Cupids (11 page)

“Yes, Mr. Guy, she knows.”

The possibilities dancing in my head take form. Now they are wasps, sharp, buzzing, each harbouring the sting of likely detection.

“You fool!” I fume with the stamp of my foot.

“Pardon me, sir?”

“You were supposed to deal with it yourself.”

A smile, sour and penetrating, passes across his face. “Indeed,” he says quietly. “Murder should not be subcontracted.” He blows out the candle.

My eyes burn now and I turn to the window once more, viewing scatterings of twigs that reach claw-like into the sky.
I cannot be real because you've done nothing to deserve me.
It is these words, rather than Bartholomew's, which now fizzle and dance in the grey room. My dream-Eliza is right. I have been sneaking toward my prize through a series of back doors and squalid alleyways. A murder is no less bloody for being passed from my hands to those of another. It is the risk itself that gives the act its one gleam of heroism. I have reserved the foulness for myself and given away the sole mitigation of valour.

“We must stop her,” I say to the dawn.

“What?” I hear Bartholomew's footfalls padding up behind me. “It may be too late.”

His voice is lighter, more like the old Bartholomew. I turn to see his face — eager, nervous, a picture of agitation.

“The route is too circuitous. We will be found out. You must tell her it was merely a joke.”

“A joke?” His eyes blink at me like those of a stage clown, but an undercurrent of exasperation is anything but humorous.

“You'll have to think of something.”

Before I can add anything more, his shoulders dip and he turns running from the room. I hear his footsteps tumbling down the stairs then running along the hallway. The front door opens and slams.

I turn again to the glass. “Fool!” I whisper at the figure scurrying like a gamecock down the path to the main road. I am full of insults, crueller and more colourful than this one, but I dare not use them for fear they may backfire. Do I even care about the maid's involvement? Do I think it will expose me to more risk of discovery? The questions melt into nothing next to the words of my imagined Eliza. It's her condemnation of my cowardice allied to the leaden facts —
dead; it's done
— that has turned my head around. There is only one fool here, and it is not Bartholomew.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Helen

N
ESTLING INNOCENTLY IN THE
oats and milk, the nightshade is difficult to tell from the overwintered blackcurrants. With each revolution of the spoon the deadly reputation of these frail and thin-skinned berries seems more unlikely, more of a joke.

I watch my hand on the spoon handle, follow the movements of those five bland fingers, the whitish skin, pinker knuckles — no scales, no talons, no sulfur stains. What did Bartholomew say about murder being more common than we think? Glancing up at the wooden shutter that covers most of the pantry window, I steal a peek at the sliver of night beyond, and almost feel the crime slipping into irrelevance. Like a mislaid sewing needle, it may simply skitter along the floor and fall into the cracks of forgetfulness. He has to die sometime, after all. At least the timing — if it is now — might do others some good. What will it matter in ten years or more if he was nudged along the way?

It is nothing, this most feared and vaunted of sins. It is a mere domestic chore, a small handful of drying fruit scattered in my master's breakfast, a task accomplished between yawns.

And then there is Bertha who now whistles through her teeth as she plucks a chicken on the workbench beside me. A short time ago she came up and looked into my palm where nightshade and blackberries mingled together. Although I was about to tip them all into the porridge bowl, Bertha's stare made me stop dead. I even lifted the evidence closer to her eyes, wondering as I did so whether perhaps I wished to be discovered.

“Passed their best, I think,” she said with a shake of the head.

“Should we perhaps throw them out?”

I cursed my cowardice as soon as the words left me; an ache of guilt and fear ran from somewhere in my chest, down my poison-laden arm and back again. My fingers trembled and I closed my hand upon the berries before any slipped through.

“No, my dear,” she answered, turning and throwing a towel over her shoulder. “The master is pernickety about waste. It's one of his ways to cheat the worm of his reward.” She picked up a large pan and moved toward the stove. “But let me take his breakfast to him this morning, in case there are questions. Just because we're following his instructions it doesn't mean he has to be happy about the result.”

