Deadly Affair: A Georgian Historical Mystery (Alec Halsey Crimance) (18 page)

“Thank you, sir. I have two in mind:
Taxus baccata
and
Aconitum napellus
. That’s Yew and Monkshood, sir,” Tam explained. “I can’t decide which was used. Both are equally toxic and readily available. Both produce symptoms experienced by a victim of a heart attack. Yew leaves can be made into a tea which, when swallowed by a female, will bring on her infant before its time. More often than not both mother and infant die in the attempt. Monkshood, or more correctly, aconite, is used in tinctures and as an ingredient of liniment, which, if applied
externally
, is not fatal. However, if
ingested
, and often this is in a powdered form added to other ingredients, then death can occur within minutes.”

“Powder?” Alec enunciated, blue-eyed gaze fixed on Tam. “Blended powder? Snuff. The poison could’ve been mixed into Blackwell’s snuff. Is that possible?”

“Certainly, sir. As I said, aconite is readily available as a powder. In fact, to blend a lethal dose of poison into a man’s snuff would be a simple and effective way of committing murder with least suspicion.”

“Precisely! Especially if the victim appears to all the world as if he’s had a heart attack,” Alec said as he took another turn around the table. “A man’s snuff is his personal domain, especially to a man such as Blackwell who was not used to the etiquette of communal dipping. He mentioned that snuff taking was new to him; that he had recently been given a superior blend. He showed me an ornate gold snuffbox. A gift he said...” Alec stopped his pacing and leaned his palms on the billiard table’s polished mahogany frame and looked at his valet. “Blackwell’s snuffbox was an identical twin to that carried by the Duke of Cleveley.”

Tam’s eyes widened and he let out a low whistle. “Perhaps the snuff Mr. Blackwell snorted was intended for the Duke? Perhaps, in the course of the evening, their boxes got switched and Mr. Blackwell dipped into the Duke’s snuffbox by mistake? Seems likely, don’t it, sir? After all, Mr. Blackwell had no enemies, well not the Blackwell we knew, whereas the Duke must have plenty. Stands to reason someone might want to do away with him.”

“I don’t doubt
the great man’s
political actions have made him enemies over the years, but to want him dead because of them? That’s the wish of a madman.”

“Poisoning is the act of a madman, sir.”

“Poisoning,” said Alec as he thrust Tam’s leather-bound textbook back at him when the butler trod into the room to announce nuncheon, “is the act of a coward.”

When Alec entered the dining room he was pleasantly surprised to discover his uncle partaking of a hearty late breakfast, grizzled head still swathed in bandages, a little lopsided from a restless night’s sleep, and a richly embroidered banyan thrown negligently over his crumpled nightshirt. Yet it was the visitor sitting across from the old man that brought Alec up short. A fresh-faced young man with a receding chin and overlarge front teeth was enjoying a plate of egg and kippers and a tankard of ale. He was wearing a frockcoat of canary yellow damask. This garment of dandified fashion was so ill-fittingly tight that it rounded the young man’s shoulders; excessive and ill-advised movement having split the seams of the watered damask in several places along both arms where the sleeves were attached.

Plantagenet Halsey hailed his nephew with a friendly wave of his fork and mischievously announced him to the visitor as the Marquess Halsey, whereupon the young man dropped his knife and fork onto his plate with a clatter and shot up off his chair. He swallowed whole a mouth full of egg as he hastily doubled over in a bow befitting a foreign potentate, the dirty lace ruffles at his wrists trailing in coddled egg.

“Thaddeus Fanshawe Esquire, attorney at law and your most obedient, my lord,” the young man announced grand-eloquently, and when politely asked to resume his seat, did so with another series of small bows that threatened to overset his wig
a la pigeon
. “I’m most grateful to Mr. Halsey for obligingly offering to share his breakfast, my lord,” he said by way of an apology for picking up his knife and fork and savagely splicing a kipper in two. “And I beg your lordship’s understanding when I tell you I’ve not eaten since breakfast yesterday. I must own that there is nothing more soothing to troubled nerves than a large plate of warm egg.”

“Sharing his breakfast is the least my uncle could do given, and correct me if I am wrong, he took a direct hit to the head in your defense, Mr. Fanshawe?”

