Her hands did not hesitate but moved smoothly along as she wrapped the next shirt. “I cannot tell you, lady. He can.”
We worked another minute in silence.
“Who is Mariah Young?”
There was a reaction at this, a tiny jerk of the hands and a bit of the paper tore. She smoothed it, regaining her composure. “I cannot tell you, lady. He can.”
“But he won’t.”
“Then it is not my place,” she said calmly. She was fetching hats now, crumpling paper to fill out the crowns.
I twisted one of Edward’s neck cloths in my hands. “Magda, how can you be so stubborn! Don’t you realize that I am only trying to help you?”
She continued to work deliberately and slowly, moving with a certain deft precision that I had often seen among the Roma. I moved closer, determined to make her understand.
“He means to see you hang for murder, do you hear me? He has the poison.”
She turned, her dark eyes wide with surprise. “He took my arsenic?”
I groaned and dropped Edward’s neck cloth to the floor. She bent to retrieve it, fluidly, with none of the creaking and snapping one would expect from a woman of her years. A life spent traveling had kept her supple and strong, stronger than I.
“Itwasarsenic, then. He thought so. He has sent it to a doctor to be tested.”
I reached out and took her hand. It felt cool and wrinkled, like the top of a blancmange left too long in the larder.
“Magda, I know that you must have had some innocent purpose for the arsenic. I must believe that you wanted it for a cosmetic, a face cream. But Mr. Brisbane believes Sir Edward was poisoned. I cannot help you if you do not tell me the truth.”
Her face was utterly blank. No emotion, just the calm, fatal acceptance of her race.
“I always tell you the truth,” she said. “Not all of it, not at once, but what I tell you is never false.”
I nodded encouragement.
“I did not kill Sir Edward.”
I felt my spine sag. I had never actually believed her guilty, but it was a profound relief to hear her deny it.
She looked at me curiously, her eyes snapping with emotion. “You know why I am unclean to my people. But you have never asked me why I went to Carolina’s grave. It was because she called me.”
My breath caught painfully in my throat. “Called you? Magda, how can that be?”
“I was sleeping, and I dreamed of her. She came to me and said that I must go to her, that she was in danger. I rose and I went to her. My brothers found me there, sitting on her grave with her body in my arms. My brothers understood, they knew that I had to protect her, but the taboo had been broken. I was unclean and I had to leave them.”
Magda fell silent, but her words echoed in my head. Why had she felt the need to protect her dead child? The graveyard was a quiet country place, with no one to disturb her. And why should anyone want to? Granted, graverobbing had been a lucrative occupation fifty years before, but there were laws now, providing for the legal use of cadavers for medical study. Schools no longer needed to rely upon unsavory villains to retrieve the newly dead for their anatomical dissections.
But there were others, I thought with a thrill of horror, others who might have need of a fresh corpse, others who had no access to proper medical schools. I thought of my poor, misguided brother, and it was almost more than I could bear.
“Magda, did someone else remove Carolina’s body from her grave before you reached the churchyard?”
She nodded and began to rock slowly, her arms crossed over her womb.
“I was too late to stop him disturbing her rest, but I chased him away. He could not take her.”
I had read before, in lurid Gothic novels, of one’s blood running cold. Until that minute, I had thought it an exaggeration. But as the implication of her words took root, a monstrous idea began to grow, and with it, a cold, creeping certainty.
“Did you have that arsenic because you intended to kill the man who defiled her grave?”
She looked directly into my eyes. “Yes. I waited. It is almost time for me to return to my people. I did not want to kill him and remain under your roof.”
