I Want to Teach You

Mikhail had suspected it from the very beginning. That was why he had deliberately ordered the under-butler to set out the dinner cutlery for breakfast. The instant Anastasia looked at the table and her face stiffened, suspicion hardened into certainty.

Anyone with even the faintest knowledge of table manners would have noticed something wrong at once. Yet Anastasia, far from pointing it out, only averted her eyes and began to pray.

Mikhail knew every prayer by heart as well. Not that he possessed so much as a fingernail’s worth of faith; he had memorized them solely to counter those who forever tried to belittle him as uneducated.

In Novgord the prayers used at any given moment were fixed by custom. There were fifteen in all for mealtimes. Mikhail waited patiently while Anastasia recited every last one of them. The moment she once again tried to dodge the problem facing her, he grew tired of waiting and finished the prayer for her. And then:

“Don’t you know how to use them?”

He closed off every path of escape.

This was one of Mikhail’s habitual methods: thrust the other person into an awkward situation and, while pretending to know nothing, slowly drive them into a corner. In the end you could see their true face. He was curious how Anastasia would respond.

Is it really only because of that?

In truth he did not deny that a touch of spite was mixed in. The reason was Anastasia’s clothes. When he had entered the room he had thought Natasha had simply rolled up a blanket and carried it in. A top far too thick for the season, and a shawl wound tightly around her neck as well. Was it about to snow outside all of a sudden?

Of course he knew she had asked Natasha to layer on more clothing. Still, he disliked the way she had wrapped herself so thoroughly, as if refusing to show him the clothes he had given her. In the hallucination she had worn them so prettily…

Mikhail watched Anastasia, whose ignorance had been exposed in an instant and who now had nowhere left to retreat. The moment he thought her clear green eyes had clouded—

Plip.

Fat tears spilled from Anastasia’s eyes. The one who was flustered was Mikhail.

It was not that he had failed to anticipate something like this. She was a fragile woman; even a little pressure would make her eyes well up—that much was obvious without looking. But he had never expected her to sob so hard, the way she had when the merchant startled her and she threw herself into his arms.

What’s so sad about not knowing a bit of etiquette?

He had cornered her because he wanted to see her look troubled, not because he wanted to see her cry. He had never once thought himself capable of such stupidity in his life, yet all he could do was stare at Anastasia as she wept without a sound.

After a long while Anastasia wiped her tears with the back of her hand. The fine tableware and food arrayed before her came into view. Only moments ago she had felt as if she had truly become a young lady, but that dream had not lasted even a day—not even an hour.

In truth Anastasia was well aware of her own ignorance. She still could not read the letters that even some of the maids knew, and she had never learned numbers either. She knew neither how to greet people nor any of the other common knowledge. Behind her back the servants whispered that she must be an idiot.

On nights when she fell asleep after hearing herself called deficient, she sometimes dreamed.

In those dreams she wore her clothes properly, spoke without stammering, and did everything right. Dressed in pretty clothes like Elizabeth or Catherine, neatly groomed, she moved with elegance. In the dreams no one glared at her or mocked her; they smiled and welcomed her. And they offered her a seat at their side.

And now the very thing she had always seen in her dreams had come true in reality—only for it to end like this.

“…I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?”

“I know too little… I think I’m going to make an unsightly spectacle of myself at your meal, Lord Mikhail.”

Having voiced the very fear she had been harboring, Anastasia started to rise from her seat. In that instant Mikhail suddenly reached out and shoved all the cutlery in front of her to one side.

“……?”

Startled by Mikhail’s abrupt action, Anastasia looked at him with wide eyes.

Mikhail stretched out an arm, picked up a freshly baked roll from the basket, dipped it straight into the soup, and brought it to his mouth. Next he picked up a piece of ham from another plate with his bare hand and carried it to his mouth just like that. Even Anastasia, who knew so little, could tell that everything Mikhail was doing right now was a complete violation of etiquette. As she stared at him, wondering why he would suddenly behave this way, he spoke.

“Anastasia, when I was a child I grew up in the stables of an inn.”

“…….”

“The only food I could get was the kitchen scraps from the inn. Sometimes… I even stole the horses’ fodder to eat.”

“…….”

She had known from the servants’ gossip that Mikhail was a commoner. But she had never heard a story like this.

“So of course my fingers were far more familiar than forks and knives. Even after I was quite grown.”

Mikhail ostentatiously sucked the butter from his fingertips. It was the sort of behavior that would get even a servant scolded by the others nearby for not doing such things.

“But now, even at meals with the nobles, no one says a word. Probably because my etiquette is more perfect than theirs. To the point that even that finicky Countess Lauderdale couldn’t open her mouth to criticize me.”

