Sweet Poison

by David Roberts

  ‘No, my lord,’ John said. ‘Of course, I have been thinking things over, especially since the Inspector –’

  ‘Oh, Inspector Pride has talked to you?’

  ‘Yes, my lord, he has talked to all the servants. Cook was very upset.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She took it, my lord, that the Inspector was accusing her of poisoning the General.’

  ‘But that’s absurd. The poison can only have been in the wine. When the General died he was not eating, he was drinking his port.’

  ‘Yes, but Inspector Pride has, if I may say so, my lord, a somewhat unfortunate manner.’

  ‘Ah yes, I see what you mean. Is she all right now?’

  ‘Yes sir. The Duchess took her in hand and was good enough to speak to us all and reassure us that none of us was under any shadow of suspicion. It was very good of her Grace and took a great weight off Mr Bates’s mind.’

  ‘Bates! Why should Bates be worried?’

  ‘The Inspector was very insistent inquiring about the port, my lord – who decanted it and how it was served.’

  ‘But that is ridiculous. There could be nothing amiss with the port in the decanter. We all drank that. The General must have had the poison in his glass.’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  Edward was silent as he pushed his left leg into the trouser, trying not to wince as his knee protested. When that was accomplished and he was pulling on a shabby cardigan which he thought he might be excused for wearing given his status as an invalid, he said, ‘So you noticed nothing in the behaviour of the General or any of the other guests at dinner – before I arrived, I mean – that you thought odd in any way?’

  John considered for a minute. ‘I thought, if I may say so, my lord, that the Duke was having a little difficulty with the conversation.’

  ‘How do you mean exactly?’

  ‘Well, my lord, it’s not for me to say and I only presume to do so since you ask me, but I had the feeling that there were some long silences – I mean, as though the guests were not quite at ease. Please understand, my lord, I speak in confidence. As you say, my lord, Mr Bates and myself were busy with the food and the wine so I may well be mistaken.’

  ‘That’s very interesting, John. Did you tell Inspector Pride that this was your impression?’

  ‘Certainly not, my lord. It would not have been proper.’

  Edward considered. ‘I expect you are right, John. The Duke particularly wanted to bring together gentlemen with very different views of the world and no doubt, since they did not have much in common, there was little in the way of small talk.’

  ‘The foreign gentleman spoke most of the time, my lord, and Mr Bates and myself commented that what he was saying did not seem to please . . . But I beg your pardon, my lord, Mr Bates would think I was being forward in presuming to say so much.’

  ‘That’s quite all right, John. I promise you that what you say will go no further. Such a terrible thing – it is natural that we should try and establish why and how the poor gentleman took his life.’

  ‘Indeed, my lord – nothing like it has ever happened at the castle and we are all most shocked.’

  Lord Edward Corinth stopped to steady himself as he was about to descend the great staircase. He had a stick in his right hand and he grasped the banister with the other. John had offered to assist him but Edward had told him not to fuss and that he could manage on his own, but the stairs were precipitous and he had no wish to go head over heels down them and break his neck. While he got his balance he looked at the portrait of his father which hung there, magnificently framed in gold piecrust. It was one of John Singer Sargent’s masterpieces. Either the painter or the Duke – almost certainly the latter – had chosen the hall below where he was now standing as the backdrop. The Duke was costumed, somewhat incongruously, in full hunting dress: tightly fitting shiny black boots, breeches, coloured waistcoat, black cravat and black topcoat trimmed with some type of fur. It looked to Edward as though his father had been so impatient to get out of the house and out of the painter’s presence that Sargent had only been able to catch him for a few moments at the front door before he went on out to his beloved horses and hounds, and yet, in other ways, it was very studied. Both painter and subject had been making a point but perhaps not the same point. Edward smiled wryly: certainly Sargent had captured the man’s arrogance. The Duke was standing feet apart, his right hand in the pocket of his jodhpurs, the other holding a hunting crop so that the whip curled along his leg, proclaiming his status not just as master of foxhounds but as monarch of all he surveyed. His youngest son’s eyes were drawn inexorably to his father’s face, deathly pale beneath a black silk top hat.

