Louisa the Poisoner Read online

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1995 by Tanith Lee

  Cover art copyright © 1995 by George Barr

  Published by Wildside Press LLC.

  www.wildsidepress.com

  LOUISA THE POISONER

  March Mire lay at the heart of the great moors, a swamp so dangerous that none but fools would venture into it, and seldom did they come out. There were however local legends of persons who lived within the mire itself, creatures that knew the two or three safe paths across the mud. Generally they were said to be mad people, for if not crazy to begin with, the gloom, vapours, and weird sights of the bog soon sent them that way. They dwelled in lopsided hovels perched upon the quag and made their soup from peculiar plants, ate frogs even, and perhaps godlessly worshipped the stars. Now and then tales were told of encounters on the moor with phantom phos­phorescent dogs and men who had webbed hands and feet, and mostly all the stories were as apocryphal as these.

  Nevertheless, it was true, Louisa lived with her aunt in a cottage on the mire and for nineteen years knew no other life.

  Her mother had died giving her birth, and her father perished some time before. The aunt took over the cottage and the baby and ruled both in her own individual style. It had happened that a traveller once penetrated the mire and came on the cottage—although whether he ever escaped from either is not known. He had a bag of books concerning etiquette and the proper manners of gentlefolk, and this, after he had mysteriously vanished from her life, the aunt read voraciously over and over and so learned of in minute detail. These lessons were then passed on to the child Louisa. From the age of three or four she was trained in how to sit, stand, walk and talk, how to clothe herself, blow her nose, and eat her food, all with imaginary implements—the cutlery and linen of the cottage were sparse—how even to comb and dress her long black hair, and when and where to lift her hazel eyes. And if the child failed at her studies, the aunt would beat her, using in the early days a softish switch of grass, but graduating to a set of sticks at the sight of which a strong man might have quailed. Let it be said that after the age of nine, Louisa was never beaten again, for she had become quite perfect.

  Aside from her obsession with comportment, the aunt was a slattern. The cottage was thick with filth, the few garments and utensils ragged and rusty. Only the hale constitutions of both the woman and the girl kept them alive and well in the midst of this sea of germs.

  On the other hand illness might not have mattered, for the aunt was a herbalist of uncanny ability. Day long and night long she roved about the bog gathering flowers and weeds, ferns and roots, and slimy excrescences without name or number. Unlike the skills of etiquette, her knowledge here was not passed on to Louisa. On returning from a foray the aunt would put herself into a mildewed chair and give instructions. “Make me a cup of parsley tea. Let me see you walk. Now turn and look at that wall. Now step over that crack. Yes, yes. That’s right.”

  The evening arrived however that was Louisa’s nineteenth birthday—for she had come into the world at one quarter to nine of a summer’s dusk.

  The aunt had been out as usual, gleaning from the mire, and as usual Louisa had got on with her few allotted chores and otherwise spent the time looking in the mirror over the mantle. For this was Louisa’s hobby. In her strange and boring life, she had found one interest, her beautiful face, her long black satin hair, the elegant patterns she made as she moved in the stances her aunt had grafted to her. When the aunt set her tasks, Louisa would get enjoyment in watching her own graceful hands at the work. It was true they were brown from the sun, but even so a better pair of hands could not be imagined. “Put on your rings,” the aunt would say, and Louisa would put on the twists of bark and paper, and herself imagine the great fiery rubies and weeping sapphires pictured in the books.

  So, Louisa was looking at herself in the mirror when her aunt returned from the mire, out of breath and croaking like a frog.

  “Louisa—Louisa—”

  “Yes, Aunt.”

  “At last, I found them. I found them in the reeds. For twenty years I’ve searched them out, I knew they must be there. And now, now I have them, plucked in my basket. The key to enormous dreams.”

  Louisa said again, in her phonetically taught, accentless and cultured tones, “Yes, Aunt.” and went back to the mirror. Unlike her aunt she was not a slut. Her person and the mirror (as it were, her territory) were always as clean and pristine as she could make them.

  The aunt began to brew a foul smelling concoction on the range, and presently Louisa left the cottage. She stood and admired the stars, and the will-o’-the-wisps flitting on the bog, though they were a poor substitute.

