CHAPTER V

KITTY IN GREY;
AND A CAT-OF-NINE-TAILS

THE PASSAGE OUTSIDE HAD ONLY TWO WINDOWS: one at the far end and one a little down on the right, over the staircase landing. As Giles bowed him out, Fenton remembered a new cause for trouble.

“Er—Giles!”

“At your command, master?” answered Giles, sticking round a wrinkled and more malapert face.

“In that manusc … that is to say, I call to mind this morning,” Fenton corrected himself, “you made mention of a certain Mistress Kitty …?”

“Kitty Softcover, the cook?”

“Tush, that’s it! The very name!”

“And upon whom, I also said,” added the remorseless Giles, “your own lewd eye hath so often been cast?”

“My meaning, as touches Kitty, runs thus. Are we … have we …?”

“Nay, now how should I know?” demanded Giles, pursing out his lips with a look of holiness. “If you are not yourself aware, then only God He knoweth. Yet it seems to me, master, you have acquired a singular delicacy of speech. I but said,” the wicked smile came round again, “you often cast your lecherous eye upon her: which fact, under favour, was as plain as a book with large print. Still, I will present them all to you in the study.”

It did not strike Giles in the least odd that he should introduce the master of the house to his own servants. But that, as Fenton reflected, was only natural. A man of quality would not condescend to learn the names or faces of lower servants, unless he had special reason to do so.

At the turn of the staircase they descended to the lower hall, and turned round so as to face the front door. And how that lower hall had changed, since he spoke to Mary Grenville in the front room on the left! It was now all black oak panelling and silver sconces, with one carved chest.

And the big front door stood wide open.

Though he had been prepared for it, yet Fenton was startled to find Pall Mall a little sylvan lane. There was a border of lime trees before his own front door. Sweet air stole into the hall. Fenton recalled that one of his neighbours was Madam Eleanor Gwynn, but he could not remember whether she had yet moved from the north side to the south side.

“If you will be pleased, sir …” murmured Giles.

“Stay a moment! Is Lord George yet come?”

“Over an hour gone by, sir.”

“Did he quiz you; did he make merry?”

“Nay, sir. He is in the stable, and happy. He but said … if your hearing be not still too delicate?”

“Now a pox on your sauciness!” roared Fenton, with so vivid an imitation of Sir Nick that Giles darted back as though from a blow. “What did he say? Speak plain!”

“Well! ‘If Nick be having only one of them, instead of two,’ quoth His Lordship, ‘then why is he taking so plaguey long about the business?’”

“But this morning—”

“I replied,” softly said Giles, “that you, being a good trencherman, liked oft to partake several times of the same plate. ‘Ay,’ quoth he, ‘there’s reason in that. Don’t trouble him.’”

Again Fenton glanced ahead. He could see, motionless to the right outside the front door, the porter on guard. He was lofty of manner and carried a tipstaff. He admitted desirable people and turned away undesirables: all without constantly opening and shutting the door, or fussing the occupants inside.

Fenton had always considered this an excellent old custom, which should have been kept up.

“Sir, sir!” implored Giles, beginning to open a door at the back of the hall. “If you will but deign to enter?”

Fenton entered.

The study, though small, was well stocked with calf-bound books from folio to octavo. Against one window facing the door a flat desk-table in heavy, polished, dark wood stood sideways to the window. But the East India Company had again done its best in the carpet, and the rest of the furniture was oak.

Even as he went in, Fenton sensed the atmosphere of tears and screams and huffings which must have beaten against these little walls. He thought of Lydia; his nature became harder, more ruthless than Sir Nick’s, because it was not wild or whirling; and Sir Nick’s anger lasted ten minutes at most.

Four persons were drawn up in a kind of semicircle, each a little way apart, to face him. On a carved cabinet standing against the right-hand wall, the cabinet being about as high as a man, a silver candelabrum held three branches of wax lights.

From a hook beside the door, Giles coolly took down a middle-­sized whip with nine leather thongs, each tipped with steel. This was the law, though the cat might be used only on suspicion of serious offence.

