CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

They take the woodland path up onto the lower reaches of Cwm Nantcol on foot. They do not say a word – have agreed not to speak until they are safely away from Plas Helyg – and this silence, though it is charged with anticipation of the news his companion carries, is calm, peaceful.

Nothing like the painful silence Henry shared last night with Linette.

If only she had not seen him give the vial to Miss Carew! He had been on the cusp of telling Linette his suspicions when Julian arrived but he was thankful, in the end, of the interruption; Henry wanted to be absolutely sure before saying anything and causing distress. Of course, considering the deadly nightshade found in Dr Evans’ vial there could be no doubt of the matter, not really, and yet … Would Enaid Evans really have poisoned her own brother? Would she attempt the same with her mistress? The plausibility of it is untenable, but there can be no denying what he found. No, it had been best to keep silent. Still, it has been a trial. He knows Linette is confused by his behaviour; Henry sees the distrust in her eyes, the hurt. Yet what could he do? What could be done?

Wherever possible he avoided both her and Julian – yesterday Henry had visited the apothecary in Criccieth to ascertain whether he recognised the vial, to which the Welshman stated (so Henry’s dictionary revealed) that he did not. Dejected at this lack of progress, Henry has since confined himself to his room and trawled through old medical books to see if he could find any other explanation for Gwen’s condition, something else to explain the fits, the aversion to light, the odd behaviour that makes her say such strange things, but nothing provided a condition that accommodated all symptoms at once. His only course of action was to wait for Miss Carew to return with an answer.

And now, to Henry’s intense relief, she has.

They continue up the woodland path. Leaves rustle above them, birds temper the air with their sweet song. At one point Miss Carew catches her boot on an exposed root, stumbles into him, and Henry takes her hand to steady her. It is small in his, fits the cushion of his palm perfectly. He feels bereft when she lets him go.

Soon the trees part, the fields stretch out before them, and Miss Carew veers to the right. It takes a few moments for Henry to realise that she is heading toward the stone structure on the far side of the valley – a cromlech, he remembers Linette calling it – set atop a gentle knoll.

It is large, larger than he anticipated from where he first saw it, and on their approach Henry looks at it with interest. Four stones lean against each other in a manner reminiscent of a cave; three of them are propped up to form makeshift walls and what serves as a ceiling is a long capstone mottled with moss and lichen.

‘Let’s sit here,’ Miss Carew says.

They sit just under the lip of the capstone, the grass acting like a cushion, and she brings her knees up to her chest, wraps her hands around her skirts, looks out across the valley with a wistful expression on her face.

As with each time he has seen her, Henry feels his pulse knock hard in his throat.

Her beauty really is unlike that of any woman he has seen before – those amber-brown eyes are little firelights, that flame-red hair molten silk. He even likes the sound of her name. Rowena .

The fields slope beneath them, lushly green after the recent rain. On the lower reaches are clouds of the same mustard-yellow flowers to be found in Lady Gwen’s room, their vanilla scent strong against the warm breeze. In the distance Henry can see a rambling farm and beyond it, black cattle. A gull – or perhaps a buzzard or kestrel, for he can perceive only its shadow across the wide expanse of sky – soars aloft, arching across the clouds like a winged dancer before wending downward to the right, and as it does a cluster of stone huts snaps into view. Henry nods to them.

‘Linette told me these were ancient settlements,’ he murmurs. ‘Can you imagine anyone living there? So desolate, so open to the elements. I can scarce picture it.’

Miss Carew props her chin on her knees. ‘But people did live there once,’ she says quietly. ‘Not so ancient, either. Whole families, before Emyr Cadwalladr turned them out.’

‘Where did they go, do you think?’

Her nose creases, drawing attention to the pretty smattering of freckles on its bridge.

‘Where they could.’

Henry nods thoughtfully. ‘It must have been awful to see the fields sold off, one by one, wondering how long they had left.’

Miss Carew says nothing, only picks at a blade of grass.

‘Where are you from? Linette says you’re not local to Penhelyg.’

She hesitates. ‘I lived in the marches.’

‘Then how came you to be here?’

Again she hesitates, a little longer this time.

‘I wanted more,’ she says softly.

Henry does not say what he thinks – that Penhelyg surely could not offer more than the borderlands. Still, he thinks, picturing her little cottage, the table of herbs, Miss Carew has carved a life for herself here. She is useful to the villagers. Respected.

He was respected, once.

