His Mother’s Hand
Chapter thirty-eight
His Mother’s Hand
Violet
Violet went to the stillroom on a grey afternoon, when Henry was sleeping and the house had at last stopped holding its breath.
She had been tired since yesterday. A low ache behind the small of her back she had not had before persisted, but she had refused another day in bed waiting for her body to settle.
The stillroom had been waiting for her for too long.
She had been avoiding it. She could admit that now, standing in the doorway with the cold key in her hand.
It was the room where the poison had been measured out jar by careful jar, in a hand she had once admired.
It was also hers now, and she did not intend to keep a room in her own house that she was afraid to enter.
She opened the windows. Then she set to work.
She went along the shelves slowly, reading every label, setting the harmless things to one side and the dangerous to the other, the way her mother had taught her before she could read the words themselves.
It was steadying work. By the time she reached the high shelf she had stopped flinching at the handwriting.
The receipts were there in a clothbound folio, and she took it down and sat with it on the stool by the bench and read for the better part of an hour without moving.
Every measure was recorded. Every margin was noted.
She had never met Henry’s mother. She felt, turning the pages, that she was being introduced, and that she would have liked her a great deal.
But the folio held only receipts. Formulations and dosages and drying times, and nothing at all of the woman who had written them.
And a woman who wrote this carefully did not set down only her recipes. There would be more of it somewhere.
Violet entered the hidden room. The Runners had taken what the magistrate required and left the remainder, and she had resolved to catalogue every item with her own hand, because she would not grant Sarah the satisfaction of a room Violet could not bear to stand in.
She worked through the shelves, then the narrow bench, then the single drawer beneath it. It had swollen with the damp, and she had to work it free. Inside were twine, a paring knife, a stub of candle, a packet of pins. And beneath them, lying flat against the wood, a book.
Small and thick, bound in green cloth gone dark with age, soft at the corners as though it had been held a great deal by the same hands in the same way. No title. No name.
She knew what it was before she opened it. It had not been hidden. That was what turned her cold. It had been used.
A shiver moved through her. Sarah had discovered the book only recently. She had been searching for it, perhaps for years. The disturbed air in the late dowager’s rooms. Sarah had looked for this.
Violet stared at it for a long time, as though the book might stir.
It cannot hurt you, she told herself.
She opened it and recognised the hand. She had seen it on every jar on the shelves above her: small, even, careful. The duchess’s hand.
The first pages were what she expected. Deeper in, the entries grew more particular. Tinctures for pain. Sleeping draughts. Compounds that required care. Every measurement recorded. Every caution noted.
The hand had changed. Not the penmanship but the purpose. The entries were no longer receipts. They were observations.
14th March. S. asked today whether foxglove might be given in smaller doses than I have taught. I told her the margin is too narrow for experiment. She did not argue, but she asked twice more before the hour was out. I should not have found this remarkable had she asked about anything else.
22nd April. I have begun locking the upper cabinet. I cannot say precisely why. S. has never taken anything without asking. It is not what she does. It is the way she looks at the locked door after I have turned the key.
3rd June. Took S. to the garden to cut rosemary.
She worked beside me as she has always done, her hands quick and sure, and I felt proud of her as I have always felt.
But she asked about the monkshood again, and when I told her it was not for her to touch, I saw something on her face I have not seen before.
It was there and gone. I do not know what to call it, but it gave me the chills.
17th August. Harold is worse. I have been at his bedside since Tuesday.
S. brought the tea and the compresses and did everything I asked with a competence.
She sat with him when I could not. She was gentle with him.
She was gentle with all of us. I am writing this at three in the morning, and I do not know why I feel what I feel.
There is nothing she has done. It is what she is.
I taught her everything I know, and I am beginning to wonder whether I ought to have looked more carefully at her character before I opened the book.
9th September. Harold is dead. My boy is dead. I cannot write. I cannot.
2nd November. I am putting this book away. Somewhere in the bones of the house where S. would not find it. I do not accuse her of anything. She has done nothing wrong. But there is something in her that I cannot reach and cannot identify, and it frightens me.
Violet closed the book. Her hands were shaking. Sarah had not burned a single page. She had read it and kept it like a lock of hair.
She entered Henry’s room without knocking. Henry was at the glass, his valet tying his cravat. He saw her face and dismissed the man with a gesture.
“What is it?”
She held out the green book. “Your mother’s.”
He took it. She watched his face as he read. His hand went to the edge of the dressing table and gripped it, and the knuckles whitened by degrees. He turned the pages without speaking. When he reached the last entry, he closed the book and held it against his chest with both hands.
“She knew,” he said, his voice rough. “She could not prove it, but she knew.”
Violet went to him and held him. He leaned into her embrace. “Do you think she killed Harold?”
She pulled away and gazed up at him. “Harold died of his lungs. I cannot imagine what poison could cause that, but when Edmund asked Sarah… Something about the way she looked at him gave me the chills. I do not know, Henry. I really do not.”
He nodded. “And Mother? She had fever and lung troubles. She perished over three weeks.”
“A fever and a weak chest in an aging woman worn thin by the death of her husband.” Violet shook her head.
“Dozens of people die exactly like it from a hard winter and the ordinary cruelty of living.” She took his face in her hands.
“Listen to me. You are about to do to yourself what the curse did to you, taking every grave in this house and laying it at one door. We will never know the whole truth, but we will have to learn to live with the unknown.”
He placed the book in his pocket. His hand came up to rest on her shoulder. “You are right, of course. I married a wise woman.”
That is when she noticed his hunched shoulders, the way he was supported by the bureau. She guided him to the chair, and he sat. She knelt at the arm of it.
For a while neither of them spoke. The fire shifted. Below them the house went on about its evening.
Violet shifted on her heels. Something low in her had moved, a small turning she could not place. She sat very still until it had passed. It did not quite pass.
“What shall we do with it?” he asked at last, his hand over the book.
“Put it back where it belongs.” She held out her hand, and after a moment he gave it over. “In the stillroom. On the shelf beside her jars, where she kept it. Where it should have stayed.”
He reached for her hand and held it a moment against his cheek, his eyes closed.
“She would have liked you,” he said.
“I am certain I would have liked her.”
He was quiet a moment. Then, chuckling at a memory, he said, “She kept bees. Before my father made her give it up…”
He went on, there in the low light, telling her small things he had told no one—the bees, and the way she sang flat and did not care who heard—his voice easing as he spoke, the dead woman becoming, by slow degrees, a living one.
Violet stayed at the arm of the chair and listened, and let him remember, and the fire sank in the grate.
After a while she was no longer hearing the words, only the sound of him: a man talking about his mother in the dark, at last.
She rose, she was uncertain why, and the room turned slowly under her, and she put her hand on the chair to steady herself and saw that her hand was shaking.
The pain in her back had moved.
“Violet.”
He was on his feet before she had time to ask him not to be.
She felt his arms come round her, and she heard him call out a name.
And then she was being lifted. She saw the green book on the floor where he had dropped it.
Then she saw her eyes holding her gaze, her slackened mouth, and heard her gentle voice saying, It’s a shame I didn’t know about your condition sooner.