A Taste for Nightshade (30 page)

By now my heart was banging against my ribs. Perhaps I should, as Peg had urged, exchange our two glasses. Michael's still lay untasted on the table. In a sort of trance I watched him fill my own glass from the punchbowl.

‘No water for me,' I said in a strangled tone.

‘You always have water. Or you turn foolish.' He picked up the jug that held the invisible poison and poured a good measure into my glass. I was now frantic, casting about the room for some distraction, something to draw Michael's attention from the punch. Then suddenly, I remembered my Christmas gift, still sitting in my pocket. ‘I have a Christmas tradition too,' I lied. ‘And that is to give my loved ones a gift before the toast.'

He frowned. ‘A gift? But I will give you yours at New Year.'

‘Well, my family do things differently. I will give you yours now. Come along.' I took out the little bundle wrapped in silk. ‘Close your eyes, my darling.'

Reluctantly he stood stock-still and closed his eyes. I spun him around so his back was to the table. It was the work of a second to switch the two glasses about, so the watered punch stood at his setting and the untainted glass at mine. A terrible pressure was pounding in my temples, but I took out the buckle and fastened it into the linen at his breast. He opened his eyes, looked down at the diamond, and walked to the mirror. ‘How charming!' he said to his reflection. Then he ruined everything by returning to the table and obscuring my view of it. When he turned around he held a glass in each hand. I looked from one to the other; no longer able to tell which was mine.

‘Here.' He offered me the glass in his right hand. Was the straw-coloured punch in that glass paler than the other? I looked at the other. No, that was paler still – or was it?

‘For God's sake, Grace – take it.'

He was trying to confound me. I reached across him to the left-hand glass. ‘You have mixed them up,' I said. ‘This one is mine.' Before he could remonstrate, I raised my unwatered glass.

‘To Christmas!' I said very quickly.

Michael hesitated, then slowly lifted his glass too. We both drank, in a state of acute tension.

I knew at once that my punch tasted just as it should. Michael took a long draught, and his usual satisfied expression returned. We both sat down and sipped our punch in silence while Michael absentmindedly picked from the platter of salad. I exulted that Peg was wrong. I wondered for a few moments if Peg could in fact be the origin of all our troubles? The food spread before us was magnificent, but something she had said stuck in my mind. Had I truly heard her wish her master dead?

‘Some game pie?' I sliced a beautiful Yorkshire Pie, filled with concentric pink and brown meats held in a lavishly ornamented crust.

Michael didn't reply, only pulled his face at his half-empty punch glass. ‘Too sour, don't you think – perhaps too much lemon?'

I shook my head. ‘No, it seemed perfectly sweet.'

He raised a napkin to his mouth. ‘I am sorry,' he mumbled. He began to cough loudly, then began hacking more strenuously. At the height of his gasping, he suddenly slumped, crashing forward onto his plate of salad, sending orange and ham flying onto the linen. A guttural choking sound emerged from his throat. The horror of it was, he was still trying to control himself; trying, bizarrely, to apologise. Did a part of me still wonder if he was acting, even then? A moment later all doubts fled. With terrifying suddenness, the scene lurched from celebration to nightmare. As Michael coughed, a stream of crimson blood issued from his mouth across the pristine table. I screamed and ran to the bell. After frantically summoning Peg I looked back at him. He had toppled to the floor, banging against the furniture. More blood, gobbets of it, ran down his chin onto his clothes. Lying prone before the fireplace, his legs cramped up against his stomach, he vomited another stream of blood. Horribly, he tried to speak.

I knelt beside him, appalled by the livid crimson around his mouth. I grasped a napkin and tried to blot his lips, but only succeeded in smearing the stuff, spreading it about. His expression was hard as his eyes rolled up to fix on my face. ‘What,' he said in a wheezing parody of his true voice, ‘have you done to me?'

Running footsteps approached. Peg rushed into the room and stopped in her tracks. She reached for a chair to support herself. ‘Oh, mistress, what have you done?'

‘I think I've killed him,' I said. The room, the whole scene, did not appear real. Trivial notions spun in my head: that the carpet would need to be patched, that all Peg's food was spoiled. Michael's eyelids blinked, then slowly closed. Blood was spattered over his ivory linen, his silver coat, the expensive new carpet. The scene was like a grotesque waxworks; it was impossible to believe this had happened here, in my own dining room.

‘You swapped those two drinks?' Peg turned to the jug of water that still stood half-full on the sideboard.