“I offer my humble apologies to your lordship, as I have to Mr. Halsey, for causing him to suffer at the hands of those two brutes who accosted me in the laneway,” the lawyer replied seriously, oblivious to Alec’s heavy irony. “I would not for the world have followed Mr. Halsey from the anti-slavery meeting had I realized I myself was being followed, and by two such fiends. I feared for my life, I may tell you, my lord, and still do!” He licked his rabbit-like front teeth, dropped his voice to a whisper and lifted his gaze from Alec’s elaborately tied linen cravat to his unblinking blue eyes. “I have not dared to venture home for fear of those thugs doing violence to my family and thus you find me at your table in such a deplorably bad-mannered state of dress.”

“You don’t suppose the men who followed you know your name and your direction and may go to your home in spite of your absence from it?” Alec asked lightly, spreading a linen napkin across his lap.

“I did have such a wild thought, my lord,” Thaddeus Fanshawe agreed earnestly, eyes very round, “and so I sent a link boy with a message for my father to keep the front door bolted and on no account open the door to strangers—”

“—particularly strangers dressed in the Cleveley livery?” prompted Alec.

Thaddeus Fanshawe blinked and looked to the old man for confirmation. “My lord? Cleveley livery? Indeed! Those fiends were in the pay of the Duke of Cleveley? I did not know.” He smiled deprecatingly. “It is my great misfortune to be blind to many colors, my lord, and so one Duke’s livery is as much the shade of another’s.”

Hence the canary-yellow frockcoat, thought Alec, smiling to himself and exchanging a glance and the same thought with his uncle as he picked up his wine glass. No doubt an underpaid tailor’s prank, or a gift from a prankster brother. “And has the beneficial effects of warm egg reduced the bump and pain to your head, Uncle?”

“Egg and Fanshawe’s company have done me wonders,” Plantagenet Halsey replied briskly, though he did not in the least feel hearty. He should’ve had a breakfast tray sent up to his room, the thump to his head was still that bad, but the opportunity to interrogate the buck-toothed lawyer was not to be missed. Thus, he ignored his nephew’s note of censure and smiled encouragingly at the visitor. “Fanshawe, be good enough to explain to his lordship what you were doin’ followin’ me from me meetin’.”

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir,” said Thaddeus Fanshawe and addressed himself exclusively to Alec. “Mr. Blackwell asked that I seek out Mr. Halsey at a meeting of the anti-slavery league because, he said, it was the only place Mr. Halsey and myself could converse without the circumstance being reported to certain persons within the Cleveley House, by which I took him to mean he did not wish His Grace to know of my mission on Mr. Blackwell’s behalf. And now I discover that the thugs who accosted me were in the Duke’s employ!” He licked his wet lips free of ale. “I may tell your lordship I was never more terrified for my life than when those fiends loomed large over me demanding that I hand over Mr. Blackwell’s will. Had it not been for Mr. Halsey’s timely intervention I shudder to think of the consequences to my person of such an encounter!”

Alec glanced at his uncle’s bandaged head but refrained from commenting.

“Do you have any idea why the Duke’s liveried servants would demand Blackwell’s will when surely, as signatory, the Duke of Cleveley was well aware of the vicars wishes?”

“I wish I knew, my lord. For it makes no sense. As you say, His Grace knew only too well the contents of Mr. Blackwell’s will. Indeed, if he feared I was in possession of a copy of the earlier will then I understand his wish to retrieve it. For he made me assure him on no less than two occasions that there was but one copy of Mr. Blackwell’s original will and this I had placed in his hands under Mr. Blackwell’s instruction. As we all then witnessed the burning of that particular document in the grate of his fireplace, His Grace must surely have been satisfied as to its destruction. Indeed, he was most insistent that we all remain in the room until the parchment had turned to ash.”

“What was in Blackwell’s original will that Cleveley would want it turned to ash?” asked Plantagenet Halsey. “Can you tell us that, Fanshawe?”

“Most certainly, sir, for the second will was just like the first. All beneficiaries and their legacies remained unchanged. Reference to certain inconsequential particulars regarding the beneficiaries were removed, as was reference to the main beneficiary’s mother. I can only say that the removal of such wordage made the second will a much more succinct and unsentimental document and perhaps that was His Grace’s object? There was one other change, and one that was insisted upon by His Grace to which Blackwell most reluctantly acquiesced. That was the removal of one of the two executors, leaving the Duke as sole executor of Blackwell’s estate.”

“As my uncle and I have read the will you placed in my uncle’s pocket during the scuffle there can be little harm in you elaborating on the contents of the original.”

