A small moan left her throat. “She came out with such a look of fright. She is just a young thing, and so small. She nearly collapsed into the arms of the first person she saw, Lord Clarence’s brother, who is a physician. Immediately, he rushed down the corridor from which she’d just come. There were people everywhere, running this way and that in a complete uproar. From down the hall, near the library, I heard shouts and cries, something about his heart having stopped, and I rushed to see him. He was still clothed, thank God. And as I suspected, on a small table next to the chaise was the empty crystal glass. He must have drank the entire thing. Oh, Nella, I did not know it would happen so quickly!”

“I told you half the jar would kill him in an hour. How much was in the glass?”

The look of anguish on Lady Clarence’s face fell away, transformed into something like guilt. “I believe my maid used all that was in the jar.” She let out a cry, slumping forward in her chair, while I gasped in disbelief; it was no wonder he died within moments.

But Lady Clarence seemed as distraught about Miss Berkwell’s behavior after the fact as she was about her dead husband. “Would you believe that as I sat there looking at his dead body, Miss Berkwell approached me and placed her arms around me, and began to cry? ‘Oh, Lady Clarence,’ the girl wailed, fig fruit stinking on her breath, ‘he was like a father to me!’ And I thought it a sick thing to say, and I had half a nerve to ask her if she liked to prig her own father, too!”

Lady Clarence let out a final, hideous laugh, her eyes sunken as though spent from the telling of her tale. “And now I am the widow of a wealthy man and will never want for anything except for the thing I most want, which is a child. How utterly bitter on the tongue, even to say it! I will never have a child, Nella, never!”

A statement with which I could well relate, yes. But something about her story began to tug, to worry me. “You say his brother, a physician, was the first to administer to him?”

She nodded. “Yes, a kindly man. He declared my husband dead not five minutes after Miss Berkwell came into the dining room in a mad fright.”

“And he did not seem worried by the empty glass sitting next to the chaise?”