by Mike Ashley
I stood, taken aback by the speed of her collapse, pitying her and thinking of the temptation it must have been.
“Don’t you think it might be a good idea to give them to me and I can take them back to her husband?”
I could make no promises about there being no prosecution, but I was inwardly determined to urge mercy on Mr Haslem. She drew her fingers down just enough to look at me.
“You have them still?”
“Here, all of them.”
She looked over at a battered wooden chest on the other side of the bed.
“I’m engaged to be married, you see, sir. I was saving them for my wedding.”
The thought of a rustic bride glittering with Mrs Haslem’s diamonds was almost ludicrous enough to force a smile, even in those circumstances. But I kept my face grave as she went heavily round the bed and threw back the lid of the box.
“There they are, sir. And these, and these, and these.”
They came at me in a soft avalanche across the bed. White silk and satin, cotton and broderie anglaise, pink ribbons, green ribbons, stockings, garters, and a dozen other frills and furbelows that only the goddess of lingerie or her devotees could name. Over them, from the other side of the bed, scared brown eyes looking up at me.
“What in the world are these?”
“Her things, sir. She said I could have them because she’d had new ones made. She told me I could keep them, sir.”
When I told Harry he laughed so hard he nearly fell off the feed bin.
“Well, are you taking them back to Mr Haslem?”
“Can you imagine me riding back across country with an armful of lady’s cast-off unmentionables? Let her keep them for her wedding day.”
“So she didn’t take the diamonds?”
“I’m sure of it. The best actress in London couldn’t fake such simplicity. And I’m equally sure she put nothing in that flask.”
His grin faded. “Still looks bad for the governess, then?”
“Not good, certainly. Still, there’s one thing that puzzles me. Why does a lady married nine years or more take a fancy for a whole wardrobe of new underthings? The ones she gave her maid weren’t worn out by any means.”
“That, Mr Ludlow, is a matter beyond our understanding. Unless . . .”
“Unless.”
The word hung there for a moment between us in the bran-flecked air, then he stood up. “Miss Thorn will be arriving any minute. She’s bringing the boy down to look at a pony.”
A pony phaeton delivered them. A boy got out first, muffled up against the cold, then a young woman in a black coat and hat. I’d imagined that a person who could arouse such concern in Harry would have some special appeal – one of those fragile, flowerlike women. This was no flower. She was squarish in build and broad of shoulder. Her face was attractive in its way, but from an impression of common sense and openness rather than delicacy. Her hair was dark, her eyes a deep grey under straight black brows. If I’d been asked to sum her up in one word, that word would have been honest, the way a rock or a tree is honest because it has no other way to be. But then I’d seen people double-dyed in guilt who had the same air. She looked at me, then towards the boy, who was already well out of hearing, leaning over a stable door with Harry.
“So you’re the gentleman who’s come to ask me if I poisoned Mrs Haslem? Mr Leather says you’ll want to ask me questions. Ask anything you please.”
Her voice had a hint of the north country in it. I suggested that we should go into the tack room and sit down, but she wanted to stay outside where she could see young Master Haslem. It was a strange way of questioning. We stood there side by side in the yard as a bay pony was brought out and the boy mounted on it.
“Did you take Mrs Haslem’s flask out of the victoria?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“If I could stop my employer’s wife making a scandal of herself before the whole county, it was my duty to do it. Mr Haslem was ill with worry over it. It was bad enough with her friends near here. He didn’t want her to call on people who were more in society because the whole world would know, but she was a stubborn woman.”
No nonsense from Miss Thorn about not speaking ill of the dead. Her contempt was rocklike.
“So you decided to do something about it?”
“I decided to get the flask away from her. I wanted her to arrive at the house she was visiting as sober as she was ever likely to be.”
“Was this your own decision, or in consultation with Mr Haslem?”
“He didn’t know what I was going to do.”
“Did you put anything in it?”
