“If you do not help him, I shall ensure that you do not see a single shilling of a widow’s inheritance,” Constance huffed and puffed, pacing the greenhouse with the fear and fury of a woman who feared she was about to lose everything.
Or it was a well-honed ruse. Matilda had not yet decided, but shedidknow that it was better to have Constance here where Matilda could watch her, instead of in Albion’s bedchamber where she might not be trusted.
“Do you think your constant monologue is helpful? I assure you, it is about as helpful as you refusing to obey the command I sent with Jenna!” Matilda shot back, her arm burning with every rotation of the pestle in the mortar on the bench.
A thick, wet paste was forming though she was careful not to let any splash on her skin. Almost every part of the manchineel tree was poisonous or prone to causing reactions, particularly the fruits, but they also happened to be the antidote to larkspur. All she needed to do was get the quantity and consistency right.
“I am merely saying,” Constance remarked, “and you had no right to ask that maid to?—”
“And I am asking you to be quiet so that I may think clearly!” Matilda snapped.
Constance pouted, muttering a few rude things under her breath as she took herself off to an old terrace chair in the corner and sat down. “What are you doing, anyway?”
“Saving him,” Matilda replied curtly, pouring out a cup of water.
To a different pestle and mortar, she added a small dose of powdered willow bark for her husband’s pain and a heartier dose of pounded charcoal to hopefully neutralize any of the more poisonous effects of the manchineel fruit. To that, with her heart in her throat, she added a very conservative measure of the crushed and ground up fruit and began to mix vigorously.
“What is that fruit? May I have some? I have not eaten since yesterday,” Constance said, clearly incapable of being quiet.
“You can have some, but it will kill you,” Matilda replied.
Constance gasped. “I knew it was you! You came back to finish what you started with all of the wicked plants in your dastardly little garden!Thatis why you did not want me near my darling boy! Is the maid part of this? Is she your accomplice?”
“No, it is just one of nature’s curious miracles,” Matilda said as calmly as she could. “Larkspur is poisonous. Manchineel fruit is poisonous. But one poison nullifies the other if the dose is correct. I believe I have added the right dose, per the instructions I found in my father’s book. Indeed, you ought to be thanking me for wanting a ‘dastardly little garden’ because that is the only reason we have a manchineel tree! And thank the gardener too because heaven knows where he managed to find one!”
The moment she had seen the two antidotes written down in her father’s book—the Calabar bean or the fruit of the manchineel tree—she had known that fate was smiling down on her. The gardener had informed her several days ago that there had been a number of rare plants that he had been unable to acquire, but she had been as giddy as Anna reading the latest romantic novel when he had told her, gruffly, that hehadgotten his hands on a manchineel tree. One in fruit, too.
Alongside the dosage, it was all she had needed to see in that book, counting her blessings for being the strange and unnatural young woman that her father had raised with a curiosity for the darker side of nature. She had set off immediately afterward with Max, both of them riding hard for Whitecliff Manor.
Constance looked like she might scream but settled on a glare and sternly folded arms. “Well, I do not know what a… whatever-you-called-it-tree is, but you should not shout at your mother-in-law. I asked what you were doing; all you had to do was politely explain.”
“You accused me of poisoning the man that I love,” Matilda retorted, adding the contents of the mortar to the water. “Wouldyoube polite if you were me?”
To her surprise, Constance seemed perplexed. “You really do love one another?”
“I hope so.” Matilda held up the glass of water, watching the liquid turn an ominous shade of dark gray. “It is ready. I suggest you pray.”
Carrying the glass as carefully as possible while walking at an urgent pace, Matilda made her way out of the greenhouse and back into the manor. She had no notion of whether or not Constance was following her until she reached Albion’s bedchamber.
Max looked up from a book and stood, bowing his head. “Is it done?”
“We shall soon find out,” Matilda replied, wishing that Anna was there in her brother’s place.
Constance scowled at Max. “You can leave.”
“If the Duchess asks me to, I will,” Max replied with a smirk.
Matilda gave him a warning smile. “Rest awhile. If all goes well, you can return home in the morning. If all does not, then… I might have to ask you to return anyway to bring Anna to me.” Her voice cracked. “I will need her.”
“Of course.” Max departed without another word, leaving Matilda at Albion’s bedside, her hand shaking as she clasped the glass.
She stared down at the man she loved, his face drained of all color, his lips as deathly a gray as the liquid she was holding. His beautiful eyes were closed, barely a hint of movement beneath his eyelids. He truly looked as if he was already at death’s door, raising his hand to knock.
All at once, the terror, the anticipated grief, the anger, the pain that she had shoved down since Jenna found her in the ornamental garden broke its banks, flooding her mind and body. It did not surge out in a rage to serve a purpose as it had with James. It was worse than that.
Tears streamed down her face, her chest squeezing out an inhuman sound, like a wounded beast with an arrow through the heart. Her legs wobbled, her eyes wide as she watched the liquid in the glass, terrified of spilling a drop, but she no longer seemed to have control over herself. She was trembling from head to toe, making that awful, awful sound.
“Do not dare leave me!” she wheezed, shambling closer. “Ishall haunt you if you dare!”
