FDND 04

Chapter – 04

The Duke’s study.

The place was neat and tidy, but every piece of furniture, the wallpaper, and even the smallest trinket were of the finest quality. I pushed a promissory note across the black, glossy desk.

“Just sign here!”

[If Magritte finds the person who poisoned the well, the Duke will grant Magritte one wish.]

A contract written cleanly on high-quality parchment, issued by the duke.

There’s no point doing things only by word of mouth. Everything must be written down.

“You can write.”

“Huh?”

I looked down at my handwriting — neat and composed.

Surely, it wasn’t the kind of handwriting one would expect from a pauper raised in an orphanage. It was odd enough that a peasant could write at all; how suspicious would that seem?

Ah. What to do?

After a moment’s thought, I came up with a credible lie.

All right, start acting again!

I thrust my palm toward the duke with frightened eyes.

“What’s this?”

The duke frowned in puzzlement. I pressed my voice against my larynx and made a choked sound.

“I—I’m sorry, I can’t write! I made a mistake!”

“What do you mean…? And why are you holding out your hand?”

“W- will you—beat me?”

“What?”

“Uh, do you hit people on the palm or on the calf or thigh?”

Bang!

The duke slammed his fist down on the desk.

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“B-but… children who write badly always get beaten…”

At my words, the duke took my palm — rough, scarred, callused — into his hand and frowned.

It was as if in his head he pictured a child being flogged until they could write perfectly.

“…From now on, in this place, there will be no beating for anything you do. Never.”

The duke said each word with emphasis as he held my hand tight.

Then he produced the housemaster’s signet ring and impressed it on the promissory note.

“And—”

“Yes?”

“If you remember anything else about the orphanage you were in, be sure to tell me.”

“Yes!”

The moment he let go of my hand I breathed easier and ground my teeth a little as I watched him.

It seemed the duke was willing to accept my fabricated explanation that my detailed knowledge of poisons came from “poison-making work forced on me every day at the orphanage.”

Well. It wasn’t entirely a lie.

The Leviathan had rounded up children and kept them in an underground prison euphemistically called an “orphanage,” and there they had, in fact, conducted poison experiments and manufactured toxins.

And besides…

“It was in the countryside, hmm… I think central region. The other kids helped with the farming. I… was mostly kept in the isolation cell, so I don’t know much else.”

It was true that I’d been alone in a cell!

Because the lie mixed with truth, the duke believed me more easily than I’d expected.

That was a relief. Most orphanages in the Empire were in rural areas in the central region, and the children were naturally put to farm work.

So many orphanages fit that description that it would be difficult for him to pinpoint which one I’d come from.

But the duke attached exactly two conditions to the contract.

When I walked around outside my room during the investigation I must wear a bonnet that covered my face, and I was never to enter the annex building.

I wonder what’s in the annex…?

I began by investigating the well water to find the culprit.

I had already determined the poison in the well was arsenic, so I could move on to the next step.

“What kind of arsenic is it.”

Arsenic is used in many ways.

It can be an insecticide or rat poison, used in building repairs, in dyes and pigments, and sometimes in minuscule amounts as medicine.

It comes in many forms — red, yellow, black, green, and so on — and depending on what you mix and how you manufacture it, it can take the form of a solid, powder, liquid, and sometimes even a gas.

So it’s simple.

If I could identify how the arsenic was prepared, I could deduce its use and thereby narrow down who could have had access to it.

For example, if it was a formulation used for building repairs, I’d start by questioning the building’s custodian; if it was an insecticide, the household servant in charge of pests; if a pigment, then painters or cloth merchants who might have had access.

I added ceraphine to a sample of the distilled well water. Ceraphine causes mixtures of low purity to solidify into a solid mass.

If the arsenic were a rat poison or insecticide, it would fully solidify; if it was for building repair, it would show some viscosity; if a pigment or dye, it would clump slightly.

If it stayed as a thin liquid like water… then it meant the arsenic was high-purity, nearly pure.

But I was certain it wouldn’t be that.

Making pure arsenic is extremely difficult. Not only is it costly, it also requires high technical skill and is usually found only in university research labs.

So if, hypothetically, it were pure arsenic, the culprit would likely be a doctor or pharmacist — someone with ties to a medical school and its laboratories.

“Huh?”

