The Muse and Other Stories of History, Mystery, and Myth

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  For a moment Viola envisioned returning to Orsino with her verdict, that Leonardo had indeed taken his own life, that Olivia’s shame would keep her forever from his embrace and he should look elsewhere for a wife. But no. While she, like Olivia, would have compromised her honor to protect her brother’s, in this there could be no compromise.

  Helen clanged the pan of meat down on the hearth. “After the Count lay dead, Malvolio called us together and told us the Countess’s will, that it be known her brother died of his wound. And may God forgive her her lie, he said, and for burying her brother in consecrated ground, but she was our mistress and we owed her our obedience. And we owe Malvolio, too, I’m thinking.”

  “If he tried to smile he would break his face,” said Ferdinand.

  “Who are you to criticize him?” Bianca demanded. “Who is the steward here, and who the footman, eh?”

  Ferdinand opened his mouth to retort. Maria, the housekeeper, walked into the kitchen carrying an armful of autumn flowers. “Fetch me a vase, Ferdinand, if you can tear yourself away from idle talk.”

  Ferdinand disappeared out the door into the front of the house. Bianca turned her attention to her mending. Viola split the last pod and let the peas fall into the pot. Helen whisked it away and hung it jangling from a hook above the flames.

  She reached for a basket. “Viola . . .”

  That’s me.

  “. . . go into the garden and collect rosemary for the lamb, savory for the peas, sorrel to make a sauce for the fish. Leeks and lettuces, too. The Countess may be in mourning, but still Sir Toby and Sir Andrew will have their cakes and ale. Came for the funeral, they did, and stayed like a plague of locusts upon Egypt.”

  Bianca gasped. “How can you speak that way of quality folk?”

  “Peace, Helen. Such talk helps nothing.” Maria’s buxom body, clad in a plain dark dress, reminded Viola of a pigeon. As did her eyes, black beads of perception. “While my lady’s uncle and his friend worry her with their antics, at the same time those antics distract her from her melancholy.”

  Viola took the basket and a small knife and turned toward the door. “Savory. Sorrel. Leeks, lettuce. Rosemary.”

  “Rosemary flourishes where there’s been a death.” Bianca bit off the thread and shook out the gown.

  “No,” Helen corrected, “it flourishes when the house is ruled by a woman.”

  “Rosemary makes a fine hair and scalp lotion,” added Maria, “although my lady prefers the scent of rose petals in her cosmetics.”

  Unlike Malvolio, Maria probably approved of Olivia’s decision to give her brother a proper burial. Viola herself would’ve allowed Sebastian the benefit of the doubt, that he’d not intended the sin of suicide. But Sebastian’s death wasn’t at all mysterious.

  With a sigh, she stepped out into the bright if cool afternoon. The trees beyond the garden wall were touched very lightly with gold and russet. Still the roses bloomed. Marigolds and Michaelmas daisies lined the path where the Countess and her guests were walking. Fabian, the gardener, waved a pair of shears over a hedge and leaned forward. Viola could almost see his ears quivering.

  No, a bit of eavesdropping wouldn’t go amiss. She took the long way round to the kitchen garden, curtseying to the Countess, Sir Toby, and Sir Andrew as she passed. Olivia nodded, but didn’t really see her.

  The Countess was hardly older than Viola herself. Her face was fair as pearl, set against her black clothing like a jewel in a velvet box. She was so beautiful even Viola would’ve run a marathon to fan the bloom only hinted at in those pallid cheeks. She could imagine how Orsino felt.

  Olivia’s uncle, Sir Toby Belch, had the red face, big belly, and booming voice of the habitual drinker. His companion Sir Andrew Aguecheek strutted like a bantam rooster. Producing a small enameled box from his pocket, he said, “My thanks, dear lady, for doing me the honor of presenting me with your late brother’s snuffbox.”

  “A fine appetite he had, for all the pleasures of the senses. Never to excess, of course—like some I could name.” Olivia looked reprovingly at the two men. Their smiles ranged between sheepish and belligerent. “Even so, it could well be divine justice that he died purged and purified and so entered heaven without delay.”

  Sir Andrew sneezed so mightily the daisies waved in the breeze. Viola thought, Count Leonardo took snuff? What if the powder on the tray beside the fatal glass was snuff and not arsenicum at all?

