Night of Eden 88

Chapter 88

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"What?"

Isabella's reaction didn't deviate from Nordstrom's expectations. Oh, what to do, she sighed in frustration.

"Tilly Bryson... You're sure he's there... right?"

"Yes."

"And his bodyguards?"

"Don't worry about them. Tilly will be with the young master, if that's what you're worried about. He's got his back."

Nordstrom's reassurances were useless. Isabella was on the verge of tears.

"What should we do, honey?"

Anton patted her hand soothingly.

"Don't you think we should go there now? What if Teddy gets a bad idea? I'm so afraid that he'll do something wrong!"

"Tilly Bryson is with him, and he's never wrong, so let's trust him and wait."

It was no use.

Isabella sobbed softly, and Anton pulled her to him and patted her back gently.

"It's my fault, it's all my fault! When Teddy confided in me that day, I should have realized right away that something was wrong...."

She repeated the same words almost every day for the past three years. Each time, Anton soothed her without a single grimace.

"I should have poked and prodded to find out who it was and brought the girl here myself... If I had... then none of this would have happened...."

"No, it's not your fault, the girl had already made up her mind and left."

"Oh, God. Why are you doing this to my son?"

Isabella raised her head to the sky like a madwoman and then burst into tears again. Anton felt like crying, too.

After that, the first year had been rather good.

Because Theodore was burning with passion to find the maid. At that time, Anton could not understand his son at all.

He'd raped the maid, forced her to run away, and then he'd sent his servants scurrying from place to place, searching everywhere for her.

He was unbearably angry that his son was such a poor fool.

Rumors spread like wildfire. Even the nameless hillbillies in the countryside seemed to know what the young master of Macmilan had done with women.

Blinded by jealousy, he had written a scandalous play about a dear friend, broken up with his fiancée, and now he wandered the world like a ghost, searching for the woman who had run off with another man.

The truth, a lie, had been exposed to the world. There were even people selling it as a romantic novel.

He knew that Theodore visited her home in Dorset several times a month. Even when he was certain she wasn't there.

Anton went beyond anger to bewilderment and doubt.

He convinced Tilly to retrace his son's steps in Dorset. He found that his son visited the same places and did the same things, as if it were a well-organized itinerary.

It started with a small, crumbling house in a field. Theodore would stare at it for hours on end.

While Anton and his son stood there, doing the same thing, Tilly brought in a neighbor who lived nearby. He began his explanation with familiarity.

"That's the house where John Bordon lived with his little granddaughter until he died."

Anton suddenly realized: Theodore was feeling the vestiges of the maid’s childhood.

For the first time, he felt compassion for his son instead of anger.

"Dana was such a sweet, beautiful child.”

"And such a poor child, too. She lost her parents within a year of her birth when the plague returned to the village, and when she was growing up, she lost her only grandfather in the Great Famine."

"But John Bordon, it made me smile to see how the old man raised his granddaughter so lovingly and beautifully, right up until the day he died."

"Dana's a very good-natured girl, and she's been brought up to be a good girl. Every woman who had a son wanted that girl, even though they couldn't afford a dowry."

"She was quick and smart, and she helped out by sewing for a living, and whenever there was a wedding or a funeral in the neighborhood, she'd go and work to make money, so when John died suddenly, she took care of everything, from the funeral to the burial. She cried so hard it was almost painful to watch... and yet, that little thing...."

It was strange.

Anton cared nothing for the maid's personality or character. He could only surmise that Theodore had been forcibly drunk, and that she must have been quite disfigured.

But the longer the villagers talked, the more he felt sorry for them. He felt sorry for his son, who had done something unusual.

It wasn't just lust.

It wasn't an impulse or an unhealthy obsession.

His son had really, humanly, liked her.

"The child was so good. That peevish widow Dorrison couldn't have done better than to ask her to be a maid at a nobleman's house, Hazel or Hastings, a very respectable family, where she had some security."

"The maid there said she is so young, but the window begged them to take her in.”

"Well, Dana would have been fine no matter who she met or where she worked."

It was hard for Anton to listen anymore. His heart sank as he thought of his son, who must have come here every time and heard the same story over and over again.

Tilly led him to the next trail. It was a cemetery on the outskirts of town.

"John Bordon’s grave is here. Dana's grandfather."

Anton found the gravesite first.

He knew Theodore had already done the work, but he asked the gravedigger again. If anyone else was looking for that tomb, capture them by any means necessary.

The gravedigger was speechless at the additional gold. As he left the guard post and stood before John Bordon’s gravestone, Anton burst into tears for the first time in his life at the sight of a faceless man.

Theodore stood there for a long, long time, lost in thought.

Theodore's desperation was palpable, and he wondered if he would ever see her again.

Anton swallowed back a sigh and turned away, and when he returned to Peron, his mind was completely changed.

For his son's sake, he had to find the maid.

He was wondering what he should do with a woman who had already left for another man, but he thought that if his son met her again, he might be able to let go of his attachment and come to his senses.

He gave Tilly dozens of assistants. He even tried to launch his own search, using all his connections and administrative power.

But for more than two years, they were unsuccessful.

"I don't think she's missing, but I think she's running away on purpose, covering her tracks meticulously, and if she really is, it won't be easy to find her.”

Even the Empire's best detective said so.

In the meantime, Tilly had crossed the continent and headed for the Federation. Anton didn’t have much hope.

It was twice the size of the mainland for starters, overrun with immigrants, and the nature of the Confederacy meant that the laws and administration varied from state to state, making it difficult to find people.

But Theodore didn't let that stop him. He scoured the mansions of noblemen from the mainland, the famous horse farms, and the tea houses that sprang up in every alleyway.

Anton was becoming increasingly unmotivated; he was growing weary of his son.

Then, half a year ago, Theodore suddenly stopped searching.

Had it occurred to him that he was like Sisyphus, doomed to roll a rock up the hill for eternity?

He stopped everything at once. He locked himself up in Kreutz.

When they heard that he had not been out for over a month, they went to Kreutz themselves.

Tilly was not there, but they were greeted by the butler, Berzlow. One look at the butler's white face was enough to tell.

He knew what his son would look like.

As expected, the door was locked tight.

Theodore was drunk and high on drugs when he forced it open.

If he had just passed out, he wouldn't have been so shocked. He was thinking of emptying his mind and forcibly admitting him to a mental hospital.

But Theodore seemed so normal on the outside.

He was a little disheveled, but he wasn't covered in feces and vomit like most junkies.

"You’re here."

His son was dressed in a straight shirt and pants, no tie. His pronunciation was on point.

But he could tell from his unfocused, wandering eyes that he wasn't in his right mind.

He thought about punching him or grabbing him by the throat to bring him to his senses. But the next words that came out of his mouth made him stop dead in his tracks.

"...I'm sorry. I'm trying, it's just not working out as well as I thought it would."

Those few, simple words broke his parents' hearts.

They would rather seeing him wandering around the world like a runaway train than this.

Theodore was broken.

Their one and only son, the only heir to the family name, was completely broken.

Anton despaired.

Just when he thought nothing could go wrong, three months ago, something even more despairing happened.

Theodore suddenly burst through the gates of Kreutz and began to 'pretend to be normal'. At first, they thought it was real.

When he stopped drinking and taking drugs, joined the polo team training and started to get in shape, he and his wife were hopeful.

But that, too, was an illusion.

Theodore was instead falling deeper into darkness.

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