Alec said this with such a nice smile as he put down his knife and fork to take up his wine glass that the lawyer smiled back, thinking he had been asked rather than told and so did not hesitate, saying in a confidential tone, as two soft-footed footmen removed and replaced dishes from the table,

“Not at all, my lord, for Mr. Blackwell requested of me most strongly that his last will and testament be given to his good friend Mr. Plantagenet Halsey, for it was he who had been named one of the executors of the first will and whom His Grace was most insistent must be removed—”

“
What
? The Devil!” exclaimed Plantagenet Halsey, half out of his chair. His fist came down so hard upon the table that the wine glasses rattled. “The lousy livid cur! Of all the mean despicable acts! To bully a meek-mannered man like Blackwell into removin’ me from carryin’ out his last wishes! Ha!” He sat down again and adjusted the slide of his bandages from his left eye. “But it don’t surprise me that leech would stoop to such craven tactics all to get an advantage for himself for I’d not have let him get away with a penny more than was due to him!”

“But, sir, the Duke of Cleveley did not stand to gain from Mr. Blackwell’s will,” Thaddeus Fanshawe correctly pointed out. He gave a little jump and an involuntary squeak when the old man’s fist again thudded upon the table.

“Then what was he tryin’ to hide by havin’ me removed, aye? Tell me that!”

“Precisely, Uncle,” agreed Alec and focused on the lawyer. “You mentioned that certain
inconsequential particulars
about the beneficiaries were omitted from the second will, as was reference to Catherine Bourdon’s mamma…?”

“Oh, yes! I remember the omissions most clearly.” The lawyer smiled smugly. “I am frequently complimented for my exceptional capacity for remembering the mundane… As you’ll recall, Blackwell bequeathed his bible, gold pocket watch and the sum of one thousand pounds to one Thomas Fisher, who just so happens to be your valet, my lord. The words omitted being:
for putting to good use his apothecary skills in providing medical assistance free of charge to the parish poor of St. Judes.
”

“Hardly inconsequential particulars,” Plantagenet Halsey grumbled, a guilty sidelong glance at his nephew as he downed knife and fork and pushed his plate away.

“But best removed from a legal document if Tam hopes one day to be accepted into the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries,” Alec calmly pointed out. “And Sir Charles Weir, Fanshawe? The fact Sir Charles and Blackwell, or more correctly Kenneth Blackwell Dempsey-Weir, as is his proper name, share a common surname has not gone unnoticed.”

“Egad! I’d not thought about that,” announced the old man.

“Just so, my lord. As you will recall, Sir Charles Weir was bequeathed the sum of five thousand pounds,
my nephew having made his own mark in the world without my assistance
being omitted—”

“
Nephew
? That mealy-mouthed sycophant was Blackwell’s
nephew
? It beggars belief!” declared Plantagenet Halsey, astonished. “You have a strange sense of the inconsequential, Fanshawe. Blackwell’s life becomes more complicated with every sentence you utter. Next you’ll be tellin’ us that Catherine Bourdon was the vicar’s long-lost mistress or his long-sufferin’ wife and Charles Weir’s mamma no less!”

“That is impossible, sir,” the lawyer answered respectfully, ignoring the old man’s levity, “for Mr. Blackwell confided in me that Catherine Bourdon is a precocious child only four years of age, with her mother’s black ringlets and her grandmother’s gray eyes.”

“A-a
child
—of—
four
?” Plantagenet Halsey blurted out.

“Not his child, Fanshawe,” Alec asked rhetorically.

“No, my lord.”

Alec tried to sound disinterested. “But a child of his parish perhaps...?”

It was the lawyer’s turn to be amazed. “I do believe you are correct, my lord, for Mr. Blackwell mentioned with no small amount of pride that Miss Catherine was one of his flock.”

The old man sat bolt upright. “Aye? From St. Judes? He left his fortune to a
beggar’s
brat?”

“Can you think of a more deserving beneficiary, Uncle?”

“No! Of course not!” Plantagenet Halsey blustered.

“Fanshawe, you said the original will mentioned Catherine Bourdon’s mamma?”

“Yes, my lord. The first will stated that Catherine Sophia Elizabeth Bourdon is the
natural
daughter of Miranda Ann Miriam Bourdon
.”

“You are certain that was the name of the child’s mother, Fanshawe?”