Maria-sama ga Miteru:Volume22 Chapter5.2

Part 2.

Sachiko-sama's room was a room fit for a princess. A huge, beautiful room.

But that didn't mean that the walls were lined with pink flowers or that the room was filled with teddy bears or other such girly things. It was a room of ivory walls and curtains of a brick-like crimson. The room was a work of art.

The curtains were different than the ones she had seen last time. Perhaps Sachiko changed the color for the season.

Rei considered herself a child, but even to her untrained eye, she could easily spot the furniture made of quality, old wood.

"...."

Just what didn't this room have? There was a four-poster bed, a desk, a grand piano, and a table set all fit into one room. Plus Sachiko even had her own bathroom.

"Please, sit."

Sachiko said, as she picked up a circular object from her table.

"Embroidery?"

With a single glance, she knew it was. To Rei who had a hobby with such crafts, there was no mistaking it.

"Yeah, just a bit."

"Show me."

"No, I'm not as good as you are, Rei."

Sachiko hesitated, but then showed Rei the work.

"I don't really stitch that often."

Rei took the stitching in her hand and set her cheeks in place. In the middle of a white handkerchief, a red rose was blooming. This had to be a Bullion Stitch.

"It looks fine by me."

"Really?"

Sachiko smiled at the praise. Rei was a lucky girl to get a princess to smile at her like this.

"For Yumi?"

"You can tell?"

"Well you know..."

Sachiko always daydreamed about Yumi. She didn't show it but she thought of Yumi as the cutest thing ever. Rei and Sachiko were good friends so Rei knew these things.

It was not quite love.

The two had a relationship that could be best summarized by something Sachiko's previous Onee-sama Mizuno Youko had said. "Ever since you made Yumi your soeur, you've started to make these great faces."

Yumi-chan was pushing Sachiko in a good direction.

"Let's eat."

"Even though we're still waiting on your cake Rei?"

"Even then."

The two laughed and suddenly a knock came from the door. Sayako Obaa-sama had brought tea.

"Thanks for waiting."

Sayako Obaa-sama said as she placed heated slices of Rei's pound cake on their plates.

"Ah, sorry."

"I tasted your cake already Rei-san. It was unbelievably delicious."

"Thank you. I put a lot of hard work into it."

Rei's response was simply flattery but it seemed to make Sayako Obaa-sama happy.

"What did you use to make it? Please show me some time."

"Oh, I'll write down the recipe and send it to you. As soon as I ..."

Rei stuttered as she spoke. Sachiko's composed face seemed to be giving Rei a message.

"Well not right now you know. Soon though."

"Oh yeah sure. Please don't forget."

"Y, yeah."

Sachiko waited until Sayako Obaa-sama left for the room before she shrugged.

"Ah, thanks for holding back on the recipe. If you hadn't, the family's stomachs would wretch at the sound of pound cake too."

It seems like recently Obaa-sama had cooked a fairly large amount of Mille-feuille, and had been causing trouble for her family and friends. If that's all it was then Rei would have no problems holding off on the recipe from Obaa-sama.

"So?"

Sachiko changed the subject as she sipped her tea.

"You wanted to talk about something right?"

"Huh?"

Rei wondered whether she had revealed to much already, and finally admitted that she did want to talk. After all, she had something she wanted to talk with Sachiko about.

"You knew all along."

"I did. Just meeting without a reason isn't your style Rei. Though I would be happy if you just wanted to meet Rei."

"... I'm sorry about that."

"So am I. Plus I'm glad that you wanted to come and talk with me."

Sachiko went back to eating a bite of her pound cake and exclaimed "It's delicious".

"It's made of raisins, apricots, plums, and pineapples."

Rei began to count out individually the fruits that she had put into the home cooked pound cake.

"Is that all?"

"And figs."

"Ah, figs. Now that you mention it, it makes sense."

Sachiko seemed to feel more satisfied as she took a not very thin piece of cake, jabbed her fork through, and brought the fork into her mouth. Rei asked as she saw Sachiko eating.

"I've been thinking about a lot of things."

"Mmhmm."

Sachiko's answer was ambivalent.

Did Rei really want to go through with this? The thing was, she was only having trouble with finding her resolve at the end of the very end of the last part. And the only reason she could go back on her decision was because she was still in a position where she could fall back on something but what she chose. Once Rei began talking about it, she couldn't take the words back.

"Would you listen to something I want to say? Are you up for that, Sachiko?"

"Not a problem with me."

Sachiko responded.

"Just keep your thoughts to yourself until the end, okay Sachiko?"

Rei desperately pleaded with Sachiko. This was the reason she had come.