  So where, then, was the arsenicum? Accidentally misplaced? Or deliberately destroyed by someone who wished to profit from the ambiguous circumstances of Leonardo’s death?

  Behind her she heard Malvolio’s voice, his tone no longer peremptory but unctuous. “My lady, it’s a bit chilly today, perhaps you’d prefer taking tea in the Chinese gallery rather than the summerhouse.”

  The clang of the garden gate covered Olivia’s reply. Viola set about her task, taking care to cut only the tender ends of the rosemary and choosing a variety of green lettuces. She pinched a bit from the magnificent clary sage bush with its pinky-purple blooms, even though Helen hadn’t asked for it, just to inhale its tangy scent. A shame the kitchen garden with its vegetables and herbs was hidden away behind the stable yard as present fashion dictated.

  The household refuse pile filled the far corner of the yard. Viola walked by it, then doubled back. The noisome mound glinted with myriad bits of glass, some small, some large enough to show the curve of their original shape. A couple of champagne bottles lay unbroken amid the trash. Were Sir Toby and Sir Andrew responsible for emptying all those bottles? What about Count Leonardo? Viola went on her way wondering if he’d indeed drunk himself to death, on alcohol, not arsenicum. But no. His symptoms were of a much faster-acting poison.

  She found the madman, Feste, lounging beside the fire in the kitchen, holding a bowl of soup to his lips. Beside him sat a sleek calico cat, looking round the room with a professional air and all but polishing its claws. Mice, rats, what you will. . . . Its ears flicking forward, it disappeared beneath the sideboard.

  Over the rim of the bowl, Feste’s flint-gray eyes took in Maria’s flowers, Helen’s kettle, Bianca’s needle, Viola’s basket. “A cat’s a cat for all that,” he murmured.

  Viola had the uneasy feeling not that he recognized her from Orsino’s palace, but that he recognized her true nature. No help for that. She sat down and started peeling the potatoes Helen handed her. “I met the Countess and her guests in the garden. Sir Toby and Sir Andrew must be famous drinkers, judging by the vast number of broken bottles on the refuse pile.”

  “She sees well,” crooned Feste, “who looks well.”

  Helen arranged the tea dishes on a tray and lifted the kettle from the fire. “Yes, Sir Andrew and Sir Toby enjoy their cups. And it was Sir Andrew who sent many of those bottles to the Countess. But they contained not liquor but food.”

  “Food? Oh.” Viola answered her own question. “I’ve heard of M. Appert’s new method of preserving food. He became a wealthy man, didn’t he, provisioning the French emperor’s armies?”

  “Very much so,” said Maria, jamming a larkspur into the midst of the other stalks. “A fact that has not escaped Sir Andrew. He’s built a manufactory here in Illyria, and began sending along samples of his product some months ago, wishing first the Count and now the Countess to join him in his enterprise.”

  “By marriage,” Bianca commented, “if by no other way.”

  “Her knightly guests wait upon her night and day,” sang Feste, “and seek to set the date of nuptials long denied.”

  So Sir Andrew was also a suitor? If Olivia rejected Orsino, Viola told herself, she wouldn’t give Andrew Aguecheek the back of her hand.

  “There,” Helen said, and set the tea tray so emphatically on the end of the table the porcelain dishes clattered. She turned to the sideboard and threw open its doors. “Look—meat stew, milk, beans, cherries, raspberries, apricots, asparagus, peas, artichokes. I wasn’t sure about these foods at first, to tell you th
e truth, but the Countess ordered me to serve them. And with herbs and spices to correct the seasonings they’re not too bad, although I wouldn’t give the milk to that cat, let alone the Countess.”

  Viola considered the ranks of champagne bottles, their corks held on as carefully by twisted metal hoods as though they contained the finest vintage. But the lumpy shapes of fruits, meats, and vegetables showed through the tinted glass. Each bottle bore a neatly written label.

  The damp potato peels wrapped her fingers. The peas she’d shelled boiled merrily away. When either peas or potatoes came to the Countess’s table they’d be nestled in porcelain, lapped with butter and fresh herbs. The bottled foods, too, were decanted, heated and flavored.

