The Poison Bed: 'Gone Girl meets The Miniaturist'

by E C Fremantle

  ‘Arthur Mannery – you don’t know him.’ Her smile couldn’t disguise the twist of pain in her eyes. I asked what the matter was.

  ‘You were always so perceptive, Frances. Do you remember when I taught you to read palms? I could see then that you had the touch.’ She said the word ‘touch’ as if it were a secret between us. ‘Arthur won’t marry me and my husband left me with almost nothing to live on.’

  ‘How do you manage?’ Mine was a world of abundance, and it was hard to imagine her straitened circumstances. But she seemed well dressed, her clothes beautifully tailored from good fabric, and her fingers were free from callouses. ‘Do you take in sewing?’

  She laughed and, though we were entirely alone, leaned forward to cup a hand to my ear. ‘I introduce fallen girls to gentlemen seeking a little comfort.’

  It took a moment for the truth of what she was telling me to sink in. ‘You mean …?’

  She nodded, raising her brows. ‘Many think ill of me for it, but the girls I help have already been ruined. They have nothing left but their bodies, and my intervention keeps them from the stews. The gentlemen often set them up with a roof and board, and some are of very high standing, like your –’ She stopped herself.

  ‘Like my what?’

  ‘No – no … I didn’t mean …’ She was clearly flustered, her hands squabbling like pigeons.

  ‘One of my brothers, my father?’

  ‘Yes, one of your brothers.’ She responded too quickly and I knew it to be a lie because two red spots had blossomed on her cheeks. It was a tell-tale sign I remembered from when she used to cheat at cards. I was suddenly convinced it was my great-uncle’s name she was refusing to say, which would have explained their surreptitious exchange.

  ‘And that provides you with a living?’

  She nodded. ‘To a degree. But I’d like your opinion on another endeavour.’ She picked up her bag, unbuckling it.

  ‘If you need money, Anne –’

  ‘Goodness, no!’ She seemed mortified and then, like a magician, produced a great circle of golden lace from the bag. ‘Look. Isn’t it a wonder?’ She held it up to her throat.

  It was a ruff, but unlike any ruff I’d seen before. It shimmered in the candlelight, seeming dipped in gold. ‘It must be worth a fortune. How did you come by it?’ I was trying to calculate the cost of so much precious thread and the thought crossed my mind that she might have stolen it.

  ‘Convincing, isn’t it?’ She tossed it to me.

  Something wasn’t quite right about it: it hadn’t the cold feel of metal. ‘It’s dyed linen?’ I felt tricked.

  Her eyes flared. ‘All the ladies wear them at the French court. It’s a starching technique with saffron – a secret formula I managed to get my hands on. I have wristbands too.’ She thrust her hand into the depths of her bag once more, pulling out several cuffs.

  The lace was fine and the colour remarkable. ‘Do you intend to sell them?’

  ‘Well,’ she trained her gaze on me, ‘I was hoping you might wear a ruff to court. If you’re seen in it everyone will want one. With your connections, we can make a good business out of these.’ She broke into the angelic dimpled smile I remembered from childhood.

  I couldn’t help but laugh. Anne enthralled me. She had a boldness and an ingenuity that made me glad she had returned to my orbit. ‘What harm can come of it? I’m sure you’re right. They’ll all want to get their hands on one.’

  ‘I was hoping you’d agree.’ Her excitement was contagious and caught hold of me, making me forget my earlier unease.

  ‘Ingenious – you’ll hardly need your Arthur Mannery to marry you.’

  Anne laughed. ‘I’ll be a wealthy widow – the best of all worlds: able to own property, make a will, answer to no one, have none of the suffocating ties of marriage.’ Her excitement was replaced with a look of fervent determination. ‘But I want him. Sometimes when you want something enough you will do anything to have it.’

  I knew what she meant, know it all the more now – that the wanting is a force more powerful than the having.

  She was talking at a whisper again. ‘Dr Forman is making me a love potion.’

  ‘A love potion?’ I remembered then that Anne’s fascination with the occult didn’t stop at fortune-telling games. When I was very small she used to tell strange and terrifying stories of demons and magic. They gave my sisters nightmares, but not me. ‘You don’t really believe in such things, do you?’ I don’t know why I asked, for I knew she did and she wasn’t the only one. Dozens of women at court consulted Dr Forman.