‘I had to. Or—'

‘I never thought you would do it.'

‘What shall we do?' I begged.

Peg walked warily over to my husband and crouched to feel his neck.

‘You have killed him,' she said flatly. ‘All that blood. It's the ratsbane burning his windpipe, then his insides. It kills in minutes, they say.'

‘No!' I sank to the ground, clutched his still warm hand and kissed it.

‘Can you hear me? Make a sign,' I begged. He lay motionless, his eyelids closed. Michael, my husband, was dead. His beautiful pallid face was stiff in repose, his lips slack, blossomed with gobbets of crimson. ‘Michael,' I cried again and again, caressing him frantically; chafing his hands, undoing his linen to free his throat. A kind of yawning chasm was opening in my mind, consuming the life I had always known. I don't know how long I sat there on the floor beside him. I began to shiver as violently as if I sat on a sheet of ice. It could have been me, I repeated to myself, I might have drunk that arsenical punch. It could have been me vomiting blood while he – what would Michael have done? Would he have wept – or watched me die with cold satisfaction?

Peg was shaking my shoulder. ‘You must go, mistress.' She was white-faced and frightened, but still her first thought was always of me. ‘You must get away.'

‘What?'

‘Think! How will this look to the authorities? The justices will find out you gave him poison.'

I stared at her and already the events of the last hour were difficult to grasp. ‘I tried to switch the drinks about. Everything got – muddled. But it was his plan. You will be my witness, surely?'

‘Me? An escaped felon? I cannot bear witness. Look at him. Picture it. They will say you murdered him, mistress. That's the truth. You must get away. While you have the chance.'

I felt as if that sheet of ice I sat on had cracked above a plummeting abyss. ‘Surely he needs a doctor?'

‘I will fetch Dr Sampson, mistress. But go first. Before someone sees you.'

She grasped me by the shoulder and imparted her orders as if I were a dumb child. ‘Hurry. Go. Now.'

‘But where shall I go?' I groped to recover my capacity for rational thought, but still it eluded me. She shook me like a rag doll. ‘Remember them murderesses I told you about? Do you want to be locked in a cell and used by the jailers? Do you want to be strung up on the gallows?'

‘No,' I whispered, almost falling insensibly, my limbs weak.

She glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘The London mail goes in half an hour. You could be on it.'

‘Then what shall I do?' My voice rose in panic.

‘Go somewhere no one will find you. Change your name. Make a new life. Don't for God's sake let yourself be taken by the Justices. I will take care of everything.'

In such a state I could not resist her. While I was near to collapse she was clear-headed, firm and commanding – so I did as I was told. I rushed upstairs at once. I cast off my bloodstained dress and pulled on the first other gown I found. Though I tried to rinse my trembling hands, I could not rid myself of the tacky rustiness of Michael's blood. I threw a few items into my smallest trunk: my writing box, my paints and sketchbook and my heavy purse. Then I fled back downstairs in a frantic flurry. Peg was waiting in the hall. I made to return to the dining room, but she held me back. ‘He's looking very bad. Go, so I can send for the doctor. Just to be sure.'

I scarcely knew which direction I faced, but she hustled me outside. The pony and trap were standing at the door, waiting. I had only those few possessions and the clothes on my body.

‘Hurry, mistress.'

‘Yes, yes, listen. I will write to you, Peg. You must tell me how – if, he recovers.'

‘I will, dear mistress. Now get away safe. You have been such a friend to me.' We squeezed hands without restraint and I pulled her to my breast and embraced her like a sister. Then I picked up the reins and, scarcely knowing where I was going, I headed away down the drive.

 

 

My memories of that journey are jumbled shards: the hurtling progress southwards, my fretful dog-naps in the rocking coach; my horror at waking again and again to find my nightmare true. Michael, I told myself in disbelief, was dead. Panic seized me, as if all the ordered parts of my life had been torn up and cast to the four winds. The journey seemed infinitely long, and yet all too rapidly it ended. Looking out of the carriage glass I found myself amidst a great passage of people and carts and horses, communicating a queasy mix of unease and excitement, as if some general calamity had erupted. We had entered the great highway into London. I roused myself inside that sour-smelling coach, at a loss as to what to do next.

