Louisa the Poisoner

by Tanith Lee

  “Oh, uncle,” said Maud archly, “and I thought I was your favourite.”

  “Ever and always, dear Maud. But Louisa doesn’t need to be my favourite. Louisa simply is. Are you not, my dear?”

  Louisa dipped her green-sherry eyes. Lord Maskullance laughed aloud in pleasure. Louisa said, “You’re very kind. More kind than one in my position could hope for. I trust I won’t be a burden to the house.”

  Hearing her trained voice, the others started. They had been trusting she would utter the notes of a fish-wife. Louisa knew, just as she knew his lordship was not fooled and did not mind, that the rest of them, even the surly Bleston, had swallowed her lie. They thought her one of themselves, though demoralized, outcast, and badly-clad. A hunger lit them like the gas-jets to turn her inside out.

  “We must all,” said Lord Maskullance, “remember the Prin­cess and the Pea.”

  Georgie said, “Eh?”

  “And now,” said Lord Maskullance, “one of the maids shall take Louisa to the Blue Room.”

  “But that is the room—” cried Millicent, appalled, “that was kept for your bride!”

  “And as we know, I have never taken one and am now too old to think of taking one. But the room’s fresh and pretty. Let it be used. Let Louisa have it.”

  * * * *

  Louisa entered into the Blue Room as a butterfly enters an iris. It was hers by right. It was what she had always waited for. Lovelier by far than the drawings in the books. The curtains were of royal blue velvet and the canopy of the bed. There were filmy intermediary curtains with hyacinth blue bows. (The windows overlooked the lawn and lake.) The carpet was cream and woven with gigantic indigo violets and violet roses. There were bluebirds on the wallpaper. The candles and gas-lamps were in holders of white and cerulean china trimmed with gold. The basin and ewer were like lapis lazuli. The clock was lapis lazuli.

  On the bed were pillows edged with streamlets of lace. On the counterpane were embroidered cornflowers.

  Despite the restraint in the matter of gold, Louisa was philosophical. Perhaps gold had gone out of fashion.

  Soon after she had possessed the room, clothes began to arrive. Where they came from who knew? Perhaps a trousseau had been got up too for the mooted non-materializing bride. There were numerous gowns for every time of day, all of which Louisa recognized correctly, undergarments and accompanying linen. There were gloves and hats, scarves and sashes, shoes and umbrellas. Last came a casket—of gold. Inside was a pearl bracelet, a bracelet of sapphires, a broach with another sapphire, and a golden necklace hung with three pendant emeralds.

  Louisa was not taken aback.

  Having bathed in an adjacent chamber with blue and pink lights in the windows, Louisa summoned the maid who had been allotted to her—a solid creature called Prudent—and was dressed for dinner.

  A vision then went down, in a cucumber evening creation, hair astonishingly built into a Roman mode, (Prudent was also handy) and garlanded by the emeralds, whose inclusions had drawn raptures from prince and pauper alike for more than one hundred years.

  “Ah!” screamed Maud, Millicent and Agathena in a har­monizing chord. Maud added, “That’s grandmother’s necklace!”

  “And one day it will be yours, dear Maud,” said Lord Maskullance in the most soothing and gentlemanly of tones. “Till then, permit Louisa to borrow it.”

  And Louisa knew, without having the words to describe his sadism, that the one who loved her was also canny and cruel. She was to be his vengeance on this pack who had so bored him.

  She peeled away the pale fingers of her gloves and set about the demonstration of her perfect table manners. They were much better than Maud’s, far far better than Bleston and Georgie’s.

  How easy it was, the world. All she must do now was to persuade his lordship to wed her, and surely he was halfway there already? The rest was violence.

  * * * *

  There was an impediment.

  Louisa could not have guessed. The books omitted speaking of such things.

