The Poison Thread

by Laura Purcell

  I wanted to see her suffer.

  26

  Dorothea

  You would not have occasion to drive out as far as Heatherfield unless you were visiting the manor house. Removed from the town of Oakgate and up steep hills, the journey thither is fraught with mud. Given the damp fortnight we have suffered, Papa was concerned for the horses on the slick roads, but I am pleased to report his fears were unfounded. We arrived yesterday unscathed, if a little shaken about.

  For all its discomforts, the expedition proved worthwhile. Reports have not exaggerated the beauty of Heatherfield Manor: the grey and beige stone house, almost like a chateau in its design, and the cheerful red tiles that adorn its roof. There is a gravel sweep and a hexagonal lake, but these are the only signs of stately grounds. The sloping fields and valley beyond run in their own, rugged fashion, washed with the pink and mauve heather from which the house takes its name. The plants are beginning to bud: I caught their scent as Papa handed me out of the carriage.

  ‘Is it not the most splendid place you ever saw?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes! Very fine.’ It was not a lie.

  ‘And it will all belong to Sir Thomas, one day.’

  I was occupied with holding down my dress as we walked across the gravel. Foolishly, I had chosen something with a light, floaty skirt and was paying the price for it. ‘Sir Thomas?’ I said, distracted. ‘Surely not?’

  ‘Why, yes. Lady Morton has no children.’

  ‘But the house came from her late husband. I expect there is an entail, or something like one, to keep the property within the family.’

  ‘I am not sure there is any family, Dora. No one has taken the title, after all.’

  There it was again: the reckless turn to my imagination. It painted me as Lady Biggleswade, mistress of Heatherfield Manor. I might sit at the window in that tower, there, my chest covered in diamonds, and gaze over the hills, remembering my lost love.

  A romantic picture, but utterly stupid. I should be bored after an hour.

  Existence as a society wife must be akin to standing in a bog. That slow, sinking sensation. I would be dragged down day by day, grow vacuous and preoccupied with frivolity like those around me. I should begin to resemble Papa or – God forbid – Mrs Pearce. At least with David I may strive to be a better person, practical and helpful to my fellow creatures.

  We reached an arched door studded with iron. It opened before we could knock, revealing a line of powdered footmen clad in a purple livery. They bowed simultaneously before the tallest man said, ‘This way, if you please. Sir, madam.’

  A greater contrast to the fetid debtors’ prison I could not imagine. Here was gilding and chestnut; there, chandeliers and oil portraits. As an heiress, I have always lived in comfort, but Heatherfield was something else: something elegant and full of joy. Small wonder Lady Morton is reluctant to leave the place, hives or no hives.

  We were shown into a honey-coloured drawing room with gilded window shutters and a great frieze ceiling. Sir Thomas and a middle-aged, pudding-faced lady rose from separate sofas to greet us.

  ‘Please excuse my sister,’ Sir Thomas offered a shallow bow. ‘She’ll be down presently.’

  I turned to the lady, who clasped her hands together and averted her eyes. Her gown was good, but out of fashion. I should say a year or two old.

  Sir Thomas fiddled with his pocket watch. I cleared my throat.

  ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Yes, of course. You haven’t been introduced. Mr Reginald Truelove, Miss Dorothea Truelove; Miss Selma Potts.’

  ‘And how are you related to our dear friends?’ Papa asked, kissing her hand.

  Colour flooded the woman’s fleshy cheeks. ‘Oh! No relation. I am Lady Morton’s companion.’

  Papa rather lost interest in her after that.

  I was by no means sorry to have an opportunity to converse with Miss Potts, prior to seeing the famed Lady Morton. From what I could glimpse of her Secretiveness, concealed by a lace cap, it was uncommonly small, and she should prove the ideal gossip.

  Papa and Sir Thomas sat together, talking about coursing dogs and tiresome subjects, while we ladies moved nearer to the fire. Occasionally, I permitted myself a glance in their direction, but not once did I see Sir Thomas regard me with his sleepy eyes. Poor Papa – he shall be disappointed!

