Dark Origins

Dear Kara,

Evelyn reread the letters more than she could say. She was careful to avoid touching the ink after the first time her dark fingerprints smudged evidence into parchment yellowed with age.

Her mother, Kara Kilpatrick, never yelled at her. A lady did not raise her voice. However, she saw and heard the pain in her voice when it was discovered her private correspondence had been violated.

So, Evelyn Kilpatrick learned to hide her transgressions in favor of absorbing her word from the rare letters from a man she long suspected was her true father.

Arthur Kilpatrick had treated her as well as any man could treat an illegitimate child. He could have been a great deal worse, as many bastards were left to work houses or orphanages, if they were lucky.

Nevertheless, lacking cruelty left an abundance of space for indifference. Evelyn did not realize how distant the man was with her until Kara birthed their first child. James had been doted on, showered with love, bonded with. Things that Evelyn witnessed but never experienced.

The letters gave her hope that someone in the world would love her unconditionally. In the letters was a gentleman with an adventurous spirit and a hunger for knowledge, just like her. Unlike her, he was not stifled by societal expectations. No one would have been demanding he attend a formal luncheon to meet potential suitors out in the wilderness.

Evelyn lived vicariously through the brief accounts of adventure in those letters. For years she dreamed of being in the places Nathaniel had gone. She had dreamed of living a life guided by a noble thirst for truth without knowing what that truth was.

Then, one day, a different letter arrived in the post at the Kilpatrick homestead in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One fresh piece of parchment wrapped around a torn and stained scrap of notebook paper.

Then, the uncharacteristic scribblings of a madman.

The final letter was unsigned. The dark coppery brown smudges looked suspiciously like old blood. One corner of the wrinkled, tattered page had been smeared worse. Evelyn imagined someone, perhaps Thomas Karger, had made a fruitless effort to clean the letter before sending it.

Now, there it sat hidden in the small cabinet beneath her mother’s sewing supplies. Stacked at the very top of Twenty years' worth of letters was the final one. The last letter forever marked by death.

Evelyn’s mother hid it away with no intention of attending the funereal of a man that adored her for the better part of his life. She meant to keep it a secret, one dark enough to take to her own grave.

Evelyn would not let the man in the letters go so easily. Like her own dark secret, she stole away in the dead of night with a single packed bag, a ticket for a ship bound for London, and a letter of her own left behind.