The Inheritor's Powder by Sandra Hempel

Author:Sandra Hempel [Hempel, Sandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393240467
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-10-08T07:00:00+00:00

13

Oh My Poor Mother

With tensions at fever pitch, at last Coroner Carttar called the star turn: the charming, lazy Young John Bodle, dressed in the latest fashions. Mr Colquhoun began by asking him to explain those early-morning visits he had made to the farm, which had begun so suspiciously just two weeks before his grandfather died. The story that emerged was one of innocent flirtations between three young people that had started with Young John telling his cousin, the cowherd Henry Perks, to ask Sophia for some cream when he fetched the milk and Sophia sending back a message that he could have some if he came himself. So began a pattern of helping the lively Sophia and the pretty, deaf-and-dumb Betsy with their chores; opening the shutters, filling the kettle, banking up the fire, churning butter and skimming milk in the cellar, along with ‘gambolling’, as he called it, ‘capering around’ in his grandfather’s heavy old boots and his grandmother’s bonnet and dress to make Betsy laugh, and waking Sophia up by banging on her window with a stick.

On the crucial day, Saturday, 2 November, he had got up too early, mistaking moonlight for daylight, and had set off to fetch the milk, but then he heard a clock strike five and so he turned back home to wait for daybreak. Mary Higgins then came down to the kitchen and soon after he went to his grandfather’s house. Here he met Betsy by the back gate. The kettle was standing outside the kitchen door and the wash-house door was open. He found Sophia in the kitchen cleaning the stove and asked whether he could do anything to help. She had said, ‘You can do your old job if you like, filling the kettle.’ He took the kettle to the pump in the yard, emptied out the water, refilled it and put it back by the kitchen door. He would have hung it over the fire but Sophia hadn’t yet laid it.

He had been sitting down for a few minutes when someone had knocked at the door, he said. It was a man begging. He told the man he had nothing to give him because the family was not up. Sophia had seen the man and asked who he was, he said. (Sophia was later to tell the coroner she knew nothing about a beggar.) He was about to leave when Sophia complained that he hadn’t finished his task so he had brought the kettle in and hung it on the crane. He then collected his milk and headed home. As he opened the shutters, he had heard the ringing of the Arsenal bell. At that one of the Woolwich magistrates, William Stace, interrupted to say that the Arsenal bell had not been rung on a Saturday since 1 October. Young John said that he was sure it was the Arsenal bell.

Asked whether he could account for the arsenic that Constable Morris had found in his trunk, he said yes, he used it to treat ‘the itch’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.