Letitia Or The Convalescent Heart

by Catherine Bowness

  She did not know what the doctor had said but, recalling the look that had passed between Lord Archibald and her aunt, she was afraid that Lady Stonegate was about to confess attempting to kill the Earl. She was not particularly surprised that the waspish old woman should want to confess on what might prove to be her deathbed – she believed people often did feel so inclined, presumably because they hoped thus to soften whatever punishment the Almighty might have in mind.

  “I killed my husband,” the Countess said baldly into the silence.

  Letty, less surprised by the content of this admission than by the identity of the dead man, was momentarily rendered speechless but, recalling that the previous Earl had reputedly suffered from a similar malady to the present one – and that he had died from it – realised that the confession might not yet be complete. Having killed the first one, it seemed only too likely that she had attempted to kill the second.

  Perhaps the Countess did not expect a reply; in any event, after apparently letting the fact of her announcement settle in her listener’s mind, she continued with the sort of defence which murderers are inclined to dredge up from somewhere in their painful consciences.

  “I did not mean to put a period to his existence,” she said. “He was always a sickly man with the same delicacy of digestion from which Frederick suffers. I suggested he try a new sort of medicine which a Saxon doctor, a Herr Hahnemann, had recently discovered. It involves the patient ingesting tiny quantities of what makes them unwell – sometimes of a substance which is in itself poisonous but which, taken in infinitesimally small amounts, can make them well.”

  Letty said nothing. She had never heard of Herr Hahnemann, but she did not think the idea was so very absurd since she knew that, after a person had survived certain illnesses - the measles being one of them – they were unlikely to be afflicted by that disease again. In view of this, she was ready to believe that ingesting a little poison might indeed render a person immune to larger quantities of the same thing.

  “Stonegate was scornful,” the Countess continued. “He thought it a ridiculous conceit and denounced Herr Hahnemann as a charlatan, so I determined to give him the medicine without his knowledge – for his own good, you understand. I obtained a small bottle of the tincture recommended for his malady and put a few drops into his tea every evening. It is, you see, the sort of thing which must be given regularly if it is to have the desired effect.”

  “Did he never notice?” Letty asked, thinking that the previous Earl must have been unusually unobservant.

  “No. The doctor had given him some other drops – laudanum, I think – because he suffered quite badly from cramps so that, when he saw me putting something into his tea, he thought it was that.”

  “I see.” Letty wondered if the two together were what had done the damage, but all she said was, “Did it make him better?”

  “It was hard to tell at first. Apart from the cramps, he had bouts of extreme disturbance in his internal workings which made him irascible. I thought he did improve a little and, since the dose was so minuscule and had so little effect, I increased it.”

  “Did that work better?” Letty enquired when the Countess fell silent.

  “I thought it might have done so I increased it again, but it is not easy to be precise when using drops and I fear that I may have given him too much the evening before he died. I was not certain, although I confess I did wonder if I had, inadvertently, poisoned him. Dr Stone reassured me that it was simply a case of his malady having caught up with him although he did order that the remains of the previous night’s dinner be examined. Afterwards, I wished I had been a little bolder or started the medicine sooner. Frederick has always had a similarly delicate digestion so that it seemed to me only sensible to begin his treatment earlier.”

  “Did he consent to it?” Letty asked, beginning to feel a little queasy.

  “No; I have always found him even less subject to persuasion than his father. In any event, he denies that he suffers from the same weakness so that I did not think he would welcome the suggestion. I have from the outset been a little more generous with his dose than I was with my husband – Frederick is still relatively young and is, as I am sure you must have noticed, a tall and powerful man.”

  “Did you put it in his tea?”

  “Yes – and I own I have been surprised that he has not noticed for he is far more observant than his father.”

  “Indeed – and I suppose he does not take laudanum every day either. But I understand he spends a great deal of time in London where he will surely miss several doses.”

  “Yes, which is why I have been accustomed to give him a much larger quantity when he is here.”

  “Do you think you may have given him an excessive one the other night?” Letty asked, taking care to keep her tone as neutral as possible.

  “I own I am afraid I did.”

  The Countess, who had seemed so frail when she began to explain her actions, had rallied as she continued to defend her conduct. Letty suspected that telling someone else – and she was fairly certain she was the first to hear this story – was the cause of her revivification. The old lady must have been burning to communicate her strenuous efforts to save her husband – which had very likely only hastened his progress to the grave – and her continuing selfless crusade to save her stepson in spite of having to hoodwink him to do so.

  “The thing is,” she went on, now apparently holding Letty to blame for the way in which she had dispensed the drug which had almost sent the Earl to meet his Maker, “after we had spent that horrid day at Amberstone when you were so unkind to me, I was excessively fatigued and had not the strength even to eat dinner with the rest of you that evening. Since then, I have been assiduous in putting in the drops – I have not missed a day since the soldiers turned up - and Frederick has not complained once of indisposition until this morning so that I really began to believe that he was on the mend. Last night, I think I may have put in a little more than usual; I had opened a new bottle the night before and found the opening so excessively small that hardly anything came out of it, so that night he did not have a proper dose at all. Consequently, I made the hole larger and remember thinking, as I inserted the drops, that they were coming out more easily.”

