“Then it might interest you to hear that Mr. Treviscoe called upon Dr. Tindle this very mom,” said Treviscoe. “I have been led to understand that Dr. Tindle has been rehabilitated. It had something to do with a misunderstanding concerning the daughter of Mr. Treviscoe’s other physician.”
“Miss Merwood, you mean?” Coridon’s eyes lit up. “She was in this very shop last week, sir. A winsome bit, I must say! Wouldn’t mind some meself. We should all have such a nurse to comfort us.” He winked and chortled. “Mr. Treviscoe must have been feeling better, no mistake. Attempted something he oughtn’t, did he?”
“In any event he has engaged Dr. Tindle again. ’Tis said he is still very weak, confined to a chair. There is every possibility that his disease might return, wouldn’t you say?”
“You have no love for Mr. Treviscoe, have you, sir?”
“His every action has its effect on me.”
Coridon nodded. “Aye then. I’ll take a wager on him. To live, or did you wish to guess the time of his passage?”
“What are the odds?”
“Oh, I’d say ’tis not likely he’ll survive, sir. Three to one on life, at a guess, others depending on what is wagered, now that the book is open again.”
“Then the long odds are that he shall live.”
“That’s it. Your wager, sir? And how much? And your name?”
“I’ll wager on life because, after all, he’s escaped death once. Let the sum put forward be twenty guineas, for that should see me quite fair. As to my name, perhaps it is familiar to you, for I am called Alan Treviscoe.”
“Alan—!” Coridon went pale and turned to flee through the back of the shop, where he was stopped by the tall and imposing figure of Hero.
Hero grabbed him by his shirt collar and dragged him back into the front.
“I have no intention of dying for your profit, Mr. Coridon, especially not abetted by the arsenic you include in every emetic you prepare for Dr. Tindle,” said Treviscoe.
“I do not know what you mean,” Coridon replied, cringing.
“Deny it if you will, it matters not. I have proof of your murderous intent: the bottle, prepared by you in the sight of Miss Merwood, of Dr. Tindle’s patent emetic for ingrafted patients, still containing most of its deadly contents.”
Coridon struggled against Hero to little avail.
“There is nothing to be gained from attempting escape,” said Treviscoe. “I have you now.”
“Have me? ’Tis I who should have you, nailed in a coffin!” said Coridon bitterly. “You should not now be among the living had Dr. Tindle’s ingraftment of you succeeded. Then no one should have suspected anything! Trust him in his madness to botch the operation.”
“It was your plan, I expect, to disgrace Dr. Tindle, knowing that before long the invariable fatal results of his consultations for smallpox inoculation must come to public notice. I’m sure your gambling earnings padded your purse well enough, but I suspect your main purpose in accepting wagers on his patients was to call attention to the trail of death he left behind him. And yet just now, you spoke of your years with him almost with affection. What has he done to you that made you turn to murdering the innocent merely out of spite?”
Coridon sneered. “They were grand days when he and I frequented Medmenham Abbey. I see you know what that means. No, I was too low to be admitted to the inner circle, but there were amusements even for the likes of me, entertainments enough to sate the most jaded appetite. The beauties from the finest brothels in London! Young virgins heretofore unsullied by any lusty swain! Wine flowing like beer! It was a life, I can tell you. But then he caught the pox, and turned to religion: the very thing the Order had been founded to mock! He even forced me to wed that virago, my wife.
“Aye, she was once fair to look upon, the trull, but when Tindle knew he could not ever again have carnal knowledge of her, he thought to recompense her by passing her on to me.
“Well, if he could become the agent of the Lord, why should I not become the agent of the Devil? When his reason began to wane, I saw my opportunity and took it. ’Twas not difficult to convince him that he’d become the living angel of death and that his failures as a physician were signs of his success as God’s deputy on Earth. He is awaiting Judgment Day in our time, did you know that?”
Treviscoe stared at him in deep disgust. “For you, Mr. Coridon, it will come sooner than later.”
Dr. Merwood and Alan Treviscoe sat in Treviscoe’s drawing room smoking.
“I should have detected that it was poison,” said Merwood. “When you cried hellfire, I thought you delirious.”
“I was near enough to delirium that you cannot be found at fault for believing so, sir,” said Treviscoe. “Indeed, my wits were at such an ebb that at that moment I thought that Dr. Tindle was the man who meant to murder me.”
“So did we all.”
“But, of course, it made no sense, not after I realized the nature of the poison.”
“You mean because he had not e’er touched the bottle Elizabeth brought from Coridon.”
“Even without that, it could never have been poor mad Tindle who supplied the poison. Don’t you see? He believed the deaths to be miraculous, the intervention of God. He wouldn’t interfere with the work of the Lord. He believed himself to be merely the vessel of God’s power. And why would he, even mad as he is, choose to administer arsenic in an emetic, of all vehicles? Why, he would know that the patient should disgorge most of the poison in the course of events. An inefficient method, sir! Were Dr. Tindle the poisoner, he must surely have chosen a better means. No, he who poisoned the emetic must have done so because it was his only avenue, and that meant it had to be Coridon.”
“You were uncommon lucky, Alan, to discover in time what was being done. If the variolation had taken, you would now be in the grip of the scourge, weakened beyond any hope of recovery by the poison, like Lucy Phelps, poor moppet.”
“I am lucky if to be maliciously poisoned by an utter stranger can be called luck, but there was never any danger of the smallpox, Dr. Merwood, as I tried to tell you,” replied Treviscoe. “Remember how at the funeral I told you that I spent my boyhood in the shadow of Cornet Castle? Comet Castle is the ancient fortification on Guernsey. My father was Cornish, but my mother is of the Channel Isles; ’tis how I came to speak French.
“Guernsey is rich in cattle, Dr. Merwood, and although the island is blissfully free of most of the diseases that plague mankind in Britain and on the Continent, there has never been a herd of cattle where the cow-pock is unknown. I had that disease as a boy, and it is well-known that, once having suffered from the cow-pock, it is quite impossible to contract smallpox.”
“An old wives’ tale, Alan!”
“Then why did the ingrafting fail to take hold? Especially in my weakened state?”
“Medicine is an art, my boy, and art is filled with mystery. Only God is omniscient. But if you believed yourself immune to smallpox, why did you agree to the ingraft?”
Treviscoe laughed. “You gave me little option, if you recall, sir! Besides, I could not see that it would do any harm.”
Hero entered the room, bearing a newspaper. “I have some tragic news, sir,” he said. “Dr. Tindle has taken his own life. He left a note proclaiming it to be the will of God.”
“Another victim, then,” said Treviscoe quietly. “I hope that by destroying his faith I did not in the end destroy him.” He took the broadsheet, containing all the news in Bath for that day, December 22, 1773.
Tooth Fairy
by Gary Alexander
