The Perfect Poison (19 page)

Mrs. Shute opened the door to the town house before Shute had brought the carriage to a complete halt. She hurried down the steps garbed in her nightcap and wrapper, the black leather satchel in one hand. In the glow of the nearby gas lamp Lucinda could see the anxiety on her face.

“Here you are at last, Miss Bromley,” Mrs. Shute said. “I thought you’d be home much earlier. I would have sent a message but there was no one to deliver it at this late hour.”

“What is the matter?” Lucinda asked quickly.

“It’s my niece in Guppy Lane,” Mrs. Shute said. “She sent word an hour ago that the neighbor’s boy, little Harry, is very feverish and having difficulty breathing. She says his mother is frightened half out of her wits.”

“I’ll go at once,” Lucinda said soothingly. “Give me the satchel.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” Looking greatly relieved, Mrs. Shute handed her the satchel and stepped back. She paused, frowning a little. “Your hair, ma’am. Whatever happened to it?”

“Accident,” Lucinda said crisply.

Shute snapped the reins. The carriage barreled off into the foggy night. Lucinda turned up the lamp, opened the satchel and quickly inventoried the contents. All of the usual vials and packets were there, including the ingredients she used to make the vapor that eased congestion of the lungs in children. If she required anything more exotic, Shute would be dispatched to the town house to fetch it.

Satisfied that she was prepared, she sat back and watched the eerie landscape through the windows. Buildings and other carriages loomed briefly in the fog before disappearing back into the mist. The swirling gray stuff muffled the clatter of hooves and wheels.

The summons to Guppy Lane had shattered the sense of unreality that had descended on her during the drive home from the ball. She could scarcely believe that she had engaged in an act of the most astonishing passion with Caleb Jones. In a drying shed, no less. She had read a great many sensation novels but she could not recall any scenes in which the hero and heroine had employed a drying shed for an illicit tryst.

Illicit tryst. She’d actually had one of those. The realization threatened to make her a little giddy.

But she knew that it was not the physical encounter among the dried herbs and flowers, exciting and exhilarating as it had been, that had played havoc with her senses. Her body had recovered from the delicious shock of her first sexual experience but she still felt disoriented and oddly dazzled. Her senses hummed at a pitch that seemed a little too high. It was as if a few currents from the storm of psychical energy that she and Caleb had unleashed still whispered through her. She sensed intuitively that they would remain, linking her somehow to Caleb. She wondered if he now felt the same strange resonance of a connection.

Shute brought the carriage to a stop in front of a small house. It was the only house in the lane in which a window was illuminated. All the other homes were dark, the occupants long abed. In another hour or two, at about the same time that the denizens of the social world were on their way home to bed after leaving their parties and clubs, the people in this neighborhood would be rising. They would eat a simple breakfast and set off to London’s shops, factories and the large, wealthy households where they worked. The lucky ones, that is, Lucinda reflected. Work of any kind that paid a living wage was always in short supply.

Shute got the door open. “I’ll wait out here with the horse as usual, Miss Bromley.”

“Thank you.” She picked up the satchel and gave him a wan smile. “It does not appear that either of us will be getting any sleep tonight.”

“Won’t be the first time, now, will it?”

The door to the small house flew open. Alice Ross, dressed in a cap and a faded wrapper, hovered anxiously in the opening.

“Thank God, it’s you, Miss Bromley,” she said. “I’m so sorry to bring you out at this hour but I haven’t been this frightened since Annie took sick at Christmas.”

“Please don’t concern yourself about the time, Mrs. Ross. I regret that I am late. I was out when your message arrived.”

“Yes, ma’am, I can see that.” Alice gave the cobalt blue gown a shyly admiring look. “You look lovely, ma’am.”

“Thank you,” Lucinda said absently. She brushed past Alice and went toward the small figure on the cot in front of the fire. “There you are, Harry. How are you feeling?”

The boy looked up at her, face flushed with fever. “Been better, Miss Bromley.”

His breathing was hoarse and labored in a way she had often encountered in children.

