RS 02

Chapter 2

Dolores Artois.

She was born into a family that could be described as having either a long or a short history, depending on how one looked at it.

What that meant was that, in Bellov, she belonged to a social class known as the immigrant nobility.

It all began when her father was falsely accused by one of the gentry in his homeland.

Her father was an extremely stubborn man who knew nothing of compromising his pride. Enraged by a verdict he could not accept, he decided to immigrate to Bellov with his wife and three children.

Dolores had been six years old at the time.

Dolores’s first memory of Bellov was a sky streaked with clouds as white as though they had been painted with a brush, their gaps dyed purple.

The Artois family was exhausted in both body and mind after spending three days aboard a ship, and even the air carried a musty smell unlike anything they had ever encountered.

A flock of black birds flew overhead.

Dolores was already upset because she had accidentally left behind her headband in the carriage and lost it—the headband she had treasured until it had become yellow with age.

Her father, his ears red with anger, stared straight ahead without saying a word.

Is this really the right place? Did something go wrong?

Dolores was carrying her youngest sibling, Pablo, who had been a newborn, while her mother, her hair hanging down like bushes along a riverbank, held the hand of her younger sister, Anais.

Straight ahead stood a shabby wooden building that looked as though it had barely been pieced together from wooden planks. It seemed like the sort of place where a ghost might appear the moment they stepped inside.

There was no fence, and the damp, gloomy atmosphere sent chills down her spine as the hinges creaked whenever the wind blew.

Her mother burst into tears.

That was the Artois family’s first home.

It was a tragedy that was almost too absurd to laugh at.

Back when they lived in Victoria, there had been an immigration broker from Bellov who occasionally visited their mansion and spent time with the family.

Her father trusted the man greatly. Perhaps it was because of Marc’s encouragement that her father had found the courage to try living in Bellov at all.

Marc had boasted that he would take full responsibility for their immigration.

But around the time they boarded the ship bound for Bellov, Marc contracted a terrible epidemic and died.

By the time they heard the news, they had already arrived in Bellov.

They had already paid him in advance.

They were completely penniless.

With no one to rely on, they had no choice but to complete the immigration process through one of Marc’s acquaintances.

Perhaps that representative had mistaken the Artois family for a particularly appetizing pie, because after charging them an outrageous amount of money, he abandoned them here and left.

Do we really have to live here?

In Dolores’s memories, their family back in their homeland had been reasonably well-off, so the shack they now found themselves in was horribly, unmistakably wrong.

Her father ground his teeth and said,

As long as we have somewhere to lay our heads, we aren’t in a position to be picky.

The problems did not end there.

Immigrant nobles from neighboring countries such as Corten, Hennessy, Sholotera, and Triavol received fairly diverse treatment in exchange for what they brought with them.

Some were appointed to government positions in Lenoir, while others were given land and deeds granting them various rights.

Of course, there were also those who ran into the harsh wall of reality and were forced into lives of quiet poverty.

Those from the tiny island of Victor were the ones who faced that wall one hundred percent of the time.

The Bellagarde State Department, the central government of Bellov, had a friendly policy toward nobles who sought asylum from neighboring regions. After verifying the titles and positions they had held in their homelands, the government recognized them to a certain extent.

People from Victoria, however, were excluded from this benefit.

There was no Bellov embassy in Victoria, which meant there was no way to verify their social status.

Marc said everything would be fine.

The entire family literally fell into the lower class overnight.

They were ridiculous commoners who were no longer treated with the respect afforded to nobility.

Dolores remembered her parents arguing for days on end over whether they should return to their homeland.

She did not remember which of them wanted to remain and which wanted to endure the humiliation of returning to Victoria.

But in the end, they decided to stay.

Her mother became a textile repairer nearby.

Dolores did not know exactly what her mother did, but she knew that she went to and from a textile shop for work.

Her father worked at a brick factory.

It did not take long before Dolores saw her father coming home exhausted after carrying bricks around all day, then drinking every night.

Since both of her parents had entered the workforce, Dolores began taking on the role of a second mother, caring for her two younger siblings.

She was seven years old.

Although the family’s fortunes had declined in an instant, her father was a responsible man, and her mother had a personality that made it easy for her to get along with people.

While her father barely earned enough money to keep them fed from day to day, her mother interacted with people through her textile-repair work.

And so, what ultimately revived the Artois family was neither the reward for her father’s diligent labor nor the compensation from her mother’s desperate textile work.

It was the network of connections created by her mother’s friendly personality.

