Chapter 52
F
rancis Crick was spared the degradation of the barber-surgeons’ scalpels after his execution. The judge had ruled that, while he showed no remorse for his crime, he had at least confessed to it.
The trial had been held at the same Oxford court where Captain Michael Farrell had been tried not three months before. Thomas and Lydia had attended, but as Francis had confessed, it was a summary affair, without any of the intricacies and legal arguments that had been aired at the Irishman’s trial.
Lydia had visited her cousin in his condemned cell afterward and given him what little comfort she could in his last hours. But there was something she needed to ask him before the noose was tightened around his neck and she knew her question might prove almost as painful.
“Do you know who killed Edward?” she said, forcing the words from her mouth.
Francis looked at her, his eyes red from crying, and shook his head.
“You cannot ask me that,” he said and turned away, but Lydia grabbed his hand.
“Surely you cannot take the answer with you to the gallows?” she asked incredulously.
He looked at her earnestly once more. “I love you, Lydia. I have loved you for years and you should have been mine.” His words wounded her like arrows because she knew them to be true. “If it wasn’t for Farrell, we would have been together, wouldn’t we, Lydia?” There was an urgency in his voice that suddenly frightened her. “Wouldn’t we?” he cried, taking her by the shoulders and shaking her.
“Stop it, Francis,” she called. “You’re hurting me.” She pulled herself away from his grasp and he relented, taking two or three steps back and composing himself once more.
“Do not take your secret with you to the grave, Francis,” pleaded Lydia.
The young man looked at her intently once more. There was still a family likeness between them, he thought to himself. The same blood ran through their veins. He could never be robbed of that. “I can and I must,” he replied. “For all our sakes.”
And so it was that on the morning of August 15, 1781, Francis Henry Crick was hanged by the neck until he died, taking with him to his grave the secret that still haunted Boughton Hall.
For the next few days Lydia shut herself away in her room. “The mistress does not wish to see anyone,” Eliza told Thomas when he called.
“Tell her ladyship I can give her a draught to soothe her,” pleaded Thomas.
The maid went away and returned shortly afterward, shaking her head.
“My mistress thanks you, but says she would rather be left alone,” reported Eliza.
Forlorn, Thomas returned to London to his dissecting rooms. He tried to immerse himself in his work, but the passion of Vesalius had deserted him. He no longer felt compelled to probe the intricacies of the human body, to tease out tubules, to dissect tissue. Its mysteries no longer held out a promise of redemption, but of damnation. Each organ became a Medusa’s head that would turn him blind, just like Dr. Carruthers, should he set his inquisitive eyes upon it.
Furthermore, he received word from his father in Philadelphia that Charleston had fallen to the British and that much of South Carolina was being coerced to return to British allegiance.
Nothing made sense to him anymore. Into his ordered, structured existence chaos had come and brought with it destruction and death. Not only that, with it had come love, too—an emotion he had never felt before, and now that had also been taken away from him. He felt confused and bereft. Lydia had given his work a purpose. He had been on a mission for her. Now that she chose to exclude him, he felt deprived of any reason to go on.
It was therefore hardly surprising that on the ninth day after his return, having received word that Lydia wished to see him, he was on the coach that left from London to Oxford within the hour.
She received him in the drawing room, holding out her delicate hand for Thomas to kiss.
“I have been so worried about you,” he told her, continuing to hold her hand. She made no attempt to withdraw it.
“Let us sit,” she said softly, guiding him to the sofa. Thomas studied her face. She looked gaunt. It was obvious to him she had lost a great deal of weight.
“You should have let me stay with you,” he chided gently.
She looked at him, slowly shaking her head. “You have done more than your duty asks of you.”
Thomas felt wounded by this remark. “I would do anything for you,” he replied. “I thought you knew that.”
“I know it,” she acknowledged, “and yet I wish it were not so.”
Thomas frowned. “What do you mean?”
She rose deliberately and walked to the window, gazing out at the gardens beyond. “Three men I once loved, my brother, my husband, and my cousin, not to mention James Lavington, are now dead because of me.”
Thomas could not believe what he heard. “No, Lydia,” he said, rising and walking toward her.
“Lavington almost killed you, too,” she continued.
“You cannot blame yourself for any of this, Lydia,” he assured her, but he detected his words were of little comfort. So often he had witnessed the cruel aftermath of bereavement that left loneliness, depression, and guilt in its wake. He wanted to share her pain and he suddenly found himself acknowledging his own guilt. He sighed deeply. “You asked me to find your brother’s killer, but I failed. If I had been successful early on, then your husband and Francis, and Lavington, might still be alive. We can all blame ourselves if we look back,” he told her.
Lydia smiled meekly. “You have done more than any man,” she assured him, pressing her hand onto his in a gesture of intimacy.
Just then, Lady Crick came into view, passing the drawing room window carrying a pannier and wearing a moth-eaten bonnet adorned with pheasant feathers.
