C5
Deborah was digging in the rose garden?
"She not only did it in a regular garden but in my wife's rose garden! Where is Deborah now?!" shouted the Duke of Seymour.
How dare she touch that garden?
He was so angry that he didn't even care how he was acting.
"Stupid girl."
When will she start acting like a normal person?
His blood pressure rose, and his neck stiffened. He thought he had already seen the worst of his daughter; he didn't know there was still a basement behind her.
"Didn't I ask you where she is?"
"She's in the rose garden right now. She only damaged a small part of the garden, so please calm down a bit..."
"Get out of my way!"
The Duke, growing impatient with his assistant, immediately headed to his wife's garden.
The rose garden, under a preservation spell, was right next to his office.
But he stopped before he could enter the garden.
He couldn't move his feet because he thought he would only remember the absence of his wife if he entered.
Normally, he doesn't dare to enter the garden, but the Duke, overwhelmed by anger, couldn't let those thoughts stop him.
He walked furiously toward Deborah, who was in the middle of the garden.
"You!"
"Have you come?"
Deborah asked as if she were expecting him.
Then, without realizing it, the enraged Duke hesitated.
Deborah's long hair was loose and stretched over one shoulder. His daughter surprisingly resembled his late wife.
But that wasn't all.
Of all things, Deborah was wearing a bouquet of white roses as a headdress.
His wife used to use white roses to make a hair ornament for Deborah when she was still young.
He knows that the person in front of him is not his wife, yet the Duke had a momentary cognitive dissonance as his daughter's current image stimulated the blurry memories of his wife.
"What the hell are you doing here?"
The Duke, who finally managed to recover, tried to sound stern.
But his initial fierceness had been slightly moderated.
"I was taking a walk here to see the roses. It's a type of flower that's hard to see during winter."
Deborah, fearless, looked him in the eyes with her own eyes as red as roses, similar to her wife's.
"She was expecting me to get angry, so she deliberately copied her mother's image?"
How wicked.
The Duke's mouth formed a sneer of contempt.
"What the hell are you doing? It's not like you, who indulge in jewelry until you're sick of it."
"... Is there any difference between these flowers and diamonds?"
Deborah's retort made him furrow his brow.
"What do you mean?"
"I thought these roses, which have no scent, never wither, and are never attacked by insects, aren't different from diamonds that never change."
The Duke of Seymour looked at his daughter in surprise.
As Deborah said, there is no difference between diamonds and roses in this garden based solely on attributes. Both are even odorless.
However, his pride in this situation did not allow him to accept Deborah's logic.
"Your mother's flowers are different from a jewel, a luxury item. Watch your words."
The Duke replied in a cold voice.
"This is not what she used to raise."
Deborah, who was playing with some roses, lowered her long purple eyelashes.
"What?"
"The roses wither when winter comes, but isn't that why they're beautiful? Why do they bloom when it's warm?"
"You don't want to admit you're wrong. That's nonsense."
The Duke's expression hardened.
She was trying to get away with it using plausible words, but it was impossible.
"She used her brain quite a bit, but..."
The act of digging on the grounds of the garden left by his wife could never be ignored.
"It's not a fallacy."
Deborah suddenly pulled something out of her pocket.
"Check the letter she wrote herself."
The Duke of Seymour's eyes widened when he saw the light purple paper that Deborah was holding.
Unless his eyes were deceiving him, that was the stationery his wife used all the time. The butterfly patterns on the edges were the same.
"It's a letter from Mom."
With trembling hands, the Duke accepted his daughter's letter.
[Marien Seymour to George Seymour]
In the carefully preserved letter, he saw a very familiar handwriting.
"Where did you get this...?"
For a moment, he felt as if his throat were blocked and he couldn't speak properly.
"I found it here."
The Duke looked at the ground beneath the rose bushes where Deborah had unearthed before hurriedly reading the letter.
As he read the letter from Marien, which he never knew existed, he had a distant feeling as if he were going back in time.
--------------
I let out a slow sigh that I didn't realize I had been holding.
The Duke of Seymour released his cold and fierce eyes as he read his wife's letter.
"I was so scared that I almost cried."
What a fierce father.
Deborah was born with a strong heart. If it had been me in my previous life, my legs would have already given way.
"I had to risk my life just to send a letter to my father."
How crazy...
After lamenting internally, I took advantage of the sentimental and quiet Duke to return to the mansion.
"I'll be on my way now."
He was so absorbed in reading the letter from the late Duchess that it seemed he had forgotten about me.
I quickly left the garden and held my pounding chest.
I'm glad I found the letter.
The reason I risked and dug up the Duke's precious garden was for the letters from the Duchess that were buried under the rosebush.
Originally, it was the heroine, who was kidnapped by the twins, who found the letters in the middle of the rose garden.
It happened in the novel.
