Page 60 of Mischief at Marsden Manor
Collins nodded. “I’ll ask once I’m done up here.”
“I assume,” Christopher asked, “that the leaves would have to be boiled? Just steeping them in water from the tap wouldn’t have the same effect?”
Collins and I looked at one another. “I honestly don’t know,” I said, when the constable had no answer. “Although I doubt shewould have drunk it if it were cold.” Unless she did it herself, of course, and then she might have forced it down for the effects she wanted.
“It looked like tea,” I added. “Brown color, served in a cup with a saucer and a spoon. I imagine it was heated up before it was given to her. But if you’re asking whether a pennyroyal draught can be made by soaking the leaves in cold water, I wouldn’t be surprised if it could. I can’t imagine it would taste very good, though.”
“Nor would it be enough to kill anyone,” Collins added. “People drink pennyroyal tea all the time. It’s a common remedy for—” he flushed, “—female things.”
“So it’s only a problem when someone takes too much,” Christopher said.
Collins nodded. “A few leaves in a pot of water isn’t going to kill anyone. This was more than that.”
So figuring out who had used the kitchen to brew the tea might not help at all.
“Is it possible,” I said, and hesitated.
They both looked at me. “Yes?” Collins asked.
“Is it possible that there are two different people involved in this? Someone who gave Cecily the tea, and someone else who tried to kill her?” Perhaps Cecily gave herself the tea, and then someone else came along and gave her more? “Maybe this second person didn’t even want to kill her, but the second dose on top of the first turned out to be too much?”
There was a pause while we all contemplated what that scenario would look like.
“I can’t say that it wouldn’t be possible,” Collins said. “If she, say, picked the leaves herself, and asked Cook to brew the tea, and then she drank it to… um… restore her flows…”
He trailed off, flushing again.
“And then someone else came along—” I prompted.
He nodded gratefully. “And then someone else came along and gave her more of it. Or perhaps it’s more likely that that happened the other way: she picked the pennyroyal leaves and gave them to Cook to turn into tea before bed. She went to dinner and then to drinks and dancing. Someone fed her a cocktail with pennyroyal in it.”
That was certainly possible. I had seen for myself, at the Dower House in May, just how easy it is to poison someone with a doctored cocktail. And mint is a fairly common garnish; Cecily might not have noticed the taste at all.
“Then, after she retired to her room,” I continued the story, “she called for the tea, and someone brought it up, and by the time I had finished speaking to St George and was doing my ablutions in the lavatory, she was vomiting.”
“That works for me,” Christopher said.
I nodded. It worked for me, too. Even though we now had to look for two different people who wished Cecily harm, unless Cecily herself had been one of them.
Constable Collins looked around the room with a sigh. “I expect I should go speak to Cook and the other servants. I can always come back to the searching later. It would be good to have this tea issue clarified one way or the other.”
It would. And I would have offered to go and ask myself, but this was an official inquiry while I wasn’t an official participant, so I had to let the constable do his job without my help.
But at least I could make suggestions. “You should talk to Dominic Rivers, too. He told me he didn’t give Cecily any pennyroyal, and if she picked her own, then he told the truth. But he may have given some to someone else.”
“I tried,” Collins said. “I knocked on his door when I came upstairs after finishing my conversation with the two of you and Lord St George. There was no answer.”
“Just because he told me he’d go upstairs for some peace and quiet, doesn’t mean he did.”
He might have lied about his intentions, or he may have been waylaid by someone on his way to his room.
I turned and glanced at the door to the room he shared with the Honorable Reggie. It was closed.
“He wasn’t downstairs,” Constable Collins said. “At least not anywhere where I saw him. He wasn’t with the others in the dining room?—”
I shook my head. “No, he escorted me out of there earlier. The last time I saw him, he was on his way up the stairs.”
Collins nodded. “Perhaps he changed his mind and decided to take a walk, like you did.”
