I Accidentally Resurrected My Dead Husband - Chapter 60

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Episode 60
“I need to ask you for something.”
“Me? You’re asking me?”
“Yes.”
Even in the empty room, Caroline lowered her voice to barely a whisper.
“I need you to deliver a letter. My brother is arriving in the Empire soon. I’d like you to pass it to him. I’ll pay you well for it.”
As Caroline spoke, her eyes trembled faintly.
“That’s not difficult, but may I ask why you’re trusting me with this, instead of someone else?”
It was suspicious that she would make such a request to Udith when Marquis Ferni’s Estate employed countless servants.
“I can’t trust anyone who works in this house. Not my husband. He might steal and read my letter. He might not pass it to my brother at all.”
Caroline gnawed at her nails, worrying at them relentlessly; her mental state seemed precarious. Udith’s thoughts must have shown on her face, because Caroline sneered and asked pointedly.
“Do you think I’m mad too, Miss Herington?”
“No, no, madam. Who told you that you were mad?”
“Everyone in this house treats me like a madwoman.”
Blood seeped from Caroline’s finger where she had bitten too hard.
“They say my husband’s infidelity is all in my head. The ghost I see is all in my head. But I am not mad.”
“Madam, tell me slowly. The Marquis is unfaithful?”
At Udith’s words, Caroline drained the cold tea as if it were water, swallowing it down. Her reddened eyes burned with unrelenting fury.
“He has another woman. Of course I demanded a divorce. But he told me to produce evidence.”
The problem was that she had suspicion but no proof.
“You know how our estate’s receptions keep getting cancelled? Want to know why? So he can take the supplies to another woman.”
Whenever a reception was cancelled, the Marquis would gather acquaintances and go hunting the very next day—ostensibly to use up the food and wine prepared for the reception. But that wasn’t it, Caroline shook her head sharply.
“Our family has three villas.”
One was by the seaside, and two were in the Capital, she said.
“They’re called villas, but they’re really small estates. The ones in the Capital are called the Summer Villa and the Winter Villa. They’re where we go when we want peace and quiet.”
The Summer Villa sat in a shallow forest with a small pond.
“No one goes there after autumn. As you know, the Empire gets heavy rains starting in autumn. Once the rain comes, the roads turn to mud. The earth gets so waterlogged that carriage wheels sink in.”
So in autumn and winter, they mainly used the Winter Villa on the hill. The Marquis, too, had switched to hunting at the Winter Villa since early autumn, not the Summer Villa.
“But when he came back from hunting, there was mud on his trouser cuffs.”
His eyes had gone cold, his manner listless no matter what she said, and he was always staying out overnight. Caroline had long ago guessed that his heart had wandered. And the moment she saw the mud on his trousers that day, she began investigating the Marquis’s movements in secret.
“From then on, I watched my husband carefully whenever he returned from hunting.”
She would pretend to greet him and examined the carriage and horses as well. There was always mud on the carriage wheels, on the horses’ legs.
“He’s hiding a woman at the Summer Villa. And he’s been taking all the food meant for the receptions to her. To deceive me!”
Caroline’s eyelids fluttered with humiliation.
“Madam, but that alone doesn’t seem like enough evidence to say the Marquis is hiding another woman.”
“That’s exactly the problem. My suspicion is certain, but I have no proof! My husband says I’ve developed morbid jealousy.”
“Have you thought about going to the Summer Villa yourself?”
“I tried. I said I wanted to go to see the pond in the rain, and that’s when the butler objected. He made such a fuss that he even sent word to my husband at the Imperial Palace, who came back and stopped me.”
The quarrel that erupted between them that day was hardly worth mentioning. But the real problem wasn’t the quarrel.
“Miss Herington, I don’t have a single person of my own here. I brought four maidservants when I married, but two went back to the Kingdom with homesickness, and the other two met with accidents.”
So even if she wanted to rush to the Summer Villa immediately, she couldn’t. Everyone from the stable master to the butler was on the Marquis’s side.
“As long as my husband doesn’t permit it, I can’t take a single step outside this house. When my brother arrives, I’ll divorce him immediately and return to the Kingdom with my brother.”
But the problem was that she couldn’t know whether the letter would be delivered safely.
