Page 81 of Mending the Baron's Sins
He didn’t deny it. Colm looked rather like he’d been shot by a shooting gun. He stared at her, wide eyed, his body leaning forward and his cheeks the color of soured milk.
“You made him dependent on laudanum, didn’t you? Then you hooked him on this thing, too.” She nodded his head at the vial. “Just enough to make sure he stayed ill. That’s why when I persuaded him to stop taking laudanum, he improved. Whateverthatis,” she waved a finger at his cupped hands, “he was no longer taking it. He was improving. What then, Uncle? What would you have done then?”
“It’s not what you think, Orla,” he cried out. Suddenly, she could hear the Irish accent in him. Those origins that he tried so hard to hide, so he could blend into the ton’s crowd.
“No? Because it looks to me that maybe when Horace mentioned to you in passing that morning that he was doing so well, he was considering going to London, you realized your income was about to be slashed. Without Horace as your patron, all your other customers might find another healer, too.” She waved her hand sharply at him. “You poisoned him, there and then, to make him so ill he would be dependent on you again.”
“I-I… It was not meant to happen like this,” he cried suddenly. Colm’s face was now as white as the pale moon that had haunted in this room across the last few days. “I’m no murderer, Orla. I didn’t mean for this to happen. He was just supposed to get a little sicker, to be more dependent on our care. He wasn’t supposed to end up so incapacitated.” He waved a hand at the bed.
“Give it to me!” she demanded.
This time, her uncle loosened his grasp. It was enough for her to pry the vial from his fingers. She uncorked the bottle and lifted it to her nose. There were enough dregs in the vial now for her to be able to discern exactly what it was through scent alone.
“Camphor…” she murmured in horror. “Uncle, you have been poisoning him with camphor!”
Chapter 24
“Camphor!” Orla’s voice shouted once again.
Horace’s eyes were open. He was sluggish on the bed, trying his best to focus on the argument passing between Orla and Colm, but these words erupting from her were sudden and broke through what lingering darkness there was.
All Horace could remember from the night before was pushing a glass away from him. Whatever someone had tried to feed him in that glass, he had managed to smash the glass, so that he did not take it. Apparently, his body now had a little more energy, as he no longer had whatever was being fed to him in his system. He sat up a little on the bed. His movements made Orla and Colm look sharply at him.
He breathed heavily as he leaned on the bedhead, scarcely able to catch his breath, as he glared at Colm. Beside Colm, Orla had raised her hands over her face, shocked to see him sat up. Colm looked ready to fall to the floor himself.
Horace thought it was some nightmare at first. It was the only thing that made sense, for he had placed his trust for so long in Colm, yet the agony on Colm’s face told him all.
“What’s camphor?” he asked, addressing Orla alone with this question.
“It’s distilled from the bark of camphor trees that come from Asia,” she said in a whispered rush. “It’s… highly toxic.”
Horace wished to curse, but he did not have the energy to do so. He tried to sit even straighter in the bed, but groaned in pain.
Orla dropped something in her hands and ran toward him. She scrambled onto the bed and kneeled beside him, helping him to sit up. Any other time, Horace would have been overwhelmed by Orla coming so near to him. He would have cradled her in his arms, and in his wildest dreams, taken her down to that bed with him, kissed her and embraced her, as he longed to do. Yet he neither had the strength for such things now, and nor was it the right time.
“Have you kept poisoning me?” he asked Colm sharply. “Every night, a glass has come toward me. Were you trying to keep me here?”
“That was laudanum only,” Colm said in sudden desperation, moving toward the end of the bed. “I was trying to ease your suffering.”
“Uncle!” Orla snapped, holding Horace up against the pillows as she tried her best to prop him up. “It may have eased pain, but it would have kept him unconscious, unable to rouse and eat. It would have weakened his system!”
Colm looked baffled by this news. He backed up from the bed, shaking his head frantically.
“No, no. I swear to you, it was not meant to keep you here, my lord.”
“But it was meant to for years, wasn’t it?” Horace said, finding a sourness in his voice that he did not recognize as his own. “You poisoned me by slipping camphor into laudanum consistently, to keep me bedridden.”
“I cannot bear this,” Orla whispered in horror, her voice just loud enough for Horace to hear.
He reached for her, their hands connecting together in their strange position on the bed. He needed to hold on to her now, and from the strength of her grasp, she needed him too.
“I never meant to put you here.” Colm waved toward Horace was now. “I never meant for you to take such a spiral. When you said you were going to move away, I got desperate. Yes, I slipped the camphor into the laudanum again, but I thought I used the usualamount. Maybe I didn’t.” He looked helpless, lost, turning in a circle now. Panicked tears filled his eyes so that they glistened like a bawling child’s eyes, but he did not let them fall. “I must have given you too much. It has put you here. I am so sorry.”
“No.” Horace barked the word. He was still dizzy, and he began to incline to the side in his anger to be out of this bed and flying at Colm. He wished to punch and beat, to hurt Colm for the years of torture, but just by trying to lean one way, he was in danger of capitulating. Orla managed to drag him to sit up again. “No, you don’t get to do that! You don’t get to apologize and think that makes up for the years of being poisoned by you, of being tortured. You will be charged for this. I’ll make sure you see prison for this.”
Colm backed away, tears now leaking down his face. He reached for his bag behind him, desperately.
“Leave,” Horace called. “Get out and never come back!” he bellowed. He managed to somehow reach for a glass on his bedside table. He hurled it across the room, but Colm just managed to escape out of the door before it smashed against the wall.