We halted on a hillside to change the horses, and I dismounted reluctantly, standing apart, eavesdropping on my fellow passengers' discussion of the view. In the distance stood the River Thames like a ribbon cast down in a curl, passing the towered hulk of Westminster Abbey before running beneath Westminster Bridge. Above the maze of buildings, hundreds of church spires spiked the sky, piercing the sooty smoke that rose from a thousand chimneys. I had never before been to London. What did I know of the city, save that it was a monstrous home of lords and rogues? I had Peter's address, of course, and my invitation to join him on New Year's Eve. Yet now my every instinct rebelled against seeking out the Croxons. There would be questions, inquiries, recriminations. What I longed for was what Peg had advised – a spell of peace – to lose myself, if I could, in the anonymous metropolis.

At last I had a notion. There was a woman, a Miss Le Toye, from whom I had for many years ordered art stuffs. I did not even need her trade card to remember her address. Once the coach finally set me down, in the hubbub of an inn's yard, I gave her address to a hackney driver. ‘The Golden Ball, Windmill Street, Golden Square,' I said firmly, and to my relief the driver grunted and took up the reins.

The hackney crawled forward, weaving around barrows, before slamming to a halt before a herd of horned beasts being smacked on their wobbling haunches by smocked countrymen. I stared at the battery of signs hung upon buildings:
Laceman and Draper
,
Tea Dealer & Grocer
,
Goldsmith
,
Jeweller and Toymaker
. Coffeehouses, tavern signs, shop signs – there was no end to the celebration of commerce. My eye lit upon a shop titled, ‘Elvira Frankland & Sister, Milliners', and in that moment I followed Peg's advice and chose my new identity.

Set down outside Miss Le Toye's glass-fronted colour shop, even the smell of London streets was unfamiliar: a throat-catching mingling of bitter smoke and foul gutters, enriched with the stink of horses. Gathering my courage, I entered and found a long room painted very pale and pretty, set about with gilded candles and brimming shelves of paint stuffs, colours, and delightful prints. I introduced myself as Mrs Frankland, a widow of Lancaster. Then I opened my paint box and requested replacements for various paints that bore the label of her shop. Only when that business was over did I ask for a recommendation for genteel lodgings thereabouts. Miss Le Toye's shrewd painter's eyes assessed my fine but travel-worn clothes, and my exhausted face; she wrote an address on a paper and offered me a maid to show the way. That was how I found Mrs Huckle's lodging house, at the better end of Glasshouse Street. It was an austere stone house, with double doors of heavy oak; softened by no garden, no trees, not even a window box of herbs.

Mrs Huckle was a coal merchant's widow, who warily appraised me when I appeared on her doorstep. She enquired about my circumstances, and, weary as I was, I convinced her I was a widow visiting London to make certain arrangements following the death of my husband in a riding accident. She had one small room available that would cost five shillings a week, and I took it, for my purse, well-guarded beneath my petticoat, was thankfully heavy. We struck an agreement for breakfast to be served by her maid Sal, all coal and candles, and dinner downstairs with the other lodgers if I cared for it, at an addition of five pence per day.

My room had a good bright window overlooking Glasshouse Street, a table and chair by the fire, and a nun-like bed. Yet this meagre space was a sanctum I would not have swapped for a palace. It was never silent there, like the dust-drowned rooms at Delafosse. The creaks and bangings and coughs of my neighbours were an ever-present comfort.

For days I stayed in my room, see-sawing between mourning Michael's death and a heady deliverance at my escape. A conversation overheard in the passage roused me; the mention that New Year's Eve was to fall that evening, the holiday when the Croxons would be celebrating with John Francis. Pulling out my unposted letter, I re-read the self-assured lines I had written, scarcely able to credit that such high spirits had originated in my own mind.

To stop the ceaseless revolving of what might have been spinning around my head, I tidied myself up, pulling on my one creased and mud-spattered gown. For a long time I scrubbed my hands, but could not rid them of a scarlet tint and a disgusting tackiness. With much anxiety I went downstairs to meet Mrs Huckle's other lodgers. Captain Macdonald was an upright, chivalrous old soldier with ruddy wrinkles and bushy white hair, who rose and kissed my hand. ‘Delighted, dear lady,' he said, in a mild Scottish burr, making a deep bow. Sprightly and lean, I reckoned him to be fifty-five years at the least. Miss Cato, a twittery spinster of even greater years, nodded and simpered. The remaining lodgers did not dine, reduced by poverty to heating a few scraps at their own grates. Dinner was a thin indeterminate soup, bread and butter, fried fish, and gristly chops – which proved to be the full measure of Mrs Huckle's generosity. This was served with a shrewish remark that she had expected to see me changed into mourning now I was unpacked. The captain winked at me from behind the landlady's broad back, and we were only once again at ease once she had departed. Miss Cato and I sipped tea, while the captain produced his own flask of spirits.