  ‘Just you wait and see.’ She tapped the side of her nose with a finger. ‘But what about you, Frances?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Listen,’ she said, shifting closer, seeming conspiratorial. ‘I know things are on the change for you.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ The thought struck me that she had delved into my mind and read my secrets. ‘What change?’

  ‘I can help you.’ She stroked a hand down my arm to my burned wrist. I snatched it away, wincing. ‘I know you must keep your husband at bay.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ I sounded perturbed, my voice high-pitched, but I hadn’t needed to ask because now I understood the scene I had witnessed in the yard. ‘He told you?’

  ‘I know only that the plan is to have your marriage annulled. He thought I’d be able to help you.’ She threaded her fingers through mine. ‘I’m not meant to have told you I know but you needn’t face this alone, Frances.’

  It was a relief, I suppose, to have someone with whom to share my secret. Uncle must have had my interests at heart when he involved Anne but, nonetheless, his clandestine behaviour chafed me. ‘I’m not meant to know that you know?’

  She shrugged with a smile. ‘He moves in mysterious ways. But that doesn’t matter.’ I was wondering if perhaps it did matter as she continued, ‘You must come to Dr Forman. He’ll know exactly what’s needed to keep your husband from – you know.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ I was noncommittal, as Dr Forman reeked, to me, of trouble and I had no intention of paying him a visit.

  Him

  I had discovered that unspoken love can capture its victims until they no longer recognize themselves. That summer I was reborn, existing only in the context of Frances Howard. I became Troilus, subsumed by sweet suffering, propelled towards her by some enigmatic force beyond my control. Love makes prowlers of us all, does it not?

  I indulged my obsession, watching her from the shadows, making the feeblest excuses to find myself in the places where she might be. I invented reasons for my barge to drift slowly past Essex House, in the hope of a brief sighting, and I’d offer my services for errands that would take me to the Queen’s house where she sometimes was. I felt unhinged, stalking the prince for signs she had been near him, once even waiting for him to remove his coat so I could sniff it, seeking her scent. I courted Northampton, ingratiating myself with him, and befriended her brother, whose similarity to her struck me like a slap each time he smiled.

  Once I came upon her with a group of women and concealed myself to watch, riveted by the scene of female ritual that unfolded. She, her face fixed in concentration, pinched a hair from her head, tugging sharply before drawing the invisible thread carefully away.

  A woman lay flat on the floor with the others kneeling about her and removed her wedding ring. Frances threaded the hair through it, letting the ring hang down. Holding the makeshift pendulum over the woman’s belly, she closed her eyes, appearing to fall into a trance, her head gently rocking. The ring began to swing slightly, then circle, eventually making great loops in the air. I was transfixed.

  ‘It’s a girl,’ she uttered, coming out of her daze, looking up, then casting those black eyes in my direction, as if she had the power to see right through the hanging I lurked behind. She returned the ring to its owner, allowing the hair to drift to the floor. I waited and, when the women were gone, searched on my hands and knees
in the dust by the skirting for that hair. Unable to find it, I stood, turned, and there she was, as if she’d floated there soundlessly, those eyes on me. My breath lurched.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ She wasn’t so much smiling, as smirking.

  Thinking fast, I held out my hand to show her a ring I wore that had lost a stone. ‘I’m looking for this.’ It seemed impossible that she couldn’t hear the loud thump of my heart.

  ‘I’m sure it’s easily replaced.’ She touched the empty setting lightly with the tip of her finger, and I was on the brink of declaring myself, when one of her friends came to the door, calling her name, and she spun away, back into her world.

  I became bolder and followed her in late summer, like a spy, stealing in the shadows as she walked with a companion through the city. She wore a golden ruff, like a slipped halo, barely visible beneath her outer garments. They left Essex House, walking with purpose along the Strand, stopping for a drink, she wiping the wet from her lips with the back of her hand. The pair of them continued, past St Paul’s and down to Thames Street, past the bridge, shrugging off the hawkers, and on in the direction of the Tower. Eventually they stopped at an address near the Billingsgate dock, where a vast ship was berthed, its great masts towering above the roofs of the houses.

