Louisa the Poisoner

by Tanith Lee

Recrossing the manor grounds, Louisa again caught sight of a curious red phenomenon atop the kitchen garden wall. It was not a red parrot.

  Louisa stole to the small door in the wall, and easing it open, peeped into the garden. Amid the salad, mounted on a garden seat, was the thin green cook Mrs. Crampp, waving earnestly aloft a pair of scarlet flannelette bloomers.

  Without changing expression Louisa withdrew from the door and restored herself to the house, there to await the eventual sad tidings of Mr. Sheepshead’s demise.

  * * * *

  Prudent relayed the awful news to Louisa as she was dressing her in black watered silk for dinner.

  “And poor Mr. Sheepshead goes to the door of the shop, and what should he see but his old friend stretched out on the liquorice chews.”

  The cheery tobacconist had, it seemed, suffered from a sudden fatal seizure of the heart. It transpired it was a peaceful end, nevertheless, for the dead man had even a smile on his face, and round him on the ground were strewn the contents of a bag of humbugs he had been happily consuming. He was very fond of them. Fonder even than poor Mr. Sheepshead.

  “I shall wear the sapphires,” said Louisa.

  She was philosophical. She would not be discouraged.

  The dinner though was one of the worst so far experienced. Millicent declined it and swallowed instead her mixture. Bleston was absent. Lord Maskullance sat in his chair, hooded eyes beaming with definite cruelty on his sparse fellow diners.

  Sheepshead presided flat-cheeked behind the chairs. He gave no sign of any shock, let alone any perturbation.

  “Tell Mrs. Crampp,” said Lord Maskullance, “she has to­night surpassed herself.”

  After she had retired, and while she was having her evening communion with her mirror, a procedure sometimes lasting two or three hours, Louisa heard an odd rustling beneath her win­dows. Only the lamp before the mirror was lit. Going to the curtains, she pulled them slightly aside and gazed down into the shrubbery. Perhaps something moved there, or not. A faint noise, something like a bleat, rose up into the still night. Perhaps it was a wandering pheasant.

  Louisa remembered the coverts and that Mr. Sheepshead was soon due to visit them again. This thought sent her to bed in a much gladdened state of mind.

  * * * *

  Sheepshead moved across the park. Now and then his whistle sounded, and a keeper would leap out and debate with him. Louisa followed, a slender black mus­lin shape. In a basket on her arm reposed a few plucked flowers, her excuse for persistence. Occasionally she was assisted by finding flowers already pulled up at their roots.

  Now and then things rustled in the undergrowth. Louisa was put in mind of large dogs crawling on their bellies. She had not realized pheasants were so large.

  Sheepshead did not put down the whistle, which she had trusted he would do.

  After a while, the steward-butler went back towards the house. As he reached the wall of the kitchen garden there was no flash of red.

  Louisa manifested from a lilac.

  “Good day, Sheepshead.”

  “Miss Louisa.”

  “I’ll walk with you to the kitchen, Sheepshead. His lordship has asked me to speak to Mrs. Crampp.”

  “Indeed, miss.”

  “Hasn’t it come to your notice, Sheepshead, how peculiarly Mrs. Crampp is behaving?”

  “Indeed not, miss.”

  The whistle hung from a leather thong on Sheepshead’s breast. It shone in the sunlight. How many times it had entered between Sheepshead’s lips. Certain as a humbug.

  They passed through a door into the cavern of the kitchen.

  About the room, characterized already with steaming pots, and with the elements of meat and greens soon to be ruined, scullery maids and skivvies stood aghast. And at the scrubbed table, her hands in bunches of mint and onions and, strangely, chrysanthemums, Mrs. Crampp, onion-green, looked at Louisa like a soul in limbo. “Why, Miss—”

  “Please don’t rise, Mrs. Crampp.” Louisa smiled about her benignly, book-taught on the kitchen. “All of you, continue with your duties. And you, Sheepshead, pray go on as usual.”

  And Sheepshead passed into the pantry and Louisa’s fox’s ears heard the clink of the whistle hung up on a peg.

  Louisa examined the cook on the contents of luncheon.

  Mrs. Crampp stammered. “I’m sorry, miss. His lordship—that is, I haven’t been myself. There’s been that much on my mind.”

