At least five seconds passed before the prince snapped back to his senses and grabbed the iron bars.
“You! Where did you get that?!”
“I provided it for myself. It puts no strain on the treasury,” Rachel replied curtly.
“That’s not the problem!”
“These are my personal effects. You have no right to complain about them.”
“I said that’s not the problem!” the prince repeated, even louder this time. He ground his teeth, angry that they were just talking at each other. “Where did you get all of that stuff in there?!”
Rachel looked around, as if there were something missing, then opened one of the wooden boxes and took out some tea biscuits. It was one of the wooden boxes that were supposedly no longer needed. Yes, they were the very same boxes that had been there before Rachel was thrown in.
“That’s how she did it?!” Sykes shouted.
“What?!” Elliott barked.
The prison guard explained what had happened to the confused prince.
Now that Elliott knew how the trick had worked, he started to get dizzy as he watched his ex-fiancée happily nibble on cookies and sip black tea.
“Y-You’re telling me she saw this coming and brought her family’s siege supplies in here?” the prince muttered to himself, shocked.
“My people brought them here for me, to be precise,” Rachel replied, unconcerned. “Well, as you can see, I was prepared for this eventuality.”
Ignoring the speechless prince, Rachel opened her book to the place she had bookmarked and resumed reading.
Everyone recognized Rachel Ferguson’s beauty, yet she had a strange lack of presence, to the point where people would forget she was attending a reception alongside the prince. Her delicate features showed little emotion, and she basically never spoke or expressed an opinion. Even when she was asked to venture one, she would agree with whatever the prince had said. The way she acted like the prince’s shadow made her a convenient target, and her rivals for Elliott’s affections often attacked her for lacking flair and said she didn’t deserve him.
She was an unobtrusive accessory to the prince’s radiant beauty—an attractive fiancée who stayed out of the way. With no sense of self, her most endearing quality was how she reservedly supported the prince. It was why he’d found her dull.
Elliott had assumed that because she was that kind of woman, she wouldn’t dare push back against his condemnation, which was why he’d done it in such a public venue.
But now, Elliott was perplexed. Who was this woman, doing as she pleased in this ridiculous place?
✦ ✦ ✦
Duke Ferguson received word that the prince had terminated his engagement to Rachel at a party attended by many of the young members of the court. The situation was unbelievable, and as the head of a ducal house, he was preparing to make an emergency visit to the palace. He had sent his retainers out to gather information to help him grasp the situation.
As the duke panicked, his men came back one after another with bad news.
“Are you certain that the prince broke off his engagement with Rachel at tonight’s party?” the duke asked.
“Yes, sir. We were able to confirm that with multiple sources. She was restrained in the middle of the hall as he announced the annulment.”
The duke clutched his head. “That fool of a prince! I’m sure he wanted to make a spectacle of it, but doesn’t he realize that wasn’t the place for it?! This isn’t a matter of who was in the wrong; it’s common sense.”
The duke had already concluded that the prince was ruined. If you viewed the situation logically, it was plain to see that the way he theatrically broke off their betrothal, completely disregarding proper manners and customs, would become a problem once the king stepped in to resolve things.
Naturally, the duke was upset that his daughter’s engagement had been broken without a word to him about it first, but in all honesty, he had a bigger problem now.
He slammed his hands down on his desk. “That vacuous moron. He’s gone and awakened the devil child!”
The duke’s eldest daughter, Rachel, had been pretty from a young age, and her reserved behavior and ephemeral appearance had led other houses to assume that she was an introverted and quiet beauty. Not knowing any better, the duke and duchess had been incredibly proud of her. They’d believed wholeheartedly that their daughter was wonderful.
They couldn’t have been more wrong.
As their daughter grew, and they gradually came to see who she was, the duke and duchess’s smiles became more strained. She acted worse than the average bully.
When a group of bullies chased her up a tree, she threw a beehive at them. Then, when an older boy came to back them up, she clobbered him with a rolling pin she’d been hiding. Once that was done, she pushed the ringleader into a pond for revenge.
Hearing the ruckus, the duke rushed to investigate, and he spotted her throwing rocks at the boy as he tried to get to shore. When he stopped her, she looked at him and, with a completely serious expression, said, “Don’t worry. If I keep throwing rocks at him, he won’t float to the surface for a while.”
It was at this moment that the duke first thought there was a high probability that his beloved daughter was a psychopath.
In order to dissuade her, the duke pointed out the difficulty of piling rocks on top of an object underwater, and he explained how the resistance of the water as they sank and the irregular shape of the rocks would make it hard to determine their course. It was evident from this exchange that the duke was panicking a bit.
His daughter, eyes sparkling, exclaimed, “That’s amazing, father!” But, in all honesty, this was the first time that her praise went in one ear and out the other.
Once her parents realized how warped Rachel was, they put a touching amount of effort into making sure she developed a degree of sociability commensurate with her good looks by the time she was grown. The duke felt that after he’d explained that manners and morals were like the rules of a game and that order existed so everyone had a fair chance to play, she grew into their ideal daughter.
But the duke and duchess never forgot. If Rachel were to ever stop thinking that she had to follow the rules, they had no idea what their daughter might do. That was why they had focused so heavily on giving her the moral education necessary for a child of the nobility.
Despite their every contingency, this termination of her engagement...they never saw it coming.
The duke knew better than anyone what had just happened. Prince Elliott, the damned fool, had just gone and upended the chessboard.
As the duke barked orders, driven by the need to get ahead of this as soon as possible, a servant rushed into the room, out of breath.
“We’ve received more details!”
“Has there been any movement?!” the duke asked.
The retainer, blue in the face, began his report. The duke, stressed to the max, listened intently.
“I’ll explain in detail. The young lady accepted His Highness’s announcement without any change in expression, and she remained quiet as she was restrained and marched off to the dungeon.”
The duke froze for a moment before slumping into his chair like he’d collapsed. The butler rushed to his side.
The duke stared absently into space for a while, then mumbled, “The prince... He’s done for.”
The butler, who was well acquainted with Rachel’s upbringing, nodded gravely and said, “Yes, sir.”
If Rachel had already decided to act, it was out of the duke’s hands. He had no choice but to let her do as she pleased and wait until she’d blown off some steam.
No longer in a rush, the duke sat in front of his desk and slowly put tobacco in his pipe.
I think I’ll have a smoke, he told himself. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. Because there’s nothing else I can do.
The duke was filled with a great many emotions as he took a puff and exhaled. Then, he remembered something.
“Still, George must have been at the party. What is he doing now?”
George would have been close to the prince as one of his hangers-on. If he’d acted to mediate the issue or reported to the duke before things developed to this point, this uproar could have been dealt with before it got out of hand.
As the duke let out an exhausted sigh, the servant who’d brought the reports hesitantly delivered a follow-up about George.
“Well, you see... It seems the young master is as infatuated with the baroness’s daughter, who was at the center of this drama, as His Highness and the others. He was an active participant in their condemnation of her.”