"Mia, why are you trying to run away? If you stay by my side, this beautiful garden will become yours."
Rosad forcibly pushes the heroine into the rose garden, the memory of the late Duchess.
"Please, don't do this, Sir Rosad."
"Why do you want to throw yourself into a bush full of thorns when you can take roses like jewels that will never change? Are you stupid? Or are you deliberately provoking me?"
Rosad roughly pushed Mia near a rosebush, and a thorn from the bush scratched her... Hmm?
While looking at the scratch, she saw the edge of what appeared to be a box on the ground under the rosebushes.
That night, Mia, who said she wanted to take a walk alone in the garden, dug the ground.
It was because her instincts told her that there was certainly something mysterious buried in the rose garden.
The heroine finally found a beautiful box containing letters that the Duchess had written before she died.
"Duke of Seymour, I will give you the Duchess's letters, so get me out of here."
Mia was able to escape the clutches of the sadistic twins by negotiating with the Duke of Seymour, whose love for his wife was so great.
"There's still more to the story, but first, I have to get out of here..."
In exchange for intercepting an S-class item by digging it up from the rose garden, I swore to help the heroine avoid being kidnapped later.
I was surprised to find that the garden was larger than I thought.
But when Rosad prevented Mia from escaping through the glass greenhouse and pushed her near a rosebush... Hmm, I knew the specific coordinates of where the letter was buried because of that.
Furthermore, I thought there must be traces of something buried.
So, these last few days, I've been rummaging through the rosebushes planted near the glass greenhouse and observing the gardens.
She was accidentally scratched by a thorn, but it was worth it.
I found and dug the abnormally empty soil under the bushes, and I was able to lay my hands on the box from the novel!
"There's nothing wrong with it, but there's something I can't understand..."
Apparently, the only thing Mia exchanged with the Duke in the novel were the letters.
But the box I found contained not only the Duchess's letters but also her diary.
Why did Mia only exchange letters with the Duke when the handwriting seems to be from the same person?
"I don't know why, but it was good for me."
Thanks to what was written at the beginning of the Duchess's diary, I learned that she often used to put a bouquet of white roses on young Deborah.
In addition to that, I found some other useful information.
Other hairstyles and clothes that matched the Duchess's appearance in her portraits.
The cold-blooded Duke endured Deborah's absurdity because her face closely resembled that of the late Duchess.
"That's a good setup. I should use it to my advantage."
Of course, since it's too obvious, it might backfire if I use it too often.
I think this time it worked.
As I exited the labyrinthine garden, I encountered the Duke's assistant waiting nearby.
"Miss, did everything go well?"
"Yes. More importantly, I need to ask you another favor."
"Tell me, Miss."
The assistant's eyebrows furrowed at my subsequent requests. She's probably thinking about what my next request would be.
"It's not a big deal. Just don't tell Dad."
But I really don't care if she tells him.
Leaving behind the assistant, who had a suspicious look on her face, I returned to the mansion.
-------------
The Duke of Seymour stroked his chin as he read his wife's letter.
"So, Deborah quoted this part."
[... I thought of this as I looked at the snow-covered garden. Because the flowers fall, they seem more beautiful and radiant when they bloom.]
The Duke, burdened with a heavy workload, took a short break and reread his wife's letter.
He had read the letter, which his daughter had given him out of the blue, hundreds of times in the past two days.
Because it felt like he had met his wife once again.
The letter consisted of light and friendly vocabulary, making him feel as though he could hear her voice.
"Since I met you, even the unhappy memories have become meaningful."
After reading this part, he looked at the rose garden.
"Isn't it beautiful to see them bloom and endure the cold?"
Following the preservation spell, the blooming roses that once filled the garden entrance had returned to the dark earth.
From now on, he was about to look at the roses that bloomed and fell amid the changing seasons.
He didn't believe that the rose garden, which was adorned inappropriately, was what his wife wanted.
"If I hadn't cast a spell on the garden, this letter would have been found in the process of pruning the bushes and cleaning the soil."
He sighed at his pathetic self. He rubbed his eyes and continued reading the letter.
"Of course, you're trapped in difficult magical formulas, so you don't understand my delicate sensibility."
"I want to drink hot chocolate, so I'll stop writing this letter now."
Without thinking, he blew out his pipe. He did it every time he read this part.
Marien used to write letters only out of formality.
There were no letters written comfortably except for their brief exchange of letters.
"I read it too quickly."
He should have saved it a bit.
Thinking it was a childish idea, he put the letter back inside the drawer and returned to work.
It was winter, so the sky quickly began to darken.
Even though it was already night, he still had a mountain of papers to sign.
He pulled the bell to summon a servant.
"Come in."
Knock, knock.
The Duke raised his head when he heard a knock.
"Hmm?"
Deborah appeared with her assistant when he thought it would be a servant who would enter.
