Chapter 137
The moment Lionel’s words fell, the inside of the duke’s mansion grew busy.
The servants quickly sent people out, and flowers that hadn’t even been needed until a few days ago were carried into the mansion one by one.
Most of them had been brought from the greenhouses of other noble houses.
Flowers forced to bloom against the season.
In the middle of the garden, thick with fallen snow, pots of vivid color stood awkwardly in a row.
Lionel, who had kept his mouth firmly shut ever since taking off his formal attire, gazed at the sight for a moment before walking out into the garden.
“Your Grace, we’ll do it.”
“The weather is cold. Your body still—”
Despite Simon and the servants’ attempts to stop him, he rolled up his sleeves himself.
“I’ll do it.”
Answering shortly, Lionel bent his knees and touched the soil.
The cold air seeped deep into his lungs, but strangely, he felt light.
He wanted the days spent at this mansion to become good memories for Agnes.
But for that, this overly grand ducal mansion was far too bleak. He wanted to prepare at least one place she could grow fond of.
And so Lionel intended to tend the garden himself.
‘Once the garden is finished, it might be nice to take walks here together sometimes.’
Lionel’s lips curved.
The thought of an ordinary life—having dinner together, then coming out here to talk about trivial things—felt quite pleasant even just imagining it.
“For that, I suppose the ground needs smoothing too.”
It would be troublesome if the wheelchair’s wheels caught on a stone and startled Agnes.
Drawing up these various plans in his mind, Lionel drove the shovel into the ground.
Thud.
But the soil did not easily break apart.
The frozen ground was hard.
Lionel put his strength into it once more.
Even so, the blade only slipped slightly.
This couldn’t be right.
It wasn’t yet the season for the ground to freeze like this.
The sense of wrongness rose again.
His mind kept shaking loose his sense of the season, again and again.
Even as he looked at the thickly fallen snow, he kept forgetting and then remembering that it was winter.
After a few more attempts to dig into the frozen ground, Lionel stopped his hand.
Then, slowly, he pressed his bare hand against the soil.
It was cold.
“…Right. That’s right. It was winter.”
But why was he foolishly trying to tend a garden in the dead of winter. Any flowers planted now would only freeze and die soon enough.
The smile on Lionel’s lips gradually flattened into a straight line.
Only then did Lionel lift his head to look at the mansion.
Beneath the white snow, the mansion stood magnificent, lights lit in every window. Except for just one—the room beside his study.
Lionel stared long at the single window where darkness had settled.
Whose room had that been, again.
For a moment, nothing came to mind.
But that blankness felt strange.
The fact that no memory surfaced at all.
As if an entire page had been torn out of a script.
Once he became aware of it, the sounds around him began to register differently.
The sound of falling snow.
The scrape of the shovel blade against ice.
The hushed presence of the servants.
Everything suddenly became too vivid.
Like the moment after the stage lights go out at a play, when the sound of the audience’s breathing can suddenly be heard.
Lionel slowly looked around.
“Simon.”
Simon’s shoulders, which had been hovering anxiously nearby, visibly slumped.
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Today too, there’s been no reply from Agnes, I take it.”
“That’s… correct. Let me check again—”
“But, is it really true that no reply has come from Agnes?”
Simon’s eyes wavered.
“Your Grace, what do you mean by—”
“Or rather… is it that she cannot send a reply?”
Lionel’s shadow stretched long over the frozen earth.
Along with his voice, low and sunken.
“What is today’s date.”
“Y-Your Grace, that is, well…”
Ha.
A hollow laugh burst out of Lionel.
It hadn’t been a question meant to seek an answer.
Lionel already knew.
No. He had come to know, naturally.
What this season, this air, this cold soil meant.
Lionel’s fingertips paused for a moment.
But the pause did not last long.
Lionel picked up the shovel again.
Whether the ground was frozen or not. Whether the season was out of joint or not.
Like someone simply doing what needed to be done now.
The shovel blade stubbornly scraped at the frozen soil once more.
Even so, only a harsh scraping sound remained, and the ground scarcely cracked.
Lionel put even more force into it.
He was dimly realizing it.
That this snowing winter was an entirely different time from the spring in which the wedding was to take place.
That no matter how hurt Agnes’s heart might be, for a reply to be delayed this long was not normal.
And the unfamiliar scenes that had been seeping, here and there, into his memory.
Agnes, smiling and crying with a face he didn’t recognize.
That voice, small, begging to be discarded, looking at him like a withered flower.
Forgotten memories were slowly surfacing.
Like the melting snow soaking into the gray hem of his trousers, darkening the edge.
His own sharp voice, accusing Agnes of touching his mother’s keepsake.
Her round shoulders, waiting endlessly for him in this garden in the pouring rain.
As each scene unfolded one by one, Lionel finally set down the shovel.
And gripped the soil with his bare hands.
The cold, ice-flecked earth dug into his palm.
It was full winter.
