Louisa the Poisoner

by Tanith Lee

  Once Louisa was in the room, Agathena indulged herself in terrible tirades. She railed against her brother and sister, her son, the manor, the injustices of life. She tugged a string of pearls she wore, cried copiously, and pressed her handkerchief, as Millicent had done, to her lips rather than her eyes.

  Louisa spoke little. She commiserated utterly, while manag­ing to say no word against her benefactors. When pressed for eulogies for Georgie and Maud, she gave them in the most delicate and dramatic language, the very stuff of the best cards of condolence—from which, of course, they had been learnt.

  “It’s a shame you must go,” said Louisa, when the outcry eventually ran down. “I’ll miss you sorely.”

  “And I you,” rampaged Agathena, believing what she spoke.

  “Your sorrow’s unbearable to me,” said Louisa. “Oh give me your handkerchief. I have a remedy of my aunt’s here, a tincture that eases bitter grief.”

  “How I need it.” And Agathena gave to Louisa her latest handkerchief, and into the folds, so often borne to the lips, Louisa tipped a single glassy drop. “So little?”

  “More would be too much.”

  Agathena took the handkerchief. She was on the brink of dying of grief and believed it and did not know it. She raised the handkerchief to her face, and suddenly the goodness of Louisa took her like a tempest. Its rain gushed from her eyes. Agathena lifted the handkerchief higher and crushed it not to her lips but to her streaming eyes. The lace, the drop, were engulfed.

  Louisa shrank, just a very little. It was not self doubt or even fear. Yet a shrinking it was. For was this one too to be elusive?

  With the impulse to remove herself from the scene of another failure, Louisa backed towards the door.

  “Your pain wounds me—forgive me. I must go.”

  And getting out of the room, she ran to her own, where she prowled before her mirror, taking back strength from her own image, refusing Prudent entry until the gong sounded for dinner.

  * * * *

  Coming late to dinner, Louisa found Lord Maskullance, Bleston and Millicent already at table. “You are late,” chided Millicent, at once.

  “I’m most sorry. I have this awful burning sensation in my throat.”

  “Those poor meals of Mrs. Crampp’s have quite wrecked my digestion and probably yours,” opined Millicent.

  “I wonder if I might ask a few drops of your medicine?”

  Millicent was affronted. “Have you no preparation of your own?”

  “I’ve never suffered in this way before.” Louisa pressed her fingers to her heart.

  Lord Maskullance said, “Be generous, Millicent. We’re told, we may go to Hell for less.”

  “Really!” Millicent uncorked her vial and Louisa took it humbly. “A drop, no more, in your water glass.”

  Louisa said to Lord Maskullance, “Might I take it in a little brandy, my Lord? I’m quite faint.”

  Lord Maskullance said, his eyes glittering very bright, “Sheepshead shall fetch the decanter.”

  “No, not at all. I’ll help myself.”

  And Louisa went to the sideboard and poured a thimbleful of brandy and added to it a drop of Millicent’s mixture, and added to Millicent’s mixture from out of her sleeve another drop, much clearer and more wholesome-looking. Did any see? Sheepshead supervised the carving of the meat. A maid went round the table. A footman set down the huge tureen of soup. Bleston stuffed himself with a plate of salted anchovies. And Millicent discreetly burped.

  Louisa handed the indigestion mixture to the maid to deliver back to Millicent and seated herself. She tried the brandy in a lady-like, reluctant way.

  From beyond the other door, out in the vault above the chequered hall, came a freakish noise.

  It was like a child’s fist punching a drum. And then it was like icicles striking a glass roof. And then—

  “My God! What the devil’s that?” shouted Bleston jump­ing up.

  A series of fitful sharp brrongs went through the air. Like imps they were, shooting arrows at a brazen target. Like tiny stones whirled inside a bell.

  Everyone leant towards the door. There came a muffled rolling thud, a huge bundled bolster of sound on the stair. And then the gong gave off a bellowing clang.

  Millicent rose with a squawk, clutching her mixture.

  Bleston and Sheepshead ran at the door and behind them crowded the frightened maid and the footman. Lord Maskullance came last, with Louisa. Out into the hall.

