He rose from his chair and crossed the chamber toward the windows. He lifted aside the curtain to stare out at the darkness beyond. I wondered if he found it easier to speak that way. “I was in my second year at Cambridge,” he began to explain slowly. “Upon my admission to the school a year earlier, I had received special permission to live in a cottage with my mother not far from campus.” He flicked a glance at me. “My mother was sickly, you see. She always was. She would get these terrible racking coughs that seemed to last for hours, sometimes days, on end. They drained her, sucked the life out of her.” He grimaced with remembered pain. “They would send her to bed for weeks. I remember as a little boy being so frightened because she couldn’t seem to catch her breath.” His entire being seemed to tighten with emotion. “Her face would sometimes turn blue.”
My heart ached for that little boy, terrified for his mother. “Was your father there?” I asked, standing to move closer to him.
He shook his head, almost absently. “He was in the navy, and in those years he was sailing with Nelson, and then manning the blockade against France. At age eleven, I was supposed to join him, but my mother begged him to let me stay with her, and my father relented.” His smile was wry. “I didn’t want to go anyway. So, in a way, she saved me from a grueling life on the seas.” His voice turned pensive, making me wonder if he thought about this often. “How different my life would have been had I joined the Royal Navy and fought against Napoleon.”
He might have died. My heart twisted at the thought. So many young men had lost their lives in that war, and when he went off to fight he would have been merely a boy. I could sympathize with his mother.
“When I came of age to attend Cambridge my mother insisted I go. All of the men in her family had attended, and she and my grandfather did not want me to be any different. But I refused to leave my mother alone in Plymouth, not with her so ill. So we reached a compromise, and my grandfather helped me find a suitable cottage close to the university.” He shifted his gaze and I knew he was no longer seeing the world outside my window, but a house at the edge of Cambridge. “She seemed happy in our new home, and for a while she even seemed to improve. I started to believe it was the sea air that so incapacitated her, and inland she would begin to make a full recovery.”
Hope still rang in his voice, even after all these years. But I already knew the outcome would not be a happy one. I hugged myself tightly as a cloud crossed over his features.
“Then in the autumn of 1815, she began to worsen. She couldn’t keep any food down; her strength began to fail. And then the cough returned. The physicians couldn’t do anything for her.” He swallowed, and his voice, which had steadily risen with remembered anxiety, was suddenly hoarse and flat. “She slipped away just before Christmas.”
I couldn’t help it then. I stepped forward and reached out to take his hand in mine. I knew he had more to tell me, but I had to touch him in some small way, to offer some comfort. He squeezed my fingers, clinging to them, but he did not look at me.
“There was an inquiry. My father insisted upon it. Napoleon was exiled to Saint Helena; the war was over and he was home on leave. You could say it was my father’s first taste of the profession he would take up when he retired.” His smile was humorless. “I resisted the investigation, insisting Mother had simply succumbed to her illness. I believed Father was trying to make up for being absent so often. During the war, if we saw him four weeks out of the year, Mother and I counted ourselves lucky.” He did not sound bitter about such a truth, but resigned. Life in the Royal Navy was difficult in the best of times, and wartime made it almost unbearable.
“Father and the local magistrate swiftly found evidence of foul play, and it pointed to my mother’s maid, Annie. Apparently, just before my mother fell ill that last autumn, some of the other servants had overheard her scolding Annie for her insolence and her shoddy work, and threatening to let her go. However when mother’s sickness returned, Annie was suddenly needed again to nurse her, for no one seemed able to comfort my mother so well. Father suspected Annie first poisoned her so that she could keep her position, and then continued to do so so that her services would always be required. Whether she had dosed my mother with too much of the poison that last time, or the cumulative effects of the poison combined with mother’s illness had simply became too much for her weakened body, Father didn’t know, but he felt certain the maid had some part to play in it.”
Gage’s eyes were heavy with grief when he finally turned to look at me. “I didn’t want to believe it. I told them they were wrong, that Annie could not have done it. She was like a second mother to me. And she loved my mother. Or, at least, I thought she did.” A lump formed in my throat at the desolation in his voice. “I defended her, sheltered her, protested her innocence . . . up until the night my father caught her trying to dose us with the same poison to silence us.”
I gasped.
“She claimed she’d had no idea, insisted that someone had tampered with the pantry.” He shook his head. “She swore to the very last that she was innocent. And I almost believed her.” His gaze bore into mine, wretched and dejected. “I almost helped her get away with murdering my mother.”