  “Let me see the pantry, Mrs. Crampp,” said Louisa. “I’m most interested in how you all proceed here.”

  Mrs. Crampp let Louisa into the pantry. Sheepshead was gone. Louisa asked for a glass of water, and Mrs. Crampp hurried away to see to it. Louisa found the whistle with no trouble, anointed it—one drop again, for a peacefulseeming death of old age—turned and took the water, looked at it lovingly, and gave it back to Mrs. Crampp.

  Mrs. Crampp burst suddenly into tears. Oceans rolled from her. “Life’s that unjust.”

  Louisa had not found it so, ultimately. She had the oppor­tunist’s amnesia. She gazed sympathetically and blankly at Mrs. Crampp.

  “I’ll look forward to luncheon,” said Louisa.

  “Oh, miss,” wept the cook.

  * * * *

  “Mr. Sheepshead’s lost his whistle,” said Prudent.

  “What can you mean?”

  “That police whistle of his. He hangs it in the pantry and it’s gone. The boy said a magpie must have took it. But then some tarts were missing too.”

  Neither tarts nor whistle reappeared. Divine providence tended to Sheepshead. How difficult he was proving.

  * * * *

  “Oh miss, you shouldn’t,” said Prudent the following day. “Hasn’t one of the ladies advised you? His lordship would—”

  “His lordship lets me do as I like.”

  Louisa passed down again, this time via the back stairs, to the domain of the kitchen. Here the servants were about to engage in their tea. They rose in a flurry as Louisa flowed into the room. On the scrubbed board were loaves and butter, dishes of preserves, tiny sandwiches whiskered by cress, and a great walnut cake. Had Mrs. Crampp fashioned these things? It seemed unlikely, for although she sat at one end of the table, the tea pot before her, she was employed in nursing a small wooden sheep. “It was his as a boy’s,” she said to Louisa in a vague and hopeless yet explanatory way. “His little lamb.”

  “How nice, Mrs. Crampp. I trust you’ll indulge me. I should like to join the belowstairs tea.”

  At his place, the table’s opposite end, Mr. Sheepshead looked grave. Prudent said, generally, “I spoke to Miss Louisa, but—”

  “Please seat yourself,” interrupted Mr. Sheepshead. “Podgers, give Miss Louisa your chair.”

  Podgers, the youngest footman, in a dither, obliged.

  Louisa sat. She was radiant.

  “What a wonderful cake!”

  “Alice made it,” Mrs. Crampp reassured the table at large.

  “How clever of Alice. May I see?” They passed the cake to Louisa. It was already accurately cut into a quantity of slices, one being twice the size of the rest.

  “Whose slice is this?”

  “That’s for Mr. Sheepshead, madam,” said Alice.

  “Yes,” echoed Mrs. Crampp in a ritualistic voice, like a clock ticking in spite of itself, “always the largest piece for the butler.”

  “Good gracious!” cried Louisa, her hand to her throat, “what can that be at the window?”

  Mrs. Crampp leapt to her feet, almost oversetting the tea pot. “Is it him—Is it my Jacob?”

  She plunged to the window. Two of the maids rushed to hold her back. Others faintly screamed. All eyes were on the window and the cook, even the glinting lenses of Sheepshead. All but Louisa’s, as she dipped a drop of death upon the fated double slice of cake, behind the flick of a lace handkerchief. Next moment the lace was dabbing at her temples, the phial quite concealed.

  “Nothing there,” mourned Mrs. Crampp, sagging in the s
upporting arms. They bore her back to the table. Quavering, she began to pour the thick brown tea into cups.

  “Whatever did you see, Miss Louisa?” said Prudent.

  “It looked—” Louisa patted her heart nervously, “like an enormous red bird. I saw one the other day on the wall of the kitchen garden.”

  “Oh, my doomed boy,” said Mrs. Crampp, “what am I to do?”

  “There, there, Mrs. Crampp,” said Alice hastily.

  But Mrs. Crampp arose and took her toy sheep away into her parlour.

  Left free, the table took on a slightly hysterical air.

  “Perhaps a red parrot has got loose from some local minaginary,” suggested Alice. It was obviously a lie.

  Louisa was delighted by the table’s determination to fool her, since it had totally obscured, it seemed to her, her own subter­fuge.

