The Ghost Lady Of The Duke's Family (20 Chapters Left to Complete) - Chapter 6

For all her solemn resolve, nothing actually worrisome ever happened to Aeli.

Servants kept showing up, displaying only the bare minimum of interest—as if just checking whether the child was alive or dead—before vanishing again.

Above all, the daily life of a four-year-old child, unable to even leave the mansion and left to play alone, was excessively monotonous.

At most, she merely shuffled between her original room on the second floor, the study, and the attic room where she currently stayed.

‘…Wait. Maybe it’s not that there’s no problem—it’s that everything, from start to finish, is so problematic I haven’t even noticed?’

Reconsidering, Aeli furrowed her brow and tilted her head, struck by a reasonable suspicion that perhaps she herself had grown dull.

It was hard to believe that this was actually an improvement.

What had it been like right after she first decided to stay by the child’s side?

[Aeli, are you going to stay here again today?] [But I can’t go outside…] [No, I don’t necessarily mean outside—I just…]

Surely it wasn’t quite right for the child to remain cooped up in her room all the time.

Since the child wouldn’t even think of stepping out of the attic, Aeli couldn’t help but worry about her lack of physical activity.

Had Aeli not persistently coaxed her into doing something—anything—the situation likely wouldn’t have improved even now.

For a child at the age when she should be running about, not only did she not run—she barely even walked properly. To Aeli, this was nothing short of a major shock.

‘When I was about the same age, I rolled around in the garden so much I once ate an ant, making everyone break into a cold sweat.’

Not that her behavior had been exemplary—but still, Aeli felt her son was far too still for his age.

No matter how she looked at it, this could only be explained by his having been confined all this time, right?

Thus, Aeli took the child on light walks around the mansion each day, occasionally visited the study to read books together, and spent spare time teaching her to read and do simple arithmetic.

[So you really don’t have anything you don’t understand in this book now?] [Yes!] […But you’ve only been learning to read for four days?]

During this process, it was inevitable that Aeli had to constantly struggle against the classic parental delusion of “my child is a genius.”

In truth, even objectively speaking, she’d noticed the child was clearly extraordinary—but she deliberately refrained from showing it.

After all, there was no one around to see it even if she did, and she had no intention of burdening a mere four-year-old with expectations.

“Lia, Lia.”

—Huh? Yeah?

And so, after yet another short walk around the mansion with the child as usual,

she stopped by the second-floor room to gather paper, a quill, and ink, then returned to the attic.

That day, the child, who had been seated at the desk idly doodling with black ink, suddenly turned around and timidly spoke.

“Today, the fairies came outside…!”

—…Fairies?

Bewildered by this sudden, nonsensical remark, Aeli followed the child’s gesture with her eyes and saw the window at the far end of the attic.

Having happened to stand right beside it, Aeli immediately turned back to the child, her eyes filled with confusion.

—Are there fairies at the window?

“No, that’s not it…!”

The child pounded her tiny fist against her chest in frustration and said,

“They said when the flowers bloom, that means the fairies came!”

Having calmed somewhat since waking from her nap earlier that day, the child had resumed speaking politely and now rose from her chair, pressing both palms firmly against the windowpane.

A faint childhood memory briefly flashed through Aeli’s mind, and she unconsciously let out a soft hum.

[Aeli, isn’t that right? Flowers bloom because fairies come to make them bloom.] [That’s a lie! I read in a book that they bloom when it’s their blooming season.] […….]

It was just like something her mother had once said.

Indeed, as the child claimed, flowers outside did seem to have bloomed today…

‘But I’ve never gone around telling that story to anyone.’

How did she even know about it? Had it perhaps been one of those playful fibs adults commonly tell children?

After pondering and retracing her memories, Aeli soon dismissed it as unimportant—perhaps Mari, having grown up alongside her, had told the child.

In any case, a child’s innocence deserved protection… so Aeli played along gracefully.

—Hmm. You’re right. Since the flowers bloomed, I suppose the fairies must have come.

It had been precisely thirty-one days since Aeli, in ghostly form, had remained by the child’s side—just one week shy of the child’s fifth birthday.

Meeting Aeli’s gaze, the child fidgeted her fingers and spoke.

“But… if they’re fairies… wouldn’t it be hard for them to come all the way up here?”

—Huh?

“’Cause we’re up high….”

—…Ah.

Now she understood what the child wanted.

Catching the child’s subtly pleading glance, Aeli awkwardly looked away.

Though the garden was large enough to be fully visible from the attic—the highest point—it was also too high to see the flowers clearly.

