150 – Tales of the Past: Serena Elizabeth – 1
It might sound very surprising, but Serena believed in fate.
Now that she has met her true lord, even if she lives a life far from fate, the fact that the young Serena believed in fate was certain.
If fate hadn’t guided Serena, Serena would never have met her lord.
“……Ugh!”
Serena’s body fell to the side with a loud bang and the sound of dishes breaking. banged his head on the ground.
The food that spilled over her head a step later smudged her blonde hair that had lost its luster. The bright red food broth dripped down his forehead through his hair.
Her hair, if it wasn’t for the food spilled over it, was all over the place, her skin was swarthy and her clothes were all tattered and dirty.
A skinny hand caressed his swollen cheek. Judging from the fact that his body trembled with pain every time his fingers touched his cheek, he must have been beaten quite hard.
The servant who created this disaster with his cheek raised looked at Serena lying on the kitchen floor with clear eyes. There was not the slightest regret in those eyes.
“Are you insane?”
“…”
Serena bowed her head. It was a familiar treatment, a familiar pain. Anyway, if you hold on like this for a little while, they will leave laughing as they always did.
It was better to be humiliated like this rather than openly provoking him unnecessarily. No matter what you say, the pod will be caught.
As if she didn’t like Serena’s attitude, the shoe stepped on her head. His head hit the ground again and his bones rang out.
It hurt a little bit this time. Tears welled up inside the blue wall, but Serena gnashed her teeth and held back the tears to keep her expressionless as much as possible.
Showing tears here only bolstered the spirits of those people.
“Don’t you think I’m talking? You’re asking if I’m sane. But why don’t you answer? Are you deaf? Should I pierce it myself? Huh?”
The shoe that trampled on my head was rubbed left and right. Her hair, which was already sporadic, was messed up and ruined by the shoes, and changed to a more unsightly appearance.
“……sorry.”
“What? Sorry? Sorry?”
Serena barely opened her mouth and squeezed out an answer. It was the answer that I did my best in my own way, born in pain. But it seemed he wasn’t satisfied yet.
Ha, he snorted, then picked up a teapot from the table and poured the whole tea from it onto Serena’s head. Serena couldn’t even resist and drenched herself in the tea water.
It was fortunate that the tea was lukewarm rather than freshly boiled tea. If I had been covered with hot tea, I would have been burned, and then I would have been cursed again.
Seeing Serena transformed into a drowning mouse in an instant, laughter echoed through the kitchen. The laughter of the servant who spilled the tea was the loudest.
There was not a single person on Serena’s side in this kitchen.
“Do you know what to apologize for?”
“…”
What should I be sorry for? Well. Serena stared at the floor with empty eyes. There was no way to know what you did wrong in the first place.
I get up first thing in the morning, do the cleaning, do all the chores that the servants have to share, and similarly do all the chores that the servants should have done.
Originally, they took care of everything that should have been theirs, but what did they do wrong? I’ve already finished what I was told to do.
It was like that this time too. They told me to hold the plate, so all I had to do was pick up the plate that was brought out after I was wiping the floor. Didn’t do anything else.
The only thing on the plate was leftover food waste, and he was slapped on the cheek after being criticized for having poor eyesight. And it was like this.
The helping hand had long since given up. There were several other servants nearby, but all of them were busy laughing at Serena for overturning food waste and tea.
At most, looking at a ten-year-old.
The servant pushed the foot that was stepping on his head with all his might. Serena’s body fell flat. The person who was hit was Serena, but the one who hit her kicked her tongue and rubbed her shoes on the kitchen floor.
“Clean everything here, okay?”
“……Yes.”
Serena nodded. I had no choice but to answer that I knew. Even if you express your intention to reject it, violence will return until you say yes.
“Ugh, how did that bitch come into our charge?”
“What should we do next time? Didn’t we leave everything we could do today?”
“They tell me to clean up one more time. It’s easy to find fault with, right?”
Unfocused blue eyes stared at Serena’s voice as if to listen to them discussing what to leave next, and to make amends.
Serena, who had been slapped on the cheek for a while and kept on her face, gathered the broken dishes in the hem of her apron and put them in the trash.
A shard of the plate brushed past his fingertips, causing a small drop of blood to form, but he ignored it. I was too used to the pain to say it was painful because I barely cut the tip of my finger.
I picked up the teapot that had been randomly scattered, washed the inside, poured hot water, and brewed the tea again. Then he took the mop and swept the floor with his familiar hand movements.
