A Momentary Marriage(111)
James gazed at him levelly. “You really mean to play this out? Do you think I’ll believe you innocent if you pretend you don’t know the method?”
“No.” Claude glared at him. “I know I’ve no hope of that with you. You’re bound and determined I’m the villain of the piece. I just want to know how it was done.”
“Why?”
“Because how else can I prove who really did it? You’re bloody certain it was me. I presume everyone else will fall in with your thinking because that’s what they’re accustomed to. And you’re going to wind up dead because of it.”
“As if you’d care.”
“It’s my head if you do,” Claude retorted. “Don’t you think I have a vested interest in the matter?”
James sighed. “Mercury.”
“What?” Claude looked at him blankly.
“Mercury,” James repeated, uneasiness beginning to coil in his stomach. “Quicksilver.”
“Someone put quicksilver in what, your food? How?”
“My medicine. And beneath my bed.”
“Under your bed!” Claude gaped at him. “I don’t understand. You don’t have to swallow it?”
James was growing tighter every moment. Could Claude possibly be this good an actor? “You breathe it in.”
“That’s it? You just breathe it and it makes you have . . .” He waved his hand toward James in a vague, encompassing gesture.
“Coughing. Tremors. Nightmares. Headaches. Insomnia. Weakness. Hallucinations.”
“Hallucinations!”
“Yes. Visions.” James leaned forward, bracing his hands on the desk, his voice harsh. “I saw your father. I saw Mother’s dead cat, of all things. You lose your memory and your mind and eventually your life. It’s a long, lingering, bloody awful way to go. It would have been kinder to have shot me.”
Claude swallowed, looking ill. “James . . .” He shook his head. “James, I didn’t . . . Good God, you honestly think that I could do such a thing? That I’m that low? That . . . that desperate and cruel?”
“I didn’t want to think it.” James heard the pain in his own voice and forced the emotion back down. “But you were in London at the right time to place it here. And you were at Grace Hill at the right time.”
“So were a number of others.”
“But who among them had the wits to do it?” James said with finality. “Archie? Patsy?”
Claude’s snort was answer enough to those possibilities. “Well, I didn’t have the wits to do it, either. I know nothing about mercury. How should I know you get ill just from breathing it? How would I even get it?”
“You play cards with the apothecary. He would know. He could get it.”
“I barely know the man; we play cards every once in a while. That’s scarcely reason enough for him to help me murder someone.” He ran his hands back through his hair, his eyes a little wild. “James, I swear to you. On anything you like. I’ll swear it on the life of my son. I did not do this.”
“Then who?” James’s voice was raw with desperation.
“I don’t know. Why does it have to be one of us? Why not someone who—well, I don’t know, but someone else. A number of people are in and out of this house during the Season, visiting Mother.”
“But not at Grace Hill, as well.”
“Why not? There are visitors there, too.”
“You think one of her beaus did it?” James asked sarcastically. “The poet, perhaps?”
“Netherly,” Claude said in disgust. “No, someone else, someone with reason to want you dead. I’m sure there must—” He stopped. “Wait. Netherly . . . his family. Netherly’s grandfather was in trade.”
“So?” James shrugged. “How could he benefit from—”
“No, no, listen to me. I haven’t the slightest notion why he would do it. But his family owns a factory. It makes gauges and things like that. Thermometers. They make thermometers.”
The room was suddenly as silent and still as the grave.
“Good God.” James’s voice was hushed. “I left her there. He’s with Laura.”
chapter 41
“I don’t see why we have to move to York,” Patricia whined. She had been reiterating this point for the past week. Now she had a new audience since Abigail and Mirabelle had come to call on them.
“What’s wrong with York?” Abigail asked.
“What isn’t?” Patricia responded. “It’s provincial and staid and . . .”
“You’ve lived there before?” Laura feigned innocence.