Mystery Loves Company

by Sheri Cobb South

  Banishing from his mind an image too painful to dwell on, he began with the nearest shelf and began inspecting the containers one by one, sniffing this one and shaking that, and wondering all the while if he would even recognize the substance if he were to happen upon it. Dr. Gilroy had said the substance was derived from a blue pigment; did that mean it would appear blue? But no, surely any obvious color would have turned the peach ratafia dark or cloudy, alerting any potential victim—intentional or accidental—that something was amiss with the beverage. Besides, the doctor had also said it occurred naturally in peach pits, apple seeds, and cherry stones, none of which possessed any such hue. Abandoning this promising idea, he resigned himself to the necessity of recognizing the substance by the same bitter almond odor he’d recognized on the maid’s body.

  Alas, his nostrils were soon so inundated with the pungent scents of cloves, anise, and peppermint—among others—that he was obliged to open a window and take several great gulps of fresh air before returning to his task. As he turned away from the window, his gaze fell on a small book bound in black leather, a book so old that its cover was spotted and stained, and its binding cracked. Pickett was suddenly seized with the fanciful notion that he beheld a witch’s book of spells, and that if he were to open it, he would find its pages inscribed with directions for placing curses on one’s enemies or concocting charms to open the heart of one’s beloved. The latter reminded him, not unnaturally, of his estrangement from his wife, and he flipped open the pages with a rather wistful sigh.

  He was disappointed (though hardly surprised) to discover that it yielded no such useful information. Here was a receipt for black butter made from apples, and here was one for quince preserves, both transcribed in a graceful, feminine hand. Unwilling to turn back to his odoriferous investigations just yet, he spent a few minutes flipping through the pages, noting that the book contained directions for concocting medicines and beauty aids as well as jams and jellies. He grinned as he read one such entry, wondering what Julia would have to say about a face powder whose main ingredient appeared to be dried horse manure. His smile faded as he remembered he would never have an opportunity to describe this concoction to her.

  He found, too, that it was easy to see which entries were the most popular: while some of the pages resisted his attempts to part them, others all but fell open at a touch. At last he found the receipt he sought, the one describing the preparation of peach ratafia flavored with almonds. While it was interesting in its way, it was of little use to him as far as the investigation went; there was certainly no mention of the fact that one might use the leftover peach pits to create a poison whose effects would be hidden by the flavor imparted by the almonds. Heaving a sigh, Pickett closed the back cover (for he was almost at the end of the book by now) and turned it over, prepared to set it aside and return to his examination of the still-room shelves. But he failed to grasp the front cover securely, and so only succeeded in flipping the book open to the flyleaf, where the owner had written her name, along with the year in which she had begun compiling her herbal.

  Instead of Eliza Mucklow, the title page bore the inscription Mildred Frampton, 1747.

  17

  In Which Victory Turns to Ashes

  The stagecoach rattled into the stable yard of the Swan with Two Necks in Gresham Street, Cheapside, just as darkness descended over Town. Pickett, perched once again on the roof, waited with ill-concealed impatience as the inside passengers disembarked, then scrambled down, claimed his valise as it was tossed from the boot, and entered the inn. Here he was obliged once again to wait his turn while those passengers meaning to break their journey for the night were assigned rooms. At length, when the last of these arrivals had been directed upstairs, the innkeeper turned to Pickett.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but we haven’t any more room.”

  “That’s all right,” Pickett said with a sigh, mentally revising his plans for the night. “But I wonder if you might be willing to hold my luggage until I send—until I call for it,” he amended lamely, belatedly remembering that there would be no dispatching a footman on such an errand. Like his marriage, those days of prosperity were over, just as if they had been nothing but a vivid dream. Maybe it was better to think of his brief taste of marital bliss (when he had to think of it at all) as just that: a dream, and one from which he’d been rudely awakened.

  Having arranged for the storage of his bag, he set out on foot for the Grosvenor Square residence of Lord and Lady Washbourn. He sent up his card and was soon shown to the drawing room, where he found not only the lady of the house, but her husband and her mother-in-law as well.