“And you soon will be again,” she said. She set the satchel on the hearth, opened it and took out a packet. “Now then, Mrs. Ross, if you will boil some water for me, we shall very quickly have Harry breathing more easily.”

Harry squinted up at her. “Ye look really pretty, Miss Bromley.”

“Thank you, Harry.”

“What happened to your hair?”

******

Caleb stripped off his coat, waistcoat and tie and then paused, looking at the big four-poster bed. The lovemaking had left him feeling more cheerful and more relaxed than he had been in months. He had intended to take advantage of the rare sensation and go straight to bed in the bedroom he rarely used.

Now he found himself hesitating. He wanted and needed sleep but the aftereffects of the physical release and the unfamiliar psychical lift of the buoyant spirits that had accompanied it were already fading.

Another sensation was stealing in to rob him of the all too brief respite from the omnipresent sense of urgency that gripped him these days. It was still faint and the feeling was very different from his usual nighttime spells of melancholia but he knew that if he did go to bed he would not sleep.

He left the bedroom and went down the hall to the library-laboratory. Inside he turned up one of the lamps and made his way through the maze of bookshelves to the vault. He worked the complicated combination and opened the door. Reaching into the dark opening, he took out the journal of Erasmus Jones and the notebook.

He sat down in front of the cold hearth, removed the onyx-and-gold cuff links and rolled his shirtsleeves partway up his forearms. For a while he sat there, looking at the two volumes. He had read each of them several times from beginning to end. Small slips of paper marked passages that might or might not be important.

At first he had approached the task with a sense of keen anticipation, the way he always did when he confronted a complex problem or puzzle. There would be a pattern, he had told himself. There was always a pattern.

It had taken him a month to decipher the complex code that his great-grandfather had invented for the journal. It had required almost as long to work out the encryption of Sylvester’s notebook. The code in that book proved unlike any that the old bastard had used in his other journals and papers.

But in the wake of those hopeful breakthroughs he had found little to encourage him. Erasmus’s journal described a steady descent into eccentricity, obsession and madness. As for Sylvester’s notebook, it had become increasingly incomprehensible. It seemed composed entirely of mysteries within mysteries, an endless maze with no exit. To his dying day Erasmus had remained convinced, however, that it held the secret to curing his insanity.

He chose a page of the notebook at random and translated a short passage in his head.

...The transmutation of the four physical elements cannot be accomplished unless the secrets of the fifth, that which was known as ether to the ancients, are first unraveled. Only fire can reveal the mysteries...

Typical alchemical nonsense, he thought. The notebook appeared to be full of it. But he could not escape the feeling that he was missing something. What was it about the damned book that had so fascinated Erasmus?

The unpleasant restlessness was building fast within him, metamorphosing into a compelling sense of urgency. No longer able to concentrate, he closed the notebook and got to his feet.

He stood there for a moment, trying to focus his mind on the Hulsey investigation. When that did not work to settle his thoughts, he started toward the brandy decanter, the distraction of last resort and one which he had been resorting to rather frequently of late.

Halfway across the room he stopped. Maybe he would brew some of the tisane that Lucinda had given him for what she claimed was the tension in his aura. He was certainly tense tonight, he reflected. He was not entirely certain of her diagnoses but there was no question but that he always felt better for a time after he drank the stuff.

Lucinda. Memories of their time together in the drying shed no longer heated his blood. Instead he felt as if he had ice flowing in his veins.

Lucinda.

And suddenly he knew, in a way that his psychical nature never questioned, that she was in grave danger.

The inhaled vapors worked quickly, easing Harry’s congestion in a matter of minutes.

“That should do it.” Lucinda got to her feet, struggling a little against the awkward weight of her skirts. She smiled at Alice Ross. “I’ll leave you a sufficient supply to see him through the crisis. But I believe he will recover quickly.”

“I do not know how to thank you, Miss Bromley,” Alice said. Weary relief softened her face.

“You can thank me by making sure that young Harry returns to school as soon as he is well.”

On the cot Harry uttered a disgusted groan. “I can make more money selling the Flying Intelligencer on the corner.”

