Previously
Baldur returns from a summer campaign against pirates and initially plans to fire Jeanne after seeing her playing in the garden with Ana. However, he is stunned to discover that Ana has actually learned to read, write, and understand history under Jeanne's tutelage in just a few months.
Come to think of it, she had vomited while eating at first as well.
‘Why is she wearing that kind of face? When she clearly knows how to smile?’
He found her somber expression displeasing. When she had been playing with his adopted daughter earlier that day, a bright smile had graced her lips, looking far better than she did now.
Yet a person needs a reason to smile and laugh. Baldur was entirely oblivious to the fact that he himself was the primary cause of the tutor’s darkened countenance. After all, he had called her here solely to commend her.
“…”
As he sat in his chair, resting his chin on a hand propped against the armrest without uttering a word for a long while, the tutor’s frame shrank and curled inward even more.
Baldur asked.
Though posed with the intent to praise, his question drained the color from the tutor’s face.
The tutor was entirely misreading the situation.
‘Does she truly not realize how well she taught the child? After seeing the state the girl was in before?’
Baldur felt the need to explain the circumstances a little further.
“…”
Baldur was immensely curious about her method. Had she worked some kind of magic? And was that the very secret that had allowed her, despite her young age, to become the tutor to a prince, even if he was born out of wedlock?
Her expression thoughtful as she turned his question over in her mind, the tutor soon straightened her hunched back.
And for the first time, without a trace of fear, she spoke with clear, steady diction.
Baldur suddenly saw her in a different light.
Her demeanor was remarkably confident, carrying an air of quiet dignity.
‘What on earth is she talking about?’
Though he could not relate to her perspective in the slightest, Baldur listened in silence for the time being.
Regardless, her philosophy had transformed his adopted daughter, and her composure appealed to him considerably. Her eyes, filled with conviction, shone with striking brightness.
‘She looks far better with her back straight like that. Free of that groveling attitude from before, she is vastly improved.’
A slender jawline, shining hazel eyes, and a long neck that lent her the grace of an elegant doe. Merely witnessing the change in her posture and bearing was enough to convince Baldur.
‘It has to be this woman.’
This very woman standing before him.
“Jeanne de Toulouse. I wish to appoint you as my daughter’s official tutor.”
At those words, the tutor’s large eyes widened further, her lips parting slightly.
He shrugged.
Her eyes wide with shock at his remark, Jeanne began to tremble all over, as though gripped by the chill of a winter that had not yet arrived.
He shrugged. In truth, it had been a joke on his part. Why send someone who could read and write off to labor on fortifications? There was far more work she could be tasked with instead. Baldur was a man who knew how to deploy talent where it was best suited. Yet what was play to the cat was a matter of life and death to the mouse.
“…”
Seeing the woman cower sharply at his words, Baldur realized his jest had entirely failed to land.
‘She has the heart of a field mouse.’
Ducats were gold coins of high purity minted within his duchy. Whatever wage she had received serving as a royal tutor, ten gold coins was by no means a small sum. Could an ordinary tutor ever lay hands on such wealth even after thirty years of labor? As he spoke, he secretly expected the tutor before him to be unable to believe her good fortune, perhaps even leaping for joy.
“…”
Yet contrary to his expectations, the tutor’s reaction was peculiar. Jeanne’s eyes widened in astonishment, only for her lovely brow to furrow as she sealed her lips, tilting her head this way and that. The tilting went on for so long that Baldur, growing irritated, finally questioned her.
Jeanne shook her head vigorously in denial.
Baldur crossed his arms at the tutor’s plea.
‘She has… a point.’
What might happen if word got out that gold coins were lying around a tutor’s quarters… He shrugged.
‘This is my first time taking an exile—a political prisoner at that—as a tutor.’
He had temporarily forgotten the tutor’s unique position. The woman before him was, after all, a political criminal whose every move was subject to surveillance. Assuming that ‘such a thing could never happen’ was always perilous. In his earlier letter, Young Master Mael had insisted the woman had been falsely accused, but was that truly the case?
‘What if she truly is part of an enlightenment faction seeking to overthrow the monarchy?’
One could never judge a person by appearances alone. Perhaps there truly was a secret faction aiming to place an illegitimate prince upon the throne, and she was a part of it. If so, the possibility of her escaping this place to rejoin her conspirators was not entirely out of the question.
‘Even so, I cannot afford to lose a tutor I obtained with such difficulty.’
For whatever reason, he had no intention of letting such rare, high-caliber talent leave the confines of the estate. Nor did he intend to withhold her pay and exploit her for uncompensated labor as was done with other exiles.