Translator: Nox

22 - Chapter 22

Ryan stared blankly for a long time, still unable to believe what he was reading.

Then he grasped the situation.

“Wait… is this a letter addressed to Lieutenant Colonel Ryan Wilgrave?”

He started reading the letter again from the beginning, slowly.

The letter was filled with such friendly and affectionate words that it would naturally bring a smile to anyone’s face.

Of course, he couldn’t smile. It was a letter for Ryan Wilgrave, after all.

When Eloise defended Lieutenant Colonel Wilgrave at the dinner table, he had simply thought of her as one of his admirers.

He was surprised that a young woman in this rural area knew all about the battles, but he figured it could happen.

But looking at this letter now… it wasn’t quite the letter of a lover, but it certainly wasn’t a letter of platonic friendship either.

The contents showed an affection and trust too deep for mere friendship.

“This is, well…”

Ryan didn’t know what to do in this situation.

“Just how much does she like Lieutenant Colonel Ryan Wilgrave?”

Actually, receiving letters like this wasn’t unusual for him. He sometimes received over a hundred letters a day at the military base.

His mother had passed away a long time ago, and the gravedigger who had given him the Wilgrave name had also been buried in the cemetery he managed quite some time ago.

Besides, his biological father, Count Willus, always saw him as a thorn in his side, so there was no way he would send a letter.

So Ryan hadn’t opened the letters addressed to him.

At first, he had read them a few times, wondering who they were from, but he soon stopped.

The more honors he earned, the more letters arrived.

Unknown people, unknown addresses, cliché praises. And requests to meet, with transparent greed.

Some of them seemed to be written by people in serious mental states.

He could immediately recall someone claiming he had stolen their money and had to return it, someone claiming he was their grandson and they had to meet, and so on.

The most absurd of all was someone claiming to be his wife.

Tired of such letters, Ryan stopped opening them altogether.

When his adjutant asked what he should do with them all, he told him to burn them, but the adjutant said they contained the love of the citizens and took them home instead.

The flood of letters stopped as if by magic when the war ended and he was summoned to the Disciplinary Committee.

As critical comments about him increased, the letters started coming again.

This time, even the envelopes were different.

“What is all this?”

His adjutant examined the letters with his fingertips, as if handling something disgusting. Written in dark red letters were words like coward, murderer, die!

Just looking at that made it obvious what the contents of the letters would be.

“Burn them all.”

“Yes, I’ll burn them thoroughly.”

The adjutant, who had previously urged him to read at least a few, now took the initiative to gather all the letters of slander addressed to Ryan and threw them all into the bonfire he was tending outside.

He hadn’t read letters before, but from then on, Ryan truly paid no attention to any mail addressed to him.

But…

“…There are still people sending these things.”

While letters of criticism still came from time to time, letters of support were rare. But it seemed Eloise was still one of the people sending him letters.

Resting his chin on his hand, lost in thought, Ryan looked at Eloise’s letter again.

…It’s been a while since I’ve written a letter like this. I hope you’ve been doing well. Surely this beautiful spring hasn’t only visited Newham.

The letter, written in neat handwriting, contained affectionate words that weren’t overwhelming.

…Those pathetic newspapers are still slandering you, but they should all be prepared to be shut down the day I go up to Newham, you know?

Seeing the names of the newspapers and magazines that strongly criticized him written separately in a grotesque font, in red ink, Ryan burst out laughing.

It showed a determination as if she really would set fire to the place if she went up to Newham.

It was clearly a letter he had read several times, but he couldn’t help but laugh again.

After reading it several times again, Ryan placed it on his desk.

At first, he had thought of crumpling it up and throwing it away out of displeasure, but frankly, the letter was interesting and affectionate in terms of content alone. There was no rudeness, and concern for the other person was occasionally revealed.

It was a fun and cheerful letter.

If only the recipient wasn’t Lieutenant Colonel Wilgrave.

Wondering what to do with it, he put the letter in his desk drawer for now.

It would be troublesome if Mr. Palmer came into the study to clean and saw this.

Of course, not for himself, but for Eloise.

“If you’re going to write something like this, you should have at least not written the name.”

