the mistress of a ducal household, but His Majesty’s maîtresse-en-titre—his sole official mistress. Her lady-in-waiting, who resided at the royal palace, was none other than my employer, the viscountess. Thinking well of me, she had recommended me to her superior, who happened to be looking for a governess.

Though a mistress, the maîtresse-en-titre held a station second only to the Queen, and the children she bore could be formally acknowledged as the ‘King’s children.’ Even so, because he was not born of the lawful Queen, the boy was publicly styled as ‘the duchess’s son’ or ‘the young master.’ Having simply been looking for my next post, I found myself entrusted with a student whose position was extraordinarily complex.

‘They say the royal palace is rife with politics and intrigue… Will I be all right?’

Once I understood the situation, I hesitated. The Queen currently had daughters as well as two grown sons. With two princes born to the Queen, a prince born to the maîtresse-en-titre was unlikely to become embroiled in a succession dispute. Above all, the pay was generous enough to outweigh all the risks.

‘Where else could I ever earn such money?’

In the end, I accepted the second post.