Part 12 (2/2)

”Do not forget the regent of the Netherlands,” Pendennis pointed out with a smile. ”Margaret of Parma.”

”That Scots clergyman, Knox, has the right of it,” Sir Robert grumbled. ”'Tis a monstrous regiment of women.”

”Knox does object, I think, only when they are Catholic women. Still, it is as well our Elizabeth does not ally herself with her papist sisters. Working together they would be a formidable force indeed.” He grinned suddenly. ”Speaking of forceful women, did you find your letter?”

Sir Robert grimaced. ”Aye. Another from my wife, as I am certain you have already divined. Full of questions this time.”

”About your mission here?”

”No. This enterprise is of her own making. She is still in Lancas.h.i.+re.” She wanted his impressions of certain people she had encountered there.

”Well, 'twill keep her occupied while you are away,” Pendennis said.

Sir Robert let Pendennis think so and kept his concerns to himself. He could not like Susanna's stated intention to dig into both Bexwith's death and his father's. She might uncover far more than she expected, and as long as he was stuck here in France, he had no way to stop her from making matters public.

Late that night, when he was alone, he took up pen and parchment and began his answer to her letter. He had little hope he could convince Susanna to return to Kent. He reasoned that if he told her most of what he knew, however, he might limit the number of questions she asked the neighbors.

He began with Grimshaw, an easy task since he'd had but few dealings with the fellow. He'd met the lawyer once, he wrote, when he'd gone north to settle his father's estate.

He remembered the journey well. Newly knighted, fresh from the Battle of Saint-Quentin, he'd received word that his father was dead. He'd ridden night and day to reach Appleton Manor, anxious to be done with the business of burying the old man so that he might return to court. He had not even bothered to return to Kent first and tell Susanna what had happened. He'd made do with a curt note, informing her that Sir George had died.

Sir George's death had been an accident. Randall Denholm, as nearest justice of the peace, had ruled it so. Of the involvement of the girl, Edith, no mention had been made. Not to him. By the same token, Susanna's report of the events leading up to Sir George's fall came as no surprise. He wondered what age this Edith was. The last he'd known, his father had been fond of very young women. The older he'd gotten, the younger he'd liked them.

Sir Robert had not stayed at Appleton Manor any longer than necessary. John Bexwith had been in charge for years and Robert had been content to let that arrangement continue. He'd ordered the accounts sent to Leigh Abbey for Susanna to oversee at Michaelmas. Otherwise, Bexwith had been given complete freedom to run the estate.

When he had written all that in his letter to his wife, Sir Robert added what little he knew about the other servants. He did not, in truth, remember much about any of them. He'd been nineteen when he'd left Lancas.h.i.+re for good. In the fifteen long years since, he'd been back only that once. He'd never met the girl Grizel, nor Edith, either. He remembered Mabel Hussey more for her gooseberry tarts than her person. Bexwith had been in the background all of his life, but Sir Robert had never known much about the person behind the steward. He had not cared to learn.

He paused as he considered what to say about the Denholm family. They had been his neighbors as a boy. He'd certainly known Jane well when she was a girl. But what did he really have to say about Randall or Effie? They'd been aloof from him when he was a child, wanting no more to do with him than they had with their own children. Catherine had not even been born yet when he'd lived in Lancas.h.i.+re. He remembered that there had been several other children who'd died young, and wrote that down, but there was little else he could tell Susanna. Certes he could not write that Denholm and Appleton had shared the services of a Catholic priest well after such a thing was against the law of England.

Sir Robert was of two minds how much to say about his father and Jane Denholm. There was much he could reveal, but to what purpose? Both were long dead. It might be best to let their secrets, and his own, die with them.

Reading his wife's letter once more, Sir Robert realized that she'd unearthed a good many facts for herself in the short time she'd been at Appleton Manor. This missive had been penned right after Mabel Hussey's return, and had taken some two weeks to reach Paris. He wondered what else she had learned in the interim. Perhaps nothing. He hoped that was the case. After all, she was a stranger, a ”foreigner” by local standards. With luck, she'd already found out all she was going to.

Sir Robert added a paragraph strongly suggesting that she return to Kent and was about to seal the letter when he remembered the gift the queen mother of France had sent, along with the delightful Scotswoman to share his bed that last night at Blois. It was a single, thrice folded piece of parchment. Written on the outside, in French, was an inscription: ”For inclusion in Lady Appleton's cautionary herbal.”

Sir Robert thought a moment longer, then added a single line beneath Queen Catherine's words. He enclosed the sheet inside his own thrice-folded letter to Susanna. He was smiling to himself as he sent for a servant to take the packet and start it on its way back to England. It was a good thing that he trusted his wife, he thought. Otherwise it might prove pa.s.sing dangerous to thwart a woman who knew as much as she did about poisons.

Chapter Twenty-Three.

Susanna Appleton took her letter from the messenger and glanced at the seal. As she'd expected, it was an apple pierced through with an arrow, her husband's crest. She lost no time breaking the wax and unfolding the missive. A quick glance told her that the speed at which a message could be carried from Paris to Lancas.h.i.+re was improving. He'd written on St. Martin's Day, the eleventh of November, and this was only the twentieth, the Feast of St. Andrew.

She smiled slightly, struck by a thought. How slow people were to change. The law had reduced the number of saint's days in England from ninety-five feasts and thirty saint's eves to twenty-seven, but the old dates still lingered in memory and the discarded names were difficult to abandon entirely. Even the courts still divided their terms by the old calendar.

