A Study in Scarlet Women (Lady Sherlock #1)(67)

“How would you describe Becky Birtle?”

“Becky? She’s a bit of a handful. I don’t mind a high-spirited girl myself but I think Mrs. Cornish was frustrated with her.”

“Is she an attractive girl?”

“Not beautiful, but most girls that age are rather pretty—first bloom of youth.”

“Is there a picture of her anywhere in the house?”

Mrs. Meek frowned. “N—oh, wait, I remember now. A traveling photographer came through recently. Mr. Hodges said that Mr. Sackville had paid for a photograph for the servants only the year before and wouldn’t pay for another one so soon. But Mrs. Cornish said she’d pay for one herself. So we dragged some chairs outside and sat for the photographer and he came back a few days later with a copy for Mrs. Cornish.”

“Was Becky Birtle in the picture?”

“Yes she was. Standing right behind me.”

And yet Mrs. Cornish had been firm that there was no photograph of the girl in the house. Treadles made a note to speak to the housekeeper again before he left.

“Mr. Hodges tells me that a whisky decanter went missing. Have you heard about it?”

A knock came on the door. Even before Treadles answered, Constable Perkins, who had been assigned to accompany the detectives from Scotland Yard and facilitate matters for them, peeked in. The young man’s face was flush with excitement.

“Inspector, Sergeant, a word please.”

Treadles raised a brow. For the constable to interrupt an interview, it had better be important. He murmured a word of apology and left the room, MacDonald in his wake.

“Inspector, the name Sergeant told me to check—”

“What name, Sergeant?”

“When I was searching Mrs. Meek’s room, sir,” said Sergeant MacDonald, “I found letters addressed to a Nancy Monk. The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite remember. So I asked Constable Perkins to see if he could find out something more.”

“One of the men at the station remembered right away,” said Perkins. “But we didn’t want to rush, so we sent a cable on the Wheatstone machine to Scotland Yard. And they cabled back and confirmed our suspicions.

“Nancy Monk was the defendant in an arsenic poisoning trial twenty-five years ago. Everyone in the family died, except the master of the house, who was away on business. She took the stand to testify on her own behalf and the jury came away convinced that she cared a great deal for the little children. And since there was never any evidence of anything between the cook and the master—she had a young greengrocer she was planning to marry—she was acquitted.”

And a quarter of a century later, she turned up in another case of arsenic poisoning.

When Inspector Treadles returned, Mrs. Meek was rocking back and forth on her seat, her fingers clutched tightly around the armrests.

Treadles got to the point. “Mrs. Meek, have you ever gone by another name?”

All the blood drained from her face. “Why do you ask?”

He simply waited.

“I was framed!” Her voice shot up an entire octave, giving her words a jagged edge. “The man I worked for—it was him. His cousins had a sheep farm and they kept white arsenic for dressing the wool. A month before everyone died he visited his cousins. He mixed that arsenic into the spare jar of snipped-and-pounded sugar I kept in the cupboard. And of course he made sure to be away on business when the sugar in the kitchen jar ran out and I started using sugar from the other jar.

“I brought the children milk with sugar and hot cocoa for the missus, like I did every morning. They also had buttered toast sprinkled with sugar. You can’t imagine their suffering that day. I was frantic with worry. But I never thought they were poisoned. And I never thought I’d be charged.

“She wasn’t a pretty or clever woman. But she tried to make the best possible home for him. And the children were sweet and loved everything I cooked. I was happy to hear that their father, when he proposed to the daughter of a business associate less than a year later, was turned down. I was even happier to learn that he’d died on his cousin’s sheep farm, after he was gored by an angry ram. Perhaps God wasn’t blind and deaf after all.”

She knotted her fingers together, fingers that were large and rough from work. “But if that was justice from above, it came too late for me. My young man, he believed that I was innocent, but his mother wouldn’t let him marry anyone who’d been through such a public trial—not to mention she was afraid I’d poison her. And I couldn’t stay in Lancashire anymore. I had to say good-bye to him, move far away, change my name, and make a new life for myself.

The former Nancy Monk looked up at Treadles, her gaze direct and earnest. “I did not poison Mr. Sackville. And if you check with my previous employer—I served her for twenty years—you’ll find that I told the truth. She was sorry to see me go. And I’d have stayed on, but I’m not so young anymore and it was too much work feeding two dozen dyspeptic ladies day in and day out.”

“We will most assuredly be checking with your previous employer,” said Treadles.

Her distress was so palpable that he found it difficult to breathe. He wanted to believe her, but he could not allow his own sympathies to muddy the investigation.

“And what do you intend to do in the meanwhile, Inspector?” Mrs. Meek’s shoulders slumped. “Arrest me?”