“I will point them out to you, sir,” said Giles, indicating the semicircle of one man and three women. Letting the thongs of the whip fall, he pointed with the handle towards the man on the extreme left.

“That is Big Tom, the sculleryman,” he said.

Big Tom, who lived up to his name both in breadth as well as height, shifted from one foot to the other as though in this way he might get less dirt on the carpet. His face was begrimed out of a mop of hair, as were his flannel shirt, his buff-leather doublet, and his leather apron: he was evidently an odd-jobs man. Though contemptuous of Giles, he eyed Fenton in a worship of awe. He ducked his head, touched his forelock, and only made a gurgle in his throat.

The whip moved to the right, towards the next person.

“Nan Curtis, the kitchenmaid,” said Giles.

Nan Curtis, overstout though less than thirty, had a round rosy face now drained of colour by fear, and a down-pulled lip like a baby. She wore a cap, and was tolerably clean save for a few oven stains. She sobbed audibly, and then was silent.

Yet, each time that whip moved, a thicker spasm of repressed fear or anger seemed to beat against these topheavy walls of books, or send a quiver amid three candle flames shining down on silver and polished wood.

“Next on the right,” said Giles, “we have Judith Pamphlin. Our lady’s chambermaid.”

Fenton studied this chambermaid, remembering Lydia.

Judith Pamphlin was a thin, tall, harsh-featured virgin in her late forties. Her sparse hair was done into tight curls close to her head. Hands folded, she stood bolt upright in a tight-laced frock of grey wool.

No, Lydia would not like her. And yet …

“Finally,” said Giles, moving the whip, “this is Kitty Softcover, the cook.”

Fenton looked at her coldly and steadily, with hard appraisal.

Kitty seemed the meekest of them all. She was small, plump, and about nineteen years old. Though her loose blouse of coarse linen and her drab wool skirt had suffered from working over fire and turnspit, she had only a faint smut on the side of her nose. What Fenton first noticed was her hair.

It was thick and heavy, of that very dark red colour which seems to ripple with lighter gleams. The candle flames set it a-glow. She raised her head and gave Fenton a brief glance out of eyes so dark blue that they seemed almost black. They were large eyes, too large eyes for the small bold face and overbold nose.

Yet her glance was that of a woman who has been intimate with him: secret, knowledgeable, faintly defiant. Kitty was the only one who spoke.

“Sir, sir, you’d not harm me?” she asked humbly, in a light voice but with so thick an accent that Fenton hardly understood her.

“You all know,” he ignored her and turned to the rest, “that your lady mistress is being poisoned with slow poison named arsenic. She partook of it, we think, in a bowl of sack posset prepared in the kitchen and carried up each day. Slow poison does not occur by accident. Who prepared this sack posset?”

“Sir, ’twas me,” replied Kitty. Again she gave him that intimate, close-knit glance. “What I know!” it seemed to say.

“You prepared it always?”

“Always,” nodded Kitty. Slowly she turned her chin sideways. “But there’s many, passing in and out the kitchen, can swear I had no hand in it.”

“Who carried the sack posset to my wife?”

He looked at the rigid, harsh-featured Judith Pamphlin, who had now folded her arms tightly across her flat breast. Her lips had become a white, locked line. She seemed debating whether or not to trouble with answering him. When she spoke, her lip opened downwards.

“I did carry it.”

“Judith Pamphlin,” said Fenton, “how long have you been chambermaid to my wife?”

“I was her servant long before she had the ill fortune to marry you,” replied Judith, with a through-the-nose twang but looking steadily into his eyes. “When you have taken a large cup overnight, and were out of your wits, I have heard you call her Roundhead bitch, scum of the Conventicle, spawn of a regicide.”

Fenton looked at her.

“Giles, give me the whip,” he said quietly.

Giles handed it over.

Fenton looked back at her with a gaze colder, steadier than Judith’s own. These were not Sir Nick’s tactics, all bull’s roar and have-at-you, which a strong-minded woman could have met. Fenton was beating down her mind and will, slowly, because his mind and will were superior to her own.