Her smile faded as she began to read. Torn between pleasure and frustration, she skimmed the rest of the missive from her husband. He wanted her to go home, back to Leigh Abbey, but he gave no reason that made sense to her. He spoke vaguely of the dangers of lawless Lancas.h.i.+re, but she well knew that he was the one in the Appleton family who took risks daily. Every time he went abroad there was a possibility that he would not return.

Shrugging her concern for his safety aside, Susanna read the letter again, more carefully this time. In spite of his obvious disapproval because she'd disobeyed him and journeyed north, he had endeavored to answer her questions. Unfortunately, what he had to say did not help. The servants now at Appleton Manor were unknown to him, except for Mabel. He had little to say about Bexwith and seemed to know Lawyer Grimshaw even less well. Neither did he have anything of value to report about his father's neighbors at Denholm.

”I shall be greatly distressed,” he wrote at the end, ”if I return home to find you still in the north. I desire your presence at Leigh Abbey and trust you will be there, waiting for me and tending to your duties as my wife.”

”But you are not here to enforce your will,” Susanna said softly, ”and to my mind, I am tending to my wifely duties very well indeed.”

For the last few weeks she'd been extremely busy, supervising the building and repairs she wanted done before winter. She had not had time yet to journey a third time to Manchester and pursue her inquiries, though she had spoken again to Jack the tiler. He made no secret of his dislike for Bexwith or his opinion that the steward had deserved an ignominious death. Had he taken a hand in it? He'd certainly had motive and opportunity. On the other hand, he seemed the sort more likely to bludgeon an enemy to death than resort to poison.

Turning her attention to the second page, Susanna noted that, on the outside, beneath the strange handwriting that earmarked the contents for her herbal, her husband had penned an enigmatic sentence. She had to read it twice before she understood.

”From a very great lady,” Sir Robert had written, ”whose family knows well the properties of aqua di Napoli.”

Aqua di Napoli. Susanna stared at the name, searching her memory. Aqua di Napoli was a poison. a.r.s.enic combined with cantharides, if she remembered aright. Four to six drops in water or wine were enough to kill a strong man in minutes, and that method of ridding itself of enemies was popularly believed to be a favorite of the Italian family of the queen mother of France.

With fingers that trembled just a little, Susanna opened the paper. Inside had been written, again in French, that a very simple and effective antidote for ”all poisons that speed the heart” was to force the victim to vomit up the evil, then dose him with a mixture that contained a large quant.i.ty of poppy syrup. ”Though it be a poison in itself,” Susanna translated, ”given as an antidote it does not kill.”

She studied the list of other ingredients, a.s.sessing their probable effectiveness. Nettle root. Columbine. Wormwood. Those were familiar antidotes. But mixed with dried saffron? Burdock root? Dandelion root?

Leaving the letter from Sir Robert on a table, Susanna took the second page and sought the greater privacy of her stillroom. She spent the next few hours making notes in her herbal, oblivious to any distraction. She was not sure she trusted this remedy, coming as it did from the notorious Queen Catherine, but it made more sense as a cure than hanging part of a stag's heart in a silk bag around a victim's neck in order to draw poison out of the body.

If there had been poison used against John Bexwith, what poison had it been? Susanna turned her attention to the question, searching through all those toxic plants she'd marked for inclusion in her herbal, looking for any that were readily available in Lancas.h.i.+re and would produce wide, staring eyes and would act in half an hour or less.

Unless Bexwith's retching had sent him into the pie with such force that he lost consciousness and smothered. Susanna shuddered, but it was a possibility she should consider, even if it did increase the number of entries on her list of possible poisons.

It meant she had to reconsider mandrake and banewort, too. What irony if banewort turned out to be the most likely cause of death. No one had mentioned dry, red skin, though, a characteristic effect. And usually, in the first half hour, the victim had only lost the power of speech, not consciousness.

A more likely suspect was the thimbleflower. Cooking did not lesson the potency of the poison. It showed effects in twenty to thirty minutes, though it generally took longer than that to kill.

Setting aside the possibility of death by asphyxiation, Susanna finally narrowed her suspects down to three: monkshood, cowbane, and henbane.

Monkshood could cause death in ten minutes. The antidote was yew. She made a note to be sure she had an ample supply on hand. She liked to be prepared for any eventuality, and with monkshood, those who were treated and survived were almost fully recovered twenty-four hours later.

Death from ingesting cowbane came as quickly as twenty minutes. The root had a sweet taste, too, making it easy to confuse with edible plants. If the queen mother's mixture worked against poisons that speeded the heart, it should be effective against that one.

Then there was henbane, for which nettle alone was a known remedy. The root could kill in a quarter of an hour, but what if it had been cooked? She could scarcely experiment on her retainers as she'd heard the Medici did.

The pounding of a headache finally forced Susanna to stop puzzling over a mystery she despaired of solving. It did no harm to keep all manner of antidotes near at hand, but she was no closer to deciding if murder had been done, let alone by what means.

What did she know? That Bexwith had showed signs of recent prosperity, possibly from extorting money from someone about Sir George's murder. That theory held up only if Sir George had, in fact, been pushed down those stairs. The only hard evidence Susanna had that anything untoward had happened at Appleton Manor was that someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to create a ghost to blame, even having it ”appear” to Susanna herself.

That meant something. But what?

She pushed away from her worktable and went in search of food and drink, but she was only temporarily abandoning her quest. Before she left Lancas.h.i.+re, she silently vowed, she would have all the answers.

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