Her standards were high enough that she rarely made house calls for just anyone, but a client with a ducal title was a different matter. All the more so when it was a wealthy duke rather than a fallen noble with nothing but a title left.
Examining Lea’s foot, Madame Pippin felt a quiet pride in having arrived first. Word had spread widely that the duke had already filed the marriage registration with the relevant office, so even though the ceremony hadn’t taken place yet, the woman before her was the Duchess in every meaningful sense.
Lea hesitated, then lifted her foot and set it on the box. Madame Pippin studied it with a careful eye and felt a small jolt of surprise. Lea’s foot was unlike those of the noble ladies she usually worked with.
How strange…… Her feet are rough.
The feet of ladies from distinguished households were usually soft and entirely without calluses, like freshly pressed cheese. But Lea’s feet were calloused and marked with small scars. They looked like the feet of a laborer or a maid.
Surely not.
Pippin shook her head and dismissed the thought. A laborer or a maid, marrying not some frivolous second son of a count’s family but a duke with a proper succession. And Owen m’Tetias, no less. A dog becoming a duchess would have been easier to believe.
Everyone knew that the moment Owen took control of the household, he had had his stepmother committed to the most dreadful psychiatric hospital imaginable. Lady Ellarod was a stepmother, and there had been unsavory rumors about her treatment of young Owen in the past, but with the succession settled and even Lady Ellarod’s own family, a baron’s house, having gone bankrupt, she had been entirely without power. And yet Owen had finished her off. A man that cold-blooded would never marry a maid or a laborer.
Word was that the bride was a foreigner. Perhaps in some of those newly rising and prosperous foreign nations, even the daughters of nobles and wealthy families didn’t grow up as sheltered as they did here. Pippin quickly convinced herself of this theory and, after taking the measurements, looked up at Lea with a smile.
“Well……”
Lea’s eyes shifted at Madame Pippin’s questions. For her, shoes had always been subject to a single condition: as cheap and as durable as possible. Once she had stopped growing, she wore shoes made of thin, poor-quality leather or cloth, stitched together haphazardly, until they could be worn no longer.
When she arrived at Owen’s house and changed into soft indoor slippers, Lea realized the next morning that the shoes she had come in were gone.
That trash? Of course I threw it out.
Owen had answered without hesitation when Lea asked where her shoes had gone.
……Then what am I supposed to wear outside?
The garden and the fountain area outside the residence were well-maintained enough to walk barefoot, but she couldn’t actually go out barefoot. The slippers she was currently wearing had thin, light soles and were white on top of that, so she couldn’t imagine daring to step outside in them.
But when Lea protested, Owen had simply narrowed his eyes and said one thing.
Other than the wedding, do you have somewhere to go?
……
Lea caught the warning in those words and said nothing more.
In any case, what Owen saw as trash was not trash to Lea, and the thought of her shoes being thrown away without her consent made her feel as though she were looking at her own future.
Madame Pippin, taking Lea’s quietness for shyness, quickly reined in her chatter. She lowered her voice and offered gently:
“That’s quite all right, Miss. If it’s difficult to put into words, perhaps you could show me the shoes you used to wear.”
“The shoes I used to wear?”
“Yes.”
Lea had just been thinking about her discarded shoes and hesitated before answering.
“Well…… I don’t have any.”
“You don’t have any?”
“No.”
“Not a single pair?”
“No.”
Lea said it with a flat expression.
Not a single pair of shoes. Had she simply disliked all of them? Madame Pippin was briefly flustered, but quickly composed herself and smiled.
“Oh…… Then let me show you some samples. Please choose whichever you like.”
With a glance from Madame Pippin, her assistant hurried off to fetch the samples.
“Your feet are small and your toes are slender, so I think shoes that show the top of the foot would suit you well.”
“Shall we add a ribbon here? Or gemstones?”
“Let’s go with ribbon. Gemstones can look a little gaudy. Miss, what do you think of something like this?”
Madame Pippin and her assistant spent the entire day examining Lea’s feet, taking measurements, and sketching designs to show her. Creating something from nothing required a great deal of time.
But it wasn’t only Madame Pippin. Everyone who had come to the Tetias residence in high spirits ran into the same obstacle the moment they arrived: there was nothing of Lea’s to use as a reference.
Lea was asked the same questions, gave the same answers, and went through the same process all day long. She truly had brought nothing with her. There was nothing worth bringing in the first place. She had nothing at all, and when she had climbed into Owen’s carriage, it hadn’t even occurred to her to bring anything. The shoes and clothes she had managed to bring were judged to be rubbish and discarded on the spot.
So nearly everything had to be made from scratch. Not just shoes, but clothes, gloves, and hats, all going through the same process, and the time dragged on endlessly. Since most items were custom-made, selecting the right size and choosing the fabric required enormous care and time for each individual piece.
Everyone showed Lea beautiful and elaborate things, but she found the whole process uncomfortable. Any sense of wonder or admiration at the sight of beautiful things lasted only a moment. Those expensive objects looked too unreal to her, and at the same time they seemed to remind her, moment by moment, of the debt she owed for what she had done.
Every word they said, every gesture they made, told her she was someone who had no business being here, and yet it also reminded her of why she was here at all. It felt as though a heavy stone was filling the space below her chest. If that was what Owen had wanted, he had succeeded.
And Lea was certain that was exactly what he had wanted.
❀❀❀
Separate from the preparations for Lea’s clothes and furniture, the wedding preparations also began.
Most of the arrangements had been completed before Lea even knew they were underway. There were no gifts to exchange, no wedding presents, no agreements to negotiate between families or businesses, so only the ceremony itself needed to be prepared, but the scale of the wedding was such that even that alone was a considerable undertaking.
True to Owen’s word that the wedding would be grand, the ceremony was lavish and magnificent. It looked more like the wedding of a king and queen than anything the current king, who had lost nearly all his power, could have managed. The sprawling garden and the interior of the residence, large enough to require a carriage to traverse, were filled to capacity with white silk, lace, roses, and flowers for the occasion. Every maid and servant received a new set of clothes, shoes, and gloves. It was the old noble custom that no one should wear old clothes on a wedding day.
Making clothes for all of them took time, but the wedding attire for the bride and groom, the true principals of the ceremony, required even more effort. Owen, however, wanted the wedding as soon as possible. The dressmakers and tailors looked pained, but Lea assumed Owen’s urgency was his desire to settle his business with her as quickly as possible, and she raised no objection to his insistence. She didn’t really have the standing to voice an opinion anyway.
And so the preparations for the most lavish and most hurried wedding imaginable began. The household staff and the contracted craftsmen were run ragged. One small mercy was that Lea, unlike other noble brides, had no proper family or household behind her, which meant no clashes of pride between families, no disputes to navigate. The wedding preparations proceeded entirely according to Owen’s wishes, and no disagreements arose between the two of them.
On the day of the wedding, Lea’s family was nowhere to be seen, but Owen had already handled this neatly by noting in the invitation that they were foreigners and had unfortunately been unable to attend due to travel difficulties, so no one gossiped about it.
Setting aside minor matters like that, the wedding began without a hitch. To the sound of trumpets announcing the entrance of the bride and groom, Lea walked down the aisle at Owen’s side.
“Oh my……! How beautiful!”
ianthe
taking another break (i'm sorry)
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