Seconds appeared to stretch into minutes, while that cold look went on. Then he saw Judith Pamphlin’s eyelids begin to turn and lower. Not far to his right Fenton had noticed a high, heavy chair. As soon as he saw her eyelids flicker, he raised the cat-of-nine-tails high and brought it down with all the power of his arm at the meeting of the chair back with one chair arm. The thongs hissed and thudded, but with no more terrifying effect than the rattle-clack of steel tips.

They bit; they gouged raw and ugly wounds into wood, as into flesh; and the heavy chair jumped and cracked.

“Woman,” said Fenton, “you will never speak so to me again.”

There was a pause. Giles Collins was as white as a ghost.

“Nay,” muttered Judith, “I … I think I shall not.”

“What do you call me?”

“Master.”

A shudder went round the group, except for stolid Big Tom.

“Good,” said Fenton in the same expressionless voice, and handed back the whip to Giles. “When the sack posset was prepared in the kitchen, were ever you here to see it done?”

“I never once failed to see it prepared,” returned Judith Pamphlin, bolt upright but conquered. Her harsh voice sounded shaken.

“How? Did you suspect poison?”

“Nay, not poison. But this slattern,” Judith shot out a long thin arm towards Kitty, “hath been lewd and thievish since her breasts grew: she casting eyes on all ’prentices or suchlike, and wheedling them to steal for her.” Judith’s voice rose. “The Laard’s justice condemneth her already to the lake of burning pitch, and the fire that …”

“Forebear this Puritan cant. I will hear none of it.”

Judith Pamphlin folded her arms tightly, and was again silent.

But Kitty, he noticed out of the corner of his eye, no longer pretended meekness. Her small plump shoulders were crouched, and she turned too-large eyes of hatred on Judith. The small thick upper lip had risen, showing bad teeth.

“This arsenic,” Fenton continued, “is a white powder, or,” he remembered what it was more likely to be in this age, “it may have been a small white bit from a larger cake. Judith, could the cook have put this into the sack posset without your notice?”

Judith, hating Kitty, but in iron fairness, opened and shut her lips on one word.

“No,” she said.

“You are sure?”

“’Twould not have escaped me.”

“When you passed abovestairs, carrying the bowl to my wife’s room, did any person bid you pause, or try to trap your attention otherwise, so that poison might have been put there?”

“There was none. Not ever.”

“So!” said Fenton, after a pause. “You had best hear, then, that I intrust you and I think you faithful. A word aside with you.”

Fenton backed towards the door of the study, setting the door halfway open. Judith Pamphlin, who had been standing with her back to the desk at the window—how much that same desk figured in Giles Collins’s account!—Judith darted a look of suspicion at him. But, when she marched across the room towards the door, she seemed a little less rigid.

“Precede me,” Fenton said curtly, as she stopped at the door.

The woman hesitated long, then ducked her head in obedience and marched out. Fenton, following her out into the dim hall, all but closed the door and set only his fingers inside it.

“Go quickly to the kitchen,” he said in a low voice, “and prepare this. One large spoonful, of the sort I have seen in a museu—of the sort to eat soup at table, of powdered mustard. You have powdered mustard?”

Judith did not reply; she merely nodded.

“This in a glass or cup of warm water. To follow it if necessary, salt water or greasy water. Have you,” here his immense memory for minutiae faltered, “have you oil of olives?”

Judith nodded.

“This in equal parts with the juice of China oranges,” he pronounced it chaney, “and give it often. Barley water in plenty. Hot stones or bricks at the feet. All this should serve. Should my lady wife afterwards be weak, hot cloths to the abdomen and …” (No, of course there would be no morphine!) “Stop: have you laudanum?”

Another nod.

“A strong dose of laudanum, powdered and in water, to keep her drowsy for a few hours. By late afternoon, we shall see a different person. Quickly, now! Put on a salver such things as you immediately need; then return here, and tap at the door.”

Judith nodded, and turned away.

“Stay now! One moment more!” Fenton added.

“At your command, master.”