  “Why, Mr. Pickett,” exclaimed the countess, rising to greet him. “How fortunate that I should be home tonight to receive you! We—we have good news, you see. Only today my husband has been appointed to the British embassy at Constantinople, and we are to sail within a se’ennight. Washbourn wished to have this evening to celebrate quietly with his family before facing the congratulations of his friends.” Her gaze fell to Pickett’s brown coat, wrinkled from travel and almost white with the dust churned up from horses’ hooves and carriage wheels. “Am I to understand that you have just returned from—from your errand, and have some new information?”

  Pickett glanced down at his person. “You are, ma’am, else I would not have inflicted myself upon you in all my dirt.”

  “Never mind that.” She turned to her husband. “My dear, if you and Mother Washbourn will please excuse us—”

  “Forgive me, your ladyship,” Pickett interrupted, “but what I have to say concerns them, too.”

  “Have you found the Washbourn rubies, then?” Lord Washbourn demanded eagerly. “Good man!”

  Pickett made no reply, but addressed himself to the countess, who sat ramrod straight at one end of the sofa. “Throughout this investigation, your servants have made mention of the peach ratafia which ‘her ladyship’ makes with her own hands. I always assumed they meant you, given your father’s occupation. I have since asked the housekeeper at Washbourn Abbey for confirmation, but I should like to have the truth from your own lips, if you please: who made the peach ratafia that was served on the night of the masquerade?”

  “Why, Mother Washbourn,” said the countess, ges-turing toward her mother-in-law. “Everything having to do with the still-room falls under her authority. She is far better at that sort of thing than I will ever be, so everyone benefits from the arrangement.”

  Not quite everyone, Pickett thought. It hadn’t worked out so well for Annie. Aloud, he merely said, “Thank you. And whose idea was it that the ratafia should be served at the masquerade?”

  “Mother Washbourn suggested it. She is justifiably proud of it, you know, for it is very good, and the receipt was handed down from her mama.”

  “So I’ve been told.” Pickett turned to the dowager. “What was your mother’s name, ma’am?”

  The older lady looked down her aristocratic nose at him. “My mother was a Frampton of the Hampshire Framptons, Mr. Pickett, but what it can possibly have to do with my daughter-in-law’s loss of the Washbourn rubies quite escapes me!”

  “And her Christian name?”

  The dowager’s haughty gaze never wavered. “Mildred.”

  The young countess, apparently seeing the direction of his questioning, made a faint whimpering sound.

  “Look here,” Lord Washbourn protested. “Surely you can’t mean to imply that my mother had something to do with the disappearance of the rubies!”

  Pickett glanced toward Lady Washbourn for consent, and found her staring at her mother-in-law with a stricken expression. He turned back to the earl. “No, your lordship, your mother had nothing to do with the missing rubies. In fact, they aren’t missing at all. They are in my wife’s jewel case.”

  “What?” Lord Washbourn whirled about in his chair to confront his wife. “I trust you have some good reason for this, Eliza.”

  “Yes,” she said unsteadily, her eyes never leavin
g the dowager’s face. “At least, it appears that I did.”

  “With your permission, your ladyship?” Pickett asked. Receiving a distracted nod from the countess, he addressed himself to her husband. “The rubies were never missing, my lord. Their absence was nothing more than an excuse for me to confer with your wife on another matter entirely.”

  The earl’s face darkened. “If this has to do with that maid, Annie, then let me remind you that the coroner’s inquest found her death to be due to natural causes! Now either you will let the poor girl rest in peace and cease persecuting my wife, or I will go to your magistrate and lodge a complaint against you!”

  “Annie’s death enters into it only indirectly,” Pickett told him. “In fact, her ladyship sent for me because she feared her own life was in danger.”

  “Can this be true, Eliza?” demanded the earl in some consternation. “As I told you before, they were nothing more than unfortunate accidents. I had no idea they had upset you so much. My dear, why didn’t you tell me?”