  ‘I am sorry Lady Morton is not down,’ said Miss Potts. ‘It is rather embarrassing. She is so used to keeping her own time, you see. Then, of course, it does take her a while to dress . . .’ She bit her lip, as if afraid of saying more.

  I leant forwards. ‘I do understand,’ I began slowly. ‘That is – Sir Thomas has alluded to . . . there is something to do with a skin complaint?’

  Miss Potts put a hand to her throat and gave a nervous laugh. ‘Dear me. Yes. I am glad you are prepared. We have all of us been uneasy, for her sake. The poor lady does her best to cover it with powder and so on, but it is quite mortifying. And she, such a beauty!’

  I had not recalled Lady Morton being beautiful, only very rich, but I nodded as if I comprehended the depth of the tragedy.

  ‘Excuse me for asking, but . . . there is no indication what caused the outbreak? No underlying health condition?’

  ‘Not that we can observe. She had been perfectly well for months before the first bout. The doctors cannot puzzle it out, they just call it St Anthony’s Fire, but none of their lotions work.’

  ‘I do not suppose . . . it sounds foolish, but you did not notice any change after she wore a particular gown?’

  Miss Potts adjusted her lace cap. ‘Alas, no. I understand what you are thinking – it has crossed all of our minds: perhaps she reacts to a certain material, or a certain food. We have tested everything and cannot find the source.’

  Before I knew it, the next question had slipped out. ‘She never ordered clothes from Metyard’s, did she?’

  Silly, credulous goose that I am! But the idea, once conceived, would not leave me alone.

  Miss Potts widened her eyes. ‘As a matter of fact, she did order from there once or twice. I shouldn’t wonder if the material they used carried some disease from a poor seamstress’s house. I could credit almost anything, after the awful things that happened in that shop.’

  You do not know the half of it, I thought.

  Lady Morton descended the grand staircase to meet us just as we were finally walking to the dining room. Papa, who had been escorting Miss Potts, abandoned her for her mistress.

  I could not glean a glance at the lady’s skin. Only her head bobbed before me: sandy like Sir Thomas’s, with the odd wire of grey. The shape of her skull was rather like my own, except in one particular. She had the same Amativeness that longs for conjugal bliss, and the Inhabitiveness that gives a profound love of home.

  ‘How very sad,’ I found myself saying to Sir Thomas, ‘that your sister should be a widow! She does not have the type of head to flourish alone.’

  ‘And she does not have the type of face,’ he laughed, ‘to marry again.’

  Cruel – and yet he was correct. When we were seated at the mahogany dining table, I took quite a turn to see the lady sitting at the end. She looked pallid and diseased. Powder coated her skin until it was white, but lumps remained visible, as Sir Thomas had said, for all the world as if they were welts from being beaten with a stick. Her high collar and long sleeves suggested the ailment ran further down her body.

  Once, the features may indeed have been beautiful. She possessed Sir Thomas’s languorous eyes and small nose. Yet suffering, and perhaps loneliness, gave her brow a cloud of hauteur.

  ‘It is not often that Tom chooses to meet his friends at Heatherfield,’ she observed, as she took a sip of wine. It left an awful red stain at the corners of her mouth, where the powder had massed. ‘I should take this as a compliment, if I were you.’

  ‘Indeed,’ cried Papa, ‘how c
ould we view your kind invitation in any other light? It is always a compliment, and an honour, to meet with your ladyship.’

  He rather overdid it, I thought.

  Lady Morton waited until the servants ladled the soup before recommencing. ‘You have not enjoyed the honour, I believe, for some years past. Miss Truelove is quite grown. I remember you as a child, young lady. Tell me, what is your age now?’

  I suppose she wished to distract attention from her own flaws, but I did not consider it polite of her. ‘Five and twenty,’ I said, aiming for the same insouciance as Sir Thomas.

  ‘Indeed!’ Her fair eyebrows had all but disappeared with the powder on her face, but there was a movement of muscle, as if she had raised them. ‘Time does pass. Why, your mother was younger than that when she bore you. Has your father failed to find you a suitor, Miss Truelove?’

