The Cowardly Baby Saint Sees Ghosts - Chapter 47

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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 47
By the time I returned to the Temple, night had fallen deep.
The Temple’s lights, glimpsed through the carriage window, felt oddly welcoming—a consequence of how a single day had stretched into something that felt like a century.
“Saint!”
Becky came rushing out barefoot. The redness rimming her eyes told me she’d been worried sick for quite some time.
“Are you hurt anywhere? Why is your face so pale!”
“I’m fine…….”
“There are already rumors going around that something happened at the ball……. What on earth occurred?”
“I’ll explain later. Right now I just want to rest.”
Becky looked as though she wanted to press further, but the moment she saw my face, she pressed her lips shut.
Instead, she bustled about heating warm water and preparing porridge to bring me.
“You must bathe and eat something. Your face looks absolutely washed out.”
“……Is it that obvious?”
“Very much so.”
Becky, her expression heavy with concern, took my hand and guided me to sit.
As she wiped my face with the warm handkerchief, her touch was so gentle and practiced that my tension began to ease almost without my noticing.
Though my body felt utterly drained, that single gesture of care made me remember what it felt like to be alive.
Even as I withdrew to my room to change clothes, my fingertips kept drifting toward my chest.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the scrap of cloth I’d wrapped so carefully in the handkerchief.
Becky returned with a bowl of porridge and sat across from me.
“What is that? You’ve been fiddling with it since we arrived.”
There was no reason to hide it.
I unfolded the handkerchief and showed her the red cloth fragment.
“This. I found it somewhere, but the embroidery is rather unusual.”
Becky glanced down at it casually, then her expression froze.
“……Oh? This……”
“What is it?”
“I’ve seen things like this before when I was younger.”
Her reaction was unexpected. I set down my spoon and straightened in my seat.
“What is this?”
“Before I came to the Temple, I spent some time helping with laundry work at other people’s homes. Back then, I saw the older servants often mark their clothing this way.”
My heart lurched.
“……Truly? What does it mean?”
“In large estates, when they launder all the servants’ clothes together, everything gets mixed up and nobody can find their own. So they’d leave marks like these in secret—initials or patterns—so they could identify their things. I even picked up the technique from watching over their shoulders and imitated it once or twice.”
It was something I’d never known. Yet here, so close to home, the answer had emerged as naturally as breathing.
“But this doesn’t look like something recent.”
Becky added this observation as she examined the cloth fragment carefully.
The way she ran her fingertips over the texture of the weave and the faded thread color was remarkably skilled.
“Looking at the thread color and the stitching method, this is quite old. These days everyone uses separate name tags, so hardly anyone marks things with embroidery like this anymore. I’d say this is at least thirty or forty years old.”
Thirty or forty years ago.
That aligned precisely with the time when Selena Vallet had died.
“How old were you then, Becky?”
“Me? I hadn’t even been born yet.”
Becky answered with a small laugh.
“But when I was learning laundry work, there were older servants among the staff who knew stories from those days. Everyone found it remarkable since it was such an old-fashioned method.”
“What pattern do you think this is?”
Becky held the cloth fragment up to the candlelight, her eyes narrowing.
“Well, half of it has deteriorated so I can’t be certain……. But could it be an initial? It looks like it might be a single letter of the alphabet decorated ornamentally. Though given how old this is, I couldn’t possibly tell you who left it.”
‘Servants…….’
After finishing the porridge and finding myself alone in my room, a different thought struck me suddenly.
‘Rather than simply waiting for others to dig up answers, surely there’s something I can do myself.’
When it came to old records from noble families, Liam and Gaitel would certainly find them more easily. They had the connections and authority.
But I possessed something they did not. The station of a Saint.
I had heard that when poor commoners could not afford a proper funeral for their dead, they would petition the Temple to bless the deceased’s spirit.
All such petitions were kept in the Blessing Records Chamber, deep within the Temple.
Unlike the documents of noble houses, that collection fell entirely under Temple jurisdiction, and even a child like me could browse it without any need for explanation.
When I thought about it, it was strange.
The deaths of nobles were discussed endlessly throughout society, yet the deaths of commoners lay quiet and forgotten on the shelves of the Temple Basement, revisited by no one.