  It was a face which combined weakness and strength of purpose in equal measure: the beaklike nose above thin red lips, the small eyes black like lumps of coal. A memory so vivid it made him clutch his forehead came to Edward out of nowhere. He was six years old. It had snowed heavily during the night and in the morning he had stolen out, unsupervised for once, to build a snowman. He had soon tired of it. The labour was much greater than he had bargained for. Suddenly, just as he was about to give up, his father had arrived dressed much as in the Sargent portrait. Seeing his son defeated and on the point of bursting into tears he had lifted him up and swung him over his head as easily as though he had been his hunting crop and called him ‘a jolly little man’. Then together they had completed building the snowman, his father finding an old trilby for the snowman’s head, a cigar stump for where his mouth should be, and three shiny black coals, one for a nose and two for cold beady eyes. Edward had been enchanted and had looked at his father in a new light, as a magic man. Only gradually did he come to appreciate that this half-hour with his father, playing in the snow, was to be unique. For months and then years afterwards he waited for his father to come and play with him again but he waited in vain. His father, except for that one time, made no sign that he knew his youngest son existed. Edward held no grudge against him. The Duke was a god, and gods, he knew from his studies, were capricious. He treasured this single moment of communion with the father he had feared but never known. Even now he occasionally dreamed of it.

  Then there had been the war which they now called the Great War and the death of Edward’s eldest brother Franklyn almost as soon as he reached France. Franklyn, or Frank as he was known in the family, had joined a smart regiment in 1912 and welcomed the war, seeing it as a path to glory – a way of earning his father’s respect – or so his mother had told Edward many years later. He had seen himself leading a cavalry charge on his favourite mare, Star, named for the white mark on her face, but had discovered almost immediately that there were to be no cavalry charges in this horrible new kind of war. Instead, on 23 August 1914, at Obourg, north-east of Mons, he led his men – many from the towns and villages close to home, some he had known all his life – at a group of grey-clad soldiers on the edge of a wood. Waving his revolver in the air as though it was a magic wand, he had died moments later, shot through the head, one of the first British officers to be killed.

  The Duke, his mother told Edward shortly before she herself died in 1922, had never shed a tear for his dead son, but for all that, he had been wounded to the heart. He had refused to permit his second son, Gerald, who had just left Eton, to join the army, and father and son had quarrelled bitterly but the father had prevailed. Edward, six years younger than Gerald and still at prep school, had known nothing of this. He had worshipped Frank from afar and had been enormously proud when just before he left for France he had come down to the school, dressed in his uniform, and had taken him and three of his friends to eat scones and jam in the Blackbird, the tea-room in the high street. Then, only a few weeks later, the headmaster had called him into his study and gravely broken the news to him that his brother was dead – that he had died a hero’s death. Edward had been unable to understand it. How could his brother, so strong, so solidly there one moment, be not there the next? His friends treated h
im almost with awe, patting his back and making embarrassed attempts to console him in the English way. ‘I say, bad show, Ned, what rotten luck.’

  Edward had seen Frank so rarely during his childhood it was a year before he could take in that he would never see him again and that he wasn’t just away somewhere, to return unexpectedly and ruffle his hair and present him with a puppy or a Hornby train-set before disappearing again. By this time death was a familiar visitor in the families of all his school companions and his loss was no longer special except to him. His brother was a name to be read out by the headmaster on Sundays along with the other fallen heroes – young men who had been educated to die for king and emperor and had dutifully done so. Now, twenty years later, he could hardly remember what his brother had looked like. There was no portrait of him as there was of their father, and the photographs, however hard Edward looked at them, conveyed nothing; they showed a good-looking young man, virtually featureless, with whom he could hardly associate the dashing, hero figure of his childhood, let alone the reality behind that image. It was a puzzle. Edward liked puzzles but not of this kind with no clues and no witnesses prepared to talk. Neither his mother nor his brother would do more than echo the conventional tributes and it would have been cruel, Edward knew, to have pressed them further. Those dead young men were beyond comment or criticism. They were saints to be prayed for. The Old Duke had considered publishing a book of remembrance, as had the parents of other young officers who had died on the field of battle, but he never got round to it. Maybe there was nothing speakable to say.