‘I understand,’ Henry says, and he does – ambition, his brutal schoolmaster at the Foundling told him sternly, makes a man ripe for greatness, differentiates the wolves from the lambs. He never agreed with the analogy but Henry appreciated the sentiment, has lived by it for as long as he can remember. It is why he strove to rise so high at Guy’s.

As if reading his thoughts she asks, ‘What was it like, practising medicine in London?’ and though the subject has been on his mind her question takes him by surprise.

‘Different,’ he manages after a moment.

Miss Carew is looking at him now, eyes russet beneath the rim of her straw bonnet. ‘Progressive, I suppose?’

An image of the operating theatre at Guy’s pops into his head. Henry pictures the curving stalls filled with apprentices and rich patrons hungry for knowledge, how they absorbed his lectures like sponges.

‘I taught.’

‘Really? How thrilling.’

It feels like flattery. Henry likes it.

‘It was,’ he says.

‘Your parents must be very proud.’

Henry tries not to think about the circumstances of his birth; what manner of person would abandon their child to somewhere so cold, so regimented, so devoid of affection? For a moment he is taken back to his boyhood, a time when he used to have night terrors and wet the bed. Each night he would wake, call for the ward nurse, and Henry remembers how she made light of his distress, scolding him for making her more work and disturbing the other boys, until, finally, the dreams stopped altogether.

‘I don’t have any parents,’ he says softly.

Miss Carew bites her lip. ‘Forgive me. I did not mean to—’

But Henry shakes his head. ‘I grew up in a place for children who had been abandoned. I may have had a roof over my head but there was no warmth there, no love. Just row on row of beds in a sterile room shared with other motherless boys.’ His mouth twists. ‘The nurses were stern, the schoolmasters sterner. We grew up on an appetite of gruel and scripture, structure and hard work. Every day regimented, every day the same. I was never more unhappy than I was there.’

She turns her face away, for a long moment says nothing, staring down at the settlements as if hypnotised by them. Then she offers a small sad smile.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Whatever for?’

Miss Carew lifts her shoulders in a shrug. ‘It’s only that it is a terrible thing, to have an unhappy childhood.’

‘Yours was unhappy?’

A beat. ‘Yes.’

She looks so sad, so wistful. She truly is so very beautiful, Henry thinks, and until this moment he did not realise quite how much he yearned for her. A soft breeze loosens a long red curl from her bonnet, and with it, the scent of lavender. Very gently Henry leans over, tucks it back. He hears her breath hitch, sees the flutter of her dark eyelashes, and he cannot help doing what he does next. Henry cups her soft round cheek with the palm of his hand, draws her lips to his.

It is a soft kiss, quick, barely lasting above a few seconds, but in that instant he feels within him a deep and lustful longing. He wants to press her close, to have her kiss him back, but already she has pulled away.

‘No,’ she whispers, pressing her fingers against the bow of her lips. ‘No.’

Henry watches her, breathless with disappointment, his hand still on her cheek.

‘Rowena, I—’

‘Don’t, Dr Talbot.’

She pushes his hand away, and he sees in its absence how the pillow of her cheek has spotted pink. Her eyes have shifted from brown to that rich amber he finds so fascinating and Henry thinks, then, she has never looked lovelier or more tempting.

‘Please,’ he says, voice thick with passion. ‘Call me Henry.’

‘No. I cannot. I won’t,’ Rowena says – and it is Rowena to him, for Miss Carew simply will not do – and looks determinedly away across the valley again.

Henry wills his body to calm itself. It is some moments before he can speak again.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘That was wrong of me,’ and in reply Rowena lets out her breath.

‘We barely know each other.’

‘No, I suppose we don’t. I want us to, though. So very much.’

Still she does not look at him. Will not, it seems.

‘You’ve been very kind,’ Rowena says quietly, and Henry hears a tremble in her voice. ‘But what you want from me I cannot give.’

‘What is it you think I want from you?’

A little laugh escapes her. ‘What all men want.’

His chest tightens at the implication. Has Rowena been with another man? Did he wrong her? Henry wants to tell her he is nothing like whoever it is she thinks of, to convince her she is safe with him, but Rowena is opening her reticule, is removing the glass vial he gave her from its depths, and the moment has passed.

Gravely she holds it between them. A spool of sunlight pierces the grey glass, casting her chin with delicate rainbows.

‘You were right,’ Rowena says softly. ‘This is not laudanum.’

It takes Henry a moment to compose himself, to apply himself to the change of subject. He lets out a calming breath, and she pulls the gold Turk’s-head stopper from the bottle’s neck.

