Secret Wardrobe of the Duchess

Chapter 3

Rubica’s aunt considered dressing up as extremely important. When the ladies of the neighborhood kindly pointed out her excessive dressing code, she just dismissed it as jealousy of the poor people. Therefore, she only met guests when she was perfectly dressed up.

Additionally, she would only let Rubica do her hair, saying she was good at it. But now, she skipped the morning dressing up session to meet a guest…

Rubica couldn’t understand. She stopped and blinked her eyes.
But then, the maids looked uncomfortable for Rubica still lingering around after Angela told her to leave.

She had no choice but to give up asking and left the room. She wanted to know who the guest was, but she was the Cinderella of the Berner Family. She didn’t belong in that meeting.

She used the back stairs for the servants to go up to her room in the attic. Then, she asked something to a servant she ran into.

“What year is it in the kingdom’s calendar? I suddenly can’t remember.”

“It’s year 473.”

The servant, who was carrying food, answered without giving much thought to it. Rubica could now feel the goosebumps appearing on her skin, and she held the ring even tighter.

The ring was the only thing that told her she wasn’t crazy, that what had happened in the past wasn’t fake.

‘Oh my!’

Rubica had died at the age of seventy and come back to herself at 22.

***

‘Am I crazy? Am I not crazy?’

Rubica asked herself, lying with her face down on the old bed in the small attic. What had suddenly happened to her was enough to make her lose her mind in shock. It wasn’t like she had died and resurrected. She had gone back in time, it should have been impossible.

Still, she couldn’t think that the life she lived until reaching 70 years old had been fake, and it was all a brief dream.

She could clearly remember what had happened just before her death and the famine she had suffered when she 69. However, everything that had happened this year, at the age of 22, was foggy and faint, and the memories were jumbled up together as if she was trying to recall things that had happened 40 years ago.

Most of all, she had a reason to believe she had come back in time because…
She looked at the ring on her chest with sad eyes. The blue stone that decorated it was beautiful, but it was neither sapphire nor blue topaz. It was just stone. However, Arman had never parted from it as if it was something precious.

The ring had been one of the reasons Rubica hadn’t been able to tell him she loved him. She thought he still couldn’t move on from his former lover.

‘This is Arman’s, it has to be.’

She had a good reason to be so sure like that. On the day of her birth, her mother had been very delighted to see that her child’s eyes had a red hue.

-Hue will bless you.

People with red eyes were blessed by Hue, the god of love. They will always meet good lovers and live happily. The mother hadn’t known that those red eyes would just become normal reddish-brown eyes as the girl grew up.

Therefore, she named her Rubica.
Ever since then, ruby had been the only type of jewel Rubica wore.

Although her aunt had taken all of it from her because of debt, there was a time when her accessory box was full of red gems. Even after that, she never wore any accessory that wasn’t red. The color fitted her the best and her late mother had liked it.