  Frank had seemed very grown up to Edward when he went off to war but in fact, he could now appreciate, his brother had been little more than a boy, ignorant of life and of the world, and there was the tragedy. It was a burden that fell very heavily on those left behind. Edward turned from the portrait and hopped slowly down the stairs. His father had died in 1920, a shadow of the man Sargent had painted, his mind and body twisted by two strokes, a dribbling incontinent wreck. Gerald was now Duke of Mersham and gathered round his dinner-table men whom his father would have abominated had he ever deigned to notice them: stockbrokers, newspaper editors, politicians and worse. The new Duke saw it as his mission to help prevent another European war and if that meant mixing with men like Lord Weaver, Larmore and Baron von Friedberg then he would do it. What did any of that matter if they could be used to keep the peace? But now, Edward thought grimly, death had entered even into the Duke’s own castle and sat at his table and eaten his food and drunk his wine.

  As Edward entered the dining-room the Duke, who was munching toast and honey and reading The Times, looked up at him in surprise. ‘Ned, my boy – are you up? Connie said Dr Best had told you to stay in bed for at least forty-eight hours.’

  ‘Oh well, Gerald,’ said Edward, helping himself to scrambled egg and sausages from the silver chafing dishes on the sideboard, ‘I got bored. My knee is feeling better so I thought I would come down. Is there anything in the paper?’

  He did not need to say what he meant by ‘anything’.

  ‘There is a long obituary of General Craig. Wonderful how fast these blighters work, eh?’

  ‘How do you mean, Gerald?’

  ‘Well, Colonel Philips thought it best to put out a brief statement to the Morning Post and The Times about the General having died rather than let rumours get out about . . . well, about how he died, and here is a long screed about his career and what not. It takes me a day to write a letter and God knows how long it would take me to write something like this, if indeed I could,’ he added meditatively.

  ‘Ah well, you see, obituaries of distinguished men past their first flush of youth are written in advance of their death so that they can be printed as soon as news of their demise is received.’

  The Duke digested this and seemed to find it shocking. ‘You mean, people write things about other people assuming they are going to die?’

  ‘We all have to die, Gerald.’

  An awful thought occurred to the Duke. ‘They haven’t written stuff about me, have they, Ned?’

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so,’ said his brother soothingly, ‘after all, what have you done?’

  The Duke did not know quite how to take this but then saw that his brother was joking and guffawed. ‘Really, Ned,’ he said, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Throw me over the Morning Post if you are not reading it, will you, Gerald,’ said Edward, digging into his eggs.

  General Craig’s obituary in the Morning Post was very full and for the most part flattering. Educated at Wellington College, he had made something of a reputation as a young subaltern on Kitchener’s staff in the Sudan in 1896 and had distinguished himself at the battle of Omdurman. It was there he won his Victoria Cross, one of the first to be awarded. Kitchener was passing a pile of ‘dead’ dervishes after the battle when one of them sprang up and charged with his spear, ignoring pistol shots from Kitchener’s entourage. He was about to strike when Craig, throwing himself between the dervish and Kitchener, took the spear in his shoulder and still managed to kill the dervish. However, there was the suggestion of a stain on Craig’s record in the Sudan. The anonymous obituarist alluded in a couple of lines to accusations that Craig had killed wounded prisoners on Kitchener’s orders, an allegation, the obituarist added, which was denied by Kitchener and Craig and never substantiated.

