Louisa the Poisoner Read online

  The situation was so strange by now, nevertheless, and the countryside in such uproar about the case, that Louisa, who had given evidence only of amazed innocence and genteel bewilder­ment, was committed for trial on the coroner’s warrant.

  The streets of the town were not paved with gold.

  * * * *

  “I am not guilty.”

  Louisa stood upright, a white flower face upon a midnight mourning stem, in the prisoner’s dock. Her dignity and loveliness inspired cartoonists all about the court, and in the public gallery gave rise both to jealous dislike and adoring chivalry.

  This one statement, invited from her by the judge, was all she was to say. Her own statement of innocence followed the statement of the crimes of which she stood accused. That she had murdered Lord Maskullance by applying a pillow to his sleeping face and in some other form or forms dispatched all the residents of Maskullance who had shared with her in the bulk of the will of the late Lord. Sole inheritrix she would not be, save for some small bequests to servants, and the equal portion of Mr. Sheepshead the butler-steward of the estate. This was motive enough.

  The Crown opened the prosecution of Louisa with every witness reckoned at its disposal. On the stand before her Louisa beheld the maids of the house, Alice and the scullery maids, the footmen, Mrs. Crampp (much worn down and mostly incoher­ent), village acquaintances of the dead tobacconist, the old lady, the thatcher, and the blacksmith, none of which latter knew anything of Louisa, although they were sometimes led to think they did: Her own counsel swiftly intervening.

  Louisa’s barrister was a Mr. Meadham Trevis. He had taken the case on seeing Louisa’s picture in a newspaper. He was himself a flamboyant and handsome man, rising rapidly in his profession. He had seldom lost a case and declared Louisa’s to be a challenge. “Everything is against her,” he had said, “except her beauty and the law of coincidence. That’s what I shall seek to prove. That lightning does strike twice and indeed in this instance at least six times.”

  He himself had been struck by Louisa’s poise. At no moment did she seem in despair or even uncertainty. Although she did not tell him so, it was as if she believed God Himself would protect her in her blamelessness. She was also inscrutable, a quality Mr. Trevis, who collected jade figures, liked.

  All that the manor servants could say of Louisa was that she had entered into the house in a curious and rather outlandish way, and that she had never revealed her origins. The prosecution of course made much of this. But Mr. Trevis, in cross-examination, was able always to bring out that Louisa was obviously also a lady of great breeding, who had appeared devoted to Lord Maskullance, in whom possibly she had alone confided. And while the others had shown her off-hand or variable behaviour, she had stayed courteous and serene at all times. Was this the mark of a malcontent?

  There was additionally, as Mr. Trevis stressed via the wit­nesses, firm evidence to support the natural theory of all the extraordinary plethora of deaths. (He excluded from the itinerary the tobacconist, lunatic, policeman, thatcher, old lady and black­smith with sublime contempt. Was Louisa to be responsible for everything, even perhaps to the dead sheep found on the moor, or a local chicken dispatched for a roast? The gallery laughed.) The groom called to testify to Georgie’s horsemanship was made to admit that Georgie ill-treated his mounts, and that the grey would sweat and roll its eyes in fear if he even passed the stable door. Lord Maskullance had refused to have the animal de­stroyed after Georgie’s fall. Georgie, had said his lordship, had driven the poor brute to do it. Maud meanwhile had exhibited an erratic mood before her drowning, as the maid who had waited at dinner could confirm. Maud had seemed suicidally inclined, even refusing a meal, a thing unheard of. The shock of the lake water stopping her heart, killing the victim before any fluid could be ingested into the lungs, was not unknown. Agathena mean­while could well have missed her footing on the stairs in her quite-to-be expected state of extreme grief on which everyone agreed. Millicent had fainted at this horror, as Alice had soon after, and the tureen unfortunately took its toll. Had Millicent’s face not been partially scalded? This trauma alone might account for her demise. Which left only Bleston. He was, according to the doctor summoned to describe his wounds, a perfect candidate for apoplexy. In a violent fit he might easily have damaged himself fatally in falling over the table into the fireplace—as Louisa in her written state­ment had explained and of which evidence had abounded. Otherwise Lord Maskullance was an old man. So many awful shocks could well have seen off a younger stronger one.

