Three pretty little girls huddled together really made it easy to smile tenderly like an auntie. Ye Tang looked at Claudia, Gloria, and Cinderella. Her tense face relaxed a bit, and her eyes, reflecting the lamplight, softened.
Sensing his wife’s great mood keenly, Hans struck while the iron was hot. He reached out to put his arm around Ye Tang’s shoulder and whispered sweetly in her ear, “My love, shall we rest early tonight?”
If killing weren’t illegal, Ye Tang would already be a widow. She curved her lips into a smile and said, “Sure.”
Hans was delighted. “Then—!”
“Dear, you haven’t rested properly this week, have you? I know. So I’ve already had your things sent to the warehouse.”
“Huh?”
Ye Tang stood up and elegantly slipped out from under Hans’s arm. She looked down at him, smiling, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes.
“Dear, you’ve gotten confused from all the busyness too. Every year at this time, you were already in the Sailan Principality, weren’t you? If you don’t set off this year, you’ll miss the cargo ships heading to the Sailan Principality. To make it convenient for you to pack and board first thing tomorrow, I’ve had the bedding and clothes sent to the warehouse at the port for you.”
Hans wasn’t the kind of man with such a strong sense of business that he braved the harsh cold.
Every year in early winter, he used the excuse that he needed to go to the Sailan Principality to wait for Tartafu to open its ports in the spring of the following year, so he could enter Tartafu and make his first pot of gold that year. He left the Capital Vitril.
Sometimes he would suddenly burst with fatherly love and spend the entire winter with Cinderella and her mother Ivy. But more often, he wandered the bars, casinos, or inns of different cities with his caravan members. He and his men got dead drunk every day, always accompanied by nameless strange women.
In the ledgers, Hans recorded the expenses from this debauched vacation as: consoling caravan members.
Ye Tang had seen the ledgers Hans kept at home. He kept them openly, without hiding them from Anna Rochel.
But Anna Rochel, with her deep-rooted belief that men handled outside affairs and women inside ones, never interfered in Hans’s business. Even if curiosity led her to flip through a few pages of Hans’s ledgers, she wouldn’t think anything of annotations like “consoling caravan members.”
Ye Tang had seen countless ledgers like that. She knew very well that the basis of a merchant making money was controlling costs. Any merchant with a bit of experience who actually profited from business gripped costs tightly.
In Hans’s ledgers, the “consoling caravan members” expenses weren’t counted under labor costs. That was equivalent to writing on the ledger that “consoling caravan members expenses aren’t proper expenses.” So in winter, when those “consoling caravan members” expenses clustered, Hans definitely wasn’t doing anything proper.
Cinderella’s birthday was in August. Working backward, her mother must have gotten pregnant with her around October of the previous year. October was right after Hans bid farewell to Anna Rochel and headed to the “Sailan Principality.”
Cinderella was a native-born Osnabrocker. She had no Sailan Principality accent, and her mother probably wasn’t a citizen there either. So where Hans went and what he did after bidding farewell to Anna Rochel in past years was obvious.
Since Hans loved going to the “Sailan Principality” so much, Ye Tang certainly wouldn’t give him a chance to stay at Hedelin House.
Seeing things weren’t going well, Hans hurriedly tried to say he wouldn’t leave this winter. “This year, I plan to—”
“Oh, dear, you don’t need to say it. You know I’ve always understood you. I know you’re doing it for this family, to support us, going out to earn money even in winter.”
Ye Tang said understandingly and “thoughtfully,” “Don’t worry. The winter I gave birth to Gloria, you weren’t by my side, but Gloria and I both survived fine. Cinderella just arrived and might not be familiar with Vitlil city or Hedelin House yet. But compared to Gloria when she first came into this world and wasn’t familiar with it, I believe Cinderella can adapt to life in Vitlil and Hedelin House faster.”
“Cinderella, don’t you think so?”
Asked for her opinion, Kim Hora’s heart skipped a beat. The stepmom wanted to kick out this cheap dad!
She subconsciously wanted to snap back at Ye Tang, but the sound from her throat wasn’t under her control. “You’re right, Madam.”
Kim Hora was startled. Then she realized that the Cinderella she had called “useless” in the mental world was clinging to her back, covering her mouth from behind.
Cinderella truly wasn’t good at handling violence, but her mental resilience was absolutely extraordinary—in fact, in the fairy tale, Cinderella never once resisted her sisters’ kicks and violence, and even when abused by her stepmother, she never gave up her dream: to dance properly once in the castle.
“Argh— you crazy stinking woman! Do you know that two souls fighting over control of the body like this will make it pass out again!?”
“Even if it passes out… even if it keeps passing out, it’s better than letting you take full control of this body!”
In the mental world, Cinderella, beaten by Kim Hora, protected her head with her arms. In the real world, Cinderella looked like she was spacing out.
“Cinderella, are you sleepy?”
Claudia took Cinderella’s hand, and Cinderella nodded unconsciously twice.
“Then let’s go bathe first. Our figures are about the same, so wear my nightgown tonight.”
Gloria took Cinderella’s other hand. The two sisters had no complaints about their mother kicking their father out of the house, as if he weren’t their biological father.
