by Abigail Agar
This was the first they had seen of each other since he had confessed his desire to marry her and she had not said ‘no’.
She could barely look at him, and when she did, she found he seemed to be avoiding her gaze too. He looked worried, his brow furrowed when she mentioned that Caruthers seemed to have taken some poison of his own free will but she did not know what exactly it was. He seemed concerned as much about the method of suicide as by the fact of it.
When she described his seizures and the muttering, Lord Stanley seemed ready to leave the room and be sick himself. The doctor then went in with Caruthers taking Lord Stanley with him and leaving Vera to stand outside.
After what seemed like an age, they came out, and the doctor asked if he might see the room where the ‘poisoning’ occurred. After a quick and careful hunt through Caruthers’ soiled sheets, the doctor found the small bottle of exactly the sort that was missing from the medicinal cabinet.
He smelled the bottle. ‘Unclear what the poison was apart from the fact that it was a tincture. The smell of the solvent is overpowering whatever else was in here.’ The doctor turned to Vera. ‘How did you know what to do with the charcoal, young man?’
Vera glanced at Lord Stanley, trying to hide her amusement. ‘There is a passage in a learned book I read once. It tells of a great physician confronted with a poisoning. I have the volume here.’
She picked up a copy of the book lying beside Caruthers bed and finding the place began to read.
‘The doctor probed the wound. As he drew out his lancet, its point was tinged with a greenish hue. He shook his head mournfully, and quitted the bedside. ''Tis as I feared!” said he. “There is no hope. From the sudden effects, I suspected that the Abbot was stung by a Cientipedoro: The venom which you see upon my Lancet confirms my idea: He cannot live three days.”’
The doctor raised an eye at Fidel, ‘What account is this from? Galen? Hippocrates? I am not familiar with it.’
Vera raised a finger to silence the doctor and continued: ‘Without extracting the poison, he cannot recover, and how to extract it is to me still a secret. All that I can do is to apply such herbs to the wound as will relieve the anguish. The Patient will be restored to his senses, but the venom will corrupt the whole mass of his blood. In three days he will exist no longer.’
‘And so,’ said Lord Stanley, a small smile suggesting that his old self was still beneath the worried exterior. ‘Fidel here extracted the poison.’
He still had an odd look on his face as if he smelled something far fouler than the sweat of Caruthers in the room. Brimstone maybe, or sulphur. But he was also now willing to look Vera in the eyes, and doing so still seemed to give him pleasure, or at the very least relief from whatever was bothering him.
Something about the way he smiled and moved reminded Vera of the nervous energy he showed in the run up to the ball, the same sort of preoccupied storminess.
‘My father used to have my mother purged with charcoal once or twice a week during one of her fevers,’ said Vera, trying not to become too distracted. There would be time to speak with Lord Stanley later. ‘It didn’t seem to do much for the disease, but it extracted whatever she had eaten in the last few hours with great efficacy.’
‘What is that book?’ the doctor asked again.
Vera held it up for him to read the title page:
‘The Monk: A Romance in three volumes by M. G. Lewis, Esq,’ read the doctor. ‘Well, at least there is some value in the arts after all,’ he said chuckling to himself. ‘Not everything can be found in the works of natural philosophers. Although charcoal is often most useful in cases of particular sorts of poisoning. Most often I see it used by farmers when a cow has taken nightshade or hemlock in its grazing by accident. You should see the deluge when a cow brings up all four stomachs’ worth of food.’ He turned to Helen. ‘The mess back in there will take no time to clean up by comparison.’
Vera turned to ask Lord Stanley where best to keep Caruthers while his room, which now stank of sweat, vomit, and the sickly sweetness of the opiate he’d taken, was being cleaned, but Lord Stanley had gone, the door swinging on its uneven hinges where he had half-closed it behind him.
‘If you’ll come with me, Doctor, we can speak to His Lordship about what treatments must be put in place.’
‘Yes. Good thinking, Mr Fielding. I would also like to have a look at Lord Stanley’s duelling injury. When he arrived at my door, I was much concerned that tonight’s emergency would concern him. I do not like that he rode so hard on the way back; he must be in a very delicate state.’
Vera was a little surprised by this. Lord Stanley had made such a clean recovery that it seemed unlikely that the doctor could experience such worry regarding the bullet wound he had incurred.
‘Are injuries like His Lordship’s likely to take such dramatic turns?’
‘They have in the case of Lieutenant Fitzwilliam. His injury nearly carried him to death’s door. I have been there several times to cut away the gangrene, and it is only in the last few days that he has begun to recover the way your Lord has. His commission with the army is quite impossible now. He was lucky not to lose his arm or even his life.’
