The Lost Apothecary(52)
My mouth dropped open. “H-how?” I stammered. “Did you not watch your lady’s maid give it to the mistress?”
“Don’t blame this on me, woman,” she snapped back. “My maid put it into the fig dessert liqueur, just as planned.” Lady Clarence fell into the chair and took a steadying breath as she unraveled her story for me.
“It was after dinner. Miss Berkwell sat some ways away from me and my husband, the Lord Clarence, was at my right. I watched from across the room as Miss Berkwell took a sip, a single sip, of the fig liqueur from her pretty crystal glass. Within seconds, she reached her hand to her throat, a lascivious smile on her face. She began to cross and uncross her legs—I could see it all, Nella! I could see it so clearly, what was happening to her—but I began to fear that someone might catch me looking, and so I turned to my left and began to speak with my dear friend Mariel, and she told me all about her recent visit to Lyon, and on and on she went, until after a short while I dared to look over at Miss Berkwell again.”
Lady Clarence sucked in a breath, her throat rattling. “But she was gone, and my husband, too, and the crystal glass of liqueur with them. I could not believe I’d missed it—that he’d stepped away with her in that short time, and I had missed it. I was sure, in that moment, I would never lay eyes on her face again, and I imagined the two of them running off to his library or back to the carriage house for the final time. I took comfort in this, you know.”
As she told her story, I remained still, envisioning it all before me: the dinner table of puddings and evening gowns, the fig liqueur, the fine green powder hiding in the viscid shadows of it.
“But then I grew anxious,” Lady Clarence continued, “thinking perhaps it was all happening a bit too fast, and I worried that in her state of lust, she may forget the liqueur altogether and not drink the required amount.” She paused, looking around. “Might I have some wine to calm my nerves, please?”
I rushed to my cupboard, poured her a glass and set it in front of her.
“I began to panic, Nella, and considered searching them out, confronting them, asking her to join the ladies in the drawing room. Instead, I remained frozen at my seat while Mariel continued to spout on about Lyon, and I prayed that at any moment my husband would come into the room, telling me something terrible had happened to her, his dear cousin.” Lady Clarence looked down at the floor and suddenly wrapped her arms around herself, shivering.
“Then I saw a ghost approaching from the corridor. The ghost of Miss Berkwell. Oh, how I nearly cried out! I stifled it, thank heavens—how strange that would have seemed to the dinner guests—but I soon learned it was no ghost. It was her, in flesh and blood. I knew it by the mole on her neck, red and inflamed, as though my husband’s lips had just been on it.”
A small moan left her throat. “She came out with such a look of fright. She is just a young thing, and so small. She nearly collapsed into the arms of the first person she saw, Lord Clarence’s brother, who is a physician. Immediately, he rushed down the corridor from which she’d just come. There were people everywhere, running this way and that in a complete uproar. From down the hall, near the library, I heard shouts and cries, something about his heart having stopped, and I rushed to see him. He was still clothed, thank God. And as I suspected, on a small table next to the chaise was the empty crystal glass. He must have drank the entire thing. Oh, Nella, I did not know it would happen so quickly!”
“I told you half the jar would kill him in an hour. How much was in the glass?”
The look of anguish on Lady Clarence’s face fell away, transformed into something like guilt. “I believe my maid used all that was in the jar.” She let out a cry, slumping forward in her chair, while I gasped in disbelief; it was no wonder he died within moments.
But Lady Clarence seemed as distraught about Miss Berkwell’s behavior after the fact as she was about her dead husband. “Would you believe that as I sat there looking at his dead body, Miss Berkwell approached me and placed her arms around me, and began to cry? ‘Oh, Lady Clarence,’ the girl wailed, fig fruit stinking on her breath, ‘he was like a father to me!’ And I thought it a sick thing to say, and I had half a nerve to ask her if she liked to prig her own father, too!”
Lady Clarence let out a final, hideous laugh, her eyes sunken as though spent from the telling of her tale. “And now I am the widow of a wealthy man and will never want for anything except for the thing I most want, which is a child. How utterly bitter on the tongue, even to say it! I will never have a child, Nella, never!”
A statement with which I could well relate, yes. But something about her story began to tug, to worry me. “You say his brother, a physician, was the first to administer to him?”
She nodded. “Yes, a kindly man. He declared my husband dead not five minutes after Miss Berkwell came into the dining room in a mad fright.”
“And he did not seem worried by the empty glass sitting next to the chaise?”
Lady Clarence shook her head, sure of herself. “He asked about it, to which Miss Berkwell immediately claimed it as her own. She said they’d been in the library so he could show her a newly acquired tapestry, as she claims some recent interest in the textile arts. And she could hardly reveal that he shared of her drink, could she? For then it would be clear they were doing more than just enjoying his art.”