Prologue

The man before my eyes was the National Impotent.

Impotent, in the plain dictionary sense: a man whose manhood would not rise. For a marriage, it was a fatal disqualification. For me, it was not.

I don't care. No—if anything, this is better.

Better to live with the National Impotent than with a husband who left his wife to suffer his family alone, who never once stood as her strength and only ever took someone else's side, who could not be bothered with his own household. However impotent he might be, the man in front of me was hardly some impotent nobody with nothing else to his name.

I looked at him, entirely serious.

"Duke Tyrone."

At my call, the man with the soft golden hair lifted his eyes to me. Blue irises, sharp enough to cut, glittered as they found mine.

His name was Ian Tyrone. One of only three dukes in the country, a maternal cousin of the Emperor, a man who held both wealth and honor firmly in his grasp.

What flaw is it, really, that a man like that can't get it up? Better that he can't.

Look at that beautiful face, a statue stirred into motion. Even setting aside his rank and his fortune, the looks alone could have gathered him hundreds of devotees. And if a man like that were vigorous in bed on top of it all...

Far better that he can't manage a night's work than that some lover appears cradling his bastard. Yes. I chose well.

This was my second time through life. I had weighed gain against loss with a cold head and concluded that, even so, Duke Tyrone was the right answer. He had been looking down at me—my eyes darting, busy with their calculations—with a frigid gaze, and now he parted his lips.

"Are you the Duchess of Parnel?"

The voice that slipped from those apricot lips was a perfect baritone, so sensual that if he whispered it at my ear, something I did not even possess might have stood at attention. I had no time to grow drunk on it. I clenched a fistful of my skirt. My palms were damp with nerves, but my voice came out steady.

"No. You're mistaken. I am Olivia Florence. You ought to address me as Lady Florence."

At my answer, his straight brows arched high. He frowned and asked,

"And yet, were you not married to the Duke of Parnel?"

I knew I shouldn't laugh. A hollow little laugh escaped me anyway, and I shot back in a cynical tone.

"That husband who went off to war and won't return for the next ten years?"

James Parnel. My husband, whose face, at this point in time, I was not even supposed to know.

In a past I could scarcely remember anymore, I had walked into the wedding hall alone in my dress and vaguely pictured an ideal husband—a man who would come home a war hero, protect me, and build me a steadfast household. But to speak coldly, my husband was trash. He shoved the duty of filial piety onto me in his parents' place, ignored the household while his lust ran rampant, and took everyone else's side.

The worst trash imaginable!

I twisted my lips. Burning with anger at that trash, I felt the tension leave me and a strange confidence take its place, and in a tone grown all the more leisurely I introduced myself to Ian.

"Under the law of the Empire, every marriage that has not been consummated is void. I have never so much as seen my husband's face, and I am still a Florence."

"Bold words. Well, the form of address hardly matters..."

A faint smile spread over Ian's face. Those blue eyes glittered with a strange light, different from before. Interest—directed at me.

"So then, Lady Florence. Why did you ask to see me?"

At that, I smiled inwardly in triumph. Yes. I had succeeded in catching his attention and seating him at the negotiating table.

Now I have to make him accept my terms, no matter what. Even if I have to seize him by the scruff of the neck.

I lowered my eyes, drew my back perfectly straight, and opened my lips.

"Has Your Grace heard the song going around the marketplace?"

"Ah. That song. The one about you and me fucking every night."

I had asked as calmly as I could manage, and the answer that came back was unexpectedly explicit. Even as I tried to look composed, my cheeks flushed of their own accord. I cleared my throat.

Good. All the better that he already knows.

And how could he not, when it had spread too widely to miss? I dropped my gaze, arranged my face into something tragic, and spoke to him in a voice gone weak.

"That song has put me in a very difficult position. So I would like Your Grace to take responsibility."

"Responsibility? And how, exactly, am I meant to take it?"

Ian's brow twisted sharply.

Yes, I knew. He had to be dumbfounded. A bizarre song spreads through the streets, and here I was, out of nowhere, demanding he answer for it.

Before his thoughts could bolt off somewhere unhelpful—hauling in whoever first spread the song and wringing them out, for instance—I stated my business at once.

I had not the slightest intention of dropping myself into the trash a second time.

Today was my fortieth birthday.

I need to get up and prepare to receive the guests.

My body felt unusually heavy today, of all days. But there was no time to dawdle.

Her Majesty the Empress is supposed to attend the celebration, so I need to make sure the preparations are coming along. I'll call the butler...

And then I felt a strange sense of déjà vu.

This is my room?

More precisely, it was the room I had used about ten years ago. Far too narrow and shabby to be the chamber of a household's mistress, the stately noblewoman of a ducal house.

