After her came a fifth, then a sixth, and a seventh… Once they had begun, some girls regaled them with several fantasies. Josephine listened. On the surface, she was smiling calmly.
“…And then, you see. I’ve thought of a different development for that yawn which we spoke of earlier. It’s possible that Master Blue Rose really doesn’t sleep at night. You see, although there is no way for us to know, a secret banquet is held in the boys’ dormitory every night, and Master Blue Rose presides over it as king of the night—”
How many stories had there been? She’d lost track of where in the series this girl, the one who’d stood up from the sofa and was telling her tale in clear accents, belonged.
Then, finally, the girl noticed that, although she was smiling gently, Josephine had been silent the whole time. Matilda, seated in the corner, was silent as well, but this was usual for her, and no one paid any attention to it.
“Y-yes, that’s right.”
The girl gracefully resumed her seat on the sofa and stretched out a hand toward Josephine.
“I’d love to hear your story next, Josephine-sama.”
At that, as if they’d just remembered, the girls’ eyes turned to Josephine, and voice after expectant voice spoke: “That’s right.” “Yes.” “Please do, Josephine-sama.” My! Josephine put a hand to her lips, smiling coolly.
“But we’ve spent so much time already… Would anyone mind if we moved on to the main topic at this point?”
At her words, all the girls’ expressions changed: We forgot!
………To be honest, I’d like to relate my Master Blue Rose fantasies, too! I’d like to… But!
Gracefully, without letting these fierce emotions show on the surface, Josephine looked around the circle of members.
Then—austerely, elegantly—she began to speak.
“The time has come to reveal the full content of Project Coronation to you.”
“…Project Coronation?” The girls echoed her words, puzzled.
“Yes,” Josephine said, smiling proudly.
“It is a project I myself and Matilda over there have been carrying out for Master Blue Rose’s sake. I trust you’re all aware of the vote that was held—secretly, yet on a grand scale—among the girls last month? ‘Sparkle! The First Ranking of Boys Most Suited to be Prefect.’ The boy who triumphed over the current prefects for the glorious first-place spot was our Master Blue Rose.”
It was true. Although it didn’t show publically, Master Blue Rose was quite popular, not only with the Blue Rose Club, but with the entire female student population of Lutwidge Academy.
A startling number of girls secretly carried photographs of Master Blue Rose in their student pocketbooks and notebooks.
His popularity with the older students, girls in the fifth and sixth years, was particularly great. Unlike the male students, to the female students, even the shadow he carried as a member of the House of Nightray was no more than a spice that enhanced his fascination.
“As you see, then, this dream belongs, not only to the Blue Rose Club, but to the entire female student body. Prefect is a glorious position granted only to students chosen by this academy. We will do away with Gerald, a prefect unfit for the position, and install our own Master Blue Rose—”
Just as Josephine said those words.
At the phrase “do away with,” the girls gave anxious cries of “My…,” and immediately afterward—
BAM! The door to the common room flew open as if someone had kicked their way through it.
Elliot Nightray
A SHORT WHILE EARLIER.
Having entrusted their escape from the girls’ dorm to Leo, Elliot left the room with him. With Leo in the lead, they made their way down the corridor, carefully and swiftly. When they heard girls’ voices or footsteps approaching, they took cover until they’d passed. They really were skating on thin ice.
They suffered alarm after alarm.
What the heck are we doing…?
They weren’t in any position to laugh at the situation, but Elliot was finding it funnier and funnier.
He and Leo might as well be playing undercover agents.
Just as they arrived in front of a certain door, Leo murmured, “Not good.”
Elliot laid a hand on Leo’s shoulder, making him turn around, and mouthed, What’s wrong?
Pointing at the door, Leo whispered, “This is a common room. There’s a secret passageway entrance in here, or there should be, but…” He sounded noncommittal. It didn’t take Elliot long to notice, too. There were voices beyond the door. Bright, lively voices, flying back and forth. It sounded as if they were having a wonderful time.
The common room was located at a distance from the private rooms where students slept. Students without business here weren’t likely to pass by.
But even so, they didn’t have time to simply wait for the room’s occupants to go elsewhere.
“There’s nothing for it. Leo, let’s think of some other way.”
In response to Elliot’s words, Leo said, “Uh-huh…,” but he didn’t move away from the door.
The longer they stayed in the corridor, the greater the possibility they’d be discovered.
Elliot decided that the best plan was to go back to that unused room one more time and see if they could get the mechanism for the secret passage to work. He tugged at Leo’s arm, trying to get him to retrace their steps. Just as he did so, from inside the common room, he heard a certain phrase.
Almost involuntarily, Elliot spoke the words himself.
“……‘Master Blue Rose’—?”
What was that supposed to be? he wondered. Who was it? The girl’s voice that came to them faintly from the common room sounded rapturous.
“Do you recall that, last month, there was a report that Master Blue Rose had yawned during class? Well, you see… Master Blue Rose is a silver-haired vampire who slips into the girls’ dormitory every night and drinks blood from one of us, and so during the day—”
The speaker’s voice was partially drowned out by high-pitched squeals and giggles.
