The Sixth Plan. To Know Thy Enemy. (2)
“She knew about my relationship with Merilyn. She cursed at Merilyn as she knew how much she had despised me and that I was also the fool who really deserved that sort of contempt. And that’s when she finally got out of the bedroom before my mother eventually took her along as she left for the South.”
“Gellerhard.”
It reminded me of the self-deprecatory comments that he had uttered on the day the Duchess Dowager and Gellerhard himself had a fight. Born to the wife of the noblest position in the North while possessing both the looks and abilities that could never be envied at all, he did not realize at that time the reason why he had been so self-absorbed. However, he seemed to understand it now, albeit vaguely.
“Were you the only one who had known about this all along?”
He could have told his mother the issue that had transpired with Charlotte. No matter how much the Duchess Dowager had cherished Charlotte like a daughter, how could she even compare it to her own real son? In fact, he could have called for someone on the spot to embarrass Charlotte, who was all up on a married man’s bed right in the middle of the night.
“Since my mother was fond of her a lot. After Father died, she was the one who comforted Mother…”
“Tell me everything as well.”
“It’s already a thing of the past…”
“Is there anything else that you hadn’t told me about?”
“That’s really all about her.”
Gellerhard asserted in response to my question. Well, that was what happened and Charlotte wouldn’t have dared to hit on him again. The hostile atmosphere that flowed through between the two of them now finally made sense.
Gellerhard lowered his head and placed his forehead on the back of my hand while he kept on blaming himself.
“I was mean to her, so we—our Theodora…”
His voice was trembling. Nevertheless, my thoughts were entirely different. Gellerhard did not bear that level of grudge for Charlotte at all. If she had been a woman who tried to kill the baby of the one who had refused to sleep with her, she would have attacked Carl first. She had more than enough time to harm Carl anyway.
“No, Gellerhard. It wasn’t your fault at all. Really, really, this was never your fault.”
If there was any fault, it had actually been me—who failed to recognize her true nature. Without much thinking, I felt somber that I had given birth only to be taking whatever that was handed to me and it was ultimately myself who had put the children at risk. As I suppressed my welling tears and self-deprecation, I thought of the reason why Charlotte had attacked Theodora, that little baby of mine.
When she made and brought the soup herself for me to eat, Gellerhard had offered to feed me himself and Carl also stepped in at that time. She stepped in to sort things out then before the grandmother berated her own son and grandchild.
It was just weird. No matter how much the soup had been made by Charlotte herself, she was still not a member of the Duchy of DeMancier. She couldn’t have stepped in and voiced out her opinion because of some quarrels between the family members themselves. It was just not like Charlotte, whereby she had always been on the lookout for the Duchess Dowager, who really knew her place very well too.
Charlotte let Carl down from the bed and left the soup with Gellerhard before taking out Carl along with the Duchess Dowager. She already knew what was in that soup and didn’t want Carl to eat it, just in case.
“Gellerhard, if I—if I were to die or be removed from the position of the Duchess, will the Duchess Dowager turn Charlotte into the new Duchess then?”
“There’s no way that Mandy will ever leave me, but if you somehow do… she must have.”
Charlotte said that she was barren and she had almost remarried to a very old man. The position of power where the previous wife had by then was to give birth to a successor. The Duchess of DeMancier was one of the positions too.
“But if something like that had truly happened to you…”
“The position of the Duchess has nothing to do with my own will. If you were to ever leave my side, I wouldn’t have cared who would become the Duchess either.”
Gellerhard said before burying his face into my hands with a bitter face. Well, I got married to Gellerhard without ever having a proper conversation with him as well. So, she only needed one child to eventually become Duchess Charlotte of DeMancier. Carlos Merilyn von DeMancier. A boy who would ultimately inherit the Duchy. My child, Theodora, was never needed and I had to disappear on the spot as well.
“Perhaps she didn’t really do this on her own… Just because the baby—the baby is gone, it doesn’t mean that she will straight away become the Duchess anyway.”
If I had guessed it right, another ordeal was already waiting for me.
“I’d like to meet Charlotte in person.”
Gellerhard soon nodded and lifted me up gently.
* * *
I wanted to meet Charlotte myself. I could already guess the reason she had done it, but I also wanted to hear it as a solid confession. On top of that, I was also curious about the letter from Merilyn which was said to be taken back by her. Indeed, I doubted that Charlotte would answer me kindly, but I still wanted to at least try.
However, she was currently imprisoned within the Duke’s dungeon and the Duchess Dowager was to publicly execute Charlotte right on the next day. There were trials in this world as well, but the judge of a trial within a specific territory was its own Lord and the crime of harming the DeMancier’s granddaughter made it so that she had the power to punish Charlotte who had harmed the child quickly at once.
The executions of heinous criminals as such were usually held in public and the purpose was to instill the fear of punishment within the territories itself, but those of noble lineage would never be executed publicly unless they had been guilty of treason. I didn’t look through the history books, but if her sentence got carried out, Charlotte would soon be the only noblewoman who was ever to be publicly executed.
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