  Old Lord Maskullance was not, and never had been, inclined to ladies. Which was not to say he was not ready to fall madly, aesthetically in love with them. He had been almost ceaselessly infatuated in his youth, now with this famous beauty, now with that. He would write them poems, he would speak of the heaven-softness of their hair, the liquid clarity of their eyes, and the alabaster of their complexions. He would send gifts, he would seek their company. He would sit beneath their windows night-long, in moon-beam and rain storm. But take them to wife he would not. At length his measure was gaged. No one any more expected marriage of him, and several pleasant and civilized liaisons occurred, after which the lady in question might pass on, physically quite unsullied, but considerably advanced in the financial way. His family, especially his sisters Millicent and Agathena, had never faced up to his lordship’s preference. They had manufactured the formula of embitterment, a youthful bro­ken heart. Latterly, Bleston and Georgie took care that any sniggering went on sotto voce.

  In old age Lord Maskullance had seemed to give over all his former practices. He led a blameless existence with his batch of relatives, now the sole beneficiaries of his delightful will, merely accruing wealth innocently, as a matter of course. Truly nothing had stirred him but controlled exasperation and a caustic dislike for more than twenty years. Then Louisa flamed upon his sight. Perhaps now too old to be aroused in the other way, or at least to have any hope of indulgence, his lordship responded to Louisa as the jaded desensitized palate which suddenly discerns a taste.

  There was too the added attraction of using her to provoke his ghastly tribe.

  But marry her—never. There were dreadful tales of young wives who clambered into bed with an elderly spouse, insisting upon their rights. It was not to be risked. Besides, he was too fastidious to live out such untruth. Louisa should fill the silver niche of his dream, the last of her kind, as perhaps he was the last of his.

  * * * *

  The days of Maskullance Manor passed, marked out by the chimes of clocks, ringing of servants’ bells, the dinner gong, and the continuous eerie shriek of the peacocks. “I’d shoot the damn things,” said Bleston whenever he heard them. His mother frivolously laughed, perhaps not believing him, or not caring. Maud was unfavourable. Peacocks were not game birds. One might massacre pheasants, bludgeon cattle and lambs, destroy difficult horses, skin bears, ride down foxes, but very young kittens, singing canaries, peacocks and so on, had been given another function, that of entertainment, by God.

  One day all this would be theirs. Would Bleston then go out with his gun, even as Georgie rode amok from the stables?

  Now and then Maud walked to the village, accompanied by a maid. She seldom returned with anything. Some young labour­ers were building a cottage, and Maud would pause to watch.

  Millicent embroidered her samplers. He seeth all. She was thinking not of God, but that Alice might have been unwise with the youngest footman. Alice must be watched. To Millicent a peacock was of no interest. People interested her. She feared for them, their morals, their foolishness upon the primrose path. She kept a close eye on Louisa. She tried to draw Louisa out. But Louisa was reticent. Flamboyantly so. “I can say nothing. It would be painful to me, and to you, madam, to hear.” Georgie was also inclined to watch Louisa. Millicent considered what might happen there. Louisa was a lady, albeit a fallen one (how had she fallen?). What would Georgie do? Millicent viciously stitched an eye into a pansy.

  She had never seemed to notice Maud’s jaunts to cottages, or her eying of two or three of the younger footmen.

  Agathena had tried to befriend Louisa. Agathena had played cards with Louisa—book-educated in such games, Louisa in­variably won. Agathena spared Louisa reminiscences and con­fessions of her own past, in the hopes of eliciting a response. “Well, that’s enough of me. Now what of you?” “I can say nothing,” said Louisa. “Don’t press me.” “One must confide,” said Agathena. “Oh, a terrible headache has com
e on,” said Louisa, rising up with her lace handkerchief at her marble brow and drifting out.

  Maud spurned—if it is possible to spurn that which does not care—Louisa, as Bleston did. (Of course Maud had her labourers and footmen to interest her.) To Georgie Maud said severely, “Don’t ogle her, Georgie. She’s a minx.” For she was modern and spoke her mind. Also one that doeth, knoweth that others do.

  “Ogle who?” asked Georgie, pretending to be as stupid as he truly was.

  Sheepshead hovered faultlessly through the house. Now one cheek bulged, now the other—toothache? A migratory boil?

  So the days and nights passed, with their sidling insinuations, lumps, stares and rasps. And in his chair Lord Maskullance looked on, gazing at everything as if at a play. Sometimes he would—as when Louisa left with her headache—openly applaud.