  Dinner. Leonardo had been taken ill after dinner. Could she make a case for him dying of food poisoning? Was it Sir Andrew who’d hidden the arsenicum, not wanting it to be known that his food was tainted? And yet Sir Andrew had only come here for the funeral.

  Feste shrank back into his corner. Malvolio walked in the door like Alexander entering Persepolis, followed closely by Ferdinand in the guise of pack animal. The steward looked over the tea tray, repositioned an item or two, and then gestured to Ferdinand to pick it up and carry it away.

  Malvolio’s beaked nose turned toward the sideboard. “Bottled, preserved, food. What’s the world coming to? No good comes from interfering with nature. We’ve all suffered from this novelty, haven’t we? But the Countess—well, she’s young and unmarried, without guidance now.”

  “Sir Andrew,” Maria commented, “would hardly have invested his fortune if he didn’t think preserved food was the way of the future.”

  “And his fortune is squandered, I daresay. I overheard him telling Sir Toby he’s desperately in need of funds to support this mad enterprise of his. Gluttony and greed are two of the seven deadly sins, but sinners seldom recognize the error of their ways.” Malvolio stalked out the door.

  Bianca looked after him. “He’s right. That food isn’t fit to eat.”

  “Why not?” asked Viola. “Has it made anyone sick?”

  “Hard to say,” Helen answered. “We all have upsets from time to time.”

  Feste put aside his bowl and picked up his lute. “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, both the flesh you eat and the flesh that is eaten.”

  Viola persevered. “Were any of these bottled foods served the night Count Leonardo died?”

  “Oh yes,” said Maria. “I know what you’re thinking. It was the first thought on my mind, too, and on Malvolio’s—he was adamant, at first—but only the Count was taken ill that night.”

  “If the food were tainted, we would all have suffered,” Bianca added. “No, it was poison that did for him, I’m sure of it.”

  “Tainted food is a poison,” Viola told her. “Almost anything can make a poison, whether intended or not. The leaves and stems of these potatoes. The seeds and leaves of that larkspur. Gastric fever is always a symptom of food poisoning, but there are other signs . . .”

  She caught herself, but it was too late. Every eye in the room was on her now. Flower stem, ladle, needle, lute—every implement was held aloft in its owner’s hand. “Out with it, girl,” Maria commanded.

  Viola laid down the knife. “I have some experience as a nurse. And I can tell you this: arsenicum strikes within the hour. Food poisoning takes several to manifest itself.”

  “Well then,” Bianca said. “It was arsenicum.”

  “Was it? In his extremity, did the Count suffer from cold, clammy skin?”

  “No.” Ferdinand walked into the room and shut the door behind him. “I helped the Countess as she labored over him, I was there when he took his last breath in her arms. He moaned that his limbs were numb, but his skin was flushed as though with a fever.”

  “Did he have vertigo or double vision?”

  “Not so’s I could tell, no.”

  “He fell unconscious before he died?”

  “No, he suffered a seizure and then was gone.”

  “What are you thinking?” Helen asked.

  Viola frowned. “That he died neither of arsenicum nor of tainted food, but of some other poison. Ferdinand, did you notice anything else?”

  “He could take no food or drink,” the youth offered.

  Maria scoffed, “Of course not, with his bowels in revolt.”

  “Well yes, that, but also his mouth and tongue were horribly blistered, as though his posset cup had been boiling hot.”

  “It was lukewarm,” said Helen. “And cooled further before you bestirred yourself to take it to him.”

  “A cup, a stirrup cup, let the cup pass from me,” Feste muttered.

  Blisters. Viola smelled the aroma of the clary sage on her fingertips, faint beneath the pasty scent of the potatoes. The sage bush filled an entire garden plot, and yet there’d been something else. . . . “I’ll return in a moment,” she said, and hurried out the door.

  Fabian stood in the kitchen garden maneuvering his hoe between the lush tiers of plants. Several fragrances mingled into one, overcoming the stink of the refuse pile. Viola walked briskly to the clary sage and thrust her arms into it, pushing its limber branches aside. Yes, there, its sparse, shiny leaves thrusting up into the lower shoots of the bush, was a black hellebore.

  “Fabian,” Viola called. “Did you know this was here?”

  He looked over her shoulder. “There were several plants in the woods, bloomed prettily at Christmas, they did. I warned the Countess off picking them, though. I don’t know how this one got here.”