  The two women disappeared inside. I loitered nearby, watching, as the ship was unloaded to the shouts of the men and the shriek of the winch. The dock was a mayhem of activity and a fellow approached me with a caged parrot, brightly plumed and big as a goshawk, asking me to make an offer for it.

  ‘He can speak three languages,’ he assured me, demonstrating by saying a few words, which the parrot mimicked.

  It struck me that I was much like that parrot, in my fine feathers, repeating things that others put into my mouth. It was only my secret love that was truly my own. ‘I’m not in the market for a parrot,’ I replied. ‘But I wonder, do you know whose house that is?’ I pointed towards the door where the women had entered.

  ‘Strange sort lives there. A Dr Forman.’ He looked at me with narrowed eyes. ‘Not an ordinary doctor. I wouldn’t think you’d be wanting to consult one such as he.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  He seemed to have no answer, only shrugged, saying, ‘Like I said, strange sort.’

  The women emerged some time later, reversing their tracks, back through the city towards the Strand, but instead of turning into the gates of Essex House they continued westward to where the houses gave way to fields. The thought lodged in my mind – and with it a rising sense of agitation – that they were heading for St James’s Palace and a tryst with the prince. But my fears were allayed when they disappeared into the church of St Martin.

  I followed them in, lurking in the dark at the back. They walked all the way down the aisle, stopping eventually close to the altar, where they knelt side by side and began to pray. I wondered why, since there was a chaplain at Essex House, she would choose to make her prayers at St Martin’s. The enigma deepened when they stood, approaching a passing verger to exchange a few words and he disappeared, returning a short while later with a package that Frances’s companion cached beneath her cloak. Aware of the rumours surrounding the Howards and their papist sympathies, it occurred to me that the mysterious package might contain religious paraphernalia.

  I felt a shiver of fear for, though James’s policy was of tolerance for both faiths, families with Catholic leanings had to tread with great care. The Gunpowder Treason, six years before, had left a grim shadow.

  Only once they had left the church did I emerge from the gloom, walking down the aisle to the place where Frances had been minutes before. I sank my knees into the very hollows where hers had rested, thinking of the fine silk of her stockings, all that lay between her skin and the tapestry surface where my own knees were nestled. The thought wound me tightly. I shut my eyes, feigning prayer. The place echoed with the intense silence particular to places of worship, interrupted only by the soft slap of the verger’s slippers as he moved about, lighting candles. Then I saw it, lodged in a corner of the prayer stand, a pearl that must have dropped from her sleeve.

  I plucked it from its niche, bringing it to my lips, touching my tongue to its surface. Bliss made me lightheaded. To me it was another fragment of her to add to the collection of relics I was amassing.

  Her

  ‘No, like this.’ Nelly is jigging the baby on her hip as she demonstrates how to hold two cards together but make them appear to be one. ‘The edges must be lined up perfect.’

  Frances’s fingers are all thumbs and she drops the cards in exasperation. ‘It’d take real magic for me to be able to do it as well as you.’

  ‘I know a fair bit about real magic.’ Nelly bends down to whisper, ‘I made a spell once. I wanted rid of my baby cos – Well, you know why.’

  ‘I’d watch what you say.’ Frances is disarmed by her frankness. ‘They could burn you for that – making spells.’

  ‘But I trust you.’ The baby has picked up a card in its sticky fist and Nelly gently prises it away. ‘You wouldn’t say anything. We trust each other, don’t we?’ Her words seem weighted with something. Frances isn’t sure what.

  ‘Of course.’ She nods, adding, ‘I don’t know much about such things. It was Anne Turner, not me, who was fascinated by the occult. She was involved with a Dr Forman.’ Frances is on the brink of launching into a description of her ill-advised appointment at Dr Forman’s house but thinks better of it. Though it was entirely innocent, and she had gone there only because Anne had been so dogged about it, she fears it may give Nelly the opposite impression.

