PandoraHearts ~Caucus Race~, Vol. 2 (11 page)

On hearing it, disappointment showed on all the girls’ faces. However, no one complained. “That’s that, then,” Leo smiled, turning to Elliot, and conversely, Elliot felt irritation start to build inside him.

It was true that the matter of the Blue Rose Club had been resolved. …But.

Leo had known about the Blue Rose Club.

Leo had introduced himself to the girls as Gardener “M.”

The girls had obeyed Leo’s words obediently.

They were master and servant, and friends on top of that, but it didn’t mean they had to reveal everything to each other.

However, having lots of secrets floating around didn’t feel good.

Irritably, Elliot struck the floor of the common room with the toe of his shoe, crossed his arms, and began the interrogation.

“…Hey. Hurry up and explain all this to me, starting at the beginning. I’ve got the right to hear it.”

“Yes, you do.”

Leo agreed easily.

“Are you planning to stay here, though? The common room may be built to make it hard to hear what goes on inside, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to camp. You were being very loud, you know.”

At Leo’s words, Elliot froze for a moment. Then, with an expression that said as plain as day that their circumstances had slipped his mind, that he’d forgotten they were intruders in the girls’ dorm, he muttered:

“……………………………………………………Oh.”

“Well, I technically did it for you, Elliot.”

They were in a narrow, pitch-black passageway, barely wide enough for one person, when Leo spoke. Elliot, who was walking very carefully ahead of Leo, asked, “For me?”

As Leo had guessed, the common room had held the entrance to a secret passageway. Josephine had operated the mechanism of the entrance to the corridor—which had been, she said, a secret handed down through the years, known only to girls’ dormitory prefects—and let the two of them escape.

As Elliot walked, feeling his way along the wall, he asked again, “What do you mean, ‘for me’?”

“I found out about the Blue Rose Club by chance, a while ago. It was a quiet group back then, but it also felt as if things could get out of hand at any time. I thought about telling you, but you’re terrible at dealing with things like that, so I didn’t.”

Disgusted, Elliot was silent. When he thought back to what had just happened in the common room, he had to admit that Leo had probably made the right call.

“I thought that, as long as they weren’t starved for information, the Blue Rose Club would stay quiet. To keep the pressure from building up, I sent them a certain amount of information from our end on a regular basis under the name Gardener ‘M,’ before they came looking for it. Information about you, I mean. Although, in the end, it looks like they got out of hand anyway.”

“W-w-wait just a minute. ‘Sent them information’………
You
did?”

“Right. I sent letters about how you tried to leave your vegetables at breakfast; things like that. Girls are really tough to understand, though. I didn’t manage to read them completely.”

“That’s not what I meant! What the hell were you doing, you jerk?!”

Elliot couldn’t help himself: He yelled. He turned around in the darkness, but although Leo couldn’t have been that far away, he couldn’t see him. That meant he couldn’t grab him by the shirtfront.

Leo spoke, calmly:

“If I hadn’t done that, they would have intruded further and further into your private life. Before long, they might have been peeping into our room. You didn’t want that either, did you?”

He spoke without hesitation, and the logic seemed sound.
But
, Elliot thought. Leo had, without a doubt, been at least a little entertained. “……Haaaaah.” Elliot gave a long sigh, then asked a question that had been on his mind:

“By the way, what’s with the ‘M’? You don’t have an
M
in your name.”

“Oh, it’s the first letter of ‘menace,’” Leo answered nonchalantly. “It means ‘threat,’ and similar things. —It meant that the gardener definitely wasn’t the Blue Rose Club’s ally.”

In the end, Elliot thought, it had been Leo’s words that had done away with the Blue Rose Club, so “threat” had been entirely accurate. His valet had a rather extreme side to him, and if words alone hadn’t done it, there was no telling what methods he might have used. He didn’t even want to imagine it.

Leo continued, smiling wryly, oblivious to what Elliot was feeling.

“Still, it ended up becoming a weird source of pocket money, and that was a problem.”

Pocket money.
The word had come out of nowhere, and Elliot gave a foolish-sounding “Huh?

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“They said it was a gratuity for providing information as the gardener. They always left it where I left the letters.”

“…………I’m so appalled I can’t even— Whoa?”

Possibly because he’d been concentrating on his conversation with Leo, when the dark passageway turned into stairs leading down, Elliot lost his balance and almost fell. Somehow he managed to hang on. The stairs in the secret passage were steep, and if he fell, he wasn’t likely to walk away unscathed.

Now that he thought of it, Josephine had said to be careful of the stairs. Apparently a prefect had fallen down them and died once.

“Man, that’s not safe… Stairs, Leo.”

“Yeah. So you see, I did tell you it wasn’t anything important.”

“—???”

He didn’t know what Leo was saying. However, as he slowly descended the stairs, an unpleasant premonition began to well up in Elliot’s heart.
Just maybe
, he thought. He was a little afraid to ask, but he did anyway, praying that that wouldn’t be it.