Contrary to my expectation, the mixture remained a completely transparent liquid, rippling without a single grain forming.

That’s right.

Amazingly, it was pure arsenic.

“I’m one of the geniuses who graduated top of the class from the kingdom’s finest medical school.”

Now that I thought about it, that quack doctor earlier had certainly said something like that.

If he’d claimed to graduate top of the kingdom’s best medical school… that would almost certainly mean he had access to a research lab.

Suddenly that doctor became a prime suspect.

Hmm.

I’ll start with him.

I perched on a tree opposite the servants’ quarters and scanned the windows. One window with a birdcage hanging from it caught my eye.

“There.”

Among the servants, the only person who could afford an expensive parrot would be the doctor.

So that had to be his room — the farthest room on the second floor.

Using the lock-picking skill a man had taught me, I opened the doctor’s door in an instant and slipped inside.

“Wow…”

This quack is doing very well for himself.

The doctor’s room was full of rare medicines, expensive specimens, and packed bookshelves.

“Coo—”

Lost in my exploration, I jumped when a sound startled me. The parrot in the cage was tapping the window with its beak, keeping watch.

As I approached the cage, the bird fluttered pitifully.

“Somehow this bird is so scrawny…?”

I slipped some corn I’d quietly snatched from the kitchen into the parrot’s feeding cup, mixed with a three-year-old herb. At first the bird seemed wary, but the smell of the herb drew it closer.

“Coo.”

“Here. Aren’t you hungry? Don’t be proud, just eat.”

The parrot cautiously took a kernel of corn and ate it, drawn by the scent.

“All right, sit and eat quietly, yeah?”

I put more corn into the feeding cup and closed the window.

Then I began to look for arsenic in earnest.

No matter how thoroughly I searched the bookshelves, I couldn’t find any arsenic.

‘Where did he hide it?’

At that moment, a heap of dead ants in the corner caught my eye — something about their state was unusual, so I examined them up close. I sniffed the nearby floor and even tasted it with my tongue.

‘Sweet!’

So he must have spilled arsenic around here.

I clenched my fist and tapped the floor lightly to see if there were any hollow spots. At one point I heard a hollow “thunk.”

Upon closer inspection, the floorboards around there were slightly loose.

Creak—

“Found it!”

A glass bottle stamped with the seal of the Vermont Medical School’s Pharmacology Research Institute tucked into a gap under the floor.

I opened the lid and tasted a drop: colorless, odorless, and sweet-tasting — it was arsenic.

Good, I’d found the evidence.

But it wasn’t strange for a doctor to have arsenic for medicinal use; he could always claim he kept it for legitimate reasons.

Hmm.

Maybe there was something more conclusive.

I rifled through the doctor’s cluttered desk. Amid medical texts, scribbled notes, and specimen research materials, I found a leather-covered notebook with a heart-shaped lock; he clearly treasured it.

I picked the lock and read. The notebook was a diary the doctor had started writing the first day he arrived at the manor. Early entries were full of complaints about adapting to the north.

What about recent entries?

I flipped through to the last pages and read carefully. I was so shocked I clapped my hand over my mouth.

“You—this crazy bastard…!”

Footsteps came — hurried, steady, coming closer.

I hastily returned the diary to its place, seized the bottle of arsenic, and crawled under the doctor’s bed.

Just then, the door opened and the doctor came in.

He immediately opened the window and tied a message to the parrot’s leg.

“Coo, coo—.”

“Shut up and move, you thing! Now!”

The scrawny parrot seemed reluctant to comply.

But the doctor had no mercy; he shoved the bird out of the cage.

“Fly properly, don’t act like a baby!”

When the poor bird was in danger, it instinctively took flight.

Holding my breath, I watched as the doctor left; his footsteps faded away, and the parrot’s sounds faded with him.

Then I saw the bird stagger, flap its wings precariously, and plummet.

“No!”

With a sick feeling, I opened the window and reached for the bird slumped on the branch.

“Are you okay? Pull yourself together!”

“Coo… coo…”

The bird opened its eyes weakly. Thankfully it wasn’t dead. It seemed not injured, but horribly malnourished. I picked some berries from the tree to help restore its strength and untied the message from its leg.

[Little brother, I’m in danger. Before I’m unfairly executed, run away. Send a carriage so I can flee south. The sooner the better.]

Got you, you little rascal!