A Cruel Deception Read online

  That frightened her—she took that to mean he intended to kill himself.

  “Lawrence?” She went to him, putting a hand on his arm. “You don’t mean that. It’s wrong—the church says—”

  I’d reached the doorway, and I stopped there.

  He pulled away from her. “Just leave me alone,” he said, straightening up. “You don’t understand, you can’t possibly understand.” Shoving her out of the way, he walked to the door, brushing me aside as well, before taking the stairs two at a time. He disappeared into the darkness, and after a moment I heard a door slam.

  Marina had heard it as well, and she looked at me, tears in her eyes and despair in her face. “What am I to do?” she asked me. “I don’t know how to help him.”

  “There’s only one way—find out what’s haunting him, and then try to break its spell.”

  But even as I said that, I could see that she didn’t believe me.

  I don’t think any of us got any real sleep that night. I tossed and turned, trying to find a comfortable spot in my bed. The room was cold—we needed to be sparing with our store of coal—and in the middle of the night there was nothing to be done about it. The hot water bottle that I’d brought up to bed with me and an extra blanket from the cupboard helped a little.

  Marina looked tired and worried when she came down to the kitchen the next morning. Lawrence Minton didn’t appear at all.

  I said, trying to be cheerful, “You found a chicken yesterday. That was wonderful. If we can buy a little more coal, we might have enough to keep our bedrooms warm at night. What do you think?”

  “I have no money. And I can’t let you go on paying. It isn’t right.” She picked up the bowl in which we’d put the eggs, looked at it for a moment, and put it down again.

  “Marina, it isn’t my money. Lawrence’s mother has given me carte blanche to use whatever I need from her account. I think she had a feeling that all would not be well with her son. She isn’t wealthy, but she’s comfortably situated, and she would want me to help. At least until we can decide what to do about Lawrence. I can’t in good conscience write to her and tell her what’s happening here, when I don’t know why.”

  She looked around the kitchen. “How long can she afford to keep up two households? I feel so uncomfortable, you see.”

  As I began to slice the bread to toast, I changed the subject. “Were you as wretched as I was last night? The wind must have come up, and when I looked out my window this morning, I was sure there had been frost. After breakfast, we might collect blankets from the other bedrooms. I know I could use more. And why don’t we fill more hot water bottles?” I pointed to the dresser against the wall where the extra hot water bottles were stored on the top. Smiling, I added, “It appears there are enough that we could have two each.”

  But it would take a fire in the hearth to rid the bedrooms of the pervasive damp that seemed to permeate everything, even the clothes in my armoire.

  Looking up at the dresser, she said, “I should have thought of that myself. It’s just—to be honest, I am a teacher—I thought, this is a house with servants, I can manage. I wasn’t prepared for—for this.” She gestured around her, sadness in her face. “How will it end? I ask you.”

  For a moment I wondered again if she was in love with Lawrence Minton. On the whole, I decided, she wasn’t. He had saved her father’s life, and in gratitude, she was trying to help him. But she was right, she wasn’t prepared for no money, no servants, and a man who was too selfish to see what he’d brought her to.

  “I miss my own life,” she said forlornly, her voice very quiet. “My students, preparing lessons. Going to the cinema with friends. Visiting my parents on school holidays. I’d so hoped that after the war, life would be a little better. But it hasn’t been, has it? When the fighting stopped, we realized that nothing would ever be the same again.”

  We heard the sound of someone knocking at the house door, and Marina quickly turned away, hurrying up the stairs to answer it.

  I took the eggs she hadn’t prepared and began to break them in another bowl before whipping them with a fork.

  She was back in less than a minute. “A poor soldier, looking for work. I couldn’t even give him a sou or offer him a crust of bread.” She watched me prepare the eggs. “It’s so sad. What are they to do?”

  “If you want to leave, I will stay here and do what I can. If all else fails, I’ll send for Matron. His mother.”