“I think you faithful. No guilty woman would dare speak as you did. Then why, tell me, does my wife mislike you, and run away, and bolt the door against you when she is ill?”

Unexpectedly, an odd kind of emotion half-stirred behind that emotionless face. Judith Pamphlin touched her cheek.

“Because I am hard-favoured, which is but the Laard’s will. Because I would help her, and well she knows I hate you. Because, as in childhood, I would teach her what is the will of the Laard …”

“Again, woman: forbear your Puritan cant!”

“I know the will of the Laard!”

“What humility! How wiser than the wisest of men!”

“Nay,” said Judith, all but shrinking up, “I am humble, the humblest of creatures …”

“Yet you know His will. Attend to me: say but one word of your gibberish to my wife, and I will not have you flogged. You don’t fear a flogging.” (He knew her, and she sensed that; her eyes moved sideways.) “But I will have you turned into the street, and she will die.”

“In some ways,” said Judith Pamphlin, again defeated, “you do well.” In a queer croak of something like respect she added: “Master.”

Then, bolt upright, she marched towards a very small stairway leading down under the main stairs.

For a long time Fenton stood motionless, his fingers inside the door, looking towards the front door and the border of lime trees.

Towards anything that endangered Lydia, he was not angry: he was only merciless. Though he fought against history and the devil together, he swore she should not die. Then who was the author of the mischief?

Plainest of all was Kitty Softcover, despite Judith’s statement. There could be no doubt that Kitty was Sir Nick’s latest conquest. Fenton did not like her in the least. For all her bodily charm, for all her insinuating large eyes and her magnificent red hair, he sensed that Kitty was as cold as a fish and had the instincts of a magpie. What a fool Sir Nick was!

Compare Kitty, for instance, with Meg York. Compare the redhead dullard against Meg’s wit and Meg’s physical presence! (Now why was he making such comparisons?)

True, he himself had been the first to suspect Meg. But that estimate had come entirely from reading Giles Collins’s narrative. Now that he had seen most of these persons, and weighed them up in judgment, his conclusions about Meg were different.

Meg, of course, might easily commit murder. He had almost seen her do it. But Meg would kill only in one sudden flare of violence, with dagger or pistol; swiftly, before the fit died. Slow, laborious poisoning would not be quick enough for her. She would administer enough arsenic to kill ten persons, or none at all. And in this she was exactly like Sir Nick.

Yet someone …

Fenton hesitated. There was another possibility, beside the plain course in Giles’s account. He could apply a certain test. Settling his periwig, still butting against history and the devil, Fenton went into the study and closed the door behind him.

Each person stood in the same place. Only the wax lights leaped at the draught of the closing door.

“It would seem,” said Fenton, “that Mistress Pamphlin is now cleared. There remain but three of you.”

Nan Curtis, the young but too-stout kitchenmaid in the cloth cap, could no longer be repressed. She put her hands to the sides of the cap, as though stricken with toothache, and tears trickled down her cheeks.

“Oh, we are poor wretches in poor plight!” she cried out, so that Fenton could not help feeling sympathy for her. “We are undone, Tom! Tom, we are undone!”

“Nay!” growled Big Tom in heavy bass, and boomed away in so thick an accent that Fenton called Giles to translate.

“Why, sir,” smiled Giles, rattling the whip, “his talk runs thus, since he much admires you. ‘Harm him or his own? Him, the best swordsman in all England?’”

Fenton was taken aback. “It is increasingly clear,” he thought, “that I am notorious for my rapier play. If only they knew the feeble truth!”

“I thank you, Tom,” he said with courtesy. “I would wish it so, if I could.”

During this time Kitty Softcover watched him openly, and disturbingly as though she saw a different man there. Her eyes were as quick and alert as those of a magpie with a bright new thimble clutched in its beak. She sidled up to Fenton.

“Pray, sir,” she begged, with a wheedling look and half-smile, “you say Mistress Pamphlin is cleared. Well! Am I not cleared too? Didst not hear (eh) the bracket-face say I put in no poison?” Her voice dropped to an intimate whisper. “Tip us truth, dear Rome-Culle.” Up went her voice. “Am I not cleared too?”

