We needed a plan. To plan, and plot. Think, Tomasino, think. There’s no time to waste. Maybe we could sneak off to the village and find someone there to help us. No, that wasn’t possible. Wire cutters, maybe, so we could break free and clamber away under the cover of darkness. No, that wasn’t enough, either. We needed more than wire cutters. We needed Markus and Moritz and Matilda out of the way.
Perhaps Hogarth was the key. Certainly he’d be here closer to her due date. His Lordship was nowhere to be found, and we were thankful for that. I didn’t think she could take the feel of his horrible hot fingers right then; it might have shocked her into giving birth. No, Hogarth would never think we’d have the courage to challenge him.
For starters, we had to make nice to Matilda. Belladonna could do that without too much strain, because Matilda was showing markedly maternal tendencies. If the sight of this squat and taciturn peasant patting Belladonna’s growing belly hadn’t been so ludicrous, I might have laughed. Matilda was cooking nutritious soups and meals, and checking on the expectant mother so many times every day that I swore Belladonna was ready to scream. The mind boggled at the thought of Matilda sitting in the gatehouse at night, knitting booties and hemming diapers.
“But how are we going to get past the gatehouse?” I asked Matteo softly as we went for a walk one night. We’d already waved to Moritz, so he knew we were aware of him and he wouldn’t have to shoot us. “It’s the only way out.”
“Slit their throats,” Matteo said after an uncomfortable pause. “Like the war.”
Yes, it still was like the war, and we were prisoners of the enemy.
“Except it might make a bit of a mess,” I said, sounding a bit Hogarthesque. “Too much blood.” I shuddered, and we kept on walking, our breath misting in the chill air as we pondered our few options.
Belladonna solved the dilemma for us the next day. Under the napkin on her tray, she slipped a slender tattered volume: The Connoisseur’s Guide to Poison. “I found it in the library, hidden in another book,” she whispered, her eyes huge and staring.
“How splendid. Now don’t you worry about a thing,” I whispered back. “You concentrate on making nice babies, and we’ll take care of all the particulars.”
The book was fascinating reading, and I hastened to the library to see if there was another book identifying which plants and mushrooms were what, so we could start poking around in the woods. A little oleander would be nice. One branch, a few leaves, was all we’d need. Or castor beans. They’re terribly toxic. Except castor beans didn’t grow around here. Potato sprouts"no, it was a bit late in the year for potatoes. Arsenic was foolproof, except I hadn’t been able to find any here. Nor could I tell a toadstool from a truffle, so we’d have to skip the mushroom expedition. Besides, how could we feed the three M’s mushrooms without them getting suspicious? I kept reading. There had to be something. Oh ho, autumn crocus. The entire plant is toxic; that’ll do. Wait a minute"there’s a section on botulism. The Connoisseur’s Guide explained exactly how to grow the mold in little jars. Brilliant. We’d create our very own tasty toxic cocktail, and we’d hide it in the hollowed-out book where she found the guide. They wouldn’t know what hit them. And then when the coast was clear, we’d gather their clothes and their money and their passports, which I’d tweak to suit our more pressing needs.
I refused to think of the further implications.
Quite soon after Belladonna’s water broke, Hogarth showed up with the man he said was the doctor. I remembered this doctor from the examination when she’d first suspected her pregnancy. I didn’t trust him any more than I did Matilda’s maternal fussing, but I had to hope he was going to help Belladonna through the birth.
We had no choice but to trust him.
His Lordship was still nowhere to be found. His disappearance made me nervous, but he must have had his reasons for staying away. It was more than merely not wanting; the birth to be disrupted by his presence. It was something else; I could feel it.
Once her labor started, it quickly became agonizing. I couldn’t bear to hear her screaming so, for hour upon endless hour. “Can’t you give her something for the pain?” I begged the doctor. He shook his head. He was very focused, which made me feel marginally better. Hogarth was pacing in the kitchen. The thought of all the mess was simply too much for him to bear.