  Craig had been wounded again in 1900 at Spion Kop in South Africa during the Boer War, and at the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 was Major-General Sir Alistair Craig VC. He was on Sir John French’s staff and along with a hundred thousand professional soldiers – the British Expeditionary Force – he fought at Mons, on the Marne and at the first battle of Ypres. There was no question, Edward saw with admiration and envy, but that Craig had been a man of exceptional physical courage and an experienced and successful soldier. However, for some reason the General had not ended the war with all the honours and titles one might have expected. He became a full general but not a field marshal and most surprisingly of all he was never given a peerage. What, Edward wondered, had gone wrong for him? The obituarist did not speculate.

  Edward folded the newspaper and was about to toss it aside and ask to see The Times’s obituary when his eye caught a headline on page three. It read: ‘General Sir Alistair Craig’s death caused by poison: allegation in the Daily Worker.’ There followed a summary of a report in the latter journal, a newspaper whose existence the Morning Post normally refused to acknowledge, which gave an accurate account of the General’s death from cyanide poisoning at Mersham Castle. Edward went white and bit his lip. His brother would be horrified that any newspaper, let alone the organ of the Communist Party, should be describing in such detail how one of his guests at dinner died. The gutter press would leap on the story. The Duke’s peace-making dinner-parties would be made mock of or there would be suggestions of backroom conspiracies. It didn’t bear thinking about but of course that was just what needed to be done.

  He was about to say something to his brother when the Duke gave a howl of anger. He thrust his copy of The Times at Edward, stabbing his finger at a story half-way down page two. He was unable to utter, such was his anguish. With a heavy heart Edward took the paper and looked at the offending item. It, too, was an account of the General’s demise quoting the Daily Worker. Edward might have expected The Times to have added words of disbelief; after all, Times readers did not normally expect accurate reporting from employees of the Daily Worker. The fact that they did not express doubts about the accuracy of the story suggested that they had already checked that it was true.

  At last the Duke was able to speak. ‘Who has done this? One of the servants, the police? I asked everyone for discretion.’

  ‘I am afraid, Gerald, that it is more likely to be one of your guests.’

  ‘What? You mean one of the women?’ The Duke spoke with absolute scorn of that lesser breed of mortals. ‘Hermione Weaver, I suppose? Why did Connie insist on having that awful girl in
our house? Connie!’ he shouted, getting up and going to the door. The Duchess was an early riser and was already in the garden doing something to the hollyhocks with Andrew, the head gardener.

  ‘Yes, dear, what is it?’ Edward heard Connie calling. She was used to the Duke’s rages. They were unpleasant when they occurred but usually quickly over. On this occasion, however, Edward was inclined to believe that the Duke would not be easily mollified. He valued privacy above almost everything and the idea that he and important guests of his should be held up to public scrutiny was unbearable. Of course, the Duke was aware that at the inquest some account of the General’s death would be reported but he had been confident that he could use his influence to keep it to a minimum. But here was a list of guests given with the implication that one or all of them had poisoned General Craig. It was outrageous, it was . . .

  Edward was tortured by another thought. The Duke had forgotten it but there had been a journalist present when the General had died, and she had not been a guest proper so may well have considered she had no duty of silence, in fact just the opposite. Edward could quite see that with ‘a scoop’ handed to her – almost literally on a plate, along with cold ham and salad – she would be mad to do anything but use it. Verity, for of course it was of her he was thinking, had left very early Sunday morning without saying goodbye. It all fitted. The only thing that puzzled him was why she had gone to the Daily Worker. Country Life would not have been suitable, he realized, but why not the News Chronicle or the Daily Express? She would have avoided the New Gazette as this was owned by Lord Weaver but that still left her lots of choice. She hardly looked like a foot soldier in the class war but that meant nothing. Nowadays it was quite impossible to predict the political views of anyone, even someone one knew well, and he did not know Verity at all except as a black-bereted, tousle-haired young flibbertigibbet completely lacking a sense of direction.

  Oh God, he thought, he was in for the high jump. He had inadvertently introduced a spy into the heart of his brother’s castle – a spy who had already done incalculable damage. How could his brother invite other important men into his house now? How could any visitor be confident his conversation would not appear in next day’s newspapers? No one would dare to accept his invitations except the vulgarly curious and the sensation seekers.