  The case so far had run two days, the jury each night being imprisoned in a local hotel, Louisa being returned to the adjacent jail. Here her wardresses, taking her for a perfect lady, treated her with careful consideration.

  “My plan,” said Mr. Trevis to Louisa in the grey confines of her cell, “is that I shall call no defence witness, and neither will I call on you to make any further statement. That way, I’ll have the final word at the summing up.”

  He had noticed the judge was already partial to Louisa, saying she was pale and might sit down, and once intervening in the cross-examination to stress a point Mr. Trevis was already making to Louisa’s good. The jury, like the gallery, was a blend of entranced and disapproving. This might prove a nuisance.

  “My one worry,” lied Mr. Trevis, “is that the prosecution have up their sleeve an ultimate witness who must in some way have information that might discredit you or show you in a bad light. This Sheepshead, the butler. Would you say that he was in your favour?”

  “I think, sir, he was envious of my closeness to Lord Maskul­lance.”

  “I was afraid of that. Well, I must simply sharpen my pruning knife.”

  Louisa smiled a little. She had received that morning a letter from Mr. Sheepshead. It informed her that he would call on her, by way of some special dispensation of the prison, that evening.

  And from this, if from no other thing, Louisa knew herself as ever still in the supporting hand of fate.

  Mr. Trevis rose to leave her, tickled as always by this succulent and placid calm in the face of such odds. His gaze swept over the tiny shelf on which, partly against the rules, a few feminine articles had been allowed, even a small perfume bottle of clear glass, perhaps thought too tiny to cause harm.

  After he had left her, Louisa picked up the poison phial and sniffed it. It smelled of the perfume with which she had rubbed its outer surface on the morning of her arrest.

  In the grey cell, as daintily as in her Blue Room, she awaited the fateful visitor.

  He came at eight. He sat down at the long table facing Louisa, and the wardress whom Louisa had charmed the most stood well back at the door. She was a little deaf.

  “You should speak loudly,” said Louisa, “so the wardress can hear you, Sheepshead.”

  “No need for that, said Sheepshead. “My words are for you alone.” His spectacles gleamed, and she knew herself, as one infallibly does at last, in the presence of the inimical enemy.

  “Miss Louisa,” said Sheepshead, “you are a murderess. I know it. I’ve seen you. Not the means, never that. But your goings to and fro. You were with Mr. Georgie when he rode along the beech walk. You were with Miss Maud beside the lake. You were with the ladies, both of them, before their fatal falls, above in the room of one, and below with the other as we ran, the rest of us, into the hall. And Mr. Bleston, you were in the dining room with him, also. His lordship was there. He too perhaps saw what you did. And so his lordship you murdered, for I was the one that saw you pass into his bed chamber by candlelight, where no lady should go by herself.”

  Louisa lowered her eyes, modestly.

  Sheepshead put between them on the table a large bag of humbugs.

  The wardress was alerted and said, “Nothing must change hands.

  “I assure you, madam, that it won’t,” said Sheepshead. He looked at Louisa from his blind glass lens eyes. “You’d like to doctor them, no doubt. The poor fellow in the shop succumbed to your
scheme for me, did he not? And the madman with my slice of the cake, and the poor man with the whistle meant for my mouth. What did you use, I wonder?”

  “I think,” said Louisa primly, “you accuse me of witchcraft.”

  “Fifty years ago, maybe. Now I make other plans. What are they? I’ve only to speak. At best they’ll think you have the power to drive men and women to their ends. It will condemn you. Even if I never see you hanged, Miss Louisa, my evidence will be enough to keep you incarcerated for the length of your wicked life.”

  “It was kind of you to warn me.”

  “Don’t mention it, miss.”

  And from his coat Sheepshead drew the habitual box of his snuff, and taking in his triumph an extra large double pinch, he sniffed it up.

  And then, Sheepshead sneezed.

  It was not general with him, snuff-accustomed as he was, to sneeze. It took him by surprise. Perhaps in his nervous malice he had overcharged the dose. His glasses slipped, his head shook violently sideways, eyes closed and mouth wide open.

  Louisa’s hand in turn darted forward. She too was excessive in excitement. One, two, three lights flashed in the air.

  Sheepshead opened his watery small nearly sightless eyes to find she extended to him her lace handkerchief.

