I opened my eyes to see Colonel Greene looking clammy and ill, his eyes glassy and one hand grabbing at his chest. Then he staggered and collapsed onto the rug, head narrowly missing the fireguard. By the time I had crossed the room, he was already dead.
Chapter 12
Colonel Greene had been an imposing figure in life, but in death he looked vulnerable and somehow smaller.
I knelt by his body to check for a pulse and found nothing.
‘Could someone pass me a glass? An empty one.’ I held it above his lips – nothing. The ragged breath I had heard him exhale was his last.
‘Darling? My love, what is it?’
His eyes were glassy, staring sightlessly ahead, but Aurora took his face tenderly in her hands.
‘I think he hit his head when he fell. Perhaps a concussion?’ She looked at me desperately. I privately suspected he was dead before he even hit the carpet, but there was no need to tell her that, certainly not in front of an audience.
‘Perhaps we should all return to the dining room and let Mrs Greene tend to her husband,’ my mother said in a commanding tone. Even the vultures who had hoped for some gruesome excitement this evening found themselves following her – she would have made quite the sergeant major. ‘Sarah, I’m sure Alisdair can take it from here.’
I glanced up. Wherever he had slipped off to, he had yet to return.
‘Send for Professor Gregory Merchiston. If he isn’t available, get Professor Randall Chalmers.’ Somewhere I found the presence of mind to scribble down their addresses – though admitting in a room full of strangers that I knew Merchiston’s private address wouldn’t do my reputation any favours – and hoped desperately that at least one of them was home.
‘We have a family doctor,’ Aurora whispered. ‘Miles, tell the servants to send for Dr Hamilton.’
The assembled throng had been ushered back into the dining room and my mother took my arm.
‘Sarah! Leave him alone and come with me.’
I looked up at her, this woman I loved and feared in equal measure, and it was suddenly easy to say what needed to be said.
‘I’m the only person in this house with any medical training. I’m not going anywhere.’
She pursed her lips. ‘I think we both know he’s beyond your help.’
‘But the family isn’t. It’s best if I stay with them until a doctor arrives.’
She shook her head sadly. ‘What people will think . . .’
‘They’ll see a woman supporting her new family. You may not like my education, but even you have to admit it has its uses.’
She gave me a long look with an expression that on anyone else I might have called impressed and withdrew. I turned back to Colonel Greene, with his cooling skin and the beginnings of rigor mortis, and his red-eyed, disbelieving wife.
‘I’m sorry, Aurora. He’s gone.’ She yanked her hands from mine and looked at me with pure venom.
‘What do you know? You’re not a doctor, just some silly little girl. Where is Dr Hamilton?’
‘He’s on his way,’ I soothed. If she didn’t want to accept it now, I wasn’t going to argue with her. She had the rest of her life to come to terms with her husband’s passing.
As did her sons. I looked up at Miles. He had his arms wrapped around himself as if it were his body that was rapidly decreasing in temperature rather than his father’s.
‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’
‘I’m sorry, Miles.’ He just stared at the corpse with an expression I couldn’t read. Then he took Aurora gently by the shoulders and eased her to her feet.
‘Mother, come and sit down. We’ll wait for the doctor together.’
In grief, Aurora was a mess, her usual pristine facade shattered. In contrast, Miles was calm, more assured than I had ever seen him. Times like this could bring out strengths in people that even they didn’t realise they had, and the family would be grateful for the younger son’s composure in the difficult weeks to come.
‘Father?’
The new head of the Greene family stood in the doorway, his eyes locked on the body on the ground. He was so ashen that I thought for a moment I would have a second body to deal with.
‘What happened?’ he rasped.
‘He just collapsed. He clutched his chest, so I suspect an acute myocardial infarction.’ Alisdair looked blank, and I remembered anew that this wasn’t one of my lectures; this was a real man, a real family plunged into grief. ‘A heart attack. It would have been very quick; he wouldn’t have felt any pain.’ It was a lie, but one kindly meant. I had seen the expression on the colonel’s face – he had been gripped by a spasm of agony and in his last seconds I believed he knew he was about to die.
In the silence that followed, I heard footsteps, heard the front door open and close and the sound of horses’ hooves striking the cobbles as the family’s guests left. I hid a smile. I thought I was practical, but Mother and Aunt Emily had choreographed the evening to a close discreetly, ensuring that whatever was said about a second death in the Greene household during a party, it would be done in the same breath as admiration for the new fiancée and her family.
As the house descended into silence, Alisdair closed his father’s eyes.
‘Could you fetch me a sheet?’ I asked Miles. ‘I don’t want to leave him like this.’ Truth be told, I could barely stand to look at him and I wanted to prevent his family seeing his body stiffen with rigor mortis, the way his skin would fade to an ashy blue as all the blood, no longer pumping in his veins, drained to the bottom of the corpse with an ugly lividity beneath his clothes.
A light knock sounded at the drawing room door.
‘Our carriage is outside.’ My mother held out my coat and hat pointedly, and I didn’t doubt that she was willing to dress me herself if necessary.