  In the evenings, when Maud bad-temperedly thumped at the piano forte, Louisa would dance alone across the chequered floor, measures learned by rote in the cottage where now frogs might feed, if they would, upon her aunt. Gossamer was Louisa, thistledown, with the waist of a snake.

  The stars chimed, the warning bells of envy and malice rang, there were shrieks in closed minds, and the occasional gong of lust in Georgie’s uncomely body.

  But what of Louisa? Under her silk and satin hide, what did she think of it? She thought, of course, it went too slowly. By now the old man should have succumbed, the nuptial been arranged. As his wife, she would enter the waiting-room of his treasury. A Blue Chamber, a chest of clothes, three emeralds were appetizing, but not enough. He was so old. Every morning she wondered if he would descend. And if he did not, there were these others, who would drive her out at once.

  Louisa entered the breakfast room.

  “My Lord, I must speak to you—alone.”

  His lordship glowed. Millicent and Bleston, the only other early risers, glared.

  None would be sorry to leave the breakfast. The excellence of meals had fallen off. The green-faced skinny cook, Mrs. Crampp, had recently seemed to be worrying over something and the culinary arrangements suffered.

  “We’ll take a stroll under the grape pergola,” said Lord Maskullance and took Louisa on his arm away into the knot garden. “Eyes will soon be everywhere,” he told her. “Do you really wish to unburden yourself?”

  “No,” said Louisa, departing from the books, “only to ask you why you don’t marry me?”

  “Hah!” exclaimed Lord Maskullance, with genuine glee.

  “I’ve been here almost a month.”

  “And so you have. Don’t you suppose I’m a trifle ancient for a bridegroom?”

  “Naturally,” said Louisa. “But it doesn’t hinder me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” and here Louisa went back to the books, “lacking your protection, what will become of me?”

  “I think you mean if I should die.”

  Louisa lowered her lashes. “Don’t speak of it. It upsets me so. What’s that whistling? Is it some giant bird?”

  “No cause for alarm. Sheepshead is checking the coverts. He has a police whistle which he blows to call the keepers to where he is. On the other matter,” went on Lord Maskullance, “I have an idea of what to do. You shall become my legal ward and be popped into my will. I can’t promise very much, my dear girl, since most of it must go to the greedy vultures, all of whom are now about you will notice through his hedge, and searching the topiary and the peach arbour to find us. However, there is the added attraction to my will that if any of them should perish, the spoils will then be divided among the remaining persons, whose number will have come to include yourself.”

  “How could they perish?” asked Louisa. “How loud Sheepshead’s whistle is!”

  “Bleston might give in to an apoplexy. Note his fat red form and the amount of brandy he consumes. Georgie might be thrown, he treats my horses abominably and they’d love to kill him. The women are probably indestructible.”

  Louisa smiled. In a way that could not find out and did not need words, she now sensed a confederate of no mean propor­tion. Did his lordship know it himself? At that moment, as she thanked him for his goodness in the matter of the will, she beheld Mr. Sheepshead placing himself unsuitably behind a statue of Venus. Mr. Sheepshead’s glasses shone. Between his lips shone the whistle. They were like the eyes and beak of some dreadful bug. Clearly he had heard everything.

  “Sheepshead I don’t grudge,” said Lord Maskullance. “His share of my estate has been well-earned.”

  Sheepshead slipped away among the yew hedges and pres­ently collided there with Agathena.

  On the ground below Venus lay some of Mr. Sheepshead’s snuff, spilled in a brown patch.

  “His only vice,” remarked Lord Maskullance with disap­proving admiration. “Except perhaps,” he added, “his passion for humbugs.”

  * * * *

  It caused upheaval and then silence. It was like a thun­derclap followed by a pause before the angels speak. The wardship and the alteration to the will.

  Lawyers went back and forth. Sheafs of paper spread across the library’s mahogany table, the great globe of the whole world pushed to one side.

  Each member of his family attempted to advise Lord Maskullance against it. Such a little little amount, but why should this stray have it?

