Plague and famine ran through the town of Shadif, eventually claiming the lives of a number of people, including some within the Ardennes family. Instead of attempting to understand or reconcile with the problem, everyone within the family blames Chloe, the second daughter and someone with a noticeable birthmark that reeks of someone who’s cursed. Throughout most of her childhood she’s denied the very basics despite being a noble, and it only gets worse when her only defender, a handmaiden named Shirley, had to to leave the Ardennes household following a death within her family. At 16, Chloe is essentially trained to bow and accept that everything is her fault, until her mother stabbed her with a knife, an event which has Chloe fleeing for good.
She manages to travel over mountains and reach the royal capital, Liberta, but with no money and no idea of what to do aside from finding Shirley, Chloe is at a complete loss. She is then accosted by a group of thugs who attempt to take her away, but is saved by Lloyd, a Knight of the capital. When she awakens she’s in his home, unsure what to do until a talk with Lloyd leads to her being hired by him to be a housekeeper. Before she knows it, she starts to learn what it’s like to live a normal life — or at least she tries to, while still being plagued of her servitude and desolate upbringing.
Very much along the lines of works like I’ll Never Set Foot in This House Again! and My Happy Marriage, Safe & Sound in the Arms of an Elite Knight is your general heroine treated extremely harshly by her family that slowly starts to heal under the care of someone who wants to help. The nature of these stories makes it sometimes extremely tough depending on what the author chooses to write about, but the appeal of someone, in this case Chloe, rising despite their terrifying circumstances is compelling. Simply put, Chloe finding her own path despite everything is wonderful to read.
This doesn’t happen overnight, naturally. The scars, literally and figuratively, still remain after far too long, to where even wielding a knife is impossible for her. Mentally Chloe even wonders if she truly deserves to have happiness after spending so long treated literally like she’s not human. But from spending time with Lloyd, going shopping, and even interacting with someone else’s family for the first time ever, Chloe begins to learn new things about herself, and hopefully, start to take the next step to heal along the way.
She’ll naturally do that with Lloyd, whose stoic and sometimes aloof nature hides the fact that he has his own set of demons in his past, which is why, unbeknownst to him at the time, he connected with Chloe’s plight. How these two interact has been interesting, from how he reacts to seeing how she genuinely enjoys an average pot-au-feu to much later in the first volume his mindset when he must protect Chloe from harm, and how Chloe responds in order to change the situation. Again, since this is a romantic work it’s not doing anything out of the ordinary, but with some quirks (don’t play a drinking game with how many times Lloyd mentions his time in the jungle) and good pacing, this is a very engaging read.
There’s still much to learn about our characters, none more so than Chloe and what, if anything at all, her birthmark actually is, but our current villains — The Ardennes family — actually was what I was hoping to get more info out of aside from what we got. Granted, we got enough about what led to why they’ve treated Chloe so unacceptably poorly, but the aftermath of what happened to the family after Chloe ran away was great. Isabella essentially losing her mind just makes me wonder how far gone she is, and Chloe’s sister Lily didn’t come close to having much page time, which is why I wonder why she is the way she is. What exactly has Isabella been doing to Lily to have her think she can make Chloe create all these dresses and treat her poorly? Maybe we’ll find out in volume 2?
Maybe we’ll also find out if the entire Ardennes line has collapsed, as without Chloe actually around, they all discover (this includes the servants themselves) she’s handled a majority of the work, which means they can’t even manage their domain at all. And while Chloe doesn’t want to hide her actual noble upbringing from Lloyd, at some point she’s not going to have a choice. And will Chloe meet up with Shirley at some point? There’s much that compels me to find out, and there’s much to hope that Chloe will continue to discover who she really is under a brand new and much more positive environment.