Fenton looked her up and down, without favour.

“That, good wench, depends upon her eyesight and your own daring. Still! Let us suppose, for discourse’ sake, that you are all innocent. Now stand aside.”

Kitty showed her teeth. Fenton, ignoring her, went to the desk of polished dark wood set endways to the window. He moved round to the desk chair. For so many years he had conned Giles’s script that he had fully memorized it. His mind’s eye saw the curling characters of the script flow across in front of him.

“… mid-afternoon of Monday, 9th May [it ran; the 9th May was yesterday], as I Remember, that Sir Nicholas discovered, in the desk in his Study, a paper packet. On it was writ, in clarkly Hand, the words, ‘Arsenick, Deadly Poyson.’ Under this was a Mark or Desy’n in blue ink. Being much surpryz’d, Sir Nicholas did summon me to ask, How came it there? I reply’d, That I knew not. But what make you, saith He, of this Mark here? Why, sir, I make no doubt ’tis the street-desy’n that hangs above the Door of some Apothecary. …”

Fenton cleared the memory of the manuscript from his mind and looked down at the desk. Except in imagination, he had never seen it. It had only one drawer, underneath the flat top. Someone, who for once was not Sir Nick, had put there a “paper packet.” He pulled open the squeaky drawer.

Well, it was still there. A little rumpled, but fresh. Heavy whitish paper, about three inches wide, folded lengthwise and tucked over at each end. Rather thick, too. He touched it, and found the contents in powdered form after all. White arsenic, old when Greece was young. And enough of it to satisfy old Locusta herself.

He turned round from the desk, opening out the packet gingerly.

“Here’s arsenic,” he said. “The poison itself. Which of you finds it familiar?”

Big Tom growled and shook his head. Nan Curtis, after one quick glance of insatiable curiosity, fell to sobbing again. Kitty, who had retreated into the shadow of the high cabinet, muttered words so low-voiced that Fenton nearly missed them.

“Stow your whids, Rome-Culle!” she breathed. “The’ talkst overmuch!”

“Now tell me,” Fenton addressed Nan Curtis gently, to prevent screams. “These materials for my lady’s sack posset: are they drawn from common stock in the house, or are they kept apart in particular for the posset?”

“Nay, sir,” sobbed Nan, after pausing to consider what he meant. “They are all kept apart, each in particular. Even the milk is fresh-fetched from the dairy.”

“Now here’s an admirable thing!” declared Fenton. “Here’s a way to explain much! What’s the answer, Giles? Do you apprehend it, Giles?”

He said this out of pure devilment. At that moment Giles was leaning round the side of the high cabinet and looking at Kitty, who did not see him. Giles’s upstanding light-red hair and Kitty’s dark-red gleaming hair stood out against dark wood carved in satyrs’ heads. Giles’s expression, as his eyes devoured Kitty, was more goatish than the carved heads.

But you could not catch him off balance. He was himself almost instantly.

“Why, sir,” he replied, “I call it simple.”

“How?”

“Sir, we learn that no poison was dropped into the bowl by … by this poor wench. We learn that none touched the bowl as it was carried up. Then, mayhap, the poison was in one of the ingredients before the posset was made.”

“Good, fair Giles!” Fenton faced the other three. “Now if this be so, we have a plain way to try it. We descend to the kitchen. We prepare a sack posset precisely as ’tis done for my lady. And all of you shall drink of it.”

Except for a high wind prowling at the window, the study was so deathly quiet that there was not even the scrape of a foot. Slowly, as his meaning penetrated, the lines in their faces altered.

“Ay; good!” Big Tom roared suddenly, and rumbled out some words which were evidently meant for approval.

Nan Curtis, even her cap now tear-drenched, fell on her knees.

“Nay, master, would you kill us all that are but your poor servants?”

“Kill you?” inquired Fenton. “Is my wife dead?”

Holding the paper packet of arsenic in front of them, he slowly refolded it, tucked over the ends, and put it into the deep right-hand pocket of his coat.

