Chapter 44
“How dare she bring something so vulgar in here.”
Nora twisted her fingertips as if she had touched something filthy and threw the pointe shoes into the attic.
While she was dusting off her hands, Andrew approached.
“Mother? What are you doing?”
Andrew looked at the pointe shoes rolling on the dust-covered floor.
“Those are pointe shoes.”
“Yes. That Bardo girl had them hanging in the middle of her room. One cannot hide their origins. To dare drag such a lowly hobby into this house.”
Nora pushed the protruding ribbon string back with the tip of her toe.
In Nora’s eyes, there was a mixture of loathing and a strange heat.
It was a gaze that looked as if she were the true master of this house.
To her, the Valheim family was an entity akin to a religion.
She had lived for the family for a long time and grew old for the family.
It was also she who had raised Lionel and Cedric from a young age, teaching them dignity and etiquette one by one.
The fact that Lionel grew into an unparalleled talent. The fact that he rebuilt the fallen Valheim. It was all the result of her raising him uprightly.
How hard she had struggled to raise Lionel—who had pestered her like a child, saying he wanted to play the piano—into a respectable son of a noble house.
‘If it hadn’t been for me, the first young master wouldn’t have grown up so well, indeed.’
That conviction sustained Nora.
Therefore, the current Duchess appeared to be nothing more than an insult in her eyes.
Not only did she cause Cedric’s death, but she dared to occupy the side of Lionel, who was like a work of art that she had spent her life refining.
And a daughter of a lowly merchant, at that—one who was being pointed at by the entire Empire.
That was a sin.
It was a shameful and dirty ambition.
However, a decision already made could not be reversed.
“I shouldn’t have left the mansion back then.”
Nora pressed her forehead and shook her head slowly.
Nora firmly believed that the reason Lionel and Cedric suffered all sorts of hardships by enlisting in the military at a young age was because she was not by their side.
The late Duke and Duchess had Nora accompany Andrew, saying they couldn’t send the still-young Andrew alone to a distant continent.
That was the first time she had left the Valheim mansion. She didn’t want to go, but she obeyed by force because it was the master’s command.
Believing only in the promise that she would be reinstated to the position of head maid once Andrew finished his studies.
However, when she finally returned to the mansion, truly absurd news was welcoming Nora.
Cedric had entered eternal rest inside a small coffin barely a square meter in size, and the look in Lionel’s eyes had changed amidst the wreckage of war.
“If only I had been by their side…… the young masters wouldn’t have suffered those hardships.”
Nora muttered like a habit.
Those words contained both regret and the conviction that only she could have protected those children.
“But now that this Nora has returned, I will not let such a thing happen again.”
Lionel, who rebuilt the fallen house, must never be unhappy again.
To ensure that, she had to clean up the impurities sticking to Lionel’s side.
Just as she had done before.
Therefore, Nora intended to make Agnes into a more perfect noblewoman than anyone else. So that she would not dare obstruct Lionel’s path.
“I must make her into someone who suits the young master’s side.”
She had to make sure no one could leave a scratch on Lionel.
Thus, Nora solidified her own belief.
The pain Agnes would receive in the process was not a subject of consideration.
Perfection was always completed through pain.
That is why a perfect noble is admired.
“Only a person completed in that way can stand by the young master’s side. That is what a noble is, Andrew.”
Nora said, narrowing her eyes.
“Noble beings that one cannot even dare to look up to at will. The qualification to stand by them is given only to the chosen ones.”
Andrew’s pupils wavered for a moment.
In that wavering, complex emotions were mixed.
He had been tamed by his mother’s words since he was a child.
Nora instilled in him that his being a non-noble was like a sin.
“No matter how well you study, you cannot hide your blood.”
“That is why you must live more uprightly.”
He grew up hearing such words countless times.
As a result, Andrew always lived with a sense of guilt, as if he had become a being without qualification.
And yet, the woman who became the Duchess was from a commoner background like himself.
Andrew bit his lip firmly.
He had gained a reputation as a doctor. He was a next-generation talent that the Imperial Medical Association was paying attention to, and it was thanks to his skills that he was appointed as the exclusive attending physician of the Valheim family.
However, in his mother’s eyes, Andrew was still just an insufficient being.
“It would have been better if you had become a knight and received a title instead.”
Nora was obsessed with status and bloodline.
Every time he heard those words, somewhere deep inside Andrew cracked little by little.
Was that why?
He hated Agnes.
He couldn’t stand the fact that she was from the same background as himself, yet sitting in a higher place.
Her attitude of raising questions about his treatment method felt not like simple distrust, but like an insult.
‘You doubt my treatment? A commoner who knows nothing?’
He would personally make that woman realize how outstanding a talent he was.
His goal was only one.
To completely fix Agnes.
Whether it was her legs or her head, it didn’t matter.
The moment he perfectly cured Agnes, he would prove his own value.
To the woman who luckily rose to the ranks of nobility, and to his mother who had pressured him his whole life.
Andrew’s pupils slowly clouded over.
Within them, deficiency, the desire for proof, and an unknown madness were mixed.
As Lionel’s absence grew longer, the air in the Duke’s mansion slowly changed.
Things that were uncomfortable, like a thorn stuck under a fingernail, rose to the surface one by one.
The attitude of the servants, which at first stopped at ignoring the sound of the bell, gradually developed into blatant disregard.
That change was as sophisticated as if it had been planned by one person’s hand.
It was Nora.
Since she began managing the interior of the mansion, everything gradually became twisted.
One day, the layout inside the room had changed.
In the space that Agnes had left empty so she could easily move around in her wheelchair, a thick rug was laid out.
“Winter is approaching; it is not proper etiquette for the Duchess’s room to be without a single rug.”
Nora always added a reason with a smile.
There was nothing wrong with those words, but as a result, Agnes became unable to move freely inside the room.
Next was the dining table.
“A noblewoman does not empty all the food at the dining table. That is a behavior only commoners do.”
Along with her words, the food on the table gradually decreased.
Agnes didn’t eat much from the start.
Nevertheless, from a certain moment, hunger began to encroach upon her body to the extent that she didn’t even have the energy to lift a spoon.
The servants turned their eyes away even while seeing such changes.
Everything was justified with a single word from Nora.
She always began with the phrase ‘To maintain the Duchess’s dignity,’ and that sentence soon became an absolute command.
No one openly harmed Agnes.
Instead, they slowly, very secretly, encroached upon her daily life.
In the order of the food on the table decreasing, the maids’ greetings disappearing, and the fire in the fireplace cooling.
Agnes’s day became increasingly unfamiliar.
On days when the air of the mansion settled heavily and she felt suffocated, the old mansion of the Bardo trading company suddenly came to mind.
However, if there was a difference from that time, it was that this time, no one scolded her directly.
They said everything was for her sake.
Laying the rug, making her moderate her meals, and correcting the servants’ attitudes.
They said it was all discipline to make Agnes into a noblewoman.
Nora had never once raised her voice.
Her smile was always perfect, and within it, a deeper fear bloomed instead.
In that way, the Duke’s mansion slowly tightened its grip on Agnes’s breath.
Amidst Lionel’s indifference and acquiescence.
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