Gardens

  Lucia was concerned about Lady Veronique.

  She knew Miss Hawkings wasn’t stupid and was likely to notice the young Lady was looking at things that weren’t there, yet as far as Lady Veronique didn’t speak out aloud to those things maybe Miss Hawkings wasn’t bound to know for sure just suspect.

  However right now she had to focus on the task ahead.

  Mos and Bos weren’t as behaved as they were with Lady Veronique, and got quite whiny when they noticed the lady was missing, and to make things worse they weren’t used at all to the leash so taking them to this walk wasn’t an easy task.

  Lucia had to be careful to not let them go anywhere near where the Lady was to stop them from trying to reach their owner and accidentally sabotage her, while at the same time to keep them from getting upset.

  So far she had been successful in that task, the issues she had right now were the leashes tangling and the dogs pulling on the leash to try to run off.

  Lucia was quite strong but the sudden pulls nearly made her lose her balance a couple of times, this sure was going to be a problem if they kept acting like this once they were grown.

  Kaine had to steady her once, but he didn’t need to intervene again once Lucia got the hang of it and successfully reigned in the dogs.

  She had no idea if to be grateful for his presence or blame him for the dogs acting erratically

  Lucia really didn’t know what to think of the Undead guard, what she knew about him was that he kept holding the lowest rank among the knights and wasn’t even recognized as a proper one, was he the only one that volunteered to look after Lady Veronique like herself? Or was he the only one that was spared for the task?

  He did look imposing and dangerous, which was a good thing for a guard but as far as Lucia knew no one of the other members of the Aurelia’s family had one, so the fact Duchess Lucretia thought Lady Veronique needed one was concerning.

  Lucia wondered if he was there to compensate for her lark of skills since Mr Jerkings seemed quite sour with her all of the sudden.

  Or would it be possible that he found out?…no if that had been a problem she wouldn’t have been hired in the first place, let alone be allowed to be around Lady Veronique.

  Given how the staff in the library behaved maybe the Duchess just got concerned about the Lady’s safety and Kaine might be of low rank but he was still a trained Knight.

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  He was probably just there as deterrent more then anything.

  Lucia glanced at him and saw his eyes were pointed to somewhere to the right while he still held his on guard stance.

  She followed his line of sight and saw white hair behind some bushes

  ‘Amelia?’ she wondered, then got distracted by Bos pulling hard on the leash, by the time she looked again there was nobody ‘No, it couldn’t have been her’ she dismissed her initial thought ‘Amelia wouldn’t be able to go out on such a sunny day without her umbrella and would never leave Duchess Lucretia’s side unless ordered, but the Duchess wouldn’t be that cruel’ Lucia had no idea on who else it could be and what they would gain by spying on her ‘maybe they weren’t even spying, they could have been just there for some other reason and we mistook it as spying’ she ended up reasoning and focused back on the task at hand.

  Miss Hawkings’s Study

  The time of the day Veronique was dreading had arrived as she entered the theater of her doom, she would rather keep reading her book then subject herself to this but she had no choice in the matter.

  Damn it sucked to be a child and the worst part of this was that as a low end noble she was probably going to be ordered around for the rest of her life.

  What a joy.

  Miss Hawkings’s study remembered her more of an old fashioned fancy classroom, the giant chalkboard on the wall sure sold it as such.

  There was a long table in the middle facing the chalkboard vertically, it wasn’t a big table compared to the ones in the Dinning room in the Main wing, in truth it was even shorter then the one Veronique used in the Est wing.

  “Ladies take your seats so we can start the first part of our lesson” Miss Hawkings declared

  “First part?!” Veronique didn’t want to hear that

  “Yes, first part then we will resume after lunch” the older woman specified “Now I will simply evaluate your behaviour of the day and point out your mistakes” Rhea followed Veronique to sit next to her “for a start I would prefer if the two of you were at the opposite sides of the table and not sitting next to each other”

  “But I want to sit next to Veronique” Lady Rhea complained

  “Don’t you want Lady Veronique to learn well?” Miss Hawkings rebutted as Veronique rolled her eyes at the oblivious manipulation

  ‘Just let the child sit where she wants’ she complained in her head, however she had to admit that if Rhea sat next to her, then she would have difficulty seeing the board since Veronique would be in the way and that was without counting on the fact that they might distract each other.

  “Alright” Rhea obeyed

  “Good, now Lady Rhea can you point out yourself what you did wrong today?” Miss Hawkings asked despite knowing the answer, while it was a good way to gauge a student understanding Veronique feared that having such question repeated everyday would end up harming Rhea’s confidence in the long term.

  “I shouldn’t have hit Alexander” the child answered guiltily after thinking about it.

  “Anything else?” Miss Hawkings pushed on it.

  “No?” Rhea ended up saying already doubting herself, which Veronique didn’t like.

  “Wrong, you shouldn’t have called Veronique over and talked to her so much during the meal and it was rude to pull on her dress as well” the old woman explained

  “Is that such a big of a deal? I don’t mind if she does” Veronique rebutted not seeing the point of stopping a child from acting like a child.

  “Lady Veronique may not mind, but the same can’t be said of all the people looking up to the Aurelia to uphold top notch manners at all the times” Miss Hawkings started her speech “we must always give our best and show no flaw”

  “That’s impossible we are humans, not robots” Veronique spoke without thinking about the word she just used

  “Robots?” Miss Hawkings repeated slowly making the redhead pale as she caught up on what she just said.