Previously
Madame Pauline visits Jeanne to explain her duties, mentioning that Baldur permits corporal punishment and that previous tutors were frequently fired. Jeanne prepares for her first lesson by visiting the Duke's massive library, struggling with her own anxieties about being a political exile with no safety net.
I set the writing instruments and the test paper down before the student.
Yet after looking back and forth between the paper and me, Lady Ana bit hard on her lower lip, wearing a look of sheer, helpless distress. She hesitated, fidgeting, not even attempting to read the test. I tilted my head.
‘Is she trying to rebel? Breaking my spirit right from the start?’
Unlike the viscount’s daughter, who had picked fights, nitpicked every word, and ignored me until learning I was close with her grandmother, Lady Ana seemed utterly intimidated.
She looked at me as if seeking help, then cast her eyes down to the test, nervously toying with the corner of the paper.
Lady Ana bit her lower lip so hard the color drained away entirely.
“I can’t read yet, Teacher.”
Gazing into the girl’s expression, I realized she spoke the truth.
‘Wait… why? How?’
I froze in my place. Utter bafflement flooded my mind.
‘Didn’t they say she’s thirteen?’
Thirteen was the age Young Master Mael had been when I first met him. Back then, Young Master Mael had possessed a level of knowledge so astounding it had stunned me. Of course, the young master was an exceptional case, but… she couldn’t even read?
‘Something doesn’t make sense.’
I hadn’t been in a position to pry, so I had let it pass, but looking back, there was more than one strange detail. For one, the fact that His Grace had an older brother until only recently. Noble families typically passed down the title and estate solely to the eldest son. Otherwise, within a few generations, there would be far too many title-holders, while the domain would be fragmented to pieces.
‘So I wondered if the older brother was illegitimate.’
Even so, children acknowledged by the father were given advanced education alongside legitimate heirs. And someone of ducal rank could easily grant middle-to-lower noble titles to half-brothers. As long as succession and inheritance rights weren't challenged, brothers from different mothers could still remain close.
‘He wouldn’t have adopted the child of a brother he despised. Not to mention personally scouting a private tutor for her.’
Yet if all those assumptions held true, shouldn’t she have received schooling before entering the ducal mansion? And yet she knew nothing at all?
At my words, the girl before me shrank in even deeper distress and nodded.
I asked, taking the seat right beside Lady Ana. Caught off guard by the abrupt question, the girl seemed bewildered.
Lady Ana’s face flushed bright red at my words.
At that, the student’s face suddenly lit up like bright sunshine.
She leaned in close, almost as if she might tumble into my embrace. Placing her small hand upon my shoulder, Lady Ana whispered into my ear like sharing a secret.
‘Buttermilk? Did she just say buttermilk?’
Buttermilk was the leftover dregs of butter-making.
‘What on earth did I just hear?’
A daughter of a noble house should never have known buttermilk existed, let alone how to churn butter….
I could not make sense of what I had just heard.
* * *
Though a nobleman himself, Duke Baldur de Skadi harbored deep animosity and prejudice toward the nobility. He saw them as arrogant, extravagant, and downright incompetent. That prejudice only deepened when the capital of Franc sent him nobles exiled after losing political power, all under the guise of ‘royal orders.’ Despite their status as convicts exiled to the Skadi Territory, these nobles—who were of far lower birth than a high duke like him—subtly looked down on him, calling his bloodline barbaric.
Even so, during his early days as Duke, he had been considerate of the exiled nobles’ circumstances and extended mercy. His mercy took the form of assigning them simple, easy tasks and providing room and board at the manor in return, but what came back was not gratitude, but horror and reproach.
‘How dare you tell me to work!’
They leveled threats of retaliation once reinstated, pouring scorn upon him and claiming that putting fellow nobles to work proved he was no true nobleman.
‘Did they truly expect to lounge around and feast in idleness in their place of exile?’
Fed up, Baldur responded by assigning the complainers to forced labor building border fortresses. Only for those nobles who finally grasped their situation and belatedly bowed before him did he assign the tasks of drawing up land surveys and copying ledgers.
As for why he had extended far better treatment to the woman exiled this time, it was by no means due to the earnest letter sent by the King’s illegitimate son, whom he had never even met. It was because he had suddenly gained an adopted daughter. It would be a long story to explain how his niece came to be his adopted daughter. In any case, Baldur was determined to raise his niece to be worthy of the ducal house. Now that he had adopted her, the child was someone who might one day even rise to become queen of a realm.
Yet when he finally brought the child to the manor, a grave problem came to light. The girl could not write, nor could she read. Feeling the pressing urgency of the matter, Baldur hastily searched for a tutor, but none of those hired satisfied him. What was worse, several of them even hurled insults verging on malice, calling the child dyslexic and an idiot.
And right at that moment, as if falling from the heavens, someone was exiled to his domain. A tutor who, although for an illegitimate son, possessed experience teaching a prince.
‘Finally! They’ve sent someone useful.’
Wondering what crime had sent her into exile, he looked into the roster.
Her name was Jeanne de Toulouse, her charge spreading subversive thoughts.
‘Subversive thoughts?’
Such a charge was of no consequence to the Duke. What of subversive thoughts?
‘It’s not murder, assault, arson, robbery, theft, or infanticide, is it?’
Aside from political prisoners, criminals deserving immediate execution were routinely dumped here, and Baldur worked those prisoners to the brink of death building fortresses.
In any case, the letter that arrived ahead of the exile—sent by the tutor’s pupil, the prince born of the King’s mistress—detailed just how fine an instructor she was and how she had wound up exiled. Reading the letter, it was the usual story of someone caught unwittingly in political strife.
‘Even if it was an illegitimate prince, she served as his tutor, so she won’t fall short in skill. She’ll surely be arrogant beyond measure, but I can easily break her pride. Being an exile works even better; she’ll be entirely under my thumb.’
In any case, he eagerly awaited the arrival of the woman named Jeanne.
Yet Jeanne did not arrive on the scheduled date. A day, two days, three days, five days, a fortnight, and then a month passed by.
‘Did something happen?’
Wondering if she had been set upon by bandits, he sent men to scour the area. The search revealed that while the woman had reached the Skadi Territory several days earlier, she had fallen so ill that she remained staying at a shabby inn until she could recover.
The moment he learned of this, Baldur went in person to the inn. That was how he first laid eyes on Jeanne.
‘Younger… than I expected?’
A prince’s tutor was usually an elderly matron, but the one who had arrived was an astonishingly young woman. She hovered between life and death in a filthy, grime-soaked state, and the sight of her emaciated frame made his temper flare.
‘How dare they torture my tutor?’
Though she had not yet agreed, in Baldur’s mind, she was already his adopted daughter’s tutor. He naturally assumed she had been tortured before being sent into exile. But after hearing the account from the escort officer, whose schedule had been derailed while nursing the exile, Baldur pressed a hand to his forehead.
‘She took to her bed in that state without even being tortured?’
Apparently, merely enduring the journey here on horseback had exhausted her to that pitiful extent.