  The sandwiches and bread were soon consumed by the servants, hungry from overwork. All the while, Mr. Sheepshead maintained a stoical silence. Louisa chatted graciously with Alice, Prudent and Podgers. She did not risk a direct sally at her enemy so soon to fall beneath her blade.

  The moment came for the great cake.

  It was passed along the table to the butler, who considered it as if from an Olympian height.

  “No, I think today I must abstain.”

  “Oh Mr. Sheepshead,” exclaimed Alice.

  “Greed is a sin. I’ll take this lesser slice.”

  Sheepshead plucked out, searing Louisa to the quick, apiece of cake several inches to the left of the prescribed slab.

  The plate of the cake slid sinisterly along the table.

  “Well then,” said Alice, “seeing as Mr. Sheepshead doesn’t, may I—”

  “No, no, Alice,” said one of the scullery girls, “Prudent must have it.”

  “No, no,” said Prudent. “I can’t eat all that there. I’d bust.”

  “Alice’ll bust if she does. She’s much too fat.”

  Alice went crimson. As the cake came to her she waved it away in injury. “I won’t take any of it then, drat it.”

  “Hush. Before Miss Louisa,” scolded Prudent. “Er, miss, could you fancy the piece? Alice is a lovely cook,” she added, in solace.

  “Oh, no,” said Louisa, “I seldom touch cake.”

  “Podgers should have it then,” said Prudent. “He can do with building up.”

  Podgers also blushed. “No, no,” said Podgers, “you know I’m not much of a one for cake.”

  The walnut cake sat in the midst of the table, slices missing from its bulk, the great slice still glowing there, as if haloed by a mysterious and baneful light.

  “I’ll put it away in the pantry,” said Alice. “I believe Mrs. Crampp may fancy some later.”

  Louisa got up; she was dissatisfied. She frowned at Sheepshead who had let her down and thereby exposed the innocent creatures of the kitchen, who did not track her and were not significantly included in the Maskullance will, to peril.

  But Mr. Sheepshead had taken out a fresh supply of hum­bugs, as if to chastise her further. He put one into his cheek.

  “I hope,” said Louisa tartly, “your teeth don’t suffer from your sweets, Sheepshead.”

  “My teeth are very strong, I’m pleased to say, miss.”

  His glass lenses blinked at her.

  Louisa felt for only the second time in her life a brief flood of hatred. She would not be able to sustain so epic an emotion for long. Louisa was not a serpent, but a butterfly which stung. Nevertheless, for a few moments her thought hung palpably between them, as once, long ago, it had hung unobserved be­tween her and her tutoring aunt. And Mr. Sheepshead twisted his thin mouth in a smile, which the humbug made ludicrous and macabre.

  Something protected him, something divine or demoniac. Louisa did not perfectly believe in such things, for in her world she had found no need of them, either for help or blame. She had no conscience, required no prop. When Lord Maskullance once, as they sat in the peach arbour, referred to a demon of the Maskullances, some perhaps heraldic thing which, in any previous century was said to have protected them, neither Louisa nor his lordship gave the matter more importance than a brief discussion of the weather or the local landscape. And if from this it may be inferred that, to the pair of them, weather and landscape were also basically immaterial and unreal, that too might have been so.

  However, Sheepshead was three times now saved. He was not the easy prey the others had proved to be.

  She would turn from him, currently. For she did not want to

  waste her time. She liked to be both busy and successful.

  * * * *

  A day later, a double tragedy occurred on the moor.

  A small battalion of searching policemen came upon the escaped lunatic, a wild red-headed young madman of good looks and strong physique, who lay in his shapeless institutional clothes quite close to Maskullance Park. In one hand he clutched a partly eaten piece of walnut and, in the other, a snapped leather thong. The other portion of the thong had remained with the police whistle, which the lone policeman had blown, to attract the rest of the search party. The lunatic had perhaps died of exposure, although the warm nights and the healthy state of his body made this deduction puzzling. But, since there was no mark upon him of any violence or disturbance, there seemed no other cause. A post-mortem heightened the curiosity of the case, for it ruled out even the matter of exposure. The man was fit and quite well fed from some unguessed source—the supplier of the cake. It was presently learned that other items of food had gone missing from the manor. Also, a whistle. It seemed the lunatic had always liked digging up flowers and playing with shiny things and most probably had got into the house at night and stolen the whistle in lieu of anything more attractively available.

