by Abigail Agar
Vera watched the chiselled jaw of her Stanley, his fine dark lashes, hoping for some sign of guilt or innocence; instead, he seemed embarrassed as if she might find that he had farted in church rather than that his house was harbouring either a hedge-doctor or a poisoner.
She continued: ‘The second injustice concerns what I found in there. I –’
‘Perhaps I might interject,’ said Lord Stanley. His tone suggested that this was not a request but a command. ‘I should probably give you the details that might explain whatever you found behind those doors.’
Was it to be as simple as that? thought Vera. I ask him once, and he tells me to never ask again. I ask him twice, and he will tell all?
‘You no doubt in your wandering found that a shrine remains in the ruins of that wing to your only competition for my heart.’
No, she thought. Anything but that.
‘I married when I was very young, not a happy marriage at first, one arranged from birth. Some people are lucky, I suppose, thrown together, we turned out to be well matched. She was sweet tempered and kind, and I did all I could to be likewise. It was not a happy marriage at first, but it became one. We had a child, and our love for him became a deep love for each other. All three of us were one person more or less. My parents lived on the Devon estate and passed the manse into my hands as a wedding gift. This was their home as much as mine.’
‘And where is your wife now?’ Vera asked in place of the question she wanted to ask him. The image of the ghostly shadow in the window, the bedroom that appeared to be in use, the preservation of the child’s room. Was his family living imprisoned in those walls?
Without realising she had done it, she had kicked her horse, nudging it away from his.
‘My mother became sick a few years into our marriage, and my father sent her to Bathcombe for the waters. She lived here during that time. She held on for three weeks before passing. Word came that Father had caught the same sickness and died shortly afterwards.’
Vera felt sick herself, the memory of her own parents’ death bubbling up. Not now, she thought, pushing the emotions down. I need to stay strong.
‘We sent all the servants away apart from Caruthers and a doctor, to keep them safe. We burned everything my mother had touched while ill. But too late, my son …’ he paused as if about to voice a name but, half-choking, he seemed unable to. ‘My son had spent much time, without my knowledge, with his grandmother. My wife told me after he became sick too. And we had to watch together as he wasted away. I buried three of my closest blood in three months.’
Vera listened with horrified fascination, unsure whether to comfort Lord Stanley or condemn him, to pity his wife or be jealous.
‘And your wife?’
‘I killed her, after a fashion.’
Every fear she had of Avonside Manse, every suspicion since that first day seemed now to hang on the rhetoric of that one phrase. All that fear was present in her question: ‘Explain yourself, what do you mean “after a fashion?”’
‘I blamed her. I wouldn’t speak to her. I couldn’t even look at her. Or be in the same room as her. I gave her the East Wing and locked the adjoining doors. I had Caruthers hire back only the bare minimum of staff required to run the household, and I threw myself into drink and suchlike. I hid my grief behind the mask of grand parties, because when I pretended to be a man who was free, and happy, and without conscience, I felt free and happy, and my conscience fell quiet until the morning after and there was no audience to play my part to. All the while she … she was alone, abandoned. The doctor said she died of her sadness, but it was not her sadness that killed her. It was my callousness. To me she had killed my child, and I was young, foolish, and deeply cruel.’
‘Cruel? No. You were grieving.’
The anger that passed over Lord Stanley’s face was frightening, a kind of blind fury that fuelled every word that followed with a spiteful invective that made it sound more like a curse than the simple statement it was: ‘So was she, Vera.’
She shrank back from that voice. A voice that carried all the hatred of one hurt and lashing out.
‘And is that the whole story?’ The two bedrooms, child’s and mother’s made sense now, not the young James Stanley’s but his son’s. The medicine cabinet remained unexplained. And there was the matter of the many poisons … She knew before he said it that he was lying.
‘No,’ he said. ‘There is nothing more to it. That is the secret of the East Wing. There is nothing more.’
Yes there is, thought Vera. Yes, there most certainly is.
***
They rode back to the house in silence. Even the dogs – which had bayed happily on the way out running ahead and scurrying back to bother the horses – seemed to sense their master’s mood and fall into an uneasy silence.
No, there is something more afoot in these words he is spinning.
For the first time, she began to feel that her love for him may have been misplaced. After all the rumours of licentiousness and the strain of their current mismatched standings, it might be this, this moment of untruth that was to break their bond?
She hated that it threw her motivations into a whirl. She wanted to justify his behaviour to make him loveable once more; she wanted to condemn it with all the poison of her jealous heart. She wanted to find some way to undo it all, to go back to the happiness she had felt when he had asked to marry her; she wanted to go back to before she had ever met him, to when her own family was alive.
