Page 106 of The Shadow Key

‘Oh!’ Mrs Evans chokes. Blood has rushed into her pale cheeks now. When she speaks again her voice is cracked. ‘You cannot know what it has cost me to give it to her, every day, for twenty-six years!’

‘Twenty-six years, madam, is a long time. Do you have any idea what that can do to a body? Her organs will be failing. It will kill her, eventually.’

‘But I didn’t know that, I swear! Please, you must understand. I had no choice!’

‘Of course you did! Everyone has a choice.’

Mrs Evans presses her lips at this, turns her face away.

‘Who concocts it? Your brother? Dr Beddoe?’

‘I don’t know.’

He stares. He did not expect that answer. To possess so many bottles of the tincture, Henry expected Mrs Evans to at least know that.

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

‘He never told me,’ the old woman whispers, a frail hand pressed to her chest as if to suppress her grief.

‘Who never told you?’

‘Lord Tresilian.’

It does not shock him to hear the name. But Linette raises a hand to her throat, looks as though she is going to be sick, and Henry feels achingly sorry for her then, knows now too that Linette had no part in this either, no part in this at all.

‘Mrs Evans,’ he says, striving for a calm he does not feel. ‘What happened to Gwen Tresilian? Why has Julian ordered you to keep her drugged? Has it anything to do with his club?’

She looks panicked, like a rabbit poised to flee. Mr Dee presses his hands flat together in prayer.

‘My dear lady. Speak. Confess. The good Lord will hear you and offer his forgiveness. You need not be afraid.’

But in that moment Linette utters a choking gasp, is looking at the housekeeper with an expression on her face that makes Henry suck in his breath. Never, not once, has he seen anyone look the way she does now, as if her heart has been so completely torn in two.

‘All my life I’ve looked up to you,’ she whispers. ‘All my life. But you’ve lied to me from the very start. How could you? How could you?’

Finally, the old woman’s face breaks.

‘Linette, I—’

But it is too late. With a strangled cry Linette turns on her heel and leaves the room.

Henry confiscates the tinctures. Mrs Evans makes no objection – indeed, the old woman is too emotionally exhausted to even exert herself to try – and so he promptly takes the bottles out into Plas Helyg’s gardens and deposits their contents into an obliging flowerbed, keeping only a few back with the intention to wean Lady Gwen off them later. These he locks in his trunk, tucks the key into his pocket.

Rowena and Mr Dee have sat with Mrs Evans while Henry has been downstairs, and when he returns it is to find the housekeeper quiet and dry-eyed, hands clasped as the vicar leads her in prayer.

‘You have to understand,’ Mrs Evans says to Henry when they are done. ‘There were circumstances, circumstances beyond my control …’

‘I’m sorry, madam,’ Henry tells her, firm and unmoving, ‘but no circumstance can be so damning that they can justify what you have done here.’ He gestures to Lady Gwen sleeping soundly on the bed. ‘You’re slowly killing her, don’t you see?’

‘I swear,’ she whispers, ‘I didn’t know what was in those bottles. His lordship told me it was a more potent mix of laudanum, something more stringent to keep her numb, that was all. That’s the truth.’

‘Then I ask once more. Why?’

‘Because my lady was so disturbed she was a danger to others and herself! Lord Tresilian told me that unless she was sedated she’d have to go to an asylum, and I could never live with myself if she were sent to one of those. I’ve heard such stories!’

Henry thinks of Bedlam, and his lips thin. He knows what stories she might have heard, does not wish to confirm them.

‘And if my lady went to an asylum,’ she continues, ‘I’d have lost my position, and poor Linette …’

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