A Pinch of Poison Read online

  The young woman wore blue and white silk crepe that mimicked the girls’ uniforms, yet with draping that hinted at the work of Paul Poiret—again, surprising for an assistant headmistress, but then again, Miss Sedgewick never missed an opportunity to remind people she hailed from a landed family in Hereford. Perhaps her relatives supplemented her income.

  “Is everyone ready?” the woman called out as if the luncheon hinged upon her leadership, as if Eva couldn’t manage to direct the girls into the dining hall.

  “All ready, Miss Sedgewick,” they responded in the practiced unison of schoolgirls, and formed a queue in front of her.

  Lady Zara, her chestnut ringlets upswept and arranged to frame her face, shouldered her way to the front of the line. “I must be first. I’m to present Miss Finch with her Madeira cake as the rest of the desserts are being served. Look, Miss Sedgewick, didn’t it turn out splendidly?”

  Miss Sedgewick regarded the miniature cake, iced with a cinnamon and nutmeg glaze. “It certainly did, Lady Zara. Miss Finch shall be very pleased.”

  They held each other’s gazes another moment, long enough for Eva to notice and wonder whether a silent communication passed between them. But perhaps Zara Worthington, as the daughter of an earl, felt a stronger bond with Miss Sedgewick, who was more her equal than any of the other staff.

  Miss Sedgewick pivoted on her fashionable heel and preceded the girls into the dining hall—as if she had led them in their efforts from start to finish. Unhurriedly, she all but floated back to her seat and gave an authoritative nod for the girls to begin serving. Eva might as well have stayed downstairs in the kitchen. One by one they passed her, dispersing in an almost dancelike formation among the tables. Another minute or two, and Eva would retreat to her own cup of tea before helping Mrs. Honeychurch and the kitchen maids restore order to their domain.

  Phoebe’s gaze caught hers. Grinning broadly, she lifted her teacup in a toast and mouthed a silent thank you. As if Eva needed to be thanked—as if women in her position were typically acknowledged in any but an absent, offhand way. Her heart swelled with gratitude, and with pride, too, that her lady had grown into such a gracious young woman.

  She watched Zara present Miss Finch with her special Madeira cake. After an exclamation of delight, the broad-faced, large-bosomed woman wasted no time in tucking in. One by one, the students set their various desserts on the tables and then moved to form a queue at the side of the room. When all had been served, light applause broke out among the assemblage. The girls curtsied and more than a few blushed with pleasure. At the rear of the room, an array of boxes and packages occupied a long table draped in colorful bunting. Collected under Lady Phoebe’s directions, these were the personal and household items to be distributed among the needy families of the Great War’s veterans. Each attendee at today’s luncheon had made a generous monetary donation as well.

  Eva smiled. Yes, Phoebe and the girls had much to be proud of. Today was a resounding success.

  She was about to retrace her steps to the kitchen when a noise held her still. Despite the mingling conversations and the oohs and ahs as delicacies were sampled, a distinct choking sound reached Eva’s ears. Concern became foreboding when the coughing escalated to forceful hacking. Heedless of whether she would be seen or not, she pushed the baize door wider. Miss Finch held a hand in front of her mouth and gripped the edge of the table with the other. Her shoulders shook violently.

  “Good heavens, Miss Finch. Someone, pour her some lemonade.” Without waiting for anyone to comply with her demand, the Countess of Wroxly snatched the pitcher from the center of the table. She poured a generous measure into a glass, but when she attempted to put it in the woman’s hand, Miss Finch shoved it away. The glass fell, splashing lemonade onto the table linen before rolling and crashing to the floor. The other ladies at the table, most of them members of the school’s governing body, leapt to their feet.

  Eva abandoned all discretion. She entered the dining hall and hurried to the head table. Phoebe, her face etched with shock, attempted to reach for Miss Finch, but with flailing arms the woman stumbled backward. Ruddy color flooded her face, her several chins, her thick neck. Eva came to an abrupt halt. She no more knew how to intervene than the bug-eyed ladies surrounding her.

  One idea presented itself amid the growing panic. “Lady Amelia,” she called out, “run and fetch the nurse! Tell her Miss Finch is choking.”

