Chapter 1 #2
Arthur Pendleton had left his widow a Hampshire estate of twenty-four hundred acres, a London townhouse on Mount Street, an annual income of approximately three thousand two hundred pounds, and a personal investment portfolio of some eight thousand pounds.
It was a modest fortune by aristocratic standards, but it was the foundation upon which Cecilia Blackwood had begun to build.
Henry Ravenscroft was more complex. A self-made man, the owner of textile mills in Manchester and railway investments that had made him, by the standards of the industrial north, extremely wealthy.
His fortune was estimated at over a hundred thousand pounds.
He had married Cecilia Pendleton, as she then was, in April of 1883, and died in March of 1885 after a riding accident on the grounds of his Cheshire estate.
The inquest had returned a verdict of accidental death.
A wire, possibly left by poachers, had been strung across a bridle path.
The horse had been startled, Ravenscroft had been thrown, and his neck had been broken.
He died without regaining consciousness.
His widow had been prostrate with grief, or so the reports indicated, though the reports had been written by men who had no particular reason to dissemble and every reason to be thorough, since Ravenscroft's fortune and its disposition had been a matter of considerable public interest.
The Earl of Ashworth was the final and most elevated step.
Richard Edmund Ashworth, Seventh Earl, had married Cecilia Ravenscroft in September of 1885.
He was fifty-seven to her twenty-six, a gap that was not unusual in aristocratic circles.
He brought to the marriage an earldom, a Mayfair townhouse, estates in Suffolk and Kent, a name that opened every door in England, and, less attractively, a collection of debts that his new wife's fortune was expected to service.
He died three years later, in June of this year, from what his physician described as gastric complaint leading to hepatic failure.
No post-mortem. The body had been buried at Ashworth Park in Suffolk with the full ceremonial due to his rank.
I sat back in my chair and stared at the notes I had assembled.
The pattern, if it was a pattern, was elegant in its simplicity.
A young woman of good family but limited means marries a man with a weak heart.
She inherits. She marries a wealthy industrialist. He dies in what is ruled an accident.
She inherits again. She marries an earl.
He dies of an illness whose progression, upon closer examination, appears unusually rapid for a natural gastric complaint.
She inherits a title, three estates, and a fortune that, by my rough calculation, exceeded a hundred and sixty thousand pounds.
Three husbands. Three deaths. Three inheritances. Each elevation in rank and wealth, each conveniently timed, each leaving the same widow in possession of more than she had before.
Price looked up from his desk. "You've gone quiet, Aldric. That's always a bad sign."
"Price, do you know anything about the Ashworth family?"
"Only what's in the papers. Old family. Impoverished, until the current Earl married well. His widow's a beauty, by all accounts. There were sketches of her at the funeral in this morning's Standard."
I pulled the newspaper from the stack on my desk and found the illustration.
A sketch, somewhat idealised, of a woman in mourning, her features partially obscured by a black crêpe veil.
The artist had captured something of her bearing, an erectness of posture that suggested composure beyond the merely physical, and the suggestion of fine features beneath the veil.
The caption read: "The Dowager Countess of Ashworth at the funeral of her husband, the late Earl, at St. George's, Hanover Square. "
I studied the sketch for longer than was necessary.
There was something in the drawn face, an expression that I could not quite identify, that struck me as odd.
Not grief, exactly, though the artist had rendered it as such.
Something more controlled. More precise.
The face of a woman who was performing grief with the same meticulous attention to detail that a prima donna brings to a death scene in Italian opera.
I folded the paper and put it aside. I was being fanciful.
A sketch in a newspaper was not evidence.
A pattern in inheritance was not evidence.
A physician's notes that described an unusually rapid decline were not evidence.
They were suspicions, and suspicions were the raw material of detective work, but they were not, in themselves, sufficient to justify the questioning of a countess.
I returned to the Ashworth file and read Dr. Hale's notes again, more carefully this time, paying attention to details I had glossed over in my first reading.
The peripheral tingling, the neuropathy that Hale had first noted the previous summer, interested me.
Peripheral neuropathy was associated with a number of conditions, but one of the most common causes was chronic arsenic exposure.
The thought was shocking, and I rejected it immediately, not because it was impossible but because it was the kind of thought that led to places I was not permitted to go.
A countess. Poisoning her husband with arsenic.
The accusation was so extreme, so far beyond the boundaries of what was considered plausible in polite society, that merely entertaining it felt like a form of madness.
But the physician's notes described symptoms that were, upon careful reading, consistent with arsenic poisoning.
The nausea, the abdominal pain, the progressive weight loss, the tingling in the extremities, the eventual failure of the liver.
I was not a physician, but I had worked enough cases involving poison, mostly in the poorer districts where such things were more common and less expertly concealed, to recognise the constellation.
The Marsh test, developed in 1836, could detect arsenic in biological samples.
The Reinsch test, developed in 1842, was even more reliable.
Both were available in 1888. Neither had been performed on the Earl, because no one had thought to perform them, because the Earl was an earl and earls did not die of poison.
They died of gout and apoplexy and the various ailments that attended a lifetime of rich food and excessive drink.
The physicians who attended them were not trained to look for evidence of foul play, because foul play, in the context of an aristocratic household, was practically unthinkable.
I closed the file and sat in silence for several minutes.
The main room of Scotland Yard bustled around me, clerks moving papers, constables coming and going, the eternal machinery of criminal justice grinding through its daily motions.
Price had returned to his counterfeiting case, his pen scratching across a statement with the focused industry of a man who preferred clear problems to ambiguous ones.
I thought about the three dead men. Arthur Pendleton, with his weak heart and his Hampshire estate.
Henry Ravenscroft, with his Manchester mills and his enthusiasm for early morning rides.
Richard Ashworth, with his earldom and his reliance on brandy.
Three different men, three different methods of death, three different physicians, three different sets of circumstances.
The variety itself was suspicious. If a woman were going to murder her husbands, she would not use the same method twice.
That would be obvious. She would vary the approach, match the method to the man, exploit each husband's particular vulnerabilities.
The weak heart could be accelerated. The careless rider could meet with an accident.
The heavy drinker could be poisoned through his nightly brandy, because who would think to test the brandy of an earl?
The elegance of it was what troubled me most. A scheme of such scope, such patience, such calculated audacity, implied a mind of considerable intelligence and discipline.
A woman who could plan and execute the murder of three husbands over eight years, each time escaping suspicion, each time performing the role of grieving widow with sufficient conviction to deceive physicians, servants, solicitors, and the entire apparatus of society, was not a woman who could be investigated in the ordinary course of police work.
She was operating at a level that made the standard tools of criminal detection look crude and inadequate.
And yet, I was a detective. My entire profession was built on the premise that crime, no matter how clever, left traces.
Patterns. Inconsistencies. The small, overlooked details that, when assembled correctly, told a story that the criminal had intended to conceal.
I had solved cases that other detectives had declared impossible.
I had a reputation for persistence, for thoroughness, for the kind of dogged attention to detail that drove my colleagues to distraction and occasionally to drink.
If there was a pattern here, I would find it.
And if there was evidence, I would assemble it, no matter where it led.
The difficulty was that where it led, in the first instance, was to a drawing room in Mayfair, and the woman who sat in that drawing room was protected by the combined weight of social convention, legal privilege, and the explicit instruction of my superintendent to handle the matter with discretion.