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“If the two wives fail to be convicted,” Isla continues, “Annis has Mr. Fischer waiting in the wings to be framed. Then Mr. Ware must die because Gordon may have legitimately worried the solicitor had caught wind of the scheme. Annis efficiently ended all potential threats to her plan.”
“Which ultimately is what? Fischer’s motive would be revenge or money. Annis wouldn’t need revenge and doesn’t need money.”
I know what would drive her to want to get rid of her husband. Sarah. As long as Annis was married to Leslie, any relationship they had would be risky. Instead, she could be a wealthy widow, unencumbered by obligations—business or marital. Free to be with the forbidden love of her life.
Free to be happy. Tofinallybe happy.
I would be cheering her on… if it weren’t for four dead bodies and three innocents framed in their deaths.
“That is the sticking point,” Isla says. “I do not see Annis’s motive.”
Is love motive enough for such crimes? Is Annis capable of such crimes in pursuit of it? She is difficult and complicated and not a very nice woman,and I don’t mean that in the positive sense, where a woman can be “not nice” and still be good and admirable. In her way, Annis is as much a bully as her husband. She mistreats her family, especially Gray, and I cannot forgive her for that.
Does that make her a woman who would murder four people and frame three others to secure her own happiness? There’s cruel, and then there’s downright evil.
Is Annis evil?
I don’t want her to be. Whatever she has done to Isla and Gray, they still care about her, still long to believe she isn’t capable of this, and I desperately want them to be right.
“I do not think her capable of this,” Isla says, as if reading my mind. “Yet I fear saying so and being proven wrong, and then I am shamed by that fear, because it proves I am not as firmly on her side as I ought to be.”
“No, it means you’re human. I can count on one hand the people I’m one hundred percent certain couldn’t commit murder. As for Annis, yes, some things bother me, but they don’t ultimately lead anywhere. For example, the poison garden. Is it concerning that it used to be hers when she’s a suspect in her husband’s death? Damn right it is. But that’s herbal poisons, and we’re talking a rare chemical element. Not the same thing. She wasn’t interested in chemistry.”
When Isla says nothing, I look over at her.
“She… did take an interest in chemistry,” Isla says. “It was not the same as my own, but we shared equipment and…”
“Still means nothing,” I say, a little too quickly.
“But now that I have mentioned it, you will be unable to forget it. I do recall that she had a different interest than I did, which is why we shared little more than the equipment.” She rises. “Her notes are still in my laboratory. Let us take a look, and with any luck, set our minds at ease.”
FORTY-ONE
We find the notes. Three books of them right in the middle of the shelf, as if awaiting Annis’s return.
DidIslaawait her return? Hoping someday Annis would once again take an interest in the poison garden? In the laboratory? The younger sister keeping these books exactly as they were, as if her older sister might need them at any moment?
We take down the books and begin with the earliest one. It’s soon apparent exactly how Isla’s and Annis’s interests differed. For Isla, chemistry is all about hard science, with practical applications in medicine. Annis’s interest, at least in her early teens, is… unexpected. Or maybe, considering this is the girl who started a poison garden, not so unexpected.
Annis was all about alchemy. The woo-woo side of chemistry. While Isla says that most alchemy in the Victorian period, as in earlier eras, aimed at turning base metals into gold, Annis’s experimentation was a little more eclectic. Turning metal into gold, sure, and if that sounds laughably naïve, remember that chemistryisoften turning item x into item y, where item y usually has a more valuable use, like medicine. But while Annis dabbled in gold alchemy, she was more interested in things like finding the secret of life. How could you use chemicals to prolong life? Or prolong health? What if there was an elixir that would cure all diseases?
That is what Annis—circa early teens—was interested in. Her notesbetrayed a brilliance beyond her years but also both an ambition that I recognize in the adult Annis and an enthusiasm I do not. In some ways, reading those entries, I’m reminded of Gray, and I’m saddened to think this is an Annis lost to time. I suspect I would have liked her very much.
While I’m saddened, I’m also relieved, because there’s nothing about poison in these journals. Quite the opposite. Annis’s interest, like her sister’s, looks to herbalism and chemistry for health benefits. Keeping people alive, rather than killing them.
It gets even more fascinating—and more of a relief—in the third book, where her poison garden becomes obviously related to her alchemy. She wasn’t growing plants to kill people or to harm those who’d wronged her. There’s no sign of her even slipping a little into someone’s soup, as Isla had done with Lawrence.
Instead, Annis was investigating whether the route to a cure-all could lie in poison. And ifthatsounds odd, I have to remember that most poisons either also have curative powers or were once believed to have them. Just look at radium—the ultimate cure-all until people realized it’s freaking radioactive.
“Annis was very young,” Isla says with a smile. “That is not a vantage point I have ever had on my sister. Here, she is young and passionate and naïve in the sweetest of ways.”
That’s true. For all Annis’s brilliance and enthusiasm, she wasn’t exactly on the verge of creating an actual cure-all. She was exercising her creative and scientific mind. A hobby that yielded little in the way of useful results, though she did make a few accidental discoveries, like a poultice that made cheeks rosy without cosmetics.
We’re about a third of the way through the last book when something stops us both short. A change in handwriting. Entire chunks of notes written in a very different hand and also written in the third person.
“Annis acquired an assistant,” I say.
“Evidently.” Isla shines the lantern on the page. “I recognize this handwriting, but I cannot place it.”