“Hey, Leo. ………What’s all this?” Elliot asked in a small, thoroughly disgusted voice.
Leo looked back at him. “Umm……”
Even as he waited for Leo’s response, the girls’ conversation continued.
“Let me go next, if you would. I think Master Blue Rose is—”
Elliot kept his voice low.
“……So they’re setting up somebody from our school as ‘Master Blue Rose’ and getting all excited talking about him? It sounds as if they’re adding some crazy stuff, too, like he’s a vampire—Is that actually fun or something?”
“They do sound as if they’re having fun.”
At Leo’s response, Elliot muttered, “Girls make no sense.”
However, he thought, they could do whatever they wanted. It was nothing to do with him. —Not that he knew who their “Master Blue Rose” was.
Elliot thought for a minute.
“Somebody girls like… Would that be Gerald, maybe?”
“In Gerald’s case, it’s more that he pays too much attention to girls than that the girls like him.”
Now that he mentioned it, that sounded about right. Elliot looked convinced. Impressed, he glanced at Leo.
“You really watch other people, don’t you?”
“Not at all. I’m not even interested in them.”
Leo shook his head. “But,” he continued:
“Some things are easier to see when you aren’t trying to look. You see them, whether you want to or not.”
Beyond the screen of his hair and glasses, Leo was smiling faintly.
Elliot knew that Leo wore glasses and grew his hair long to hide his face, not because he didn’t want to be seen, but because he “didn’t want to see” the world. Maybe that was why: Although he was smiling, Leo’s smile didn’t look like a smile at all.
Elliot wondered whether he’d seen what he knew about Ger
ald and Marcel that way, too. …This wasn’t the time to discuss it, though.
“Well, never mind. Let’s go. For now, we’ll head back to that room—”
Just as Elliot whispered, a new voice began to speak inside the room.
‘Today, I saw a teacher summon Master Blue Rose to the guidance office.’
At those words, Elliot remembered his noon recess that day. He’d also gone to the guidance office, summoned by one of the female teachers. Since he was a member of the House of Nightray, his teachers also paid a lot of attention to him, and they sometimes asked him about this and that.
However, many students were summoned to the guidance office every day.
Students who’d earned warnings for being tardy to class, students being scolded for breaking school rules… Apparently “Master Blue Rose” had been one of them. Elliot had no sympathy for him. The fact that they were having their discussion at his expense this way, amusing themselves with him, meant that, in other words:
The guy gives them way too many openings!
‘I’m quite certain that teacher is after him. When he enters the guidance office, she tries to seduce him. ‘Now then, Elliot-kun. Come to me’—”
Elliot-kun? …………What, ME?!
He felt a violent sinking sensation, as if he were falling.
Then a storm of fierce emotions welled up.
……Wait! Wait wait wait wait. Why!? Why are they talking about me like this? Openings? I don’t have any openings! ……Well, I was prepared for people to talk about me, but as a Nightray, a member of the four great dukedoms, not as…… Or is that why? Did my brothers and sister, or—I can’t see it, but—even my father, go through this? Is this the duty of the elite?!
Elliot’s spine was quivering.
He couldn’t sense anything like malice in the voices he heard. Quite the opposite, in fact.
That didn’t mean he could feel happy about it.
The being he called “himself” was being put to selfish use and used to entertain the girls, as if it were a stuffed animal or something. On his pride as a man, Elliot didn’t think he could take it. The urge to barge in yelling and make them stop was nearly unbearable.
But what would happen if he did? Yes, this was the girls’ dorm, territory where boys were absolutely not allowed.
Calm down, calm down, calm—Rrgh—
He desperately suppressed the torrent of emotions with reason.
“…And then, you see, I’ve thought of a different development for that yawn which we spoke of earlier. It’s possible that Master Blue Rose really doesn’t sleep at night. You see, although there is no way for us to know, a secret banquet is held in the boys’ dormitory every night, and Master Blue Rose presides over it as king of the night—”
What “secret banquet”?! What “king of the night”~~~~~?!!
His emotions sent his reason flying.
Elliot flung his arm up, on the verge of striking the door open……but, at the very last minute, Leo held him back, curbing him with a tiny, sharp, “No, Elliot, don’t. You’ll cause a scene.”
However, as a man, he couldn’t keep silent any longer. Shaking Leo’s arms off, Elliot prepared to beat his way into the common room. Leo blocked him. The two pushed and pulled at each other, scuffling, just barely managing not to make any loud noises.
They’d gone on like that for a few moments when, suddenly, from inside the common room…
A girl spoke in tones that were clearly different from the rose-tinged voices they’d been hearing.
There was a tense silence.
“The time has come to reveal the full content of Project Coronation to you.”
The significant-sounding words woke Elliot from his rampage.
Coronation? He and Leo looked at each other. The word seemed to have caught Leo’s attention as well.
The voice continued:
“It is a project I myself and Matilda over there have been carrying out for Master Blue Rose’s sake. I trust you’re all aware of the vote which was held—secretly, yet on a grand scale—among the girls last month? ‘Sparkle! The First Ranking of Boys Most Suited to be Prefect.’ The boy who triumphed over the current prefects for the glorious first-place spot was our Master Blue Rose.”
