The beautiful Isabella would never have taken Maletta’s side had she known what Maletta had actually said.
However, Maletta had conveniently omitted her own actions, simply telling Isabella, “Lady Ariadne struck me.” Since Isabella could never resist playing the role of a righteous savior, she immediately reported the incident to Lucrezia.
Lucrezia, who had been harboring a grudge against Ariadne since the recent tutor incident, seized the opportunity. With Maletta in tow, she stormed into Ariadne’s living quarters, brimming with ferocity.
The hallway leading to Ariadne’s small attic room in the corner of the third floor grew noisy with the militant, thumping footsteps of half a dozen people, and the old oak door was flung open.
“How dare a girl lose her composure and lay her hands on others so recklessly!”
It was Lucrezia, appearing in one of her signature revealing, tight-fitting dresses, followed by Isabella, Maletta, and the maids she always kept in her entourage.
Maletta, standing before Lucrezia, showed off her swollen cheek and pleaded her grievance.
“I was organizing the clothes for you to wear, my Lady, when Lady Ariadne suddenly struck me without any provocation.”
Lucrezia nodded vigorously at Maletta’s words and bellowed, “A superior’s role is to govern those below them with virtue, yet you raise your hand without a word! Your nature is so vicious, it is truly a disaster!”
It had come.
Ariadne did not panic; she lowered her head politely. “Mother, a superior has the responsibility to correct the misdeeds of those below them. Maletta insulted Father and Mother, so I had no choice but to act.”
“What?”
“Maletta said that because Father is shameless and raises his bastard children as if they were legitimate noble offspring, there is no need for her to treat me, a mere bastard, with any respect.”
Maletta’s face turned deathly white. She looked at Isabella, pleading with her eyes for her to do something.
Isabella was simply dumbfounded. No—she had brought her mother to take sides because Lady Ariadne was violent and vicious, not knowing that Maletta had dropped such a bombshell regarding Cardinal Del Mare!
Lucrezia’s complexion paled as she glared at Maletta. “Is this true?”
“No! It’s not! On the contrary, I told her that Lady Isabella and Lady Arabella are noble-born, so Lady Ariadne should not try to overstep her bounds with them!”
Ariadne cast another bait.
She had laid in her small attic room on the third floor and simulated this conversation more than ten times, deciding exactly what she would say in response to whatever lies Maletta fed Lucrezia.
“To be precise, she said that because Father’s blood is lowly and only Mother’s blood is noble, Isabella and Arabella—being born of Mother’s lineage—are noble, but that there was no need to treat me with respect since my mother was nothing more than a maid, just like her.”
While these words might have been secretly satisfying to hear from Lucrezia and Isabella’s perspective, it was something they could never acknowledge publicly.
The fact that Cardinal Del Mare was originally an orphan of unknown parentage—and thus had to start his life as a priest in the Holy See, which had raised him, without the opportunity to choose another profession—was the Cardinal’s Achilles’ heel.
If these words reached the Cardinal’s ears, there would undoubtedly be hell to pay.
Ariadne cast her final, carefully saved trump card before the now-ashen Lucrezia.
“She also said that if she caught Father’s eye and bore his child, that child would be of the same status as me, so she would not need to treat me with any respect.”
Suddenly, sparks flared in Lucrezia’s eyes. This was a different matter entirely.
“What was that?”
Only then realizing she was in deep trouble, Maletta shook like a leaf in the wind.
Lucrezia turned her head with the haughty grace of a leopard, fixing her gaze upon Maletta. It was a brief movement, but the time it took for that predatory stare to settle felt like an eternity. Maletta collapsed to her knees, trembling.
“It’s not true, my Lady! How could I ever say such a thing? Lady Ariadne is telling nothing but lies!”
Lucrezia scanned Maletta up and down, weighing the two of them.
The maid was no beauty, yet she possessed a certain fleshy, voluptuous appeal. Her chest and arms were soft and full, cinched tightly at the waist. Despite her short, thick limbs and plain features, she carried a jarring, physical presence.
*What would my husband think if he saw this maid…?*
Maletta knew her own strengths well, having had her uniform tailored to cling to her form. The neckline was cut with a vanity that mirrored Lucrezia’s own dresses.
As the realization dawned on her, Lucrezia’s eyes flashed with manic fury. She let out a piercing shriek.
“You lowly harlot! How dare you cast eyes upon another woman’s husband!”
She snapped her head around, barking an order at the head maid standing in the line behind her.
“Give this impudent wench ten lashes!”
It was a brutal punishment for a mere slip of the tongue. An older servant might die from twenty lashes; ten was a sentence of agony.
“Yes, my Lady!”
“Aah! No! It’s all a lie! Please, spare me, my Lady!”
The head maid and several of Lucrezia’s personal staff swarmed Maletta, forcibly dragging the struggling girl away toward the servants’ quarters on the third floor.
Though Maletta had been Isabella’s personal maid, Isabella did not offer a single word of intercession.
The immediate crisis had passed, but Lucrezia was not finished with Ariadne. Her dignity as the mistress of the house demanded a reckoning.
“And you! If such a thing occurred, you should have come to me for guidance. How could you strike a servant without warning?”
She scolded Ariadne, her eyes burning with icy contempt.
“Violence is never acceptable, under any circumstances!”
*‘Violence is never acceptable, under any circumstances!’*
The words Cesare had spoken to her in her past life, following the tea party incident, echoed in her mind. Ariadne offered a crooked smile.
Violence wasn’t unacceptable—it was only unacceptable for those who lacked the power to justify it.
By that logic, was the violence of the Marquis’s troops, led by Cesare into the heart of the capital, not violence? Was Cesare, who had murdered Prince Alfonso and hung his corpse from the city walls, as pure as newly fallen snow?