  Covering her hand with her apron, Viola reached out and with one good tug pulled the hellebore up by its roots. Yes, its stem was scarred where several shoots had been recently stripped away. “And who would know, Fabian? Who comes here, to this enclosed spot behind the stableyard?”

  “Helen gathers herbs for her cooking, Maria to make lotions. Bianca, too. Malvolio misses nothing, not one tarnished horse-brass, not one beetle-ridden rose. And the madman, well, the madman is everywhere.”

  “Thank you.” Leaving him scratching his head, Viola carried the plant back into the kitchen. Every eye followed her as she walked across the room and cast the limp stem onto the hearth. “This may be odorless,” she announced, “but it stinks of death and deception even so.”

  “Black hellebore!” exclaimed Helen. “How did that get into the garden?”

  Maria shook her head. “Not by Fabian’s hand, he knows better.”

  “Someone’s hand put hellebore in the Count’s dinner,” Viola stated.

  The room fell so silent the bubbling of the cooking food sounded like rain. When the cat popped out from beneath the sideboard, each person jumped and shot a wary glance at someone else.

  Triumphantly, the cat laid a dead mouse at Feste’s feet. “Hell bore his soul, and bore it well indeed,” the madman said.

  “Poisoned with hellebore?” Maria demanded. “How can that be? Thanks to the Countess’s generosity everyone in the house eats of the same dishes. No one else suffered the least twinge that night.”

  “What was served?” asked Viola.

  Helen thought for a moment. “The usual soup, fish, meat. I made a sauce from the bottled raspberries, and a small dish of the apricots for the Count—he was very fond of my apricots dusted with cinnamon, although the Countess doesn’t care for them at all.”

  “He ate that entire dish himself, with good appetite,” offered Ferdinand, “as he’d been out all day.”

  “But he killed hims . . . Ow!” Bianca stabbed her own finger. She dropped needle and silk and watched as a ruby drop of blood welled from her skin.

  Maria, Helen, and Ferdinand looked around at her, but no more closely than Viola did. She was Olivia’s maid. Of all the people Fabian had seen in the garden, Bianca had the least excuse. Unless. . . . “You are interested in herb lore, Bianca?”

  “Asks enough questions,” said Helen, “though she gets half of it wrong.”

  “No harm in that,�
� Bianca replied hastily. “If I learn to cook or make cosmetics I could better myself, couldn’t I? Malvolio tells me I have many skills and can in time rise above my station.”

  Maria set her hands on her hips. “I’ve seen you loitering in the pantry, where you have no business, simply to drop Malvolio a courtesy. I thought him too haughty to take notice, and yet you tell me now he’s had private conversation with you?”

  “And why not?” retorted Bianca, her voice shrill.

  “You were hanging about the pantry before dinner, beside the serving dishes, the night of the Count’s death,” Ferdinand said. “And later, when the Count rang for me and bid me alarm the Countess, I found you here in the kitchen shaking and weeping, and Helen going on about the missing arsenicum.”

  “It was you pointed out the arsenicum was missing, now that I think about it.” Helen waved her ladle. “It was you rinsed off the serving tray, saying the powder on it was arsenicum.”

  “It was, it had to have been . . .” Bianca thrust her injured finger into her mouth.

  Viola looked down at her apron, at the faint yellowish-green stain left by the hellebore plant. She knew what would happen next, and for just a moment she rued her place in it. But if Orsino had been willing to gamble on the truth, she could do no less.

  Maria asked, very quietly, “What have you done, Bianca?”

  Bianca’s colorless eyes seemed too large for her face. Her complexion wasn’t the appealing pallor of Olivia’s but the flat white of a fish’s belly. She slumped down in the chair and spoke around her finger, thickly and reluctantly. “Malvolio praised me for learning herb lore. He told me the plant behind the sage was a restorative. When Count Leonardo complained of being tired and achy after his ride, Malvolio said a restorative would be just the thing. So I stripped off a bit of the plant and brewed a tisane.”

  “But since it wasn’t your place to carry food and drink to the Count,” Ferdinand said, “you poured the tisane in his favored dish, the apricots.”

  “Thinking,” Maria said with a scowl, “to go to Malvolio later on, when Count Leonardo recovered, and earn even more praise. Foolish girl.”