“You will suffer,” he said, “but a day of cramp; perhaps, if the dose should be strong, a sense that a fire is lit in your belly, and will not be put out. There is one part of the test. Should any draw back, or refuse to drink …”

He paused, and then went on. “Nay, I have not done. It may be there is no poison in the bowl. But that I, detecting one reluctant to drink,” he touched his pocket, “may conjure into the bowl enough of arsenic to ensure death. So that only the guilty shall suffer, and the innocent take no harm. In either case, one who should refuse to drink …”

“I refuse,” said Kitty.

Again Fenton looked her up and down, without favour.

“Do you so? Then we must try the other way.”

Kitty opened her mouth, showing the bad teeth, but shut it again. She stood with her back to the cabinet, arms outspread on either side, each hand grasping a satyr’s head.

“If t’ mean tha’ cat—”

“Not at all. We must fetch you up before each magistrate, until we find the one who knows. Now I’ll lay a gold angel to a lead shilling, by way of wager, that you’ve already been charged with theft or other offence that’s a matter for hanging. You’re a handsome mort, overaged at nineteen. Why do you huddle here, over a hot fire in a vile hole, except for safety’s sake?”

Kitty’s eyes grew narrow and ugly.

“Plant your whids, cokir!” she sneered. “Me a thief? Th’ couldst na know!”

“I could not know? Come! You discovered it a pleasure, I suppose, to prattle sweet nonsense into the ear of thick-witted Sir Nick Fenton? Myself, yes! All so artless, that you could laugh inside you and he was befooled?”

Then Fenton’s voice lashed out at her like the whip.

“But I am not your ‘rich coxcomb,’” he said, “as twice you dubbed me with ‘Rome-Culle.’ I need not be wary, as you bade me with, ‘Stow your whids!’ Now you have shouted, ‘Have a care what you say, liar,’ I know your place in life. —You forget I speak thieves’ cant too.”

With an effort Kitty threw off both dialect and thick speech.

“What I can speak of you …!”

“Then speak it. But first choose. Shall it be the sack posset—or the magistrate?”

There was a sharp rapping on the door of the study, which was instantly thrown open.

“Now, scratch me,” proclaimed a genial, hearty, what-does-it-matter voice, “but I’ve sought you in every nook and cranny of this house except a room with books in it. I take it as a favour, Nick, scratch me if I don’t, that at last you ceased pleasuring your wife and clapped on your clothes to meet me. ’Twas to be eight-thirty prompt, d’ye recall? I near died in the waking up. And now …”

Here the voice stopped short.

Into the room blew a large breath of the stable and of heavy white wine, but overcoming more offensive air from below. Fenton turned round, and immediately grinned. The engraver made it easiest of all to recognize Lord George Harwell.

George’s broad-brimmed beaver-skin hat, which had a low crown with a gold band, was stuck rakishly on his long flaxen periwig. Out of this frame twinkled brown bold eyes, together with a good-sized nose, a narrow line of (blond) moustache, a broad grin, and the suggestion of a second chin.

Though George was two inches taller than Fenton, he had grown a little stout; it impeded, or so Giles wrote, his fine swordplay. Wearing purple velvet, his fingers afire with jewelled rings, with ruffles at his wrist and a fine fall of lace at his throat, the newcomer made the gaudy display he intended.

George sensed there was something wrong here; he frowned; yet he could not quite seem to find it. He and Fenton went through the formula of friendship.

“George!” said the latter affectionately. “May your soul rot as deep among cinders as Oliver’s!”

“Nick!” said George, with sincere affection. “May you have the pox worse than Charles Sedley, and every doctor in the world struck dead!”

During these amenities, George had been industriously clearing his shoes of stable mire against the lower edge of the door.

“Nay, pay no heed to my manners,” he advised everybody in general, trying to look tragic. “I’ve been a ruined man since my christening; stay; no jest; dead earnest! I’ve told people a thousand times—” He paused, and his eyes rested on Giles. “Come! Did I ever tell you?”

“No, my lord,” lied Giles, with a deep bow.