Perhaps there it is, she thought; her own grief for her family, she had hidden from it, allowed Fidel to distance her from it in the same way that he had become a public lothario to hide himself from private pain.
She understood now the anxieties he went through before the ball, the sudden relief he showed when by donning his flamboyant suits he could throw off the widower’s weeds of his mind.
By the time they had reached the house and dismounted, her love had not faded. Instead, it burned just as strong, applying its heat to the betrayal she felt at the lie of omission at the heart of his tale.
Perhaps there is a fragment of truth in what he has told me. Perhaps it is all true. But it does not explain everything. It cannot be the whole of the truth.
Her love was just as strong perhaps, but now it was tinged with pain.
Chapter 16
For two days after the conversation she had with Lord Stanley while on the hunt, Vera could not leave her room.
She felt heart-sick but claimed to be sick of body.
Caruthers despite his strange recent mood did not harangue her, but nor did he visit to ensure her wellness.
Perhaps, Vera thought, he was more hurt or frightened by my threat than I imagined.
Helen nursed her, bringing food that Vera refused to eat, tea and ale which she drank listlessly. She longed for Lord Stanley to visit, but knew he would not, could not.
From time to time, she took out the bottle of laudanum and considered allowing herself to sink into the warm blanket of its effects. She resisted, replacing the bottle in her coat each time.
Helen wanted to call a doctor, but fear of being examined by a professional made Vera refuse. It wouldn’t take much probing to find that her body was not what was expected of your average young man-servant.
Luckily for Vera, on the third day of her bed-rest, a new development shook the house, putting from Vera’s mind all of her own worries.
With the sun just crowning the hills, and the latest of the Manse’s flock crowing their last crows of the morning, Helen rushed into Vera’s chambers. Her face was white as a January frost, and she seemed so close to fainting that her words spilled from her mouth in a drunken slur.
‘It’s horrible, Fidel. Come now, come quick. It’s Caruthers. He has become a suicide! Hurry, please!’
Vera sat bolt upright. A suicide? But … but … why?
For a moment, the confusion of sleep continued to smear her mind, but as she realised the significance of this, anoth
er death beneath the roof she lived in: Maman, Father, Mishka, the ghosts of Lady Stanley and her son, Lord Stanley and Lieutenant Fitzwilliam’s injuries.
Now Caruthers, the man whose love she had spurned, and who she had threatened to expose to public ridicule in a moment of cowardice, was killed by his own hand!
Am I cursed, she wondered. Or am I the curse?
She put aside such thoughts. Blame could fall later, now action was needed; Caruthers needed help.
Vera bound her breasts at record speed, shrugged her shirt on and nearly fell over pulling her britches up and lacing them up. She shot into the corridor, shirt untucked and barefooted, and sprinted down the corridor to Caruthers’ room.
The door was open when she got there, and Helen who had been running ahead of Vera had a look of absolute terror on her face. She was staring at the tangle of sheets and skin that was the sprawled form of Caruthers. He lay on his side in the bed with his eyes glazed over and his lips moving breathlessly as if trying to form words.
Vera leaned in close to feel the strength of his breath. It was the barest tickle on the skin of her cheek. He was making faint noises, but she could only make out a meaningless babble, like an infant’s gibberish, in the string of syllables he was whispering.
‘Hello, Caruthers?’ she said. ‘It’s Fidel.’
He didn’t respond; his open eyes didn’t even move to take her in. He was lost in his own dreams, hunted perhaps by his own wolves.
This then is where that missing bottle went. But what did he fill it with? The opium or laudanum would be the quiet way to go. Hemlock would be a more surefire tool. Perhaps a mixture would be the kindest to one’s self.
Whatever he had plucked from the apothecary’s cupboard in the East Wing was in his stomach now, being drawn into his blood. His spittle had formed a thick white scum at the corner of his mouth, bubbling a little as he spoke his meaningless incantation.
‘Have you sent for the doctor?’ Vera asked.
‘Aye,’ said Helen. ‘Lord Stanley rode out himself to fetch the doctor. But the nearest leech is at Myton Brookleigh nearly a mile each way.’
If only I had let Helen call the doctor for me, he’d be on hand now.
But then Caruthers would have waited, if he wanted to end his life now.
What can I do?
Vera cast her mind back over the diagrams and writings in Father’s books on medicines and anatomy. There must be something she had read that would help a man poisoned like this.
