The Poison Bed: 'Gone Girl meets The Miniaturist'

by E C Fremantle

  My hand hovered over him. I wanted to coax him awake, to tell him I’d make him better. Elwes pulled me back sharply. ‘I wouldn’t. Not without gloves. We don’t yet know the cause and he might be infectious.’

  ‘I’d like to take him out of here, give him a proper burial – some dignity.’ Even saying it I knew there was no dignity in death, not that kind of death – the worst kind.

  ‘The coroner will have to look at him first, with witnesses.’

  I hated the idea of a stranger picking over him, cutting him open, no secret left unexposed. I knelt to pray but felt the weight of God’s judgement. It was too late for His intervention anyway, so I got back to my feet. ‘I’ll stay to witness the post-mortem.’

  ‘It’ll be a grim business. Are you sure you want –’

  ‘I am.’ I sounded more assertive than I felt but I was compelled to be there while he suffered that final indignity. It was the least I could do.

  We went in silence to Elwes’s lodgings to wait. Lawrence Davies was still there, hunched on a bench, cradling his head in his hands. Elwes suggested he go home.

  He deliberately bumped me with his shoulder as he made for the door, saying under his breath, ‘If it wasn’t for you he’d still be alive.’

  The sickening accuracy of his statement jolted me. I saw he wanted someone to blame and tried to placate him, but he told me he had no use for my sympathy. ‘If you want to help me, find me work. Nothing will bring Sir Thomas back, but the means to put food on my table and a roof over my head …’ He paused. ‘Someone like you could never understand what it is to be stalked by destitution.’

  I heard Thomas in his words; it pulled me up. I hadn’t even considered that the boy had lost his livelihood. ‘Of course,’ I promised. ‘I’ll find you a position.’

  He looked me full in the eye, then went on past me and out of the door.

  ‘What was that about?’ asked Elwes.

  ‘Poor lad’s beside himself with grief. Overbury was something of a father figure to him, you see.’ Elwes was happy with my explanation but I was left with the feeling that Davies had been coercing me – with what I wasn’t quite sure. Grief had addled me too.

  It wasn’t long before the coroner arrived. Elwes gathered six of the Tower guards to stand witness and before long we were all crammed into that stinking charnel house of a room.

  The coroner came with an assistant – a young lad who might have been his son, for they both had the same dark hair and sallow skin. He was asking questions of Elwes and carefully noting the answers. He opened a large bag to reveal the instruments of his trade: long-bladed shears and clamps, and a set of knives buckled to the lid in order of size. He asked what Elwes knew of the treatments that had been given to Thomas. He called him ‘the deceased’.

  ‘For God’s sake, use his name,’ I shouted, without thinking, and everyone turned to stare at me as if I was a lunatic. I couldn’t stop. ‘Sir Thomas, that’s what he’s called. Sir Thomas.’

  Those near me took a step away but Elwes clapped a hand to my back. ‘It’s the legal term, that’s all. No disrespect is meant.’ He turned back to the coroner. ‘Sir Thomas was bled regularly and, as far as I know, an enema was administered several hours before he expired.’

  Weston was called in to tell what he knew. I couldn’t listen any longer for the despair thudding through me.

  The coroner and his boy efficiently removed Thomas’s shirt with gloved hands and slid all the bedding from under him, until he lay naked on the hard bench beneath. The whole thing was half dragged, half lifted, to the window to make the most of the small ration of light. The witnesses shifted uncomfortably, not looking at each other and hardly able to look at Thomas either.

  He was pathetically thin, the deep valley of his stomach covered with pustules. The coroner made more notes and gave instructions to the boy who, with docile nonchalance, lifted Thomas’s skeletal arms to look in his pits, then inspected his mouth and his pitiable genitals for lesions. They found an issue in his arm, which must have been a conduit for bleeding him. It was held open with a small gold bead, plucked out with tweezers and dropped, with a plink, into a dish.