And even those whose deaths had warranted a petition were among the fortunate few.
‘If I go there, might I find records of commoner children who died thirty years ago?’
If that maidservant had a child, and that child died during that time.
And if that death was so unremarkable that no one paid it any attention—still, the record might have been preserved somewhere.
The moment the thought crystallized, I couldn’t sit still.
* * *
The next morning, I set out alone for the Blessing Records Chamber in the Temple Basement without telling anyone.
As I descended the stairs, cool air washed over me.
Since even the priests rarely ventured here, my footsteps echoed unnaturally loud.
Dim oil lamps hung along the walls, swaying faintly, their shadows stretching long against the stair walls.
Dusty shelves were crammed with aged ledgers.
With no priest overseeing the place, I was free to search through them. Fortunately, they were organized by year, so finding the shelf from thirty years ago wasn’t difficult in itself.
The problem was that the aisles between shelves were narrow—even someone small like me had to turn sideways just to squeeze through.
The real challenge was locating the one line I needed within them.
The ledgers themselves were all thin, wormeaten paper; if I wasn’t careful turning the pages, they’d crumble to dust.
Page by page, I checked the dates, my fingertips blackening as I turned each leaf. Dust kept working its way into my nose, forcing me to stifle sneeze after sneeze.
‘When exactly did Selena die?’
I turned the pages, recalling the date Gaitel had mentioned, until at last I found the page bearing that exact date.
“…Found it!”
I held my breath and peered at the page.
Listed there were the blessing petitions that had arrived at the Temple that day.
Most were elderly people who’d simply died of age, or adults who’d succumbed to illness.
All of them had only brief names and circumstances recorded.
Then my fingertip stopped at one line.
Female child, two years old, died of fever.
Household: Rochel Viscounty.
Petitioner: Maidservant ○○.
The family name was perfectly clear.
Rochel Viscounty.
Written in the same firm hand as all the other entries.
The problem came after.
In the space where the petitioner’s name should have been, thick stains overlapped so heavily that the characters were almost completely obliterated.
‘The family name is perfectly intact, so why is only the personal name like this?’
Thinking it through, the reason became clear.
The household name would have been copied neatly from a list the Temple clerk had prepared in advance, whereas the petitioner’s name must have been scrawled hastily in something like a signature by whoever came seeking aid that night.
In places like that, with time, the writing fades and smudges more easily.
‘…Or perhaps someone deliberately traced over just that part and erased it.’
Either way, one thing was certain.
Rochel Viscounty. One maidservant.
Everything else was crystal clear except for that single name.
The date was unmistakable. The very night Selena died.
‘Another child died that same night.’
The fact that beside Selena’s death—which the entire social world had been gossiping about for decades—there lay another death, so quietly buried that it had gone unnoticed, gnawed at me.
And of all households, it was precisely the one I’d seen in that newspaper clipping.
‘Rochel. It’s definitely Rochel.’
Now at least ‘which household’ was beyond question.
What remained was a single mystery: who was that maidservant?
Yet I felt no sense of relief.
I continued turning the pages before and after, just in case.
I thought perhaps there might be another record with the name intact.
But among the other petitions from around that time, there was no other record that hinted at Rochel Viscounty.
Only this one line, with just the name section so distinctly erased.
I turned through several more pages.
I examined about ten pages carefully, before and after, but there was only that single place where a name had been so deliberately singled out and obliterated.
As if someone had chosen precisely that one name to erase.
‘Leaving the household name intact but erasing only the personal name—that’s even more suspicious.’
I copied down only the page number on my palm, then quietly closed the ledger.
All the way back up the stairs, that erased line wouldn’t leave my mind.
It was no different when I returned to my room.
I looked at the page number I’d written on my palm again and again. I couldn’t decide whether I should tell anyone at all, or if I even could.
‘What would I say to Liam? What about Gaitel?’
They would both certainly try to help. But I didn’t want to cause unnecessary upheaval over something uncertain. More than that, the weight of the possibility that someone’s entire life might hinge on this single smudged name kept pressing down on my heart.
‘Until I’m certain, I’ll keep this to myself.’
Beyond the window, the evening sky burned crimson.
Strangely, the thought of a child’s death sent a sharp ache through her chest.

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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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