The Broken Ring: This Marriage Will Fail Anyway Chapter 50

Chapter 50

The scale of the room and the scale of the furniture did not match, making it somewhat comical, but the scene itself seemed quite plausible, as Ines, who had gone out to the balcony, did not return to the room for a while. As if a gap had finally appeared, behind her back, Cárcel silently reproached the loyal housekeeper with his eyes, busily pointing this and that with his arrogant chin. [ʏᴜʟʜᴇʏᴜɴ] The loyal but not very respectful old housekeeper frowned and gestured, arguing.

She was frustrated that he had suddenly chosen a small house overnight with so much luggage and moved them in, asking her what to do.

It was a conversation without sound or answer. At that moment, Ines spun around and walked back into the bedroom. Cárcel and Arondra shut their mouths as if they had planned it.

"Then what about my bedroom?"

Ines asked, not so much because she had initially declared that she would use a separate bedroom from him, but as if she could not immediately believe that two people could use this narrow bedroom.

Cárcel now seemed to understand the situation of the Major's residence. Even though he had originally set aside the option of using separate bedrooms, this made it feel like they had been forced to share a room due to a lack of space.

"Will it connect if I go that way?"

She walked briskly towards the side where another door was visible, as no one answered rashly. When she opened the door, she saw a dressing room that was already more than half full of Cárcel's clothes.

"...That's our dressing room.”.

Cárcel reluctantly added an unnecessary explanation as she opened the door and confirmed the identity of the inside. Ines tilted her head.

"This looks like yours, Cárcel. I don't think there's enough room to put mine in..."

"No, señora, the dressing room attached to the couple's inner room is unconditionally yours. Which señor would dare to be so rude as to keep his clothes with his wife's in the inner room? I will throw them out right away."

"It's okay, Arondra. I don't have that many clothes. I can share it with him."

"...Why would you throw them away...”

Even though he was the one who had put them in there in a hurry... Cárcel muttered, glancing down at Arondra in disbelief. However, his employee, as if she didn't care about him at all, took out a few of Cárcel's clothes on hangers as if she was going to throw them out right away, and when Ines stopped her again, she started moving busily again.

With a bit of exaggeration, Arondra, who was about half the size of Cárcel and boasted a hefty build, skillfully dodged between the furniture that she had personally ordered and arranged, her face contorted in a distracted frown. [ʏᴜʟʜᴇʏᴜɴ] Ines passed by her smoothly without avoiding anything... It was only Cárcel who kept bumping into things here and there.

He accidentally kicked the armrest of the chair and contorted his face with frustration rather than pain, then laughed when he belatedly noticed Ines looking back at him with wide, surprised eyes. Just as she was about to ask if he was okay, Arondra waved her hand dismissively and called Ines to the other side.

"Señora, this is where it connects directly to the Captain's bookshelf."

"Ah, this way? Can I use your bookshelf too, Cárcel?"

“Of course—"

"—I don't know how it is in Mendoza or Esposa, but this old woman hasn't seen the Captain reading much. I think it will practically be your own bookshelf, señora.”

Being quick-witted is good. Grabbing her and making various arguments wasn't bad either. His housekeeper was acting as if the new mistress would run away—or like any mother-in-law who was afraid that her son's wife, surprised by the poverty of the house, would run away... The intentions were... ...yeah, all good, but.…

"I'll still must be saw me from time to time...."

"Not at all. To be honest, it's not that I haven't seen much, but I've never seen you read a single book."

"No, I have a few books too...."

"Not at all. You're just saying that because the Señora is here. The shelves are always busy cleaning cobwebs. You never use them, you know.”

Isn't it more than just not running away? His housekeeper was obsessed with blocking Ines' escape route. The housekeeper's words were no different from saying, 'Your husband is strange, but don't worry, the house you live in is not that strange.'

Until now, Cárcel Escalante in this mansion was an uneducated social misfit who played billiards with the wall, played card games, played chess alone, had no friends, and never read books in his life.

Cárcel blinked at Arondra as if to tell her to hurry up. Arondra smiled reliably as if to say she would take care of it, nodding her head. The signs were not good.

"Just because it's a bookshelf doesn't mean it's only used for reading, so he's also looking at his duties and if there's anything he needs to do..."

"Oh my, what kind of duty? What kind of errand does he have in the bookshelf? The tip of the pen is so dry it's going to crumble to dust...!"

