Simon Beaufort - A Head for Poisoning

“What have you been up to, all alone in here with father’s corpse?” Henry demanded.

He strode forward, as though he would lay hold of Geoffrey to shake the truth out of him, but made a hasty diversion when he saw the effects of the poison had worn off, and that Geoffrey would certainly no longer accept any manhandling from his smaller brother.

“He is not alone,” said Stephen, eyeing Mabel with amusement.

“Geoffrey! You should be ashamed of yourself!” cried Walter, aghast. “Seducing our father’s whore while his corpse is barely cold.”

“Excuse me!” said Mabel angrily. “What do you take me for? I am not for any man to take!”

“Well, Mabel,” said Stephen pleasantly. “To what do we owe this pleasure? You vowed never to set foot in Goodrich after our father’s preferences changed to younger women.”

“I came to do for his poor corpse what you would not,” said Mabel, scrubbing furiously. “Sir Godric and I had our good times and our bad ones, but I wanted to see him properly prepared for his funeral, and I knew you lot would not bother.”

“You came to search for the ring you claim he promised you, more likely,” said Joan, appearing suddenly in the doorway. “I looked for it myself, but someone had beaten me to it.”

“Henry took it,” said Stephen. “Before Godric was even dead.”

“Liar,” spat Henry. “I gave it back to him.”

Geoffrey was sure he had not, and moved away from the bed and his bickering relatives. He sat by the ashes of the fire, and gave a sigh. His head began to ache, and he felt sick again, as always seemed to happen when he set foot in his father’s chamber. He started suddenly, astounded at his sluggishness in putting together the facts that had been staring him in the face almost from the moment he had arrived at Goodrich. Godric had hired two food-tasters to assure him that no one was poisoning his meals, and the physician had found no poisons in what Godric had eaten. But the toxins were not in the food at all: they were in the room!

Geoffrey had heard of poisons being put in clothes and materials, and Godric’s bed had always made Geoffrey cough and his eyes water. Had someone been placing some kind of poisonous powder in the bed, so that it would kill Godric as he lay in it, the poisons wafting into the air around him each time he moved-and the weaker Godric grew, the more he would be forced to stay in bed, and the longer the poison could work on him. That was it! Geoffrey grew more certain as he considered it. Geoffrey had been told that Godric had been confined to his bed around November, and had simultaneously taken a turn for the worse.

So, Geoffrey now knew something that the physician had been unable to deduce. He knew how his father had been poisoned when all the food had been carefully checked. He decided that he would ask the physician to see whether he could find traces of the poison in Godric’s mattress. His elation subsided as quickly as it had arisen. He knew how Godric had been poisoned, but he still did not know who had done it. Julian came to sit next to him, sniffing and rubbing her nose against an already slimy sleeve.

“You look sick again,” she said in a low voice. “Do not let on to Henry, or he will take advantage of it and kill you.” She reached for the bottle of wine Stephen had given Geoffrey two nights before, and offered it to him. “Drink some of this. It might make you feel better.”

“God’s teeth, Julian!” muttered Geoffrey. “Do not give me that. It contains the poison that almost dispatched me the last time.”

“It cannot,” protested Julian. “The seal is not broken. How can it be poisoned if the seal is intact?”

Geoffrey stared down at the bottle. Julian was right. He looked around, but it was the only bottle in the room. It was, without doubt, one of the same kind that Stephen had brought him, and before Julian had picked it up, it had stood next to the bowl in which Hedwise had brought the broth. Geoffrey leaned over and picked up the bowl. It was clean: someone had washed it. Geoffrey frowned, and looked at the bowl and bottle thoughtfully. It seemed that the murderer was taking great care to cover his, or her, tracks.

Once Geoffrey’s squabbling relatives had left Mabel to her business and she and Geoffrey were once more alone in Godric’s chamber, Geoffrey went to examine his father’s body. The wound in the stomach was small, although deep, and had penetrated an area that Geoffrey, who had seen many battle injuries, knew would be fatal because of the great veins there. But the wound to his chest was larger, and Geoffrey could come to no conclusion other than that it had been made by the one Arabian dagger that the Earl of Shrewsbury had declined to appropriate. The smaller wound, however, had not. Geoffrey made a search of the room, but could find no other weapon. He sat back and considered, watching as Mabel carefully combed Godric’s hair and beard.

It seemed clear to Geoffrey that whoever had stabbed Godric in the stomach was probably not the same person who had knifed him in the chest after he had died-it was unlikely that someone would wait at the scene of the crime before attacking him a second time with a different knife-and the physician’s evidence implied that the second injury had been inflicted later, after Godric had taken some time to die from the wound to his stomach.

So, was the person who had poisoned Geoffrey the same as the person who inflicted the fatal wound on Godric? Or did that honour go to the person who had stabbed the already-dead Godric after his death with Geoffrey’s dagger?

Geoffrey rubbed his head, and then went to open a window, leaning out to inhale the fresh, cool air. As he leaned, he saw a deep, red stain on the outside wall that disappeared into a tapering tail on the grey stone. He inspected it closely. It was wine, and a good deal of it. Geoffrey could only suppose that it was the wine that had been in Godric’s massive jug, and that someone had tipped the stuff out of the window to make it appear as though Geoffrey had drunk it before, after, or during the murder of his father. It was also possible that the ergot-tainted brew had gone the same way.

So, that explained one mystery, he thought with satisfaction, before returning his attention to the murder of Godric.

Geoffrey knew he had dragged the chest across the floor to the door, so that anyone entering the room would have made sufficient noise to awaken him-and he would have woken had he not been drugged when the killer had appeared to kill his father. Meanwhile, his dog, which would have growled at a night intruder, had been whisked away by Stephen. During the night, someone had moved the chest back to its usual position at the end of the bed. Was Walter responsible for that, lying when he claimed to have slept the whole night undisturbed? Or was he telling the truth, and had heard nothing?

But Walter would need to be an unnaturally deep sleeper not to have been awoken by the sound of the chest being moved. Geoffrey chewed his lip. But perhaps Walter was a man who could sleep through anything-he had not woken when Geoffrey had put the box there in the first place, and there was the fact that he had been very drunk.

Or was the culprit Stephen, who had brought drugged wine for Geoffrey to drink, and who had made sure the dog would not cause a disturbance by taking it to his own room for the night?

Or was the killer Hedwise, who had provided Geoffrey with the rank fish soup? Geoffrey rubbed his chin. Not Hedwise-the chest was heavy, and he doubted that a woman of her slight build would have had the strength to move it, at least not without considerable effort.

And who else knew about Godric’s secret passage? Despite Mabel’s claim that she was the only one in the castle who knew of its existence, Geoffrey was not so sure. He suspected that once he knew the answer to that question, he would have the solution to his father’s murder. He looked around the gloomy room, wondering what he should do first. He supposed he should see to the safety of Rohese, and explore the passageway to see if she were hiding there. But even the thought of entering the slit of blackness brought him out in a cold sweat.