‘I’d prefer to wait until the doctor arrives.’ Propriety indicated I leave. This wasn’t my family, not yet, and I certainly wasn’t their doctor. But some nagging voice told me to stay and see it through. Duty, perhaps – although whether to Colonel Greene, a man I was charmed by but could never bring myself to actually like, or as a physician I couldn’t say.
Unexpectedly, Miles came to my aid.
‘Please, Mrs Gilchrist. If you wouldn’t m-mind letting us have your daughter a little while longer.’
Even my mother couldn’t refuse a grieving man the company of his fiancée. Promising to send the carriage back within the hour, she left with my aunt and uncle, and I wondered what on earth they would talk about on the journey home. Mother hadn’t exactly been bowled over by Miles, but whatever he lacked in charisma he made up for in having a respectable family and being willing to take on board damaged goods. Now, with the Greenes once more the centre of all polite society gossip, his value was plummeting by the minute.
Aurora was weeping openly now, and even Alisdair was rubbing the back of his hand across his eyes. Only Miles remained impassive. I knew he hadn’t been close to his father, but was he really so unmoved? I knew what it meant to have a parent disapprove of everything you did, but if Mother died, I would be inconsolable. Perhaps he simply felt numb; perhaps inwardly he was roiling with all the arguments left unsettled, the gulf between them that would never now be bridged.
‘Perhaps we should move to another room,’ I offered gently.
‘I won’t leave him,’ Aurora whimpered. ‘He shouldn’t be alone.’
Her sons looked grim and less than pleased, but they allowed her this irrational display of grief. Alisdair poured a hefty measure of Scotch for him and his brother, and to my surprise, Miles took it with trembling hands.
A maid carried in a bedsheet to cover the late colonel’s undignified state and a murmured word in her ear was all it took to bring back a pot of tea – I would have preferred strong, sweet coffee, but under the circumstances I could feign a taste for more ladylike refreshments – and we sat in silence, the only noise in the room the crackling fire and Aurora’s sobs.
Suddenly t
he fabric shifted as the body beneath it twitched.
Aurora jumped to her feet. ‘He moved! I saw it!’ She went to tug back the sheet, and I pulled her away gently.
‘It’s not uncommon for bodies to move involuntarily after . . . What I mean to say is, you mustn’t get your hopes up, Aurora.’
‘Men are buried alive every day! You read about it in the newspapers. I won’t have my husband locked up in the family crypt before his time just because some little chit thinks she can be a doctor!’
Alisdair knelt down with me, and together we pulled back the sheet. We were accosted by the sweet scents of recent death and stale urine – it would have happened before he hit the ground, in those final horrible moments when Colonel Greene’s body left his mind’s control entirely. It would get worse. Soon the muscles of the gastrointestinal tract would relax sufficiently to expel whatever waste matter was left, and neither the sound nor the smell was something I wanted to be in the room for.
No matter what Aurora might have read, the burial would not in this case be premature.
Dr Hamilton arrived after the clock in the hall struck ten, and I was grateful to be replaced as the person in the house most familiar with death and its processes. I was weary to my bones.
He was a doctor of the old school, all mutton chops and an air of condescension towards the general populace that was as unmistakable as the faint scent of Scotch he left in his wake. His face was as shiny as his medical bag and his shoes, and I wondered how long he had spent perfecting his appearance before leaving home. I knew by looking at him that he had served the Greene family faithfully and well for decades. He had probably helped deliver the boys and treated their childhood ailments and complaints until they were old enough to bring him more adult problems. And now he would see to the death of the paterfamilias.
His expression was grave as he greeted Aurora and her sons, a mere flickering glance to the covered body on the carpet enough to tell him that whatever treatment he had arrived prepared to give would not be needed.
‘Miss Sarah Gilchrist, my brother’s fiancée.’
Hamilton bowed in my direction, but I detected a hardening of his watery blue gaze.
He had heard of me, then – the bride-to-be who fancied she could join the august ranks of his profession. Whatever dislike he had of me, however, he shrouded in civility – I would, after all, join the list of his patients when I was married.
He knelt by the body, looked under the sheet and sighed to himself.
‘Let’s move him away from the fire, boys. We don’t want him to overheat.’
‘I thought you might prefer to see the body as it was when Colonel Greene fell, sir.’
He looked at me as though I were a dog speaking Latin. Blasted Merchiston – he’d let me forget that medical men didn’t always want to hear the opinions of ladies, even if those ladies were first-year medical students themselves.
As though I hadn’t opened my mouth, he turned to Aurora.
‘Ladies, perhaps you might like to wait in the parlour while I examine the colonel.’
I would like nothing of the sort, but it wasn’t a request. I shepherded Aurora into her parlour and murmured something about fetching her a glass of water before running back on tiptoes to press my ear against the door I had deliberately left slightly ajar.
Miles simply sat staring at the sheet that covered his father, a man who had bullied and humiliated him but who had nevertheless been family. Dr Hamilton addressed all his comments to Alisdair, and behind that I could see a lifetime of acting as though the younger son was not even in the room.
‘Had he complained of any chest pains or trouble breathing since I attended him last?’ he was asking.
Alisdair shrugged helplessly. ‘His stomach was bothering him. And he was still getting those godawful headaches . . .’
