Aquinas was on top of it before I could stop him. He was not so fastidious as I. He unfolded the dripping garment with his hands. It was a man’s shirt, as I had known it would be, stained streakily across the cuffs with blood. There was a handkerchief this time as well—a woman’s, from the look of the pansies embroidered garishly in the corner.
I stared at the bloody, soaking mess, wondering how I could have been stupid enough to believe Val’s story about a fight at the opera. He was a medical student, not permitted to practice. It was apparent that he had found somewhere to continue his studies, somewhere he could not speak of, somewhere that would provide him access to people who were profoundly in need of his attentions, I thought as I fingered the handkerchief. It was slashed in places, the edges of the cheap cotton curling back on themselves like the petals of a gruesome flower.
I shoved the handkerchief back into the shirt and rolled the bundle back into the gory bucket.
“This has nothing to do with what we are about. I will deal with it myself,” I told Aquinas firmly.
He said nothing but simply threw fresh water onto the pinkened puddle and took up a mop, swabbing at it until it was gone.
But it lingered in our minds, and I knew we were both thinking of it as we made our way to Cook’s room. There the mood lightened. We both smiled at her harmless indulgence in cherry brandy and fashion magazines. But even as we neatly tucked her bottles back under the bed, I found myself wondering about Magda. As the laundress, she could hardly have overlooked Val’s bloody shirts. I had rinsed the first bloody one clean for him, but I had little doubt now that there had been others. He had not bothered to rinse this one, and yet he had to know she would see it. Did he pay for her silence? This possibility worried me. Val never had much money. Father’s allowance was generous, but Val was, too, always giving money to causes he deemed worthy and friends who were not. I found myself rushing to search Magda’s room. I felt certain that I would find something there that tied her to my brother, and I was very much afraid of what that might be.
But even I never expected that it would be arsenic.
THE TWENTY-FOURTH CHAPTER
My duty pricks me on to utter that
Which else no worldly good should draw from me.
—William Shakespeare
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Of course I was not certain that it was arsenic when I found it. I was not even certain that it was anything of importance. But I suspected.
And when I looked at the little box of grey powder, I felt sick. I had wanted so badly to give Magda a chance. Aunt Hermia had warned against it. She had never been as warm in her acceptance of Gypsies as Father had, and she was eloquent on the folly of bringing one into the house.
“You won’t have a stick of furniture left by the time she’s done with you,” she had warned me. “She’ll sell it all from under you. And you’ll not get a proper day’s work from her, either.” Privately, I rather agreed with Aunt Hermia. I knew Magda too well to expect she would settle easily to life inside four walls. I had a somewhat higher opinion of her honesty, and indeed in the time with us nothing more significant than a teaspoon had gone missing. But Magda had not fit in happily with the staff, preferring to keep to herself, occasionally engaging in violent, shrieking quarrels with one of the maids, which usually ended with the maid stalking off with a stellar reference and a handsome pay packet from me, and another trip to the domestic agency for Aquinas.
But I could not turn her out, any more than I could explain to Aunt Hermia why I had taken her in. Why Magda had turned to me in her time of trouble, rather than Father, or someone else with the authority to help her, I could not imagine. She had, though, and I could no more abandon her than I could neglect any other responsibility. Father may have been a bit slapdash in the raising of his children, but he managed to instill in us the essentials, and duty was one of them. We were charged with taking care of those to whom our money and our blood made us superior, and it was an obligation we neglected at our peril. When Magda had come to me, cast out and penniless, I had not wanted to give her a place at Grey House, but I had no choice in the matter. She was in need and had asked for my help.
I had given her cold refuge, I thought as I looked around the little room. It was bare as an anchorite’s cell, and I felt a stab of anger, not at Magda, but at myself. She was like Morag, a creature without a home, but I had given her little more than four walls to call her own. The room was uncarpeted, furnished only with a narrow bed and a single hard chair. Her meager possessions were divided between a carpetbag and a discarded, crumbling old hat box. There was not even a proper curtain at the window. I looked at those four dull grey walls and the cold stone floor and the cheerless window, and I realized then what a prison it must have seemed to her, a Gypsy woman with rolling moors and tumbling rivers in her blood. She had roamed freely with her people before coming to me, winding from one corner of the kingdom to another. From Kentish summers making hay to the foggy winter London campgrounds, she had spent her entire life out in the fresh air, sleeping in a low tent, and later a painted caravan. Now she was confined to pavements and coal dust, as unnatural a being as the raven locked in Val’s room.
I pocketed the box and turned to Aquinas.
“There is nothing else here. I do not think we need search Diggory’s quarters. He has no access to the house.”
Aquinas nodded solemnly. “I think there is more at hand here than anonymous notes, my lady,” he ventured, without a hint of reproach.
“Yes,” I said. I hesitated, then squared my shoulders. I had trusted Aquinas this far. It seemed pointless and insulting not to tell him the rest. “Mr. Brisbane suspects, as do I, that Sir Edward may have died by poison.”
“I thought as much,” he said blandly.
I blinked like a hare. “I beg your pardon?”
“In Italy such things are more common, even in France it is so. It is not unheard of for an unhappy wife or husband to remove the cause of their sorrow. Or for a young nephew to help a rich and elderly uncle along to his grave for the sake of his inheritance. And it is not impossible that a man with poor health would take his own life rather than linger on in pain.”
I stared at him, remembering suddenly what Simon had told me about his own intentions. Why had it never occurred to me that Edward might have done the same?
But I patted the tiny box of mortality in my pocket and I knew better. Edward had been genuinely terrified of the anonymous notes, according to Brisbane. A man bent on self-destruction would not have been so troubled by them. Besides, if Edward had engineered his own death, he would not have left the means secreted away in some innocent person’s room to cast suspicion where it did not belong.
“I shall have to deliver this to Mr. Brisbane. I think sooner rather than later.”
Aquinas withdrew, leaving me alone in Magda’s room. I sat for a long moment, trying to put things together in my mind, but nothing seemed to fit. Every thought I had seemed to end with a question mark. What was Val about and how much did Magda know of it? Did she have cause to harm Edward? And would she? Had she?
I shook myself finally and prepared to call upon Brisbane. I had questions, to be sure. And perhaps he had answers.
I should have thought that I would have felt rather smug handing over my little box. Instead I felt only miserable. I was implicating a woman I had known since childhood, a woman I trusted, after a fashion. I was putting her fate into the hands of a man I knew very little about. I still did not know the cause of his terrible headaches, but knowing the cures he had sampled did not reassure me. Everyone I knew had taken opium in some form, but I had never met anyone who had dosed themselves with absinthe. It had left me wildly curious and a little wary. Of course, this was largely due to the fact that I had recently sat up late, reading the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by guttering lamplight. I did not seriously believe that Brisbane had somehow caused his own suffering through scientific experiments gone horribly wrong, but it was enough to make me look at him closely as he surveyed the contents of the little box.