But who could they blame? Hans had been absent for long stretches in Claudia and Gloria’s lives. Not only had his credit gone bankrupt with the two sisters, his favorability had been reset to zero. Even if he still had some favorability in his daughters’ hearts, it hadn’t accumulated much.
By now, when Claudia and Gloria saw their father, besides the awkwardness of not knowing how to interact, they mostly felt disgust and loathing.
Knowing their mother had had their father’s things thrown into the port warehouse—and that he wouldn’t spend nights at home anymore—Claudia and Gloria both breathed huge sighs of relief. To be honest, their father felt too dirty to them. He was like a lump of moving filth that prevented them from relaxing.
……
The next day, the weather was nice—a rare sunny day in winter.
After breakfast, Claudia and Gloria excitedly took Cinderella out to buy things for her. Ye Tang sat on the sofa, checking the shopping list that the cook Emma had submitted.
Hedelin House hadn’t had servants before, so Anna Rochel had handled procurement herself. Now, most of the new maids weren’t from the Capital Vitril and lacked experience in shopping.
To avoid the maids being cheated or overcharged by small merchants, Ye Tang still handled procurement personally. But every time she went out, she brought maids and Ian along to observe from behind her, learning the Capital’s general prices and how to haggle with small merchants.
“Hm? Flour’s gone again? This is the third time this month.”
If the water’s too clear, there are no fish. Ye Tang understood the need to turn a blind eye sometimes.
The maids without exception sent money home to subsidize their families. Ye Tang generally didn’t pry into things like them eating an extra two loaves of bread or sneaking a handful of white sugar. But this week, flour had been restocked twice, and those two batches were enough for everyone in Hedelin House top to bottom to eat white bread for over half a month. That was excessive.
Emma the cook was trembling like a bowl of water. She feared Ye Tang would think she was pocketing things and fire her. But she also feared telling the truth would anger Ye Tang.
“Madam, Madam, please hear me out… I-I at first wanted to sleep an extra hour in the morning, so I’d mix the dough the night before and use the fermented dough from yesterday to bake bread the next morning.”
“But the dough disappeared! More than once! In the morning, I checked the temperature in the oven. I could tell someone had taken my dough to bake bread! But everyone said they didn’t take my dough! No one baked and ate bread behind others’ backs!”
Emma grew more despairing as she spoke. She wouldn’t even believe these words herself.
“I thought someone was playing tricks, so I wanted to catch them and have you fire her, Madam! But I stayed up all night guarding the maids’ room door, and no one went in or out of the maids’ room…”
“Then that day, the dough was stolen again. The oven was hot too… I thought I must have dozed off and someone sneaked out. The next night, I directly moved my bed to block the door. Then—”
Of course, blocking the door with her bed upset the maids who got up at night, but no one wanted to be seen as a thief or lose their job at Hedelin House. So despite the complaints, the maids supported Emma’s action.
And then things got wild.
After sleeping a night with her bed blocking the door, Emma was sure no maid had gone out that night. She rushed excitedly to the kitchen, only to find the dough gone again.
A huge basin of dough, not a scrap left.
If it wasn’t the maids stealing the dough, then who was?
Hedelin House’s only male servant, Ian, was very thin. He didn’t look like he could eat ten people’s worth of baked bread daily. And Emma had searched Ian’s room with the maids.
Ian’s room truly had nothing. Unlike the maids who sneaked candy to send to siblings in the countryside, he saved every bit of his weekly pay. His room had not a single personal item.
The remaining suspects… Emma didn’t dare call them suspects.
Because the only ones left were Claudia, Gloria, and Ye Tang herself, the mistress of the house.
After hearing Emma out, Ye Tang understood why Emma hadn’t dared mention it to her before and why she hadn’t stopped mixing dough before bed at night.
She feared it was Claudia, Gloria, or Ye Tang taking the dough.
“I understand. Leave this to me. I’ll handle procurement as usual.”
“Yes! Thank you, Madam!”
Seeing Ye Tang had no intention of blaming her, Emma perked up again.
After Emma left, Ye Tang recalled the horror-story-like experience Emma described.
Ye Tang hadn’t seen much in the way of strange forces and gods, and she was quite interested—not murderous or harmful, just stealing dough to bake and eat bread. If it was some nonhuman thing at work, this nonhuman way of scaring humans was too cute.
“I’ll go take a look.”
Setting the shopping list aside, Ye Tang planned a short nap to be full of energy at night to catch the bread thief, human or otherwise.
……
Three hours before dawn, Ye Tang opened her eyes. In the darkness, she changed into the easy-movement men’s clothes she’d prepared that day, went downstairs without even an oil lamp, and headed to the kitchen.
No lights in the kitchen, but the air carried a sweet wheat fragrance.
Ye Tang’s footsteps were lighter than a cat’s, so the two little ones squatting in the kitchen, stuffing their faces wildly, didn’t notice her arrival.
When Ye Tang turned on the kitchen light—which had only been wired two days ago—the two little ones, each holding bread with crumbs on their mouths, were fully exposed before her without any cover.
Hair whiter than snow, eyes redder than rubies. The boy with the strange hairstyle, like half a wing grown on his head, didn’t expect anyone to come to the kitchen at this hour. One of them dropped the bread dough in his hand to the ground, while the other stared blankly at the suddenly appeared Ye Tang.
Ye Tang realized she had caught the culprits stealing the bread dough.