The Whipping Maid of House Calley - Chapter 54

On the day she’d put those humiliating words in her mouth, Sheila had to admit that something about her had changed.

She’d simply refused to acknowledge it, but the Sheila of the past, who was past marriageable age, inexperienced yet full of curiosity, was clearly different from the Sheila of now, who’d accumulated experience through repeated real encounters.

On top of that, being subjected to a string of perversions far removed from anything ordinary, she sometimes felt as though she herself had become a pervert as well.

It was clearly a situation so humiliating that tears burst out, and yet moisture flowed down below too.

In truth, it wasn’t the first time something strange like that had happened.

“Please…! Punish Sheila who did wrong. With Master’s cock, punish lewd Sheila’s pussy…!”

Even if she’d only been mimicking the way he spoke, Sheila had sincerely wanted to be punished by him even then. She couldn’t understand herself. She’d only gone in and out of that room twice.

Recalling not only the words he’d made her say but also the words she’d uttered of her own accord, Sheila couldn’t help but acknowledge the change in herself.

But separate from acknowledging it, thinking that she’d become a worn-out woman in the short time Alfonso had been gone made her mood sink.

The corners of her eyes, which had reddened from crying earlier in the day, flushed red again.

Just then, Judith, who’d finished eating all her beans, opened her mouth.

“What do they give you for lunch at the palace?”

She wasn’t particularly gluttonous, but Judith was always interested in ‘today’s menu.’

It was common for her to send someone down to the kitchen in advance to ask what the menu would be.

Now the thirteen-year-old girl was even showing interest in the palace’s lunch menu.

“The food’s all the same, Judith,” Alfonso answered briefly, suppressing his irritation.

After all, the palace wasn’t a foreign country, and between a great noble’s estate and the royal palace, food would all be more or less the same.

Sheila suddenly thought of the delicious cookies Cedric had given her as a snack.

At the time, she’d been too flustered to notice, but thinking back now, that hadn’t been food from Beloica.

She hadn’t seen anything like it among the countless cookies served as Judith’s snacks either.

It was probably a Lotas-style cookie from Cedric’s place of study abroad.

She’d heard that the desserts there were incredible, but she hadn’t expected she’d ever actually get to taste them.

And the rumor was true. It was the first time in her life Sheila had ever eaten cookies that delicious.

If only Cedric hadn’t brought up the taste of the milk, she could’ve savored the cookie flavor even more….

‘No, wait a moment.’

One and a half months as a whipping maid. About half a month since she’d done those bizarre things with him.

Sheila suddenly realized that all her thoughts kept ending up circling back to what had happened with him, and she shuddered.

‘Whew… this is dangerous.’

Somehow, she’d ended up in a physical relationship with him, but that was just work.

To him, it was probably nothing more than premarital indulgence. There was no way he could do those, ha… those kinds of things with the noble young lady who would become his marriage partner.

Sheila objectified the reality she was in, and his position as the future count.

Including Sheila, the atmosphere at the dinner table was subtly different from usual. But it seemed no one noticed it keenly. No one except Cedric himself, with the appointment ceremony approaching.

***

It wasn’t until the following day that Alfonso entered Cedric’s room to discuss the appointment ceremony.

“Here. This is the list of nobles who sent replies saying they’ll attend.”

Alfonso slid the documents across the table.

While invitations had been sent out and he’d gone to the royal palace, Alfonso had organized the families who’d sent replies according to his own criteria.

He hadn’t organized them simply in alphabetical order. He placed the families with higher titles and greater wealth at the top so they could see at a glance which influential houses they needed to pay close attention to.

Not only that, for houses with daughters of marriageable age, he marked them with a dot on the side so they’d be easy to identify.

Most of them were attending because they were conscious of Cedric Calley returning from studying abroad, but the opportunity couldn’t be said to be limited to Cedric alone.

It wasn’t just the position of next count. Alfonso also had plenty of chances to catch the eye of a proper young lady who would look at him for himself.

