Chapter Thirty-Nine

Helen sat next to her grandmother’s bed. She had forced Gloria to go home but had coaxed Dr Parker and the ward nurse into letting her stay. Henrietta had just had another unnatural tremor and Helen had taken hold of her hand to try and soothe her – to make it go away.

Make it all go away.

She felt angry. Desperate. She and her grandmother should be getting excited about her new outfit, about the Christmas Extravaganza – about her coming to live back home. She was on the cusp of so many good things – and now this had happened. Although what ‘this’ was, she didn’t know. And more worryingly, neither did John, who was presently holed up in one of the consulting rooms with his head in a load of textbooks, desperately trying to find a possible answer. She felt awful for being so sharp with him earlier, but she couldn’t give up – and she couldn’t have him give up, either.

‘Grandmama,’ she whispered to Henrietta, ‘I want you to know that I won’t let you die. And I won’t let you give up.’ She moved nearer to the bed. ‘Because something tells me you might … But I’m telling you now that you can’t.’ She looked around and checked no one could hear her words. They were for her grandmother’s ears only. The three other patients in the ward were still sleeping.

‘I know what you think,’ she said. ‘You think you’re to blame for those poor girls and what happened to them. But you’re not, Grandmama. You’re not. Like Kate said that day, there’s only one person to blame for what happened back then and it’s most certainly not you.’ Helen could feel the anger rising. She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. ‘So, if you have a shadow of a doubt about that, I want you to shoo it away. And then I want you to use all your strength to beat whatever it is that has got a grip of you.’

Helen swallowed hard, forcing back the tears.

‘I know it sounds selfish, Grandmama, but you’ve got to pull through. For me. You can’t leave me now – not when I’ve just found you.’ She reached over with her other hand and gently touched Henrietta’s cheek. ‘It’s not on, you hear me – it’s just not on.’ As she spoke, tears started to trickle down her face. She thought of the last time she had been in this hospital. She had lost her unborn child. A baby that might have only been four months in the making, but whom she had loved more than anything else in the world. Now here she was in this damned hospital once again – and it was looking ever more likely that she was again going to lose someone she loved.

So immersed was Helen in her one-way conversation with Henrietta that she didn’t hear the ward doors swing open, nor a soft muttering of voices. It was only when she caught sight of the nurse walking towards her that she looked up and saw an anxious-looking Dorothy and Bobby standing by the entrance. She wiped away the tears from her face.

‘Miss Crawford,’ the nurse said, ‘there’s a man and a woman here to see you. I can’t have anyone else in the ward. Not outside of visiting times. I’m breaking the rules allowing you to be here.’ Her words were spoken with empathy rather than as a reprimand.

Helen got up and walked over to them. All three went out into the corridor.

‘Henrietta’s been poisoned,’ Dorothy said straight away. There was no time to lose. ‘By a plant!’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Helen, looking at Dorothy and Bobby. They were both out of breath and flushed. ‘Why would Grandmama eat a plant?’ she asked them. For a horrible moment, she had an image of Henrietta finding some poisonous plant and eating it to assuage her guilt. To punish herself.

Bobby shook his head. ‘We don’t think your grandmother knew she was being poisoned.’

Helen looked at them both. The penny finally dropping.

‘You think someone else tried to poison her?’

Bobby and Dorothy nodded. Their faces grim.

‘But what’s really important,’ Bobby continued, not wanting to distract Helen by pointing the finger of blame, ‘is that we’re pretty sure we know what it is that’s causing Henrietta to be so ill.’

‘A young boy gave us a note – a clue – saying to go to the Winter Gardens,’ Dorothy blurted out. ‘That whatever was making Henrietta ill was there.’ Dorothy felt as if the words in her head were tripping over themselves to get out. ‘We’ve just seen a plant in there – we were in the beautiful but deadly section. It’s one that cows eat and it causes their milk to be poisonous.’

Helen looked from Dorothy to Bobby. ‘A note?’ she asked, confused. ‘The Winter Gardens?’

‘We can explain all that later,’ Bobby said. How could you tell someone that it looked highly likely that their grandfather had tried to kill their grandmother? ‘But what you need to know now is that we’re pretty sure we know what’s making your grandma so ill.’ He looked around nervously to check that no one could overhear their conversation.

‘Abraham Lincoln’s wife – I mean, mum – died of it,’ Dorothy butted in.

Helen looked at Dorothy. Now she was speaking gobbledegook. What did Abraham Lincoln’s mother have to do with all of this?

‘It causes the exact same symptoms Henrietta is suffering from,’ Dorothy said.

Helen realised her grandmother was being offered a lifeline. It might be tenuous, but she was going to grab it for all it was worth.

‘Come on, talk to me as we walk. We’re going to see John,’ she said, as she started marching down the corridor.