Then he could just say it was a letter for him and laugh it off… no, come to think of it, it was for him.

Thinking that far, Ryan opened the drawer again and took out Eloise’s letter.

Then he read the letter again. Frankly, he already remembered all the contents, but somehow he couldn’t take his eyes off it.

‘Judging by this, it seems this isn’t the first time she’s written a letter.’

The words “previous letter” were written in various places.

Ryan slowly tapped the table with his finger. What was in the other letters that had arrived for Lieutenant Colonel Ryan Wilgrave in the capital?

“If there were things like this, I should have read them once…”

As he muttered that, he shuddered.

What am I saying right now? Read what?

He hurriedly shoved Eloise’s letter deep into the desk drawer as if it had arrived from hell.

‘I should just pretend I don’t know.’

There’s no way Eloise put this in here for me to see. She probably just got it mixed up while organizing documents and sending them.

He thought about sending it back, but remembering the look on her face when he returned the painting last time, how she grabbed it in horror and glared at him, he wondered if there was any need to return it.

If he pretended not to know, she might just think she had forgotten it somewhere and soon erase it from her memory.

Ryan turned his attention back to the documents related to the Summer Ball.

He needed to look through this quickly, but strangely, he kept thinking about the letter he had read several times in the drawer.

Every day felt like walking on thin ice for Eloise.

She felt like Sergeant Thornton would appear at any moment, looking at her with an even more contemptuous face than when he saw the nude painting, and say, “You were a crazy woman.”

Then he would hand her letter over to Feltham’s people. People would cover their mouths and look at her with surprised expressions, and her mother would faint from embarrassment.

No, she might faint first.

‘Why of all people! Why! Why to that person!’

She screamed in her heart, but that didn’t mean the letter that had gone to Sergeant Thornton would come back to her.

The first person to notice Eloise’s strangeness was Emily.

“Miss, are you feeling unwell?”

“Huh? Oh, no. I don’t feel sick anywhere?”

“Really? But why haven’t you been eating any cookies lately?”

Eloise was the biggest fan of Emily’s cookies. So when she baked them, she would share them with the children in the village and diligently eat them herself, wouldn’t she?

So it was one of the weekly routines for Emily to complain that she had to bake more cookies because the cookie jar was always empty so quickly.

But this time, even after a week, there were still cookies left in the cookie jar. That was after giving a handful to the children who came over expecting cookies.

Of course, Mrs. Serverton also noticed her daughter’s strangeness.

“Eloise, are you really alright?”

She was always scolding and nagging her daughter, but when she saw Eloise’s complexion worsening, she panicked and didn’t know what to do.

No matter what, she was her only daughter and beloved child. That’s why she had given up Newham’s social scene and moved to this rural area to live, all for Eloise’s health.

“I’m fine. I’m just… worried about my godmother.”

At those words, Mrs. Serverton stroked her daughter’s shoulder as if she understood.

“Yes, I’m worried too that we still haven’t received a letter. I wonder if she’s very ill.”

Hearing her mother’s worried voice, Eloise apologized in her heart.

I’m sorry, Father. I’m sorry, Godmother.

Eloise continued to feel anxious and sleepless.

But for over a week, Sergeant Thornton didn’t show up with her letter, laughing at her.

And two weeks later, her father’s letter arrived.

Fortunately, her godmother had passed the dangerous point, but because she was so old, she was slowly preparing for the end of her life, and he would probably stay here until the end, so he didn’t know when he would return to Feltham.

A month passed like that.

Now Eloise had completely erased the letter she had written to Lieutenant Colonel Ryan from her mind.

Of course, she felt uneasy whenever she looked towards Blissbury, but since there had been no contact yet, it was clear that Sergeant Thornton hadn’t seen it either.

‘Yeah, it might have fallen somewhere else.’

Or maybe God picked it up and placed it in front of Lieutenant Colonel Ryan Wilgrave.

Seeing that it hadn’t turned up even after searching so thoroughly, wasn’t it more likely that it was there?

Emily’s cookies were disappearing quickly again, and Mrs. Serverton’s nagging increased.

As they peacefully entered early summer.

“A letter from Blissbury!”

A messenger boy appeared with a letter.