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T HE FLICKERING LIGHT FROM Constance's candle gleamed and winked among the hundreds of glass jars, bottles, beakers, and phials that crowded the shelves in the chemical storeroom housed in the basement of 891 Riverside Drive. She moved silently on stockinged feet, holding the candle to the labels in each row of vessels in turn, on which an impeccable hand had written the name of the item or substance within—a venomous insect, snake, or other noxious creature; a swollen poison gland dissected from a toad; a deadly plant, mineral, liquid, powder, crystalline, or colloid.

This was the heart of Leng's collections—poisons, toxins, banes, and venoms. He had only begun to stock this most valuable and dangerous storeroom; over the years, Constance knew, it would grow to embrace virtually every lethal substance known to exist, as he searched for the ultimate poison capable of driving the human race to extinction. It had been an unpleasant experience for Constance—delving into her memory, back to the time when she was a young girl living in this same mansion, acting as Leng's assistant in various chemical and toxicological experiments—but necessary, if she were to reacquaint herself with its layout.

She was looking for a certain toxin Leng had been fascinated with, found in the death cap mushroom, Amanita phalloides . The toxins of that infamous species of mushroom were thermostable: they could be cooked yet remain deadly. In addition, the mushroom had a pleasant taste resembling beef broth, allowing food to be heavily laced with it yet take on no bitter or unusual flavor. But what primarily attracted Leng was the fact that the mushroom's deadly effects took days to appear—much too late to purge the stomach with an emetic. By the time you felt sick enough to realize something was seriously wrong, you were already a dead person. You could ingest a fatal dose and remain unaware of it for as long as two weeks—until your liver began inexorably to fail. For this reason, the death cap had been used as a poison for thousands of years, playing a role in the demise of, among others, the Roman emperor Claudius, Pope Clement VII, and the Austrian emperor Charles VI.

Once the poison finally manifested, it made itself felt in a most unpleasant manner indeed. An antidote was not developed until some time into the twenty-first century. Prior to that, nothing could save the victim except immediate liver transplantation.

In the nineteenth century, there was no cure at all.

She recalled that, during the 1890s, Leng had labored in this laboratory for weeks: preparing a desiccated and powdered form of the death cap, trying to isolate and identify its poison. He had discovered it contained not one, but seven toxins, each biochemically distinct and with different effects. The empress of these toxins, alpha-amanitin, was the deadliest and also had the advantage of taking the longest to manifest itself. The ingestion of as little as ten milligrams was fatal.

Constance had helped Leng isolate the toxin, and she had searched her memory for the exact process. She wanted to make sure to prepare an absolutely fatal dose, and that meant concentrating the poison through biochemical extraction. Although it would be a decade before he turned his attention to studying its properties, even as early as 1881 she knew Leng had kept a cache of powdered Amanita phalloides somewhere in his storeroom.

At last, the candle flame flickered over the label she was searching for:

A MANITA PHALLOIDES

D EATH C AP

D ESICCATED

She could not simply take the jar of white powder—Leng frequently haunted the laboratory, and she planned on leaving nothing to chance, not even the remote possibility he might spy that the level of powder had dropped in a single jar. Removing a small bottle, a piece of paper, an empty phial, and a packet from the pockets of her dress, she placed them on a shelf. Rolling the paper into a funnel, she gently shook out two tablespoons of the amanita powder into the phial; then, transferring the funnel to Leng's jar, she took the packet—containing confectioners' sugar—and restored the powder to its former level, stoppering the jar and shaking it to disperse the sugar.

As she slipped the items back into her pockets and returned the jar to its place, she heard a faint noise. Instantly, she extinguished the candle and stopped its smoke with a pinch of her fingers to the wick. Another sound—a door, scraping a sill with a creak of hinges—and then a gleam of light appeared. It was Leng. The man, so regular in his eating habits, otherwise kept the most unpredictable hours. And it could only be him: no one else, not his gang or his servants or even the hated Munck, was allowed in the basement laboratory and storerooms. None of them, Constance believed, even knew of their existence. She had—over time—become the only person Leng allowed to assist him.

She shook away further recollections.

As the light moved into the chamber, Constance shrank back behind a row of shelves and pressed herself against the damp stone wall. The light continued to move down the central aisle, slowly and silently. From the dark of her hiding place she could see the patrician face of Leng, pale and hollow in the light of his lantern, his eyes glistening behind violet-tinted glasses. He was hatless, and his light blond hair, brushed back, gleamed with Macassar oil. At the sight of him, a hatred rose within her so violent that she feared he might detect the angry beat of her heart. But he passed by like a specter, intent on some late-night business of his own. Soon he had left the room and gone into the next—full of weapons, for the most part still boxed from shipping—and she took the opportunity to creep out of her hiding place and move deeper into the basement, away from Leng.

To isolate alpha-amanitin from the powder would be her next step. It would involve another trip to the laboratory, the borrowing of certain reagents along with a titration burette, analytical balance, mixing beakers, and tubes. It would have to be done tonight, and the equipment returned before morning—once again, to its precise position in the lab.