A Stepmother’s Marchen

Chapter 2

To make matters worse, my husband had four children with his wife who had died. The eldest Jeremy and the second son Elias, the youngest fraternal twins Leon and Rachel.

From the first day I entered the house, the hostility and anger in their eyes was hard to describe by words.

Jeremy looked down on me, Ellias always pranked me, his pranks were too harmful to be a joke, and the twins often called me ‘fake mother’.

God alone knew how many sarira have accumulated in my body over the years of living with them.

(m.sarira= A bead-shaped substance found in bones left after the body of Buddha or a saint is cremated.)

Would I have loved this man, my husband, who I was sold to like a sheep in a slaughterhouse? He was my father’s age, and the reason he married me was because I looked like his first love.

Nevertheless, he was kind to me. He was always too kind and thoughtful.

Even though we were married, he never even touched me for the sole reason that I didn’t want to. In a way, he complied with my request even though he bought me.

I have never received such consideration and respect even from my family.

Although I didn’t love him, I respected him and felt grateful. Until he died of pneumonia after only two years of our marriage, we were quite friendly with each other.

After the Marquis heard that he was in critical condition, he sent the children out, and it was I, his young wife, who drove his relatives away and wrote his will.

Maybe he was considerate. A step he took to ensure that I, a young novice who no one treated as a real Marquis wife, could be respected in the house even after he dies….

But he left a heavy responsibility.

I still remember every word he said clearly.

All rights of the patriarch are temporarily entrusted to Shuri Van Neuwanstein, which is valid until the eldest son, Jeremy Von Neuwanstein, passes the age of adulthood and gets married.

If she dies before that time, everything will be taken by the imperial family.

It was a natural process, after all, the authority regarding inheritance was different.

Under the Imperial Act, the authority was solely passed on to the eldest son or son-in-law, and if the successor was too young, the uncle or aunt would represent them until the coming of age ceremony.

But since when was the Neuwanstein family ordinary?

Nevertheless, the Marquis’s handwritten signature and seal were stamped on the will that not only gave the power to control the knights to a young girl who didn’t reach adulthood, but also deal with all matters large and small in relation to position and social affairs, and even to sit in one seat in the council and speak out.

Everybody said he was crazy. I’m also wondering if there was something wrong with his brain.

My husband entrusted his children to me before he died.

It was a ridiculous thing to call me ‘mother’ and even the new title wasn’t suitable for me.

He even asked the people in the room to take care of me and protect me at all costs.

He had too much faith in me, and for that I have abided by the agreement in order to repay this trust.

I won’t bother to mention how scared I was when I was just 16 years old, surrounded by prominent aristocrats who are pressuring me to give up my sovereignty somehow and just look contemptuously at me.

I won’t bother to mention how scared I was when I was just 16 years old, surrounded by prominent aristocrats who are pressuring me to give up my sovereignty somehow and just look contemptuously at me.