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“I am.”
She ducks her head, and I recognize the gesture. Earlier, I’d seen it as embarrassment. Ducking to hide a blush. But there’s no blush. You can’t fake one, and she knows it.
“You must think me such a foolish woman.” She touches the wig. “Trying to disguise myself, as if I am a detective. I just… I do not know what to do, now that Annis is in prison. I feel so helpless.”
“You could try hiding thallium in Isla’s lab.”
Her brows crease in a perfect impression of bewilderment. “Hide what?”
“I know you’re framing Annis, Sarah. Don’t worry. She didn’t tell me anything. She won’t because she’s afraid of you.”
A burst of soft laughter. “Afraid ofme?Annis?I will admit there are times when I have been frightened of her, but she has nothing to fear from me.”
“Yeah, I’m not playing this game. You’ve finally found an unreceptive audience, Sarah. That’s the problem when you meet people who haven’t known you long enough to be horrified by the very thought that you’d commit murder.”
She stares at me. Then her bottom lip trembles. “I…” She staggers to my bed and sinks onto it, her head dropping. “I have done a horrible thing. The most horrible thing. You are correct. I committed murder. I did not mean to. I only wished to frighten Gordon. I wanted him to think Annis poisoned him and stop stealing from her, but I did not know what I was doing, and I gave him too much.”
“And Mr. Young?” I say. “You were spotted giving him the gin bottle. The widow’s weeds were a nice touch, though.”
When I say “widow’s weeds,” I get the first genuine reaction out of her. The barest hint of worry chased by rage, both quickly dismissed as she finds a more suitable expression of wide-eyed horror. “Widow’s weeds? Do not tell me Annis murdered—”
“Pause. Think. That doesn’t work, timing-wise. She was in London on business. You’re panicking, Sarah. If you don’t want to truly embarrass yourself, slow down and think. Annis is the clever one. Yours is an animal cunning hidden behind a vapid face.”
She launches herself at me. It’s “vapid” that does it, surprisingly. I only meant to goad her and instead I hit a launch-sequence button.
Sarah flies at me, and I back up fast, smacking into the corner of the dresser. Pain courses through my back. She grabs for my knife, but I have the sense to slash at her. The blade cuts into her arm, and she howls like a banshee and springs at me with a ferocity that—as much as I hate to admit this—I do not expect.
I know what she has done, and yet I’ve still bought enough of her act that when naked rage contorts her beautiful face, I stagger back. She smacks my arm, and the knife goes flying. I dive at her, and she grabs my hair and wrenches, and the sudden pain has me gasping. I twist to punch. Her gloved hand slaps over my mouth, the fabric stinking of some chemical.
No, it’s not her glovedhand.It’s a rag. When she’d been hunched over on the bed, feigning distress, she hadn’t been playing on my sympathies. She’d been preparing the cloth, and now it’s covering my mouth and nose, and the smell of it makes my head throb and my gorge rise.
Not chloroform. Something else.
Something poisonous.
Sarah shoves me. I stumble, the nausea so intense that I gag. I try to right myself, but she trips me and the next thing I know, I’m on the floor beside the bed and she’s on my back, pinning me.
My brain screams for me to vomit, instinct insisting I need to puke this poison from my gut. It’s not in my gut, though. It’s in my lungs. But the panic wipes away any thought except survival.
I have been poisoned.
“Do you want to survive, Miss Mallory?” she whispers. “The poison will kill you in less than an hour, but I have the antidote. Would you like it?”
I retch. She slams the heel of her hand into my back, pressing my diaphragm into the floor until I can barely breathe.
“I am going to make a deal with you, Miss Mallory. I will give you the antidote in exchange for Duncan’s notes. I presume he knows nothing of your conclusions? If he did, you’d hardly be here alone, would you? You came looking for him, I bet. You went to the prison and saw Annis, and she told you something and you raced home to tell your master.”
“She told me nothing,” I wheeze. “Dr. Gray’s the one who figured it out.”
She laughs. “I would caution against such lies, or I might decide your darling Duncan has to die. You wouldn’t want that. I see the way you look at him.”
“The same way Annis looks at you.”
It’s a game try, but she only snorts. “Is it? Silly Annis. She thinks she is a sphinx, but I have always seen through the façade. Even as a girl, I saw how she looked at me, understood what it meant. Does that shock you, Miss Mallory? My admission of Sapphic love?”
“HerSapphic love. Not yours.”
“True. I prefer men, but I can be what Annis needs, in return for what she is willing to give.”
