the tea when she’d taken the dishes down the next morning.
Could it be Gideon had only given Cassandra the broth, and someone else had given her the tea? Someone like Lady Leanora, for instance?
But why? Why would Lady Leanora go to such lengths to poison her cousin, and when would she have had the opportunity? Gideon was the only one permitted in Cassandra’s bedchamber. Lady Leanora could have crept past him and the staff, of course. But there’d been a great many people in the castle back then, and whoever had administered the poison would have had to sneak into Cassandra’s bedchamber every night for months. Surely, someone would have seen her?
Lady Leanora as the evil villainess didn’t quite fall into place, yet Cecilia’s brain had seized on it with a familiar dogged determination born of instinct. She couldn’t let it go. Her hands were shaking as she rose from her chair and replaced the book on the shelf. She hurried down the deserted corridor, surprised to find she’d been in the library for hours, and the afternoon was waning.
The stillroom was through an arched door off the back of the kitchen and down a narrow stone hallway that let out onto the kitchen garden. Cecilia had never ventured inside it. Given the shortage of servants, no one seemed to make much use of it anymore, but Lady Leanora would have been mistress of it in the years she’d been the lady of the castle.
It was much like every other stillroom Cecilia had ever seen, but bigger and grander, with a large stone fireplace at one end, and a huge cabinet made up of neat little drawers and topped with a counter that ran the entire length of one wall. Beside the counter was a long table with a dusty wooden top, likely put there for mixing herbs.
There was no window, but the beamed ceilings were high, to help disperse any smoke from the kitchens, and dried herbs were hung from the beams. Cecilia reached up to pinch a few leaves from one of the bundles. She crumbled the leaves between her fingers, raised them to her nose, and inhaled the woody scent of rosemary.
She wandered to the cabinet, opened a few of the drawers, and peered inside. Fennel, sage, comfrey—the usual herbs one would expect to find in a stillroom. Another drawer held bunches of lavender wrapped in silk and tied with string, sachets for scenting drawers or closets, and a few bottles lined up on the counter held lavender oil, the scent faded now.
There was nothing unusual or sinister in any of it. Even if she did find pennyroyal, it wouldn’t prove anything. According to Culpeper, it had a number of perfectly innocent medicinal uses, and many households favored an herb with such a strong scent of spearmint for use in soap.
Cecilia turned in a circle, rubbing her hands up and down her arms. The stillroom fire hadn’t been lit in months, but for a room right off the kitchen it was colder than it should be.
The draft was coming from this side of the room. The temperature here was at least a degree or two colder than the side closest to the kitchen. Not so surprising, perhaps, given all the cooking that took place there, yet Cassandra’s bedchamber was cold in this same drafty way, as if a window or door had been left open. But where? There was no window in this room, and only the one door—
She crossed to the door that led out into the kitchen garden, thinking the draft must be coming from there, but a quick inspection revealed it to be locked and tightly sealed. Well, perhaps it wasn’t all that mysterious. Castles were drafty places. She turned from the door with a sigh and made her way back across the stillroom toward the kitchen.
That was when she saw it. Hidden in a shallow alcove in the darkest and coldest part of the room was a stack of wooden boxes containing messy piles of glass jars, and behind it…
Behind it was the edge of a door. Only the merest sliver of it was visible—if she’d blinked, she would have missed it. She approached the stack of wooden crates, her heart pounding. They looked heavy, much too heavy for her to move them, but just as she was trying to make up her mind whether to fetch Duncan or not, she noticed the dust pattern on the floor.
Grime had accumulated over every surface