‘Would you care for a game of cards to while away the hours until midnight?' he asked. I did, for the flower-papered parlour was convivial, and I was heartily starved of good honest company. ‘The chops tonight might more profitably have been used to re-sole leather boots, wouldn't you say, Mrs Frankland?' the old man remarked drily, as he dealt me a hand. Miss Cato tittered, her head bent over a vast piece of knotting. The captain winked at me again, and politely allowed me to win. Two hours later, Miss Cato retired with a quaint little curtsey, and I sat on by the fireside, not disliking the gallant old gentleman's company at all. He chatted about his time in Bengal, of his army days and the campaigns he had seen. He was blessed, he said, with a grant of half-pay that kept him in brandy and tobacco, so he took employment only as it interested him. The captain was also one of those rare fellows who attend intently to whatever is said to him. Thus I found myself running on at length of my home in Greaves, my parents' deaths, and my marriage to Michael. Then, of course, I had to recount my husband's ‘riding accident'; at which my new friend tilted his head rather quizzically. The midnight bells rang in the New Year of 1793, and the captain rose and made a sort of pantomime of opening the door and seeing the old year off and ushering the new one in. Raising a toast to good fortune, I had little notion of what tumultuous changes that New Year would bring.

‘And how do you intend to spend your time here in the capital?' the captain asked with great courtesy. ‘While you make your family arrangements, that is.'

‘I love to paint,' I told him. He assured me I was in the best of neighbourhoods for that. ‘The great Swiss paintress, Miss Kauffman, lived at number sixteen Golden Square for many years. Might you allow me to show you her former home in the morning?'

I had seen that lady's work in prints and thought her the pride of her sex, being a Royal Academician, though a woman. Thus our friendship was sealed, and my next morning's walk on the captain's arm set a precedent for many days to come. The frayed gentility of Golden Square suited me well. I inspected my purse and found that, thanks to my filling it in readiness for Christmas boxes for the tradesmen and servants, it contained just less than fifty pounds. It was enough to pay for a good few months of this gentle existence. So it was that I began slowly to mend myself.

I could not, of course, escape my guilt about Michael. In dreams he rose before me, chalk-faced and bloody, accusing me of taking his life. Sometimes I hid from him, crouching in terror. In other nightmares he chased me through filthy alleys. Always, he found me; the final barrier would be broken, and he would scream at me draped in blood besmirched linen, his beautiful face turned monstrous with spite.

From such dreams it was a vast relief to wake and find all of London about me, the road outside rattling with wagons and coaches, the servants' cheery cries, or a tradesman whistling a tune as he unloaded a cart. The longer I thought of it, the more I regretted running away. Peg's advice had been well-intentioned, but I had been wrong to let her put me to flight. It had been cowardly to leave my husband; in fact, with hindsight, I found my actions inconceivable. I began to fret to know what had happened at Delafosse, until the craving burned like a fever. Finally, at the end of January, I gathered my courage and wrote to Peg.

Fearing that she might be forced to betray my location, I sent my letter from the postmaster's house in Golden Square, and advised her to reply to the same. What, I enquired urgently, had happened since I left? Was Michael's death generally known? Should I return and oversee the estate? Each day I had studied the notices in the newspaper and seen no mention of his death. Neither, I was relieved to see, had there been any Hue and Cry against me, nor indeed any word of events in Earlby. I posted the letter, and for two days trailed back and forth to the postmaster's window, to enquire of a reply.

Then, at last, it was there, addressed as instructed to ‘Mrs G Frankland'.

I read and re-read that letter a score of times. So Michael lived after all. I thanked the Almighty he had been spared, and also, I admit, that I was not a murderess and lived secure and secret at Glasshouse Street. Mostly, however, I was left with the clear knowledge of how stupid I had been to believe myself in love with a man who wished my utter ruin. If I stayed well away from Delafosse, I told myself, I would be safe.

I wrote a hasty note back to Peg, relieving her of any obligation to nurse Michael, and sending a guinea piece in a twist of paper, as recompense for all her trouble. I wished her joy of the future and thanked her heartily for spreading the tale of my moving abroad. But as for Peg's remedy, I threw it away. I had no wish to return to day-time naps and a muddled head. Fresh air and company, I decided, were better remedies than any bottle.