  ‘We’ll turn him over,’ the coroner said to his boy and together they rolled him on to his side, exposing his back. The entire company, coroner included, gasped in unison. Thomas’s skin from nape to buttocks was dark brown, the colour of Madeira wine, and the movement had released a new pungent odour of decomposition. I heard one of the witnesses whisper to another that it must be the pox.

  I stepped towards the man. ‘Keep your filthy speculation out if it.’ Though it was said quietly, it came out with force and he was cowed, mumbling an apology.

  A plaster was removed and beneath it lay a deep black abscess an inch in diameter. I remembered Mayerne telling me of the incision between his shoulder blades to be anointed daily with a balsam. I had imagined a small clean carefully tended wound designed to allow the bad humours to escape, but this was a putrefying crater.

  The room had become unbearably hot and sweat flared beneath my clothes. Someone retched. Most looked away but not me. I’d turned away from Thomas in life and was determined to give him my full attention in death, though it took all the will-power I could muster. I suppose it was a kind of self-imposed penance to force myself to face the unendurable truth.

  The coroner picked up several of the phials and bottles that were on a small table to one side, examining their labels and jotting down his findings. ‘Natural causes. I see no foul play here,’ he announced, looking around the company, who seemed to accept his pronouncement.

  I doubted a single man among us could have coped with another moment in that foul chamber, and the idea of the body being opened was too much for anyone to bear. Elwes, hovering half in and half out of the door with a hand clamped to his forehead, uttered a great sigh of relief.

  As the coroner was leaving, Lidcote arrived with old Master Overbury, labouring on his sticks. They looked straight through me as they passed to enter Thomas’s cell. I stood outside in the curdling heat. It was too hot for the time of year, as if the seasons were muddled, too, by Thomas’s death. A blacksmith was shoeing a horse nearby and the sound of his hammer rang through my head, like a punishment, the blighted image of Thomas’s corpse more deeply engraved with each strike.

  When they returned to the yard old Master Overbury gave me a look that could have soured milk, but he couldn’t make me feel guiltier than I already did. He was asking that the body be released, so his family could bury Thomas at Compton Scorpion where he’d been born and where his relatives lay. Lidcote, by the look of him, would have plunged his sword into my heart, given the chance. I couldn’t blame him.

  ‘I don’t think it will be possible,’ said Elwes. He turned to me to uphold his refusal and wore a strange expression I couldn’t read. I supposed the whole episode happening on his watch had rattled him greatly.

  ‘For goodness’ sake,’ I said. ‘Release his remains. Give him a little respect in death at the very least.’ Elwes looked doubtful so I added, firmly, ‘Just do as I say.’

  A messenger interrupted us, panting and puce-faced, handing a letter to Elwes. He excused himself and half turned his back to read it, folding it and stuffing it away before calling for writing materials to scrawl a reply.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ he said, addressing old Master Overbury, ‘but with the heat at the moment and the condition of the body – you saw it for yourselves – we will need to bury your son without delay in the chapel here. We’ll make sure it is done properly.’

  ‘What’s going on, Elwes?’ I pulled him aside. ‘I told you to release the remains to the family.’

  ‘With respect,’ he seemed unsure of himself, ‘I have the jurisdiction here in the Tower.’ He looked at his shoes. They were scuffed.

  ‘You didn’t have the jurisdiction to let me see him when he was still alive.’ He still didn’t meet my eye. I turned to Master Overbury. ‘I’ll ensure your son is returned
to you.’

  ‘As the lieutenant says’ – the air was sharp with hostility – ‘in this heat …’ His words trailed off.

  ‘As you wish.’ I had no choice but to let it go.

  Back at his lodgings, Elwes discarded his coat, slinging it over a bench in the outer corridor, and led Master Overbury on. Seeing the letter forgotten, peeping up from his inner pocket, I lingered, on the pretext of wanting a smoke, and made a point of asking for a candle to light my pipe.

  Once I was sure I was alone I slipped the letter out, recognizing instantly Northampton’s distinctive looping hand: When the coroner has seen it, bury it as soon as you possibly can. ‘Him,’ I muttered under my breath. ‘Not “it”, him!’ We don’t want to provoke scandal and in this heat keeping it above ground might give more offence to the deceased than honour …

  A floorboard creaked. I turned to see Elwes in the doorway. ‘What are you doing, reading my private correspondence?’