  “Did you give him an extra large dose last night to make up for the small one?” Letty asked, now almost certain that her ladyship had caused the Earl’s illness.

  By this time both women were so entirely engrossed in the story that they had almost forgotten the dire conditions in which they were discussing the matter.

  Letty wondered why, having admitted that she believed she had killed her husband, the Dowager had gone on using the same exceedingly uncertain method to treat her stepson. It would not have surprised her if the old lady had fully intended to put a period to the Earl’s existence. After all, if she did so before he was married, Lord Archibald would inherit the title. Indeed, had she not seemed to genuinely certain of her own motives in dropping increasingly large quantities of poison into both her husband’s and her stepson’s tea, Letty would have been convinced that she had intended to kill both. There had not only been a good deal of overt criticism of her stepson but a certain amount of husbands in general – and whence would she have come by her cynical attitude if not on account of her own experience?

  “He had been doing so well,” the Countess complained as though it had been Stonegate’s fault that he had succumbed to an excessive quantity of whatever noxious substance his stepmother had been feeding him. “I did not want all my good work to go to naught.”

  Aspasia was pacing restlessly up and down the saloon when Lord Stonegate came in.

  “Have you found her?”

  “No, not yet. The men are still looking.”

  “But you are not? What do you know that you hesitate to tell me?”

  “I know nothing for certain,” he replied, taking her hands in a firm clasp, “but I feel I should warn you that there may be bad n
ews. I am going to look in the dungeons in case she has somehow found her way down there.”

  “How could she have? Do you not keep them locked? You don’t mean the oubliette, do you?” she cried, turning white.

  “The cover has been slightly displaced, not by so much that anyone could have got in, but Archibald found it and is beside himself. I have told him I will go down from inside and try to open the door.”

  “But she could not have got in that way, could she?”

  “No, I don’t think so; I don’t think she could have got in at all but, until we find her, Archibald will not rest until the oubliette has been searched.”

  “Can I come with you? It is not a question of being lowered by rope, is it?”

  “Not from the inside, no; but I am not sure that it will be possible to open the door. Archibald and I used to go down there sometimes as boys, although we were not, strictly speaking, allowed to. The last time we tried we were probably about fourteen and the lock had rusted so that we could not open it. I’m hoping that perhaps, now that I am a little bigger and stronger, I will be able to unlock it.”

  “But you are not stronger!” she cried. “You are unwell.”

  “Only temporarily. I don’t think my muscles will have weakened appreciably in one day. I will take a couple of the servants with me to help.”

  “Can I come too?” she repeated. “I promise I will not get in the way or give way to hysterics, no matter what you find.”

  “Very well.”

  Chapter 37

  Lord Archibald, crouched at the top of the oubliette, continued to call his beloved’s name, although much more quietly since he no longer expected to receive an answer.

  When the men arrived, he directed them to move the cover off the top of the shaft, tie one end of the rope to the cannon and the other around his waist and lower him into the dungeon.

  “My lord, you cannot go down there,” the groom, who led the party, exclaimed, horrified. “I will go or we can send one of the boys.”

  “I would prefer to go myself,” Archie said.

  He had previously intended to send someone else but, now that it had come to the point, he could not bear the idea of anyone other than himself finding her broken body.

  “I will come to no harm. If Miss Denton has somehow fallen in, I would like to – to find her …” His voice, firm and decisive at the beginning, trailed off hopelessly by the end.

  “My lord, you are still weak,” the groom argued.

  “My limbs are weak, but my mind is strong and, since I will be attached to a rope and let down like a bucket before being pulled up again, I cannot see that strong limbs are essential. Please do as I say.”

  Bowing to his authority, the groom directed his underlings accordingly and soon the thick rope was tied firmly to the cannon at one end and around Lord Archibald’s waist and shoulders like a harness at the other.

  He climbed on to the low wall and, telling the groom to haul him up again when he tugged three times on the rope, let himself down into the vault.

  The men belayed the rope slowly, taking care not to allow the man on the end to sway against the sides of the funnel or to extinguish the lantern, which he still held.

  Down at the bottom of the oubliette Letty said earnestly, “I do think it is possible that you gave him too much last night. Would it not be best to cease the treatment for Frederick now? His becoming so ill must have given you a fright.”

  “I do not want him to get worse and, if I stop now, he may, do you not think?” The Countess’s voice wavered as she spoke so that Letty thought it likely that the old lady was fairly longing to abandon her efforts but wanted permission to do so.