Every event and party where men and women gathered had a very high chance of becoming an opportunity for men and women to meet each other’s eyes. No, maybe that was the purpose of every event from the start.

The opportunity was open to Judith, who had recently lost her engagement, to Allen, who said he would become a clergyman, and even to Bernard and Marisa, who already had spouses.

Among them, besides Cedric, the one with the highest likelihood was, without question, Alfonso. With that thought, Alfonso should have been thrilled as usual, but right now he wasn’t thrilled at all.

This was all because of His Highness the Crown Prince.

‘What on earth did you do while you were studying abroad?’

Alfonso thought to himself as he looked at Cedric, who wore his usual arrogant expression.

It wasn’t even within the country, and there were no family elders in Lotas, so becoming freer and more promiscuous, fine. But to think he would even do ‘that.’

Even Alfonso, who loved gossip, had heard all sorts of stories about what happened in places people studied abroad, but his standard for what a noble man must not do had never once wavered.

The more he thought about it, the more nausea rose.

He should have stayed out of it. He stepped forward and took charge of the event for nothing.

And now, it wasn’t something he could back out of and say he wouldn’t do it.

“Anyway, I think a total budget of about one thousand five hundred solids will be enough, and if there’s anything you want to add, tell me through the secretary.”

Alfonso said that while holding the budget plan he’d organized. Then Cedric reached his hand out.

Alfonso frowned reflexively and pulled back the hand holding the papers.

Cedric, who had been about to take the budget plan, stared at Alfonso.

“Didn’t you bring it to give it to me?”

“…I did,” Alfonso answered as naturally as he could. “I was checking one more time to see if there was anything missing.”

“Ah, is that so?”

Cedric withdrew his hand without regret, crossed his arms, and leaned back against the sofa.

“Talk about His Highness the Crown Prince.”

At the word “Crown Prince,” Alfonso’s expression became subtle again.

“I heard one of the royal family’s collateral relatives was kidnapped not long ago. It seems the royal family is secretly investigating the case. Because of that, His Highness the Crown Prince can’t move recklessly.”

“I see.”

Kidnapping and human trafficking happened from time to time both inside and outside the country, but for even a royal relative, not a commoner, to be kidnapped, it couldn’t be anything but a serious matter.

It also made sense that the Crown Prince’s movements would be restricted until the people behind it were identified.

“Still, don’t be too disappointed. His Highness really wanted to attend his friend’s appointment ceremony.”

“Disappointed?”

Cedric let out a hollow laugh.

He thought Alfonso was only saying that because he didn’t know the contents of the invitation Cedric had written.

But contrary to Cedric’s expectation, Alfonso had already more or less grasped the invitation’s contents through his conversation with Marquis. He had simply guessed the reason Cedric told him not to come in his own way.

‘He probably did it because he was afraid their relationship might be exposed for no reason.’

Alfonso shot Cedric a sharp look and spoke.

“His Highness the Crown Prince said he’d even pressure the ministers to investigate the truth of the incident as quickly as possible. He seemed very determined to attend his close friend’s appointment ceremony.”

That damned ‘friend,’ ‘close friend’….

Since the day before, Cedric found Alfonso’s choice of words constantly grating on his ears.

‘Eric, what the hell did that bastard go around saying….’

‘Eric’ was the alias Marquis used while studying abroad. It was to hide the fact that he was the Crown Prince of the Beloica kingdom.

Because of that, only a very small number of people knew his true identity. A few high-ranking Beloican nobles who had known his face from the start, like Cedric, or play partners, perhaps.

Of course, just because he played a few times didn’t mean he went around blabbing his identity to anyone.

He was a somewhat frivolous man, but he wasn’t an idiot who couldn’t tell what should and shouldn’t be said.

Moreover, in the case of the club, there were confidentiality clauses, so even as Crown Prince, he couldn’t freely talk about matters related to the club.

That was why Cedric had sent Alfonso in the first place, but even so, it was clear Marquis had said something unnecessary.