  His letter hung from my hand. I took a stride towards him, exhaling a lungful of smoke. ‘The question that needs answering is why the rush to get Sir Thomas underground? This doesn’t smell right, Elwes. What does Northampton want hidden?’

  ‘We all want to see Sir Thomas treated with respect.’ He sounded surprisingly unruffled and gave me a sympathetic smile. ‘The shock has put us all on edge. It must be so distressing for you, particularly.’

  I was disarmed by his kindness. He took the letter – ‘Let’s get rid of this, shall we?’ – and touched its corner to the candle. It flared up and he dropped it in the empty hearth.

  Thomas was buried within the hour and all his secrets with him.

  Her

  Thin sunlight dapples the floor of the room above the watergate. It is four months since Frances made her confession. Bacon came yesterday to question her again but she had nothing to add that he didn’t know already. It is May, yet still no date has been set for the trial. She wonders how her husband has fared under interrogation.

  Her heart feels loose and worn, its petals falling. Time creeps in the Tower, yet she has the incongruous sense that her life is disappearing too fast, like water into a drain.

  The baby sits upright on Nelly’s lap. It has a fine fluff of hair, so fine that a bald patch, like a tonsure, has appeared at the back where it has rubbed against the pillow. Nelly is making small objects disappear – thimbles and hairpins – causing waves of astonished chuckling from the child. Frances can hardly bear to listen, not when the past is winding itself around her until she cannot move.

  She wonders where Nelly went during the long hours Bacon was here. ‘Nowhere much,’ is what she said when asked. Just after he’d left Frances had seen her with him, deep in conversation.

  ‘I saw you talking to him.’

  ‘He wanted to know –’

  ‘What? What did he want to know?’ Frances feels her moorings loosen.

  ‘If you were well in yourself. He was worried about you.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’ The words snap out of her. She doesn’t believe the girl. Something grazes her face, and her head is thick with the stench of bergamot. It is suffocatingly sweet. Her arms wave frantically, batting it away. A guttural cry escapes from her throat. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘There isn’t anything.’ Nelly leans across and gently takes Frances’s hands, holding them in both of hers.

  ‘That terrible smell.’

  Nelly, with a strange look, tucks a long strand of fallen hair behind Frances’s ear. ‘Bergamot?’

  ‘You can smell it too?’ Frances is sniffing at things – a cup, a cloth, her cuff. Her eyes are black and round.

  ‘It’s the hair oil. Don’t you remember? There was no more lavender so I used that pot of bergamot I found.’

  ‘Oh, God!’ Frances sinks backwards into her chair, with a short burst of manic laughter.

  ‘This place is wearing you down. Here, why don’t you tell me about your wedding? That’ll take your mind off it all.’

  ∞

  I was back at the heart of things, had almost forgotten what it had been like to be the subject of adulation and relished it more than I should have.

  My wedding day passed in a glittering whirl. All those who had vilified me in the previous months were determined to make amends and I knelt at the altar filled with gratitude for my good fortune. The celebrations went on for ten days. It was a wild blur of pleasure and indulgence that culminated in a lavish performance at the Inns of Court, hosted at great expense by Francis Bacon. I only tell you that detail because it seems to me an irony that he is now determined to send me to my doom.

  The day of the marriage was the most extravagant, and Uncle’s delight at the whole occasion was apparent. At one point, he whispered triumphantly, ‘We did it, Frances, against the odds. All your life I’ve been preparing you for a moment like this.’

  I remembered him saying the same thing eight years before at my first wedding, but didn’t remind him – he wouldn’t have liked that.

  ‘Now we are as close to the King as it is possible to be,’ he added. Uncle liked to believe he had made me ruthless, with the drive to power my greatest attribute. I let him believe it. It would have disappointed him greatly to know that, whatever his intentions for me, I’d married for something as banal as love.

