“Chicken in aspic, bread and butter, China tea. And in case you’re thinking the poison might be in that, she didn’t finish her lunch so the maid did after she’d gone and she was as fit as a flea.”
“It looks like an open-and-shut case against Miss Thorn. What happened at the inquest?”
“Open verdict.”
“Astounding! Didn’t it come out about Mrs. Haslem accusing the governess?”
“Oh yes, it came out, in a manner of speaking. Only everybody round here knew the wicked tongue she had when the drink was in her. They felt sorry for her husband and anybody else who had to do with her.”
“What about the symptoms? What did the doctor say?”
“That she’d been very sick, had convulsions, and her heart had stopped — which it tends to do when you die.”
“Is this whole countryside in a conspiracy to protect the governess? It can only be a matter of time before she’s under lock and key.”
“You could think of something, though, couldn’t you, a gentleman of your experience? Just enough to give everyone an excuse for pretending to think she didn’t do it.”
His tone, soft as any sucking dove, was the one he used to get scared colts to come to his hand.
“Where is this paragon of a poisoner?”
“Still up at the hall.”
“What!”
“Mr. Haslem has kept her on. After all, someone has to look after the boy.”
I sat and thought for a while.
“If you want me to take any part in this, you must arrange for me to speak to the governess. Can you do that?”
“Yes. Give me a few hours.”
“Mr. Haslem too.”
“He’s not seeing people. Hasn’t been out of the house or had anyone calling since the inquest.”
“What about the doctor and the maid?”
“Dr. Gaynor’s easy enough, he’s just up the road. The maid’s gone back to her parents ten miles away.”
“Didn’t Mr. Haslem keep her on?”
“The fact is, she bolted straight after the funeral. The gossip from the hall is that some of Mrs. Haslem’s diamonds had gone missing.”
“Is the maid suspected of stealing them?”
“I don’t know, because Mr. Haslem wouldn’t have any inquiries made. I had that from the solicitor’s clerk.”
“But this is incomprehensible. The man’s wife is poisoned and he keeps the woman suspected of it in his household. Her jewellery’s stolen, he does nothing to recover it and lets the maid run away. Isn’t it more likely that the maid poisoned Mrs. Haslem to save herself from being found out about the jewellery?”
“It wasn’t the maid she accused.”
“Accused or not, I want to speak to the maid before anyone else.”
He lent me a cob to ride and a boy on a pony to show me the way. As we trotted along together under the green leaves I thought it was a poor thing if I could only lift the noose from one young woman’s neck to drop it round another’s, but Harry as usual had me caught and bitted whether I liked it or not.
Susan was the maid’s name. When we got to the cottage, which looked as if it hadn’t had a lick of paint or dab of plaster since Queen Anne’s time, she was in the kitchen with her mother making pies. There was a clutch of children toddling, crawling, and bawling round the open door, scrawny hens pecking unhopefully, their skin pink and shiny in patches where feathers had been scratched away. For a daughter of such a place, the position of lady’s maid must have been a considerable prize. When I came to the door she was laughing at something one of the children had said, a pretty, plumpish girl in her twenties, neater than you’d expect from the confusion round her, her dark hair tucked under a clean white cap. The laughter died away when she saw me, turned to misery when I introduced myself and asked if I might have a word about the late Mrs. Haslem.
“Would you come with me, sir, where we can be quiet.”
Mother, brothers, and sisters watched open-mouthed as she led the way up the stairs that rose straight from the kitchen, little better than a ladder. If I say we talked in her bedroom, I wouldn’t wish to impute to her a lack of propriety. The place was no more than a kind of open cabin at the top of the stairs with one wide bed that almost certainly accommodated several sisters as well as herself. All the time we talked I was half aware of her mother’s worried murmurs from below, trying to keep the children quiet. I asked her about the brandy.
“Every week, sir. She’d give me the money and I’d go into town without letting anyone know. Two bottles a week it was, three sometimes.”
“That last day, she had her lunch in her room?”
“Yes, sir, but she hadn’t much appetite. She never had these days.”
“Was there any sign that she was ill?”
“None at all, sir.”
“Did she fill the brandy flask while you were there?”
“Yes, sir. She rinsed it in the water from her ewer, then she opened the new bottle I’d bought from the shop and filled it up over the basin.”
“A new bottle, you’re sure of that?”
“Quite sure, sir. She had to break the wax seal on it.”
“And did she, or you, put anything else in that flask except brandy?”
“Oh no, sir.”
Her eyes met mine. Scared eyes, with tears beginning to wash over them but not, I thought, guileful.
“You know Mrs. Haslem died, almost certainly, as a result of what was in that flask.”
She looked down at her lap and nodded.
“Have you any idea how poison might have been introduced into the flask?”
“No, sir. I know what was said, but I don’t think she would. She was always kind to me.”
“Miss Thorn?”
Another tearful nod. I didn’t care for the situation at all, but there was no going back.
“There’s another matter. Did you know that after Mrs. Haslem’s death, some possessions of hers were found to be missing?”
An intake of breath. Her hands, which had been lying motionless in her lap, began twisting together.
“Do you know anything about them?”
She was crying in earnest now. Her hands came up to cover her face and a few muffled words squeezed out through her fingers.
“... didn’t mean any harm... gave them to me... for going to buy the brandy for her... because she didn’t need them any more.”
I stood, taken aback by the speed of her collapse, pitying her and thinking of the temptation it must have been.
“Don’t you think it might be a good idea to give them to me and I can take them back to her husband?”
I could make no promises about there being no prosecution, but I was inwardly determined to urge mercy on Mr. Haslem. She drew her fingers down just enough to look at me.
“You have them still?”
“Here, all of them.”
She looked over at a battered wooden chest on the other side of the bed.
“I’m engaged to be married, you see, sir. I was saving them for my wedding.”
The thought of a rustic bride glittering with Mrs. Haslem’s diamonds was almost ludicrous enough to force a smile, even in those circumstances. But I kept my face grave as she went heavily round the bed and threw back the lid of the box.
“There they are, sir. And these, and these, and these.”
They came at me in a soft avalanche across the bed. White silk and satin, cotton and broderie anglaise, pink ribbons, green ribbons, stockings, garters, and a dozen other frills and furbelows that only the goddess of lingerie or her devotees could name. Over them, from the other side of the bed, scared brown eyes looking up at me.
“What in the world are these?”
“Her things, sir. She said I could have them because she’d had new ones made. She told me I could keep them, sir.”
When I told Harry he laughed so hard he nearly fell off the feed bin.