Drops of Gold(35)

“I did everything I could. I visited whenever my presence didn’t unduly upset her. I tried to rally her spirits with tales of Caroline’s adventures: her first smile, first laugh, Nurse’s belief that she was going to produce a tooth despite being not quite four months old. I suggested she write to her father, something she had done regularly before Caroline’s birth. Though I was never privy to their correspondence, she did seem to enjoy hearing from him. But Bridget either acted as though I weren’t speaking at all, or she cried.

“Then one night, the crying stopped.”

“Oh, sir.” Miss Wood’s tiny voice echoed in his ears.

“I ran to her rooms, convinced something had happened, that she’d taken ill.” He closed his eyes, the setting so real he might have been experiencing it all over again: running frantically into a room decorated in blue, eerily quiet. “The window drapes were all pulled back, moonlight spilling across the floor, but the bed curtains were pulled shut. The room was so quiet. The clock on her dressing table had been stopped. I . . . I didn’t even hear her breathing.”

The story flowed from him then, and he felt powerless to stop the words.

“I walked to the bed. I think I was even shaking. I hadn’t been so scared in . . . probably my entire life. I grabbed the bed curtains, knowing I needed to check on her. I kept telling myself she was just sleeping, that everything would be fine.” Layton felt a warm tear run down his wind-bitten cheek. His breaths shuddered in and out of him. “I was too late. Too late. She was dead.”

Suddenly, Miss Wood held his hand in her two smaller ones, looking up at him. Dawning horror touched her usually cheerful face. Little did Miss Wood realize, he hadn’t reached the worst part of the story. But he couldn’t stop. He needed to tell someone after all these years. He needed to tell her.

“I sent for Dr. Habbersham, of course, not because I thought he could do anything but to determine what had”—somehow he couldn’t say killed her—“happened. She didn’t look peaceful, like she’d passed away in her sleep. She’d obviously been terribly, terribly ill. Violently ill, even. I’d never seen anything so horrible.” He felt her fingers tighten around his hand as if she knew he needed that, needed to feel the strength of human contact. “I kept the servants out, hoping to spare them the sight of her final moments. It was while I waited for the doctor that I found it.” He took a deep breath, remembering too vividly. “A vial. On her bed stand. It was empty. I hadn’t seen it there before, and I wondered about it.

“Dr. Habbersham had no trouble identifying what it had once held. One look at Bridget, and he knew. Arsenic. Pure, unadulterated poison.”

“Someone poisoned her?” Miss Wood asked in innocence.

“No, Mary. She poisoned herself.”

He heard her suck in a shocked breath. “I had no idea,” Mary said, emotion thick in her voice.

“No one has any idea. I haven’t told anyone. Neither has Habbersham. He listed her cause of death as a wasting illness. She’d been out of the public eye for so long, it was easily accepted.”

“Did you tell your family?”

“Of course not.”

“But why?” Mary stepped back from him just enough for him to see her face, tears hovering at the corners of her eyes. “Surely they would have been a support to you.”

“I couldn’t, Mary. I couldn’t.” He pulled his hand out of hers and began pacing among the copse of trees they’d stopped under.

“I don’t understand why not.”

“Because they would have—” He ran his hand through his hair. Sometime during their walk, he’d lost his hat. “Do you know what happens to people who kill themselves, Mary? Do you have any idea?”

She shook her head, her chin trembling but her tears remaining firmly in her eyes.

“Suicide is a felony in England and a sin of some significance. There are repercussions. Consequences.” Layton rubbed his face, the tension in his body almost unbearable. This was why he never talked about that time, tried not to think about it. “Someone who commits suicide cannot be buried in a churchyard, cannot receive a graveside service or a Christian burial. Their death is not acknowledged by the parish.” He was pacing faster, harder. “Bridget would have been buried at the side of a road, Mary! A stake driven through her heart! It is the law: the law of England, the law of the church. I could not, could not, do that to her. I would never have permitted her body to be desecrated that way, relegated to an unmarked grave in a place where her family would be ashamed to bring flowers or go to remember her. The few times I have encountered her father since her death have been in the churchyard—we both needed her to be there. Caroline needs her to be there.”