by Caro Peacock
‘Mr McPherson, isn’t it? I believe we have an acquaintance in common.’
‘Have we?’
His tone was barely civil. Beyond a routine attempt to glance down my bodice, defeated by my demure muslin, he wasn’t interested.
‘He’s a member of parliament, Mr Cyril Eckington-Smith,’ I said.
It was an experiment. If Eckington-Smith had indeed been acting as McPherson’s messenger boy in the matter of the pamphlets and found out who I was, surely he’d have reported back. There was no recognition in McPherson’s eyes, no change in his bored tone.
‘I’m afraid you must be mistaken. I don’t know the man.’
I said I was sorry and crossed back to my own side, aware of eyes on me, including Tom’s. Another black mark.
Soon afterwards, the party broke up in the usual mild confusion of people looking for their cloaks and overcoats, waiting in the hall for carriages and cabs. Determined to salvage something from the wreck of the evening, I helped Mrs Glass on with her wrap.
‘I was interested in what you had to say about India,’ I said. ‘I’d be so pleased if you’d let me call on you to hear more about it.’
She was surprised, but only mildly so. As far as I could tell, she was one of the few who’d enjoyed the evening, after that first shock of seeing the man she’d never wanted to see again.
‘Call as soon as you like, dear. Monday if it suits you. Perhaps I can get you interested in a bazaar we’re planning for the Calcutta orphanage.’
She gave me an address in Kensington. Beattie arrived beside us and put an arm round Mrs Glass.
‘So kind of you to come,’ Beattie told her. ‘I’m having cook put up a bottle of the milk punch. I’ll send it round to you with the recipe.’
Mrs Glass’s driver arrived and she went out into the night, uttering thank yous. Most of the guests were still there, but dispersed over the next ten minutes or so until only the Talbots, Tom and I were left.
‘I’ll take Mrs Glass’s punch if you like. I’m seeing her on Monday,’ I said.
The Talbots insisted on calling out their carriage to take Tom, myself and Mr Tillington home. They stopped at the gateway to Abel Yard to drop me off first. Tom walked with me to the bottom of my stairs. He hadn’t said a word on the journey. I could feel the anger radiating from him.
‘That piece in the paper, was it anything to do with you?’
I couldn’t lie to him. I said nothing and he drew the right conclusion.
‘I don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t know what you’re thinking.’
He didn’t add: I don’t know what you’ve turned into, but it was there in his tone. There was no point in telling him that I didn’t know what I was doing either, so I wished him goodnight and went upstairs.
FIFTEEN
On Monday morning I walked across the park to Kensington, carrying the bag with Beattie’s bottle of milk punch. Tom’s remark was very much in my mind. I did not know what I was doing, except following a stubborn belief that Mr Griffiths’s death had its explanation in what had happened in India a long time ago. Tom’s new friend Mr Tillington could have told me more. It was annoying that I’d made progress in getting him to talk about it, then cut off the flow with too blunt a question. If I tried again, Tom would hear about it and be angry. Apart from Amos’s horseshoe clue, that left only Mrs Glass. She was of the same generation as Griffiths and McPherson and clearly had a story to tell. The question was, could she be persuaded to tell it to me? It was worth a try, at least.
Mrs Glass’s little house in Kensington High Street proved that the late Humphrey, who died of India, had left his widow well provided for. Its sash windows gleamed in the sun, with velvet curtains looped up inside. Rows of red-and-white tulips stood on parade in the window boxes and two closely clipped bay trees in tubs guarded the front door. A maid in a white frilly cap opened the front door and showed me into a ground-floor drawing room. Mrs Glass was sitting in a chair by the window, in a loose gown of brocade, her feet in embroidered slippers and a kind of turban round her head.
‘You’ll excuse my not getting up, Miss Lane. The fact is, I’m not quite myself this morning.’
