Chapter 5
***
Louise had a letter of introduction from her former employer. She glanced at Mrs. Smith with an unflattering glance.
"..................Since when did you always believe my mother?"
"I always believed, always believed, of course!"
She insisted that she should write immediately for the interview. Surely she deserved the highest level of treatment to repay the favor of being fed for the past three days.
"I'll think about it, Mrs. Smith."
Louise answered weakly, but Mrs. Smith waved her arm and urged her on.
"My dear Louise, even I, a jobless woman, know that everything is first come, first served. It's urgent enough to warrant an ad in the paper, and the sooner you send it, the better!"
Louise didn't have any money on her. She was not afraid of starving to death, but what about her mother's ashes?
Scattering the ashes in the river or the sea was against the doctrine. Ashes were like a house for the soul.
The church also forbade it.
Instead, parish after parish built communal mausoleums and sold them at a nominal price to the common people who were forced to cremate their loved ones, as if the poor souls, reduced to ashes, could step onto the threshold of the stairway to heaven.
Of course, Louise didn't have that kind of money.
Mrs. Smith took a step back when she saw Louise's face darken.
"Do you know how fond the Viscount was of you! He would never send you elsewhere, if he were safe, and you seem to me a very good teacher! Even in my ignorant eyes!"
Louise escorted Mrs. Smith up the hill, insistent to the end.
When she returned, she read the classified section of the newspaper from cover to cover. Alas, there was only one job opening for a tutor.
But a margrave.
Not just any count, either. The margrave had private soldiers for border defense.
What's more, he's clearly an imperialist nobleman, having grown older since the current emperor's ascension to the throne. As a member of the Emperor's nobility, Louise dared not even send a letter of introduction.
Mrs. Smith's voice rang in her ears.
"It's urgent enough to take out such an advertisement in the newspaper."
If they were really in a hurry for some reason.................., the emperor had always tried to embrace the nobility of the pre-emperor faction, except for the first three or four years of his reign, and she happened to have the right letter of introduction.....................
She looked at her mother's urn on the bedside.
It was her duty to see her laid to rest in peace.
Finally, Louise took out a piece of paper and dipped her nib into the ink. The short letter to accompany the letter of introduction was completed in a flash.
She hesitated for a moment before signing the last line.
A noble family of such high status would do a background check on her anyway, and she would be in even more trouble if it turned out that she was Ermoli. If her mother were still alive, she would have disapproved of her working for such a noble family.
Ever since she had written her name at the pawnshop, she hadn't expected to have to sign again so soon.
Louise Henriette Ermoli
A name that was supposed to disappear from this empire for being loyal to the Emperor.
She wrote the name again.
****
A week later, the Margrave of Burg.
Caius glanced down at the jewelry box on his desk. Inside a jewelry box as sturdy as a vault, a pearl wrapped in velvet glowed with a mysterious radiance.
His face showed no joy as he held his father's most sought-after relic. No, it was anger that filled his golden eyes.
It had been twenty years since Albrecht's pearl had been lost, and while he had assumed that some smugglers had gotten his hands on it and taken it abroad, he had never been able to give it up, and he had hoped for something more than desperation.
There would be excuses. He was ill, or gravely wounded.
When things were better, he would come to apologize with the pearl.
The expectation grew without warning, and sometimes disappeared without a trace, so that in the time it took for the river's tide to change twice, the lost pearl was returned to its owner.
But the pearl never returned to its owner. The stupid loan shark had notarized Ermoli's name as the owner of the pearl.
Because of that, the pearl came back with a lousy loan note.
Trying to steal a notarized document from the imperial bank would draw attention. It was not the kind of thing you want to do in the run-up to a big event.
He could only hope that the blind bankers would be unaware of the pearl for a moment, labeled as a baroque pearl.
Caius drummed his fingers over the woman's name, scrawled in flowing cursive at the bottom of the note.
Louise Henriette Ermoli.
The traitorous Ermoli survived and gave birth to a daughter. And the lady dared to put her name as the owner of an imperial heirloom.
Three crowns.
The more he thought about it, the more outrageous it was, but it was only for three crowns.
Knock.
After a loud knock, the butler, Martin, appeared.
"What you've been waiting for."
Caius took the flimsy envelope he held out. The name he'd been staring at a moment ago was scrawled across the outside.
***
A few days later.
Louise was nervous and up before the sun had risen.
When she'd sent the letter of introduction like Mrs. Smith advised, she hadn't really expected a reply.
But less than ten days after sending the letter, a reply arrived, and according to the letter, Louise had an immediate interview the next day. As Mrs. Smith had surmised earlier, Burg was in a hurry.
It was cold, but she didn't hesitate to pull out her black dress and put it on. She couldn’t take off her gown until her mother's ashes were placed in the chapel.
She put on an old overcoat and wrapped her mother's old shawl around her. The color was mismatched, but the lingering scent of her body scent was warm, like a hug on a dry shoulder.
As dawn broke, Louise brushed her palm against the urn and said goodbye.
"I'll be back, Mother."
She left the house and went straight to the center of Melk.
Even this early in the morning, the marketplace was filled with the acrid smoke of braziers and the smell of bread baking. The warmth of the bustling merchants welcomed her clumsy new start.
The coachman shouted out from among the wagons pulling the newly imported goods.
"Helden! I'm going to Helden!"
Louise quickly gathered her wits and climbed into the carriage. It was a long ride by carriage to Helden, then another carriage to Burg.
In Helden, there was no room in the carriage, so six people were crammed into a five-seat carriage.
Louise was rather relieved. She would have been even more anxious if she had traveled all the way to the distant city of Burg alone, relying on a letter.
By the time they arrived in the city of Burg, it was already midday.
"Which way is the margrave?"
She asked the general store owner, who had just opened his shop. The master rolled his eyes as if he had heard something strange, then pointed north.
The gesture explained her suspicion. Ahe could see a huge mansion on a hill, although it wasn't close.
The hill was uphill, and the vast gardens were visible.
Viscount Engel was also a lord of Melk, but he was nothing compared to the margrave of a large estate like Burg.
Louise gasped at the overwhelming sight of the vast gardens, the many outbuildings, and the castle. In fact, it had been so long since he had seen the Castle that even the sight of it was a distant memory.
"Thank you."
As she turned to leave after a quick greeting, the general store owner called out behind her.
"It's a long way to walk from here!"
He had a cat on his shoulder, probably a pet.
She wasn't sure she'd been hired, but she couldn't justify spending more money on a ride.
Louise gave him a wry smile and nibbled on a piece of bread she'd stuffed into her pocket before heading to the margrave’s residence.
Not because she had a taste for it, but because an empty stomach would make her blurt out anything during the interview.
Her numb feet screamed in pain as she walked up the hill, but she kept going until she reached the grand gates.
Guards stood at attention on either side of the impossibly high wrought-iron gates. She was so wary that she doubted the letter with the interview schedule was really for her.
Still, she took the letter and held it out.
***
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