Although they had become poor, her mother seemed to have completely forgotten her time in Victoria, unlike her father, who, out of pride in having once been a nobleman, would not utter a single word whenever he went outside.

“Come on in. If we don’t celebrate a day like this, when will we ever have the chance to gather together and enjoy ourselves like this?”

She invited people over and accepted their invitations in return.

She worked alongside them, sometimes introducing people to one another and sometimes being introduced herself, steadily expanding her circle.

Every now and then, her father would sit with his pipe between his teeth, scowling deeply, and furiously berate Dolores and her siblings because their mother was always going out.

Yet once their mother returned home, he would be silent.

Her mother’s connections changed their lives.

Through one connection, then another, then another, that network eventually led them to the local investigator of Aquine.

Her mother confessed all the countless injustices and tragic hardships they had suffered since arriving in Bellov…

And, incredibly, the local investigator of Bellov returned with someone who was supposed to be dead.

Marc, who had supposedly died, was arrested.

No… How…

What had hurt her father the most that day?

Was it the financial loss caused by Marc, who had sold off all of their family’s heirlooms?

Or was it the betrayal of someone he had trusted?

Dolores felt as though she would never be able to forget the look in her father’s eyes as he fell into an endless void.

Of the money they had been swindled out of by Marc, only a portion was returned to them.

But even that portion was several times greater than the wealth they currently possessed, allowing the Artois family to escape their crushing poverty.

They also left behind the tiny wooden house that looked ready to collapse, where insects crawled across the walls.

A decent five-room house, built of sturdy bricks, was waiting for them.

The bricks that made up their new home were the product of the humiliation her father had endured while working at the brick factory.

That was not merely Dolores’s personal opinion.

Her father himself had said it.

“Every single one of those bricks is no different from the humiliation I carried on my back.”

Even so, what mattered was that their lives had improved.

The fact that she no longer had to worry about whether there would be food to eat or clothes to wear brought Dolores a sense of peace.

Her mother still occasionally went out to help with textile repairs, but sometimes she was invited to nearby tea parties and salons, where she could enjoy Aquine’s elegant culture.

Those who wished to flatter them would smile and address her father by the title of Count, even though it had long since become little more than an empty title.

At such times, her father’s laughter, which had seemed to disappear beneath the weight of life’s hardships, would return like a nostalgic fragrance that warmed the heart.

Like all Victorians, Dolores’s parents placed great importance on education.

Of course, this applied only to the eldest son, who was expected to carry on the family.

Regardless, thanks to that, Dolores enrolled in the parish school district of Aquine as Pablo’s guardian.

It was a small school with a capacity of around forty students.

[Aquinier Parish School]

Dolores was eleven years old, while Anais and Pablo were six and four, respectively.

Life became difficult for Dolores after she entered the parish school.

She had no particular attachment to religion or any firm ideas about the clergy, so the Bible was simply boring to her.

Her interests were completely different from those of her classmates, most of whom came from the lower middle class, making it difficult for her to find a friend with whom she could genuinely share her feelings.

It probably also had something to do with the fact that Pablo had entered an educational institution at such a young age, meaning that most of her recess was spent looking after him.

Even so, Dolores considered the parish school one of her good memories for one reason alone.

Aquinier Parish School had a curriculum centered mainly around reading and writing the Bible, prayers, and history.

Like any institution affiliated with a religious organization, its overall atmosphere was quiet and solemn.

But there was one period every week when it wasn’t.

“Dolores, have you ever tried on pointe shoes?”

It was the time when a group of slender little girls were gathered together and taught ballet.

Following the instructor’s commands while holding a switch, the little girls moved as though they had rehearsed every motion together.

“Raise your toes!”

They spread their arms and slightly bent their knees into a demi-plié.

Then they rose en pointe on the hard tips of their pointe shoes before spinning rapidly and powerfully in place—a pirouette…

Her father viewed dancing from a perspective completely different from that of the people of Bellov, so ballet was not a subject Dolores could ever dare to pursue.

All she could do was stand beyond the window, losing track of time as she watched girls her age leap lightly like butterflies and walk on their toes like dolls.

Dolores’s favorite movement was en pointe.

After putting on pointe shoes with their flat tips, using gentle hand movements as delicate as wiping a glass bead clean, and tying the ribbons around them as carefully as if she were wrapping cream, she found the courage to rise powerfully onto her toes, as though she had never been shy in her life.

Even after standing like that for only a few seconds, her heart would race uncontrollably.

Dolores’s still-unformed heart ached as she chased after the movements of the dance.

They say that if you have a long tail, it will eventually be caught.

It was a weekend when she had returned home.