Indeed, her face had a greyish tinge, and her eyes were bloodshot, as if she’d slept badly. Her breath had a faint odour of garlic. I asked if I should go and call another time, but she said no, it was nice to have company. We exchanged a few remarks of no importance about the Talbots’ dinner party. I produced the bottle of milk punch from my bag, explaining that I’d offered to bring it over to save Beattie the trouble of sending a servant. Her reaction was unexpected.
‘She’s already sent it.’
‘When?’
‘First thing on Sunday morning. Just after eight o’clock it was. I was still in bed. My maid Jane answered the door and said a boy had come with a bottle for me from Mrs Talbot.’
I stared at her. Beattie wouldn’t have forgotten that I was delivering it. In any case, her household would have been too busy first thing on Sunday morning cleaning up after the dinner party to have anybody to spare for running errands.
‘Are you sure it was from her?’ I said.
‘Of course. I had a touch of indigestion all day yesterday – no reflection on Mrs Talbot’s dinner – so I told Jane to pour me a little glassful yesterday evening, thinking it would put me right.’
She made a face.
‘It didn’t?’ I said.
‘It did not. I think it must have gone off overnight. In fact it made me . . .’ She put a hand on her stomach and mimed, as genteelly as could be done, violent vomiting. ‘It left a metallic sort of taste, like eating sugar off a cheap spoon. Only I wouldn’t want Mrs Talbot to know.’
‘Might I see the bottle?’ I said.
She looked surprised, but rang the bell for Jane and the bottle was brought. It was ordinary green glass, full to within a few inches of the neck. I eased out the cork and sniffed. The aniseed smell from the rack was much stronger than I remembered from Beatrice’s brew. I put the bottle I’d brought beside it for comparison. That one was clear glass. When I opened the bottle, the aniseed smell was indeed less pronounced.
‘Beattie will be very sorry about that,’ I said. ‘I’ll take both bottles away with me, if I may.’
‘You won’t let her think I’m complaining?’
‘Of course not, no.’
I tried to follow my plan of questioning Mrs Glass about McPherson but to no effect, partly because my mind was on the bottles and partly because she made it clear that she was allowing no trespassing in that quarter. Even a gentle reference to her moment of uneasiness the evening before was batted firmly away.
‘Don’t let’s talk about it, dear. I was being silly and that’s that. I’d hate Mrs Talbot to think I’d been upset in any way.’
She was willing enough to talk about other aspects of her life in India. She’d been sent out at the age of eighteen, to act as a companion for an aunt who’d married a government official.
‘Up to then, I’d never even crossed the Channel, been no further away from home than Bath, then there I was sailing halfway round the world. Oh, it was such a life – the jewels, the elephants, all those handsome men in their uniforms. I didn’t mind the heat then. You don’t feel it so much when you’re young. We’d dance all night, then go out on breakfast picnics at dawn with real champagne imported from France. Would you believe, I had three proposals of marriage in my first season?’
Her eyes were sparkling and the pink coming back into her complexion at the thought of it. I resisted the temptation to ask if one of those proposals had been from McPherson.
‘Then there were our concerts and plays. We had to make our own entertainment as a rule, but some of the gentlemen were as good as Garrick. Too good, some might say. Amateur dramatics can be very dangerous to the feelings in sultry climates. Then I married poor Humphrey. I’m not saying a word against him, but it’s a different thing being a wife from being a girl. Different anywh
ere, I dare say, but more so in India. I buried three children in four years. None of them lived beyond three months. Fever, you see.’
‘You had children who lived too?’
‘Yes, two sons. And they’re both in India, one a colonel already and the other with the Company. It’s in your blood, you see. If you’re there any time, it’s in your blood.’