  Millicent breathed, “The curse of heaven is on this house.” She did not leave the table where she stood. She pressed her side where her indigestion now stabbed her with knives.

  At the foot of the stairs Agathena had met with the gong. She had met with it first headlong and then sideways. She lay across its surface now, her neck at a rag doll angle, with a few pearls dappled on to it. The rest, their string broken, had made the noises as they struck the carpet and the treads of the stairs, and in hitting the gong itself in the instants before Agathena did so herself. She had tumbled all the way from stair-top to bottom. They gathered about her, speechless, and from the lower stairs Alice and Podgers emerged to gather with them.

  No one made a sound. Only from the dining room came the splash of Millicent at the soup.

  Then his lordship spoke. “Podgers, take the trap and go for the doctor.” Podgers, with a blue face, hurried off. “Too late, of course.”

  “She flung herself down,” said Alice. “Poor madam.”

  “Shut up, girl,” said Bleston. “The stupid woman tripped, of course.”

  “Blind from tears, she missed her step,” Alice interpreted.

  Louisa stood bathed in a silent and superb gleam, better than the brandy. The poison had not after all required insertion though the mouth. The eyes had absorbed it. True, the action was rather delayed, but so much to the good. How excellent of Agathena to be susceptible.

  Lord Maskullance turned back towards the parlour.

  “There’ll be no need, Sheepshead, to go on with dinner.”

  “Excuse me,” said Bleston, “there is a dashed need. I’m hungry if you ain’t, uncle.”

  “Serve Mr. Bleston,” said Lord Maskullance. His eyes set­tled upon Louisa. “Pale beauty stands aghast,” he said, “at the vulgar ugliness of men.”

  It was the maid who re-entered the dining room first.

  She let out a piercing shriek.

  Then she ran out gesticulating and inarticulate.

  Sheepshead proceeded into the room, and after a moment, called quietly, “My Lord, something else very dreadful has occurred.”

  They entered the room in a body, his lordship, Louisa, Bleston, Alice to the rear. After a moment Alice fainted with a loud thump. Bleston cursed. His lordship said, softly, “Use every man after his desert and who shall ’scape whipping.”

  Millicent had had recourse in their absence to her mixture. It worked at once to end her indigestion. She had dropped forward and into the vast tureen, submerging her head in ox-tail. They pulled her out. She was not to be revived. It seemed she had swooned and drowned, like Maud, but in the soup.

  * * * *

  The doctor drove away. He had attended the bodies of Georgie and Maud. He attended those of Agathena and Millicent.

  Perfunctory post-mortems would be carried out on the latter two corpses as on the former. Nothing fresh would be ascertained beyond the obvious. Georgie had broken his back on being thrown from a horse. Maud had drowned in the lake—a dry drowning, the heart stopping at the shock of the water, that very little fluid was in the lungs. The same was true of Millicent. The shock of the hot soup seemed to have killed her outright. Obviously Agathena had died of a snapped neck.

  The perpetration of the post-mortems was a mere accession to law. Otherwise they would have been omitted. It was obvious how death had struck. One did not wish to distress a family of the Maskullance stature more than was necessary.

  However, otherwise tongues wagged. The doctor’s among them. Superstiti
on and queer philosophic flight took over where suspicion might otherwise have done. Was the family cursed? Surely such a terrible flock of violent and appalling ends must stem from something? Maskullance was to be considered at least ‘unlucky.’

  * * * *

  The double funeral was of extra magnificence. Grateful for their custom, the undertaker, who had recently bought for himself a house in the nearby town, gave of his best. The ebony horses pulled the enormous hearse. Through the bones of the summer’s heat the cortege drove its black uncompromising way. Earth to earth, flesh to grass. The marble mausoleum was built up over them, as if they cared. Louisa went in a carriage to place the fresh bright flowers of summer’s end upon the doorstep. All who saw her were charmed. They had forgotten no one knew who she was. She was the ward of Lord Maskullance. She was what an aristocrat should be, porcelain and silk, unreachable, gracious, untainted by the dust of all this common death.