  “I don’t know,” Letty said truthfully. She had not understood much of Dr Hahnemann’s theory, as propounded by the Dowager, and was by no means certain that the Countess had been carrying it out correctly in any event. It seemed to her, from the explanation the old lady had given at the beginning, that the Saxon physician thought that only a minute quantity of the substance should be administered to the patient, but that the Countess, when it did not have the effect she sought, had increased it without seeking further medical advice. The infinitesimal dose had become quite substantial.

  “But, if he does,” she added more firmly, “I think it would be better to seek Dr Stone’s advice; after all, he is in the neighbourhood whereas the other is a long way away.”

  “I own it would be a relief not to be obliged to be counting drops every evening,” Lady Stonegate admitted. “It is not altogether easy obtaining the tincture either. I have to send to Saxony. But I would not like to give up if – if I should not.”

  “I think you should.”

  “Do you think I did kill Stonegate?” the Countess asked.

  “I don’t know; you have not killed Frederick in any event; he is definitely on the mend.”

  “You will not tell him what I have done, will you?” the old woman asked anxiously, tacitly admitting that she had been at the very least foolish, at the worst criminal.

  “I don’t know,” Letty answered after a long pause while she wrestled with her desire to set Lady Stonegate’s mind at rest and her suspicion that the old lady had indeed caused one man’s death and might cause another’s if she were not prevented from doing so. In addition, although she wanted to believe the Dowager’s motives had been honourable, she was not absolutely convinced that they had been.

  It was at that moment when, perhaps seeking enlightenment from the heavens, she looked up and saw a light coming slowly and not very steadily down the shaft.

  Her heart lifted but she said nothing because she did not want to raise her companion’s hopes only to have to dash them later. Indeed, she was afraid that the light was in her own mind and feared that it might signal the gates of Heaven opening before her.

  It came ever closer, wavering against the walls, until at last she discerned the shadowy figure of a man behind it.

  Somebody had come to rescue them.

  “Pray do not!” the Countess begged, still taken up with her own anxieties. She did not seem to have noticed the light so that Letty was even more afraid that her mind was playing tricks upon her.

  “Bear with me a moment, my lady,” she said at last, squeezing the old woman’s hand before letting it go and rising, with considerable difficulty, to her feet. The injured ankle gave way, but Letty, gritting her teeth and forcing it to act as some sort of a prop, managed to remain upright.

  The man landed – she heard his feet sloshing in the mud - the light steadied but, as he was behind it, she could not see his face. She was uncertain until he spoke whether he was an angel or a corporeal man.

  “Letty!”

  He had not seen her either; he called her name as he landed, trying to steady the light so that he could examine the oubliette. His voice was urgent, almost as though he believed he must wake her from the dead.

  “Archie!” she cried, joy exploding in her heart and suffusing her voice.

  She ran towards him, stumbling, almost hopping, dragging her weak leg, and cast herself into his arms almost exactly as she had six years before.

  And, as she had then, she kissed him.

  He was still holding the lantern in his good hand; the other hung by his side but, not wanting to drop the light, he managed, almost by will alone, to raise the damaged arm and encircle his beloved who, by some miracle, was not only not dead but enthusiastically kissing him.

  “Here, let me put the lantern down so that I can hold you properly,” he said at last when she unfastened her lips for long enough to draw breath.

  “Is it really you?” she asked, still confusedly wondering if he was a figment of her imagination or if, perhaps, she had died and gone to Heaven; after all, the hereafter would hardly fit its popular image if he were not there to greet her.

  He put the lantern on the ground and turned his full attention to his love, taking her firmly in his good arm and kissing her with the sort of fervour which he had
reined in that first time, when she was only fourteen, and even the second, when she was sixteen.

  “Yes, it is really me – and is this really you?” he asked, beginning to laugh with a sort of wild abandon to have her in his arms - living, breathing and returning his kisses.

  “Yes, yes; oh, Archie, I was quite, quite wrong; I think I have been utterly confused and all at sea: I love you so much, more I think than ever. Do you still love me?”

  “Of course I do, you silly girl. Are you hurt?” he asked, belatedly becoming aware that she, like him, seemed only to have one arm capable of being wrapped around him and that she was leaning both unevenly and heavily against him.

  “Nothing to signify. I think I may have broken my wrist – and perhaps one of my legs too – or it may only be the ankle.”

  “My God! Do we only have two working arms and legs between us – well, I suppose that will suffice to be going on with. Did you land on that pile of straw? Is that how you are miraculously still alive?”

  As he spoke, he picked up the lantern again and played it round the dungeon.

  “I landed on a sort of old mattress, I think,” she said. “That pile of straw …”

  She stopped because, now that the initial transports of delight had calmed a little and he at least had begun to return to reality, she could hear Lady Stonegate, who had quite possibly been trying to draw attention to herself for some time, but had failed on account of the two young people being so taken up with each other that there had been no room for anything else. Very likely they would not have heard a cannon firing.

  “Is that you, Archibald?”

  “What the devil …?” he asked, hobbling towards the straw.

  “It is your mother, Archie,” Letty said.

  “What? What the devil is she doing here? Did you somehow come in from the bottom, Mama?”