  The other, more disconcerting, part of the affair was the death of the policeman who had discovered the corpse. It seemed he had had time only to blow his summons on the handy whistle, (his own having been mislaid) when he also dropped lifeless on the earth. The policeman, too, gave no evidence either of assault or illness. He left a widow and fifteen children, but further assurance of his aggressive physical power.

  The spot where the two cadavers were found quickly became ill-omened. There was talk of weird morbid gasses drifting from March Mire several miles away. Fairly soon these tales were augmented by sightings in the area of gigantic hounds, headless horses, and the ghosts of the policeman and the lunatic howling and rending themselves with fingernails grown grave-long.

  The tragedy on the moor had another, unexpected effect. This was upon Agathena, who emerged from her seclusion into the afternoon parlour.

  “I can no longer remain here! In this den of death and iniquity.”

  “Indeed?” Lord Maskullance stirred in his chair. He had been watching Louisa as usual, as she played a game of Provi­dence with an ill-humoured Bleston. The more Bleston swore, banged with the cards, and lost, the more beatific beautiful Louisa became. Millicent stitched primly at a sampler and sometimes sipped from her indigestion bottle. Although lunch­eon had been quite pleasant, for Mrs. Crampp had finally col­lapsed and the burden of the meal descended on fat Alice.

  “Don’t you know what goes on belowstairs?” shrieked Agathena. “That scurrilous cook—the dead lunatic was her son. Her—unlawful son. She’s signalled to him, sheltered him. And she has fed him off our plates. And now she screams that her own food has poisoned him to death.”

  “Very likely,” snarled Bleston. “I have you!”

  “No,” said Louisa. He had not.

  A shower of cards hailed on the carpet.

  “I will no longer stay in this nest of villainies. My children ripped from me. My only Georgie. My Maud.”

  “Mother,” said Bleston, “control yourself.”

  “And you—no son to me!” screeched Agathena. “What have you had for me in my agony? Nothing.”

  “So I am to take it,” said Lord Maskullance, “that you’ll be going away.”

  “
Far, far away,” said Agathena.

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” said Lord Maskullance. He still watched Louisa, who went on playing prettily with her cards, though Bleston’s were on the floor. “Where shall you go?”

  “To my husband’s cousins in the north.”

  “The north? A great way off.”

  Louisa lifted her head and looked at Agathena with the sweetest prettiest concern.

  “This is a painful thing for me to say,” said Lord Maskullance, smoothly, “but I grow no younger. Suppose I were to die suddenly. It would be a long and tiresome journey back to hear the will and to receive your quite considerable portion.”

  “What do I care for money? Don’t speak of death to me over the bodies of my children.”

  “When,” said Lord Maskullance, “do you propose to go?”

  “As soon as everything can be arranged. I trust you and Bleston will assist me, as you have done in nothing else”

  “Naturally. A week then.”

  “A week,” said Agathena.

  When she had quit the room, Bleston stormed to the dining room sideboard for his brandy. Millicent stitched Virtue is trium­phant.

  “Well, Louisa,” said Lord Maskullance. “Only a week.”

  * * * *

  It was a fact, Agathena did not want to go north, a fearsome carriage journey of several days, to live with the dour northern cousins of her late spouse. She had wanted Lord Maskullance, Millicent, or at least her own son Bleston, to dissuade her, showing her at last some care and attention. But nothing of that had come, and the only look of concern had emanated from the stray, Louisa, with whom she had had, it must be said, some amusing hours of tattle. Even if Louisa was not herself to be drawn out, she had that marvelous facility for listening to the monologues of others so prized by everyone in another.

  Perhaps of them all, Louisa, so obviously a lady, if in suspicious circumstances, Louisa had shown her friendliness. Louisa had even come to the funerals of her children, and though she did not weep, she had had upon her a magnificent and proper solemnity, like that of a priestess who attends the sacrifice.

  The door was knocked at. Agathena, who had dismissed the maid, had a second of amazed anticipation of Bleston. But then came the dulcet tone of Louisa. And though disappointed, Agathena stretched towards this visitor in the instinctive craving for likely sympathy.