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“Fine,” Charles said. “My carriage will drop you to her home and I shall come to see you first thing in the morning.”
“Thank you, Charles,” Edward said. He didn’t know if he could ever repay him for being on his side so that he could do the right thing. “I want to marry Ariadne as soon as possible. That will be the only way to keep her safe.”
“You have the ring with you, right?” Charles asked. Edward nodded.
“I wish you good luck, Cousin,” Charles said before he alighted from the carriage.
When he got to Ariadne’s home, the streets were already quiet even though few people still lingered around the scene of the fire. The entire studio had been decimated in the ruthless fire but it had thankfully been put out quickly before it could spread to the other buildings.
Most of the structures here were poorly built and depended on wood and thatch as the foundation. Edward shuddered to even think what would have happened if the fire had gotten out of hand. The entire neighborhood would have been burned to the ground. But he doubted his father had thought of that when he gave the order.
Leda opened the door up to him. “How is your sister?” he asked.
“She’s resting,” she replied. She looked around nervously and Edward could tell immediately that something was wrong.
“Are you all right?” he asked. Before Leda could reply, Emma came out of the kitchen carrying a few dishes in her hand. As soon as Leda saw her, she seemed to jump. “Lord Whitely! How kind of you drop by so late at night. We weren’t expecting you until tomorrow morning.”
“I needed to see if Ariadne was doing better,” Edward explained, but his eyes stayed on Leda. Something was definitely amiss here. He followed Leda into Ariadne’s room. He expected her to be asleep already, but when they entered she was sitting up on the bed with a piece of paper in her hand. Edward had the keen sense that she had been in that position for a while now.
“Edward,” she said with a start when he realized that he had come in. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to see you of course,” Edward said. He placed a chair near her bed and sat down. “Are you feeling better?”
She nodded.
“Charles and I handed over the perpetrator to a constable. Justice will prevail soon,” Edward said. He expected Ariadne to be happy about it, but she didn’t.
Edward was lost in his thoughts. “I confronted my father but he was adamant about his lies. He said he had nothing to do with it.”
“Your father may have not been lying after all,” Ariadne said.
This wasn’t the answer Edward was expecting. “What are you talking about?”
“An acquaintance of mine…he managed to find the true culprit behind the fire,” Ariadne said. “It was a boy, merely five-and-ten and he confessed to his crime.”
Edward’s eyes widened and he almost swore under his breath. “Where is he now? Did he hand that boy over to the constable?” Edward asked. He still couldn’t believe that he had caught the wrong person or that his father wasn’t the guilty party after all. Everything fit in perfectly.
Ariadne shook her head. “He isn’t exactly…friendly with the law, but he has promised to keep him in his custody and keep a close eye on him until we decide how to resolve this matter. There is something worse to be dealt with now,” she said. Edward frowned. What could be worse than today?
Without saying a word, she handed the piece of paper to him. Edward recognized it from the one she had shown to him a few weeks ago, the same that she had found tucked away in her mother’s pendant. The paper looked as if it had been dipped in water recently and words that he hadn’t seen before were scrolled on the other side, written in diminutive so Edward had to squint to read.
My dear Ariadne,
If you have this letter, I’m no more. I know that I have very little time left in this world. I have many regrets but the worst of it is that I couldn’t give you or Leda the life you deserve. I was consumed by my inventions which took up all of my day and night. My time and patience should have been spent on you. But despite all of that, both of you grew up to be so loving and compassionate and know that I may be lost to you, but my love for you isn’t. The one we considered family has betrayed me. Just a while before I wrote this, I caught her poisoning my soup. I suspect she has been doing this for a while now. I’m weak and don’t have much of me left. I can’t be saved now, but I needed you to know the truth.
Love,
Papa
“This is dated just the day before he passed away,” Ariadne said. Her voice sounded hollow. “We did everything we could to save him but in the end, he just wasn’t responding…” Ariadne’s words caught on a sob, “he gave up on us and his own life. Just like that. Didn’t we matter to him?”
Edward stood up from his chair and sat down on the bed next to her so he could be closer. “That’s not true.”
“You read the letter,” she said. “You know what he did. He could have told us about Emma. We could have done something.” Her voice held a note of betrayal.
“Ariadne, he loved you but your father was a smart man. He discovered that he was being poisoned so rather than spending the rest of his life like an invalid, he chose to remain silent so that the last dose could be administered,” he said. He felt terrible even as he explained.
“What does that even mean?” Leda asked.