‘Oh, dear. Poor boy,’ said Vera. ‘Although he wished me harm, now that all that horrid business is in the past, I really cannot wish it on him anymore.’
‘What a noble young boy you are, Mr Fielding. Unfortunately, the lieutenant may be rather less magnanimous than yourself. When I was there, but yesterday you see, I was put most heavily to task on the subject of duellists and murderers. The lieutenant was quite – nay I go further – most excitable on the matter and still more than a little feverish on account of pustules – I’m sorry, my boy, your face tells me that my medical descriptions upset you a little – but the matter is best put thus: that it is my very personal understanding of the lieutenant’s wishes that criminal proceedings be levelled against your master in the matter of the duel. Murder, or attempted murder rather, was alleged.’
‘Murder? They partook in a duel of honour.’
‘Not for their own honour, and given the current, rather new fangled attitude towards the duel as an institution per se, such proceedings regarding criminal action may well be brought. After all the boy’s uncle has much sway with magistrates. In some cases, innocence matters not a jot as much as you might hope.’
You don’t need to tell me this fact, thought Vera. Sometimes it matters not a jot full-stop.
‘Oh dear,’ said Vera and received a pitying look from the doctor no doubt for very different reasons than those which she should truly be pitied for.
‘Do not fret too much for your master, boy. The lieutenant is still bedridden and quite agitated by periodic fevers. He is in no condition to put around his accusations and has been more or less isolated under his father’s care. And I will tell you this much – the Lord Fitzwilliam has little motivation to go to his brother on this matter. He is in the most extraordinary rage at his brother for putting his own flesh and blood in, as it were, the front line of his quibble with yourself.’
‘That is a relief to hear. So no word of his accusations has made its way into Bathcombe?’
‘Oh, no. But with the lieutenant beginning to improve, he may be in better condition to take matters into his own hands. And his account will be more believable then, for he will have the clarity of mind that comes with a body that is in balance. Mens sana in corpore sano.’
The doctor continued his verbiage, dropping Latin and Greek phrases ad nauseam, and finding way-after-way to ramble on-and-on while Vera’s heart sank lower and lower.
The odds of her ever being truly happy seemed now to be in decline. She was in danger of losing her one hope for proving her innocence while Fielding still sat on his heels unpaid, and Lord Stanley’s good wishes towards her were thrown into contention by her snooping and by this new threat she had brought on his head. Her actions seemed about ready to drag him into a battle for his own freedom.
What a couple we make: a lunatic woman and a deadly duellist.
Indeed, she might lose him wholesale, for no other reason than he had stepped in to protect her. Not only was his love endangered by her action, but his freedom, maybe even his life, all on account of his decision to act in her defence, and take her place in the duel.
If only she had gone elsewhere, found her way to a different house, had not visited this horror on this household. Perhaps this might have been something less fearful, less awful in another place.
Her whole new identity – in which she had come to feel at home, to feel safe – was unravelling, and the discarded aspects of Vera Ladislaw were floating up to join those that she had learned to let be part of her whole self.
I am the ghost, she thought. I am the curse, the mystery that haunts these halls. Disguised and hunted, she had brought misery on Helen, injury on Lord Stanley, and had driven Caruthers towards his hideous attempt at the most appalling of sins.
‘Here we are,’ she said to the doctor ushering him into Lord Stanley’s room where His Lordship stood with claret bottle in hand drinking heavily. Vera stayed, longing to know why it was that Caruthers’ act had written such worry into the crinkles of Lord Stanley’s brows.
The doctor eventually left his instructions, took his payment, donned his hat, and left.
Lord Stanley’s hands were shaking. Vera took them in her own and felt the strong, warm grip respond to her gentle caresses.
‘What is wrong, My Lord?’ she asked in a voice barely above a whisper.
He looked at her, tried to say something, and then stopped. She reached out and touched his face, wishing there was something more she could do, some more profound way to reach out and touch him, touch his soul.
‘It’s my wife.’
‘What about her? What are you not telling me?’
‘Oh, Vera. How could I tell you something that would hurt you?’
‘I will bear it, for your sake.’
‘Then how can I tell you something that will hurt me?’
‘I will bear your pain too, my love. I am here. Tell me what I need to know.’
‘I still love her, just as I love you.’
It was too much. She understood at that moment how Lord Stanley could look at his own past littered with women and yet be jealous at even the hint that she had known a man. She felt the same protectiveness, the same fury she had felt when she saw him with Fitzwilliam’s sister at the ball.
