Dark Matter

“That is most coincident,” said Newton, scrutinising the contents of Berningham’s pisspot as if the proof might be found there. “It may be that she has poisoned him. But I fancy there’s a quick way we can prove it, at least to our own satisfaction.”

“How?” I asked, looking in the pot myself.

“How? That is simple. If Mrs. Berningham has left her lodgings in Milk Street, then I’ll warrant she’s as guilty as Messalina, and this poor wretch is poisoned right enough.”

“I cannot believe that lady would do such a thing,” I protested.

“Then we’ll soon find out which of us understands women better,” said Newton, and started to leave.

“But is there nothing we can do for poor Berningham?” I asked, tarrying by the fellow’s grimy cot.

Newton grunted and thought for a moment. Then, removing a shilling from his pocket, he beckoned a girl toward him.

“What’s your name, girl?”

“Sally,” said the girl.

Newton handed her the shilling. “There’s another shilling in it if you look after this man exactly as I tell you.” To my surprise, Newton bent down to the fireplace and removed a piece of cold charcoal, which he then broke into small pulular fragments.“I want you to make him swallow as many pieces of charcoal as he can eat. As in the Psalms of David. ‘For I have eaten ashes like bread and mingled my drink with weeping.’ He must eat as much as he can manage until he dies or until the convulsions cease. Is that clear?”

The girl nodded silently as once again Berningham was overcome with a fit of retching so strong that I thought his stomach would fall out of his mouth.

“Very likely it is already too late for him,” Newton observed coolly. “But I have read that charcoal absorbs some vegetable-based poisons. For I think it must be vegetable-based, there being no blood in his water, and that is sometimes indicative of something like mercury, in which case I should recommend he be fed with only the white of an egg.”

Newton nodded as if he had only suddenly remembered useful information that had been long forgotten to him. This was a distinctive characteristic of his. I was always left with the impression that his mind was as vast as a great country house, with some rooms containing certain things that were known to him, but seldom visited, so that sometimes he seem surprised at what knowledge he himself possessed. And I remarked upon this as we walked along Cheapside to Milk Street.

“As to myself,” he replied, “it very much appears to me that the most important thing I have learned is how little I do know. And sometimes I seem to myself to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, diverting myself with smooth pebbles or pretty shells while a great ocean of truth lies undiscovered before me.”

“There is much that still lies undiscovered in this case,” said I. “But I have the impression, from all our activity, that we shall soon discover something of significance.”

“I trust you shall be right.”

For my own part I could have lived very contentedly without the discovery that lay before us now, which was that no such person as Mrs. Berningham or anyone answering her description lived, or had ever lived, at the house in Milk Street where Newton’s coach had set her down but thirty-six hours earlier.

“Now that I do think of it, I cannot remember that she went through the front door at all,” Newton admitted. “You have to admire the jade’s audacity.”

But the realisation that she had tricked us disappointed me, for I had entertained high hopes of her being innocent of her husband’s poisoning, which her never having lived there at all seemed after all to confirm.

“Who would have thought that I was a keener judge of women than you?” railed my master.

“But to poison your own husband,” I said, shaking my head. “It is quite unconscionable.”

“Which is why the law takes such a dim view of it,” said Newton. “It’s petty treason, and if she’s caught and it be proved that she did murder him by poison, she’ll burn for it.”

“Then I hope she is never caught,” said I. “For no one, least of all a woman, should suffer that particular fate. Even a woman that murders her husband. But why? Why would she do such a thing?”

“Because she knew that we were on to her husband. And hopes to protect someone, perhaps herself. Perhaps others, too.” For a moment he remained in thought. “Those fellows whom you did suspect of accosting her near the Whit.”

“What about them?”

“Are you quite sure that they meant her harm?”

“What do you mean?”

“By the time I saw them, you had engaged with them.”

I took off my hat and scratched my head sheepishly. “It may be that it was only their weapons and rough voices did persuade me that they meant her some harm. In truth I cannot recall that any of them laid a hand upon her.”

“I thought as much,” said Newton.