“Yes,” I said hurriedly. I felt lighter then as I threw the berries into his bowl.

I had erected a new obstacle to the crime and Bertha, not I, had dismantled it. Better still, it was she, and not I, who would deliver the fatal blow. Now I could share the crime with
two
others. Only one third of my soul would be damned; hellfire for one third of eternity.

THE PORRIDGE NOW READY, I stop stirring. I turn to Bertha who lifts her hands from the chicken. The sagging bird, abject in its nakedness, seems to wave a half-bald wing at me as Bertha rubs her hands on the towel and takes the bowl.

As she does so, as my fingers slip from the wood, I feel a pang of something new. I watch innocent, kindly Bertha, with her thick ankles, and her many years of stolid, reliable toil, pausing at the table edge to take one of the candles, then shuffling toward the pantry door with a third of my sin. Chain of guilt or no chain, even a third of this crime is more brutally heavy than anything Bertha has ever imagined.

Helpless I watch the door close behind her and the berries, now out of sight, seem no longer innocuous, no longer forgettable, but rather a hundred times more wicked for seeming so. The sudden change within me is like the flutter of a wing, barely felt, but already I feel migrating armies gathering into monster remorse.

In another moment I'm running across the pantry after her, cool sweat creeping under my hairline. As I race up the stairs, syllables of explanation form, scatter, and then form again. Overtaking her halfway up, I reach my hand to the bowl.

“I'll take it to him, Bertha, if you don't mind.”

Breathless from the exertion of climbing, she takes a moment to reply. Both of my own hands are now beneath the bowl, but she has made no move to let go.

“I'm almost there, girl, and I have housekeeping questions to talk over with the master.”

“Please, Bertha,” I say warmly. I make a playful, bouncing action at the knee. This mini-jig of impatience is to remind her of those surrogate years of mother and child. “I need to learn how to deal with the master if he is displeased.”

The look she returns to me is warm also, but searching. Her yellow-tinged eyes hold mine for a moment longer than usual. Locked within the same wavering light of Bertha's candle, there is something unthinkable about adding more lies to those I have already constructed, and the sigh as she lets the bowl go does hold a question. But I merely smile, convincingly enough in the circumstances, I think. She holds out the candle for me to take, but I shake my head and gesture for her to keep it. Slowly, she turns to descend, and the warm halo of light follows her. The walls about me flicker, fade, and turn to darkness.

As I start to climb to Mr. Egret's room I find the ache that travelled between my heart and hands in the pantry has dropped now to my feet. My sandals flop after each step, heel and toe landing slightly apart.
Lonely
is the word that the double
flop
spells. Soon a thickening silence gathers around my ears, stretching the time between each footfall, screaming in whispers:
You can't! Turn back! You'll hang!
As in a nightmare where mouths open with urgent but mute warnings, the absence of noise merely heightens the horror. I am the executioner, my shuffling feet seem to say as I reach the landing, yet I am also the condemned.

I raise my fingers to touch Mr. Egret's door and a cool wind blows over me. I imagine the spirit of my mother. Is she urging me onward or turning me back? Once opened there will be no option but to administer the poison. And I will be half a murderess, not merely a third. My mercy for Bertha has lengthened the time of my damnation.

My white hand opens the door before I am aware of a final decision. The palest of light, a hint of dawn only, comes in ghostly streams through the shutters. There is a hiss of silk. The master must have moved upon my entry.

“Is that you, Bertha?”

The question hangs.

I'm not certain why I don't answer. Instead, I make my way in silence toward the shutter on the near wall and open it with one hand, the other still gripping the bowl. Blue light spreads in a wave over the bed. The heavy blanket is smooth over the spare mound of Mr. Egret's body, and the pillow upon which his head now perches is ghostly white.

“Is it morning?” he asks, and I realize why I did not answer. The tone of his voice, thin and wavering, carries an expectation of trouble, and the twin peaks of curiosity and vengeance want to tease this as long as possible. Why should he be anxious? I wonder. Does he fear intruders? Or has he had some premonition? Does he sense assassins in the shadows?

