The poisons had been easy enough to obtain, though potassium cyanide was an odd purchase for winter, with no wasps afoot. I went to two different shops in London, one for the potassium cyanide and another for the strychnine, the beauty of a populous city, where nobody would remember me, or think to connect the substances with any death in Yorkshire. Archie may not have read Agatha’s books but I had. I knew poison was the best way to accomplish a quick and easy murder – easy to perpetrate but not to solve.
Sister Mary Clare, now Mrs Marston, was so untrue and unthinking in her every word and deed. At the Bellefort Hotel she stared directly at me. Never into my face. Only glancing at the surface. Bess, too, she trained her eyes on both of us and spoke about herself. Just like at the convent, she smiled, she chatted, she landed her plump hands on our shoulders as if she believed herself fond of us. But when we appeared in her life again, there was nothing about either of us she recognized. To her all girls were the same.
It was Hamlet, wasn’t it, who said: ‘One may smile and smile and be a villain.’
To the man who’d never bothered to smile, at least at us – the ragwort – some girls stood out. Father Joseph knew Bess the moment he laid eyes on her. In the hotel dining room, doing what needed to be done, Bess had felt no fear. None at all. Only a gladness at witnessing his discomfort. Knowing he’d be dead before he could alert his wife to our identity.
Bess’s sister Kitty and her husband Carmichael, posing as an unhappy English couple, had caused the necessary diversion – a great row that commanded the attention of everyone present. Bess had been able to step forward and plunge the syringe into Father Joseph’s flank, then secret it back into the pocket of her dress almost before he felt the prick. Kitty – pretending to be a nurse – had flown to his side, not to help him, but to make sure he was dead. She had a secondary needle waiting in her own pocket just in case, but that proved unnecessary.
Bess couldn’t call it gladness, exactly, watching the man die. She wasn’t a cruel person. It was a distasteful but necessary task. The world had offered no justice so we made our own.
Kitty, the little girl Bess had told me about in Ireland – the pretty twelve-year-old who’d wanted to be in pictures – had grown up to marry a young man blessed not only with a family fortune, but also with theatrical aspirations of his own. With his help Kitty pulled off the greatest performance of her career before it even began. She and Carmichael stayed on at the hotel afterwards, continuing the ruse, so no one would suspect their row was connected to Mr Marston’s collapse.
In my room at the Bellefort, with Chilton’s ear pressed against the door, I said, also loudly, ‘I do hope everything is all right.’
‘Yes,’ Bess said. ‘Everything is perfect. Perfect.’ Then, in a whisper that wouldn’t be heard no matter how closely Chilton hovered: ‘Kitty and Carmichael will stay on, and they’ve paid for your room through to the end of next week. But we’re leaving. Back to America. You should come with us.’
I shook my head, vehement.
She said, ‘Stay in England, if you must. But go back to London. Get out of here, fast as you can.’
‘That would only make me look guilty, wouldn’t it?’ But I wasn’t thinking about looking guilty. I was thinking about Finbarr’s arms, a brisk walk away. Soon enough I’d have to face my whole life without him. But I couldn’t do it just yet. I needed just a little while longer. Even if it did increase my risk of being caught.
Bess and I embraced, hands clutching at the other’s clothes, faces buried in each other’s necks. We had done what we’d come to do. Now the world would unfold however it needed to. Having removed Father Joseph from the world, Bess could go on with her life. In fact, we didn’t know she was leaving England already pregnant with a little girl who’d be born – the squalling picture of health – that September.
And I had taken care of Sister Mary Clare. By bringing a steaming cup of tea to her door and gently rapping.
‘Oh my dear,’ the former nun said, when I peeked into the room. ‘How good of you to come to me. I’m afraid I shan’t sleep a wink tonight. Not one wink.’ Her face was swollen and blotchy. She covered it with her hands and wept some more.
I walked to her bed and sat down, pressing the cup into her hands. ‘Drink this,’ I said in my most soothing voice. ‘There’s a bit of brandy in it.’ I wore a dressing gown, my hair loose. Hers was gathered up under a nightcap. I could see the gleam of cream upon her face, still tending to the usual ministrations, imagining a tomorrow despite her bereavement.
‘Oh, you’re a darling,’ she said to me. ‘That doctor gave me a sleeping draught but my nerves are overcoming it.’ She took the cup and sipped. The English love of tea as solution to life’s ills does make us easy to poison.
‘I can’t say where I’ll go tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We had a plan, Mr Marston and I, for where we’d go next. Manchester, where I lived as a girl, before I was sent off to Ireland.’ She was speaking to herself, not realizing I’d heard this story before. ‘But my family’s not there anymore. How can I do it without Mr Marston? I’ve never lived alone, you see. I used to be a nun, if you can believe that.’
‘Oh, I believe it, Mrs Marston. I do.’
She cried and sipped, cried and sipped. I sat beside her and patted her knee. It had only been seven years, and not years that particularly age a person. At twenty-seven I looked passably as I had at twenty. She’d seen me every day for months. She’d been with me when Genevieve first laughed. She was the last person I ever saw holding my baby. I stared and stared, willing her to stare back. The ghosts that ought to have haunted her fluttered away, unthinking.
‘You’re a dear,’ she said, handing me the empty cup.
I put it on the bedside table. Later, I would be sure to wipe it clean of fingerprints and residue. Sister Mary Clare lay back. She reached out and clasped my hand. ‘You’ll stay with me, won’t you? Until I fall asleep.’
‘Of course I will.’
Her eyes fluttered closed. If I waited, the poison would kill her. But unlike Bess, I wanted hands on my quarry. The coroner would find the strychnine. But I’d have her dead before it did its work. I hummed a few bars of the same haunting tune she was always so fond of, but even that didn’t make her realize. She smiled a bit and said – very quiet, eyes still closed – ‘Oh, I do love that song.’