Chapter 2 - Proposal

“I swear, you need not be afraid. I already have a fiancee. I have no intention of laying a hand on you.”

Alperil flinched and lifted her head. The red-haired nobleman, dressed impeccably in a formal tailcoat, was already striding away down the corridor with long, unhurried steps befitting his tall frame.

It was clear he had no intention of hearing any reply she might have offered. At last, Alperil let out the breath she’d been holding, her chest rising and falling in shallow gasps. Ding, ding… The bells began to toll, marking the arrival of midnight.

It signaled the hour for mourners to take their leave.

She, too, as one of the visible faces of House Heron, was expected to hurry to the entrance and bid them farewell.

There was no time left to steady her frayed nerves.

“I have no intention of laying a hand on you.”

Only a fool would take comfort in that promise. She was nothing more than a serf girl, and he was the commanding heir of House Heron. Even if he summoned her to his chambers and did as he pleased, she would have no right to refuse.

As Alperil stood in the corner of the grand hall, exchanging handshakes as requested, the thought pressed upon her mind. 

Some of the nobles gave her sly, leering glances, their fingers lingering around hers for a moment longer than necessary, or leaning in just a little too close.

Perhaps it was a fate she could never truly escape.

The costly dresses, the fine jewelry, the endless expenses for her grooming.

Her tutors in music, etiquette, and rhetoric, fortunes spent on her alone.

Unlike the late Grand Duke, who had possessed a keen appreciation for the arts, Lord Leopold showed little interest in such things. 

In his eyes, all the extravagance that sustained her life would seem nothing more than wasteful indulgence.

***

Alperil was not able to return to her room until an hour later. Though it sat at the far end of the corridor, cold in the winter and stifling in the summer, it was, for a serf and not even a lady’s maid, an undeservedly generous arrangement.

The first thing she did was strip off the suffocating dress that had bound her all evening. She scrubbed her face several times with the cold wash water always placed in the corner of the room. 

The elaborate makeup painted around her eyes faded away, revealing a clearer, more unadorned expression.

Leaning against the headboard of her narrow bed, she caught the faint sound of the last bell of the night. At some point, the clock hands had crept past two in the morning.

Will I really go? … No, I have to.

The notion of disobeying a lord’s command had never existed as a choice.

Resigned, Alperil slowly lifted herself up, moving toward the wardrobe to take out a thin nightgown. Though it was hardly appropriate for going out, she layered a thick cloak over it, choosing it as her shield.

The door creaked softly as she pulled it open. After confirming again and again that no one was moving about the corridors, she placed her foot on the staircase leading up to the very top floor of the mansion.

What is it that he wants from me? A man who seems to have everything in this world, what could he possibly desire of a lowborn woman like me?

She glanced down beneath her cloak, Her fair skin swelled softly at her collarbone, the gentle curves of her breasts noticeable even to her own eye. 

Filthy whore. 

It felt as though she could hear the jeers of women she could not even call her peers. The color drained from her full lips.

Knock knock… knock…

A steady, measured knock sounded at the door of the young lord’s chamber. She fretted for a moment, would he scold her for arriving too early? Or too late? But the door opened immediately in the next breath.

Lord Leopold’s chambers were among the most private, most secretive spaces within House Heron’s mansion, a place few but a handful of servants and the butler were ever permitted to enter, made all the more so in the absence of a mistress of the house.

“You’ve come.”

His blue eyes began their calm, unhurried scrutiny.

The room, unexpectedly plain, was devoid of any decoration. Though spacious, it could hardly be called comfortable. As if warmth itself did not belong there, the floor beneath her bare feet felt deathly cold.

The door shut behind her with a metallic click. Startled, Alperil turned, only to see the young lord raise both his hands as if to reassure her.

“A troublesome meeting, should anyone discover it. Go on, sit over there.”

“But… with you standing, how could I—”

“Alperil.”

Sit.

His voice, as always, was steady and perfectly composed.

Shrinking a little under the force of his presence, Alperil hesitantly took a seat on a chair behind the table. 

Ironically, amid this unbearable situation, the chair’s fine craftsmanship lent her a brief, undeserved sense of comfort.

Lord Leopold took in the sight of her swaddled in a thick cloak within the room and gave a faint smirk.

“All bundled up, are you.”

“Ah… I…”

“I don’t mean it as reproach. If anything, I’m grateful. Keeps me from falling prey to wicked temptation.”