“Didn’t I? Scratch me!” said Lord George Harwell, with honest brown eyes bulging out. “Well, ’tis no secret. We’re good old stock in general. But my cursed granddam was a cursed Germanic frog; my cur—blessed parents wanted her money; they christened me George. (My name is George).” None could now doubt his sincerity. “Foggy Germanic name like everlasting rheumatics. May God send there be never another German George in this land.”

“Amen to that,” Fenton said grimly. “But I much fear you won’t have your wish.”

“And how not? If—”

For the first time George really looked at Giles Collins, and saw the steel-tipped thongs of the whip. He placed the elusive sense of wrongness.

“That’s it!” he muttered. George snapped his fingers, and shifting colours of diamond and ruby and emerald burned against the silver setting of his rings. Kitty, who had again become a truly beautiful woman, could not take her eyes from them.

“Here’s a court; here’s judge and jury; here’s a trial,” George said hastily. His sword, with a pierced-silver guard and even a smooth silver grip, blundered and clattered against the door as he turned round. “Nay, Nick, I’ll leave you. These things must be done; but I don’t like ’em. The stable, now …”

From the corner of his eye Fenton saw Judith Pamphlin marching upstairs with a large laden tray.

“Don’t go, George. My business here is ended, for the moment. —Giles!”

“Sir?”

“Keep them in this room,” Fenton nodded at the group, “until I return. Let them be easy; give them chairs; but none is to stir belowstairs, lest matters be tampered with. Lord George and I have business of moment; but we shall be short.”

Now that he saw removed (for a time, at least) the prospect of a flogging which could half-kill a woman in twenty lashes, George’s rosy face broadened and beamed.

“Scratch me, but there’s a fine wench!” he exclaimed, nodding broad-brimmed hat and flaxen peruke towards Kitty. “How d’ye go, m’girl?”

“The better for your lordship’s notice, my lord,” sweetly answered Kitty, with a low curtsy.

“Hah!” said George, delighted. “Nick, she has wit too! Eh?”

“It is remotely possible.”

“But look you, Nick! This ‘business of moment.’ In your letter you were so cursed mystérieux (as the French say, curse ’em) that I understood no word of it.”

Fenton took from his pocket the wrapped-up poison and handed it to him.

“I found it yesterday, hidden unbeknownst to me. Read the inscription.”

“Poison!” said George, shrinking back and holding the packet as though it might burn him. “Here, be quick; have it back!”

Fenton took it. Though George always plunged headlong into a fight, saying with tears that he was a man of peace, the presence of arsenic scared the colour from his face.

“D’ye think, now,” he said, “that already it might have infected my hand? Causing it to swell up and turn black? Nay; dead earnest! Do ye?”

“Come, man, there’s no harm here! Observe how I touch it. Now, then: did you note the mark or design drawn in blue ink under the writing?”

“I … to speak truth …”

“Well! I made nothing of it, until Giles Collins aided me. ’Twas the street sign above the door of an apothecary, he said.”

“Eh? How?”

“The design is like to a mortar, with a pestle above it. Some sign, it might be, as the Blue Mortar.” (Here Giles smirked complacently, and contemplated a corner of the ceiling.) “If we fetched in a street porter, he might well know the place itself.”

“And did the porter know?”

“At once,” said Fenton, quoting the manuscript. “At the sign of the Blue Mortar, in Dead Man’s Lane, off the Strand by the Savage’s Head. We go there to discover who bought the arsenic of the apothecary.”

“Ah, crafty!” nodded George, who was never conspicuous for his shining intellect. “Crafty as a daggle-gown at Westminster Hall! Are we ready now?”
“Yes. I have but to go upstairs, presenting my person to my wife …”

George’s eyes bulged out. “Ecod, Nick! Not again?”

“Your mind, good fellow, is more nauseous than Snow Hill in August. Lydia must hear my voice, and know it for mine. Then …”

Fenton paused. Though he could not have said why, a premonition of dread shot through him.

“To the Blue Mortar,” he said, “in Dead Man’s Lane!”