Finally, a boy was born first, howling lustily. She called him Tristan. After Matteo and I quickly toweled him off, we couldn’t help but notice Tristan’s beautiful bright pink baby balls, whole and perfect. Of course I’d never seen any baby balls before, but his were disproportionately huge, it seemed to us. A violent wave of affection flowed from my fingers to: the newborn’s skin.
A baby girl slipped out with one final push from Belladonna, and we instantly fell in love with her, too, as we put her in Belladonna’s arms, next to her brother. Belladonna could barely manage to kiss the tops of their heads before falling into a deep sleep of exhaustion. The doctor packed up his bags and Matilda swaddled the babies, clucking to them. She hadn’t yet spoken to us, so I didn’t expect to hear her crooning a lullaby anytime soon. We watched as she carefully put the babies in little cots lined with warm blankets, by the side of the bed, and then tiptoed out. Hogarth came in briefly to look at the babies, saw the rumpled, bloody sheets, and hurried out, practically green.
For the first time in a long time, Matteo and I felt nothing but pure happiness. We fussed over the babies; then we, too, fell into a deep sleep on the sofas near the piano.
I woke up first, and went, yawning, to check on the babies. Then I realized that Hogarth was sitting in the room, and my nerves tingled awake. He shouldn’t have been there; something was wrong. I looked at my watch; late morning. The babies should have roused us by now, hungry for a feeding; that much I remembered from all the Screaming infants who used to drive me crazy in Bensonhurst. I went to Bryony’s cot first, where she was peacefully sleeping, then looked at Hogarth, frowning. “Matilda fed her from a bottle,” Hogarth whispered.
This made me instantly cranky. Belladonna had insisted that she’d be breast-feeding"she was hoping that would make them let the babies stay close to her. I went to Tristan’s cot, but he wasn’t there. By then, all my nerves were jangling so loudly I was surprised Belladonna didn’t wake from the sound of them. I shook Matteo’s shoulders gently, and he quickly woke. The look on my face was enough to alert him that everything was not fine and dandy.
“Where’s Tristan?” I asked Hogarth in a loud whisper, not wanting to rouse Belladonna.
“He’s not well,” he whispered.
“What do you mean?” I said. I was ready to throttle him. He was lying; I knew it. Matteo came up beside me, and Hogarth actually stood up and backed out of the room. Oh ho, so we still could intimidate the enemy if we put our minds to it. This was reassuring. Or would have been, if I could have figured out what was going on. We couldn’t do anything now. And we certainly couldn’t try to escape with only one baby.
When Hogarth reached the safety of the door, where Moritz had suddenly materialized at his side, he turned back to us. “There’s something dreadfully wrong with Tristan’s chest” he said. “Matilda was worried about his breathing when she was feeding him. I certainly hope he’ll be fine. The doctor’s come back to take him to the village. Absolutely nothing to worry about.”
How could we not be worried? “I don’t believe you,” I told him.
“I don’t like your tone of voice, dear boy,” he said, and strolled away.
This couldn’t be happening. What was I going to tell Belladonna when she woke? They’d stolen her baby; I knew it.
When Belladonna stirred a while later and after we forced her to eat some soup, we handed her Bryony, who snuggled to the breast eagerly. She was so exhausted she fell back asleep with Bryony still nursing, so Matteo sat with them, keeping Bryony positioned perfectly. They almost resembled a happy family. Almost.
When Belladonna next woke, she was still too weak
to get out of bed. “Where are my babies?” she asked sleepily. We brought her Bryony, who once again started to nurse like a dream. “Where’s Tristan?”
I sat on the edge of the bed, and she saw the look on my face. “There’s something the matter with his breathing,” I said carefully, “and the doctor took him to the village for more care. He’s going to be fine. Now you rest Bryony needs you.”
“No,” she said, struggling to get up. “No no no"”
Bryony lost the breast and started to cry. Matteo tried to soothe Belladonna, who was sobbing hysterically, and I ran off to the kitchen. Only Matilda was there; Hogarth was nowhere to be found.