  She shook her head vigorously. “That is the worst possible thing for him. To lose his future in the Army? It will be disastrous.”

  “Don’t you think that every day he fails to appear at the Peace Conference is going to cause comment and eventually put that in jeopardy?”

  Her face sad, she sat down in one of the chairs at the servants’ table and stared at me. “But if they had found him incoherent from—”

  The sound of footsteps coming down the passage, slow and erratic, reached us. Marina rose quickly and took my place at the cooker, pushing me aside.

  As the half-opened door swung back against the wall with a loud thump, Lawrence clung to the frame in the opening, looking very ill.

  “I think—” he began, his face gray. “Poison.” And before either of us could move, he slipped to the floor in a heap.

  I reached him first, turning him over as he vomited so that he wouldn’t choke, undoing his collar so that he could breathe more freely, then reaching for his pulse.

  It was rapid. But that could be the vomiting. I’d been given a brief overview of poisons in my training, and I tried to remember details. One didn’t expect to find them on the battlefield, and so I’d had little actual experience with them.

  There were some where vomiting was dangerous, and others where it was the only treatment, getting it out of the system before it could circulate throughout the body.

  Dry heaves racked his body now, and he lay on the cold floor, shivering violently.

  Marina was white as her apron, her hands at her throat, as if to ease his suffering.

  “Blankets—towels—quickly,” I told her firmly, cutting through the shock.

  She fled, and I held Lawrence’s body, trying to ease his suffering. He didn’t fight me, his skin pale and clammy, eyes unfocused. “Oh, God,” he managed to say, then began to vomit again.

  I was rapidly going through what I knew. He wasn’t having spasms, arching his back in pain. And a corrosive poison could get into the lungs, if vomiting was severe. If it was arsenic, he hadn’t shown any of the usual symptoms of paleness, lethargy, dry hair from a slow poisoning. The various food poisonings were less likely, because we’d eaten the same meals, Marina and I, and we were all right.

  She was back, dragging a large feather duvet behind her, arms full of towels. “It’s awful,” she was saying. “He’s been sick in his room, down the stairs—”

  I took the duvet and wrapped him in it, handed her a towel and instructed her to wet it for me, to clean his face, and put another over the puddles beside him.

  Lawrence was still trembling, his eyes closed, his hands cold. Curling up like a small, sick child, he moaned once or twice as new waves of nausea hit him. Marina had poured warm water from the kettle over the towel, and I washed his face and hands with that.

  “Are you in pain, anywhere?” I asked as I worked. Appendix, a twisted intestine, gall bladder . . .

  “N-n-no,” he managed to say. “J-just—this.”

  Unable to watch his suffering, Marina had found a pail and a mop and was starting out of the kitchen to begin cleaning up after him. I said, mouthing the words rather than speaking them, The bottle.

  She stared, uncomprehending, and then she seemed to grasp what I was trying to say. Nodding, she hurried on.

  I took two clean towels and made them into a pillow, and put that under his head. He lay there, exhausted, eyes closed, breathing still rapid but easing, and when I tried his pulse again, it was slowing a little.

  Was the worst over? Or was thi
s only a brief respite before the violent waves began again? I couldn’t be sure. My legs were beginning to go numb, kneeling there on the cold floor beside him, but I didn’t want to disturb him by moving, risking setting him off once more.

  It was nearly half an hour before Marina was back, her apron off, a pillowslip full of soiled towels in one hand, the pail and mop in the other. She was struggling to manage it all, but when I didn’t get up to help her, she cast a quick glance at Lawrence.

  “Is—is he—?” she asked, horror in her face.

  He did look quite bad, but I shook my head, giving her a smile. She disappeared into the backyard, left her burdens, and came back to wash her hands.

  Coming over to me, she said, “I’ll burn the lot. But not just now.” Reaching into her pocket, she brought out the blue bottle with a cap on it. I covered it quickly with my own hand, and put it out of sight.