  At a trot, Amelia began wending her way around the tables in her path. Lady Phoebe, meanwhile, seized Miss Finch’s forearm to prevent her from falling over backward, while Miss Sedgewick did likewise on the woman’s other side. The ladies seated farther back in the room finally realized something was terribly amiss at the head table. Tea and desserts abandoned, the assemblage came to their feet, their cacophony of voices echoing against the ceiling high above them.

  “Quiet, everyone!” Lady Wroxly held up her thin hands. “Quiet, please. This isn’t helping.” She spoke next to the gaggle of ladies who had closed in around Miss Finch, each attempting, in shrill voices, to ascertain what was wrong. “Ladies, give her some air. Miss Finch, is there something caught in your throat? Nod once for yes.”

  Where was Lady Amelia and that nurse? The school’s infirmary occupied the former music room at the back of the house, overlooking the gardens. It shouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes at the most. Eva spotted Julia, or rather the back of her, as she fled the table and rushed from the dining hall. Eva barely had time to contemplate where Lady Julia might be going before a crash drew her back to the situation unfolding before her.

  Miss Finch, though still held by Phoebe and Miss Sedgewick, had begun twitching and jerking. Her complexion turned garnet and her eyes bulged. To Eva’s horror, she realized the woman was no longer hacking and sputtering, but heaving silently in a futile attempt to draw air into her lungs. With a great wrenching of both arms, she broke free of Lady Phoebe and Miss Sedgewick, pitched forward, doubled over, and dropped face-first onto the head table with all the deadweight of a sack stuffed with flour. Her plate rattled beneath her and her teacup went rolling.

  CHAPTER 2

  The ladies nearest the fallen woman screamed, their cries quickly taken up and echoed from table to table. The students, still lined up on the side of the room, began to weep, and a quick-thinking woman in a fox-head stole scurried over and herded them back into the corridor and down to the kitchen.

  Eva rushed to the fallen woman’s side. Phoebe reappeared at Miss Finch’s other side, but before either could lay a hand on the headmistress, she slid grotesquely downward, taking the tablecloth and place settings with her as she collapsed to the floor. Dishes and glasses shattered around her; cutlery clattered; tea and cream and remnants of cake splashed and bounced. At first, no one moved, frozen in obvious disbelief. Then Eva sank beside her, hesitated, drew a fortifying breath, and slipped her fingers to the side of the woman’s neck.

  “Is she . . . ?” several voices hissed at once.

  Eva looked up and found Lady Phoebe’s anxious face. “I don’t feel a pulse.”

  A chorus of shrieks raised a lament and invoked the Lord’s mercy. Ladies huddled together with their arms around each other. Still others buried their faces in their hands, until footsteps from the main hall turned their horrified gazes in that direction, as if the assemblage believed Death, having fled too hastily, had decided to return to claim another soul.

  Instead of a shrouded, formless creature, the school nurse appeared, clad in blue with a crisp white pinafore and matching kerchief. She strode briskly in, looking straight ahead and avoiding the stares converging on her. She carried a short length of rubber tubing and what appeared to be a hand-held pump very much like a concertina accordion. As the nurse grew closer, she attached the tube to a nozzle at one end of the pump, and Eva surmised this to be some kind of breathing apparatus. Amelia and Julia came in behind her, trotting every few steps to keep up. So that was where Julia had gone.

  Lad
y Phoebe pushed to her feet. “Amelia, don’t come any closer.”

  The youngest Renshaw sister paid no heed, but was forced to halt before reaching Miss Finch’s inert form when Lady Wroxly adamantly stepped in front of her. “I’m feeling faint, dearest. Would you help me into the hall?”

  “Oh, but Miss Finch—I want to know if she’s all right.” Uncertainty spread across Amelia’s pretty features, but she linked arms with her grandmother and walked away. She apparently couldn’t resist looking back several times before they reached the doorway and turned out of sight.

  It was then Eva realized the nurse had yet to take action. The woman, about Eva’s own age, had come to an abrupt halt and simply gawped down at her would-be patient. She clutched the apparatus so tightly, the rubber tubing compressed and the accordion threatened to collapse into uselessness. With her frizzled, strawlike hair and ashen complexion, she more resembled a patient than a healer. Why didn’t she do something? What was she waiting for?

