by Tessa Harris
“Was the body too ...” It was difficult for her to bring herself to say the words.
“No,” Thomas interrupted. “I am still hopeful of finding the cause, but I need to do more tests.” Lydia nodded, but her sense of frustration was palpable.
“All is not lost,” assured Thomas. “But I need to return to London before I can be sure.”
He saw her body heave in an inaudible sigh before reaching for a small velvet bag at her side. She handed it to him and he took it, hesitantly.
“Your fee,” she said coldly.
Thomas bridled, but before he could protest, Hannah returned with a tray of tea and poured the hot black liquid into porcelain cups. Thomas could tell she was oddly nervous and the servant sensed he was looking at her. The spout strayed from the cup and, to her dismay, she spilled tea on the table.
“Begging your pardon, my lady,” she blurted, almost distraught at her mistake.
“ ’Tis of no consequence, Hannah,” Lydia said kindly. Nevertheless, the maid rushed off distraught.
Lydia shook her head. “Poor woman.”
Thomas looked at her questioningly, awaiting an explanation.
Lydia knew she would have to give him one. “Hannah lost her daughter a few weeks ago.”
Thomas frowned. Lydia continued: “She was drowned in the lake. A tragic accident.”
“A terrible loss,” sympathized Thomas.
Lydia fingered the handle of the delicate porcelain cup that remained empty before her. “Yes, and now I know how she feels,” she said softly.
Thomas saw the emotion rise in her face. He wanted to reach out and clasp her soft hand that played so forlornly with the teacup, but all he allowed himself were a few words of comfort across the great abyss that divided them.
“I will find out how your brother died, your ladyship. That I promise you, but I will not do it for money.”
She lifted her gaze to meet his and for the first time she looked at him as an equal.
“I will not accept payment for my work,” he reiterated.
She was about to protest, but saw the resolve in his face and detected a note of hurt in his voice. Instead, she tilted her head slightly in a gesture of thanks.
“You colonists are very proud,” she observed.
Thomas was not sure whether she was reprehending him or admiring him, but he dared to suspect the latter. The uncertainty was short-lived, however, as Hannah returned with another teacup and poured once more, this time without incident. Any mutual understanding there had been between them in that split-second smile was now lost.
Decorum and cool politeness reestablished themselves for the next few minutes. In between sips of tea, her ladyship spoke of the weather and the garden and Thomas, who had become accustomed to English reserve, could do little but nod and agree and punctuate the awkward silences with inane pleasantries until he felt it politic to take his leave.
Lydia escorted him through the garden to the courtyard where Will was waiting with the horse. He smiled at Thomas, who gave him another farthing.
“I meant what I said, my lady,” he told her just before mounting his mare.
“Thank you, Dr. Silkstone,” said Lydia, allowing a smile to flit across her lips.
She felt a strange compulsion to watch him ride off through the main gates, then turned to walk back through the garden. Passing the low box hedge, she was reminded of the unpleasant incident with the rat not an hour before. She could see Kidd through a half-open door planting seedlings in the glasshouse nearby and went over to speak to him.
When the gardener saw his mistress approach he put down his trowel, wiped his muddy hands on his breeches, and stood to attention.
“Your ladyship.” He nodded.
Lydia did not return the greeting, but looked at him sternly. “You know I cannot abide rats, Kidd. Can you see to it that more poison is put down?”
The gardener’s expression suddenly changed. He looked awkward.
“What is it?” she quizzed.
“I fear ’twould be hard, my lady,” he told her.
Lydia raised an eyebrow. She was not used to being crossed by the servants. “And why might that be?”
Kidd fixed his gaze on the earth floor. “There’s no more poison left, my lady.”
Lydia looked at him quizzically. She had seen several jars of the laurel water herself only three or four days before.
“Where has it all gone?” she demanded.
Knowing there was no easy way out of his predicament, the gardener raised his bearded face toward his mistress and looked at her sheepishly. “His lordship ordered me destroy the retort and all the jars yesterday,” he mumbled.
