Chapter 367: The Wrong Sister
On top of that, when the viscountess began investigating the Elsheimer illegitimate child in order to drive Mort out, he felt a profound sense of crisis and wove his scheme to save his own skin.
That was the background from which the viscountess’s death had arisen.
But the mindset of the Mort now looking at me registered denial.
"You’re wrong, Baron of Rosenheim."
Wrong?
Was the relationship between Amalia and Adelbert something other than what I thought?
"I don’t know how you learned of it, but it’s true that Amalia loved Lord Adelbert. However, the one Lord Adelbert truly loved was someone else."
"Then, don’t tell me..."
"Ariel von Elsheimer. Amalia’s younger sister."
A cold silence seemed to settle between us.
Only now did Adelbert’s strange behavior make sense.
"So there was a reason he went to the Viscount Elsheimer estate."
When I sent Adelbert back after the suppression ended, he headed not to the government offices but to the Viscount Elsheimer estate. I had brushed it off, assuming he had simply gone to console a young lady he thought of as a little sister.
Even Lady Mühe had suspected a relationship between Adelbert and Amalia, but if Mort’s words were true, every one of us had been barking up the wrong tree. Mort spoke as though recalling something precious.
"She was a ray of light, an oasis, in my utterly barren married life. Unlike my wife, that venomous spider, she was gentle, beautiful, and graceful. I swear before the Lord, I had never known a woman so lovely."
"...So it seems you loved your sister-in-law deeply."
"How could anyone not love the beautiful Ariel? But as a man taken in as a live-in son-in-law, I never dared dream of holding her. The one who held her was my master."
A master and a servant in love with the same woman.
Good grief. This just kept getting better.
"Did you betray your master out of resentment that he was the one who held her?"
"My heartbreak was great, but I am not fool enough to throw away wealth and rank over such a thing. No, it all began because that spider of a woman went mad with jealousy and tried to kill Ariel."
Adelbert had said he cherished the Elsheimer sisters like little sisters. But both sisters fell in love with him, and he gave his heart to the gentle, beautiful Ariel.
And so a rift opened between the sisters. It only deepened when Amalia was married off to Mort, and it reached its peak when she discovered the secret meetings between Ariel and Adelbert.
"Born to a poor court noble family, I learned to endure from a young age. I endured Amalia’s cold contempt, and I endured the trysts between Ariel and my master. But in her efforts to push me out, Amalia finally crossed the line. An illegitimate child of Viscount Elsheimer! And what, then, of all those years I spent enduring!"
Mort had endured all that time to protect his position as Elsheimer’s proxy and his office as Inspector General. At the viscountess’s scheme he flew into a violent rage, and everything he had held down came bursting out.
Hatred and ambition had finally come into full bloom.
"My wife found the viscount’s journal, hidden away for many years, and through it she learned that the illegitimate child existed. Absurdly enough, the viscount had permitted that lowborn bastard to take his own name as a surname. I stole the journal away in secret."
After poring over the stolen journal, Mort learned of the Pauper’s Crown one step ahead of the viscountess, and he was able to identify the prostitute who had borne Elsheimer’s illegitimate child.
He even discovered that she had been killed by a slum organization.
Bodo had finally surfaced.
To wreck the viscountess’s plan and tear out the seed of discord at the root, Mort looked into Bodo’s background. No one paid any mind when a street urchin vanished, so he meant to have the boy assassinated, but...
"At first I couldn’t believe he was the same Bodo who served the Streit family. I never imagined you would have taken a street urchin from the brothel district as a retainer."
When Mort learned that Bodo was a retainer of the Streit family, he was the one left blindsided. Once he knew the boy’s standing, killing him became all but impossible.
Assassinating Bodo would not have been difficult in itself.
The trouble was that there was no telling what retribution would follow if he laid a hand on the Streit family. What if I, rumored to hound my quarry to the very end, flew into a rage over Bodo’s death and began tearing everything apart?
Mort judged it would be like kicking a hornet’s nest. Dragging a powerful prince into the internal power struggles of the Finance Department and Elsheimer would have been the height of folly.
"It was great fortune that I found out before Amalia did. Had that woman known, she would surely have approached you."