“No. I didn’t even unscrew the cap of the flask. I should have done that – poured it away on the gravel and let her dismiss me if she liked.”
“And perhaps saved her life.”
She gave me a questioning look.
“If there was poison in that brandy, you’d have saved her life by pouring it away.”
“How could I have known that? How could anybody know that?”
“You didn’t know?”
She took a step to face me.
“I swear to you, as I’d swear at God’s judgment seat if my soul depended on it, that I didn’t know.”
We followed Harry and young Haslem on the pony to the paddock at the back. All the time that he was walking and trotting the animal I was trying to work up to a question which there was no delicate way of asking. In the end I came flat out with it.
“Do you think it possible that Mrs Haslem had a lover?”
A moment of shock, then anger.
“That’s a most improper question to put to me. I have no intention of answering it.”
And she moved smartly away to the paddock rail. Back in the yard afterwards she ignored me but smiled at the boy and his babble of enthusiasm for the pony, wrapped his scarf round his neck, and saw him settled in the phaeton. With her boot on the step she turned to me, icily polite.
“I’d offer to shake hands, but you might not want to take the hand of a woman they think is a poisoner.”
Then she was in her seat and away.
“Something wrong with your arm?” Harry asked.
He’d caught me with my hand half extended, responding too late to what she’d said.
“That accusation of her wanting to marry Mr Haslem – was there any truth in it?”
“Well, the talk was he spent more time in the schoolroom than with his wife, but so would I have in his place.”
“I need to speak to him, whether he likes it or not.”
I requisitioned some of Harry’s business stationery and composed a careful letter, standing at the old desk in the corner of the tack room where he made up his accounts. The stable boy was sent up to the hall with it. By then it was late afternoon and Harry informed me that Dr Gaynor would be back from his rounds. With the westering sun throwing long tree shadows across the road, I walked the mile to a substantial brick house in a couple of acres of ground.
The doctor was younger and more urbane than I’d expected in a country practitioner, a handsome man in his late thirties. He was working in his dispensary when I arrived but kindly invited me to sit down in his study over a glass of sherry, fastidiously amused by my amateur interest in murder and quite willing to discuss the Haslem case.
“A very sad affair. I take it you’ve heard the details from Mr Leather.”
“You were called to Mrs Haslem?”
“Far too late to be of any use. I was at a confinement on the far side of my practice. When the messenger came I galloped like the devil, but there was nothing I could do.”
“Are you in any doubt that she was poisoned?”
He looked at me over the sherry glass.
“Do you want me to tell you what I said at the inquest?”
“I suspect, like other people, you were not anxious to condemn a certain person.”
“Unprofessional on my part, if so.”
“But human.
I think I have my answer.”
He sighed. “She was poisoned.”
“Did you form any idea as to the poison used?”
He swirled the sherry round in the glass.
“Your knowledge of toxicology is probably as extensive as mine.”
“Aconitine?” Another sigh. I prompted. “The symptoms suggest it and there have been a number of cases recently.”
“As you say, the burning in the mouth. The convulsions.”
“So Mrs Haslem was poisoned with aconitine. And as far as we can tell, that aconitine could only have been administered in the brandy she drank on her last journey. Can you as a medical man see any other conclusion?”
We went on discussing it, in a guarded way, over another glass of sherry. But no other conclusion emerged, beyond my conviction that the doctor too favoured mercy above justice for Mrs Haslem’s murderer.
Back at Harry’s stables, a curt note had arrived from Mr Haslem to say he’d see me at ten the following morning. Harry offered me the hospitality of his hayloft for the night and I treated him to a supper of chops and claret in The Woodman’s Rest. We chose a quiet corner so that I could report progress – or lack of it.
“Aconitine. Does that make things worse for Miss Thorn?”
“Yes. It acts quite quickly, so there’s no hope that the poison might have been in what Mrs Haslem ate at lunch or anything before. You’d expect the first symptoms within about half an hour, the tightness and burning in the lips and throat. That fits quite well with her getting out of the victoria and then collapsing in the drawing room. In fact . . .”