  “She charms me,” said Lord Maskullance with utter truth. How cruel truth so often is. She charmed, they did not.

  They sulked. They muttered. Like Shakespearian villains they skulked in corridors and bushes, listened at doors and learned only what they already knew.

  How he must have enjoyed it. He smiled on them almost with love. Then took Louisa’s arm and walked about the gardens and the park.

  “Are you secure now, Louisa?” Louisa gave him one of his own early roses. “Never a rose without a thorn,” he said.

  “Should you like,” she said, for she had learnt now to speak

  beyond the books, with him, “a rose without a thorn?”

  * * * *

  Louisa sat at luncheon in Maskullance Manor, glancing about her under her shade-lashes, wondering simply, Who shall be first? From a small drawer in the Blue Room, a drawer having blue enamel butterflies upon it, she had taken out a lace handkerchief in which was wrapped her sole memento of the cottage on the mire and of her now skeletal aunt. The phial of clear liquid.

  As if pulling the petals of a flower, she looked them over. This one, that one. That one, this one. Which would be best, most apt? For Louisa was an artist in her own way. She liked symmetry and patterns. Perhaps she should find some means to make them draw lots . . . whoever raised their knife the next? No, it was his lordship, and his lordship must be left until the last—

  Georgie got up, thrusting back his chair and Sheepshead who was behind him. Sheepshead stepped away decorously, unruf­fled, only the humbug abruptly evident in one cheek. Georgie went to the sideboard.

  “This food is foul. I’ll take some brandy, uncle, if you don’t mind.”

  “Please do,” said Lord Maskullance. “Perhaps Bleston has left you some.”

  Bleston grunted.

  Georgie, glass filled, came by Louisa and paused to admon­ish her. “Try to eat more, old girl. Or you won’t grow up big and strong like Maudie.”

  Maud clucked with annoyance, and Georgie slipped one hand down upon Louisa’s knee. The movement was swift and barely to be noticed; he seemed to have adjusted her napkin. He had just drawn for himself the relevant straw.

  Louisa gave him one ravished glance. It was an action as swift as his own. Georgie reddened and licked his lips.

  After luncheon, Georgie made a great to do about going out to the stables.

  “Should you ride after all that brandy?” inquired his solici­tous mother, to whose eyes perhaps he and Bleston were beau­tiful and virtuous.

  “Yes, mother. Of course I should. Give that grey thing a taste of my crop.” And he winked, for Lord Maskullance had left the dining chamber.

/>   After Georgie was departed, the ladies retired to their rooms to rest, a chronic post-luncheon procedure.

  Louisa did not retire.

  Soon she was on the beech walk which led from the stables to the park. She moved slowly, twirling her parasol, and in a few minutes Georgie rode up on the grey gelding, which as usual was flinching beneath him and rolling its eyes.

  “See how it obeys,” said Georgie, “eh, Louisa? It’s getting to know who’s master.”

  “It’s true you’re masterful, sir.”

  “A horse is one thing. A pretty woman another.”

  Louisa had very few emotions of her own; the swamp had not inclined her to grow them. Of sex she knew next to nothing, only its stylized symbols and the ardour of gentlemen, from her books. She therefore dealt with Georgie after their manner, in the mode of a well-bred flirt. But Georgie liked that.

  When Louisa dropped her lace handkerchief on the ground: “Oh I say,” said Georgie and started to dismount. “Stand you brute. Stand I say, or do you want correction?” The horse stood like a stone, and Georgie plumped down and retrieved the handkerchief. He gave it to Louisa.

  “For your gallantry you must have my favour, sir.”

  “A kiss?” asked Georgie hopefully, meaning by this naughty slightness things far steamier, gropings and liftings, a promise for the dark.

  “First,” said Louisa, “a rose. And on the rose I will place two drops of this.”

  “Why, what is it?” chortled Georgie.

  “A love potion.”

  “What, you want my love, do you?”

  Louisa lowered her eyes and held out to him the flower, on which now reposed two clear drops from the glass phial.

  “I see you set no store by magic,” said Louisa. “But I warn you. Touch the dew to your lips, and you’re lost to me.”