‘It’s a clever concoction; it took me some time to identify the ingredients. I had to refer to my own stores and replicate it.’

Rowena passes the bottle over, and Henry takes a sniff.

‘Careful,’ she warns. ‘It works best by ingestion, but I cannot vouch for its potency when inhaled too deeply.’

‘What is it?’

‘A mixture of herbs, all of them deadly taken in large quantities on their own. But the measure of oils extracted from each plant is just about safe if mixed with wine or water.’ Rowena replaces the stopper. ‘This is wine.’

‘What are the herbs?’

‘Mandrake and valerian. Mugwort and henbane. The smallest touch of deadly nightshade but not to the potency of what was in Wynn Evans’ vial.’

Henry frowns at this. ‘Deadly nightshade I know, of course, but my knowledge of herbs is woolly at best. What do the others do?’ and when Rowena tells him he swears. She nods in understanding.

‘It’s a risk to pair so many toxic plants together. I’m surprised Lady Gwen has not suffered more than she has. What prolonged effects such a tincture might cause, I do not know.’

Henry does. Organ failure. Internal bleeding. Death. A slow death, but death all the same, and the thought leaves him cold.

‘I need to put a stop to it.’

Rowena shakes her head. ‘To remove the tincture so suddenly could do more harm than good.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then how will you do it?’

He sighs, runs his hand through his hair. ‘I do not know. But it isn’t a simple task. There are many other factors to consider.’

Henry considers them now.

First, there is the matter of Mrs Evans. It is she who administers the tincture, she who guards Gwen Tresilian like a hawk. There is no question the old housekeeper knows she does not sedate her with laudanum (for if she knew, then why hide the bottles?) which raises further questions. Why? To what purpose?

Second, if Mrs Evans is in possession of bottles identical to the one found in the gatehouse does that mean she, rather than Dr Beddoe, played a part in her brother’s death? Do the other servants know too? And what of Linette? How can it be possible that she has spent so many years unaware her mother is being drugged? It seems incomprehensible. So, then, has Linette lied to him all this time?

Then, thirdly, there is Dr Evans himself.

Perhaps, as Reverend Dee suggested, the bottles did belong to the old doctor. If that was so he must have known what was in the vials given to Lady Gwen, and instructed his sister to administer their contents. But why? And if he did instruct such a thing, and the vials were indeed his own, then the one found in the gatehouse is not as suspicious as he once thought.

But then, what of the deadly nightshade within it?

Has Julian Tresilian known any of this? Surely he could not, for why bring him here as Lady Gwen’s doctor when it was clear Henry would, in time, discover the truth? If such a thing was to be kept secret, then employing him was a reckless decision.

‘Dr Talbot?’

Rowena’s voice is soft, tinged with concern, and Henry raises his head.

‘I do not know,’ he says again, despairing, and a cricket chirps noisily in the grass.

‘’Tis a difficult situation,’ Rowena murmurs. ‘I do understand. If I can help in any way …’ The cricket ceases its song. She rises to her feet. ‘I should start back.’

Henry stands too, moves to take her hands, then thinks better of it.

‘Must you?’ he asks, searching her face. ‘Aren’t you lonely, living there all alone?’

Rowena sighs, looks out over the fields to the ruined cottages below. ‘Of course I am,’ she replies softly. ‘But I have to earn a living.’

A thought flashes into his mind then, and Henry’s stomach flips at the possibility of it.

‘You could earn it with me. As my assistant. I’m not used to your traditional methods, but it is clear to me now I should adopt at least some of them if I am to get along here in Penhelyg. Your help, it would be appreciated. I can pay you handsomely from my own salary.’

Rowena’s eyes snap back to his. ‘Dr Talbot, I—’

‘The gatehouse will be ready soon,’ Henry says in a rush. ‘There’s a spare room. It’s yours, if you want it. Staying at the gatehouse would be far more convenient than living out here. Safer, too.’

‘But—’

‘If it’s the impropriety of it you think of, I …’

He trails off. The gatehouse has only two bedrooms, no third to accommodate a companion. There is nothing that can counter that oversight, and as she looks up at him he curses inwardly. Why does he sound so desperate? It is foolish to act so, to ingratiate himself like this, but hell’s teeth, he cannot help it!

‘I want nothing from you,’ Rowena is saying now, ‘except one thing.’

Henry swallows. ‘Anything,’ he answers, and gently she takes his arm.

‘You may walk me back to Moelfre.’