It was as though I had been seeing everything through smeared glass, and now it was coming into focus. The way the colonel had been swallowing more frequently, and every word sounded faintly damp, as though there were too much saliva in his mouth. A stomach complaint severe enough to call the family doctor out. The way he had complained of a headache and picked at his meal. The way his body had convulsed for a few horrible moments as he collapsed . . .
That strong whiff of garlic on his breath had been from more than just the food. Merchiston had discovered arsenic under Clara Wilson’s fingernails, and now I knew what she had been doing with it.
Colonel Greene had been poisoned.
Chapter 13
Voicing my suspicions to Dr Hamilton would be a pointless endeavour – he had disliked me on sight, if not before, and I could just imagine his response to my even breathing a word about murder.
Jolting across the cobbles in my uncle’s carriage, I felt a twinge of embarrassment as I recalled the way I had accused Merchiston of that most grievous of crimes a few months prior. But I had been right, about the murder if not the perpetrator. And if Hamilton was a doctor worth his salt – unlikely though it was if he had genuinely missed the symptoms of arsenic poisoning on at least one visit – he would report his suspicions to the police. He would never voice them to me, but he didn’t have to – I had an ally of my own.
Could I risk sending word to Merchiston now? I knew how it would look, conveying covert messages to a man late at night. I would have to catch him before lectures.
A light in the parlour caught my eye. Aunt Emily sat in front of the dying fire in her nightgown, her hair in a loose plait down her back. The firelight glinted off the strands of grey – how long had they been there? She glanced up at me and gave a faint smile.
‘I told Diana I’d wait for you. Poor thing, the shock of the evening must have exhausted her. Still, on the whole I thought it went very well.’
If you set aside the part where a man keeled over and died in front of us, she had a point. Up until then, everyone had got along marvellously, and even Miles and I had formed a bond. All of which was precisely what I didn’t want.
‘How are you, my dear? You were very brave to stay like that, I’m sure the family appreciated it.’
I was too tired to be tactful. ‘It isn’t my first dead body.’
‘I wouldn’t mention that to your mother if I were you,’ she said wryly. ‘I never told her about that ghastly business with Caroline Hartigan last year. I doubt you’ll want to raise it either,’ she added with a warning in her voice.
I wanted to tell her that Miss Hartigan’s murder had been the tip of the iceberg, that I had seen things that would turn the rest of her hair white. If I had, I think in that moment she would have comforted me. But the next day I would doubtless be locked in my room and forbidden to attend lectures or so much as mention Merchiston’s name. I had thought her opprobrium about my behaviour and studies had put a wall between us, but this secret new life of mine was a crevice that seemed impassable.
‘Do you want some warm milk or something to eat? Cook is still in the kitchen if you do.’
It felt rather cruel to have kept the poor woman here so late on the off-chance that I might be hungry. Then again, I was.
‘Toast, perhaps? Maybe some marmalade?’
‘Go upstairs. I’ll send Agnes through to get you ready for bed.’
As I reached the bottom of the staircase, I heard her call quietly to me. ‘Miles clearly adores you. He could make you very happy, you know.’
Miles quite liked me, but I thought adoration was overdoing it somewhat. Still, this didn’t seem the time to remind Aunt Emily that I didn’t love him and didn’t expect to.
The next morning, Mother was sitting at the breakfast table eating kippers. She was ready for me.
‘You’re up early, Sarah.’ Her cheerfulness put me on guard. I had learned at an early age that it was never a positive sign – good behaviour would be rewarded by bland approval, bad by a lashing of her icy temper. Cheerful was reserved for those moments when she thought she had the upper hand and planned to exercise it.
&nb
sp; Well, if she could act as though everything were ordinary, then so could I.
‘I have a lecture at eight. I normally ride with Uncle Hugh in his carriage.’
She put her cup down slowly, eyes never leaving mine, and smiled quizzically.
‘You can’t mean to go to that dreadful place today of all days?’
That had been exactly what I meant to do and she knew it.
‘I’m not in mourning, Mother. He wasn’t my father-in-law.’
‘Yet.’ She bit the word off crisply. ‘It wouldn’t hurt to show some sympathy. We don’t want the Greenes thinking better of their match, now do we? Especially since Miles stands to come into his inheritance earlier than we had expected.’
My heart leapt. Without Colonel Greene’s bullying insistence, would Miles still feel the need to continue with an engagement that had been arranged for show rather than love? Mother would be furious, and God only knew what Uncle Hugh would say. But perhaps I could finally bring this hideous charade to an end.
‘What if I called on Miles this afternoon once I’m finished with my lectures?’ I bartered. ‘I doubt the household will be up for visitors, but I’d be showing my respect without barging in on their grief.’
She looked at my navy skirt and jacket. ‘I suppose you aren’t completely inappropriately dressed,’ she conceded. ‘But for heaven’s sake don’t show up covered in ink and chemicals. You’re supposed to be comforting your beloved, not horrifying him.’ She waved a hand at me. ‘Go if you must. Emily and I had arranged to call on her friends the Patersons, and Lord knows you’ll find some way to cause a ruckus if we bring you.’
The Unquiet Heart Page 10