Prompt from Hades Lord of the Dead: a coded message
From the moment I saw the first of those little chalk figures, I knew it could not end happily.
I had tried so hard to escape my past. I had left my country and found a new one; I had told nobody where I had come from, not even my beloved Hilton. I had even been willing to give up on being his wife if he could not accept that he must know nothing about what I had come from - he, beautiful man, had been happy to marry me anyway.
O - to know I am the cause of his downfall!
I had tried to keep him away from the figures, to pretend they meant nothing, but he knows - knew - me too well. Nothing would dissuade him from finding out the truth, and even then, he discovered it too late. If I had only told him sooner, maybe we could have found another way, and we would even now be safe and happy together.
Instead, he is dead, Slaney is in prison, and all that is left is poor Mrs Elsie Cubitt, widow.