Wicked temptation…

Did that mean the thing she feared would not happen after all?

But even as a faint hope flickered within her, Lord Leopold’s bright gaze drifted away from her. As though to maintain an appropriate distance, he leaned his frame against the far wall. 

Alperil, keeping herself from letting her eyes roam too curiously around the empty room, bit down on her dry lips.

A silence, oppressive only to one of them, stretched between them.

Just as she was beginning to take a fragile sort of comfort in the fact that he made no move to approach her, Leopold spoke, with a subject so strange it almost felt out of place.

“You know, I have a younger brother.”

Alperil’s eyes, which always held a calm, subdued light, flickered for the briefest moment. The fact he now spoke aloud was something everyone knew, and yet, something no one was supposed to know. It was an open secret, not only within the ducal house but across the entire kingdom.

It happened in April of the year 789.

At the time, Queen Alexandra Morgenstein wished to pair the young and seemingly earnest Duke with her youngest daughter, Princess Erni Morgenstein.

Unable to refuse the Queen’s will, the two were wed after a mere two meetings, a wholly political union. But though the marriage was forged under the blessings of the entire realm, it was, in truth, an unmistakable failure.

A naive princess who knew nothing of the world could hardly be expected to adjust to the austere, joyless life within the ducal household. 

And the Duke, who had never intended to indulge a pampered royal bride, occupied himself ever more outside the estate.

The two of them were grotesquely ill-suited for one another.

Even when the princess, somehow, conceived an heir within her womb, the circumstances did not improve.

On the very day their son was born, a day when the Duke should have rejoiced more than anyone, a scandal broke that left all in attendance dumbfounded. He knelt at the foot of the princess’s birthing bed and confessed that a bastard child had been born to him.

It was hardly uncommon for a nobleman to keep a mistress or two, and it might not have drawn such ire had the Duke not overstepped. He proclaimed his deep, unwavering love for an unnamed foreign woman and declared his intent to bestow a title upon the son she had borne him.

The proud princess, shattered by both the agony of childbirth and the Duke’s betrayal, did not endure for long. She passed away a month later.

‘I regret the day I met you.’

Only upon hearing that brief, parting confession did the Duke finally realize the enormity of his wrongdoing.

From then on, the foolish man poured his entire heart into the son born of his wife, the very man now standing before Alperil, Leopold.

In memory of his late wife, he devoted himself to charity works, banquets, and theatrical performances held in her name.

And as for the illegitimate child born the following year, he was sent away to a villa on the far western outskirts, to be raised by a wet nurse.

That was as far as the tale of the Duke and the Princess, often told in society, was known, a sorrowful tragedy. The tragedy of the Duke and the Princess.

But what made their all-too-common story so tantalizing was not their misfortune itself, but rather the unbelievable rumors surrounding the illegitimate child no one was meant to care about.

In truth, the Duke had not remained long in mourning. Before much time passed, he discreetly took several more mistresses, and, as if to prove he was no man for sentimental romance beneath his polished exterior, set his gaze upon the youthful beauty and talents of little Alperil.

Yet what drew even more attention than Leopold, the legitimate son of the Princess, was the forsaken child left in their wake.

Despite being the bastard of a commoner woman, he did not live hidden away. His two-part name spread across the continent like wildfire.

The ill-fated genius Terencio Heron, not only the kingdom’s, but the entire continent’s most celebrated pianist.

So famed was he that even the King, who had publicly declared himself indifferent to music and culture, would occasionally journey to the man’s estate in the countryside to hear him play.

And that was merely one among countless tales surrounding him, stories so extraordinary they seemed more suited to a saint than a musician.

It was said a blind noble heir cast aside his eye bandage after hearing one of his preludes. Or that a foreign princess, lost to love and madness, was brought back to her senses by his music alone.

Of course, these were nothing but wildly exaggerated, absurd rumors.

Alperil was familiar with this story because, like so many others, she too had once indulged in a fleeting curiosity toward those very rumors. 

For someone whose life was lived so closely alongside music, it had been nearly impossible to turn away from such extraordinary praise.

And then, quite suddenly, a thought struck her. A line of reasoning both painfully rational and yet entirely impossible. 

It was a suspicion regarding why, back in the corridor, Leopold had asked about her skill at the piano.

“Unfortunately, My Younger brother wasn’t able to attend today’s memorial banquet, Theo, that is.”

My younger brother.

