Chapter 11
But I knew nothing about the steward.
In that case, I should ask someone who knows him well to gather information.
‘…The problem is, there’s no one like that.’
The people in this mansion disliked me. The dislike itself was fine. The bigger issue was that they likely wouldn’t even answer me if I asked about the steward. It would be nice if there was at least one person who might give me an answer.
Thinking that, I suddenly remembered one person.
Anne. She had shown distaste, but she had answered my questions one by one.
Anne, at the very least, probably wouldn’t ignore my inquiry.
I got up to find Anne and left my room again.
* * *
“Anne?”
As soon as I stepped out, I stopped a passing maid and asked if she knew where a maid named Annw was. When I spoke to her abruptly, the maid looked at me with open displeasure.
“Why are you asking me that?”
For a moment, I wondered again if I could really get along in this mansion, but now wasn’t the time for such thoughts. I pressed on.
“You don’t know?”
“……”
“If you know, please tell me.”
Of course, I could have asked someone else, but the reactions of the other servants would likely be similar. Rather than wasting time, it was better to stick with this maid until the end. As I persistently clung to her, insisting she tell me, the maid, who had been trying to escape, seemed to decide it was unavoidable. She clearly thought it better to just tell me what I wanted and shake me off quickly.
With an annoyed expression, the maid said to me.
“If it’s Anne, she probably went to the back garden to hang the laundry.”
With a look that said, ‘Are you satisfied now?’, the maid hurried away. However she reacted, I had found out where Anne was, so it didn’t matter. I wasn’t sure exactly where the back garden was, though.
I headed quickly towards where the back garden was likely to be, hoping to catch Anne before she went somewhere else. I figured if I wandered around the back of the mansion, I’d probably find it. I found the back garden more easily than I had thought.
The Layton family’s back garden was a fresher, more beautiful space than I had imagined while reading the novel. Anne, who I was told would be hanging laundry, had just arrived with a basket of laundry and was preparing to hang it. I approached her.
“Fancy seeing you again.”
Anne, who had turned at my voice with a puzzled look, was startled.
She probably hadn’t expected me to show up here at all.
Anne hesitated for a while before asking me.
“Miss… what brings you here?”
Beating around the bush didn’t suit my nature, so I got straight to the point.
“There’s something I wanted to ask you, Anne. That’s why I came. But…”
As I spoke, my eyes fell on the laundry basket Anne had been carrying. Letting my sentence trail off, I smiled again and continued.
“You seem busy, so I’ll ask later. Were you hanging the laundry?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll ask after you’ve finished hanging it all. Shall I help you?”
It felt awkward to just stand there and watch while we were together.
If Anne did this job alone, she’d probably be busy finishing it and rushing off to her next task.
Then she wouldn’t have time to talk to me.
‘If two people work, it’ll finish faster, and then we can talk more comfortably, right?’
Besides, having lived as an ordinary eldest daughter in Korea, hanging laundry wasn’t a particularly difficult task for me.
However, at my offer to help, Anne reacted with surprise and began to refuse.
“Huh? You, Miss? No matter what, that’s out of the question. Laundry is my job, and you are the Lord’s guest. I can’t have you doing such menial work.”
So they treat me as the Lord’s guest in this regard? I sighed inwardly and retorted.
“Well, everyone seems to have no problem gossiping about me, even though I’m the Lord’s guest. Some even say rude things right to my face without a second thought.”
“……”
“So I don’t mind. It’s a bit late for that now.”
Anne seemed to have nothing to say to that and stood there awkwardly.
Unabashedly, I started skillfully shaking out the laundry from the basket and hanging it.
Seeing this, Anne, perhaps feeling she had no choice, quickly began hanging the laundry alongside me.
Ann glanced over a few times at how I was hanging the laundry and suddenly remarked.
“You’re very skilled. Looking at your hands, they’re so smooth, it doesn’t look like you’ve done this kind of work much.”
It was true. My current hands were impossibly clean, as if they’d never even held a pencil.
