Chapter 02
Dolores Artois.
She was born into a family that could be described as having either a long history or a short one.
What that meant was that, in Bellof, where she now lived, her family belonged to the social class known as immigrant nobility.
It had all begun when her father was falsely accused by a certain member of the gentry in his homeland.
Dolores’s father was an extremely rigid man who knew neither how to bend his pride nor how to swallow his principles. Outraged by a verdict he found utterly unacceptable, he decided to immigrate to Bellof with his wife and three children.
Dolores had been six years old at the time.
Her first memory of Bellof was a sky painted with broad strokes of white clouds, with patches of purple showing through the gaps between them.
The Artois family had been exhausted in both body and mind after spending three days aboard a ship, and even the air carried a musty smell unlike anything they had ever encountered.
A flock of black birds flew overhead.
Dolores was already sad because she had accidentally left her headband in the carriage and lost itāa headband she had treasured until it had become yellow with age.
Her father, his ears red with anger, stared straight ahead without saying a word.
Is this really the right place? Could there have been some mistake?
Dolores had been entrusted with holding her youngest sibling, Pablo, who was still a baby. Her mother, her hair hanging down like riverbank weeds, held the hand of her younger sister, AnaĆÆs.
In front of them stood a shabby wooden building that looked as though it had barely been pieced together from planks. It seemed like the sort of place where a ghost might appear the moment you stepped inside.
There was no fence. Whenever the wind blew, the hinges let out a creaking, creaking sound, and the damp, gloomy atmosphere sent shivers down Dolores’s spine.
Her mother burst into tears.
That was the Artois family’s first home.
It was a tragedy that was almost too absurd to laugh at.
When they had lived in Victoria, there had been an immigrant broker from Bellof who would occasionally visit their mansion and spend time with the family.
Her father had trusted the man greatly.
Perhaps Marc’s encouragement was what had given her father the courage to try living in Bellof at all. Marc had boasted that he would take full responsibility for their immigration.
But around the time they boarded the ship departing for Bellof, Marc contracted a terrible epidemic and died.
By the time they received the news, they had already arrived on Bellof soil.
The money had already been paid in advance.
They were left with nothing.
With no one to turn to, they had no choice but to complete the immigration process through one of Marc’s acquaintances.
Perhaps that representative had mistaken the Artois family for a delicious pie waiting to be devoured. After charging them an outrageous amount of money, he abandoned them here and left.
Are we supposed to live here?
In Dolores’s memories, their family back home had been reasonably well-off, which made the shack seem like something that had gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Her father had gritted his teeth and said,
If we have a place to lay our heads, we’re in no position to complain.
But their troubles did not end there.
Immigrant nobles from neighboring countries such as Corten, Hennacy, Sholotera, and Triavol received fairly varied treatment depending on what they brought with them.
Some were appointed to government positions in Lenoire, while others were granted land and legal deeds.
Of course, there were also those who collided headfirst with the harsh reality of a silent, impoverished life.
People from the tiny island of Victur had a one-hundred-percent chance of being among those who encountered that wall of reality.
Bellagarde’s Ministry of State, Bellof’s central government, followed a friendly policy toward nobles who sought asylum from neighboring regions. After verifying the titles and positions they had held in their homelands, the government recognized them to a certain extent.
But those from Victoria were excluded from those benefits.
There was no Bellof embassy in Victoria, which meant there was no way to verify their status.
Marc said everything would be fine.
The entire family had literally fallen into the lower class overnight.
They were ridiculous commoners who were no longer treated with the respect afforded to nobles.
Dolores remembered her parents arguing for days over whether they should return to their homeland.
She no longer remembered which of them had wanted to remain and which had wanted to endure the humiliation of returning to Victoria.
But, in the end, they stayed.
Her mother became a textile mender nearby.
Dolores never quite understood exactly what her mother did, but she knew that her mother went to and from a textile shop for work.
Her father found work at a brick factory.
It did not take long before Dolores saw him come home exhausted every night after carrying bricks all day, then drink until late into the evening.
Because both of her parents had thrown themselves into earning a living, Dolores began taking on the role of a second mother, looking after her two younger siblings.
She was seven years old.
Their fortunes had declined in an instant, but her father was a responsible man, and her mother had an easygoing personality that allowed her to make friends with people quickly.
While her father worked diligently to bring home enough money for them to survive from one day to the next, her mother interacted with people through her textile-mending work.
And so, what ultimately revived the Artois family was neither the reward for her father’s steady labor nor the proceeds of her mother’s desperate work repairing textiles.
It was the network of connections created by her mother’s friendly nature.