  * * * *

  On an early autumn evening, when a few swallows were performing the last dance in the sky, the penultimate act of the Maskullance saga was visited on Bleston. He did not anticipate any such thing. He had been out shooting in neighbouring parts and come back in a rage because his viciousness was unmatched by any knack with a gun.

  Dinner had been served at an earlier hour of late, for Lord Maskullance had claimed an increasing tiredness.

  They met then in the dining room, these remaining three, his lordship, Bleston, and beauteous Louisa in a low-cut gown of dark mourning, a broach and necklace of jade and jet.

  They dined in silence, but for the twelve or twenty morose tirades of Bleston concerning useless keepers, feckless beaters, and imaginary prey.

  The concluding savoury was served. The servants left the room.

  “What’s this muck? Alice is getting as useless as Crapp.”

  Lord Maskullance addressed Louisa across the table’s length.

  “The sadness of the summer’s passing. The apples in the orchard are red, and they fall. Are we all merely apples, Louisa? Ripened for death and devouring?”

  “Even the rose must die,” said Louisa, between the books and the experimental dialogue Lord Maskullance had always encouraged in her.

  “But the rose won’t die. My white rose with the black hair. I can predict for her a long and lustrous life.”

  Bleston snorted.

  “I’ll take some brandy, uncle.”

  “Of course you will, Bleston. Tell me, Louisa, how do you think such a fine young man as our Bleston deserves to meet his end?”

  Bleston looked round, infuriated.

  “Is that your humour, sir?”

  “Yes, Bleston, it is. Just as your humour was to go gaming after the funeral of your mother and aunt.”

  “Which you didn’t attend, uncle.”

  “I am old and feeble. I shall soon join the ladies in the dark. I don’t hurry to funerals, one hurries towards me”

  “Hungch,” agreed Bleston.

  “Well, then, Louisa,” said Lord Maskullance, “what so you think? A soft and gentle death for my nephew, or a theatrical and epic death?”

  Louisa considered, her lashes lowered, candlelight swim­ming in the lagoons of eyes.

  “Nothing soft,” she murmured at last, “for such a bold gentleman.”

  “Well said,” barked Bleston, missing the point.

  He pulled the brandy decanter back to him and refilled his glass attentively.

  “Well, Louisa,” said Lord Maskullance. “One should not be dilatory.”

  Louisa raised her eyes. Between peridot and amber they shone upon the old man with as much love as she was capable of—indeed, not much, and yet, by its very dearth, valuable.

  “Dilatory,” said Bleston, shifting his fat body. “I recall meeting this minx on the moor, a mermaiden in the rain.” He belched loudly, without bothering to pretend.

  “Louisa will fill your glass again, Bleston,” said Lord Maskullance. “Get up and come to the window with me. We’ll observe the park, how the dusk settles on it. Louisa must work her magic unseen.”

  Bleston said, “Why should I move?”

  “Because I tell you to, because you are a gentleman and have impeccable manners.”

  “Hah,” said Bleston, but he laughed and rose and went to the windows and stood there with the old man by him. And Louisa, who carried her phial now always with her, prepared the glass of brandy in her own unique way.

  She had not tried again to poison Sheepshead. He had ceased following her. Seldom was Lord Maskullance able to walk with her about the gardens, but when he did, the figure of the butler-steward, his snuff and humbugs, were not to be seen. Sheepshead might wait. It was right that he should, until the opus of Maskul­lance be concluded.

  Lord Maskullance guided Bleston back to the table. “And there is your drink, Bleston.” Prepared by magic.

  Bleston took the brandy and drained it and poured himself another.

  “We must gather the apples,” said Lord Maskullance to Louisa. “Do you think an apple has a soul?”

  “Does a man have one?” asked Louisa. She was not ex­pressly watchful. She saw that the old man was not either. Each knew or had deduced the oncoming fury.

  “One hopes not,” said his lordship. “One hopes for rest. The soul, if it exists, must surely undergo such—”

  Bleston gave a loud cough. He put his hand to his throat and half got up. “This brandy,” he said and choked.

  * * * *

  “—such endless toils and tasks to purify and make sense of itself. I confess,” confessed Lord Maskullance as Bleston arched across the table, cartwheeled among the candles and descended to the floor, taking plates and cutlery and tablecloth with him, “I confess I long for oblivion.”