Lydia paused for a moment, surprised at the revelation. Not wishing to register her shock, however, she simply shrugged her small shoulders. “Of course he did. I was forgetting,” she said and, lifting the hem of her muslin gown slightly so as not to trail it in the dirt, she walked off back toward the hall.
Chapter 15
“If God had intended men to lie in water,he’d have given them fins,” chided Mistress Finesilver, pouring the last of countless jugs of hot water into the tin tub.
Ever since Thomas had announced his intention to take a bath shortly after his return from Oxfordshire that morning, the housekeeper had been complaining about having to heat so much water. Moreover, when Thomas told her that he wished to bathe in the privacy of his room, he thought the old harridan would explode. A compromise was reached, however, when it was agreed the young doctor would soak in his laboratory, where there was a water pump just outside the door. He would give the irascible matron an extra phial of laudanum for her pains, he told himself.
The click of the laboratory door came as an enormous relief to Thomas. At last he was alone and he walked naked across the room. The past two days had been rather disturbing and slightly traumatic. He was used to dealing with dead people, but dead people who had died without any real mystery. True, sometimes the cause of death was not straightforward. Was it an aneurysm or a heart attack, a burst appendix or a duodenal ulcer? Yet there was so much more to the case of young Lord Crick.
For now, however, he would let all thoughts of the hapless aristocrat, his beautiful sister, and her arrogant husband float away in his bathwater as he attempted to slough off the gruesome events of the past forty-eight hours.
Dipping his hand into the tub, Thomas smiled at the comforting warmth of the water. It was then he remembered the essence that one of his wealthy Jewish patients, Mrs. Margolis, had given him. He had lanced a particularly aggressive boil for her and, to show her gratitude, she had given him a bottle of scented water.
“A token of my appreciation,” she had told him, handing Thomas the clear glass bottle. He had taken it graciously and put it away in the top drawer of his desk, never giving it another thought, until now. With only a towel to protect his modesty he tiptoed across the slate floor to his desk drawer and retrieved the bottle. Uncorking it he sniffed it and found the scent to be very pleasing. He then returned to the bath and poured in most of the contents of the bottle. A powerful perfume was immediately released, enticing him, as if he needed enticing, into the deep, soothing waters of a battered old tin tub.
Never had water felt so warm, so comforting, so relaxing. He immersed himself in it totally so that it enveloped him entirely from head to toe. As it did so, Thomas could almost feel the layer of death that had clung so avidly to his body for the last twenty-four hours ease itself from his skin and drift away. He did not close his eyes, so that he could see ripples and currents whirl and eddy before him, making him feel like a fish swimming through fresh water. For a split second he almost believed he could breathe, but then, as his lungs began to burn, reality returned and he reemerged from the depths, taking a deep gulp of air.
Thomas surfaced and lay back. Baths are inspirational, he told himself. After all, did not Archimedes formulate his great principle of water displacement while indulging in one? He smiled at the th
ought of making his own great discovery in the bath. But his breakthroughs, his advances, such as they were, never came to him in a blinding flash, but rather through a chink that allowed a narrow shaft of light to penetrate and gradually illuminate the darkness of ignorance.
Thomas put out an arm and reached for a strange, fibrous object that lay on a chair nearby. A naval friend of his had presented him with the curio after one of his voyages to Africa, telling him it was the skeleton of a fruit called a loofah, that the natives used to slough off dead skin. Thomas began to rub his arms vigorously with it and found it quite a painful, yet strangely satisfying experience. He even started to sing, something he very rarely did. The words of a sea shanty, taught to him by the first officer of the frigate that brought him to England, sprang to mind and he embarked on the first verse with great gusto. In fact, so engrossed did he become in his song and in his rubbing that he did not hear the latch lift on the laboratory door. Nor did he notice a figure approach the bath until it was too late to protect his modesty.