“In fact what, Mr Ludlow?”
I sat there with a piece of mutton chop on my fork, staring at his still-hopeful face.
“Harry, this is an odd thing. You said it took her two hours to be driven to the place she was visiting. Now, wouldn’t you expect her to be taking nips out of that flask the whole journey?”
“I would.”
“And yet if she’d drunk from it at the start of the journey, she’d have been in a much worse state by the end of it. She was well enough to speak and to walk up to the front door. That suggests she didn’t drink from the flask until near the end of the journey. Is that likely?”
“It doesn’t help, though, does it? It’s still the flask we’re looking at.”
“I need to talk to the coachman. Early tomorrow before I see Mr Haslem. Can you arrange that?”
“Sure as sunrise.”
Mr Haslem’s coach house was a shadowy building with a few shafts of morning sunlight coming through narrow windows. The dark bulk of an old-fashioned closed carriage took up a lot of the space. Beside it were the pony phaeton and a victoria with the hood up. The coachman was polishing the phaeton but straightened up when he saw us. Harry introduced me after his fashion.
“This is Mr Ludlow. I don’t know what he’s going to ask you, but you tell him what he wants to know.”
The coachman stood like a man on trial.
“What happened to the victoria that day Mrs Haslem died?”
He swallowed. “I drove it back, sir.”
“It must have been dark by the time you got it back here.”
“Pitch. It was past midnight.”
“What did you do with it?”
“Backed it into the coach house and left it. Next day I had it out to clean it and put it away again.”
“Has anyone used it since?”
“No. The victoria was hers. Nobody else seems to have cared to use it.”
“What happened to the rugs and the foot warmer and so on?”
“They’re still in there.”
We all three poked our heads under the hood. On the seat, a dark wollen blanket and canvas cover. I plunged my hand into the darkness beside the folded blanket. It touched fur.
“Ah.” I drew it out so that they could see it, the thing flopping heavily in my hand. Harsh fur, wolf’s or bear’s probably. “This is the fellow I was looking for.”
Harry moved in to look and drew back, disappointed.
“It’s only her travelling muff.”
“It was a cold day and she’d be wearing light gloves with her best visiting outfit. Naturally she’d have a muff for the journey.”
I slid my hands inside the fur’s silk lining. “Let’s have some more light here. One of the carriage lamps.”
A scrape of flint, a flare of light. I waited until they were back with the lamp then slid a hand out and let the muff dangle. Something small fell to the brick floor and burst open in the circle of lamplight. “Whatever you do, don’t tread on them.”
On the bricks was an enamelled box of the kind that ladies use to carry pills, with small white globes like chalky pearls scattered round it. Harry knelt, picked one up, sniffed.
“They’re only . . .”
If I hadn’t grabbed it, he’d have put it in his mouth.
“They’re what will keep Miss Thorn from hanging. Get some paper.”
We tore the wrapping from a new cake of harness soap, bundled the box and most of its contents together. A few minutes later I was walking up the steps to Mr Haslem’s front door.
The butler showed me into a handsome study on the ground floor, with leather-bound books from floor to ceiling and classical texts and dictionaries ranged on a desk by the window. The man himself seemed less substantial than his books, thin and pale, with sunken eyes. He held himself painstakingly upright, like a marionette on a single string that might part at any moment and land him in a disjointed heap on his Turkey carpet. I’d explained myself to him in my letter – as far as a total stranger’s interest in a gentleman’s affairs can be explained – and came straight to the point.
“I spoke to Miss Thorn. She says she wanted to get the flask away from your wife and hadn’t discussed it with you.”
“Miss Thorn is trying to protect me. We had discussed it.”
“Discussed what exactly?”
His face creased up. He may have been a clever man with his books but he lied clumsily and painfully, like an inexpert angler with a fishhook through his finger.