  Lady Washbourn found her tongue at last. “Because I thought—I thought it was you,” she confessed, her voice low and breathless.

  “Me? You thought I was trying to kill you?” Lord Washbourn sounded more injured than angry.

  “Lady Barbara’s husband had just died,” the countess said in her own defense. “If you could only be rid of me, there would be nothing to prevent you from marrying her.” She gave him a brave and, Pickett thought, rather pathetic smile. “I know it was she you had wanted all along.”

  “My dear Eliza!” The earl took her hand in both of his. “My father was ill. He insisted that I marry before he died, and I had long ago come to realize that marriage for me must mean an alliance with a woman of property, no matter my feelings for the lady herself—or hers for me, for that matter. My fascination with Lady Barbara was nothing more than a stubborn man’s last act of rebellion against the fate that had been forced on him by his ancestors’ extravagance.”

  “You answered the summons to her theatre box readily enough,” she reminded him.

  “Only because I wanted to make it clear to her that whatever had once existed between us was over, and to beseech her to put an end to advances that could serve no purpose but to embarrass us both.” He grimaced at the memory. “If you desire proof, you have only to ask the people in the boxes on either side, for she did not accept the rebuff quietly. No, Eliza, within forty-eight hours of the wedding ceremony, I knew that any marriage between Lady Barbara and me would have been an unmitigated disaster. By the time you and I returned from our wedding trip, I was in the unexpected position of blessing my forebears for the profligacy that made it necessary for me to make a match which otherwise I would never have had the wisdom to seek.” He lifted her hand to his lips. “So you see, my dear, your fears have been groundless.”

  Pickett, feeling very much de trop by this time, cleared his throat. “Not quite groundless, your lordship.”

  Lord Washbourn turned toward Pickett as if surprised to see him still there. “Eh, what’s that?”

  “In fact, there was someone who wanted your wife dead—someone who pretended to be her friend while losing no opportunity to poison first her reputation, then her marriage, and, finally, her peach ratafia.”

  “You brought me the glass, my love,” Lady Washbourn reminded her husband. “I was obliged to set it down untouched, but Annie drank it—and Annie died. You can see how it looked—why I thought—”

  Lord Washbourn’s gaze slewed from Pickett to the countess, and back again. “Is this true, Mr. Pickett?”

  “Quite true, your lordship, no matter what any coroner’s jury might have said to the contrary. I’d heard of a poison that left behind an odor of bitter almonds, and when I learned that a beverage flavored with almonds had been added to the menu at the last minute, I couldn’t help thinking it would have been a very convenient medium in which to hide a poison. Although I failed to convince the coroner of its significance, I did a little investigating on my own, with her ladyship’s permission. I recently learned from a physician that the poison I had in mind occurs naturally in the pits of peaches, and so I traveled to Washbourn Abbey in search of some evidence that might confirm my suspicions.”

  He wisely neglected to mention the fact that his suspicions at that time had centered on Lady Washbourn herself. Instead, he reached into the inside pocket of his coat and withdrew a small book bound in worn black leather.

  “I found this in the still-room there. I’d been told that ‘her ladyship’ made the peach ratafia from her mother’s old receipt, and I found the receipt here, so well-used that the page has almost detached from the binding. But when I saw the name and date inside, I realized that it hadn’t belonged to Lady Washbourn—her maiden name had been Mucklow—but to the dowager countess. Then, too, it is dated 1747—too early to have belonged to Lady Washbourn’s mother, even if Mrs. Mucklow had borne a child very late in life.” He turned to the dowager, who sat as if turned to stone. “Well, ma’am? What made you do it?”

  “Have the goodness to leave my mother alone!” put in Lord Washbourn, very much on his dignity. “Why, Mama has been nothing but kind to my wife since the day I brought my bride home to Washbourn Abbey!”

  “Kind to her face, perhaps, I’ll grant you that,” conceded Pickett with a nod. “And all the while spreading the most vicious half-truths designed to cast her in as unfavorable a light as possible.” He looked to the dowager for confirmation. “Isn’t that right, your ladyship—or should I say, ‘Aunt Mildred’?”

