第9章 The Second Batch

The December cordial was made and bottled in the first week of the month, and on the Thursday before it went out Prudence did a thing that a braver woman would have called a plan and an honest one would have called a crime. She went up to the chapel on Sallowfield Road after dark, with Ned Trigg carrying a satchel and keeping the watch, and while the office above was dark, she let herself into the yard behind and looked at the lean-to where the society kept its casks and its empty bottles, because a chemist may look at a yard as well as any constable, and the lock on the lean-to was a lock her father had fitted the year the society was built, and she knew it as she knew her own gate. Inside were four casks on trestles, three of them still sealed, one with the tap left in. Beside them stood a crate of stone bottles, and beside that a basket of small paper twists, and it was the twists that made her stop, because a twist of paper in a chemist's yard is a fact that wants an explanation, and these twists were folded in three folds, the way she folded a powder for a customer's pocket. She did not touch them. She took out her own vial, the one she had brought empty and clean, and drew a little of the cordial from the tapped cask, and stoppered it and set it in the satchel in a nest of straw, and then did the thing that took the most nerve of all: she drew a second vial from the same cask, and wrote on its label the day and the hour, and put it in the satchel beside the first, so that when the time came there would be two bottles drawn the same night from the same tap, and no one could say that the one that blackened the copper had been tampered with by her. Outside, Ned coughed twice, and Prudence shut the lean-to door on its old lock and did not breathe until they were two streets away. "I saw a light in the office," Ned said. "Up the top. Didn't move while I was watching." "There is always a light in that office." "Aye. That's what I thought." He hopped over a puddle. "Miss Ruddock, am I to tell anyone what we done tonight?" "You are to tell no one, and if anyone asks, we were in the shop, and I was showing you how to fold a powder." "I can't fold a powder." "Then you will learn tomorrow," she said, "and it will be true by the time anyone asks." The tests took her two evenings. She ran the copper on the vial from the cask, and it went sooty black, and she ran it again on a control bottle she had bought from a rival chemist on the other side of the town, and it stayed grey and dull, and she ran it on the December vial, and it blackened. Then she ran it on the half-drunk bottle Alvina had given her from Throstle House, the November bottle with Skell's own mark on the wax, and it blackened too, and then, for the whole of one long evening, she ran it, slowly and with the patience of a woman doing penance, on every bottle of the Unity cordial she could get her hands on: two from the Bott court, one from the Gantry house, one from an old woman on the canal bank who had bought it at a sale of effects, and three from a sack of them that Dorcas had gathered from her rounds and brought to the shop in the dark. Nine bottles. Of the nine, six blackened the copper and three did not. Dorcas had brought the sack of them on the Saturday, wet from the lane, and had stood in the doorway and refused a chair and refused tea and said, in the flat voice she used when she was frightened, that she had gone round every house on her books and asked after the cordial and been asked, more than once, what business it was of hers. Two of the women had given up their bottles gladly, glad to be rid of a thing they had begun to distrust. One had refused, and had taken the bottle out of Dorcas's hand and put it on the shelf behind her, which was the nearest thing to a curse that a poor woman can offer another. And one, in the canal bank court, an old woman who had lost a son in the summer and kept the bottle for the memory, had said a thing that Dorcas had carried all the way to Bellhouse Lane without knowing why it would not leave her. *Some weeks it tastes stronger, and some weeks it tastes of nothing. I thought it was my mouth.* Prudence had written that down, in the little book, under the words *parish, society, habit*, and under the line, and had looked at it for a long time before she had gone back to the foils, because it was the one thing in the whole business that a clever man would never have thought to say and could not have prevented: a poor woman's mouth, remembering the weeks. The three that did not were marked, on the wax, with the same small stroke, the hook and the count, the mark of a man satisfied with his tally. The six that blackened carried nothing at all, or carried the mark of a different hand, the visitor Coombes's slanting signature, written over the top as though it had been added last. Prudence sat back in the cold room with the foils in a row in front of her, grey and black and black and grey, and understood at last the shape of the thing, which was worse than any plan she had imagined. The poison was not in the casks. It was not in the making at all; it was in the giving. Of two hundred bottles filled from the same cask, nine had come into her hands, and three of those nine were clean and six were not, and the difference between them was not the batch and not the month and not the weather: it was whose hand had stoppered the bottle and written the wax. The man who made the medicine had also made the deaths, one bottle at a time, out of a paper twist folded in three folds, and he had done it so slowly, and so neatly, and with such good arithmetic, that the whole town had drunk the proof of it and called it charity. And at the bottom of the paper in her drawer, the list Ephraim had given her, lay flat under the foils, and among the eleven names there were six that she now knew, and six clean bottles that she now knew, and they were the same six, and the same names, and there was nothing in the world that a magistrate would call that but coincidence, and nothing in the world that she would call it but the truth. She wrote it all down then, the way her father had taught her to write a test: what she had taken, from where, on what day, in whose presence; what she had done to it; what she had seen; and what she had not seen, which is the part a careless chemist leaves out and a careful one underlines. She wrote the six names beside the six black foils and the three names beside the three clean ones, and she wrapped each foil in its own paper with the label outside, and she laid the whole of it in the drawer of the balance in a wooden box that had once held her father's knives, and she turned the little key and put it in her pocket, and understood that from this evening the box was the whole of her case and she was the whole of its keeper, and that a woman who keeps such a box in a town like Cinderthorpe keeps it at the price of everything else. She put her face in her hands for a moment, and then she got up and put on the second lamp and began to write. ---