Lionel’s voice came out as if wrung from him.
“Everyone must have had quite a hard time, indulging their deranged master all this while.”
At once, the sound of sharply indrawn breath came from all around.
That, too, confirmed it once more. Just how mad the things he had been doing were.
Lionel’s shoulders shook with something that might have been self-mockery or might have been weeping.
How had he forgotten all of it, and dared to dream of happiness.
And on top of that, gotten excited about tending this very place—the place that had given her a wound that could never be erased.
“…What right do I have to—”
Had he erased the pain.
Doing something like this wouldn’t bring her back anyway.
Lionel bit down hard on his lip. Hard enough to tear.
The wedding was already over, and he had wounded her.
And in the end, he had lost her—Agnes.
That fact rose to the surface of his mind, undeniable now.
He had dreamed a belated, undeserved dream. He had dreamed of a future that could never come true.
No. Perhaps this had been exactly the future he’d wanted.
Only, he had realized it far too late.
Somewhere that had been tightly sealed collapsed.
And the sense of loss he had been pressing down all this while surged forward like a tidal wave.
The awareness that had been out of place returned to where it belonged.
The time of loss, of losing Agnes, poured down over his head all at once, like a downpour.
At the same time, his vision split in two and returned again, and pain came pounding at the inside of his head like a small hammer.
Cold sweat, beaded on his straight forehead, ran down the side of his face and dripped onto the frozen soil.
The clumsy play had come to its close.
Without any warning at all.
***
“Your Grace, please open the door! Your Grace!”
Outside the firmly shut study door, Simon’s voice rang out harshly.
But Lionel, as if he couldn’t hear, said nothing at all and walked toward the desk.
Soil, not yet dry, still clung to his sleeves.
The hem of his trousers was dark and damp from melted snow.
The room was quiet.
Within that quiet, the loss came surging back again.
More vividly than in the moment he had been digging up the garden.
There was nowhere to run from the emotion pouring down like a downpour.
The price of imagining, even briefly, a happy future was terrifyingly bleak.
“…I need to find the secret letter.”
Lionel murmured like a man who’d lost his soul.
He had to do what needed to be done again.
He knew it clearly, in his head.
But his body would not move.
He needed to go forward, but he couldn’t take a single step.
Every breath he drew in and let out felt like thousands of needles stabbing through his entire body.
The memory that had returned to its place made him recall even things he didn’t want to know.
“We’ve secured the passenger list for the Corel, but as for traces of Lady Agnes—”
The words Kalt had spoken as they were leaving the hospital. He hadn’t finished the sentence, but there was no way to mistake what it meant.
Agnes had not been among the passengers bound for Marsen.
Therefore, what he had seen must have been an illusion, born of a foolish hope he couldn’t let go of—not Agnes at all.
Agnes was dead.
Lionel could not bear to reaffirm that fact a second time.
Contrary to how clear his memory had become, he could not think properly at all.
If he was going to dream such vain dreams and imagine an impossible future like this, he might as well have died on the spot instead.
Why was he still opening his eyes, still breathing without trouble.
“…What a filthy, stubborn thing, this life.”
It was a life disgustingly tenacious.
Lionel slowly opened the desk drawer.
The sound of wood scraping was unusually clear, and the revolver lying inside the drawer gleamed coldly.
He looked down at it for a while without a word.
His eyes were vacant.
If he let go of his life like this, in the end it would be one more thing he couldn’t do to Agnes. That was exactly why he had sworn never to do such a thing.
His mind was clearly telling him that.
But the pain of loss was vast enough to erase every judgment.
His hand, crushed under the pain, moved as if slipping, and picked up the revolver.
Click.
The sound of a round being loaded split the silence of the room.
Lionel raised the revolver and pressed its muzzle to his temple.
The cold touch of metal against his skin brought, unexpectedly, a kind of relief.
He wanted to be trapped, if only for a moment, in that happy time.
Back into that brief illusion where he’d been planting flowers, tending a garden, picturing a future of walking side by side with Agnes.
Lionel set his index finger on the trigger.
His faintly trembling finger tightened with force.
All he had to do was press down, just like this.
Just once.
That would be the end.
At that moment, urgent footsteps rang out outside the door.
“Colonel—!”
It was not Simon’s voice, but Kalt’s.
“The Emperor has sent someone to Marsen!”
Lionel’s hand, resting on the trigger, paused for just a moment.
Marsen.
The word brushed past his ear.
But that was all.
Lionel closed his eyes.
Now, everything was meaningless. He could not endure a world without Agnes any longer.
Lionel’s outstretched finger finally moved to pull the trigger.
At
that moment. Through the closed door, Kalt’s shout burst out again.
“We’ve gotten word that someone resembling Madame Leuceviten was among the Corel’s passengers! And—”
Gasping, as if forcing out breath from the very bottom of his lungs, Kalt spat out the next words with all his strength.
“And among her party, there was a young woman in a wheelchair!”