“Where is her baby?” I screamed. “What have you done with him?” I was so angry that I was ready to pick up a butcher knife and stick it in Matilda’s squat backside, when Markus came in. He shook his head, frowning, and I stopped screaming. There was no use. They looked as perplexed as we were. In fact, the newly maternal Matilda seemed positively sick with anxiety. Even though Matilda had been in His Lordship’s employ ever since Belladonna could remember"was, in fact, the awful woman who’d laced her up so tightly the night of the auction that she couldn’t breathe" she would never do anything to harm one of those babies.
Either Hogarth had stolen him away or he really was terribly sick.
All I knew was that her baby was never coming back.
“I want my baby,” she whimpered like a wounded puppy. “I want my baby I want my baby my baby"”
She slipped into a desperate lethargy, weak and too unresponsive to breast-feed. Bryony was hardly fussy once we started her on bottle feedings. I didn’t mind; it gave Matteo and me something to do.
Hogarth reappeared a week later and told me bluntly that Tristan was dead. That they kept him in the village for fear he was contagious, and still weren’t sure what killed him. One of those dreadful things that could happen to newborns. They’ll bring him back here to bury him, someday soon.
“Don’t lie to me, Hogarth,” I said wearily. How could a day-old baby catch a cough and be feared contagious? Why won’t you let us see the body? I wanted to say this"I wanted to strangle Hogarth until the golden buttons of his bespoke waistcoat popped"but I didn’t have the energy to fight. Besides, he needed to think we were weak and defeated.
But we weren’t. We followed the instructions in our tattered guidebook. Jars filled with leftover food were tightly lidded and hidden in thick volumes of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained in my room, sprouting a deadly mold. We’d snuck out in the night to dig up the crocus patch, then spent endless hours in the bathroom extracting the toxins.
Don’t think I’d ever tell you how to do it.
Belladonna did not leave her bed. Without Bryony, I doubted she’d have kept going. Despite everything, Belladonna still had a mother’s instinctive need to nurture her offspring. Bryony quickly settled down and was a remarkably good baby. She rarely cried, and slept well. She ate, pooped, napped, made faces, blew bubbles. She was altogether delicious, my little flower. It was as if she somehow already knew the circumstances surrounding her birth and was trying everything in her tiny power to ease her mother’s situation.
Or perhaps I was just being ridiculous.
Hogarth left again, and we started getting ready to go, too. We rehearsed our every move. We didn’t tell Belladonna, because she was too weak to care and would undoubtedly have protested that we couldn’t go without Tristan. Matteo agreed with me, though. All that was keeping us here was waiting for her to regain a bit more strength. We had to fly before His Lordship returned form his prolonged absence. We had to.
We had no choice.
Sometimes we let Matilda hold and feed the baby, but only in Belladonna’s room and under Matteo’s careful supervision. We told Belladonna to ask Matilda for special things from the village, things that involved a longer trip, so we could get Markus out of the house. The day that Markus went on a shopping expedition for something big and bulky, so Moritz was obliged to go with him, was the day we’d been waiting for.
That day, I hurried into the kitchen at lunchtime to tell Matilda that Belladonna was desperate for her help with the baby, right that minute, and she almost smiled. She was only too glad to oblige. I offered to carry in the lunch on a tray, and she nodded.
I was surprised my hands weren’t shaking when I put on my gloves. They still weren’t shaking when I took the small glass vial out of my pocket and sprinkled a bit of poison in the sugar bowl and poured a bit of poison into the salt and pepper shakers. Then I spread a little on the bread of the sandwich Matilda had already made for herself. I spread a little more on the bottom of the loaf of bread Markus and Moritz would be eating for dinner. You are going to be a murderer, I told myself.
You are going to watch them die.
We’d already packed ourselves sandwiches and put them outside under a potted plant to stay cold and fresh. We weren’t going to be eating anything that came out of this kitchen ever again.
I brought Belladonna her nutritious soup and Matilda her delicious ham sandwich on rye, heartily seasoned. Matteo and I watched her eat it. Botulism can take twelve to thirty-six hours to work, the guidebook said, but the crocus may speed things along.