‘Is it strange to be skilled at hanging laundry with hands like these?’
For a moment, I faltered at Anne’s words, but fortunately, she seemed to interpret my silence in a positive light.
“I’ve worked in quite a few mansions over the years. Having met so many different people, I can usually tell what kind of work someone does just by looking at their hands.”
“……”
“Everyone says you’re not really a noble and all that, but if you weren’t a noble, you couldn’t possibly have hands that clean. Besides, you seem to have been raised very delicately, yet you know how to do this kind of work… You must have helped out like this occasionally before, I suppose.”
I figured it was best to let a good thing be. I didn’t particularly want to change Anne’s relatively favorable opinion of me, so I gave a vague reply.
“Well… It’s not really that difficult.”
“Moreover, you don’t even speak down to me, a maid… To be honest, I don’t think badly of you like the other servants in this mansion do. If you were a bad person, there’d be no reason for you to help me like this.”
Now I thought I understood why Anne had treated me better compared to the other servants. Unlike the others, who had lived in this territory almost since birth, she had moved around various regions.
It was a large amount of laundry, but with both of us working, we finished hanging it relatively quickly. Once we were done, Anne picked up the empty basket.
“Thanks to you, the work finished quickly. Thank you. I should go attend to my next task now… But now that I think of it, didn’t you say you wanted to ask me something?”
Until that moment, I had forgotten my original purpose for seeking out Anne. Reminded by her words, I hurriedly asked.
“Ah, right! Anne, do you know much about the steward?”
My question seemed to puzzle Anne, as she tilted her head.
“The steward? Of course I know of him, but what I know about him is probably no more than what any other servant knows.”
“That’s fine. By any chance… has the steward had any recent worries? Or perhaps found himself in some troublesome situation where he might need someone’s help?”
Even I knew it was a rather abrupt question, but my plan was this: proactively help the steward in a difficult situation to mitigate his hostility, even if just a little. If no such situation existed… I decided I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.
Sure enough, Anne seemed taken aback by my seemingly random line of questioning and couldn’t answer immediately. After thinking for a while, her expression lit up as if she’d remembered something, and she spoke again.
“I’m not sure if this is the answer you’re looking for, but now that I think of it, I heard the steward recently lost a pocket watch he was very fond of.”
“A pocket watch?”
“Yes. Rumor has it it was a gift from the previous master of this mansion, the former lord, so it was very precious to him.”
A pocket watch given as a gift by the former lord… I recalled the steward’s hostile demeanor towards me. Given his blind loyalty to the former lord, which was intense enough to make him so hostile towards me, I could imagine how important the item was.
“But they haven’t found the pocket watch?”
I asked, thinking that if it was that important, he would have tried to find it immediately even if it was lost. Anne furrowed her brow slightly as she replied.
“Well, that’s the thing. They figured out where it is. When the other servants learned of the situation, they offered to tell the steward if they found it. But the problem is…”
Did it fall into a lava pit or something? As Anne paused, my thoughts veered off in an absurd direction. Before my imagination could fully run wild, she continued.
“There’s a shallow lake in this territory. Apparently, the steward dropped the pocket watch there.”
“A lake?”
“Yes. But no one knows exactly where in the lake. It’s not like he can have people search the entire lakebed.”
“He must be very upset about losing such a cherished pocket watch.”
“Yes… Does that serve as the answer you were looking for, Miss?”
To be honest, I had no idea how I could possibly help with a pocket watch lost somewhere in a lake, its exact location unknown. Still, I had obtained the information I wanted—a ‘worry the steward had’—so I was satisfied.
I smiled brightly at Anne.
“Yes, that’s plenty. Thank you for telling me.”
“Not at all. And I… I’m sorry for just standing by silently when the other servants speak ill of you.”
Anne genuinely looked apologetic.
I gazed at her silently for a moment before shaking my head.
“It’s fine. If you had said anything, you would have become the odd one out. Just please continue not saying anything. That’s better for you too.”
I spoke as if it were no big deal, and Anne stared at me with a slightly dazed expression.