At least we got on well enough for Mrs Glass to say she enjoyed talking to me and I must call again. Back home, I put the two bottles on the table in my study, dipped my finger into the liquid from the green bottle and licked it. Since a spat-out mouthful had not killed Mrs Glass, it seemed no great risk. The flavour was mostly aniseed. There might have been the faintest metallic aftertaste, but then perhaps I imagined that because I was expecting it. I knew about arsenic. There was a reliable test for it now. A few months ago, I’d stood in a London laboratory and made notes while it was done. I took my casebook from the cupboard to refresh my memory. The experimenter had mixed a sample of the suspect cold coffee with sulphuric acid and zinc to produce a gas that left a silvery black deposit on a glass test tube. Metallic arsenic. My client had been standing beside me at the time, solemn faced.
‘As I feared. It looks very much as if my poor wife is trying to poison me.’
Not enough to kill him, he’d insisted. She only wanted to make him ill. In her poor, confused brain she saw him as her enemy. My client wanted me to keep watch on his wife and produce firm evidence, then he could decide what must be done. He was a liar. I’d suspected it from the first consultation, but it was several weeks before I’d proved it. The aim had been to consign his entirely innocent wife to an insane asylum. The name of my then client had been Cyril Eckington-Smith MP. And here we were, with Eckington-Smith crossing my path again and the presence of arsenic. Coincidence?
Possibly, yes. For one thing, it wasn’t conclusively proved that it was arsenic in the false bottle. I could go to the trouble and expense of sending it to a laboratory. At less expense, I might have asked one of the urchins in the mews to catch me a live rat for experiment, but couldn’t have brought myself to kill even a rat that way. For the moment, let it stand as arsenic. I wrote out a note giving the date and circumstances, tied it round the false bottle and locked it away in a cupboard and went on trying to sort out my ideas. Eckington-Smith had not been at the dinner party. Only a very small group of people knew that Mrs Glass was expecting the delivery of a bottle of milk punch – Beattie’s dinner guests and their servants. I ruled out the servants. They’d all been with the Talbots for some time and could have no possible motive for poisoning their dinner guest. I cast my mind back to that scene in the hall where Beattie had made the promise, trying to remember who might have overheard. No help. As far as I could remember, it could have been any of the guests. Even ruling out the Disraelis, Tom and Mr Tillington, Mr Calloway and myself, that still left fourteen. Of those, who had heard me making an appointment to call on Mrs Glass? A smaller number, certainly, but I couldn’t remember clearly enough to narrow it down. Again, who could have noticed that I’d been deep in conversation with Mrs Glass? The women mainly, because it had mostly happened while the men were still at table. I’d still been sitting on the footstool at her feet when they all came back into the drawing room, but it would have taken a very quick eye to notice that or draw any conclusions from it.
A quick eye, or the eye of a man with reason to be worried about what Mrs Glass might say. A man who had figured so unhappily in her past that, many years later, she was shocked when he walked into a room. McPherson. Because of my prejudice against the man, I’d been trying not to rush to the conclusion, but he was the obvious one from the start. He’d noticed me talking to Mrs Glass. Soon afterwards, I’d accosted him about Eckington-Smith and put him on the alert. I was sorry about that now, but couldn’t have foreseen how things would develop. Then he’d overheard me making that appointment to visit Mrs Glass and drawn the right conclusion: I knew Mrs Glass had a secret involving him and was hoping to root it out. What I hadn’t expected was this immediate and ruthless action. He’d taken ten hours or less to concoct something resembling the punch and deliver it. Almost certainly, he wouldn’t have attended to the details himself. He seemed to have plenty of cronies to do his dirty work for him. Did he intend the drink to kill her or just make her too ill to receive visitors? No way of telling. I worried at it all day until my head was splitting. All paths seemed to lead back to McPherson but there was no sure proof against him. Eckington-Smith was possibly his only weak point.
In the afternoon, Mrs Martley and I took a walk across the park to the livery stables, to give a carrot or two to Rancie. Amos was in the yard.
‘I’ve got a horse to see out Richmond way tomorrow. That mare of yours could do with a proper bit of exercise.’
