by Lynn Messina
Bea tried to recall the other ones she knew.
Hemlock came readily to mind because every child learned of Socrates’s fate while still in the schoolroom. But hemlock, she felt positively, did not cause terrible convulsions like the ones described by Mrs. Otley. Indeed, in the version she had read of the Greek philosopher’s death, the poison had been almost gentle, with numbness slowly overtaking him until he could no longer stand. Then he calmly lay down.
Next she considered monkshood, which was the substance many suspected Emperor Claudius’s wife sprinkled onto a plate of mushrooms to hasten his end. Did it cause painful convulsions? Bea did not know, but she did recall Seneca’s description of the scene in Apocolocyntosis (divi) Claudii, which satirized the fallen Roman’s death. “Vae me, puto, concacavi me,” he said, meaning he had soiled himself. As Mr. Wilson had not suffered that particular mortification in the act of expiring, she realized monkshood could not have been the culprit.
What about belladonna? she wondered. It had a long and illustrious history as a murder weapon, gaining a reputation in the Middle Ages as a reliable potion for disposing of one’s inconvenient spouse. She closed her eyes and tried to recall details of how the poison progressed in the body. All that came to mind was George Buchanan’s History of Scotland, which claimed that King Duncan I mixed the juice of the berry with wine and fed it to the Danish army under the guise of a truce. The Scottish historian had been light on the details of how the poison affected the body, but he’d made no mention of convulsions. Indeed, his description made it clear that the soldiers had been immobilized by the draught and, unable to yield a weapon in their own defense, found themselves slain where they lay.
Aware that her options were rapidly dwindling, Bea tried to think of other poisons she had read about. Wasn’t there one that was made from a lovely blue pigment called Prussian blue? It was mixed with water…
Prussic acid!
Yes, that was it, she thought, recalling it dimly from the biography of Carl Wilhelm Scheele, a Swedish apothecary who mixed the ingredients together to create the extremely toxic liquid. Did prussic acid create convulsions?
She truly had no idea.
Ah, but it was notorious for having the faint odor of bitter almonds.
Calmly, Bea contemplated Mr. Wilson and conceded the only way to discover if he smelled of almonds was to lower her head and inhale deeply. Inevitably, she found herself disinclined to proceed with such a plan, for there seemed to be something innately repulsive about getting that close to a dead body. But it would smell of things other than just almonds, would it not?
As repellant as it was, however, she had no choice, for what kind of investigator would she be if she allowed a little bit of squeamishness to stand between her and the acquisition of knowledge.
A very feeble one, she assured herself.
Slowly, cautiously, she bent her head forward, breathing in deeply as she drew closer and closer to his face. She did not detect almonds nor the vague stench of decay. Rather, she was struck by a disconcerting mix of lemon, bergamot, rosemary, mint and orange blossom—disconcerting because it was exactly the way her uncle smelled.
Startled, she looked over to the side table, searching for a snuffbox. Finding none, she examined the banyan for pockets.
Aha, she thought, locating the tobacco and promptly confirming that Mr. Wilson used the same sort as Uncle Horace: Lord Penwortham’s mixture. It wasn’t surprising, as its combination of fresh florals and piquant herbiness was pleasing if a little cloying.
Bea returned the enamel box to the banyan pocket and sighed heavily, for she was quickly running out of poisons. All that was left from her extensive reading was Cleopatra and the asp, and she could not believe an Egyptian cobra had been delivered to a residence in Mayfair.
Thoughtfully, she leaned forward and considered the possibility that Mrs. Otley had been correct in her insistence that Mr. Wilson had been felled by a medical problem. Although the violence of his struggle indicated that it could not have been a gallstone, it was possible that his contortions had been caused by something else. Apoplectic fits were often characterized by jerky, uncontrollable movements. Could he have suffered one of those?
Like Mrs. Otley, he appeared to be somewhere in the middle of his fifth decade, which made apoplexy possible but not very likely.
No, in this case, the obvious explanation was the correct one: Mr. Wilson had been poisoned. Now, if she could just identify the substance.
Scowling, she pressed closer to examine his face, which was not what she had been expecting. Emily’s description of her father’s business associate, given during a conversation in the Lake District, had included a large wart on his left cheek. Looking at him now, she saw nothing of the sort. Rather, he had an odd-shaped birthmark hardly larger than a fat drop of water. Perhaps it had been more pronounced before his sojourn in India, where he had been exposed to the relentless sun, which was no doubt responsible for the array of freckles across his nose and forehead.
The sun, however, could not account for the dried spittle edging his lips and dotting his chin.
Now that was interesting, she thought as she examined this new piece of evidence, which indicated the victim had foamed at the mouth like a dog suffering from hydrophobia.
It tickled something in her memory.
Had she read something about that—the frothing?
Yes, she had.
But where?
She stood up straight, closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to picture the words as they had appeared in the text. She saw it in the middle of a page about flora, for it had appeared directly below the image of a leafy tree with a short, crooked trunk and medium-sized fruit. What did the caption say?
Bea rested her head against her palm as she struggled to read the words.
