CWMBR 7

Chapter 7

***

Ain Wise was in the middle of a workday at his office when he received the letter announcing his wife's miscarriage.

He hadn't had much rest in recent days, having lost contact with a trading ship in which he had invested heavily. When he received it, he was still busy calculating the losses he would incur if the ship sank.

Everyone in the office knew that her news was far down on his list of priorities, and once again, he'd tuck the letter away somewhere out of sight, unopened.

But this day was different, for it was not a letter, but a telegram. The sender was a doctor who regularly visited the mansion to examine his wife.

That was how he learned of the miscarriage.

After reading the same words over and over again, he casually resumed his work. Then he boarded the train that evening. The destination was Breford, the city where his wife was staying.

It was a few days' journey by train. Once there, he would have to take a carriage and travel another long day. It was a long journey that would take him days on the road, even if he moved quickly, he thought.

He thought of his wife, who he had been neglecting as he was engrossed in his work. The relationship he tried so hard not to think about.

"Hello, I’m Bridget Pennington."

He remembered  the first day he met her, how she greeted him by looking him straight in the eye. He had traveled to many cities for various investments, but few had lasted as long as Glynford. It was the city where he met Bridget.

When he thought of Bridget, Glynford naturally came to mind, and everything else followed like sausages on a string.

He grimaced and buried himself deeper into his seat. It was one of the stupidest times of his life, and he didn't like to think about it much. He'd been so stupid, so lapsed in judgment.

The train continued to chug along, even as he mulled over his lament for months. And so it arrived at Glynford.

But he didn't head straight for the mansion upon arrival. As soon as he stepped off the train, he ran into an unexpected person.

"Long time no see, Patrick."

A dark blonde woman approached him, calling him by the pseudonym he usually used more than his real name.

"No, I should probably call you Ain, don't you think it's okay to call you that now?"

Donna Green.

She greeted him, her smile still as bright and beautiful as ever.

***

The first thing Ein Wise remembered when he came into the world was his mother banging a young man he didn’t recognize.

The next thing he remembered was his father beating up a servant who was attending to him.

Without a doubt, they were two of the worst human beings ever. The Wise family's demise was predictable.

Given the circumstances, Ain couldn't help but wonder how he was born, and how he was born at all. No matter how he looked at it, his parents were enemies and could never be in the same room together.

When he was a little older, he learned that his parents were quite the pair, and that they used to get along quite well, sometimes even fucking each other when they were drinking heavily. He also learned that several nameless relatives had disappeared without ever seeing the light of day before he was born.

Ain's birth was pure luck. The attending doctor who saw his mother trying to get rid of the child pleaded with her, saying, "Abortion will ruin your body.”

And so Ain Wise was born. The blood of Cliona Wood, cousin to the King of Alensia, and Belmer Wise, Grand Duke of Renefels. A bloodline so rare that it would never be found again.

But humans don't always value what's precious.

Raised by a misguided parent and surrounded by the eyes of envy and greed, it was inevitable that Ain Wise would grow to distrust humans. This culminated when he was kidnapped and rescued when he was barely 10 years old.

His kidnapper was the caretaker of a vacation home he often stayed at in the summer.

She was a middle-aged woman, quite impressive, who had drugged his snacks, kidnapped him, and tried to extort a ransom. Given her audacity, he suspected his mother's or father's silence was probably behind it, but............. That was for the adults to figure out, and the only person the young child felt threatened by at the time was the caretaker who executed the kidnapping. The same woman who had always greeted him with a warm smile.

Naturally, the plan failed. It wasn't that his parents cared too much for him to rescue him with all their might; they were simply angry at the lowly employee who had challenged their authority. And so, after nearly being killed by his kidnappers, Ain was rescued, but in a very dangerous state, a side effect of the cheap drugs he had taken in excess.

Mr. and Mrs. Wise agreed to keep the ailing child in the rural town of Elver. Unsurprisingly, neither of them were around to care for him, and he was left unattended in Elver, his identity disguised.

It was in Elver that he met Donna Greene, his first love, whom he reunited with in Glynford.

His meeting with Donna forced him to spend an extra day in the city of Breford before he came back to his manor. In the foyer of the mansion, arriving late at night, he saw Bridget for the first time in months.

"The errand boy must not have delivered the news right."

It must be because he hadn't seen her in so long, for her face was pallid and sickly, and she looked unusually gaunt and frail.

It made him angry rather than sorry. Normally cool under all circumstances, Bridget had so easily stirred his emotions. Inexplicably.

"I, a few days ago........................"

"Can you not do this?"

And with that, he spat out a harsh sound. Donna's voice, whispering to him just a day earlier, came back to him.

"Honestly, divorce isn't even a blemish on you."

Well, why bother with the paper trail in the first place?

Ain was so sick of it. He had been plagued by ugly people for a very long time, and this relationship, which always made him emotional, was unpleasant and tiring.

Worst of all, he realized that this woman was no different from the countless others he had encountered. She had spent the night with him and pretended to be pregnant with his child, and to his surprise, it felt like a great betrayal.

He was shocked and even alarmed by the betrayal he felt.

That was why he decided that he had to cut ties with her once and for all. He didn't want to have her in his life, not even in a sentence.

The day after his unilateral accusation against Bridget, Ain immediately set to work on the paperwork to annul his marriage. The marriage of a royal blooded Ain Wise couldn't be handled by the usual local courts: they had sworn eternity before God in an orthodox marriage vow, and their names were somewhere at the head of the royal genealogy.

It would take quite a bit of work to undo that, but the marriage was meant to be a royal bloodline from the start. If you can prove that there was no royal blood to begin with, or that they were never royal blood, then naturally the marriage would never have happened.

............... But if there really was nothing wrong with the marriage process.

Then this whole process would be a good excuse for him to wash away all the bitterness he'd been feeling, and if that was the case, that was not bad for him either. At the very least, it would give him a chance to refine his approach to his marriage to Bridget.

The royal reply came quickly, and now all that remained was to wait.

Ain planned to take care of a few urgent matters in the city of Breford before returning to his work. He would have, if he hadn't remembered that he'd left his fountain pen at the manor.

It had originally belonged to his father, and Ain usually used it to sign important papers, and it was dubbed the "lucky nib" by the locals because contracts signed with it had never failed.

Of course, Ain wasn't superstitious; he just happened to have the fountain pen, and he used it because it was easy to carry around. But when he realized that he had left it at the mansion, it bothered him. Perhaps he had used the fountain pen for so long that his hand had become accustomed to it.

"Master?"

It was lunchtime when he returned to the mansion to retrieve the fountain pen. The servants hadn't expected their master to come back, and Coleman was very puzzled.

Coleman been in charge of the mansion for a long time, but he'd never seen Ain much. In the first place, Ain had only visited the remote mansion a handful of times in his life. It was a bad location to get to and from, there was nothing interesting around, and the area had no future development potential. The mansion had been given to Ain as a bonus by someone he was doing business with, so he wasn't particularly interested in it.

Naturally, the mansion's servants were unaccustomed to serving their master. It would be even harder to guess their master's intentions.

"Shall I prepare a meal?"

Coleman finally asked, unable to guess whether Ain intended to leave or stay. Ain didn't answer, instead glancing around the silent mansion.

"Is it usually this deserted?"

"Ah, it's lunchtime, so everyone is gathered in the kitchen. But you won't have to wait long......................"

"All the employees are eating?"

***

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