  It was as well I had a mouthful of soup. Papa was called upon to laugh it off and say, with a fond sort of weariness, ‘I fear Dorothea has kept herself too busy to consider marriage, as normal young ladies do. She has set herself a colossal list of good works to complete, when she should be concerned with performing other duties.’

  ‘It is to Miss Truelove’s credit, I believe,’ Sir Thomas said to his bowl. ‘Better than having your head full of gowns and pugs and other such fluff, as most ladies of my acquaintance do.’

  ‘My dear boy, as if you would know!’ laughed Lady Morton. She had a nasty laugh; abrasive. ‘When you yourself can think of nothing but Ascot or the lineage of your pointer.’

  ‘There’s precious little else to think of, banished out in the country here.’

  ‘I am sure I never saw a happier estate,’ Papa put in, smoothing the way. ‘I should be entranced by it forever. Tell me, your ladyship, do the hounds run in the woods in the valley?’

  ‘Certainly. Do you and your daughter hunt, Mr Truelove? I do not recall . . .’

  ‘In my younger days, you could not tear me from a horse. Alas,’ he added, with a sorrowful glance at me, ‘Dorothea has never learnt. She lacks that ladylike accomplishment.’

  ‘Then she must come and ride with us. Tom and I shall teach her. She will take Miss Potts’s horse.’

  ‘How kind of you! You are all goodness. Dorothea would be delighted.’

  Lady Morton returned to her soup.

  I was fidgety and unhappy in my chair. How could Papa talk about me in that belittling manner? What pass had I come to, when the only person to speak a word in my defence was the feckless Sir Thomas!

  As for hunting—! I could picture nothing worse than riding to dogs with Lady Morton. I did not see how that could be a suitable pursuit for me – how Papa could consider visiting prison unrefined, but be happy for me to gallop through the mud and watch a fox meet its bloody end.

  While the servants removed the soup bowls and set the main dishes down, Papa enquired how Sir Thomas spent his time in Gloucestershire. Sir Thomas toyed with his wine glass and replied he was always up to ‘this or that’. Lady Morton seized his hesitation as her opportunity to swoop in again.

  ‘Did you taste nothing remarkable in that soup, Mr Truelove? It is a great favourite of mine.’

  ‘It was certainly very pleasant, your ladyship. What do you call it?’

  ‘It was white soup. I was sure you would recognise the mixture. I had the receipt from your wife.’

  A hush fell over the table.

  I looked up at Lady Morton. Our dining preferences are not a vast part of our general character, I admit, but still they are a detail. One of the intimate details I have forgotten about my mother. I was hungry for her to say more; all appetite for the actual food before me evaporated.

  Lady Morton threw a slender, powdered hand in my direction. ‘Did it not survive in the household cookbook, Miss Truelove? That is a pity. I will have my housekeeper make a copy for you. Your mother was wonderfully fond of this dish. She must have been, for I could often smell the almonds on her breath.’

  ‘Well,’ said Papa, clearly discomfited, ‘she certainly did have an inclination for soup.’

  I wondered if he recalled, as I suddenly did, that soup and broth were all she could swallow in those last days. The terrible pain even that simple fare caused as her weak body attempted to digest it.

  ‘Indeed, most of the receipts in the Heatherfield kitchen were given to me by my lamented friend,’ Lady Morton went on, but her eyes, the only animated spots in that white face, turned from me to Papa. They seemed to pin him in his chair. ‘A more indefatigable little housekeeper I never did see. Were it not for her sad illness, I would have called her unstoppable.’

  Papa muttered some words of thanks and dabbed his mouth with his napkin.

  A brooding, uncomfortable silence followed. Even Papa’s stream of toadying compliments dried up. You would have thought that Lady Morton, a widow herself, might have been more sensible of his feelings. How could it be that this woman was acquainted with my mother? Two more disparate characters I cannot imagine: the one all goodness, all delicacy; the other haughty and lacking tact.

  I gazed from our disfigured hostess to the mute Miss Potts, all but invisible in her chair. Then I saw Sir Thomas.

  He had set down his fork. A spark of worry lit up his tired eyes, there was tension in his jaw. I would have expected him to stare at his outspoken sister, to upbraid her with a glance for starting this mischief. But on the contrary.

  Sir Thomas was looking straight at me.