The stains that permeated the wooden floor didn’t even come off well. Surely, tomorrow will be wrangled with this. Where will it be this time? Is it the cheek, the shin, or the hair?
It was clear that wherever it went, it was going to be a much more exhausting day than usual. I even thought that it would be better if tomorrow never came.
Serena, who finished cleaning with her hands diligently while worrying about tomorrow, roughly brushed off the dirty clothes soaked in food and tea. If there are stains on the floor, you have to clean it again, outside.
The sky was already dark itself. It was time for all the servants to go to sleep, except for a few on patrol at night. As evidence of that, the mansion was very quiet.
It was quite late, when the sunlight had completely disappeared from the sky, from the time I was called to the kitchen in the first place and caught this fault. If so, it must be midnight now.
I put the mop and bucket back where they were and headed home. Serena’s house was not a mansion. However, it was not a residence for the servants.
The building that Serena calls home was in a place far away from the accommodations of the servants, tucked away in the corner of the mansion site and poorly managed.
It’s embarrassing to even call it a house, something made of tangled old boards. It was the building Serena called home and slept in.
Serena slapped her on the cheek a couple of times, straightening her face as much as she could, and pushed a wooden plank, which she doubted could function as a door, and entered it. The hinge creaked.
The inside of the house was filthy. The size of the building itself was the same as that of a single room, and the ceiling was very low.
The walls were moldy, the floorboards were worn out, and the lighted candles were almost worn out. Of course, the magic to create a light source had never been dreamed of.
The furniture was at most a bed and a few hangers. Because of that, even though the area of the room belonged to a fairly small axis, it gave the feeling of being very empty.
Serena shouted at the bed, speaking as brightly as she could.
“I’m back, Mom!”
At that voice, one of the figures lying on the dirty bed slowly raised his upper body.
Her golden hair, which resembled Serena’s, was frizzy, with no vitality to be found. It was so thick that it could easily break in the middle if you pulled it.
There were dark circles under her eyes, and her cheekbones stood out due to the overlapping skin bones. Her wrists were so skinny that it made everyone who looked at her feel sorry for her.
“My daughter… Kolok, are you here?”
It was a voice with boiling phlegm, no strength at all, and a voice that sounded like it would die at any moment. Serena ran to her mother and hugged her.
“My clothes… why are they so damp… cologne.”
“It’s because I accidentally spilled water on it! It’s nothing!”
And as soon as she hugged her daughter, she scrambled to make excuses as she saw her mother pointing out her wet clothes. But I couldn’t fool my mother.
The eyes that looked at Serena turned melancholy. Those eyes pierced Serena’s heart.
Her mother didn’t seem to want to pursue her daughter any further after working late into the night. Instead, I put more strength into the arm that hugged my body and patted him on the back.
Although it was hard to tell that he had given strength because his physical strength was so low, it was enough because Serena could clearly feel it.
The mother-daughter hug, which had been quiet while holding each other for a while, ended with Serena taking her body away first.
She changed into a scruffy nightgown that was no different from a scruffy maid’s uniform, and burrowed into her mother’s arms, who had stepped aside a little. It was a cramped bed for the two of them to lie on, but they managed to sleep well if they were close together.
Lying on the tattered bedspread and covered with the tattered blanket, Serena held her mother tightly in her arms.
It was the moment when the only rest came to Serena, who had been suffering all day long.
Serena wasn’t like this from the beginning. Rather, until she was seven years old, she was proudly recognized as a daughter of a noble family and lived affluently without lacking anything.
Serena’s father was a member of a prominent aristocratic family, which owed much to her well-established ancestors. If there was something important, they were allowed to enter the palace.
Nobles were killed in an enormous amount due to Charlotte’s tyranny, but unless she was truly unlucky, Charlotte also tended not to touch the aristocrats who had fallen flat.
It meant that if he shut himself up in his territory, collected taxes from the people of the territory, paid the amount as prescribed to the kingdom, and did not set his mind on something else, at least there would be no sudden death.
Serena’s father was also of the same kind. The aristocrats that Charlotte didn’t pay much attention to because they quietly obeyed Charlotte’s words from the beginning and died.
It was a human group that realized in advance that it was better to give up pride and preserve life and family than to rebel to take care of useless pride and then be left with nothing.
That’s why he survived even while the execution ground was stained with blood, and he was able to pass on a family that has grown several times to his descendants.
Because all high-ranking aristocrats, such as dukes and marquesses, who used to take care of their pride unnecessarily, were swept away, low-ranking aristocrats in ambiguous positions took their place as fishermen.
