the illustration she needed. So, she settled in, her wilted stalks on the table beside her as she flipped through one page after the next, searching for the spiky purple plant.
In the end, it didn’t take hours. Just when she was certain she’d go cross-eyed if she had to study another illustration, she found what she was looking for. Green stalks, spear-shaped leaves, topped by a spiky purple flower like a fuzzy starburst.
Pennyroyal.
She leaned over the book to read the page. The entry was brief, as all the entries were, but by the time she came to the end of the short series of paragraphs, her blood had turned to ice in her veins.
…it provokes women’s courses, and expels the dead child and after-birth.
Cecilia read it again, then again to be sure she hadn’t confused the words, or somehow misunderstood.
Being boiled and drank, it provokes women’s courses, and expels the dead child…
The tea Mrs. Briggs had mentioned hadn’t been spearmint at all, but pennyroyal. Cecilia slapped a hand over her mouth as a horrible, sick feeling twisted in her stomach. An herb such as this, that brought on bleeding…
What might it do to a lady carrying a healthy child? What might it do to the child?
She blinked blindly down at the page, tears blurring her eyes, because she knew…she already knew. Cassandra and Gideon’s child, their son…someone had seen to it he’d never draw breath, and they’d taken Cassandra away too, ensuring she’d be laid in the cold ground before she ever conceived another child.
Cecilia pressed her hand tighter against her lips as bile flooded her throat, gagging her. Dear God, she was going to be sick. She gripped the edge of the table, and sat for a long time, the library swimming around her, until at last she gained control of herself. She stared down at the book open on the table before her, not seeing it, her mind working to untangle the interwoven threads of the mystery of Cassandra’s death.
Ugly questions, and even uglier answers, but in the end, there was only one question that mattered. Who at Darlington Castle stood to gain the most if the Marchioness of Darlington died before she could give birth to her child?
Not Gideon, and not any of the servants.
No one else had been at the castle during Cassandra’s illness and death but Lady Leanora.
But why would she want to hurt Cassandra or her child? From what Mrs. Briggs had said, Lady Leanora hadn’t even been permitted in the sick room during Cassandra’s illness. It didn’t make sense, unless…
They grew apart somewhat after Cassandra became the marchioness.
Cecilia tapped her palm against her forehead, trying to think. There was nothing so sinister in Lady Leanora’s being jealous of Cassandra once she was elevated to marchioness, but could she have been so jealous she’d have poisoned her own cousin?
No, surely not, but then…
There was one odd thing that had struck Cecilia about Cassandra’s diary. She’d hardly said a single word about Lady Leanora.
Cassandra had mentioned Isabella hundreds of times, and Gideon twice as many as that. She could hardly put pen to paper without saying how grateful she was for them both. She wrote constantly of the people she loved, including Mrs. Briggs and the other servants.
The one person whose name rarely came up in those pages was Lady Leanora’s.
Cecilia thought of Lady Leanora’s portrait in the small picture gallery—of her haughty expression, the petulant curve of her lip—and wondered how such a lady would have reacted to her cousin’s sudden elevation in rank. Cassandra had come to Darlington Castle as Lady Leanora’s lowly companion, and six months later she’d supplanted her as its mistress.
Still, jealousy was one thing, and murder quite another. In any case, Cecilia strongly suspected it was the pennyroyal tea that had killed Cassandra, and according to Mrs. Briggs, it had been Gideon who brought Cassandra’s broth and tea on her dinner tray every night, so how—
But no, that wasn’t what she’d said, was it? A chill rushed over Cecilia’s skin as she recalled precisely what Mrs. Briggs had told her.
Lord Darlington brought her a tray of broth every night at dinnertime…only thing she ever touched was the spearmint tea he gave her much later in the evening, to help her sleep.
The way Mrs. Briggs had described it, the tea hadn’t been on the dinner tray with the broth. Had anyone actually seen Gideon give Cassandra that tea? Mrs. Briggs had only mentioned seeing the teacup with the dregs of