“Dear Mama,” sighed Lydia, watching the old woman shuffle toward the garden gate. An air of fragile melancholy seemed to surround her. “I cannot understand what ails her. One day she is in some far-off land of her own and another, she seems perfectly well.”
Together they watched the old dowager walk out of the walled garden and down the path.
“Where is she going?” asked Thomas.
“For her walk in the woods. She and Francis would often go and she misses him.”
“Does she know?”
Lydia shook her head. “If she does, she has not spoken of it, but she is sad, that much I do know. It will be a year tomorrow since Edward died. She mentioned the date only yesterday. I wasn’t even sure that she had grasped he was dead. I only wish I knew what went on inside her head.”
“Would you like me to speak with her?” Thomas ventured.
Lydia swung ’round. “Would you? “ she said.
The day was bright, but the air was chill as Thomas followed Lady Crick as she ventured into the beech wood. He kept his distance so that he could observe her and watched curiously as she weaved in and out of trees, entering deeper and deeper into the forest.
Once or twice he had snapped a twig underfoot and the old woman had stopped in her tracks. Perhaps sensing she was being followed, she had turned and looked about her, then shrugged and carried on, going ever deeper under the forest canopy. Was she nervous about being detected? She seemed to be on a mission. Her steps were purposeful and confident, as if she were going to meet with someone.
Presently the track became narrower. The sun no longer reached into the dark places and the smell of rotting vegetation assailed the nostrils. There was no birdsong now and Thomas was growing increasingly uneasy. If he revealed himself to her, he would frighten her out of her skin and risk causing heart failure. He would have to bide his time and be silent.
A few seconds later, however, the old woman stopped for the first time in her foray and began looking at the ground. Thomas strained his eyes to see what she was doing. It appeared as though she was looking for something. Suddenly she bent down, plucked something from the ground, and put it in her pannier, then again and again.
Thomas, too, shifted his gaze, trying to see what the dowager could be collecting. The answer was quick to reveal itself to him. On the trunks of fallen trees, nestling in dead leaves, in little clearings, Thomas could see them everywhere. Flat purple ones, rounded scarlet ones, ochre helmets, brown mushrooms: the fungi were everywhere in various stages of growth or decay. The old woman was doing nothing more sinister, or strange, than collecting mushrooms. He smiled to himself, more out of relief than anything else. After all the intrigue and mystery he had encountered over the past few months, his mind had become suspicious. He upbraided himself for being so mistrustful and allowing himself to doubt the innocent intentions of an elderly gentlewoman. He was just about to turn and go back to the hall quietly, without attracting attention, when he noticed Lady Crick do something rather unexpected. He saw her eat what he assumed was a raw mushroom. Chewing it slowly and deliberately as a cow chews cud, she pulled another from her basket, then ate it before straightening herself and turning to leave the forest the same way she had entered it.
Thomas ducked behind a tree, not wishing to be seen, and watched the dowager pass, carrying her pannier full of mushrooms. He remained at a discreet distance behind her for the next few minutes. He estimated the old woman had traveled almost a mile into the woods and it would take her almost half an hour to reach the garden gate moving at her steady but slow pace.
It was not until she came to the edge of the forest that Thomas noticed something else. The sun was dappling the ground now and the path was only a few feet away when Lady Crick appeared to stagger slightly. She put her hand out against the trunk of a tree to steady herself, took a deep breath, then carried on.
Not wishing to alarm her, but being near enough to the garden to pretend he had come from that direction, Thomas decided to approach the old woman from the side.
“Are you well, my lady?” he asked her gently.
She stopped and looked at him quizzically. “Francis? Is that you, Francis?” she asked.
“No. I am Dr. Thomas Silkstone, a friend of Lady Lydia. May I help you?”
Lady Crick cocked her head at an odd angle as if trying to orientate herself.
“Where am I?” she asked weakly.
“In the grounds of Boughton Hall, your ladyship,” replied a puzzled Thomas.
She looked at him with the dull eyes of a fish and then seemed to have difficulty focusing. The young doctor was just about to take her by the arm and guide her inside when she suddenly let out a shriek and started pointing at his head.
“There’s a monkey. Look,” she screamed. Her breathing became harsh and labored.
Unsettled by this sudden outburst, Thomas once again began to take her by the arm, but she refused. “No. No. Get the monkey away,” she yelled, flailing her arms and dropping her basket so that its contents scattered on the ground below.
Alerted by the old lady’s cries, Lovelock, who had been working the garden nearby, approached to see if he could help.
“Come, my lady,” he told her soothingly. “ ’Twill be all right,” he told her, taking her gently by the hand. She smiled at the burly servant. “Francis,” she said calmly. “I am tired,” and she surrendered herself into his arms as he picked her up with ease and began walking back to the hall. Thomas followed swiftly behind. Lady Crick was humming gently now, like a contented babe, and by Lovelock’s demeanor Thomas surmised this was not the first time she had behaved in such an odd manner. “Pretty penny,” she mumbled. “Pretty penny and white roses.”