Although they had become poor, her father, still clinging to the pride of once having been a nobleman, would not say a word whenever he went outside.
Her mother, on the other hand, seemed to have forgotten everything about their life in Victoria.
Come on in. If we don’t celebrate a day like this, when will we ever have a chance to gather and enjoy ourselves like this?
She invited people over and accepted their invitations in return.
She worked alongside them, introduced people to one another, accepted introductions herself, and steadily expanded her circle.
Every now and then, her father would sit with a pipe between his lips, scowl fiercely, and erupt in anger at Dolores and her siblings because their mother was always going out.
Yet whenever their mother actually returned home, he would be silent.
Her mother’s connections changed their lives.
Through one acquaintance, then another, and another, those connections eventually led them to the local investigator of Aquinieu.
Her mother confessed to him all the countless injustices and tragic hardships they had suffered upon arriving in Bellof…
And, astonishingly, Bellof’s local investigator brought the dead back to life.
Marc, who had supposedly died, was captured and brought before them.
No… How…?
What had hurt her father most that day?
Was it the loss caused by Marc, who had sold off all their family’s heirlooms?
Or was it the betrayal of someone he had trusted?
Dolores did not think she would ever forget the look in her father’s eyes as he seemed to fall into an endless void.
Only a portion of the money Marc had stolen from them was returned.
But even that portion amounted to several times the entirety of what they currently possessed, so the Artois family was able to escape their crushing poverty.
They were able to leave behind the tiny wooden house that looked ready to collapse at any moment, where insects crawled across the walls.
A decent five-room house built from sturdy bricks awaited them.
The bricks that built their home were the product of the humiliation her father had endured while working as a brickmaker.
That was not Dolores’s personal interpretation.
Her father himself had said so.
Each and every one of those bricks is no different from the humiliation I carried on my back.
And yet, what mattered was that their lives had improved.
The fact that they no longer had to worry about having enough food to eat or clothes to wear gave Dolores a sense of comfort.
Her mother still occasionally went out to help with textile repairs, but she was also sometimes invited to nearby tea parties and salons, where she could enjoy the elegant culture of Aquinieu.
Those who wanted to flatter them would smile and address her father by the title of Count, even though it had become little more than an empty name.
Whenever that happened, the smile that had seemed to disappear beneath the weight of life’s hardships would return to her father’s face like the nostalgic scent of a distant memory.
Like all Victurians, Dolores’s parents placed enormous importance on education.
Of course, that expectation applied only to the eldest son, who was responsible for carrying on the family line.
Regardless, thanks to that, Dolores was able to enroll in the parish school of Aquinieu as Pablo’s guardian.
It was a small school with a student body of around forty.
[Aquinieu Parish School]
Dolores was eleven years old, while AnaĆÆs and Pablo were six and four respectively.
Life after entering the parish school was not easy for Dolores.
She had no particular convictions about religion or the clergy, and the Bible was simply boring to her.
Her interests were completely different from those of most of her classmates, who came from the lower middle class, making it difficult for her to find a friend with whom she could truly open her heart.
And because Pablo had effectively entered an educational institution at such a young age, much of her free time was spent looking after him.
That probably played a part as well.
But despite everything, there was one reason Dolores considered the parish school one of her good memories.
The Aquinieu Parish School’s curriculum primarily focused on teaching students to read and write through the Bible, prayers, and history.
Like most institutions affiliated with religious organizations, its general atmosphere was quiet and solemn.
But once a week, there was always one period that was different.
Dolores, have you ever worn toe shoes?
It was the class in which a group of slender little girls were gathered together and taught ballet.
At the teacher’s commands, delivered with a switch in hand, the little girls moved as though they had rehearsed every motion together.
Point your toes!
They stretched out their arms and slightly bent their knees into a demi-pliƩ.
Then, rising en pointe on the hardened tips of their pointe shoes, they performed pirouettesāquick, powerful turns in place…
Dolores’s father viewed dancing from a perspective entirely different from that of the people of Bellof, so ballet was a subject Dolores could never even dare consider taking up.
She could only spend hours gazing through the window at children her own age, hopping lightly like butterflies and walking on their toes like dolls.
Dolores’s favorite movement was en pointe.
After slipping her feet into pointe shoes with their flat, hardened tips and tying the ribbons around them as softly as if she were wrapping whipped cream, she found the courage to rise powerfully onto her toes, as though she had never been shy in her life.
Even if she could remain standing like that for only a few seconds, her heart would pound uncontrollably.
Dolores’s still-unformed chest ached as she chased after the dance.
They say that a tail left too long will eventually be caught.
It was a weekend when she returned home.