  “God bless you, Sheepshead.”

  “Was it a sneeze?” asked the deaf wardress. “God bless you, sir.”

  Sheepshead stared at the handkerchief. Then he smiled, pushed up his glasses, and waved the lace away. “I thank you. No” He thrust back his chair. “Nothing must change hands. But you can keep the humbugs.”

  Louisa inclined her head, a noble rival in honorable defeat.

  “You mustn’t blame me, Sheepshead, for my try.”

  “There, there,” said the wardress, mistaking Sheepshead’s blowing nose as he left the cell, “don’t take it too hard. Do you know why we say bless you at a sneeze? It’s because the Devil tries to enter in at one!”

  “Just so,” said Sheepshead.

  “And blessing makes him fail.”

  “Just so.”

  * * * *

  Skeletal sunlight, thin, bright and hard, laid its mesh upon the courtroom as Louisa the dark and fair came into the dock. Escorted by her wardresses, she was like a tragic queen flanked by raven attendants. Her face had stayed flawless in innocence, and if she was not redolent of absolute homely goodness, yet she seemed pure, beyond the world, saint-like; holy.

  Handsome Meadham Trevis, her knight, offered her the smallest and most gentlemanly sign of courtesy and kindness. The judge burned his hearty Christmas red. The prosecution called at once for Mr. Sheepshead. Mr. Sheepshead, fortified by snuff and humbugs in the anteroom, entered.

  “Mr. Sheepshead, you were I believe Lord Maskullance’s butler, and later also his steward, for some fifteen years. Is that so?”

  “Yes. And before that a servant at the house.”

  “Which would seem to place you in an excellent position to know the ways of his lordship and the household in general.”

  Mr. Sheepshead affirmed that he felt it did.

  “How then did you react, when the young woman, identified only as “Louisa’, was brought into the house?”

  “I was at a loss, sir. But then, I trusted my master. He seemed to value the young lady, and I could do no less than show her every respect.”

  “The lady to whom you refer is here in the court?”

  Sheepshead indicated Louisa.

  And Louisa looked upon him in turn and observable on her crystalline face was the faintest disappointment, but only for an instant.

  “Louisa then was the companion, and subsequently became the ward, of your master, Lord Maskullance. She was put into his will.”

  Sheepshead agreed.

  “Did this enrage you?”

  “Not at all, sir. It made no difference to my portion.”

  “Did it, though, occur to you, Mr. Sheepshead, when Mr. George, and later Miss Maud, met their violent deaths, that by the arrangement of the will more was then to be shared by the remaining parties?”

  “It did not, directly, occur to me. However, had I considered it, I should have known that it was so.”

  “And do you imagine, Mr. Sheepshead, that this thought also occurred to Miss Louisa?”

  “I object, my lord,” said Meadham Trevis, rising like a gaunt and elegant heron from his seat. “My honourable friend requires his witness to be a telepath.”

  “Quite so,” admonished the judge. “The prosecution will be wary.”

  The prosecution bowed. The point had been made, dis­counted or not.

  Sheepshead was then questioned on the demeanour of Louisa during the series of savage and distressing deaths.

  “I can’t say, sir, very much on the lady’s demeanour. She was at all times very calm, as now, when she’s at trial for her life.”

  “You’ve said in your written statement, Mr. Sheepshead, that Louisa was always, and I must repeat, always, in the vicinity of those who perished exactly prior to their deaths.”

  A murmurous rumble went through the court and was rapped to silence.

  Sheepshead nodded. “On every occasion.”

  “You must describe these occasions.”

  Mr. Sheepshead did so. He reported spying Louisa on the beech walk with Mr. Georgie minutes before the horse appar­ently threw him. He described Louisa with Miss Maud upon the terrace, closeted in the Blue Room, and later travelling through the park late at night, towards the lake.

  “How did it happen, Mr. Sheepshead, that you were also near at hand that evening?”

  “I took an interest in the coverts and had gone to inspect them after dark as a fox had been seen.”

  Mr. Sheepshead went on to say that Louisa had also gone up to Agathena’s room and stayed some while, about an hour and a half before Agathena’s plummet down the stairs. No one else had gone near Agathena at that time. Louisa was also the last to leave the room where Millicent had fainted and might have manhandled her into the tureen. Louisa had also taken some of Millicent’s medicine and might have tampered with it.

