The Cowardly Baby Saint Sees Ghosts - Chapter 51

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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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# Chapter 51.
Liam returned four days later.
“I found her.”
At those words, I abandoned everything I’d been doing.
“Really? Where is she?”
“A small hermitage half a day’s journey from the Capital. Quite isolated—even the villagers barely know of it. The neighbor who received the letter showed me the way.”
“Can we go now?”
“Yes. Though…”
Liam studied me for a moment.
“Will you truly go alone, or rather, just the two of us? It would be safer to bring additional guards…”
He remembered what I’d said before sending him out—that I didn’t want to make the matter larger than necessary.
“No. Let’s just go ourselves.”
I had no wish to arrive at this meeting with soldiers in tow.
Whoever she was, I wanted at least that first moment to be unthreatening.
“Just bring a few knights for restraint, in case her guilt is confirmed.”
“Understood.”
In the carriage, I couldn’t stop fidgeting with my fingertips.
The reality that I would finally see her face was sinking in, yet I still had no idea what to say or how to begin.
The hermitage was truly wretched.
Rotting wooden fences that looked ready to collapse, and a low roof that seemed barely capable of keeping out rain and wind.
A thin curl of smoke rose from the chimney.
When I knocked, the door opened after a long pause.
“…Who is it?”
The fragile voice belonged to a woman whose face was far older than I had imagined.
A woman with gray-streaked hair looked down at me, surprise and fear flickering across her eyes simultaneously.
“…Your Holiness?”
“You’re Hanna, aren’t you?”
The woman’s body went rigid.
Instead of answering, she slowly opened the door wider.
Like someone who had known this moment would come long ago.
There was no sign of flight in her, no denial.
The hermitage inside was narrow and dark.
Hanna led me to an old chair and sat across from me.
Her hands were folded neatly in her lap.
“…May I ask how you found me?”
“Embroidery traces inside the shoes.”
Hanna’s eyes wavered.
“I didn’t know such marks remained.”
Her voice was calm. No denial, no deflection.
“…Is the young lady of the Valet House well?”
It was an unexpected question.
“She’s safe.”
“Thank heavens.”
Her face truly showed relief—not the expression of someone who had meant to kill.
That look, paradoxically, made my heart even more troubled.
“Why did you do it?”
In truth, I still had no certainty that she had cast the Curse at all.
But I asked anyway.
Hanna was silent for a long time at my question.
Only the sound of wind passing outside the window could be heard.
“…I suppose I should start with my daughter.”
She began speaking slowly.
The afternoon sunlight seeping through the old window illuminated her lined face.
“Thirty years ago, I worked as a maid in the Rochelle House. It was the night of the debutante ball for their eldest daughter.”
Her voice began to tremble slightly.
“My daughter suddenly took a high fever that night. She was barely two years old. She’d always been a healthy child, but that day her breathing was labored and her face was flushed.”
I held my breath and listened.
“I needed to take her to a physician. But that day the entire household was occupied with entertaining guests. I begged for permission to leave, just for a moment.”
“…And then?”
“They wouldn’t let me go.”
Hanna’s hands clenched into fists in her lap. The veins on the back of her hands stood out, taut with tension.
“Their young lady and her friends. Five of them altogether. Rochelle House, Bern House, Cassel House, Doren House, Valet House. They were all gathered together that day. When they heard me pleading, they laughed at me. They said, ‘How could we possibly leave such a grand event empty-handed because of some commoner?'”
A chill settled into my chest.
“I kept begging. Please, just for a moment—let me take her to a physician and come right back. But one of them grabbed my arm and said, ‘If you cause a scene here, you’ll be thrown out, understand?'”
Tears spilled down Hanna’s cheeks.
“I couldn’t leave. I paced in front of my daughter’s room all night, but I still had to attend to the household duties. And the next morning, my daughter was already cold.”
My breath caught in my throat.
This story wounded me more deeply than even the terrible suffering Chloe had endured.
“That night, Selena Valet—the young lady who mocked me and wouldn’t let me go—she died too. Everyone remembers only that incident. Even now, thirty years later. But my daughter……”
Hanna’s head bowed.
“Not even her name remained. Just a rumor that some servant girl had died of fever. Nothing more than that.”
“So that’s why you gave their daughter the cursed Red Shoes?”
I asked carefully, and Hanna nodded.
“I couldn’t touch them directly. Instead, I targeted what they cherished most—watching their own daughter shine perfectly at her debutante ball.”
It was a cruelly ingenious plan. I’d heard that they were devastated and plagued by trauma.
‘You took my daughter from me, so now you’ll know what it’s like.’
“How did you create the Red Shoes?”
“I did piecework by day, and at night I stitched my resentment into those shoes. Every few years, whenever the young ladies from those five houses held their debutante balls.”
The matter-of-fact way she spoke made my skin crawl all the more.
For thirty years, it seemed she had lived for nothing but this one act of revenge.
“……But they’ll never know any of this, will they?”
“I know.”
Hanna looked directly at me.
“I know too. That girl is innocent. Just as my daughter was innocent. But without doing this—I couldn’t bear it.”
I had no answer to that.
“You couldn’t have created a curse alone. Someone must have helped you.”
“……”
“Tell me. Who helped you?”
Hanna let out a bitter laugh. She lifted her head and met my gaze.
Her eyes, already full of resignation and sorrow, did not waver.
“But they’re still human, aren’t they?”
“……!”
“My daughter was everything to me. You think I would inform on the person who offered me a hand when I had lost it all?”
“Hanna.”
“If there’s any humanity left in me, Your Holiness, then I cannot do this.”
She shook her head gently.
“I will go. Just take me.”
“Thank you for confessing.”
Liam spoke softly, his hand resting carefully on her shoulder.
Hanna rose from her seat without resistance.
She did not struggle.
If anything, she seemed relieved.
“What will become of me?”
“Curse-related cases fall under the Temple’s jurisdiction, not the secular courts.”
Hanna’s eyes widened slightly.
“……Will I be executed?”
Liam spoke coldly.
“The Temple offers a chance for repentance. You will spend the rest of your life in the Penitence House.”
Hanna fell silent for a moment, then bowed her head very slightly.
“……Thank you.”
I could not say exactly what that gratitude meant.
But her shoulders seemed, for the first time in thirty years, to lighten just a little.
Hanna looked around the hermitage once more, a final time.
An old bed, a small box filled with piecework tools, and a faded child’s garment hanging on the wall. She gazed at it for a moment, then quietly turned her eyes away.
“Let us go.”
Liam prompted gently.
Hanna nodded and walked ahead.
As we left the hermitage, I turned back once.
The evening sky was staining the old roof a deep red.
I wondered if the sky had burned this red on that night, thirty years ago.
Watching Hanna climb into the carriage, I found myself repeating the same thought again and again.
Chloe’s suffering was real, and Hanna’s sorrow was real—both of them.
There was no way to say one was right and the other wrong.
That the legend of the Red Shoes had been born from the hand of a single person—even now, I could scarcely believe it.
Hanna’s receding figure looked utterly forlorn.

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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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