  We had a few minutes alone in my chamber before the ceremony. ‘Only you’d dare be married with your hair down, considering the circumstances,’ he’d said.

  ‘Since we went to such a bother to prove me a virgin I might as well dress accordingly.’ He laughed, but I still felt uncomfortable with the deception. And yet I reconciled myself with the knowledge that God saw all and, given my good fortune, must have chosen to pardon me.

  Uncle asked if he might comb my hair, as he’d sometimes liked to do when I was a child. He did so in a trance, smoothing it through his fingers, and lifting it to his face to smell, murmuring, ‘Goodness, he is a lucky man.’ There was something else in his voice – not happiness.

  ‘You sound envious?’ I said.

  He launched a look at me, like a stone from a catapult. ‘I couldn’t be more delighted. We’ve achieved the impossible. We Howards are unassailable now.’

  Father was waiting for us on the steps when we went down. He flicked a brief look over me before continuing some kind of squabble with the groom about the team of horses hitched to the carriage. I might have been upset but I was accustomed to Father’s coldness.

  Uncle, too, became quite heated about those horses, hissing to Father, ‘We can’t let them accept.’ It was a magnificent team that I’d never seen before, all identical thoroughbreds, jet black with white socks and brushed to shine like polished leather.

  ‘We can hardly send them back to Winwood. It’s too late now, and she can’t exactly walk to her wedding. All the other horses are in use. And, anyway, we’ve none even half as good as these.’ They talked of me as if I was absent.

  ‘Who accepted them?’

  One of the grooms was attaching white ostrich plumes to the horses’ headstalls and another was arranging their manes, which had been threaded with gold beads.

  ‘Carr, of course.’

  ‘Didn’t you have words with him?’

  ‘He was insistent – said Winwood was an old friend of his.’

  ‘He must know that Winwood is on the wrong side. He can’t have dealings with those kinds of people now.’ Uncle expelled an exasperated sigh. ‘You know what Winwood’s after with this generosity: secretary of state.’

  I stood on the steps, waiting for them to finish their hushed conversation. It had rained earlier, which had made the cobbles slick and dark. A line of white birds pecking at the ground made a perfect diagonal line, like a strip of lace running from the stores to the stables. There must have been a hole in a sack of grain. Watching the birds, I was only half listening. From nowhere one of the greyhounds came bounding into the courtyard, causing the birds to take flight, up and up, until they became dark again
st the bright sky, turning from white to black in an instant.

  In the carriage, Uncle said to me, ‘You must work on Carr to promote our choice of secretary.’

  I protested, reminding them it was my wedding day.

  ‘Surely you haven’t forgotten what this is for, Frances.’ Father’s tone was frigid.

  ‘She knows. She’s a Howard first.’

  I was thinking, a thrill catching in my throat, that in a matter of hours I would no longer be a Howard but a Carr. Uncle had picked up a hank of my hair and was stroking it absently.

  Robert was captivated by my hair too, winding tendrils of it through his fingers during the celebrations. By nightfall, I was impatient to be alone with him, but when we finally left, the King insisted on accompanying us. We were all the worse for drink but he was more so, lolling on the bed and stumbling over his words. He seemed delighted with me, as if I were a new toy. I was surprised as I’d anticipated his resentment. Perhaps he hadn’t thought it possible that Robert might love me.

  He proposed we play a game. I suppose he wanted to prolong the moment before he had to leave us. It occurred to me that being king might be a lonely business. ‘This is what we will do.’ He fumbled in his pocket for a pair of dice. ‘Each of you throws in turn and the loser must remove something from their body.’

  ‘I don’t think –’ Robert looked dismayed.

  ‘Has marriage made you dull already, Robbie?’

  ‘Humour him,’ I whispered. ‘It can’t hurt.’

  Robert and I were sprawled on the floor. He lost the first three rounds and was undressed down to his bare torso. I saw the King’s gaze fix on his exposed flesh. I’d always known I would have to share Robert but witnessing that look made me understand the extent to which my position was dependent on the King’s goodwill.