  Lawrence lay where he was for another hour. By that time I couldn’t feel my toes at all. Marina had found a cushion that helped, a little, but I was quite cold as well as numb.

  Finally he opened his eyes. He frowned when he saw me, started to move away, then stopped as swiftly as he’d started, trying to take deep breaths. After a time he mumbled, “What was it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Will—will I live?”

  “I think you might,” I said, not sure how much I could promise him.

  “His bed is clean and made up,” Marina said.

  “I don’t know that he can cope with the stairs. A bed in the parlor? And a fire on the hearth?” I wasn’t certain we could carry him that far, and he didn’t seem to have the strength to walk far on his own.

  Marina was about to say something about the coal on hand, then thought better of it. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

  When she’d gone, Lawrence said to me, his voice still only a halting thread, “You—you should have—have let me die.”

  “I thought for a while that you might,” I told him. “It seems you are stronger than you think.”

  He closed his eyes. “I couldn’t get my breath. Waves of nausea—”

  “You came for help. I’m glad you did. I didn’t relish the idea of writing to your mother tonight.”

  He might claim that he wanted to die, but when it came down to it, he had the same will to live that drove all of us to keep fighting. I found that interesting.

  It was another two hours before we could help him to his feet and half carry, half drag him to the parlor, where the fire was a pale shadow of itself, but on the hearth rug, the blankets and quilts would be warm enough.

  He didn’t lie down so much as fall down. It occurred to me that as little as he’d eaten, he’d had no strength to fight off whatever it was that had made him so ill.

  I left Marina to watch over him when I slipped back into the kitchen and took out the blue bottle of laudanum.

  Removing the cap, I smelled it, and it was the usual sweet odor I recognized. But there was something else as well. I took the tiniest bit on my finger and tasted it.

  There was laudanum, that was certain. But it had been thinned with something else. It took me several minutes to decide what else had been in the bottle.

  I’d been thinking poisons—but there wasn’t any poison.

  What had been added, with only enough laudanum to cover the taste, was a strong emetic. Used to induce vomiting in poisonings, it irritated the stomach and forced it to expel anything that was there.

  I stood there in the middle of the kitchen. Who had done this?

  My first thought was Marina, to stop him from using laudanum, to make him so ill, he would turn away from it.

  But where would she have found such a thing as an emetic? Or known how strong to make it?

  The emetic itself could be a poison in high enough doses.

  I remembered her reaction at seeing him so ill. That hadn’t been guilt. She had been genuinely frightened. And why would she bring me the bottle if she had tampered with it? She could have said it had been broken in the first throes of Lawrence’s nausea, or that she couldn’t find it.

  Who, then? Lieutenant Bedford, who had brought the vial here?

  I was interrupted by footsteps coming toward the kitchen, and I hastily recapped the bottle and put it back in my pocket. I wasn’t certain just how much I should tell her.

  Marina came in, bursting with questions. “I think he’s asleep. You are a Sister—what did that to him? Was it poison? I can’t imagine who would do such a thing. He has only eaten what we ate—should we throw away what is in the larder? To be safe?”

  I said, trying to calm her, “It wasn’t the food. We haven’t been ill, after all.”

  “Then the bottle—was it in the bottle? I don’t know how many others he has. If that’s the only one.”

  “I think it must have been,” I said slowly. “But he shouldn’t use any more of the mixture in the bottle. And we should be sure we have all that is left of what Lieutenant Bedford brought him.” I was already considering taking it to Dr. Moreau, to be absolutely certain of what it contained.

  She shivered. “I’ve never seen anyone so ill.” Looking around her, she said, “I’ll clean up here. But we need to eat, you and I. I feel faint from missing breakfast.” She did look as if she was on the verge of collapse—fatigue, the fright, the lack of food, had taken their toll on her as well.

  “I’ll clear away in here and prepare breakfast. Stay with him. Keep him calm. He needs to rest more than anything right now.”