“After I received my brother’s letter saying he was coming to the Empire, I broached the subject of divorce with him. Then I wrote to my family again, but I haven’t had a reply.”
She couldn’t tell whether her brother was already on a ship and couldn’t reply, or whether the letter was never delivered at all.
“And what did you mean about seeing a ghost?”
Caroline hesitated. The memory of being treated as mad after mentioning the ghost came back to her.
“Don’t worry and tell me, madam. I’ve experienced things myself that would make anyone call me mad.”
A dead husband’s corpse that didn’t rot but came back to life; a shop reeking of stench; cohabitation with a bug that brought wealth and fortune. Udith’s eyes showed she was ready to listen without prejudice, and so Caroline opened her mouth with difficulty.
“I see a dead friend of my husband’s.”
“A friend of the Marquis? You mean the Marquis’s dead friend is appearing to you? Would you tell me the details?”
“Yes. The first time was about a month ago, I think. It was just after midnight. I couldn’t sleep, so I was going to the study when I happened to look out the window and saw that person standing at the back door of the estate. Just standing there, vacant.”
But at the time, Caroline hadn’t thought it was a ghost. It was night and visibility was poor, so she thought it was simply someone who resembled him.
But then, when Caroline had resolved on divorce and was in the thick of a cold war with her husband, she saw the ghost again.
“This time I saw his face clearly. I’m certain it’s him. When I told my husband and the others that I’d seen him, they all looked at me like I was mad.”
The Marquis, hearing that she suspected his infidelity and was even seeing ghosts, declared she had developed delusional disorder and brought a psychiatrist to the Estate.
“Did you see him alone?”
“Yes. I was taking a solitary walk because I was feeling particularly unwell that day. I wish now that I’d brought Meira with me.”
“What was the ghost doing?”
“It seemed like he was waiting for someone. He was standing there, looking around nervously. He looked just like a living person.”
Caroline had said she fled the moment she saw him. A thought suddenly surfaced in Udith’s mind as she listened to the account.
“What if he isn’t a ghost at all—what if he’s actually alive?”
Could the Marquis, unwilling to divorce, be trying to paint his wife as mentally ill to prevent divorce proceedings altogether?
“He might have lied to the Marquise about being dead. The two of them could have conspired to make her say these absurd things about seeing ghosts.”
The Marquise shook her head at that.
“No. That man is definitely dead. He was executed for treason. Loam Stebil—Miss Herington may have heard the name. He was the commander of the Imperial Third Knight Order.”
At the unexpected name, Udith’s pupils contracted as though the ground had shifted beneath her feet.
Loam? Why would Loam appear here of all places? Udith’s face contorted with discomfort. There was a reason Caroline believed so absolutely that he was dead. He had been officially reported as executed.
Her thoughts tangled. Udith began methodically unraveling the knotted thread of reasoning.
‘So the Marquis Ferni and Loam are friends, and Loam still frequents the Marquis’s estate.’
Loam is one with the Followers. Therefore, the hypothesis takes shape: the Marquis could also be a Follower.
‘Did the Followers teach the Marquis this Sorcery? To induce the Marquise into infidelity, so her own indiscretion couldn’t serve as grounds for his divorce?’
The fact that he even prevents her from exchanging letters with her brother makes it clear: the Marquis is the one who doesn’t want a divorce.
‘Well, if I were him, I wouldn’t want to divorce either. It’s not every day you meet a woman this wealthy.’
But just as Caroline, sleepless from Sorcery, had grown irritable and nervy, Loam appeared. Caroline, believing him dead, mistook him for a ghost.
With a sound mind, she would never have confused a ghost with a living man. But Caroline was far from rational now—stressed to exhaustion by her husband’s infidelity, deprived of sleep, and made impulsive by damp, suffocating air.
‘They’re using that as an excuse to paint her as a victim of Morbid Jealousy and Delusional Disorder within these walls. Because of that, she’s on the verge of genuine madness.’
No matter how resourceful the Followers were, they couldn’t stop Caroline’s brother, who was already crossing the sea. But what if they shattered her mind completely before he arrived? If even her brother saw her as unfit of sound mind?
Then the Marquis could remain a man living with a wife who’d lost her reason.
“Miss Herington, you know something, don’t you? Don’t you?”
Seeing the expression on Udith’s face, Caroline suddenly reached out and gripped both her shoulders.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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