  “Nurse, help her,” Eva shouted. “Perhaps she can still be saved.”

  That broke through the woman’s lethargy. She lurched forward, her feet crunching on china shards, and crouched beside Miss Finch. “Help me turn her.” Eva complied, summoning the strength to shift the rotund woman. But once accomplished it became all too apparent that nothing could be done for the headmistress.

  “Her face, it’s already turning blue,” Lady Philomena Albert whispered tremulously from a table away.

  “Her fingernails, too,” added her companion, who hung with both hands onto Lady Philomena’s upper arm.

  The nurse set down her breathing equipment and placed her fingertips against Miss Finch’s neck, as Eva had done. After a moment, she gestured at the tubing and pump. “I’m afraid we won’t be needing that.”

  * * *

  The coroner scribbled a few more notes in his tablet while a pair of assistants grunted beneath their burden as they lifted the stretcher bearing the headmistress’s body. They had covered her with a sheet, thank heavens. Eva still shuddered to think about poor Miss Finch staring up with sightless eyes from within her blue-tinged face. The speculation that had immediately spread among the students, staff, and luncheon guests alike had centered around three possibilities as the cause of death: stroke, heart attack, or, what Eva found most likely, choking. Miss Finch had been partial to almonds in her Madeira cake. Had one of them cost her her life?

  The arrival of Chief Inspector Isaac Perkins and his assistant, Constable Brannock, a half hour later took everyone by surprise. A man in his middle years, Chief Inspector Perkins looked put out and irritable, no doubt from having his leisurely afternoon interrupted. He shuffled in, declaring the coroner a fussy old buzzard who didn’t know one end of his business from the other. “Nonetheless,” he added, “an inquest shall commence and I should appreciate everyone’s cooperation.”

  “An inquest? What on earth for?” Miss Sedgewick had headed the man off in the entry hall and stood her ground. “Surely you’re not suggesting . . .”

  With a shocked expression, she forewent finishing her question. Neither did the chief inspector deign to explain himself. He’d merely stepped around her and commandeered one of the administrative offices. Presently, he was questioning the ladies who had been seated at and near the head table, including Julia, Phoebe, and the Countess of Wroxly. The rest of the guests had been sent home, and those with students attending the school had taken their daughters with them.

  No sooner had Lady Phoebe joined Eva back in the dining hall than the inspector’s assistant, Constable Brannock, asked to see them both together. The hairs at Eva’s nape bristled. The luncheon had been Lady Phoebe’s idea, and Eva had assisted in all the preparations. Were they suspected of something?

  Constable Brannock must have noticed something in her expression, for he immediately put them at ease. “We worked well together last Christmas, didn’t we? I thought it best we put our heads together again.”

  He didn’t say a word about his employer, Inspector Perkins, with his pocked nose and rheumy eyes—sure signs of a man who enjoys his whiskey. He didn’t have to. Last Christmas, an innocent man might have hanged if Constable Brannock hadn’t taken matters into his own hands—and hadn’t placed a certain amount of trust in Eva and Lady Phoebe.

  “Tell me everything you remember,” he said to them now. “Every detail, no matter how small it may seem.”

  They occupied Miss Finch’s office, sitting opposite one another at the desk. He had removed his high-domed policeman’s helmet, allowing waves of thick auburn hair to fall rakishly across his brow. In the window behind him, a vista of the school’s garden and, farther away, the athletic fields and outbuildings, stretched into the distance among trees and hedges wearing the pale greens of spring. Eva thought the pastoral scene outside made a pleasing contrast to the harsh lines of his uniform as well as a colorful frame for his bright hair and keen blue eyes.

  Eyes that missed nothing, she reminded herself. Though she had done nothing wrong, something about Miles Brannock always made her feel somehow . . . under a microscope.

  “As I told the chief inspector,” Lady Phoebe began, but Miles Brannock immediately interrupted.