The room I lived in right after I was married.

So why was I suddenly looking at that ceiling? I was forty. A full twenty years had passed since my wedding.

Am I seeing things?

Preparing the banquet must have worn me out. I rubbed my gritty eyes and pulled the bell-rope beside the bed. Ding-ding—the bell for summoning a maid rang out. I waited a long while, and still no maid came.

Have they lost their minds?

Or were they preparing a surprise party because it was my birthday? A surprise like this was not the least bit pleasant. Ignoring a summons, or leaving a room this shabby, was the sort of prank one played only when one fancied the other person no better than oneself.

I'll have to teach them a lesson.

With that thought I slipped my feet into my slippers and strode out, shoving the door wide. At the rough motion, a luxuriant fall of silver hair tumbled over my shoulders.

I was walking too quickly to notice it then. Of the gray that had begun, little by little, to show once I passed forty, not a single strand was mixed into my hair now.

"Masha! Masha!"

I called loudly for the head maid of our household. At my call, a woman in a black maid's uniform hurried toward me from far off.

"Yes, Madam. Did you call?"

"What is the meaning of this? I rang the bell. Why hasn't a maid come?"

"Th-that is..."

I swept my hair back in irritation, ready to take Masha to task, and then I noticed something strange.

"Masha. Why have you grown so young?"

"Pardon?"

Masha had been hired as my personal maid when I was twenty, and she had stayed faithfully at my side for twenty years, until I turned forty. We had lived so long together that she was no different from a sister to me. Which was to say I knew her from the first thing to the hundredth.

Was she ever this young?

I blinked. The Masha before me differed, in every respect, from the Masha I knew. Her thick chestnut hair was a far riper chestnut than the shade in my memory, and her freckled face held not wrinkles but a fresh, dewy brightness. That flustered expression was unfamiliar too. After she became head maid, Masha had grown adept at hiding what she felt.

That looks exactly like Masha when she had just been hired as my personal maid...

The thought rose, and I let out a short laugh. Impossible. I pressed a finger to the spot between my brows and scoffed.

"I must have worn myself out preparing the celebration. Brew me some peppermint tea."

"Pardon? M-me?"

"Then who else is going to serve me tea?"

The tea I drank was always brewed by Masha. In my younger days I had brewed it myself, but once I had the household fully in my grasp there was far too much to do, and I had handed off chores like tea-brewing to her...

She has the face of someone who has never done it once.

At my retort, the unease on Masha's face was plain. The way she clutched her apron in both hands was not merely unfamiliar. It was new.

Just as I narrowed my eyes and formed a hypothesis, a voice cold as autumn frost rang, sharp as a blade, at my ear.

"Who dares make a racket first thing in the morning, and before whom?!"

...!

The moment I heard it, a chill shot from the nape of my neck down my spine. The corners of my eyes trembled of their own accord.

How could I ever forget this voice.

I turned my head slowly. A woman with her hair teased high and rolled into a round coiffure gripped the stair rail and glared at me. Behind that stiff, vinegary figure, five maids followed with their heads bowed low.

She had the dignity of a queen. But I knew what hid behind that refined face: a temper not even a dog could match.

I opened my lips. What came out was a thoroughly choked voice.

"...Mother."

"Who is your mother? Can you not address me properly, as the Dowager Duchess of Parnel?"

That cur's temper, forbidding me to call Mother Mother. There was no mistaking her, even if I had wanted to.

She was my first mother-in-law, Lady Rosa, who had died of illness ten years ago. The moment I saw her, a sharp pain stabbed through my head, and I pressed my palm hard against my forehead.

What is this? Why is the mother-in-law who died years ago walking around my house?

Then another voice rang out, sharp, from the other side.

"Aigo, who is making such a fuss first thing in the morning? My head hurts enough as it is..."

Whining dripped from every syllable of that voice. This one, too, was impossible to confuse.

The second mother-in-law!

Open her mouth and something ached, or the neighbor had done such-and-such for her—a professional complainer among complainers. Our second mother-in-law.

Two mothers-in-law, and both of them nightmares. Surprised? It was far too early to be surprised.

"You bitches! What are you so proud of, running your mouths! I ought to beat the shit out of you!"

Filthy curses that had no place in the Parnel ducal house.

My third mother-in-law, so profoundly ignorant that to call her the second most ignorant soul in the country would have left her aggrieved. I was so dumbfounded I laughed.

"Hahaha. Even the third mother-in-law..."

At this point, however I tried to deny reality, I had to admit it.

I've returned to the past!

Somehow, I had come back through time and become a twenty-year-old fledgling duchess.