By the time Markus and Moritz returned, Matilda was groaning upstairs in bed with a violent stomachache. She couldn’t blame it on me, of course; no one touched the food but Matilda. Markus and Moritz banned us from the kitchen anyhow, and Markus told us he’d sleep in the house tonight, with Matilda, instead of in the gatehouse. Markus parked himself just outside Belladonna’s door. Honestly, sometimes they could be so paranoid.
It wasn’t easy to sleep. Matteo and I roused ourselves just before dawn, and the house was unnaturally silent. We trotted upstairs to find them. Markus had somehow managed to crawl up the stairs to the bedroom, where there was a terrible, indescribable stench, and we found him on the floor near Matilda’s bed. Their mouths were open in agony and their eyes were staring, no doubt, at the fiery fires where they’d be burning for all eternity. We quickly covered them with sheets, and I would have said a prayer if I could have remembered any. Or if they had deserved one.
We took the keys from Markus’s pockets and started emptying the drawers, looking for any useful papers and money and other things. Then Matteo hurried down to the gatehouse. He was going to gather everything else we needed, so that as soon as Belladonna woke up we could take off. We were going to prop her on a bicycle, Bryony snugly bound to her chest like a little native, and wheel her down to the village where we could hire someone with a car or a truck or some other vehicle that could get us to the nearest train station. Anything to get away, and quickly.
I was still upstairs, searching through drawers that were normally off-limits, when I heard a strange noise. No, the noise wasn’t strange; it was just unexpected. A car. A car was driving up to the house. This was most unusual. No one ever came here, and Hogarth always parked down by the gatehouse. Who could it be? Not him. Not His Lordship.
Please oh please oh please, not him"
This couldn’t be happening. Not now, not when we were so close.
I ducked down and peered out the window and saw Hogarth clambering out of the car and straightening his jacket and his few strands of hair with a frown. Hogarth must have found the gatehouse untended and opened the locks to the gates with his own set of keys, wondering what was going on. Matteo must have heard him and hid in a closet. Hogarth was by himself, thank goodness, and I pressed my hand on my chest to stop my heart from thumping. Focus, Tomasino, be calm. What was I gong to tell him when he walked into the house and saw the bodies upstairs?
He wasn’t going to be allowed to go upstairs. He wasn’t going to do anything until he told us what really happened to Tristan.
Hogarth would come looking for her first, naturally, and he found Belladonna sitting by the fire, staring at the logs burning. She didn’t move when she heard him. Bryony was sleeping peacefully in her cot.
“Hello, my
darling,” Hogarth said. “Where is everyone?”
She shrugged. “How should I know? Where’s my baby?” She looked ghastly, her vivid green eyes dulled with pain.
Hogarth made a minute adjustment to the handkerchief in his pocket. Maroon-and-pine-green paisley, it was. Very subtle, very expensive.
“Your baby is dead, sadly,” Hogarth said with only the slightest edge to his voice. “Your baby died and we buried him near the woods, on the other side of the carrot patch. Soon, we’ll put up a gravestone and have a little service.”
“You’re lying.”
“I wish I were, dearest,” he replied. “Nothing would please His Lordship more than a son. But, alas, it was not to be.”
That roused her from her stupor. “I should think he’d prefer only girls,” she said bitterly.
“My dear, you astonish me,” Hogarth said. “Now let me see the enchanting Bryony; then I must be off.” He went over to the cot and watched Bryony for a few minutes, smiling a nasty little fussy Hogarth smile. I had tiptoed downstairs and was watching him from the doorway. Why would he have come only to peer in on Bryony? Perhaps he had a message for the three M’s. I was going to hate to have to be the one to tell him he was a little late for that.
He must be smoothing the path, I told myself. His Lordship was going to be here soon. I felt a dull thudding pain behind my kneecap. Perhaps he was on his way now, driving up to the house. What were we going to do? What"
I was thinking feverishly of all our options, waiting for Matteo to return from the gatehouse so we could overpower Hogarth and"
Belladonna Page 47