  27

  Ruth

  There’s beauty in sculpting the human body. All that loose flesh pinned and transformed into something else. Naked, the female torso is a gelatinous landscape, varied in colour. But put it in a corset and you get strength, shape. A kind of armour. Vertical strips across the stomach, diagonals over the ribs. Wide bones to push up the bust, but something thinner for the shoulder blades, sewn in horizontally. Holding you steady, holding the jumbled parts of you in place. There’s no other garment like it.

  I know it sounds peculiar to rhapsodise about a piece of clothing. But when you’re sat on your own for hours at a time, whittling plates of bone, backstitching sheaths, measuring busks, these thoughts wander into your fancy.

  I learnt much in the year that followed, and not all of it from Billy. I’d picked up a thing or two making my own corded corset in the dark, before Naomi was born. Many was the time my mind drifted down the stairs to our cellar bedroom and that poor creation beneath my pillow. How I’d remake it now! Metal eyelets, spiral steel bones. Grosgrain ribbon for the laces and coutil for the body. But that would have to wait. With the captain always lurking in the shadows, I didn’t dare plunder supplies. I’d only dream and sigh, and sometimes I could hear my corset, sighing back.

  There was demand for my trade. So much easier, the ladies said, to have everything ordered in one shop. It wasn’t easier for my fingers. But it got me out of the attic room for a few days a week, so I suppose I should be grateful.

  The attic wasn’t a place for winter. No fires, no carpet. Delicate work was next to impossible with numb fingers. The only thing worse than the numbness was when you finally went downstairs for a cup of tea and the feeling came back; Nell would cry, sometimes, with the pain of that.

  So it was in the winter I turned fifteen that I sat in my curtained alcove, taking as much time as I could over the pearl-cotton flossing on my latest corset. When I was done, I would have to climb up to the attic and face its cold claws.

  I added another flower here, another swirl there. Anything to draw out my time.

  Just then, the bell tinkled. I didn’t think much of it. Kate and Mrs Metyard were in the showroom; they would deal with any customers.

  ‘My daughter is to be married,’ a lady said, her voice ripe and smug. ‘Married in the new year, on her sixteenth birthday.’

  The Metyards cooed with the usual congratulations. I tied a knot in my
thread and pulled it, tight. Another trousseau. God, how I loathed the wedding trousseaus.

  Tidying up my bits and pieces, I didn’t pay attention to what passed next. But then I heard something that stopped me, stock-still.

  ‘I want only your finest materials. Cost is of no importance. Do not show me anything less than the best.’

  Haughty, spoilt – it might have been the voice of a dozen young ladies. So why did gooseflesh skitter up my arms?

  A clearing of the throat beyond the curtain. ‘You do realise, dear, that Papa will have to pay for this and not Mr Green—’

  ‘Then I will pay him back! I could do it with my first quarter’s pin money, you know that.’

  ‘My daughter’s intended, you must understand, is well placed in society and exceedingly rich,’ the mother explained.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Mrs Metyard, affecting the same self-satisfied tone, ‘I had the pleasure of clothing Mr Green’s first wife.’

  I smiled. It wasn’t often I took Mrs Metyard’s side, but I had to give her points for that hit. There was something I couldn’t put my finger upon in the voices of the customers outside. They made me feel ill. Especially the girl. Where had I heard that girl before?

  ‘The old Mrs Green was a dowd.’ A rustle of material. Evidently the young lady was not cowed by Mrs Metyard. ‘I mean to put her quite in the shadows. But I must have green, nothing but green. They shall remember my name.’

  At this Kate piped up. ‘We have some wonderful shades of that colour. Let me show you the tarlatanes in Scheele’s green.’

  The elder women were silent for a moment, letting Kate spread out the materials.

  ‘A sweet fancy, madam,’ Mrs Metyard observed, ‘your daughter dressing to match her husband’s name. I married a soldier myself. Ah, it was nothing but scarlet for me many years after.’

  ‘But scarlet is not becoming to the complexion.’

  ‘It is not, Mrs Oldacre.’

  The golden walls crept in on me. Rosalind Oldacre. My schoolyard nemesis.