What the heck? thought Elliot.
He hadn’t had the foggiest idea that something like that had been carried out in secret, in the shadow of school life.
The glorious first-place spot? Prefect was a tiresome role, and he’d never once wanted to be one.
The voice continued:
“As you see, then, this dream belongs, not only to the Blue Rose Club, but to the entire female student body. Prefect is a glorious position granted only to students chosen by this academy. We will do away with Gerald, a prefect unfit for the position, and install our own Master Blue Rose—”
…………!
Elliot remembered the threatening letter Gerald had received.
Resign from being prefect.
He remembered Gerald on the floor after falling down the stairs.
Gerald seemed to have thought that the culprit was Marcel, but—
It was these guys……?!
Elliot shook Leo off mainly by force and kicked open the door to the common room. The door opened with a terrific bang, and Elliot stalked in. Drawing himself up to his full height in the common room doorway, he denounced them with all the lung power he had:
“I just heard something I can’t ignore, you lot—!!”
It must have seemed like a bolt from the blue.
Every girl in the room froze, petrified. A nearly painful number of shocked glances were focused on Elliot.
Then one girl called Elliot’s name in a choked voice. She was the one who had been speaking about “Project Coronation” a moment before.
In a trembling, slightly hoarse voice, she said:
“…Master Blue Rose…?”
Elliot roared at her, as if to kill that nickname dead:
“Don’t call me stupid names! My name is Elliot… Elliot Nightray, a son of the four great dukedoms!”
He announced his name.
On the pride in his breast.
At that, from behind him, still out in the corridor, Leo said, “Aw…
“This is the girls’ dormitory, protected territory completely off-limits to boys, and you just yelled your name at the top of your lungs. …You’re going to be a school legend, you know.
“Congratulations,” he said. He even clapped.
Letting his seething fury take over, Elliot forced Leo’s words down with a “Who cares?!” When he thought of how Gerald had treated Marcel, Elliot couldn’t forgive him, either. Still, that didn’t mean it was okay to push Gerald down the stairs in what amounted to a surprise attack. And besides—
Grinding his teeth, Elliot pressed them further.
“What’s this about doing away with people, you wretches?! Even for villainy, you’ve gone too far! —Have you no shame?!”
“P-Project Coronation was…something Matilda and I advanced on our own. The other girls had no knowledge of it. Besides, ‘do away with’ was a…an overstatement, made for effect. We didn’t really intend to go that far—”
“Quit making excuses. It’s despicable!”
Elliot glared at the girls’ ringleader, condemnation in his eyes.
Uneasy voices called to her, here and there—“Josephine-sama…”—and Elliot’s gaze traveled across the girls seated on the sofas.
One lone girl was standing in the corner, and she flinched. As if trying to escape from Elliot, she backed up and sat down hard, half-falling onto the sofa. At once, Josephine the ringleader called her name: “Matilda.”
“They’re a group called the Blue Rose Club.”
Leo, who’d still been out in the corridor, spoke as he entered the common room. Coming up beside Elliot, he continued:
“Their formal name is The Society of Young Ladies who Admire Master Blue Rose. They’re your fan club,
Elliot. Only…they do seem to have gotten a bit out of control.”
“Ahn? Why do you know that?”
Elliot sounded suspicious, and the girls’ eyes, colored with that same “why,” turned to focus on Leo. “Coincidence,” Leo said, brushing them off, and took a step forward. Through his glasses, he fixed his gaze on each girl in turn.
“Well, Elliot’s looks aren’t that bad, and you could probably call the fact that he’s idiotically straightforward one of his good points. Still, he’s fastidious about weird things, not to mention really proud, quick with his fists, foul-mouthed—”
“Why did you switch to talking smack about me?!”
Leo pretended not to hear Elliot’s complaint. He glanced at Josephine.
“I think you went too far this time. Threatening Gerald, hurting him and trying to get him to abandon his position as prefect… Gerald’s the only sixth-year student in our group, so if that happened, there was a decent possibility that Elliot would be chosen to replace him…”
After a pause, Leo went on.
“But becoming prefect because of something like that…… Did you really think that would make him happy?”
As he spoke, his gaze slid over to Matilda, who was shivering on the sofa.
Then:
“—Did you, Marcel?”
He called a name.
………………………Huh?
When Leo said that name, Elliot’s mind became an overwhelming blank.
He thought he’d misheard, or that Leo had misspoken.
Matilda. Marcel. The names did sound a bit alike, after all. Leo just watched Matilda, steadily.
Matilda looked down, avoiding his gaze; she was trembling. Elliot had no idea what was going on, and all he could do was stay silent. Like Elliot, the other girls also seemed speechless.
“What about it, Marcel?” Leo said the name again.
Elliot stretched a hand out to Leo’s shoulder, as if he’d awakened from sleep paralysis. When he spoke, his voice sounded mildly appalled.
“Leo, what are you talking about?”
“There are no girls named Matilda at Lutwidge Academy. I shouldn’t think anyone knows which class she’s in. …Well, maybe you know, Josephine. You probably arranged this.”
PandoraHearts ~Caucus Race~, Vol. 2 Page 7