“A fine tenor you have there, young fellow,” came a familiar voice. Thomas sat bolt upright in the tub and instinctively placed his loofah strategically over his manhood. He need not have bothered. It was Dr. Carruthers.
“Sir. I did not hear ...”
The old anatomist laughed. “So, you are bathing, Dr. Silkstone—a very worthwhile habit. Do I detect bergamot with a hint of hop blossom?”
Dr. Carruthers never ceased to amaze Thomas. He had seen those very ingredients written on the bottle.
“You are right, sir,” he replied. “But how did ... ?”
“You forget, Dr. Silkstone,” replied the old surgeon, smiling. “I may be blind, but I stare with my ears and detect with my nose.” Thomas was slightly puzzled by this revelation and, sensing this, Dr. Carruthers laughed and changed the subject.
“So, tell me, Thomas, I want to know all about your mysterious liaison with a certain young lady up in the wilds of deepest Oxfordshire,” he chortled.
Thomas did not feel like obliging his mentor. Despite the fact that Dr. Carruthers could not see him, he still felt oddly vulnerable. Once again, as if detecting his young protégé’s unease, the old doctor said: “But it can wait until dinnertime,” and he left Thomas alone once more, but the glorious peace he had felt earlier, prior to Dr. Carruthers’s interruption, had deserted him. Instead his eyes were drawn to the small, cobalt blue bottle that sat on his desk.
Just before he took the coach back to Oxford, he had paid a visit to Mr. Peabody, the apothecary, whose premises were in Brandwick. The nervous little man had not expected Thomas to call and seemed quite out of sorts when he appeared at his door. Nevertheless he led Thomas into the back room of his business where he mixed all his salves and febrifuges. Large glass jars containing powders of crimson and saffron, of sickly green and charcoal gray were ranged on dusty shelves, interspersed with boxes of bark and tubs of lard.
Soon Mr. Peabody’s eyebrows were knitted once more into a frown when Thomas enquired if any of Lord Crick’s purgative might remain. He suspected not, but was delighted, and somewhat shocked, to find out that the apothecary had preserved some of the batch.
“You want to test it, you say?” he said, suspiciously handing over the small blue bottle to the young doctor. “Looking for poison, I assume?”
Thomas nodded earnestly and Mr. Peabody’s brow creased once more. “Well, you’ll not find any, I can assure you,” he jibed, suddenly seeming less recalcitrant than before, like a rabbit that suddenly bares its teeth.
Thomas had promptly put the bottle in his topcoat pocket, trying not to show his relief at discovering what could be a key piece of evidence, and left as quickly as he could in case the apothecary changed his mind and asked for the phial to be returned. And now that bottle, made of glass as blue as the sea off the coast of Maine, sat enticingly on his desk, ready to offer up its secrets if he could but devise a method of separating its ingredients. Rhubarb, jalap, spirits of lavender, nutmeg water, and syrup of saffron: he had memorized the list on his return journey to London, wondering which one of these natural components, if any, could have had such a fatal effect on the young lord.
Later, over a dish of roast mutton and capers, Thomas told Dr. Carruthers about the strange circumstances surrounding Lord Crick’s death and the postmortem he had conducted. He saved the intricate details until after Mistress Finesilver had cleared their plates.
“So, now you have the purgative, you can test its effects,” ventured Dr. Carruthers, tucking into an apple.
“In theory,” replied Thomas. “But I need to find a way of separating out the components that might be involved.”
“Just as I could tell the ingredients of the individual scents in your bathwater,” ventured the old man.
“That’s it,” exclaimed Thomas, suddenly realizing the significance of Dr. Carruthers’s skills.
“But surely you know what was in the medicine? The apothecary gave you a list,” said the old doctor.
“But what if that list was added to or tampered with?” asked Thomas.
For once Dr. Carruthers did not have an immediate answer. He simply toyed with his napkin.
“There has to be a way,” mused Thomas.
His companion grunted, then pointed out rather unhelpfully: “And only a week until the inquest.”
