If You Leave Without a Word - Chapter 99
‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾.
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Cain, leaving behind an unknown fury, departed the mansion again.
Agatha expected him to return soon, but he didn’t come back for an entire month. Even then, he stayed holed up in the separate quarters. The rare times he went out, it was to carry out imperial orders, and he never mentioned anything to his wife, Agatha.
Though they lived under the same roof, they lived as strangers, never truly interacting. Time passed mercilessly.
“Madam, it’s Liana.”
The cautious knock snapped Agatha out of her thoughts.
“Come in.”
Liana entered through the side door connecting the bedroom to the inner study. She looked around nervously, as if worried other maids might be attending to Agatha.
“It’s fine. I’ve instructed the maids not to enter in the mornings until I ring the bell.”
Recently, Agatha had ordered that no one enter her bedroom without her permission. This was because she was expecting secret reports from Liana.
“This letter came early this morning from a coachman who just arrived from Gulem.”
Liana carefully pulled something out from her robes and handed it over. It was a letter sealed with a red rose emblem. Agatha quickly verified the seal and opened the envelope.
Her eyes scanned the contents sharply, making Liana, who had done nothing wrong, feel uneasy.
“According to the information gathered from a traveling dry goods merchant, a red-haired gypsy woman in Arta has recently acquired a large mansion and is caring for orphans there.”
“Arta?”
“Yes. It’s said that such a large mansion is unlikely to be afforded by a wandering gypsy, so there are strange rumors among the merchants supplying food to the place.”
Arta. Of all places, why there? Agatha bit her lip silently.
“There are rumors that this red-haired gypsy has become the mistress of a wealthy, elderly nobleman.”
“Are there any outsiders visiting the mansion?”
“Armed knights have been seen leaving the mansion late at night or just before dawn.”
“What is the name of this red-haired gypsy?”
“Esther, they say.”
Esther. Agatha rolled the name on her tongue. She must be the woman Cain was passionately in love with.
The letter ‘E’ beside the woman in the sketch she found in the study a month ago flashed in her mind. Esther. It must be her. Now that she had confirmed the woman’s existence, Agatha set her long-delayed plan into motion.
“How is the task of getting her portrait drawn progressing?”
“I had the painter bring it directly. It seemed too risky to pass it through too many hands.”
Agatha nodded. Though Liana couldn’t become a handmaid due to her low birth, she was one of the brightest. She could discern three meanings from a single instruction and would execute them without needing further orders, often handling follow-up tasks on her own initiative.
Cain’s oddly cold demeanor, his apparent erasure of the mansion from his memory, and the servants’ increasingly disrespectful behavior, which seemed to mimic his own—Agatha recognized that it was time to prepare for the inevitable separation.
People often regarded Agatha as another meek, passive noblewoman. They assumed that, like other ladies of her station, she indulged in luxuries, and even if she didn’t, they mocked her for being weak and ineffectual.
Cain, too, must have seen her as something of a trivial figure.
But they were wrong. Agatha was neither passive nor naive.
She threw the letter into the fireplace. Watching it quickly burn to ash.
The reason she endured all the unfair treatment was not due to stupidity but because she was waiting for the perfect moment to strike—a moment when she could completely turn the tables with a single blow.
“I figured it would cause a stir to bring an outsider like the painter directly into the mansion, so I arranged for him to meet us at the temple.”
“Well done. Let’s prepare to leave then.”
“Yes, I’ll tell them to start getting ready.”
A gypsy woman, who seemed barely able to make a living, suddenly became the owner of a large mansion. And this happened in the very region where Cain spent half of the year.
No bold noble would dare carry on an affair under the watchful eye of Marquis Vernat. This meant that the woman could only be Cain’s mistress.
The fact that armed knights frequented her mansion was evidence enough. With the reason for Cain’s neglect of their marriage now clear, it was time to take the next steps.
Breaking the marriage contract.
Agatha stood and rang the bell.
Soon, the door to the bedroom opened, and the head maid, Teschen, appeared.
⚜ ⚜ ⚜
Accompanied by her dedicated maid Liana and another maid, Lindsay, Agatha made an outing under the pretense of visiting shops. However, her actual destination was the temple, where she intended to verify the information she had tasked Liana with gathering.
After discovering that Cain had hidden a woman in Arta, Agatha had enlisted several people to uncover the woman’s identity.