"Yoshino..."

How should she start this whole thing? But Sachiko was only going to listen and not offer any conclusions of her own, so hopefully she wouldn't press too hard on the topic Rei was going to open with.

"Has become close friends with an underclassman."

"..... Okay..."

"Middle school, third year, a girl named Arima Nana."

"Has Yoshino introduced her yet?"

Rei shook her head and said "No."

"I was doing some things, where I saw them together."

"What things?"

Rei was just relaying the story to Sachiko but maybe she was leaving too many of the finer details out of the picture.

"Oh, I was on an O-miai. That's when I saw Yoshino."

"An O-miai?"

Sachiko suddenly straightened, and narrowed her eyes. Oh yeah. Rei hadn't said anything about that before the vacation.

But it had been a long time since that O-miai. Then finals came up and then the winter vacation, and she never found the time to tell anyone about it.

"Well, um, we'll talk about the O-miai some other time. I just met some cousin I knew. Someone told me that he was going to get the same surgery that Yoshino had gotten so I wanted to cheer him on...."

Sachiko smiled as she asked her next question.

"How old was he?"

"Ten."

Rei answered.

"I thought so."

Sachiko thought and laughed dryly.

How had Sachiko known? How did she know it was a kid the moment she heard that he was going to have the same surgery that Yoshino had. Well Rei hadn't really given much import to the O-miai. If it had been a real O-miai then she would have probably made a much bigger fuss to Sachiko about it.

Now Rei was going back to her original point.

"So what does this Nana-san have to do with your O-miai?"

Sachiko asked.

"Yoshino just dropped in unannounced to the hotel, and she had brought that Nana girl with her."

"I see."

"My dad and the dad of the boy who I had an O-miai with knew about Nana so I decided to do some research."

"More things I'd never expect you to do Rei."

Sachiko let out a bored sigh. Even Rei understood that these rash decisions weren't things she normally did.

"It's because Yoshino didn't tell me anything about her."

Sachiko noticed that whenever Yoshino came into the picture, Rei would suddenly start acting differently and her judgment abilities would become impaired.

"So? What's wrong other than her name?"

Sachiko leaned forward in anticipation.

"Arima Nana used to be Tanaka Nana."

Rei answered as Sachiko swallowed a piece of the pound cake. It felt like there had been a very large chunk of apricot. The fruit chunk must have missed the slice of the knife by a centimeter, because the whole point of the cutting was to decrease the clumps of fruit.

Why was this the only piece that had escaped the knife, though? It had also been missed when Rei had dumped the fruits into the batter, and even when she had been mixing the fruits through the batter.

"Wait a second. Who is this Tanaka Nana?"

Sachiko asked.

"The youngest daughter of the Tanaka sisters."

"Ah, like that Oonaka girl you faced off against in last year's and this year's kendo matches. Those Tanaka sisters?"

"Yeah, those. I was a bit surprised when I found out."

The man who owned the Arima Doujo was their son in law. It was a fairly well known story in the kendo world and so Rei's father and grandfather had known about it, but those lower in the Hasekura family hadn't.

And so Rei hadn't known. Rei didn't think Yoshino had known this either when she became friends with Nana.

"How do you think they met?"

"Who knows."

Rei didn't know that much. She had investigated all she could about Nana's life, but she hadn't asked either how they had met. They were all on the same Lillian Girls' School premises, so there was at least one place she could have talked to either.

"But it's a very recent thing."

This had to be Rei's soeur intuition. But Yoshino hadn't seemed to be close with Nana before the school festival. And during the Soeur Audition Tea Party, Yoshino hadn't even been sure about the 'p' in petite soeur. Even though Yoshino had been so aggressive about it then.

"Rei."

"Whenever or wherever they met I don't care a bit about. But why couldn't she tell me?"

Rei stabbed the cake with her fork in her anger.

"Rei!"

"I know, I know I'm asking too much of her. I'll be graduating soon and Yoshino needs to find a soeur. But at least, tell..."

"Stop!"

Sachiko lightly tapped Rei on the forehead.

"You've become feverish."

Sachiko's touch had felt cool to Rei. And yet for some reason, the palm of Sachiko's hand had cooled Rei down.

"I'll hear all your complaints in a second. But first just calm down a bit."

Sachiko said and stood up. Rei looked at Sachiko, wondering what she was about to do. Sachiko turned toward the room door.

"You can't finish this piece of cake, right? So I'll just go downstairs and grab a spoon."

Sachiko pointed to the cake then left the room. Rei's eyes fell on top of the cake on her plate and there she found a piece that Rei judged too thin to be eatable with a fork.