The Mansion Awaits Spring - Chapter 53

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

Chapter 53
Miller regarded him in silence for a moment, then smiled and opened his mouth.
“So that’s what a witch is, judging by how you carry on.”
……
“No, actually it might not be such a bad thing.”
Miller tapped Pejin’s arm and continued.
“Enjoy what’s good while you can. I won’t stop you that far. You know as well as I do that anything beyond that is impossible anyway, don’t you?”
Miller spoke on, his tone soothing and gentle.
“I wish you’d bring your intended wife soon. Before we have to go looking for her ourselves.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“If I rely on you, I’m afraid I won’t see my nieces and nephews anytime soon. Do try to spend some time with them.”
“I don’t want to. Not a single one of them has any manners.”
“I’m baffled myself why the children turned out so much like you, and I raised them.”
“Well, since it was you who brought them up, you’ve got yourself to blame.”
To an outsider, their bickering might suggest trouble between the brothers, but Heidi knew the truth—that the two regarded each other as the most irreplaceable family in the world.
This was why her worry at Pejin’s interest in April was so quickly put to rest.
Shortly after, Pejin led a procession of mourning through the city.
The Grand Duchy Police provided escort as the Grand Duke and his wife visited the sites where the fog had claimed lives, presenting donations.
Pejin too presented his donation, acutely aware that he should have prevented deaths from occurring in the fog.
Behind the elderly woman accepting the donation he offered, he watched two children who stood looking out through the window. In eyes red from long weeping, resignation had already settled like a veil.
The fog had taken not only the children’s mother, who had been raising them alone, but now their grandmother too found herself their sole guardian.
The grandmother, with nowhere else to turn, clutched the thick envelope of donation money in her hands and spoke in a hollow voice.
“Since I’ve accepted this, I suppose I have no choice but to raise them myself.”
Pejin closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them slowly and bowed his head.
“I have failed in my responsibility. I am deeply sorry.”
Something dark and suffocating seemed to rise from within his chest.
‘What am I even doing?’
‘Knowing everything, yet pretending to know nothing.’
As he was thinking this, one of the two children who had clung to their grandmother warily came forward and pushed him with all their small strength.
Pejin hastily caught the child by the arm as he stumbled backward.
The grandmother, startled, grabbed hold of the boy. He glared at Pejin, then asked his grandmother.
“Is it because of that police officer that Mom couldn’t come home?”
“No, that’s not it. This officer did everything he could.”
“No! People died—how could he have done his best?”
The boy’s voice rang out sharp and clear.
“If I were a police officer, our mom would’ve come home!”
Pejin frowned and gestured for the police attempting to restrain the boy to step back. Then he looked down at the child, barely ten years old.
He was of the Grand Duke’s household and a high-ranking officer himself, yet he smiled reassuringly at the grandmother, who feared him, before gripping the boy’s arm and pulling him close. For a long moment, he held the child’s gaze.
Pejin, who had lost his parents in childhood, felt a weight of guilt toward this boy. At the same time, he was reminded of his own younger self.
He thought that without his brother Miller, he would have simply drifted through life.
He had become a police officer for the same reason this boy spoke of.
Back then, the Grand Duchy had lacked sufficient police force. It was only after crossing to the Empire that he clearly understood why—imperial interference.
Pejin spoke.
“That’s why I became a police officer. I thought if I had been one, my parents would have come home.”
……
“But I’d rather have a police officer like you around than me. You’re brave.”
“Are you… not brave?”
“No. Not at all.”
Pejin ran his hand through the boy’s disheveled hair and continued.
“I never became what I wanted to be.”
……
“You become the person you want to be. I’ll support you.”
With that, Pejin rose to his feet.
To him, Devin, the head of the Grand Duchy Police and chief of police—their uncle on their mother’s side—spoke.
“This is a good way to treat your citizens.”
At Devin’s words, Pejin turned to look at him.
He still found it difficult to believe that this man, the police chief, had concealed the truth for so long.
Devin had the satisfied expression of someone who had finally found another to share a burden he had carried in secret for years.
