The Penny Heart (44 page)

I glanced back at Michael. I can picture even now the wide Chinese bowl and ladle, and the glass jug of water with which he diluted my own portion. He lifted the ladle to his lips, tasted it, added another spoonful of sugar, and proclaimed the punch good and strong. The clock chimed the hour. I can say in all certainty that I was brittle but cheerful at two o’clock on the afternoon of Christmas Eve.

‘Here we are.’ Michael’s hands shook a little as he placed two punch glasses down on the table. Wondering again if he had just that morning visited Miss Claybourn, I teased my husband. ‘You are trembling. Is your life so stimulating that you need strong punch so early in the day?’

‘Not at all.’ Yet he looked so uneasy that I thought, yes, I have caught you out.

It was then, just as we both lifted our glasses, that a knock rapped on the door. It opened a few inches and Peg called urgently, ‘Mrs Croxon, I must speak to you this minute.’

‘What is it, Peg?’

‘Please, Mrs Croxon. A word alone.’

I rolled my eyes heavenward. Michael grunted with impatience. ‘Devil take you, you drab,’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘What is it now?’

‘A most urgent domestic matter for Mrs Croxon,’ she hissed back.

I set down my punch glass and followed her into the servery next door. Once alone she grasped my sleeve and stared at me as if she had trouble shaping her next words.

‘What is it?’ I whispered.

‘I were just downstairs, mistress. And I saw that blue bottle, you know, that ratsbane, that arsenic. It had been opened up and used. So I asked the others what had been going on. I were thinking maybe Nan had made a start on the black beetles. But you won’t believe it, mistress. Bess saw the master come down for the makings of the punch, and he took the ratsbane and – Lord help you, mistress, I think he’s put it in your drink.’

I backed away from her so she no longer touched me. ‘No, Peg. That is plain ridiculous. Michael has been tasting it at every step. I watched him pour both our glasses from the same bowl. How could he poison my drink?’

‘Mistress,’ she said hoarsely, ‘it’s not in the punch. It’s in the jug of water.’

‘Are you sure?’ I said, with less confidence.

‘I swear on my mother’s heart.’ She touched her breast and looked at me very profoundly. Great God, I thought, she may be telling the truth.

‘Bess is waiting outside. Ask her if you won’t believe me.’

Peg opened the door and ushered the maid in. Bess was uneasy outside the kitchen, twisting the edge of her sackcloth apron in chapped hands. I asked her to tell me carefully what she had seen.

‘I were tending the fire when master come down t’kitchen,’ she said in a slow-witted tone.

‘What did he take? Answer carefully now.’

Her bovine eyes darted about the room and then settled on the ceiling as she spoke with some effort. ‘Some lemons and a nutmeg.’

‘And anything else?’ I prompted.

She grimaced with effort. ‘When I were seeing t’meat I seen him pocket that blue bottle. That one wi’ a skull on it.’

I dismissed her and leaned towards Peg, my words barely audible. ‘What should I do?’

‘Switch the glasses around. Give him a dose of his own medicine,’ she said coldly. ‘He deserves it.’

I shook my head in a daze. She leaned very close and whispered hotly against my cheek, ‘Listen to me. If I’m mistaken, it makes no difference. But if I’m not, he’ll get only what is due to him.’

‘I cannot.’ I looked in anguish at the servery wall and thought of Michael a few feet behind it. The door sprang open and Michael himself appeared. Peg and I jumped apart like startled rabbits.

‘What’s going on here?’ he demanded. ‘Am I to celebrate Christmas alone? Damn you, woman, get downstairs and leave us be.’ He pointed at the stairs, and, with her head bent low in mortification, Peg left us.

Everything was happening with such speed, I could not absolutely take it in. Michael grasped my arm and led me back into the dining room, once again seeming jovial and eager to begin our celebrations. Irresistibly, my eye was drawn to the two glasses standing very close to each other on the table. But it was impossible that I could pick up my glass and drink from it. Nor had I time to switch the two glasses around.

‘A toast to us and to our prosperous future,’ Michael said heartily. ‘And to many a Merry Christmas to come at Delafosse.’ He raised his glass. Yet still he seemed awkward. I could not move.

‘Come along. What is ailing everyone today? Can you not even join me in a toast to our future?’ I fancied there was a whine of desperation to his voice.

My hand reached obediently for the glass, but my nerves rebelled. If Peg were correct, I might be ending my life. My fingers fumbled over the slippery surface, and the glass tumbled to the floor; the punch spilled out, brownish-red across my new carpet.

‘The Devil take it, woman. Damn – damn it!’

I bent down to make ineffectual movements with a napkin.

‘Oh, leave it. What do we have servants for?’ He kicked the glass away in disgust. ‘I’ll mix you another.’

‘No. Not for me. My stomach—’

‘Now you wish me to toast Christmas alone? I am sick to the death of this. You will join me, Grace.’

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?’