Cedric rubbed his brow as if tired.

He’d noticed that Alfonso, who’d returned from the royal palace, was giving off an odd air since the dinner the day before, when he’d started talking about ‘birds of a feather’ and such.

Bernard seemed to have taken Alfonso’s remark, likening it to the proverb ‘birds of a feather flock together,’ as referring only to closeness with the Crown Prince, but that proverb wasn’t used solely with a positive meaning.

Birds of a feather flock together.

That phrase, meaning people of the same kind gather together, was now used more often with a negative nuance than in the past.

Like saying crayfish side with crabs, or more bluntly, that shit clumps together with shit.

Even so, Cedric concluded there was no need to pry into exactly what the Crown Prince had said to Alfonso.

No matter what it was, it was clearly not something to be discussed with his younger brother.

Cedric, a Beloican man to the marrow, had no desire to talk about that kind of thing with his own brother.

“Even if His Highness the Crown Prince comes, the only person who’d be pleased is Mother, so there’s no need to worry about it.”

A kidnapping case wasn’t something whose truth would be uncovered overnight, so it meant there was no chance Marquis would appear at this estate.

Cedric actually thought it was for the best.

‘If that bastard comes, it’ll just get noisier.’

The heir appointment ceremony was a traditional event passed down through the family, so he would follow it, but Cedric didn’t particularly like noisy events in the first place.

Besides, even if the Crown Prince didn’t attend, a budget of 1,500 solids would be more than enough to satisfy Marisa’s vanity.

It was an event where, in just a few days, they would spend money that a maid who worked from dawn to night and earned ten solids a month couldn’t save even if she did nothing but breathe for twelve years.

People might think Cedric had never worried about money even once, but that wasn’t the reality.

The era when noble status guaranteed everything had already passed.

No matter how noble you were, if you had no money, you were bound to live miserably.

Since the previous count passed away, the income coming from the Calley territory had been steadily declining.

Of course, with the changes of the times, it wasn’t fair to put all the blame on Bernard. But Bernard, who lacked a modern perspective, lost money every time he invested, and he considered directly running a business vulgar, so he never even tried.

So it wasn’t exactly a coincidence that Cedric started his first business while studying abroad. If he’d stayed in this estate and started a business, there was no way Bernard’s influence wouldn’t have come into play at all.

When Cedric revealed that he’d founded a company, Marisa’s reaction was even more ridiculous than Bernard’s.

She even cried, saying that the eldest son of their family shouldn’t have to do something the gentry would do.

But after seeing the income that came in through Cedric’s trading company, ‘Rovenhagen,’ Bernard and Marisa shut their mouths after that.

No matter what anyone said, Cedric needed the funds to protect the family he would inherit.

That was why he couldn’t say he didn’t understand Sheila’s feelings of staking her life on money. The scale of the money was vastly different, and he simply couldn’t understand the way she staked her life on small change and ground down her body for it.

“This is the list of hotels I’ve lined up. There’ll be limits to how many we can accommodate in the mansion’s guest rooms.”

This time, without making a mistake, Alfonso slid the hotel list across the table.

Unlike before, when he came and went for fun, always on the lookout for Cedric’s openings or to needle him, Alfonso looked like he wanted to deliver the business and leave quickly.

Cedric welcomed that too.

Whatever Marquis said to him and whatever misunderstanding he’d gotten, because of that, Alfonso likely wouldn’t come up to the third floor unless he really had to.

Cedric didn’t waver at all even though he knew his younger brother was looking at him with disgust. It was clear that his younger brother’s gaze came from an extremely aristocratic value system.

That was probably how the maid who admired him looked too. Different from him, who was only aristocratic on the outside….

Even Cedric, who didn’t care how Alfonso looked at him, found his composure breaking the moment he thought of Sheila.

‘Fuck….’

Cedric cursed inwardly.

At least there was one thing fortunate, and that was the fact that today was Judith’s tutoring day.