But Pejin had no intention of bearing any part of that burden.
It was only upon his appointment as director of the Special Investigation Bureau that he first learned the Grand Duchy Police had known the cause of the fog all along, yet hidden it for years.
Years of lies that had sustained Right Island lay stacked before him.
He couldn’t see which thread to pull or which to leave alone. It was a tower that seemed certain to collapse the moment it was touched.
* * *
The last day of the year.
Hanna drew a deep breath.
She had been so caught up in studying letters at the Market in the Capital City, running an errand for Baumann alongside Fred.
Hanna loved to run about, and Fred loved to draw. In any case, neither of them had shown much interest in studying.
Yet under April’s stern scolding, both children had gradually learned their letters. And between the two, it was Fred, who spent more time sitting still, who read faster.
Tonight, when the two of them returned home, they were scheduled to take a final test reading the book April had given them.
Hanna wore an anxious expression as she spotted a newspaper left behind by a man who had just polished his shoes and stood up, and she rushed toward it.
The moment she picked it up, a newspaper boy came running with his hand outstretched.
“Give it back—it’s mine. Or pay for it.”
“Someone already paid for this.”
“It’s mine!”
As the boy, a couple of years older than Hanna and Fred, yanked hard at the newspaper, Hanna, holding it with one hand, tumbled to the ground.
A large merchant who had been watching from a distance came walking over.
“Why are you kids fighting in front of my shop?”
He seized both the newspaper boy and Hanna by the nape of the neck with each hand.
Fred, terrified, cried out urgently.
“We—we work for the Lunos Family!”
“The Lunos Family?”
At those words, the merchant looked at the two children in turn, then released Hanna’s neck. He thrust the contested newspaper into her hands and spoke.
“Take it.”
Hanna gripped the newspaper as the newspaper boy, thrashing about, flew backward into the wall from a shove the merchant gave him.
The merchant kicked the boy in the belly, spat, and returned to his shop.
Fearing the boy might come after them for revenge, Hanna tucked the newspaper into her waistband, grabbed Fred’s hand, and began to run.
The snow lay frozen, and people in the Market moved about pulling sleds or skating.
Running wildly over the slippery ground, Hanna came to a stop when she could no longer see the boy through the crowd.
Where they had stopped was a residential district where the middle classes lived.
Hanna flinched at the sound of blows coming through an open window and looked up. From the second floor of one house, a girl about her own age stood with both hands covering her struck face, weeping.
Having been turned away from the factory, her next recourse was to go door-to-door through neighborhoods like this, seeking work.
It was only natural that servants trained for noble families carried themselves with pride. Such places were not for just anyone, and the treatment reflected that.
Housemaids in private homes were given room and board instead of wages, and had not a single day off in the entire year. As for the treatment Hanna, missing a hand, might expect—there was nothing more to say.
Hanna gripped the newspaper tightly and spoke.
“If I can’t keep reading, will the mistress cast me out?”
At Hanna’s question, Fred shook his head vigorously, his eyes wide.
“Of course not. She said she’d send us to school.”
“But if I’m not clever enough for school?”
“That… I don’t know.”
‘There won’t be another chance like this. There’s no way fortune like this will smile on me again.’
Hanna set down the newspaper and unfolded it with trembling hands.
The book she read and practiced with every day she had nearly memorized by now; reading it was less reading than reciting from memory. This newspaper, however, was made up of entirely new sentences.
Hanna stumbled through the newspaper.
“Unexpected… underperformance. Unexpected? Underperformance? Grievances about the granting of player nominations…”
Unexpected, underperformance, nominations, grievances, voicing…
Since it was an article about ice hockey, she had thought it relatively easy upon seeing the photographs and started reading, but from the very first sentence, not one word she had studied appeared.
Hanna was struck dumb by the realization that she couldn’t read the newspaper at all.
“I can’t read it… What do I do?”
As the spirited Hanna’s voice wavered with tears, Fred’s face too turned ghostly pale. Through the open window beyond, the sound of blows and a young maid’s sobs continued to drift in.

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