Page 65 of A Sight to Behold
“What is it?”
“My father’s special recipe; it’s been in our family for generations.” Wife Six slid it back in her cleavage. “And you can’t have any.”
“What is it?”
“Liberty cap, dear. A mushroom.”
Pippa gasped as she recognized what Six held in her fingers. “It is toxic. It causes delirium.”
“Very good, ever the botanist. But it also soothes various ailments, including itches from mosquito bites. It’s also tastelessand odorless and more importantly, your dear father doesn’t notice it in his wine, and it keeps him malleable.”
Pippa’s stomach dropped to her knees. “You’re poisoning myfather? Why?” Pippa had fought with him, but what Wife Six had done was criminal. A crime against a duke would send her straight to the Tower of London.
“Nah, darling. I wouldn’t go so far. It’s harmless.” Wife Six retrieved the bottle and shook it, peering at the bottle with a deranged fondness.
“What do you want from us?” Pippa snarled. It was then she saw the machete that Wife Six held. She’d taken it from its place on the wall. Now she held it out, admiring the edge as if she didn’t see the blood on it. Or maybe she did see the blood and that was what she now admired. That was exactly like her, admiring the sharp blade and ignoring the rest. “Isn’t it always the same thing we want?”
“Money?” Pippa grimaced. “You’ll never get any from us. Not anymore. After this, I can promise you that Father won’t and doesn’t love you.”
Wife Six laughed in a low, curling tone like a witch who had found a way to bottle evil. “You’re so easy to manipulate, so stupid. While you look for love, the grownups are out for money.”
“You won’t get any from me either.”
Wife Six nodded. “That’s true. I don’t expect you to hand it over, but the inheritance will come to me if your father dies. Then it would go to you. Or perhaps the order should be reversed.”
Pippa should have been appalled with a woman who waited out her husband’s death. It was macabre and evil, but she didn’t expect anything else from this woman. “I will discredit everything you stand for, and those friends of yours across thestreet at 87 Harley Street.” She let out a vicious snarl of a laugh. “Don’t think that your visits there went unnoticed.”
Pippa stepped back.
With a trembling voice, seething with hatred, Wife Six continued, “What you don’t know is that Sir Matthew is my father. We’d heard about you, with your fortune. But you’re pathetic and clumsy. No man will marry you. So, we came up with this plan. I’d marry your father and my father would do the rest.”
Sothatwas why Wife Six had provoked Pippa. Now that she considered it, Pippa realized that her father had started to get sicker and grumpier shortly before he’d married Wife Six. It had all been a trap. Wife Six was Mr. Matthews’s daughter and they’d planned to defraud her father to get to Pippa’s inheritance.
That Pippa hadn’t expected either. She took another step back, holding Truffles even closer but he grew limp in her grasp.
The witch stepped closer. “See, as long as you don’t marry, your father is your closest relation and the next in line to inherit from your grandfather. But I can solve that problem easily. All I have to do is give him a double dose of the mushroom cap to disorient him, then push him over the railing of the gallery. He plunges to his death on the marble floor below. It will look exactly like an accident. A happy accident. For me, anyway.” She squinted and touched the tip of the machete to her index finger, twirling it so it caught the beams of sunlight pouring through the glass panes of the orangery.
Pippa stepped back. There was the potted palm. She reached the base of the pot with her foot. She knew the paths between the flower beds as well as her own shadow, regardless of how blurry everything was. One of the advantages of years with bad eyesight was that her other senses were sharpened.
“I saw you running behind the bushes with a man. A man I recognize, from that group of doctors across from my father’s practice.”
Pippa inhaled sharply.Oh no, Nick.“He has nothing to do with this.”
“He haseverythingto do with this. Those handsome young doctors are siphoning away all his clients. They are the reason I had to rid your father of two wives and now a daughter and a niece before I can get some money.”
A niece? Bea! But it was her first claim that riveted Pippa’s attention. “Rid him oftwowives?”
“Old friends of mine.” She waved grandly. “But they were useless, so I had to step in myself.” She’d been targeting her father for so long! Pippa wondered when Sir Matthews had appeared.
She also realized that to ask for specifics about who Six had poisoned and was planning to poison now was to put herself in more danger than she already faced. Better to focus on the crazed woman’s father and their conflict with the doctors of Harley Street. “Clients? Or patients?” With her right hand on the rim of the flower bed, Pippa felt for the orchid bed—one more step.
“Patients or clients. As long as they pay, it’s a wash. Your father first came us when your mother was ill, did you know? He didn’t even see me, so blind was he with love for his wife and consumed by the fear of losing her. Luckily, it didn’t take long. And it was easy to convince him to return to my father to dull the pain of lost love.”
“Pah!” Her father had been desperate to overcome his loss. And these vile people had taken advantage of it.
Wife Six laughed coldly. “He responded well to anything that dulled his pain and his mind.”
“That’s not medicine, it’s fraud. Chicanery. Charlatanism.”