To Anastasia, who had stopped crying in her surprise, Mikhail winked one eye. At his playful gesture the tension that had locked her body slowly melted away.

“What you don’t know, you can learn. So there’s no need to be ashamed, and no need to apologize. You’ll be able to do it perfectly well if you learn, just like me. Won’t you?”

At Mikhail’s words Anastasia nodded. If someone taught her, she could do it too. She would be clumsy and lacking at first, but if only they taught her she would practice ten times—no, a hundred times—no, from morning till night so many times she couldn’t count them, until she mastered it.

“Yes, I can. I’ll learn from Miss Natasha.”

“That won’t do.”

“Ah… she must be very busy.”

Natasha spent a great deal of the day with her, but when Anastasia was in her room she often went off to do other work. So she couldn’t monopolize her all day.

“No, that’s not it.”

Mikhail picked up one spoon, one fork, and one knife from the cutlery he had pushed aside and arranged them neatly beside Anastasia again. Then he set his own the same way and said,

“It’s because I want to teach you.”

“But Lord Mikhail, you must be busy…”

“No. As it happens I’ve finished the work I was doing, so I plan to take a long rest for a while.”

If Igor and Yury had been present they would have foamed at the mouth. They were the ones who had urged Mikhail to rest, but the work was by no means finished. The point had been to stop him from working like a madman the way he did in Sokolov; the mountain of documents that still needed to pass through his hands today remained.

“Do you happen to have any other appointments today, Miss Anastasia?”

“…No.”

As if she would. If Mikhail hadn’t summoned her today she would have spent the whole day in her room.

“Good. Then we can take our time.”

Take our time.

Mikhail found his own words absurd. It was fortunate that Anastasia, her tear tracks still vivid, looked too dazed to notice. Otherwise she might have seen the slight tremor in the fingers that were now holding the knife.

Why am I…

Mikhail was dumbfounded by the story of his past that he himself had just volunteered. In Novgord there was no one who did not know his origins. But few knew exactly what kind of life he had led as a child. Because Mikhail had never spoken of it himself. Even Igor and Yury only knew that he had had a hard time; they did not know how far he had gone for survival, what he had eaten.

And yet here he was, pouring out a story he had never once told, all to soothe one weeping woman.

Mikhail looked down at his side, where a faint ache still lingered. He had clearly told Igor not to use any more drugs, so it couldn’t be that he had eaten something wrong—yet he could not understand why he was doing this. But there was no time to think deeply about it now. When he glanced beside him, Anastasia was staring fixedly at his hands.

How far can she go?

Novgord mealtime etiquette was needlessly complicated. A country founded by barbarians could hardly have had proper table manners. But once the foundations of the empire were laid, the founding emperor, Yazinsky the Great, apparently tired of being called a nation of barbarians and imported every complicated dining etiquette from other countries and made it Novgord’s own. As a result the nobles had to memorize etiquette several times more complex than that of other nations.

At Edenhurst she would have used the basic utensils, at least…

But like everyone else she would simply have eaten whatever came to hand in the most convenient way. So it would take quite some time before Anastasia could hold and use the utensils with proper hand movements.

Mikhail moved his long fingers and took hold of the knife. The position of the thumb, the place the index finger pressed, and exactly which part of the knife to grip. Even as he thought it a truly useless and tiresome set of rules, his hand picked up the knife with perfect precision.

Anastasia carefully moved her hands to follow him. He had no great expectations. For now, the mere fact that she was willing was enough.

Just as he thought. She might have roughly imitated him, but her posture was clumsy in the extreme. When Mikhail smiled as if in mild distress, Anastasia’s face immediately fell into a dejected pout.

It was truly amusing.

Mikhail found it entertaining the way Anastasia’s emotions shifted in an instant and showed on her face ever since he had entered this room. The reason he had been able to endure this endlessly boring Edenhurst from the moment he arrived until now was largely thanks to Anastasia. From the first time they met in the forest until now, she had continually aroused his interest.

It was the same now. Because her thoughts appeared so easily on her face, Mikhail did not even need to try to read her mind. An ignorance like that of a small child. Someday she, too, might put on a false mask before him the way others did.

Even as he thought it only natural, the idea of that day somehow left him in a foul mood.

“Lord Mikhail?”

Anastasia’s voice brought him back to himself. And he thought of the thing he had originally intended to do. Just as his secretaries had advised, something to while away his boredom while he stayed here.

Before summer ended, he would make this woman come into his arms of her own accord. Abandoning her god.

It would not take long. And once things went as he planned… he would probably grow bored of her.