  It was with slight amazement that Louisa discovered her aunt calling her back, near midnight, into the house. Never before had this tyrant shown any need to share her work with the simples. Now she seemed overbrimming, like her cauldron. At least the awful smell had gone. Indeed, a faint fragrance, indefinable, hung over the cottage’s congealed air.

  “Louisa, sit down.”

  “Yes, Aunt.”

  “Do you see?” The aunt held up a rare glass phial, scoured abnormally of muck. In it was a colourless oily liquid.

  “Oh yes, Aunt.”

  “There are three things that grow in March Mire,” said the aunt, in a silly sing-song voice, her eyes half closed, “and that grow nowhere else together, and seldom anywhere. Find them in one spot, take them and make them up. From them comes this dew. Oh Louisa. Listen carefully. This stuff grants the gift of death.”

  Louisa widened her eyes but she was not actually impressed. Death was everywhere in the mire and especially often in her aunt’s nasty bottles.

  “Listen,” said the aunt again, “the poison in this bottle leaves no trace as it kills. In the world beyond the mire this can mean much. I’ve told you, there are towns along the moors, and great houses piled up with money and jewels. If every cobweb on that ceiling was changed to bank notes it would be nothing to them.”

  “And the streets and roofs are paved with gold,” said Louisa.

  “Yes,” said the aunt, who had never been there, or had forgotten. “What we’ll do is this. Tomorrow we’ll leave the mire by Ghost Horse Path. We’ll seek for just such a rich place. Then I’ll know how to go on. You shall pretend to be a lost lady, as I’ve trained you. I’ll act your slave—or servant, if they don’t have slaves any more. But you’ll do as I say, and our fortune will be made for ever.”

  “But how, Aunt?”

  “They’ll fall in love and make over their goods through wills, which I’ve told you of. And then I’ll see them off.”

  “But Aunt,” said Louisa, shyly, “do you need me? It’s you who have the poison.”

  “Need you? Yes. You’re the morsel that baits my trap. It’s you will catch the eye, and you that will convince them you’re a darling angel fallen from heaven.”

  “Tomorrow?” asked Louisa.

  “Yes, and early,” said the aunt. Her head nodded. She had had a busy day. She murmured drowsily, “I’ll tell you how it is. One drop from the phial, only one. Tasteless and scentless and makes indeed the dish more delicious and the cup nicer. One drop and they die a painless easy death. But two drops and they die in agony—that’s for enemies.”

  “And three drops?” asked Louisa.

  “Three drops,” said the aunt, her eyes shut, “and there’s fire.”

  “Fire?”

  But the aunt only mumbled, “Make me some fennel tea before I sleep.”

  So Louisa put on the kettle, and the aunt being already asleep, Louisa slipped out of her fingers the phial and let fall two crystal drops from it into the cracked tea cup.

  “Here’s you tea, aunt.”

&nbs
p; “Why, how good this tastes. I never tasted anything so good. The taste of victories to come.”

  Louisa asked her aunt if she might take the phial and place it on the table. The aunt agreed and got up to go to bed. Halfway there she gave a loud cough and then bent right over backwards in a hoop. She screamed and her spine snapped and serpents of blood leapt from her lips.

  Louisa watched with great interest. What her aunt had told her was quite true.

  She waited until the spasms, asphyxia and bleeding ceased, and then she went to bed. Louisa found her couch far more comfortable without the aunt snoring beside her. The aunt was completely silent now.

  In the morning early, Louisa got up, washed herself and tidied her rags, combed out her hair and ate a piece of grass seed bread. Then she put the phial of poison in her pocket and went out along Ghost Horse Path, which her aunt had shown her long ago in order to frighten her. By night a headless luminous horse was sometimes seen there, jumping the quag and flying through the air, but by day only bog myrtle, butterflies and kestrels appeared.

  The Path ended at the edge of March Mire, and Louisa emerged from it and stepped forth on the great moors.