I think of the cool breeze at his door, feel once more the stab of his cane, this time fainter than before. I wonder whether, in the predawn light, I might look like my mother.

“Why don't you answer?” His voice is rising — I can't gauge whether in panic or anger. “Who is it?”

“Isabelle's daughter,” I say at last, feeling a heave of regret that I must speak at all, but determined to unearth all guilt. “Helen,” I add. “I was trying to give you some light. It is past six o'clock and I have your breakfast.”

I approach the bed now and stand a yard or so distant. I do not proffer the bowl yet and Mr. Egret makes no move to take it.

“Why don't you light a candle, girl?” The edge of impatience remains in his voice.

It's only now that I realize how incongruous the darkness feels. I have delivered Mr. Egret's breakfast so many times before dawn, and I have always carried a light. His question is so obvious, my omission so inexplicable, it takes me a moment to gather myself.

“Yes, sir.”

I go toward the table by the window, placing the bowl there, then with trembling fingers I unlatch the tinderbox. Sparks rise like small fireworks and finally the candlewick takes. I let the wax drip upon the saucer, and then as I turn the candle upright, the droplet of flame grows into a blade. Fixing the candle base on the saucer, I pick up the bowl and spoon again and shuffle through the glowing light toward the bed.

Grey hairs poke out from beneath his nightcap like hay after an August drought. His pinched and clay-like face makes him seem much older than usual.
These are his last
hours
, the portentous words echo in my skull. But there is something forced about it, like a funeral liturgy spoken without the presence of a corpse. It's the silence and calmness that surprise me as I stand before him. He looks at the bowl, his filmy eyes hungry, and his bony fingers reach to receive it. My eyes settle on the white foam in the corner of his lips. Then suddenly, just as his fingertips are about to touch the bowl, I jerk it from his grasp.

His eyes narrow and the reaching hand wavers in midair. It's too late already. There is no explanation for the action, none that might see the bowl delivered to him again.

My eyes fix upon the mush of oats and milk-sodden berries.

“Sorry, sir,” comes my disembodied gasp, “I saw a maggot in the bowl. I should go and get you a fresh breakfast.”

“A maggot, you foolish girl! Are you trying to kill me?”

I'm backing off already. He fades into the blue dawn as the light retreats with me.

“Leave the candle here!”

“Sorry, sir.”

I rush toward his night table, put down the light, and then back off once more facing my enemy like a retreating soldier. Groping with one hand I find the door handle, and slip through into the dark space of the landing.

“You're as stupid as your mother!” The words slice through the closing stripe of the door crack.

In the darkness now, holding the untouched, poisoned food bowl, the reality of failure descends. Moments ago, just after my hand jerked the bowl away, I was thinking not of failure, but of a change of heart. What did this man mean to my mother? the question prodded me. I was acting for her if I was acting for anyone. To kill where she loved was surely a betrayal. Then, when I looked upon my victim with his sunken cheeks, his palsied strands of hair, and the froth of sleep on his lips, angels of pity had swirled in my blood. He was a babe again. No matter his crime, no matter what obstacle to the fortunes of others he might represent, he was defenseless and old. Nothing can blunt the blade of vengeance as swiftly as advanced years. All journeys end in the feebleness of their beginnings, in the spawn of helplessness from which all life rises and to which all life returns. The time for vengeance had passed.

All this I thought in mere moments after withdrawing the poison. Fear makes alibis grow with tenacious speed, with plump leaves and elaborate entwining branches.
Stupid
as your mother!
His rusty cane scores me again in the darkness. Did she also try to settle a score? I wonder. Did she make some plea for recognition for herself or for me?

My heart thumps hard. If I could return to him now with the same bowl, I would. But this time he would surely suspect. The discipline of morals weighs upon me like some ungodly chain as I make my way through the descending darkness. The angels of pity were demons in disguise. The spoon bumps against the bowl rim and the thought passes through me that someone must take the poison, so it might as well be me.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Bartholomew