“Do you mean, uh, that…”

“Right. That bookmark I gave you. I bought it with that pocket money. Since I’d earned it selling information about you, I thought that was probably the best thing to do with it. Come to think of it, I wonder where that white cat went. I’d forgotten about it. Well, it’s probably dark outside anyway. I guess we won’t be able to look for it anymore. Right, Elliot? …Elliot?”

“………………………………………………………………………………………………”

No matter how many times he called him, Elliot was silent.

Even he couldn’t put a name to the emotion that churned inside him. It felt a bit like anger, and a bit like embarrassment, and a bit like futility… A little like all of them, or maybe like none of them. He just felt muddled, and dissatisfied, and as if it wasn’t fair.

“Hey, Elliot.”

When Leo called him again, Elliot answered in a voice so low it seemed to echo from the depths of hell.

“A thing like that… Even if we find it, even if I get it back…”

“You’ll throw it away? That’s fine, too; I don’t mind.”

Leo sounded as if he truly didn’t care.

Elliot gave a short groan. Girls entertaining themselves by picking apart his private life over their tea. Money earned in exchange. The bookmark, bought with that money. …In other
words, he felt, carrying that around as if it was something important would be the same as approving of what the girls had done. He really and truly couldn’t accept that, and yet…

He’d gotten that bookmark from Leo. He’d been rather—no, very—fond of it.

He’d liked it so much he’d thought he
had
to get it back, no matter what.

But.

But.

But—

In Elliot’s mind, a balance that held the choices “Throw it away” and “Keep it” on its two scales wavered and rocked, back and forth. It was beginning to give him a mild headache.

They went down, down, down the stairs, until they reached the first floor. Then they made their way by touch again. They’d been told that the secret passageway came out behind the girls’ dorm, in a place that was almost always deserted. As they went, Elliot managed to squeeze out the words that were lodged in his throat, spitting them out by force.

“…That…stupid bookmark! I…… I’ll……I’m……gonna—”

“Toss it? Keep it?”

Leo spoke from behind him. Elliot yelled, a bit desperately:

“I won’t toss it! But I’ll shut it away somewhere, and I’m not going to think about it ever again! I’ll forget it completely!”

At Elliot’s response, from behind him, Leo laughed merrily.

When they got outside, he might actually punch Leo, Elliot thought, as if he were cursing him— And just then, he walked straight into the wall in front of him with a
thunk
. He hadn’t been looking out for it, and he’d whacked his nose hard. The dull pain made his eyes water.

The dark was partially to blame, but he’d been distracted by Leo behind him, and he apparently hadn’t been paying enough attention to where he was going.

It was the first-floor end of the secret passageway.

“……Oww…… If there’s a wall there, then
say
so!”

Elliot kicked the silent wall, taking his anger out on it for no good reason. At the kick, the mechanism in the wall creaked into motion, and the door began to swing outward. The wind that rushed into the stagnant passage carried the scent of night air, and it was cold.

Outside, night had fallen, and moonlight streamed down through gaps in the clouds. They were behind the girls’ dorm. It was a simple plot of land, not really fit for the term “garden.”

A lone shape stood there.

Possibly it had been startled when the wall abruptly began to move and opened up: It was frozen, facing the passageway where Elliot and Leo stood. They’d been told that this place was nearly always deserted, but there was someone here… A female student. For a moment, both Elliot and Leo were speechless.

With difficulty, Leo spoke the girl’s name:

“Ada Vessalius…”

Meanwhile, hearing her name, Ada looked at the two who’d appeared and said, “Elliot-kun? Leo-kun? Huh? What?” She sounded confused. Of course she was: Part of it was due to the fact that they’d come out of the wall, but the building they’d emerged from was the girls’ dorm. Ada didn’t seem to understand any of it.

And—

Ada was holding a white cat to her chest. A white cat with a bookmark in its mouth. On noticing it, Elliot yelled involuntarily:

“That cat! Moon!”

“What? ‘Moon’? This little one is Snowdrop… Oh, um, I did make sure to leave him at home this morning, but, um……”

Confronted by Elliot’s menacing glare, Ada explained hastily. However, most of what she said didn’t reach Elliot. All he
understood was that the cat’s name was Snowdrop, and that its owner was…

Elliot’s shoulders quivered. Slowly, in a terribly cold voice, he spat out the words, “You’re the owner?” Ada probably meant to answer, “Yes,” but she was so overawed that it came out as “Ye-yesh.”

That said, Elliot didn’t care about the response. The uproar that had taken up his entire day swept across his mind like a whirlwind.

Elliot drew a deep, deep breath, and then:

“It was
you
, Ada Vessaliuuu

uuus?!!!!”

Ada was petrified. Snowdrop was so startled he jumped and nearly dropped the bookmark.

Elliot’s roar was his last, and loudest, of the day.

THAT WEEKEND. THE FINAL DAY OF
DISCIPLINE REINFORCEMENT WEEK.

“………Haaah.”

Morning classes had ended, and it was the noon recess. Ada leaned against the wall of the corridor and sighed. The corridor was filled with students heading to the cafeteria to have lunch, and students making for the courtyard with buns they’d purchased.