  “Oh no,” said Louisa. “Whatever the punishment, I long to live for ever, however I may, and in whatever form.”

  Bleston kicked and streams of crockery and blood hit the ceiling.

  “The form in your case would be exquisite, Louisa. I think perhaps your soul would resemble a small furry animal, an ermine or white fox.”

  Bleston rolled into the fireplace and the fire screen fell with a crash. None of the blood had touched Lord Maskullance or Louisa. A last candle tottered and fell to extinguishment.

  “I shouldn’t mind,” said Louisa, “so long as I was able to remember myself.”

  “And a mirror. You must have that. A mirror in Hell, which will be your home.”

  “Oh, Hell, do you think?” Louisa flirted with dismay.

  They gazed at one another, and Bleston’s right boot shot off and kicked over a vase of chrysanthemums on the sideboard.

  There was silence.

  “Obviously an apoplexy. No need to call out the doctor so late,” said Lord Maskullance. “It will wait till morning.” Lord Maskullance rose. He said, “Louisa, when I saw you on the moor, when I beheld your beauty, I knew that you were death. And so I invited you in. In half an hour, will you come to my bed chamber? You know you need fear nothing from me, from an old man, who, besides, has never seen women in that fashion.”

  “I shall,” she said, “of course.”

  “My lovely one,” he said. “Be swift.”

  But when Louisa went along the corridor to the vast old bedroom with its vast old bed draped round in velvets, she found the ancient man lying on his pillows laughing, quietly and riotously, shaking from head to foot with joy.

  “Oh Louisa, my Louisa, my darling death. What delight I’ve had from you.”

  She went to him and of her own accord she took his skeleton hand, like a dry white autumn leaf. She held his hand as it and he shuddered with laughter, and then he lay back and only smiled and closed his eyes. Presently his features sunk inwards, like spoiled dough. So easily he went, and without her assistance. Lord Maskullance had laughed himself to sleep for ever.

  * * * *

  Louisa was questioned concerning the murder of Lord Maskullance on a rainy misty morning when the oaks and beeches bled w
ith leaves. She had been seen going to his room. She was suspected of smothering him with a pillow.

  * * * *

  An inquest had been held. Despite slight postmortem evidence, it was concluded that Lord Maskullance might well have died of suffocation. Though there were few if any definite indications, the circumstances were extremely suspicious. The body of Bleston also seemed worthy of thorough examination, and it provided a more sinister picture. The spine was snapped, the windpipe collapsed, and there were haemor­rhages from both lungs and abdomen. On the orders of the coroner the other bodies of the luckless family were next ex­humed and a more detailed autopsy performed on each of them. These yielded results only sensibly consequent to their modes of death. However, Georgie’s injuries were now viewed in an altered light. He had been thrown from a horse, which could well have occasioned his broken back, and the haemorrhaging of stomach, lungs and trachea. Yet these lesions were so like those Bleston had incurred, who had not been thrown from a horse at all, but was supposed to have suffered an apoplectic fit, as to give rise to query on both counts. Agathena’s injuries were consistent with having fallen down stairs. And yet it might be said that she had been most unfortunate, for persons had actually fallen down the same stair before, with only sprained or broken limbs as a result. Maud and Millicent were mysterious in that such little or no amounts of liquid were found in the lungs. “Dry’ drowning no longer seemed a foil explanation. Had all three ladies been dead before their falls into air, water and soup?

  For traces of poison the pathologists therefore searched diligently. They found none.

  In the case of Bleston strychnine was suspected, but no hint could be obtained, even though the corpse was fresh. Nor was the body of Lord Maskullance any use either on that score. Were perhaps suffocation, and poisons of two different types em­ployed?

  Further investigations went on. It was the most prolonged inquest the county had seen. A tobacconist, who had perished during the season of the other deaths, the lunatic found on the moor with edibles from the manor, the peculiarly-dead police­man, they were also exhumed. As were the bodies of an elderly lady formerly living in the vicinity of the manor, a thatcher from the village who had died during the building of a cottage by tumbling off the roof, and a blacksmith, thought drunk, who had fallen down a chimney.