  She was hesitant, remembering that I was the guest in the house. But I said, “I tend to annoy him. Best if you are there when he wakes up. I have a little tea that I found in Paris. We’ll make a cup for him later in the afternoon. He’ll need liquids now, lots of them.”

  Marina made a face. “I think we need a little wine, you and I. There’s some in the cellar. Shall I fetch it?”

  “Later, perhaps. For now, don’t mention the bottle. One of us should search his room, all the same, and collect anything we might find.”

  She stood there in the middle of the kitchen, looking quite lost. “I only wanted to help him,” she said then. “I seem to have made a muddle of it.”

  “Don’t give up now,” I told her. “Perhaps the fright he’s just had will turn around his insistence on ruining his life.”

  But even as I said it to make her feel a little better, I knew how unlikely that hope was.

  Chapter 4

  WE HAD A very late breakfast. Neither of us had much of an appetite. I sat with Lawrence for an hour or more, letting Marina rest, and then she spelled me. I was nearly certain he wasn’t asleep, although his eyes were closed. More than likely he was ignoring me. I wasn’t in the mood to talk, either, and so it suited me to sit there by the window and keep a watchful eye on his breathing.

  The nausea had passed, but it was afternoon before I made a cup of weak tea, a little honey in it, but no milk, and asked Marina to help him sip it.

  While she was occupied with that, I went up to my room, sat down in the chair by the cold hearth, and shut my eyes. I still wasn’t sure just why someone had put an emetic in the laudanum. To make him ill? To turn him away from the very habit-forming sedative? Good intentions—or evil? I had no way of knowing. The question was, Should I tell Lawrence Minton what I suspected?

  I became aware of a tapping at my window, turned to look, and there on the sill outside was a pigeon, mostly a russet color but with a white tail. He—she?—pecked at the glass with a steady movement of the head, and eventually I rose to go to the window and have a closer look.

  He didn’t fly away as I approached, and I got quite close to the glass before he stopped his pecking. It was then I saw that he had an injured wing, and as I slowly changed my position for a closer look, I noticed something else. On his leg was the metal capsule used by the British Army to send messages by homing pigeons. This was a military bird. Accustomed to people. Accustomed to being handled.

  I opened
the window a very little, and he tried to come into the room. I had to put out my hand to prevent him from flying straight in. He was hungry, I thought, and I went quietly down to the kitchen, remembering that Marina hadn’t finished her toast. It was there in the dustbin, and I fished it out, took it up with me and crumbled it on the window ledge where the pigeon could find it easily. He ate with such relish, I realized he must have been very hungry.

  The room was already quite chilly, and I shut the window again as quickly as I could, while he huddled in one corner of the ledge. I pitied him but didn’t know what else I could do for him. Rubbing my hands together, I watched him for a moment, then went back to my chair. Drawing a quilt around my shoulders, I slipped into an uneasy sleep.

  When it was time to prepare dinner, I discovered that Marina had gone out, using the rest of the francs I’d given her earlier to buy more food. She was in the kitchen, and the first thing I noticed was how red her eyes were.

  “How is our patient?”

  “I think he’s sleeping. I can’t be sure.” She turned her back on me for a moment, then said, “Who could have poisoned him?”

  “I don’t know. Has he said anything? Do you think he knows?”

  “It was that man—Monsieur Bedford—who brought the laudanum. But why should he wish Lawrence any harm?”

  “Perhaps he didn’t know what was in the bottle. Or bottles.” I hesitated, then asked, “Did you search the Lieutenant’s room?”

  “Yes.” She was busy cleaning carrots and chopping them up. “There were two other bottles. I have hidden them in the linen closet. For now.”

  “Shall I go and sit with him?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  I walked away, went up to the parlor, and stoked the fire a little where it had burned unevenly. I was aware of Lieutenant Minton’s gaze on me as I worked, but when I turned to sit down in the chair by the window, his eyes were closed.

  After a while, I said, “Could you drink a little more tea?”