The rest of the evening Thomas spent in deep and uncomfortable thought, going down dark routes that only ended in blind alleys. The clock struck eleven when he decided to retire and he was just about to climb the stairs when a troubled-looking Mistress Finesilver entered the room, carrying what appeared to be a letter.
“Begging your pardon, Dr. Silkstone,” she said warily. “But this has just come for you.”
Thomas looked at her, puzzled, as she handed the parchment to him.
“Strange at this time of night,” he muttered, breaking the seal.
“There was a knock at the front door, but when I opened it there was no one there,” explained the agitated housekeeper.
As soon as he opened the missive, Thomas could see why the bearer had wished to remain anonymous. In strong, bold script the message read: STAY AWAY FROM BOUGHTON HALL.
Chapter 16
“You have eaten nothing, my dear,” remarked Michael Farrell to his wife as Hannah disappeared from the room with the last of the dirty dishes.
“I have no appetite,” came Lydia’s terse reply.
“You have been through much lately,” said Farrell, standing up and walking toward her at the other end of the table. As he put his hands on her shoulders, she winced.
When her husband had first fashioned the chemical retort, which he kept in the glasshouse, he had told her it was to distill attar from the garden flowers and she had welcomed the idea, envisaging a plentiful supply of exquisite floral fragrances with which to perfume her clothes, her hair, and the soft furnishings in the house. Last year, however, rose petals had been replaced by black laurel cherries. “We are overrun with rats,” he had told her. “We need to rid ourselves of the wretched things.” She did not disagree, for she loathed rats more than any other living creature. And so it was that in autumn, as soon as the plump cherries that looked like black olives appeared on the laurels on the estate, Kidd would harvest them and fill the retort with them in order to distill their powerful poison.
Lydia had been brooding on the destruction of the retort all day, wondering whether or not to confront her husband with the facts. She stiffened her back and felt his hands lift quickly, as if he had touched something hot. He drew out the chair next to her and sat down. Now was the right time to ask him, she told herself.
“Why did you order the retort to be destroyed and all the poison with it?” Her words came flooding out in a rapid torrent. Farrell looked momentarily fazed. He paused and picked up a silver fork that had been left on the table.
“How did you know?” he asked, fingering the fork nervously.
“I ordered Kidd to put more r
at poison down and he said he could not,” she replied, looking at him straight, watching his reactions intently.
Farrell smiled at her. She found him infuriating at times. She was anticipating some glib, implausible excuse and he did not disappoint. Turning ’round on her chair, she faced him and waited.
“The poison was useless,” he told her dismissively. He paused for dramatic effect, knowing that she wanted more. “It did not work. You know that yourself. I hear you had an ...” his lips curled slightly, “an encounter with a dirty vermin today.”
Lydia felt the blood rising to her cheeks. He went on: “The rats, for some reason, were not dying, so I told Kidd to destroy the still and we would find a better way to rid the place of the vile creatures.”
He has done it again, she told herself—extricated himself from a difficult situation, like some master contortionist. He smiled and kissed her on the top of her head triumphantly. He had delivered a perfectly legitimate reason for destroying the still.
“Does that satisfy you, my love?” he asked, still stooping over her chair. She detected something slightly superior in his tone and it riled her, yet she managed to smile all the same.
“Yes,” she replied softly.
“Good,” he said, as if he had just concluded some sort of deal. “Then I shall take my leave and catch up on some reading in my study.”
She watched him go, then looked out of the half-open window at the rose-tinted sunset that made the lawns and the hills beyond them glow. She walked over to the casement and inhaled the scents of jasmine and late-flowering honeysuckle that released their unctuous perfume into the evening air. She decided she needed a walk. There was no chance of sleep coming to her that night unless she vented some of her frustration. She could not possibly bear the thought of her husband’s hot breath against her neck, or the touch of his thighs against hers, unless she left the four claustrophobic walls of Boughton Hall, albeit for a few minutes. The need to distance herself from the deception and intrigue was overwhelming.