Chapter 5.3

The Two Marriage Ceremonies (3)

After the maids made me take a bath, I went to where Father and Mother were, feeling and looking refreshed. I felt pretty suffocated, as I was wearing another of my sister’s hand-me-down dresses and looking completely like an aristocrat. However, when my parents saw me, Father slumped his shoulders and said, “It’s a waste to marry you off.” Mother also lamented, “If only we could have given you to a better family.” No, I’d rather not, because if I married into too good a household, I would’ve only become the shame of the Caliente family, so I would like it if you didn’t.

As we ate dinner, Father bitterly recounted how persistently Cermiane came to ask for my hand in marriage. On the other hand, Mother awaited his daily visit with joy, since she had taken a liking to him, who was so incredibly beautiful. In addition, my niece who was three years younger than me, began to admire him deeply, so my troubled oldest brother apparently supported Cermiane, saying, “Please hurry up and approve his engagement with Ralphene.” Well, if the first daughter of the Marquis’ successor started saying that she wanted to marry a mere knight, that would be a big problem indeed. That niece was glaring daggers at me the entire dinner. Not my fault.

From the following day, I was busy preparing for the wedding. When Father approved Cermiane’s proposal, it had already been decided that the wedding would take place around a week after I arrived. A reservation was already made at the temple and the date was officially decided. Since the material and style of the ceremonial outfits were already decided to follow the Caliente tradition, all that was left to do was to tailor them to fit my body. So they hastily took my measurements and very quickly started to tailor them.

Properly speaking, the wedding ceremony at the marquis level should have consisted of tailoring new outfits for everyone attending on my side of the family, not just myself, have the wedding take place at the Imperial Grand Temple with His Majesty the Emperor attending, and host a banquet that lasts for three days at both the Imperial Palace and at the Caliente residence, but my marriage partner was Cermiane, a poor knight. If we did that, he would become bankrupt. As such, the scope of the wedding ceremony was shrunk down as much as possible and became a wedding ceremony that a typical knight would host. Since I didn’t want such a grand ceremony, I didn’t mind at all. We would host our wedding with only my parents and siblings present, and we would hold our banquet at the Caliente residence with only close acquaintances invited.

When I found out that Mama and Papa, the only ones I really wanted to come, couldn’t make it, I lost all interest in the wedding at the speed of light. When the people at the territory held the, uh, festival-like thing, that was the official wedding for me. But, when Mother, the maids, and even my sisters who came back from their new families, were putting their hearts into preparing this wedding for me, I couldn’t let their efforts go to waste. So I held it in when I had to try on countless dresses for my banquet attire.

Anyway, I had wondered, “Couldn’t they have made the schedule a little less tight?” But Cermiane had insisted that he wanted to hold the ceremony during his vacation, apparently. However, I learned afterwards that in the case of a wedding, knights would get marriage leave, so Cermiane had actually taken that marriage leave after our wedding, too. Apparently, Cermiane was concerned that after some time had passed, Father would change his mind and cancel the engagement. And truth be told, Father asked me multiple times, “Are you really okay with that man? There are better candidates who asked for your hand in marriage, too.” Apparently, it was easy for a marquis to annul an engagement to a knight using his power and influence.

I was forced to attend one tea party and one soiree before my wedding. At these events, I was introduced as the treasured, hidden daughter of the Caliente family and received a lot of attention. Immediately afterwards, a lot of engagement proposals came from high-ranking noble families, but by then, it was too near the wedding ceremony for anyone to cancel it, so I was safely able to become Cermiane’s bride. Father was lamenting this, but it was Cermiane’s strategic victory. Well, there’s no way he could marry me, a monkey-like daughter who hadn’t received proper noble education, off to a high-ranking noble family, so he probably wasn’t serious.

The day of the wedding, the maids and my sisters dressed me up in the ceremonial outfit and applied my make-up. Rather, since I came to the Capital, the maids scrubbed me squeaky clean every day. Thanks to their efforts, I was glowing, the most I’ve ever glowed in my entire life. My hair was silky and my skin was radiant. In the first place, my knicks and cuts healed really quickly and I tended to lose my sunburns and tans really quickly. So as they took care of my skincare everyday, my skin was back to being snow-white in no time.

The wedding dress had a lot of pure-white lace and was gorgeous and luxurious, so it was obviously incomparable with the dress they made me wear back in the territory. But, since it was so luxurious, it was very suffocating and heavy. I could still fight in the one I wore in the territory, but with this one, it was impossible. Once I wore the veil that had the Caliente pattern on it, my look was complete. When they saw me, Father was speechless, my brothers were flabbergasted, my sisters and Mother squealed in delight.

“Ralphene, you look so incredibly beautiful!”

“I never thought you would be this beautiful!”

I could only say, “Thank you very much.” In the first place, this outfit and make-up wasn’t mine anyway.

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