Previously
Baldur reflects on his family's tragic history with love, including his father's hollow life after his mother's death and his brother Will's fatal elopement with a maid. After discovering Will's body in a ransacked village, Baldur finds his niece Ana and brings her to Skadi, eventually hiring Jeanne to civilize her.
While Baldur stood frozen, the maids took the chilled Ana and Jeanne away, immersing them in warm water and massaging their limbs. Ana soon awoke, but the governess did not.
The moment Ana regained consciousness, she dissolved into sobs. Baldur asked the girl, who had awakened first, what had happened.
‘I went to the lake with my teacher to slide on the ice. But then the ice broke, and it's all my fault. I begged her to go there. My teacher pulled me out. She used a branch, and she gave me her coat, and told me to sing, told me to keep… singing.’
Only after listening through her incoherent stammering did he grasp what had befallen the two of them. He sank to one knee to meet Ana's eyes, caught hold of both her arms, and questioned her.
‘Why did you go there with your governess instead of the nanny?’
Keeping the girl company after lessons was the nanny's duty.
‘The nanny is always busy. The only one here who listens to me and plays with me is my teacher.’
‘…’
‘There isn't… anyone else here except her.’
Ana finally broke down into loud wails.
‘What if she dies? Because of me? It's all my fault. My heart feels like it's going to burst.’
Then, for the first time, Baldur did something he would never have done in the past. He gathered Ana into his embrace to console her. Clinging to his shoulder, Ana wept streaming tears as she asked:
‘What if my teacher dies?’
Ana's hot tears soaked his shoulder, and as Baldur held her close and stroked her back, he felt a warmth he had never known before.
‘Do not worry, Ana. Your teacher will be all right.’
Yet Jeanne showed no sign of waking. More than that, she ran a scorching fever and coughed violently even while unconscious. It was an illness terribly reminiscent of his mother's.
Baldur received reports on Jeanne by the hour. Each time word arrived that she had yet to regain consciousness, his heart grew unsettled—and not simply because of Ana's tearful pleas to save her. It was not merely that she had become precious to the girl; he simply did not wish to lose her himself.
‘I do not want to lose her. If she is gone, leaving aside Ana's tutoring… what am I to do?’
It was then that Baldur dimly realized he did not think of Jeanne merely as his adopted daughter's governess.
‘Since when?’
Yet he could not understand it. Had there even been much contact between them? Since when, truly?
‘Just when did it begin? Was it the moment she succeeded in teaching Ana, whom everyone else had given up on?’
Or was it when she rode across his grounds, when she fell asleep beneath a tree like some fairy while reading a book, when she hoisted up both sides of her skirts, baring her legs to gather apples, or when she insisted on her walks even in the bitter winter cold? Was it then? Or some other time? No matter how thoroughly he searched his memory, he could not identify the turning point or the beginning.
When a day and a night had passed without the woman waking, receiving mere reports was no longer enough for him to bear.
Deep in the night, Baldur summoned Madame Pauline and headed to the governess's room. Stepping through the door, he found Jeanne lying on the settee by the fireplace. Cold sweat trickled from a brow plastered with disheveled hair, her lips were chapped, and her face looked ghostly pale in the firelight.
When that sight overlapped with someone he once knew, cold sweat broke out across Baldur's forehead as well.
‘Will this woman die too, just like Mother?’
Baldur stood there, looking down at Jeanne. And in that sudden, unexpected moment, he realized that he had fallen in love with her.
Baldur had always imagined love to be something that struck down upon his head like a bolt of lightning. He thought a remarkably beautiful woman would appear, just as his mother had bewitched his father, captivating him in an instant with her sheer loveliness. For that reason, he had stayed guarded against meeting beautiful women, preparing himself against it.
‘And yet it is her? Truly?’
Even so, a part of him had wondered: who could ever breach his fortress?
Yet here lay an exile from a ruined count's family, lacking any universally lauded beauty and bearing no title of princess. He could neither believe nor accept it, yet now that the realization had struck, the truth remained undeniable.
‘I cannot believe it.’
Had the woman before him not been exiled, they would never have crossed paths in their lifetimes. No matter how many invitations flew into the duchy year after year, he would rarely have visited court, guarding his territory like a dragon hovering over its nest. And had she not been cast out, she would never have left the court to come here.
‘Am I not in a worse state than my brother?’
After that night of realization, Jeanne thankfully woke up.
Though he had rushed to her side the moment he heard the news, he had refused to acknowledge the truth he discovered that night, spending days in denial of his own feelings. …And even now, at this very moment, he was staying up through the night trying to decipher her words.
‘I hope Your Grace will not lose hope of taking a wife who is wise and affectionate. For Your Grace thoroughly deserves to be loved by such a person.’
Attaching meaning to every single word Jeanne had spoken.
* * *
After my slip of the tongue in the dining hall, I made every effort to behave with utmost propriety. The Duke of Skadi was a high-ranking noble second only to His Majesty the King, yet because I frequently encountered him, exchanged words, and on rare occasions even shared meals with him, I must have unwittingly let my guard down. I refrained from visiting the library and confined myself to my quarters in penance, leaving only for Ana's lessons.
As for what I did while in seclusion, I wrote letters. To my beloved Anne, and to the mother I missed and longed to see constantly. Letters addressed to my sister and my mother. There was so much I wished to say. I wrote whatever came to mind, editing and revising again and again, all while fighting off the sinking thought that my loose tongue might cost me the chance to send them at all.
Once I began writing, the longing I had suppressed welled up uncontrollably. Whenever it threatened to spill over, I turned my head aside and wiped away the tears with the back of my hand so they would not stain the stationery. Time kept slipping by. How were they all faring back home without me?
While I penned letters that I could not even be sure I would send, the position of Ana's nanny remained vacant. Ana often visited my room even after our lessons were done. One day, she came in the dead of night and asked if I would come to her room and read to her until she fell asleep.
I gladly granted her request. My younger sister had struggled to sleep by herself until she was even older than Ana. The book Ana asked for was a collection of folktales passed down by oral tradition; even though I knew all the stories by heart, reading them aloud still proved quite entertaining.
It happened on one of those evenings, as I read to Ana in her room until she drifted off.
Pausing mid-sentence, I looked down at Ana, who had nestled herself snugly under my arm.
The tale I happened to be reading was about a girl who sets off on an adventure to find her mother, who had suddenly vanished one day. Ana looked up at me with her beautiful eyes.
I answered her honestly.
“…”
Knowing nothing about Ana's parents, I had no choice but to listen in silence.
“…”
What comfort could words possibly offer to that?
‘What could have happened to this poor child? What could she have suffered to lose her parents and end up here?’
Instead of attempting clumsy words of comfort, I simply pulled Ana into a tight embrace.