THE PLAN.

The minute they all got back from the ball, Yvette was once again thrown in the cellar.

She didn't mind. If she wanted out she would just pick the lock, and anyway the kitchen staff knew where to deliver her food to at any rate, so she wouldn't starve.

Now that the ball was over and done with, and her first public appearance had gone off more or less without a hitch, she decided to make a preemptive strike. At night, she snuck out, hopped out a window, and went searching in the woods for a specific kind of plant.

Yvette didn't know the name of it, but in her memories, old Yvette had stumbled across an area where these red weeds were growing, and there were a bunch of dead animals surrounding the area near it. It was clearly poisonous if ingested.

Yvette plucked a bunch and then went back to the manor. Rather than return to the cellar, however, she decided to directly ambush a cook.

She found the one who was in charge of making tea every morning, and hovered over them as they slept.

When they woke up a few minutes later, the first thing they saw was Yvette smiling creepily down at them. Yvette clasped her hand over the cook's mouth before they could scream.

"Do this one thing for me and I won't kill you. Understand?"

The cook nodded.

So Yvette gave them her instructions. Every two days, they would grind up a little bit of the red weed and mix it in with the tea leaves for the tea that Claude drinks in the morning. The amount should be small enough that there won't be any discolouration.

It was a very clear, very obvious poisoning attempt. But what could the cook do except for agree?

Yvette was hoping that with the small dose and the fact that Claude would only be drinking the poisoned tea every other day and not every day, the effects wouldn't be so immediate. The idea was a gradual sickness, but at the same time a sickness that didn't spread so slow as to last a whole year or two. Hopefully, with this regimen Claude would start showing symptoms by next week, and by the week after that he'll start getting ill, and the week after that he'll be bed bound and unable to leave the house.

She wasn't really in a hurry to get rid of him or anything, but she didn't need to play around with him for too long either.

With that settled, Yvette returned to her cellar, intending to spend the rest of her days locked up relaxing, when she was suddenly visited by Genevieve.

She had her hand on her hips and her mouth twisted into a frown. "Tell me, how did an ugly thing like you catch Duke Olivier's attention?"

Yvette yawned and stretched her arms over her head. "Am I really?"

"Are you really what?"

"Ugly."

Genevieve froze, sealing her lips together, unwilling to answer. Yvette just laughed.

When it became clear that Yvette wasn't going to respond in a way she wanted, Genevieve stomped away in a huff. Yvette suspected that she would likely share with Sabine what had happened, and they'd realise that Yvette wasn't the same as she was before.

She wasn't worried, though. In fact she was kind of looking forward to see what Sabine and Genevieve would have planned for her.

In the mean time, while Yvette was catching up on her rest, the manor was getting nonstop invitations for Yvette to attend a myriad of different events. Adele had to angrily sort through all of them, rejecting most of them claiming that Yvette was shy and didn't quite like attending social events, until she saw the invitation from Louise Allain.

The Allain family were not particularly powerful on their own, but everyone knew about her engagement with the crown prince, and Adele knew that she couldn't simply throw away and invitation from the future queen of Royaume. So she reluctantly accepted the invitation for Yvette to go over for tea, and then informed Matthias to tell Yvette that she would be taking her to go shopping to prepare for it.

Apparently letting Yvette show up in an old dress to a more crowded event was okay, but to something more intimate like a small gathering for tea was unacceptable. She didn't bother explaining any of this to Yvette, but she figured she didn't want anyone to think the Decaux family were stingy with their money.

At any rate, shopping with her mother was a novel experience. At all the shops they went to the staff there would fawn over Yvette and flatter her endlessly, while Adele simply stood there and looked on in frustration. All she had instructed the ladies at the boutique to do was to find something that fit Yvette and then gave them a price range.

By the end of the day, when Yvette had upgraded her wardrobe from four of the same dresses to thirty dresses in all sorts of styles for different events, she couldn't tell whether the look on Adele's face meant that she really needed to go to the bathroom or if she was just really really annoyed that she had to spend all that money on the daughter she hated.

Yvette concluded that maybe it was both.

When they arrived home and got out of the carriage, Yvette saw Sabine and Adam talking by the courtyard. Sabine had one of her hands on Adam's arm, and she was smiling at whatever he was saying.

Adele frowned at the sight, not liking that Sabine was getting close to a mere gardener, while Yvette refrained from laughing. She supposed this was Sabine getting back at her for what happened by the tree before.

Rather than act upset, when Yvette walked past them, she just waved cheerfully at Adam and didn't bother sticking around. Sabine might have thought it was a competition, but Yvette was not about to play by her rules. And anyway, if it really was a competition, there was no way Yvette was losing.