And then she recalled the name of the book: Travels in India: My Journey Through a Strange, Difficult and Wonderful Land. It was a travelogue by the wife of the attaché to the second governor-general of Fort William, which she had used as a resource when looking for information about the country during her investigation at Lakeview House.
Now that she knew where the words in her head had come from, she could easily recall their context. In a section addressing native medicines, Mrs. Barlow mentioned the Strychnos nux-vomica tree, whose deadly seeds and bark were frequently confused with a local cure called kurchi. A common treatment, kurchi was used as a tonic, astringent and mild antiperiodic to no ill effect. But many people with evil intent mixed in nux vomica without anyone noticing, and when the victim died, they attributed the illness to tetanus, which had the same symptoms—symptoms that included convulsions and foaming at the mouth.
It was, Mrs. Barlow had written, a problem that the local authorities had not yet figured out how to address.
Could Mr. Wilson’s assailant have used nux vomica?
She thought about the people who might wish Mr. Wilson ill. Mrs. Otley’s knowledge of his life had been frustratingly vague, but she felt that it was much more likely that the victim had made an enemy in India than in London. The seizure of the opium field by the East India Company must have been a fraught experience for the victim. Perhaps in the struggle he angered a company official. Or maybe he sought revenge against one of the perpetrators and failed to vanquish him. Even without the brutality of the takeover, his occupation as an opium smuggler was far from a genteel one. Perhaps he stepped on the toes of a competitor or betrayed an agreement with another merchant. Or it might have had nothing at all to do with the opium operation. Maybe Mr. Wilson seduced the wife or daughter of a local luminary. Having engaged in an affair with the spouse of his employer, he could hardly be considered inviolate in his principles.
Yes, Bea thought, it was quite possible Mr. Wilson’s assailant used a poison indigenous to India. Did she think the killer followed him back to London?
No, the journey was far too long and costly to justify a vendetta.
The likelier circumstance w
as the villain bumped into Mr. Wilson in London and, realizing his propinquity, began to plan his attack.
She thought it was safe to assume the meeting happened sometime in the last few weeks. If only Mrs. Otley had any idea of his movements.
No matter, she thought, deciding there was no benefit to getting ahead of herself. At the moment, she had one responsibility and that was scrutinizing the body as carefully as possible.
His build, like his wart, defied her expectations, as Emily had described him as fat. Mr. Wilson, however, was not fat. His frame was solid, with broad shoulders and muscled forearms, which were perfectly in keeping with what she’d expect from someone who supervised an agriculture concern.
She reached down to examine his hands for signs of callouses and shivered when she noticed his skin was cool. Although hardly the missish type, she felt there was something particularly ghoulish about how quickly his lifeless corpse had lost its heat. Nevertheless, she ran her fingers over his hand and noted the roughness. As the overseer of the enterprise, he probably did not run the plow on a daily basis, but she assumed he had the knowledge and ability to operate it when necessary.
Having gathered all the information she could from the body, she turned her attention to the room itself. If Mr. Wilson was poisoned by nux vomica, then he would have had to have swallowed it sometime in the morning, for, according to Mrs. Barlow, it worked quickly once it entered the body. The authoress had not given the exact number of minutes from the moment of ingestion to the onset of symptoms, but she did relate that the poison typically killed its victim within a half hour, although sometimes, depending on the dose, it could take up to a full hour.
Bea recalled the sequence of events as described by Mrs. Otley. She’d woken up at eight o’clock and promptly retreated to her dressing room to indulge her usual morning routine of reading the newspaper and drinking tea. She heard the first indication that something was wrong with her lover about an hour later, which would put the clock at nine. By the time she responded to his cries of pain, his body had already begun convulsing severely, and although Bea did not know how long after that he expired, she felt it safe to conclude the interval was brief. According to Emily, he’d died very soon after she found him in her mother’s room.
If Mrs. Otley discovered Mr. Wilson in pain at nine o’clock and the entire poisoning episode took thirty or forty minutes, then he must have ingested the poison at around eight-thirty. Given the hour, the most obvious assumption was he had consumed the deadly substance with his morning drink, which was either coffee or tea.
Examining the room carefully, she could not find any evidence of a beverage. There was no teacup on the bed, beneath it or beside it. The armoire had only clumps of dust under it, and the looking glass was pressed too close to the wall for anything to drop and roll behind it.
As far as the room revealed, Mr. Wilson had ingested nothing since waking up.
Patently, that was wrong, for if the victim had ingested the poison the evening before, then he would have expired the evening before. Something in this room killed him, Bea thought.
Unless it had already been removed from the room.
Quickly, Bea passed through the doorway to the left and entered Mrs. Otley’s dressing room, a compact but comfortable space with the same pistache-colored paper on the walls and yellow curtains. As she’d suspected, there was no sign of a morning beverage in there either.
The staff had already cleared the trays.
Convinced this must be the correct explanation, Bea sought Emily’s approval before visiting the kitchens to question the staff. Given the ruckus Mrs. Otley had described and the crowd that had gathered in response, she thought it was unlikely that anyone in the house was unaware of the events of that morning. Nevertheless, it seemed rude to raise the topic of murder with the servants without first gaining their employer’s consent.