  “We have no evidence of poison, Mr. Sheepshead.”

  Sheepshead spoke boldly. “She told me herself, sir, that I would take her for a witch.”

  A sort of gasp now from the gallery. Witchcraft, like headless horses and webbed-foot men of the mire was obsolete, yet scarcely forgotten.

  Meadham Trevis said, “Mr. Sheepshead will have a witness, I trust, to this latest accusation.”

  Mr. Sheepshead had not, however, or at least none that was useable.

  In the matter of Bleston, Louisa had been in the exact room during the young man’s Tit’. Lord Maskullance was also there and, once Louisa had visited him improperly in his bed chamber, Lord Maskullance too lay dead.

  When Sheepshead had finished, a pall of expectant horror crouched over the court. The judge frowned. The jury quivered. Only Louisa appeared unmoved, although she watched Sheeps­head almost without blinking. Delay might have been antici­pated, but this was great delay. And had the damage been done?

  “Lastly, Mr. Sheepshead, did you throughout this time go in fear for your own life?”

  “I believe that she practiced against me, but I was saved by accident. The tobacconist died in my place, I think. The lunatic had been given food intended for me. And my whistle.”

  Mr. Trevis rose to cross-examine.

  “Mr. Sheepshead, under the terms of the will, I understand that whoever was left alive, should other parties not endure, would receive the bulk of the estate and monies. Am I correct?”

  “Yes, sir, you are.”

  “And you also are a beneficiary, are you not?”

  “I am. His lordship was so good.”

  “Then, not to put a fine point on it, you, as much as this hapless girl, are set to inherit a far larger amount than you would have done had all these other unhappy persons survived.”

  From the gallery there was a cheer. It was brusquely sh
ushed.

  “It’s true that I stand to inherit a larger portion now.”

  “Well, we will leave that a moment. I wish to inquire, Mr. Sheepshead, if you believed this young girl strove to murder you, why you took no steps to protect yourself—I do not mention your employers—by seeking the help of the police?”

  Mr. Sheepshead paused in thought. It was genuine. He said, “These things were a family matter.”

  “Oh, come, Mr. Sheepshead. I am to credit that, with a rampant witch-murderess upon your track, and your master’s life in danger, you hesitated!”

  “I did, sir. I regret, I had no proof.”

  “Indeed,” said Mr. Trevis. “You had not. And let that too, pray, be noted.” And he grinned at the gallery at least two thirds of which was now applauding him.

  The judge suggested clearing the court of hooligans and pin-drop quiet fell.

  “Mr. Sheepshead,” said Mr. Trevis, “I brought myself to this court to defend the stainless character of a young girl. A girl perhaps mysterious because she has chosen to keep close past sorrows and to protect others than herself from prying eyes. A girl who has been pilloried by persons in this court for her honour in silence. I have no intention of breaching Louisa’s privacy. I have no intention even of calling upon her to make a statement. Her face speaks for itself. Whoever looks at her and does not see true purity, pure honesty, an unsmirched soul, is a beast and a madman, and I believe that none so base, foul or misdirected sits here in judgement today. With such a jury I need only say, Look at her! She needs no other defence. She need say no other word. Her being is evidence enough. But for you, sir,” and here Mr. Trevis drew himself up towering to his full, black winged height, “you. I would suggest that, steeped in jealousy and avarice, you have used this faultless girl, who has suffered enough in seeing a whole family made dear to her and then swept away, as a decoy for your own villainy. I suggest that if any fashioned a crime, it was you yourself. God knows how you did them, these heartless evil acts. But in your place you have planted Louisa. We have your word that she was here, and here, and here. But if she was there, then so were you. And could it not have been you? Have you not, strong old man that you are, twice the strength of delicate Louisa, to fling a man from a horse, to thrust a maiden in a lake, to doctor medicine and alcohol in such a way—per­fidious and incredible—that death followed. And have not you, sir, the power of manner to send a woman crazed by the grief of losing two of her children to fling herself to her doom down the stairs? Or to press a traitor’s pillow to a sleeping, trusting face? And sir, pray tell me, if Louisa is sent to the gallows, who is it that will then inherit all of Maskullance?”