And was Lucrezia, for all her posturing, truly pure?
Was there any essential difference between swinging a fist oneself and ordering a head maid to wield the whip? From Maletta’s perspective, wouldn’t being slapped by Ariadne be a mercy compared to being dragged into the basement to endure ten lashes?
Ariadne bowed her head politely and knelt.
“My thoughts were shallow, Mother. I did not want to cause you distress, so I took it upon myself to handle the matter. I was in the wrong.”
Lowering her gaze, she sought a path of penance.
“As a gesture of repentance, I will go to the Rambouillet Relief Center. I shall spend three nights and days in service to reflect upon my transgressions.”
The Rambouillet Relief Center was a place of ill repute. It had been established by Marguerite, the queen of Leo III, to aid the destitute of San Carlo, but the Queen’s budget was woefully insufficient. It was a place where, once a pauper entered, they were more likely to leave in a shroud than in health.
“Since it was also my failure in failing to properly guide Maletta, I wish to take her with me, so that we may both cultivate our faith.”
Lucrezia looked taken aback. The Rambouillet Relief Center? To enter that living hell of blood and pus of her own accord?
Isabella interjected from the side.
“Wouldn’t five days be better?”
Her face held an angelic smile.
“It is said that even Saint Asteia of the Holy See prayed for five days and nights after committing a sin to receive absolution. Shouldn’t we follow the Holy See’s example to ensure a true atonement?”
Ariadne knew better than anyone that there wasn’t a single drop of faith in Isabella. To hear the woman who had blood on her hands just to steal her own sister’s fiancé lecture her on the Holy See was absurd.
Isabella was doing this purely to torment her.
But whether it was three days or five, it made little difference to Ariadne. She was well-accustomed to enduring things that were filthy, cold, and dangerous.
“You are right, Sister. I will repent for five days and return.”
As Lucrezia stood flustered, Isabella whispered into her ear. Her mask had slipped in front of their mother.
— ‘Mother! We can simply say she might have caught fleas or scabies at the relief center, then lock her in the small room for a month.’
— ‘If we lock Ariadne away for a whole month, won’t the Cardinal have something to say about it?’
— ‘We will frame it as a quarantine measure—to keep her isolated until she is clean for fear she brought back diseases. What could Father possibly say to that?’
San Carlo was a place where plague and cholera ran rampant. The Rambouillet Relief Center was where the poorest and sickest of the city were discarded.
Isabella added another thought.
— ‘That girl, she pretends to be obedient, but I don’t like her. We need to break her spirit. Let’s use this opportunity to show her who is truly in charge.’
Lucrezia nodded at the words of her golden daughter.
That evening, Ariadne packed her belongings, and by early the next morning, she was gone.
* * *
The De Mare family carriage heading to the relief center was a simple, black-painted affair. There was a flamboyant silver carriage the Cardinal primarily used, but she hadn’t even considered taking it. They would never have granted it to her, and even if they had, she would have refused.
In the corner of the cramped carriage, the maid Maletta, still bearing the marks of the lashes she had received, looked around with wary eyes.
Ariadne spoke up with a faint smile. She needed a loyal maid—someone of her own, free from the influence of Lucrezia and Isabella.
“Maletta. For the next five days, it will be just you and me.”
“……”
“What will you do now that Sister Isabella cannot protect you?”
Maletta’s shoulders began to tremble violently.
“No, wait—would Sister Isabella even protect you? Did you not see what happened when Mother ordered ten lashes? If Sister had said but a single word, you wouldn’t have been whipped.”
Theodosius, a general of the ancient Latin Empire, had said that people could be ruled by fear or by love. In her past life, Ariadne had succeeded in neither. She had been treated with contempt by her subordinates and had never been loved.
This time, she intended to start with fear.
“Even at home, you spend most of your day with me, not Sister Isabella.”
Ariadne leaned toward Maletta. Her tall stature and straight shoulders loomed over the round, plump maid, pressing down on her like a weight.
“One can make the wrong judgment at first. One can make mistakes. But once you realize you’ve chosen poorly, shouldn’t you change your attitude quickly?”
Maletta gasped.
“I am a generous master, Maletta. I am willing to forget the past.”
Just then, the carriage jolted violently.
— Neigh!
“We have arrived.”
Fortunately for Maletta, the carriage had reached the relief center at the perfect moment.
Ariadne clicked her tongue and stepped out of the carriage.
The Rambouillet Relief Center was a rarity across the continent; it was a charity facility for the poor run by the state, rather than the Holy See.
Guided by the Queen’s administrator, Ariadne unpacked in a cold, austere room. The royal officials, clearly at a loss as to how to treat the illegitimate daughter of Cardinal De Mare, watched her with uncertainty. Ariadne eased their discomfort by insisting she was merely a young lady there for volunteer work, encouraging them to assign her whatever duties they saw fit.
‘I must go where the poor are gathered. That is the reason I brought Maletta all the way here, after all.’
* * *
“Get in line! One bowl per person!”
Ariadne was assigned to the food distribution line. The soup cauldron was positioned at a distance, and the strain of ladling out nearly 500 portions a day made her arms feel as though they might fall off at any moment.
When the person she was searching for failed to appear by the second day, she turned to a junior official working alongside her.
“I understand there are far more people in the relief center than this. Why are so few receiving food?”
“The sick have no strength left to stand in the distribution line.”
There was no staff assigned to bring food to the severely ill, meaning they were effectively being left to starve.
‘Then that child must be there.’
Ariadne made up her mind to find her. Little did she know that in doing so, she was about to encounter someone far more significant than the person she was originally searching for.