The Yorkshire Witch by Summer Strevens

Author:Summer Strevens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2016-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

The End of a Crooked Road

Despite his wife’s entreaties, shortly before she died, William Perigo took it upon himself to send for a surgeon from Leeds, a Mr Chorley, but as word of Mrs Perigo’s death reached him before he actually arrived in Bramley, it wasn’t until the day after his wife’s death that Perigo paid a visit to the surgeon himself. On examining his patient, and taking into account the symptoms described, Mr Chorley drew the conclusion that poison had been ingested. As a means of proof, Mr Chorley suggested that some of the flour used in the last fateful pudding be made up into a paste and fed to a chicken to see what harm befell it. Whether or not the flour used was untainted, or the test subject had a lucky escape, the chicken suffered no ill effects from the experiment. However, a cat which had been experimentally fed some of the cooked pudding (by the Perigos’ neighbours) did die immediately, and though Mr Chorley’s suspicions were clearly aroused, no further steps were taken to ascertain the real cause of Rebecca’s death at that time, and no autopsy was performed on her body. Chorley did later perform an autopsy on the body of a dog which had died as a result of being fed pills and a solution made from honey that the couple were directed to take. There was poison in the animal’s stomach.

After his wife’s death, William went into Leeds to tell Mary that Rebecca had died. Mary’s surprising and admonishing reaction was that Rebecca’s life would have been preserved had she ‘licked up’ all of the special honey as directed in Miss Blythe’s letter. When William inferred that it was in fact the honey that had caused his wife’s death, an angry Mary remonstrated that if he would bring her what was left of the jar of honey she would ‘lick it up before his eyes and satisfy him’. What she would have done had William called her bluff we can only guess at, though she would have thought of something! Incredibly, even after his wife’s death, William Perigo seemed willing to continue his subjugation to Miss Blythe and not long after this confrontation, he received another letter from the lady, commiserating on Rebecca’s death but nonetheless blaming her demise, and the threat to her own and Mary Bateman’s lives, on Rebecca having ‘touched of those things which I ordered her not to’, presumably the ‘money’ stitched into the Perigo’s bed. Miss Blythe also said that Rebecca would rise from the grave to stroke her husband’s face with her right hand, and that William would ‘lose the use of one side’, but that Miss Blythe would pray for him. Of course, he should also burn the letter immediately after having read it. Was Mary paving the way for another murder attempt attributable to a stroke perhaps? She certainly had a problem on her hands with William having survived her previous attempt, and he

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.