Welcome to the Rose Mansion - Chapter 26
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Where could they have gone? Where had the children gone this time?
She gathered her long skirt and ran down the stairs. It wasn’t behavior befitting a lady, but she had no time to care.
“Good afternoon, Miss.”
“Good afternoon, Miss.”
Passing servants greeted her. There were no offers of help or inquiries about her well-being. The mansion’s servants were fundamentally indifferent, not meddling unless it concerned them directly.
But Richelle considered this fortunate, as she had no time for lengthy conversations.
Finally, she burst through the front door and into the garden, greeted by the vivid scent of roses.
Richelle paused for a moment. The ground was still damp from last night’s downpour. She quietly thought and then came up with a plausible guess.
‘The children said they liked splashing in puddles on rainy days. It’s not raining now, but they might be playing in puddles formed by the rain.’
Yes, let’s look for puddles.
Richelle began by checking the nearest garden to the mansion.
It was quite a laborious task to search the wet garden indiscriminately. And with roses, roses, and more roses everywhere, it was hard to keep direction.
‘I should have roamed outside more often!’
But with her days consumed by caring for the children and preparing lessons, there was hardly any time left to leisurely stroll through the garden. She regretted not taking the opportunity to familiarize herself with the layout of the garden more thoroughly.
Richelle pulled out the mansion’s map from her memory. Though she had only glanced at the garden section once, upon reflection, she was able to recall a fairly clear layout.
‘According to the map of the mansion… if I go straight this way, there should be a small forest.’
If she went that way, she might come across a puddle that children would enjoy.
Carefully jogging her memory, she turned the corner. The rose bushes in the garden behind the mansion were a bit taller than those elsewhere. This area was quite familiar to her as she often looked down upon it from the window.
But today, there was something distinctly out of place among them.
“…A person?”
Under the densely leafed rose bushes.
There, the tip of a brown shoe was sticking out.
Richelle’s face went pale. The shape of the nose pointing upwards indicated that the shoe was being worn by someone. It was a scene that could only bring bad thoughts to mind.
“Excuse me!”
Without further hesitation, she hurried over. In that brief moment, her mind was filled with all sorts of thoughts.
What happened? A gardener? No, the shoe was too fancy for a gardener. Did someone pass by and collapse?
Rushing over, she found a gap between the trees just wide enough for a person to pass through. Careful not to get scratched by the branches, Richelle made her way through.
And when she finally had a full view of the owner of the pair of shoes.
“…”
Richelle was at a loss for words.
‘Alan Otis?’
In a narrow space beyond the wall of rose bushes, there he was.
Eyes closed, with his hands neatly placed on his abdomen, like a corpse in a coffin or a doll discarded by a child grown bored of it.
But it wasn’t scary. Instead, it felt like observing a tragic scene from a painting. It was as if she had passed through the trees into an entirely different world.
The wind blew. The long shadows of the trees danced over the boy. Feeling Richelle’s presence, his long eyelashes fluttered.
Eventually, his eyelids opened, revealing a blue sky, as if dawn was breaking, which Richelle watched breathlessly.
His dazed eyes gazed solemnly at the heavy, rain-laden gray sky.
Then, there was no movement for a long while. Richelle gathered her courage and knelt beside him.
“Young Master Otis, are you alright? If it’s difficult for you to get up, I can help support you—”
“From that window over there.”
Alan Otis suddenly spoke up. Following his gaze, there was a window. Judging by its location, it was on the third floor of the mansion, belonging to Alan Otis’s bedroom.
The soft baritone voice, hovering between a boy and a young man, whispered into the puzzled Richelle’s ears.
“If I jumped from that window, do you think I’d die?”