  The earl stiffened. “You are offensive, sir! How dare you suggest that my mother has anything to do with that scandal-rag?”

  “That—that was you, too, Mother Washbourn?” the countess stammered, addressing her mother-in-law for the first time since Pickett had entered the room.

  The older woman regarded the younger as if she might a particularly repulsive species of insect. “I am not your mother, you—you common little adventuress! I never have been, and I never shall be!”

  “And—and you killed Annie—”

  The dowager pressed an affronted hand to her bosom, and the red stone on her finger winked accusingly in the light. “Is it my fault you are so lax with your servants that they think they can help themselves to whatever they please?”

  Lord Washbourn, who had listened in mounting horror to this exchange, now stared at her in revulsion, as if his parent had suddenly turned into a serpent before his eyes. “You gave me that glass and bade me take it to Eliza, saying she must not be allowed to tire herself out,” he recalled in stunned disbelief. “You were so thoughtful, so solicitous of her, and yet—all the while—”

  “Oh, do be quiet, Charles!” interrupted his mother. “I did it for your sake! What do you think it does to a mother’s heart, to see her son forced to give up the woman he loves? And all for what? Why, to wed the daughter of a tradesman!” She all but spat the word. “Your father and his father before him needed money no less than you did, and yet they married daughters of the aristocracy. They knew what was worthy of their name!”

  Lord Washbourn practically erupted from his chair, and began pacing restlessly back and forth. “In other words, they closed their eyes to the looming disaster, all the while congratulating themselves on their exalted lineage!”

  “Yes, they married to please themselves, and they chose women deserving of their lofty rank,” the dowager insisted. “My dowry may not have been large, but I was accounted a great beauty in my younger days, and descended from the Framptons of Hampshire, whose ancestors sailed to England with the Conqueror! Why should you alone of all the Washbourns be forced to sacrifice yourself? It was not fair, it was not right!”

  He had reached the end of the room by now, and whirled about to confront her. “Not right, Mama? Not right? What, pray, is ‘right’ about marrying an innocent young woman, possessing myself of her inheritance, and then plotting her death so that I might be free to lay my ill-gotten gain at the feet of an
other lady? What is ‘fair’ about that? No, don’t interrupt,” he said quickly, when she opened her mouth to answer. “Since you feel my wife is so far beneath you, I will not force you to remain in her presence. If you recall, I have a small Scottish holding, a castle in the Outer Hebrides, which I believe will suit you very well. If I remember correctly, it came to our family through my great-grandfather’s marriage with the laird’s daughter; I’m sure you will appreciate the irony.”

  “Begging your pardon, your lordship,” Pickett put in, “but the only place your mother will be going is Newgate.”

  The dowager wrung her hands, and the large red stone on her finger flashed erratically. “I won’t! I won’t go to prison, and I won’t be exiled to some ruin while that vulgar little creature takes my place!”

  Before anyone realized what she was about, she wrenched the gem to one side, tipped her head back, and poured down her throat the powdery substance that had been concealed inside her ring. Pickett leapt toward her, even as he recognized the futility of intervention. Within seconds, the dowager was choking and gasping for breath even as the earl pounded her frantically on the back; within minutes, she lay twitching convulsively on the floor in her son’s arms, unresponsive to his attempts to revive her. At last she lay still and the room fell silent, the quiet sobs of the countess the only sound.

  “Hush, my love, don’t cry,” Lord Washbourn chided gently. He carefully lowered his mother’s head to the floor, then rose to his feet and took his trembling wife in his arms. “Perhaps it’s better this way. We will return to the Abbey long enough to see Mama laid to rest next to Papa in the family vault, and then we will prepare for the journey to Constantinople. By the time we return to England, I hope to have persuaded you to forgive me for my blindness.”

  “There is nothing to forgive,” she insisted, “at least not from you. No one could suspect his mother of such a thing, or even believe her capable of it.”