"So you brought in Neunil and deceived her, pretending to aid the viscountess?"
"Since it was the prestigious Viscount Neunil family, Amalia suspected little. And at last she laid a trap to kill Ariel. The head steward was Amalia’s man, but unable to bear such a tragedy, he revealed the truth to me."
The head steward believed Mort would put a stop to it, but in the end he only hastened the viscountess’s death. The Viscount Neunil family quietly summoned her, claiming they had found the illegitimate child.
Amalia never noticed the trap laid out in front of her, and it ended in tragedy. The head steward, shattered by the shock, took his own life. Mort sneered that she had been caught in the very web she had spun herself.
"Watching that vicious, venomous spider of a woman scream as she was trampled by the vermin of the slums was rather satisfying. Had she not tried to kill Ariel, I would never have gone that far."
"And you took the viscountess’s death as your cue to turn on Adelbert?"
Whatever the viscountess’s true feelings had been, Adelbert grieved deeply over her death and burned with fury. The man I knew would never have let it pass.
To protect her honor he announced that she had died of illness, but he was dead set on finding the culprit. Mobilizing the inspector unit to comb through the slums was proof enough of that.
"I did not do sloppy work. Naturally, I erased every trace. But then trouble broke out from a quarter I had never anticipated. That senile old man kidnapped the illegitimate child, and the whole thing came unraveled."
Once the journal was destroyed, the existence of Viscount Elsheimer’s illegitimate child would have sunk out of sight forever. But then Viscount Neunil secretly kidnapped Bodo. Mort must have been ready to tear his hair out.
"Those foolish old men, with no idea what kind of man Streit is!"
Mort had been extremely wary of becoming entangled with me.
He recognized me as an exceedingly dangerous opponent.
He had been left with no choice but to study me closely, a man who would go after his target by any means necessary. He judged that kidnapping Bodo would cost far more than it could ever gain.
"Even I never predicted they would commit the madness of provoking a prince’s family amid so tangled a political situation. The foolish old man and his elders were firmly convinced they could negotiate with you."
What Neunil had intended to offer me was a share of the Finance Department and the Elsheimer family. Bringing the tax-collecting family under my wing would have given me easy access to inside information, so there was benefit in it for me.
But I am not a man who weighs everything strictly by profit. I am the sort who will strike boldly even at a loss. Viscount Neunil’s oversight was in assuming I was an ordinary prince.
"But it was already too late to salvage things. So I set in motion the plan I had contemplated for so long. I cast the die for power and ambition. And in the end, I failed to kill Adelbert."
"I saw the scar on his back. Had you driven the blade just a little deeper, he would not have survived."
"I simply... My heart wavered for an instant, and in the end that small difference let my master keep his life. If that is the fate the Lord ordained, then fate it is. And while I stalled for time to assess the situation, the Capital Sentinel Command moved. The slums fell once more, and in the chaos we even lost the illegitimate child. Viscount Neunil went begging to the queen for his life."
With the queen’s own position hanging by a thread, there was no one in power left to save Viscount Neunil. He had schemed to his heart’s content by exploiting the absence of the powerful, and it was that same absence that now left him with no one to shield him.
I produced the Count of Basel’s pact, recovered from the Neunil residence.
"This contains a request for the Count of Basel’s aid."
"It’s true that Viscount Neunil and the Count of Basel have been in contact recently."
"And yet the gate you bastards actually fled through was not the south but the west. You went to considerable lengths to lead us astray with this pact, but it was a transparent ploy."
"...To your eyes, I suppose it was a clumsy decoy."
It was a scheme good enough to sow confusion and buy time, but unfortunately for him, I had a Scouter that could tell truth from lies. That was why the elusive Mort was sitting before me now.
"It must have been quite an ordeal, escaping all the way here with the old viscount in tow."
"We were able to flee toward Strasbourg as planned."
"So I thought as well. We were delayed, you see, by the mercenary unit you hired."
"A mercenary unit? We hired no mercenaries, nor were we in any position to."
Huh? Then who had hired that mercenary unit?
"Baron of Rosenheim, it was Karsten. That man betrayed Viscount Neunil at the final moment."
At the mention of a name I had never anticipated, I was left speechless.