So, Serena’s father was also able to rise up the ranks thanks to having such an ancestor.
In contrast, Serena’s mother was a commoner. In Serena’s father’s domain, she was born as the daughter of an ordinary merchant and lived a decent life.
However, the two are destined to fall in love. To borrow a mother’s expression, the moment they met each other, they fell in love at first sight.
Serena’s mother always proudly explained to Serena her relationship with her husband. When she said that, her mother was full of life.
“It was so much fun back then. We fed each other, and we went on a trip in the woods just the two of us.”
“But monsters appear in the forest, right?”
“So after returning to the mansion, he was very upset. He said the forest was dangerous. But it was okay. Even then, we didn’t let go of our hands, and we wiggled our fingers to express our affection. That’s why we tried harder to hold back our laughter. I had to.”
Naturally, the relationship between the two led to marriage, and Serena’s father accepted her mother, who was the daughter of an ordinary merchant, as the hostess of the mansion despite all opposition.
It was around that time that Serena was born.
Serena grew up receiving a lot of love from her mother and father, and she wanted everything to go smoothly.
Until, around the age of seven, a woman came to the mansion.
The last thing she saw was her father, who came into the bedroom, hugged his daughter and wife, and cried and apologized over and over again.
After that, Serena never talked to her father. It was because he didn’t come out of the bedroom often, and even if he did go out occasionally, there was a woman clinging to him next to him.
It was a woman with the image of a poisonous cat.
Serena didn’t know where she came from or why she was sticking around her father’s side. Seven years old was too young to know that.
“The head of the household has fallen. So, from now on, I, as my wife, will have all the authority.”
It was a word I heard one day.
The woman with the image of the ferocious cat declared that Serena’s father had passed away due to a serious illness, so from now on she would take over all the authority of the family.
In reality, I couldn’t see the father at all, whom I used to run into on rare occasions inside the mansion. It was all after that proclamation.
The mother, who went to talk with the woman, saying that she was the wife of the head of household, returned a long time later with a drawn face and held Serena and cried. Serena cried along with her mother, not knowing why.
After that, the treatment of mother and daughter gradually began to deteriorate. All the servants of the mansion were replaced with faces they had never seen before, and the new servants treated the mother and daughter as if they were few and far between.
Serena and her mother repeatedly asked to see her father, but all were denied because of her serious illness.
The level of food, clothing and shelter surrounding mother and daughter has been lowered endlessly, and now it has reached a level where they are fortunate enough to be provided with three meals a day and fortunate enough to be allowed to stay in the mansion.
Then, in one year, Gearko was treated even worse than the servants of the mansion. Protests were of no avail.
“From now on, you should do your job like the other servants. If you don’t like it, go out naked. By the way, I don’t know if a married woman with a child can survive the night if she’s kicked out alone? It’s worth seeing, isn’t it?”
At first it was her mother. However, Serena’s mother was not in good health by nature, and because of several bad factors, she could not continue working for a long time and lay down sick.
From then on, it was Serena’s share. A mop and a bucket were held in the hands of a little girl of 8 years old, and instead of a luxurious dress, she wore scruffy rags.
Now, no one in the mansion knew Serena’s face. Attendant, butler, maid. It was the first face everyone had ever seen.
And all of them were often torturing Serena. It’s rather cute if you curse or laugh behind your back, and you’ve been slapped on the cheek or pulled by your hair.
I couldn’t find the slightest hint of guilt about bullying an eight-year-old girl.
As time passed, Serena lost her smile in proportion to the degree she got used to the work of a servant. With dead eyes, he silently carried out the work that was left to him endlessly.
At least, when my mother read a fairy tale to me, I was able to find my lost smile. Serena especially liked the story of an honorable knight.
The story of a knight who risked his life to fight for his lord who was executed after being dishonorably framed, and eventually died while restoring his lord’s honor.
The story of a knight who turned the whole world into an enemy to protect his master and stayed with his master until the end to create his own country.
Even considering the exaggeration unique to fairy tales, such a story made Serena’s heart thump. He wanted to give or receive such loyalty.
Most of the fairy tales were played from the point of view of the knight, so the aspect of wanting to meet the true lord and offer that kind of loyalty was a little bigger.
However, her mother’s condition worsened to such an extent that she could hardly do even the simple act of reading a fairy tale, and Serena’s treatment got worse and worse.
It was one day when Serena was gradually killing her heart, thinking about her mother who was dying from illness and her treatment getting worse day by day.
facing their own destiny.