".......”

Cárcel sighed at the words that went as expected.

“He’ll finish his work in the headquarters building no matter what. He hate doing it at home.”

“Ah, I see.”

Ines nodded as if she understood. It wasn’t entirely wrong, but it really got in the way.

“And the pride of this bookcase, you see, is this window… half of it shows the sea, and the other half, yes, look over there. Don’t you see the naval headquarters all the way down Logorño hill? Just look at those cute little red roofs. It’s a view you can only get from this bookcase.”

Somehow, the maid who had been there for five days was more motivated to sell the house than Major Elba, who had lived there for five years. [ʏᴜʟʜᴇʏᴜɴ] She looked desperate.

“The sunset is spectacular from the bedroom, but from the bookcase you can see the sunset this way, and you can sunbathe while reading. The sunlight shouldn’t hit the bookshelves, so they’re positioned over there so that the sunlight doesn’t…”

She was about to add, “so please don’t go back”.

Like other devout old women of Ortega’s acquaintance, Arondra, the extremely conservative housekeeper who had been brought in three years ago from the Esposa Castle to take charge of the Calstera residence, had a dogmatic and somewhat boring belief that once a woman was born with sound limbs and health, when the time came, she should marry as God intended and have children as God intended, one after the other.

For her, the fact that his limbs were not only sound, but also sculpted with such meticulous precision that even the length and angle of his arms and legs seemed to have been calculated with the utmost care, was the primary reason that her master's debauched and reckless behavior made her sigh deeply every time she saw him.

Whenever she saw her master, and whenever her master seemed to be unoccupied, Arondra would bombard him with bitter complaints: ‘Why on earth did you have a fiancée?’, ‘The mourning period is long over, why don’t you get married?’, ‘Why do you always do such crazy things?’, ‘Who are those strange women trailing after the headquarters?’, ‘What’s with that weird haircut?’, ‘God gave you such a handsome face, but you keep repaying his kindness with ingratitude’, ‘Why don’t you even bother to attend chapel these days?’, ‘Why do you insist on living like that?’… Her choice of words was harsh, though her tone of voice was cautious.

If time had allowed, his housekeeper would no doubt have ventured to give her master more advice than she did in her role as his bustling maid.

Her sisters, her parents, her dead husband and his brothers—and below them, their children and grandchildren—had long been connected to the Escalante family. The loyalty of their family was almost beyond compare, and the gray-haired old woman, a respected cultural icon of Ortega nobility high and low, could not dare be trifled with, not even by the father of Cárcel himself, Arondra.

And so she could not help but laugh when, to her face, he said, 'My Captain General…if you continue to spoil such a holy face, it will turn into the face of Satan…' While he continued to grumble at her to go and laugh like that only with the woman to whom he was betrothed.

"…Though my master does not read books, he arranges them well."

A touch of laughter escaped Inés's lips. [ʏᴜʟʜᴇʏᴜɴ] Amusingly enough, he seemed to prefer being made fun of, for that small laugh.

"Our Captain General does not read such things is not because he doesn't know how to read. But this desk is yours, señora. I hope it is to your liking."

"I like it very much. Very much so."

Inés glanced at him and Arondra, offering them a somewhat bright smile.

Really, it was so good.

***

After dinner in the small but intimate dining room, they settled on the shadowy ground-floor terrace that overlooked the sound of the waves.

Like everything else about the villa, it was smaller and more claustrophobic than they were accustomed to. But there was a certain charm in the tiny garden with its scattered lanterns of wrought brass and the soft glow from the small candles in each lantern, illuminating the white summer flowers surrounding them.

It was one of the extravagances that Major Elba had allowed himself in his excitement at settling into their new life on Calstera with his wife—because he wanted her to see something beautiful in the house even on nights when the sun had set and there was no sea to be seen, because he had wanted her to think of him whenever she saw a light, because she had said how much she liked the color of brass…

Cárcel thought of all the hours Major Elba had kept him—Cárcel, who had never been anywhere near the major's villa—talking volubly about where everything was and what it was for. [ʏᴜʟʜᴇʏᴜɴ] All made with his own hands—or rather, all commissioned by him from expert craftsmen, to be more precise.

And when Cárcel had looked suitably impressed, telling him again, from the beginning, how much thought had gone into planning it all…