“School is an investment.” Lucinda closed the satchel. “If you attend now, you will make a lot more money in the future than you ever will selling newspapers.”

Gilbert Ross, a mountain of a man who made his living as a carpenter, loomed behind Alice.

“He’ll be back in school as soon as he’s fit,” Gilbert vowed. “Don’t you worry about that, Miss Bromley.”

Lucinda laughed and leaned down to ruffle Harry’s hair. “I’m delighted to hear it.” She straightened, picked up the satchel and walked to the door. “I’d bid you all good night but it seems it is almost morning.”

Gilbert opened the door. “Thank you, ma’am. I’ll be paying for your kindness in the usual manner. When you need a bit of carpentry work done, you have only to send word.”

“I know. Thank you, Mr. Ross.”

She went outside and discovered that the fog had thickened substantially during the time she had been attending Harry Ross. Her dainty carriage loomed in the mist.

Her senses stirred as she went toward the vehicle. She was intensely aware of the damp chill of the dawn air. Should have taken the time to collect my cloak before I let Caleb hustle me away from the ball. What was I thinking? Ah, but she knew the answer to that. She had not been thinking about anything except the exhilaration of the lovemaking and the strange sense of a psychical connection with Caleb.

Memories of the heated encounter flashed through her head again but they did not warm her. If anything, she felt colder, unnaturally so.

The heavily caped figure at the railing straightened and strode quickly to the carriage. He did not speak as he opened the door and lowered the steps.

Shute always greeted her. And he always had a few words to say to whomever she had been visiting. But he did not even lift a hand to acknowledge Gilbert Ross, who stood watching in the doorway.

The sense of wrongness grew stronger.

She heard the door to the house close behind her. Gilbert was evidently satisfied that she was now safely in Shute’s hands. A panicky sensation twisted her stomach.

She had been looking forward to the comforting warmth of the carriage rug but for no logical reason she stopped less than two yards from the vehicle. There was something not quite right about Shute. The coat did not fit him properly, she thought. It was too tight across the shoulders and the hem was a bit too short. The hat was not correct, either. Shute wore his at an entirely different angle.

Whoever he was, he was not Shute.

She started to turn, intending to run back up the steps of the Ross house and pound on the door.

“No ye don’t,” the false Shute growled.

A powerful, gloved hand slapped across her mouth and hauled her back against a heavily muscled chest.

She struggled frantically, trying to kick at her captor’s legs, but her foot was immediately tangled in her skirts and petticoats.

“Stop fighting, you stupid bitch, or I’ll knock you senseless.” The footpad kept his voice low. He dragged her toward the carriage. “Bloody hell, give me a hand here, Sharpy,” he said to someone else. “Her damned skirts are in the way. I keep tripping on them.”

“I’ll get her feet,” the second man said. “Watch ye don’t frighten the horse. Last thing we need is a runaway carriage.”

She realized that she still gripped her satchel in her left hand. Frantically, she struggled to open the bag. Neither man paid any attention. As far as they were concerned she had stopped struggling and that was all that mattered. The second man had her feet now. He lifted her off the ground. She got one of the two satchel straps undone.

“Hurry.” The man wearing Shute’s coat held the door open. “Get her inside and get a gag in her mouth before someone decides to take a look out the bloody window.”

The second villain, the one called Sharpy, struggled to wedge her through the door of the small carriage. She managed to unfasten the second strap of the satchel.

Plunging her hand inside, she groped blindly for the packet she wanted, praying that she would get the right one.

“Her bloody damned skirts are caught in the door,” the other man hissed.

“Never mind, I’ll handle her, Perrett. Get on the box and get us out of here.”

She had the packet in her hand now. She ripped it open, held her breath and squeezed her eyes shut.

She flung a handful of the contents toward the man who had her feet.

Sharpy yelped in surprise when the powdered, highly potent mix of dried, finely ground hot peppers struck his eyes, nose and mouth. He dropped her feet and shrieked. The yell was followed by a great deal of gasping and coughing.

“What the bloody hell—?” Perrett said, confused and impatient.