  The thought drags her back to that day with disturbing force. She had taken care to dress plainly and cover her face with a scarf, so as not to be recognized. She and Anne had made slow progress weaving their way through the city. Frances rarely had opportunity to mingle with the myriad life on the streets, so it was a thrill of sorts to be incognito among it all. They stopped where a woman was selling ass’s milk straight from the animal and shared a single cup, lifting their scarves to drink. It was still warm and she relished the pleasure of it, laughing at Anne’s milky moustache and wiping it away with her thumb.

  Anne was elated. Just as she’d predicted, her fortunes had turned since Frances had worn one of her gold ruffs in the Queen’s chambers. From one week to the next everyone was wearing them. ‘Once it gets about that they’re being worn at court, every goodwife this side of Chelmsford will be after a set,’ Anne was saying. ‘Who says a woman needs a man to survive?’ She was bubbling over with it, but once they arrived at Forman’s house her chatter subsided.

  A hideous fellow, with a russet bush of beard and a nose half eaten away by the pox, opened the door.

  ‘Ah, Franklin, we have an appointment with the doctor.’ Anne seemed unperturbed by the man’s gruesome presence. He greeted her in return by name and led the way inside. His gait was awkward: either one of his legs was considerably shorter than the other or one shoulder considerably higher. The two women were left to wait in a room at the back of the house.

  Although it was midday, the place was gloomy and silent as a tomb, with a pervading smell of dust and something sweet and rancid, like fruit forgotten in a corner and left to rot. Every surface was stacked with books and curiosities. The shed skin of a gigantic snake, fine as a spider’s web, lay across the mantel, weighed down at one end by the shell of a tortoise and at the other by a large glass jar containing an organ of sorts preserved in liquid, a heart perhaps. Spread over the table was a map of the heavens, the stars picked out in gold on a bed of black bordered with indecipherable text. Beside it lay a dish containing a fistful of bright stones. Frances picked one up, holding it to the window, seeing how it cast its rosy colour on to her skin.

  She had a suspicion that cunning men, such as Dr Forman, were charlatans, who staged an atmosphere to squeeze money out of those who knew no better. And it crossed her mind that the servant, with his grisly appearance,
might have been employed as part of the ruse. But, nevertheless, she had to admit Dr Forman’s rooms, arranged by design or not, were morbidly captivating. Noticing a skull perched on a stack of papers, Frances nudged Anne. ‘Do you suppose that’s human?’ She stretched out a hand to touch it when something shrieked loudly, making her gasp and grab her friend’s arm. The sound came again, seeming to originate from behind a screen in a corner. Frances took a step towards it and, breath held, pulled back the screen to reveal a caged monkey. It was whiskered and fanged, standing upright, clinging to its bars with miniature old-man’s hands.

  It emitted a bloodcurdling sound. Frances jumped back, as if scalded, and someone behind her said, ‘I see you’ve met Diabolo.’ She turned sharply with a cry, to see a creature, spotted like a leopard with a wild frizz of orange hair and glazed amber eyes. ‘I’m so sorry. I seem to have frightened you.’ She realized then that what she’d momentarily feared was a demon was nothing more sinister than a diminutive freckled man with a magnetic gaze.

  ‘I don’t know what came over me.’ She pulled herself together and offered her hand as Anne introduced the doctor. He opened the cage and the monkey jumped on to his shoulder, from which it examined the visitors with disturbing fascination.

  Once they were seated Forman picked an apple from a dish and produced a paring knife to cut slices for Diabolo. Not wanting to watch its munching yellow fangs, Frances returned her gaze to rest on that skull, wondering to whom it might have belonged.

  ‘To remind me of the vanities of the world,’ Forman said, apparently noting her fascination.

  ‘Whose was it?’

  He didn’t answer, just tapped the side of his nose, a gesture she’d always thought peculiar to Anne. ‘Now to business.’ He produced a phial, which Frances assumed to be the purported love potion, as Anne reached for it impatiently.

  ‘I can’t impress on you enough the strength of this.’ He moved his hand out of her reach. ‘Use it sparingly. A mere drop in his wine before he retires each night.’ He began to shake the phial while murmuring some verse in a language Frances didn’t recognize, then handed it to Anne.