  These piled in all directions, greyish and purplish green, and tawny with bracken, with ancient rocks in the distance and a low sky of moving rock-like cloud. A storm approached and Louisa had never been so far into the world. She walked boldly out into it and after the blowing clouds. And presently she reached a broad and sprawling road. To her surprise it was not paved with gold. This gave her some idea of caution. The lessons of her aunt were immaculate only to a point. She would need a little extra care.

  * * * *

  Lightning flashed and thunder crashed above as Louisa sat at the roadside on a red stone. She had seen, below in a valley of the winding road, a dark carriage hurtling through the driving rain, and she knew that destiny gave the carriage to her and gave her to the carriage. In her mirror-like mind was an image of her own self as she would be seen, slender and peerless in a cloak of raven hair, under the scourge of heaven. The red stone was useful too, as it stood out very clearly even in bad weather.

  The carriage raged up on to the hill behind six galloping jet black horses. It bore down on her like a thunderbolt. Louisa lifted her arms in a vague appealing gesture. The carriage came level, drenched her, scorched her with its wind, and dashed past. Louisa sat down. Half a mile away, with much rearing of the horses and shouts, the carriage drew up, lurched, and was brought around. The horses bounded back to the stone. The carriage was level again. The door, whose window was curtained in salmon velvet, and on which there was a crest in gold, was opened. Two men stared out at Louisa in the rain.

  “By God,” said the young fat one, “a mermaid.”

  The old thin one shook his long grey locks. “A beggar. Poor wretch.”

  Louisa rose again and went to the carriage door like a black swan over a river. She put out her marvelous hand and raised her flower face. “Sir, I’m a lady,” said Louisa, “who is lost on the moor. I have no one in the world.”

  * * * *

  Maskullance Manor had long dominated the moor. Its foundations had been laid two centuries previously, and since then the house had grown up and over itself like a prodigious stone vegetable. It had towers at two corners and vast stacks of mullioned glass casements, and everywhere upon the masonry were the architectural puns of eight generations of Maskullances, concerning masks, skulls, and lances. Louisa liked it very well, even though the roof was not paved with anything more than slates. One golden weathervane consoled her, and a devilish golden ram’s mask above the main door.

  The approach to the manor was also quite impressive. First the carriage leapt through a village of tiny houses and squirreline shops, where, even in the downpour, villagers emerged from the inn to doff their caps. Half a mile on, a park had been coaxed from the moors, and nourished oaks and beech copses, a lake, and, against the house, sombre gardens of topiary filled with herds of screaming turquoise peacocks.

  On the journey Louisa was asked questions.

  It was the old man who asked most of them, and Louisa knew by her fox-like instinct that he did not really care what she replied. For the old man had fallen at once deeply in love with her. Nor did Louisa differentiate between types of love. She only saw that he looked at her just as she had always looked at herself in the mirror.

  The young man, however, who asked far less, was far more concerned with answers and not at all with love.

  “But where do you come from?” he had demanded, not calling her, either, by her name, as the old one had at once, on learning it.

  “I can’t say,” said Louisa. She added, diligently, “Sir. My lips must remain sealed. Mine isn’t a happy history. You would be sorry to hear it.” Her aunt would have been proud of her, had she not been rotting quietly on the cottage floor.

  “No, Bleston,” said the old man, who had lace at his cuffs, a huge ruby carbuncle on his ringer, a pearl pin for his stock. “When you find a fairy in the wood, you mustn’t pry into her secrets.”

  “Fairy!” snorted Bleston, who was not only fat but ugly, with flushed face, thick pink lips, and repressed eyes. “I’ll give her she speaks like a lady. But these clothes, the state of her!”

  “Hush, Bleston. You are not polite.”

  The old man had asked Louisa her name and age, if she had been hurt, how great a time she had wandered the moors, what he could do for her; such things. To the last query, Louisa, who had been evasive or whimsical, had said, very simply, her long feathers of lashes lowered on her cheeks, “To be shown your kindness would be the sure sign of God’s mercy.” And to this he had responded, “Well, God is merciful, we trust.” He had already helped her, creakily, into the carriage himself, while the young fat man huffed and puffed. And they drove towards Maskullance Manor, for the old man was Lord Maskullance, and the young, his nephew. They had been in the nearest town on the business of money, of which there was a great deal. And Louisa had followed this meaty matter with the daintiness of a spun-sugar dessert.

