Chapter 5
The Locked Cabinet
T he house was quiet in the hours before dawn, the particular quiet of a building that has not yet stirred from sleep, when the fires have burned to their lowest and the air is cool and dense with the residual scents of yesterday's occupation.
I moved through the corridors of Blackwood House with the practised silence of a woman who has learned to walk without sound, my footsteps muffled by the thick Axminster carpet that covered the floors, my body negotiating the familiar geography of doorways and corridors and staircases by a kind of muscular memory that required no conscious direction.
I was not sleeping. I had never slept well, a characteristic I attributed partly to temperament and partly to the particular vigilance that my activities required.
Sleep, in my experience, was a vulnerability, a period of unconsciousness during which the world continued to operate according to its own devices, and I had never been comfortable with the surrender of control it demanded.
Most nights I lay in my bed in the dark and listened to the house settling around me, the creak of timbers, the distant ticking of clocks, the occasional murmur of voices from the servants' quarters, and I waited for the particular quality of stillness that announced the small hours, the time between midnight and dawn when even the most diligent of servants had abandoned their posts and the house belonged, briefly and entirely, to me.
It was at this hour that I descended to the stillroom.
The stillroom occupied a small annex off the kitchen, a room that had been designed in the previous century for the preparation of preserves and medicinal compounds and that had fallen, under Richard's tenure, into a state of benign neglect.
The cook, Mrs. Branwell, a stout and competent woman whose energies were directed entirely toward the production of meals rather than the preservation of them, used the stillroom primarily as a storage space for bulk ingredients, sacks of flour and sugar and dried herbs that were purchased in quantity and stored against future need.
The shelves were lined with jars and canisters, their labels faded with age, their contents a mixture of the practical and the antiquated.
Dried lavender. Bundles of rosemary. A jar of crystallised ginger so old that its contents had fused into a solid amber mass.
Tins of baking powder and cream of tartar and saltpetre, the residue of culinary operations dating back perhaps decades.
Mrs. Branwell did not use the far corner of the stillroom, behind the shelf of bulk flour and the barrel of salt pork that Richard had insisted upon keeping despite the cook's protests that no one in the household ate salt pork, and it was taking up valuable space.
She did not use it because there was nothing there that concerned her, nothing that fell within the domain of her professional responsibilities, and like all competent servants, she had learned to confine her attention to those things that did.
Behind the flour sack, concealed by a shelf that could be slid aside with a single practised movement, stood a cabinet.
It was not a remarkable object, a plain oak construction of the sort that might be found in any moderately furnished household, fitted with a brass lock that was, by the standards of the locksmith's art, unremarkable.
The key was small and brass and hung from a chain around my neck, beneath my nightgown, where it rested against my skin with a weight that I had grown so accustomed to that I no longer noticed it.
I unlocked the cabinet and opened it.
The interior was arranged with the same precision I brought to every other aspect of my domestic management.
On the lower shelf stood three glass jars with tight-fitting stoppers, each labelled in my own hand with a small, neat cipher that would have meant nothing to anyone who lacked the key to its interpretation.
The first jar contained a white powder, arsenic trioxide, of a purity that I had verified myself using a chemical test I had learned from a French pharmacological text I had acquired in Paris during my marriage to Henry.
The second contained a darker compound, a preparation of digitalis derived from foxglove, kept as a reserve against future need.
The third contained a small quantity of strychnine, which I kept not because I intended to use it but because I considered it imprudent to rely on a single method when alternatives were available.
The upper shelf held the reference text itself, a slim volume bound in dark leather, its title page printed in French: Principes de Toxicologie Appliquée.
I had purchased it from an apothecary in the Rue des Saints-Pères who asked no questions about the identity or intentions of his customers, a quality I had found refreshing and had rewarded with repeat custom.
The text was comprehensive and precise, detailing the properties of a wide range of compounds, their physiological effects, their methods of administration, and, most usefully, the symptoms they produced and the means by which those symptoms could be distinguished from natural illness.
Arsenic trioxide, the text explained, was odourless and nearly tasteless when dissolved in alcohol, and produced a constellation of symptoms that mimicked, with remarkable fidelity, the natural progression of gastric disease.
Nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhoea.
These were the early signs, indistinguishable from indigestion or the after-effects of excessive consumption of rich food.
As the poisoning continued, the symptoms progressed: peripheral neuropathy, characterised by tingling and numbness in the extremities, followed by skin changes, hair loss, and the gradual failure of the liver and kidneys.
The progression was slow enough to be attributed to natural decline, especially in a patient whose physician was predisposed to expect such a decline, and the dosage could be calibrated with sufficient precision to produce a death that appeared, to all but the most suspicious observer, to be the inevitable consequence of age and illness.
I had used arsenic on Richard. I had used it because his habits made it simple.
His devotion to brandy, his reliance on the same decanter each evening, his refusal to allow servants to pour his drinks, all of these were vulnerabilities that I had identified within the first weeks of our marriage and had catalogued with the same attention I brought to every other aspect of my strategic planning.
The brandy was the vehicle. Each evening, after dinner, while Richard read his newspaper in his study and the house settled into its nighttime routines, I would prepare his glass, pouring the brandy with the practised hand of a devoted wife and adding, from the small vial I kept in the cabinet, the precise quantity of arsenic trioxide that the night's dosage required.
The dosage was the crucial element, and it was here that the pharmacological text had proven its worth.
A large dose of arsenic produces acute symptoms that any competent physician would recognise as poisoning.
Vomiting, severe abdominal cramping, a burning sensation in the throat, diarrhoea, cardiovascular collapse.
These are dramatic and unmistakable, and they lead, in short order, either to death or to the administration of effective antidotes, of which the most reliable is the administration of large quantities of hydrated iron oxide, commonly known as Fowler's solution, which binds to arsenic in the digestive system and allows it to be expelled.
But a small dose, administered consistently over a long period, produces none of these dramatic symptoms. It produces, instead, a slow, gradual deterioration that mimics the natural progression of chronic illness.
The body adjusts. The tolerance increases.
The dosage can be raised in increments so small that the adjustment is imperceptible, and the decline, when it comes, appears to be the inevitable consequence of the patient's underlying condition rather than the result of external interference.
I had begun with a sub-clinical dose in November of 1885, two months after my marriage to Richard, and I had increased it, gradually and methodically, over the following eighteen months.
By the time Dr. Hale was called in to investigate the source of Richard's persistent indigestion, in November of 1886, the damage was already underway, and the bismuth he prescribed was, in the language of the apothecary, merely a palliative applied to a condition it could not address.
By summer, the peripheral neuropathy had begun, the tingling in the hands and feet that Richard found so distressing and that Dr. Hale attributed, with the easy confidence of a man who had not considered the alternative, to nervous complaint.
By autumn, the abdominal pain had become chronic, and Richard had taken to his bed with the frequency of a man twenty years his senior.
I had nursed him through every stage of his decline with the absolute dedication that the occasion required.
I sat at his bedside for hours, reading to him, adjusting his pillows, offering him the invalid foods that his deteriorating digestion could tolerate, and my performance was, by every account, the most moving and convincing of my career.
The servants admired my devotion. Dr. Hale praised my attentiveness.
Richard himself, in his more lucid moments, thanked me with a gratitude that was, I suspect, the only genuine emotion he ever felt toward me.