She may have lied to him about her past, she was tainted with a murderer’s name, had brought the law, injury, and even suicide down on his house, and yet she couldn’t help condemning him for the pain she felt when he said those words. I still love her, just as I love you.
‘I cannot let her go. It hurts to hold on. But without the hurt …’ he paused trying to find the words. ‘I need to feel the hurt. Or else what I did … it would be like it was nothing.’
‘What did you do? Why are you punishing yourself like this, all these years after what happened?’
‘It took a great deal of strength to overcome my cowardice and tell you of my wife at all, Vera. And that is the word “cowardice”. I am terrified of the shame I brought on myself, by how I acted, by what I drove her to do. I am also ashamed that despite all I did to her, I cannot forgive her for what she did to me.’
‘Please, James. My love. Tell me.’
‘When I said she died of sadness that was, in many ways true. But it was not the whole truth.’
‘I suspected there was more, my love, and I did not push you to tell me then, but now I have to know. You have told me that you still love another. I am in competition for your affections with a ghost, and I must know why.’
Lord Stanley looked into Vera’s eyes, and she could see the tears he was fighting hard to hold back. After a long struggle, he seemed to win, and he spoke again:
‘She had lost her son, and her husband had abandoned her. I could hardly look at her. She withdrew from society, spoke to no one but her closest servants, and barely left her room except to visit the boy’s. That room which remains as it was then, a shrine to him. She needed me; she needed someone to reach out. But I left her alone to sink into her misery alone while I tried to ignore my own and damn all the other people for whom I should have cared.’
‘You have told me this. Was this the full extent of your crimes to your fellow man? Callousness during the madness of grief? Is that all?’
‘It is the extent of my crimes. But not the depth; I have not given you, dear Vera, the full shameful depth of it. My wife, you see how I cannot even bring myself to say her name, did not waste away from sadness. She was racked by a pain so severe, so unmitigated by kindness from anyone, from me, that she took hemlock. Just as Caruthers did. He did this as a reminder to me. A condemnation.’
Vera’s heart froze. No wonder he cannot let this go; the darkness in this house seems to go around and around on itself. Repeating and repeating and repeating …
‘I was fetched to her bedside when they found her,’ he continued. ‘Caruthers was sent off for the doctor. But there was no mysterious man-servant on hand to come up with the cure. She died in my arms. I drove her to death’s door, and then I failed to save her from stepping through it.’
‘And this is what she did to you? Took her life? Left you with the weight of her death on your conscience?’
There was so much she wanted to say, to tell him it was not his fault, that there was nothing he could have done. How it was dumb luck that saved Caruthers but allowed Lady Stanley to die, and there was no fighting with dumb luck.
But the words wouldn’t come to her.
She felt a pain in her own heart that she seemed still to be second in Lord Stanley’s love to a corpse. To a memory.
How selfish pain makes all of us, Vera thought. Lord Stanley, Lady Stanley, Caruthers, and above all me. We all act to save ourselves pain, and in doing so have hurt those around us, around and around it goes.
It dawned on her then what she had to do. She couldn’t cleave to this house while it circled back on its own troubles again and again. Lord Stanley was healed of his physical wounds, Caruthers would live. It was time for Fidel to disappear.
Perhaps one day Vera will return.
With the house in turmoil, she would have no better chance to make good the betrayal she would need to execute if she were to make Fidel disappear. She needed Fielding’s help and could hardly beg the money from Lord Stanley now.
She made her decision.
I will visit just one more sin on this house, and then I will go, she thought.
For hours she sat with Lord Stanley, then, when he passed into a fretful sleep, she rose and returned to her room.
She seized the key to the East Wing from its hiding place, and with its comforting weight in hand, she waited for night to fall, bringing with it the first night of the new moon.
Chapter 17
The door to the East Wing gave way to her, letting out a long creaking sigh. She looked down and followed her old footprints, which were only slightly faded by newly fallen dust. Through corridor after corridor after gloomy stairwell she hurried towards the Eastern-most rooms of the wing on the ground floor.
The design of the East Wing was much older than the main house, dating back in places to the original Avonside monastery and later vicarage which had been converted, step by step into a palace from the church manse which gave the building its name.
Many of the corridors not only lacked the woven runners of the house proper but had warped floorboards which gave off ghostly moans as she hurried down them.
Most disturbingly to her mind – which was alert to any danger that might catch her in flagrante delicto as she stole through the dark – was the fact that in the gloom behind her the boards still creaked as they returned to their old position after she stepped on them.