“Discussed how to prevent my wife obtaining brandy.”
“Did you know she was going to take the flask out of the victoria?”
“Yes,” he said. But his face winced “no”.
“Have you and Miss Thorn ever discussed the properties of aconitine?”
“Aconitine?”
“A vegetable alkaloid. A poison.”
“No.”
“What happened to the flask Mrs Haslem drank from?”
“I . . . I ordered it to be brought to me.”
“Were the contents analysed?”
“It was empty . . . quite empty.”
I’d come to him with one doubt left and now it had gone. Like everyone else, with just one exception, he was thinking only of the flask. I was on the point of explaining when he raised his hand to stop me. It was a surprisingly decisive gesture for a nervous man and when he spoke again his voice was firmer than it had been.
“Mr Ludlow, since you have chosen to take an interest in my affairs, there’s something you should know. At present I am in mourning. When that period ends, I shall ask Miss Thorn to do me the honour of becoming my wife.”
He kept his eyes on me, nerved for my protest. There was a kind of desperate heroism about him.
“In that case,” I said, “you will be marrying a brave and loyal young woman. And an innocent one.”
Shock and relief together came flooding over his face. He almost collapsed and had to support himself on the corner of the desk. I took my hand out of my pocket and rolled a few of the little white globes across the blotter. He looked from them to me and back again, saying nothing.
“You were all looking in the wrong place. Your wife’s last words were that the poison was in her flask. She died believing that. But ask yourself if she might have been killed by a poison that was not in the flask and what’s the answer?”
“But she took not
hing else since leaving the house.”
“Not quite. A lady is going visiting, to a fashionable house where she wishes to make a good impression. She won’t do that with brandy on her breath. So she’ll take the precaution of concealing in her travelling muff a little box of oil of peppermint lozenges. Those were the last things your wife took, not the brandy.”
He stared at them, still not speaking.
“My friend Mr Leather is taking the rest to London to a laboratory that I know. If my suspicion is right, they will indeed contain oil of peppermint – and aconitine.”
“Then he killed her. Stole her jewels and killed her.”
The relief was there, but pain too. I didn’t say to him that there were more ways than one of stealing a woman’s jewels. Take them and sell them, my love, and with the money we shall run away together to that warm sweethearts’ nest in Paris. Or Venice, or Timbuktu, or the dreams of deluded women knew where. No part of her lover’s plan to take a drinking and demanding woman along with him.
“Yes, he killed her. How long had you known about your wife and Dr Gaynor?”
Two days later I was back with Harry at The Woodman’s Rest, thinking I’d earned some congratulations.
“Once I knew about the peppermint pills, there was very little doubt. Getting hold of aconitine wouldn’t be so difficult. Making it into pills would be – unless you had a dispensary at hand.”
“Pity he got away, wasn’t it?”
“That’s your friend the coachman’s fault, not mine.”
The foolish man had flown to the kitchen in high excitement to tell them all about the discovery. From there the news must have come within half an hour to the doctor’s ears, because when I went back to speak to him I found only a disordered house and an empty stable.
“Will they catch him?”
“Depends how hard they try, and that will probably depend on Mr Haslem.”
“Nothing will get done then. After all, you can’t expect a man to parade in front of the world with horns on his head.”
“That means Miss Thorn will never be publicly cleared.”
“You can leave that to me. I’ll see the story’s put about where it matters.”
And I knew I could indeed leave it to him. The gossip from the stables gets up to the drawing room and down again as quickly as we can put out an edition of our paper. When the governess walked up the aisle with her employer, there’d be nobody whispering murder. I never heard the report of that event because Harry had moved on long before it could happen. Two things, though, I did hear. One was that Miss Thorn came into Harry’s yard, looking by his account “like a linnet let out of a cage”, and thanked him and me most warmly. The other was that Mr Haslem bought the bay pony for his son at a price ten guineas over what Harry should have had the nerve to ask for it. I like to think that was a sign of gratitude as well.