Yet going down to the first floor wasn’t much better either, as trees blocked the view of much of the garden.

‘So she wants me to go catch a fairy for her, is that it…?’

Exactly. Clearly, the child wanted to see fairies—or whatever they were—but couldn’t, so she was asking Aeli to do something about it.

However, there was one huge problem.

‘But I can’t catch something that doesn’t exist…’

Aeli wracked her brain again. Her writing skills—once so poor she’d failed repeatedly at the academy—were now improving daily thanks to raising the child.

Coming up with a clumsy excuse, Aeli opened her mouth.

—Um… wouldn’t it be hard for me to catch anything? Look, I pass right through the bed and the window.

“But they said fairies don’t land where human hands can reach!”

—…….

“They fly just like you and Lia… Won’t you go?”

—…….

Strictly speaking, she didn’t fly—she floated.

One might argue it amounted to the same thing, but it was quite different: butterflies and bees flew; ghosts did not.

…Not that she particularly wanted to recall how she’d discovered this.

Regardless of speed, she simply couldn’t rise beyond a certain height.

—Then how about this? We shouldn’t recklessly go catch fairies, but I’ll go down and see what they look like, then tell you. How’s that?

“…But I wanna see too.”

—Why don’t you wait until you’re a bit bigger and your father comes, then see them together? If you see the fairies before him, he might get sad thinking you left him out.

“……Appa…?”

Hmm, maybe that was a bit too much.

Scratching her cheek at the child’s skeptical eyes, Aeli had to coax her for a long while.

—Adi? Adi?

“…….”

—Well… don’t I need to go down first to check if there are fairies?

“…Can’t… can’t we just call them here?”

—Huh?

“If you go and… and Lia runs away… what’ll I do…?”

Seeing the child’s anxious, darting eyes, Aeli finally realized her mistake and let out a quiet gasp—it had slipped her mind completely.

Ever since the rooftop incident, the child had been unusually clingy, sticking to Aeli like a baby koala to its mother for the entire month.

Of course, since Aeli was a ghost, she wasn’t literally clinging—but she followed Aeli around just as persistently.

‘She even asked every thirty seconds while I was bathing whether I was still outside.’

Whenever Aeli didn’t reply immediately, lost in thought, the child would burst out with a pale, tearful face—soaked head to toe like a drowned mouse, clearly having rushed out mid-bath.

Suppressing a pang of guilt in her chest, Aeli spoke gently.

—Then how about this? I’ll go out and come back through the window so you can keep watching me the whole time. From here, you can see the whole garden, right?

“…….”

—Shall we count exactly three hundred seconds in our heads? We learned how to count numbers last time, remember?

“…….”

—Yeah?

“……You gotta come back fast….”

Having finally reached a compromise, Aeli gave a light nod and stepped out of the attic.

Glancing back briefly, she saw the child standing with both palms pressed firmly against the windowpane, lips silently moving as if counting—her breath fogging the glass.

Well, it was utterly adorable.

‘I’ll just have to use my imagination to figure out what fairies look like.’

If worse came to worst, she could always say the fairies had already finished their shift and left—something like that should suffice.

As she walked toward the garden, Aeli mentally rehearsed various scenarios, her thoughts already drifting far ahead to the child’s birthday, just a week away.

‘I’d like to give her a gift… is there really no way?’

Still, seeing the servants unusually busy since yesterday—apparently preparing for the birthday—Aeli had begun softening her earlier resentment.

But just as she neared the garden and slowed her steps, snippets of the servants’ conversation reached her ears.

“What, seriously? That’s why we’ve been so busy?!”

“Ugh, shut up! You don’t even read the papers, do you? The whole Empire’s been talking about nothing else since yesterday!”

“But I thought this war would drag on for years. How did it end so quickly?!”

“The Duke suddenly pushed forward a month ago—that’s why it ended fast. They say he even took the enemy commander’s head himself.”

The voices, starting from behind the annex, grew closer until faces appeared. Since they looked unfamiliar to Aeli, they must have been stationed in the annex all along.

Because their conversation continued uninterrupted as they walked toward the main house, Aeli soon learned the true reason for the mansion’s recent bustle.

“Still, even if he’s returning, it should take weeks to get here—why such a rush?”

“…They said he used a warp gate. He’ll be here in no more than three days.”

“…….”

Stunned by this news, Aeli froze mid-step on her way to the garden.

—So all this busyness wasn’t for the child’s birthday after all…

It was because of Lutis’s return?

…She swore she’d never even considered this possibility.