  “Forget what you said to Inspector Perkins. Pretend you’ve talked to no one prior to now. What was the first thing you noticed from the moment Miss Finch appeared to be in distress?”

  Phoebe glanced over at Eva, and Eva nodded with a smile of encouragement. She, too, had been questioned by the inspector, but only briefly. Since she had been watching from a distance, Inspector Perkins had deemed her observations insignificant and summarily dismissed her. And as for Lady Phoebe, the man seemed to assume events had left her too distraught to be of much help as a witness.

  “Well . . .” Lady Phoebe’s brows knitted. “She seemed perfectly fine throughout most of the luncheon. Except . . .”

  “Yes?” The constable’s pencil hovered above his notepad.

  “Her color wasn’t good, but then it never is.”

  “Are you referring to the blue tint to her complexion?”

  “No, sir. Miss Finch was ruddy—always ruddy. And she huffed and snuffled and . . .”

  “Yes, my lady? And what?”

  “I’m not painting a flattering picture,” she murmured. “One shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.”

  Constable Brannock laid down his pencil. “My lady, nothing you say can hurt Miss Finch now, but might help shed light on how she died.”

  Eva couldn’t help herself from blurting her thoughts aloud. “We haven’t been told anything, but can we not assume from your presence that foul play is suspected?”

  The constable held Eva in his gaze for a long, uncomfortable moment. She had spoken out of turn. Were Lady Phoebe any other but a kind and tolerant mistress, she would have received a reprimand. For instance, had she been sitting beside Lady Julia in similar circumstances . . . well.

  But she received no reprimand from either Lady Phoebe or the constable. Quite the contrary. His gaze softened—ironically making her more uncomfortable still—and he leaned with his elbows on the desk. “I can’t tell you anything on the record. But off the record . . . because of the blue tinge to her skin and beneath her fingernails, the coroner suspects poison, and so do I.”

  Lady Phoebe’s manicured hand flew to her lips. Eva’s mouth dropped open as she processed this information.

  “I assumed she choked on something,” Eva said after a moment. “Or perhaps had a heart attack.”

  “As did I,” Lady Phoebe said, “which is why I mentioned her color. As I started to tell you, she huffed when she walked and snuffed while she ate. I sat beside her, so I heard. I found it rather annoying, I’m ashamed to say, but it led me to believe she perhaps suffered from asthma, or as Eva said, a weak heart. Either of those conditions would explain her struggle to catch her breath. I’ve read that a full-on asthma attack can completely close the airways. Never did we suspect . . . my goodness . . .” Her gaze lig
hted on Eva. “Not another murder.”

  “I said no such thing, my lady,” the constable said quickly and sharply. “So do not go spreading rumors.”

  It was on the tip of Eva’s tongue to admonish the man to mind his manners when speaking to her young lady, but if she had learned anything about Miles Brannock since first meeting him back in December, it was that privilege and rank meant little to the Irishman, nor did he allow trifles like good manners to stand in the way of an investigation.

  Lady Phoebe tilted her chin, signaling she hadn’t liked the man’s tone any more than Eva had. “Then, if I may be so bold as to ask, what do you suspect?”

  “Considering this is a finishing school for young ladies and Miss Finch seems to have had no family and few acquaintances outside of her occupation, murder is highly doubtful. No, the chief inspector and I are considering accidental poisoning as the cause of death.”

  “You mean to say a poisonous ingredient somehow ended up in Miss Finch’s lunch?” Phoebe asked.

  A pang of guilt stabbed at Eva’s heart, for she had been in charge of supervising the girls during the cooking and baking. “An ingredient such as . . . what?” She mentally called up images of the kitchen counters and worktables. What kinds of items had been present during the preparations? Flour, spices, broth, sugar, cooking wine . . . she couldn’t remember any box, jar, or other container not specifically needed for the recipes. Could she have missed something?

  Of course she could have. With all those girls and the many dishes they prepared, why, the kitchen had been pure chaos these past two days. But which dish, specifically . . . Her throat ran dry. “The Madeira cake. It was the last thing Miss Finch ate right before she began to struggle.” And Eva remembered who had made the single-serving cake—Zara Worthington. She chewed her lip. Should she say anything?