“By all means, yes, please do interview whomever you wish,” Emily said with an enthusiastic nod. “I’m sure the servants are already talking about it, as they do so love to gossip. The sooner we can have this matter sorted out, the sooner we can get that dreadful man out of the house. As it is, I’m sure I won’t be able to sleep a wink tonight knowing he’s taken up residence in the cellars. Although you would not know it from listening to my mother’s tirade, I think delivering him to a medical school would be a very satisfactory solution to our troubles. Andrew insists, of course, that we alert his next of kin and that is why he went to call on the solicitor today, to begin the process of discovering who that is. Obviously, I, too, want to treat him with the decency he deserves. But at the same time, he did conduct an illicit affair with the wife of his employer and continued to do so in secret to hide the truth from his lover’s daughter, so I’m not convinced disposal by his relatives is the decency he deserves.”
Unsure how to respond to this observation, Bea withheld comment and asked Emily if she recalled seeing a teapot or tray in the vicinity of Mr. Wilson when she was inspecting him for signs of life.
She took a moment to think about it and then explained that her powers of observation, which she considered usually to be keen, had been compromised by her anger and shock at seeing Mr. Wilson in her mother’s bed. She’d noticed nothing but his bare legs under his banyan and the defiant look on her mother’s face. “As if daring me to criticize her for trying to find a little comfort after the tragic death of my father. And of course I would not had she not sought that comfort whilst he was still alive!”
Deciding the singular honor of soothing her anger, which was entirely justified given recent events, belonged to Mr. Skeffington, Bea nodded in a vague offer of understanding and closed the drawing room door behind her.
As Bea’s last visit to the kitchens during an investigation had been less than successful, she was somewhat apprehensive as she climbed down the stairs at 112 Park Street. Her anxiety grew when she entered the room and found four members of the household gathered around the kitchen table. Among them was her own maid, Annie, who had no doubt heard every dreadful detail of that morning’s proceedings.
How much easier it would be if she could simply interrogate her own servant.
As it was, she would now have to devote some of her energy to convincing Annie not to mention her activities to the staff in Portman Square. As the girl had said nothing about her previous investigation into Lord Fazeley’s death, Bea was hopeful she would hold her tongue now.
Regardless, she had no choice but to continue in her pursuit, for the murmur of conversation had halted the moment she’d appeared and several people started guiltily as if caught engaging in inappropriate behavior.
Their awkwardness made Bea’s discomfort worse, and she struggled to appear composed as she approached the wary group.
“Good afternoon,” she said, looking them each in the eye, one by one, even Annie. As a failed entrant in the Marriage Mart, she frequently felt invisible and always appreciated it when someone made a particular effort to acknowledge her presence. “I’m investigating the unfortunate death of Mr. Wilson and was hoping to ask a few questions. Would that be all right?”
Bea knew it was a bizarre statement coming from a young lady who had no connection to the family—indeed, it was a bizarre statement coming from any young lady, familiar or not—and she wasn’t surprised to see the light of suspicion enter the housekeeper’s eye. Yet she was relieved it was only mistrust that animated her, not scorn.
Cautiously, Mrs. Petrie said, “Yes, miss. What would ye like to know?”
“Well, as I’m sure you all know, Mr. Wilson fell sick and died this morning,” she began cautiously, reluctant to speak too frankly lest someone among the group took offense.
Even with her restraint, Mrs. Petrie objected immediately. “No, miss, no. He didn’t fall sick. He was made sick by something. And it wasn’t the fault of anyone in this kitchen. We know how to prepare food without killing nobody.”
Several heads around the table nodded in agreement, and one of
the other servants, a dark-haired woman with angry eyes and a speckle of soot on her chin, said, “Yes, we do.”
As Bea had never intended to blame the staff, the fact that they would assume otherwise never occurred to her, and she felt the blush rise in her cheeks at the obvious oversight. “Of course not. I didn’t mean to imply it was. Mr. Wilson was killed by—” She broke off midsentence, reluctant to share her conclusions before she knew them to be fact. Instead, she reaffirmed what the housekeeper said. “That is, he was made sick by something. I merely wanted to know more about Mr. Wilson’s morning routine. Was he served tea or coffee this morning?”
“No, miss, not at all,” Mrs. Petrie said. “As Mrs. Otley insists every time he stays here for the night that he’s not actually here, on account of the miss not knowing about their relationship, she doesn’t want us to bring him anything to eat or drink in the morning. She shares her tray with him. They drink out of the same cup in case the miss happens to see the tray when Lydia”—she gestured to the woman with the soot mark—“carries it up and down.”
“The same cup?” Bea asked, unsure if this intelligence indicated a greater intimacy between the lovers than she’d previously suspected or a more developed capacity for stealth. It certainly complicated the poisoning of Mr. Wilson, for apparently it was impossible to gain access to his digestive system without first polluting Mrs. Otley’s. The fact that the widow was alive and well indicated that her morning tea had been untainted. “When I looked in the dressing room for her tray a few minutes ago, I did not see it. May I ask when it was removed?”
“I removed it,” Lydia said. “During the ruckus over Mr. Wilson.”