“Yes, my lady,” soothed the servant. “All will be well.”
With the help of Eliza they managed to put the old woman to bed. She struggled a little before lapsing into a strange state, neither awake nor asleep. Thomas took her pulse. It raced like a hunted fox’s. “Has she been like this before?” asked Thomas of Lydia as she sat by her mother’s bedside.
“Yes. Maybe half a dozen times.”
“How long does the madness last?”
“Three or four hours, sometimes more.” Lydia looked at the dowager as she lay staring at the ceiling, as if watching something up above, an unseen drama playing out only for her eyes. “What is it? What ails her?” She folded her mother’s cold hands under the linen sheets.
Thomas looked at her and saw the same forlorn expression and the brown doelike eyes that had first appealed to him all those months ago. “I cannot say,” he answered.
What he did not admit to Lydia, however, was that he had a very good idea.
Chapter 53
T
he library at Boughton Hall was not a large room, yet judicious planning meant that as many volumes could be packed into its four walls as in many another grander library. Lined from floor to ceiling with shelves that were filled with scores of musty tomes covered in the dust of neglect, the library was probably the least visited room in the house. Nevertheless Lydia’s father, the fifth earl, had by all accounts been a man of some erudition and had collected many volumes fitting for a man of his position.
Scanning the long-untouched shelves Thomas observed the volumes that seemed to be the staple diet of every English gentleman’s library. There were the complete works of all the ancient philosophers, from Homer to Herodotus, together with the more contemporary volumes from those as diverse as Sir Thomas More and Thomas Hobbes. Moreover there were treatises from John Locke, the physician and philosopher oft quoted by his fellow countrymen in their struggle for independence.
The young doctor was even pleasantly surprised to find such fine works as Dr. Lorenz Heister’s
A General System of Surgery,
together with William Hunter’s acclaimed
The Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus.
They gave him hope that he might find just what he was looking for. Sure enough, after twenty minutes or so, a book by the great Robert Hooke, whose work he greatly admired, leapt out from the shelves of obscure periodicals and journals on forestry and the preservation of game. In its yellowing leaves, Thomas discovered all he needed to know.
Later that day Thomas sat behind the large desk at one end of the library as a bewildered Mistress Claddingbowl approached. On the desk sat a pannier, the sort used by Lydia and her mother to collect fruit and flowers from the kitchen garden. By the pannier was a large book, opened at a page of illustrations of various types of fungi.
The cook curtsied nervously. “Good day, Mistress Claddingbowl,” greeted Thomas.
“Good day, sir,” she replied, twisting her apron as if it were the dough she had left behind to prove in the kitchen.
“Take a seat,” instructed the doctor, gesturing to a chair on the other side of the desk. She did so, at the same time eyeing the basket.
“Are you familiar with these fungi, Mistress Claddingbowl?” asked Thomas. Before he came into the library, he had revisited the spot where Lady Crick had begun to hallucinate and had dropped the pannier. Carefully he had retrieved all the spilled mushrooms and fungi that had fallen. They now sat in the basket, a motley assortment of musty-smelling specimens. “These, here,” said Thomas, pointing to the four or five plump, sandy-colored mushrooms in the basket.
The cook shook her head. “No, sir. I ain’t never seen them before,” she replied confidently. “Never.”
She seemed so sure that Thomas felt there was no point in pressing her further. “Do you want me to cook them, sir?” she asked innocently. “I could fry them in a nice bit of butter and—”
Thomas smiled. “Thank you. No, Mistress Claddingbowl. These are the very mushrooms that I fear have led to Lady Crick’s condition.”
A horrified look darted across the cook’s flaccid face. “Oh no, sir. I ain’t never seen those sort before, but ...” She trailed off.
“Yes?” urged Thomas.
“But I did see that,” she said, pointing to a fungus with greenish yellow gills.
Thomas looked at her uneasily. “You are sure?”
Bending over the basket, she sniffed it, just as a dog would, then pulling herself upright she declared: “Withered roses. I’d know that smell anywhere, sir. Lady Crick asked me to cook some for his lordship’s breakfast one morning.”
“Can you recall when that was?” Thomas pressed her.
The cook sat back in her seat. “A week or so before he died, sir. I remember it because later that day he was taken real bad with the sickness and I wondered if it was the mushrooms what ailed him.”
As soon as the fat cook had waddled out of the library, obviously feeling pleased about her revelations, Thomas began to turn the pages of the large book. Soon he came to a page headed “fungi found in woodlands.” The intricate illustration showed a pale cap with black streaks radiating outward. The caption confirmed his suspicions. It read: “Yellowish green cap. Found in beech woods in the autumn months.” Thomas looked in the pannier once more. There was no doubt about it. This fungus was an
amanita phalloides,
commonly called the death cap—the most poisonous fungus known to man.