  Presently they entered the park and so reached the manor in sheets of rain. Louisa beheld the grounds and house with the calm pleasure of one who has seen nothing, been nowhere, expects everything, and has little imagination.

  The carriage was attended to, and the two men and Louisa, passed into the house under the huge black umbrellas of the footmen.

  Here, below an ornate staircase, on a floor like a chessboard, stood a large sable piece, with plumes of white hair, shiny eyeglasses, and a mysterious large lump in one cheek.

  Louisa detected instantly another antagonist: She could not see his eyes.

  “Behold, my faithful retainer, Mr. Sheepshead,” said old Lord Maskullance with a smile.

  “My Lord,” said Mr. Sheepshead, and bowed—the lump equally mysteriously disappeared. He was both steward and butler and had served the family since Lord Maskullance and he were children. He was one of those servants who twine like supportive weeds about the structure of a house. Disturb them and the bricks collapse. And this too Louisa sensed, without knowing anything about it.

  “Sheepshead, we met a lady called Louisa in the meads,” went on his lordship. “We must treat her carefully, and perhaps there will be three wishes for all of us.”

  “My Lord. Miss Louisa.”

  “Hrughch,” hawked Bleston.

  They moved from the chequered hall into a side parlour of some magnificence. Again, there were no slabs of gold or swags of jewels, but a plushy lustre, velvet and cut glass, and against the dark day, in lily-like lamps, a blue-yellow phosphorous burned that Louisa’s erstwhile limited reading gave her suppose was gas-light.

  In the manor parlour the whole tribe had assembled, as if on purpose.

  By a shining table with a glowing pomander of fruit upon it, sat Lord Maskullance’s elderly unwed sister, Millicent, a spike of a woman clad in mauve. She had been embroidering, for she believed that work of an unfortunate nature was found for
idle hands, not realizing how much less appetizing work may be found by a certain sort of idle mind.

  At another table inlaid with mosaics sat the widowed younger sister of Lord Maskullance, Agathena, who had been playing Snatch with fifty two cards and her offspring, Maud. Agathena and Maud were that phenomenon, a mother and daughter who look almost exactly alike, but also they were both similar to an animal, which in this case was a rather pretty pig.

  Maud’s younger brother, Georgie, slumped before the hearth reading a newspaper. He was only like his mother and sister in the pig department, although he bore a slight likeness to his elder brother Bleston.

  Despite the fact no jewels hung from the ceiling or were pressed into the walls, Louisa was glad to see that everyone in the room had been lightly sprinkled with them.

  The company looked up when she came in; Lord Maskul­lance had opened the door for her. Agathena was the only one to exclaim. But Bleston, pushing in at Louisa’s back, took up the cry.

  “Exactly, mother. What do you think of it? Uncle saw this young woman on the moor, and, ain’t I damned, insisted she be brought here, in her rags and soaked with rain as she is.”

  Since they were all the dependents of Lord Maskullance, not one of them could find fault with his act, only with his judge­ment. And this they prepared to do.

  “Who ever is she?” asked Agathena.

  “Some vagabond?” asked Millicent. “Surely not.”

  “She’s dripping on the carpet,” said Maud.

  “Dashed odd,” contributed Georgie.

  It came to Louisa, as she demurely scanned them, that her aunt’s predictions, again, were not entirely accurate. Only one of these people had so far taken her bait. But at least, judging the social strata of the house faultlessly from her lessons, Louisa knew he was the right one.

  “Louisa,” said Lord Maskullance now, in gentle, obdurate tones, “is my guest. She has suffered unhappiness, which to a lady of her breeding,” (Louisa saw as he said this that he did not really credit it, and that it did not bother him) “as we know, is more cruel than to any woman of the common order. She is not to be interrogated. She is not to be harried. She shall be my ward. I’ve never had a ward, only the parcel of you. Of course, I’m delighted to have you all here with me, you add an indescribable sparkle to my declining years. But I see no reason why one more shouldn’t shelter beneath my wing.”