Instead, inspiration came from an unexpected source. On the stand beside Caruthers’ bed was a large green volume, the title printed in gold on the spine.
The idea came to Vera immediately.
‘Quick.’ Vera turned to Helen. ‘Gather a half dozen sticks of charcoal from the wood store. Charcoal mind you, not coal.’
‘What?’
‘Charcoal now,’ screamed Vera aware that she was not doing a very good Fidel impersonation and hoping that Helen, in her own state of high-panic would forget or misremember Fidel’s strange changes of voice.
While Helen ran to fetch the charcoal, Vera pressed her lips to the frothing lips of Caruthers and parted them. His mouth was far colder than it should have been, and all the muscles in his jaw were stiff. She had to work his mouth open and prop it like that with the wooden handle of a spoon. Then she worked a finger into his mouth and pushed.
Nothing.
She adjusted his head so it was further off the bed, lower down and tried again. A small dribble of green bile dripped onto the floor.
This time she pushed her fingers in so hard she cut her knuckle on his teeth and was rewarded by a foul smelling discharge of yellowy green fluid which ejected the spoon from Caruthers’ mouth and doused Vera’s trousers in the filth of his stomach.
Helen returned hands black with charcoal. Together they forced the now slippery mouth of Caruthers open. Vera chewed the smoky charcoal into a paste and spat the mess into Caruthers’ mouth. Again and again she did this, tilting his head back and massaging his throat till he had swallowed his pap like a baby.
After several mouthfuls Vera’s mouth was dry and her hands caked black. The room stank now of three sweating bodies and the soured contents of Caruthers’ poisoned stomach, the ashy wooden scent of the charcoal and the sharp tang of fear that Vera could swear was its own presence in the room.
Caruthers was violently sick again. The now ink black discharge flooding the floor adding to the mess of the room which Vera had long since given up trying to keep off of herself. All three of the people seemed like they were one to her, bound up in some way, and the stench of the room made her feel ill enough that she might vomit at any moment.
Vera couldn’t tell anymore which of the black marks were vomit and which were plain charcoal and which were the pap she chewed. They were all smeared with streaks of black. They were bound up in this little drama, one single organism fighting its own death throws in a tiny room.
‘Helen,’ Vera said. ‘Get Eli and have him move Mr Caruthers to one of the spare servants’ quarters. You go make the bed up for him and see that he gets plenty of cold soup to eat and hot tea.’ Although she spoke in the voice of Fidel, she was aware of her old command underlying her voice. She was only just finding a way to have Vera and Fidel live inside this one skin, and now she felt like both Caruthers and Helen were in here too.
Then the illusion broke, and Vera rushed into the corridor and down to the servants’ bathroom where she propped a chair against the door, undressed and poured bucket after bucket of ice cold water over her skin until every vestige of Caruthers’ toxic purgation was scrubbed from her.
***
With Eli enlisted to give her a hand sponging Caruthers down and moving him to a clean bed, Vera could set up a more sustainable nursing station.
With the immediate panic over, she had the time to mix up a charcoal paste with water. Arranging a bucket to catch any further eructation of vomit, every fifteen minutes or so she would force some more of the charcoal down his throat. Wait till the bucket was full, and then haul it away.
In the interim she sat and read aloud to him softly speaking the words from Milton:
‘Men called him Mulciber; and how he fell from Heaven, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove, sheer over the crystal battlements: from morn to noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, a summer’s day; and with the setting sun dropt from the zenith like a falling star, on Lemnos the Aegean isle: thus they relate, erring; for he with this rebellious rout fell long before; nor aught availed him now to have built in Heaven high towers; nor did he escape by all his engines, but was headlong sent with his industrious crew to build in hell. Meanwhile the winged heralds by command of sovran power, with awful ceremony and trumpets sound throughout the host proclaim a solemn council forthwith to be held at Pandemonium, the high capital of Satan and his peers.’
She stopped, and looking at the pale, sleeping face of Caruthers changed her mind about reading the story of Hell to a man who had just attempted to commit one of the cardinal sins, self-murder.
She took his hand, and in an effort to reassure him began to sing him whatever nursery rhymes she could remember from her own childhood. Some of them were in Polish, but she felt sure it was the tone of voice that counted more than whether or not he could understand the words – if indeed he was aware of anything deep in that envenomed sleep.
The doctor arrived a few hours later, and she relayed all this to him as soon as he arrived, while Lord Stanley stood in solemn silence listening to her words from just outside the doorway to the room.