Leopold spoke as though hammering a firm nail into place. Catching sight of Alperil’s visibly unsettled gaze, he gave a faint, knowing smile.

“He’s a bit peculiar, but a good person all the same.”

At the friendly term slipping so easily from the Duke’s lips, Alperil instinctively furrowed her brow.

A bit peculiar, he said, yet Terencio Heron was as notorious for his erratic, mercurial temperament as he was for his staggering genius. 

Since the day he had turned eighteen and come of age, the epithet tragic prodigy had quietly vanished, replaced instead by the far less flattering arrogant libertine.

There was a well-known story of the night he appeared at a royal banquet, hopelessly drunk, only to compose and perform a dedication piece for the King on the spot. 

Those intent on condemning his insolence had, to their immense frustration, been unable to find a single flaw in his performance, and so his reputation had worsened all the more.

Alperil herself had crossed paths with him once before, during an opera company’s touring performance. She’d glimpsed him from afar, in a backstage waiting room too distant for either of them to see the other’s face.

Having never exchanged a word with Terencio, and never even heard him play, she had nonetheless waited at the far end of an empty auditorium with the faintest flicker of expectation, hoping to witness his rehearsal.

But within seconds, she had fled. The shocking sight of him smashing a perfectly sound piano with a chair, declaring he didn’t like the tuning, had sent her hurrying out of the room. Even now, she could still hear the echo of that deafening crash.

Watching Alperil turn deathly pale at the memory, Leopold rubbed his lips thoughtfully, as though weighing something in his mind.

“I worry about him, you see. Things aren’t as they were when Father was alive. Should we display any hint of closeness now, whether by our will or not, the succession line could become dangerously complicated. Both he and I… we have no shortage of enemies, within and without.”

Alperil lowered her eyes to conceal her wary expression. It was difficult to imagine the Leopold she had quietly observed from a distance all these years harboring such concern for his illegitimate half-brother. It simply didn’t suit the man.

Leopold waited, falling silent, as though measuring her reaction.

“…Why?”

“Hm?”

“So why are you telling me all this?”

It was one inexplicable, unsettling thing after another. A serf girl with no particular acquaintance to him, summoned at dawn to his chamber, only to be told stories that would make anyone uneasy. Alperil fidgeted with her small hands.

“My apologies if it bored you.”

At Leopold’s unexpected apology, a cold shiver crept down the back of Alperil’s neck. The wholly unforeseen reaction made her head shake sharply, which the man watched with a faint, knowing smile.

“Alperil… to be honest, I don’t quite know what to do with you.”

At the sudden sound of her name, she looked up to meet his gaze.

“You see, I have no interest in society or music, and those are the only things you know. If we leave things as they are, unable to find a use for you, it’ll become inconvenient for both of us.”

Leopold gradually leaned closer, his large, sinewy hand reaching out, tapping idly at the ornate carving of the chair she sat upon, tap, tap.

Alperil soon found herself caged between the man’s arms.

“Even so, I thought you deserved at least a chance. Father cared for you deeply while he lived, and I imagine it would grieve him to see you cast out from this estate without a place to go.”

Alperil’s eyes widened. 

The calm voice continued, but the words it carried were anything but. Had this man summoned her here with the full intention of sending her away?

“Oh now, don’t look so frightened. Didn’t I say this all depends on you?”

As if sensing the color draining from her face, the man murmured. A broad, imposing shadow fell over her body, and in the darkness, Pascal’s face seemed to flicker in her mind’s eye.

“I… I can do anything! Even if I can never sing again, it’s fine! Please… my lord, just don’t cast me out. I’m good with stable work, barn chores, whatever you ask of me. I’ll—”

Leopold listened to her faltering, desperate words and gave a soft, almost pitying chuckle.

“No need for that, Alperil. Talent is a blessing given by the heavens. Letting a gift you were born with rot away is no different from committing a sin. I’d rather you stay here, in this shining place, and continue to sing.”

When the young lord finally fell silent, a chilling hush settled over the room.

“Of course… if you wouldn’t refuse me a small favor.”

Before he could even finish speaking, Alperil had already begun nodding fervently. 

It wasn’t a request, it was something she could not refuse. What choice did she have, with nowhere else in the world to go?

Leopold, appearing satisfied, curved his lips into a graceful smile.

Alperil’s anxious eyes clung to his mouth, awaiting the words that would follow. After a brief silence, he finally spoke.

Alperil

Marry my brother.