Trust Amos. If I’d had an errand at the court of the Emperor of China he’d have probably known a horse in Peking he wanted to see. Instead of our usual ride in the park, we set out westwards and were on Richmond Green by mid morning. We dealt with Amos’s business first, going to a private stables to see a carriage horse that might do for one of his clients. He watched, giving nothing away, as it was trotted out in the head collar and harnessed to a phaeton, then made his offer to the head groom. The man shook his head.
‘They won’t let him go for that.’
Amos wished him good morning, cheerful as ever.
‘Waste of your time, then?’ I said as we rode away.
‘Not a bit of it. He’ll come down five guineas, I’ll go up five. Nice little horse. I’ll be bringing him back with me this time next week. That’s the farrier over there.’
We had to wait – loosening the girths and letting our horses graze – while the farrier finished shoeing a carthorse. As soon as it was led away, Amos got into conversation with him. The farrier was friendly enough, but didn’t waste words. He had bristly grey hair and looked sixty or older, but had handled the big horse as easily as a child with a doll. They’d never met before but had acquaintances in common and the horse world has its own freemasonry. Pretty soon, Amos had turned the conversation to a carriage owned or hired by an Indian gentleman.
‘Hired,’ the farrier said. ‘From over there.’ He nodded his head in what was probably the direction of a local livery stables. ‘Taken it and the horses and driver for three months.’
‘Staying a while, then?’
‘Seems so.’
‘See much of him?’
‘Not a lot. Keep to themselves.’
‘More than one of them, then?’
‘Him and the two ladies.’
‘Indian ladies?’
A nod.
‘Wonder what brings them here?’
A shrug.
‘Staying near here?’
A nod towards the other side of the green. I joined in the conversation for the first time.
‘That cottage over there?’
‘S’right.’
We said good day to the farrier and led the horses away.
‘It’s the same cottage,’ I said. ‘The one that Mr Griffiths stayed in. That can’t be a coincidence. And there were two women with the gentleman in the carriage that night by the river, I’m sure of it.’
‘We paying a call then?’
‘Yes.’
It wasn’t worth remounting for that short distance so we led the horses across the green. The cottage looked much the same as the first time I’d seen it, except that red geraniums had replaced the forget-me-nots in the border. I left Amos holding both horses, walked up the brick path to the front door and knocked. For a minute or so nothing happened and I wondered whether to knock again. Then suddenly, without any sound from inside, the door opened. Standing inside was the same Indian lad in turban, tunic and white trousers who’d opened the door to Tom and myself when we came calling on Mr Griffiths. At first I thought I must be mistaken, and they only looked alike to me because both boys were Indian. On second glance, I was sure it was the very same
lad. What’s more, there was a glint of recognition in his eyes, as if he’d seen me before. Surprise made me stumble over the words I’d prepared.
‘Please tell your master that I knew a friend of his and I should be very grateful for a chance to speak with him.’
I gave him my card. He stared down at it, then at me. The recognition had faded from his eyes. They were blank.
‘Sorry, not understand.’
He began to close the door.
‘Please, at least give my card to him. Tell him I’m a friend of Mr Griffiths and . . .’
I spoke deliberately loudly, sure that in so small a cottage somebody inside must be hearing. Before I could finish the sentence I found myself staring at a closed door.
I walked slowly back to Amos.
‘No good?’
‘Something’s badly wrong.’
I took Rancie’s reins from him and moved so that we had a view of the back of the cottage. Surely somebody inside must be curious about us. Curtains were firmly closed over the downstairs windows but above them, in what was probably a bedroom, they were parted and the window was half open. As I looked up, a flash of red and gold caught my eye. It looked very like the silk shawl an Indian woman might wear over her head, then it was gone.
‘Being watched from two sides we are,’ Amos said. He nodded across the green. ‘See the gentleman on the grey?’
A man on a grey was walking unhurriedly away from us.
‘He was taking a good look at you when you were waiting at the door,’ Amos said. ‘Stopped his horse until you started walking back, then he went.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Elderly, quite upright, like an old soldier on parade.’